Sustainability Learning – Wikipedia

2NC/1NR Essentials

2NC/1NR – Overview

Educational reform inevitably reinforces a schooled society where neoliberal institutions determine our values. Schools serve as sites of social reproduction that instill this dominant value system into the mindset of young people. This causes structural violence via social inequality and dehumanization within schools themselves and makes extinction inevitable through the environmental destruction of earth.

Reject their solvency claims – policy makers and educators have internalized the rhetoric of private enterprise and economic growth. Absent the alternative, their reforms will be coopted by neoliberal perspectives that ensure serial policy failure – that’s Blewitt.

[Insert Turns Case Analysis]

The institutionalization of values makes extinction inevitable through environmental destruction – its try-or-die.

Illich 71 – Ivan Illich, Founder of the Center for Intercultural Documentation in Cuernavaca, Mexico, Priest in the Roman Catholic Church, Former Vicerector to the Catholic University of Puerto Rico, Ph.D. in history from the University of Salzburg, Studied Theology and Philosophy at the Gregorian University in Rome, 1971 (Deschooling Society, Published by Harper and Row, Available Online at http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/DESCHOOLING.pdf, Accessed 4-20-17)

Man has developed the frustrating power to demand anything because he cannot visualize anything which an institution cannot do for him. Surrounded by all-powerful tools, man is reduced to a tool of his tools. Each of the institutions meant to exorcise one of the primeval evils has become a fail-safe, self-sealing coffin for man. Man is trapped in the boxes he makes to contain the ills Pandora allowed to escape. The blackout of reality in the smog produced by our tools has enveloped us. Quite suddenly we find ourselves in the darkness of our own trap.

Reality itself has become dependent on human decision. The same President who ordered the ineffective invasion of Cambodia could equally well order the effective use of the atom. The "Hiroshima switch" now can cut the navel of the Earth. Man has acquired the power to make Chaos overwhelm both Eros and Gaia. This new power of man to cut the navel of the Earth is a constant reminder that our institutions not only create their own ends, but also have the power to put an end to themselves and to us. The absurdity of modern institutions is evident in the case of the military. Modern weapons can defend freedom, civilization, and life only by annihilating them. Security in military language means the ability to do away with the Earth.

The absurdity that underlies nonmilitary institutions is no less manifest. There is no switch in them to activate their destructive power, but neither do they need a switch. Their grip is already fastened to the lid of the world. They create needs faster than they can create satisfaction, and in the process of trying to meet the needs they generate, they consume the Earth. This is true for agriculture and manufacturing, and no less for medicine and education. Modern agriculture poisons and exhausts the soil. The "green revolution" can, by means of new seeds, triple the output of an acre--but only with an even greater proportional increase of fertilizers, insecticides, water, and power. Manufacturing of these, as of all other goods, pollutes the oceans and the atmosphere and degrades irreplaceable resources. If combustion continues to increase at present rates, we will soon consume the oxygen of the atmosphere faster than it can be replaced. We have no reason to believe that fission or fusion can replace combustion without equal or higher hazards. Medicine men replace midwives and promise to make man into something else: genetically planned, pharmacologically sweetened, and capable of more protracted sickness. The contemporary ideal is a pan-hygienic world: a world in which all contacts between men, and between men and their world, are the result of foresight and manipulation. School has become the planned process which tools man for a planned world, the principal tool to trap man in man’s trap. It is supposed to shape each man to an adequate level for playing a part in this world game. Inexorably we cultivate, treat, produce, and school the world out of existence.

The military institution is evidently absurd. The absurdity of nonmilitary institutions is more difficult to face. It is even more frightening, precisely because it operates inexorably. We know which switch must stay open to avoid an atomic holocaust. No switch detains an ecological Armageddon.

In classical antiquity, man had discovered that the world could be made according to man's plans, and with this insight he perceived that it was inherently precarious, dramatic and comical. Democratic institutions evolved and man was presumed worthy of trust within their framework. Expectations from due process and confidence in human nature kept each other in balance. The traditional professions developed and with them the institutions needed for their exercise.

Surreptitiously, reliance on institutional process has replaced dependence on personal good will. The world has lost its humane dimension and reacquired the factual necessity and fatefulness which were characteristic of primitive times. But while the chaos of the barbarian was constantly ordered in the name of mysterious, anthropomorphic gods, today only man's planning can be given as a reason for the world being as it, is. Man has become the plaything of scientists, engineers, and planners.

