Learning as a Subversive Activity

Abstract

WHEN I began working in urban schools, Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner's Teaching as a Subversive Activity was adopted as a manifesto by those of us who were committed to changing backward-looking public education system of day. After all, it was 1970s. We were ready to challenge everything that smacked of establishment, and this book gave would-be radical teachers a way to change system from within. Many members of my generation looked for work in schools that we thought needed most changing, urban schools. And those of us who stayed in field made careers out of being subversive at some level or another. Thirty-five years on, I am still looking for small ways to improve life chances of kids who go to school in urban contexts. Now I work in a program focused on preparing teachers to be in multicultural urban settings, and I have recently adopted a concept in my college teaching that I have derived from Postman and Weingartner: as a subversive Contemporary schooling is so obsessed with measurable outcomes and accountability that learning has been distorted and devalued to point that it is disappearing from American classrooms--especially classrooms for children who find themselves outside mainstream. I tell my students that, even though public school teachers work in settings in which AYP (adequate yearly progress) is standard by which their efforts are judged, they don't have to give up their commitment to helping children know joy of learning and power of knowing themselves as learners--even if learning about learning turns into a subversive activity. What in world has happened to drive learning in school underground? A big part of what's happened is commodification of achievement by those who define education as success on a set of test scores. Curricula, teaching strategies, and educational programs are deemed acceptable (i.e., scientifically based) to degree that they improve test scores. School systems, schools, and teachers are deemed adequate to degree that their students generate improved test scores. Test scores drive everything about how public schools are organized and what happens in them. Learning as an inherently valuable human activity is no longer a goal in current education context. Learning as an exciting, fulfilling, meaningful adventure actually gets in way of accomplishing objectives of classrooms driven by teacher-proof curricula, obsessive testing, and fear of making or (in most urban schools) remaining on the list. From preschool on, students are socialized into values of a school culture that has little or nothing to do with meaningful learning. Measurable performance is coin of realm in U.S. schools, and successful students soon internalize importance of generating products that satisfy expectations of accountability system. Students who fit into prevailing school values do just what is required to complete assignments, earn credits, and pass tests. But what about learning for its own sake? What about learning as a tool that makes individuals more fully human? What about learning as a source of satisfaction, growth, and self-fulfillment? And what about all those students who don't know how or refuse to play game of school as it is now constituted? …