We see this logic at work in ourselves and in others. I know a Mexican village through which not more than a dozen cars drive each day. A Mexican was playing dominoes on the new hard-surface road in front of his house--where he had probably played and sat since his youth. A car sped through and killed him. The tourist who reported the event to me was deeply upset, and yet he said: "The man had it coming to him."

At first sight, the tourist's remark is no different from the statement of some primitive bushman reporting the death of a fellow who had collided with a taboo and had therefore died. But the two statements carry opposite meanings. The primitive can blame some tremendous and dumb transcendence, while the tourist is in awe of the inexorable logic of the machine. The primitive does not sense responsibility; the tourist senses it, but denies it. In both the primitive and the tourist the classical mode of drama, the style of tragedy, the logic of personal endeavor and rebellion is absent. The primitive man has not become conscious of it, and the tourist has lost it. The myth of the Bushman and the myth of the American are made of inert, inhuman forces. Neither experiences tragic rebellion. For the Bushman, the event follows the laws of magic; for the American, it follows the laws of science. The event puts him under the spell of the laws of mechanics, which for him govern physical, social, and psychological events.

The mood of 1971 is propitious for a major change of direction in search of a hopeful future. Institutional goals continuously contradict institutional products. The poverty program produces more poor, the war in Asia more Vietcong, technical assistance more underdevelopment. Birth control clinics increase survival rates and boost the population; schools produce more dropouts; and the curb on one kind of pollution usually increases another.

Consumers are faced with the realization that the more they can buy, the more deceptions they must swallow. Until recently it seemed logical that the blame for this pandemic inflation of dysfunctions could be laid either on the limping of scientific discovery behind the technological demands or on the perversity of ethnic, ideological, or class enemies. Both the expectations of a scientific millennium and of a war to end all wars have declined.

For the experienced consumer, there is no way back to a naive reliance on magical technologies. Too many people have had bad experiences with neurotic computers, hospital-bred infections, and jams wherever there is traffic on the road, in the air, or on the phone. Only ten years ago conventional wisdom anticipated a better life based on an increase in scientific discovery. Now scientists frighten children. The moon shots provide a fascinating demonstration that human failure can be almost eliminated among the operators of complex systems-yet this does not allay our fears that the human failure to consume according to instruction might spread out of control.

For the social reformer there is no way back, either, to the assumptions of the forties. The hope has vanished that the problem of justly distributing goods can be sidetracked by creating an abundance of them. The cost of the minimum package capable of satisfying modern tastes has skyrocketed, and what makes tastes modern is their obsolescence prior even to satisfaction.

The limits of the Earth's resources have become evident. No breakthrough in science or technology could provide every man in the world with the commodities and services which are now available to the poor of rich countries. For instance, it would take the extraction of one hundred times the present amounts of iron, tin, copper, and lead to achieve such a goal, with even the "lightest" alternative technology.

Finally, teachers, doctors, and social workers realize that their distinct professional ministrations have one aspect-at least-in common. They create further demands for the institutional treatments they provide, faster than they can provide service institutions.

Not just some part, but the very logic, of conventional wisdom is becoming suspect. Even the laws of economy seem unconvincing outside the narrow parameters which apply to the social, geographic area where most of the money is concentrated. Money is, indeed, the cheapest currency, but only in an economy geared to efficiency measured in monetary terms. Both capitalist and Communist countries in their various forms are committed to measuring efficiency in cost-benefit ratios expressed in dollars. Capitalism flaunts a higher standard of living as its claim to superiority. Communism boasts of a higher growth rate as an index of its ultimate triumph. But under either ideology the total cost of increasing efficiency increases geometrically. The largest institutions compete most fiercely for resources which are not listed in any inventory: the air, the ocean, silence, sunlight, and health. They bring the scarcity of these resources to public attention only when they are almost irremediably degraded. Everywhere nature becomes poisonous, society inhumane, and the inner life is invaded and personal vocation smothered.

A society committed to the institutionalization of values identifies the production of goods and services with the demand for such. Education which makes you need the product is included in the price of the product. School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is. In such a society marginal value has become constantly self-transcendent. It forces the few largest consumers to compete for the power to deplete the earth, to fill their own swelling bellies, to discipline smaller consumers, and to deactivate those who still find satisfaction in making do with what they have. The ethos of nonsatiety is thus at the root of physical depredation, social polarization, and psychological passivity.

When values have been institutionalized in planned and engineered processes, members of modern society believe that the good life consists in having institutions which define the values that both they and their society believe they need. Institutional value can be defined as the level of output of an institution. The corresponding value of man is measured by his ability to consume and degrade these institutional outputs, and thus create a new-even higher-demand. The value of institutionalized man depends on his capacity as an incinerator. To use an image--he has become the idol of his handiworks. Man now defines himself as the furnace which burns up the values produced by his tools. And there is no limit to his capacity. His is the act of Prometheus carried to an extreme.

The exhaustion and pollution of the earth's resources is, above all, the result of a corruption in man's self-image, of a regression in his consciousness. Some would like to speak about a mutation of collective consciousness which leads to a conception of man as an organism dependent not on nature and individuals, but rather on institutions. This institutionalization of substantive values, this belief that a planned process of treatment ultimately gives results desired by the recipient, this consumer ethos, is at the heart of the Promethean fallacy.

Efforts to find a new balance in the global milieu depend on the deinstitutionalization of values.

2NC/1NR – Alternative Explanation

The alternative is the deinstitutionalization of education and formation of sustainability learning networks to deschool society. Instead of maintaining socially reproductive structured learning which directly serves neoliberal interests, obligatory education should be abandoned in favor of life-long networks of learning accessible to all without restrictions. These networks will serve as transition areas wherein various individuals, groups, and communities will come together to facilitate a rupture with status quo schooling and value systems through sustainability learning and critical pedagogy.

That solves the case – the alternative removes any reason current education is bad and makes any benefit of education even better.

Sustainability learning networks are crucial to create a more ecological society and establish environmental and social justice for a more sustainable future – open webs of knowledge-exchange and non-restrictive learning are key.

Blewitt 10 – John Blewitt, Senior Lecturer in Sustainability and Communication at Aston Business School, Former Senior Lecturer in Education at the University of Huddersfield, Distinguished Schumacher Fellow, Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, Ph.d. from the University of Wales, MEd from Huddersfield University, 2010 (“Deschooling Society? A Lifelong Learning Network for Sustainable Communities, Urban Regeneration and Environmental Technologies,” November 12^th, Sustainability, Volume 2, Issue 11, pg. 3465-3478, Available Online at: http://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/2/11/3465/htm, Accessed 5-29-17)

This era of post ecological politics has followed closely on the heels of the post industrial society, post modern culture and a post feminist age emerged when gender inequality has only just about been dented and Chevron brandish their green credentials on global media networks while continuing to fund climate change deniers [7]. We are all green now and it is incumbent on all of us as learners to interrogate and make sense of this absurdity. To do this, learning must be rooted in the experience of living, of navigating the multifaceted and often frightening array of consumer attractions and the dangers of apprehending the real as being simply what you want it to be. There is a need for more analysis and more contemplation in, of and about everyday life, everyday working relationships and the global politico-economic environment enveloping us. Reflective diaries and logs, often a mainstay of many courses, reproduce learning theories that have been reduced to a few slogans—reflect in or on learning, learning is double or single looped or ripples to appear. But reflection is not the same as contemplation or meditation, of staying with or dwelling on. For Heidegger ([8], p. 147).

To be a human being means to be on the earth as a mortal. It means to dwell. This word bauen also means to cherish and protect, to preserve and care for, specifically to till the soil, to cultivate the vine…

Reflection and meditation in learning needs to take on a political aspect that facilitates the contestation of an educational apparatus dominated by capital and its associated logics. Knowledge is also increasingly being created politically, collaboratively and collectively in a world where the experts, the high priests of intellectual culture, take a place alongside the buff, the enthusiast, the loosely knit social network where we-think is clearly more generative than academic group-think and where [9,10] cultural and academic gatekeepers still delineate what constitutes knowledge and what methods may produce valid and reliable knowledge. The wiki world is the fast show of contemporary intellectual and popular culture and has profound implications for understanding the future for sustainability in learning and development. The world of what I know is, the world of wiki economics, wiki design and wikipedia is allied to the world of carbon accounting, biosynthesis and cloud computing. There are further risks and uncertainties in this world of shifting and multiple references and disappearing reference points and a further antagonism in securing a cultural space for meaningful, critical, contemplation in a world where the futures market operates to the beat of the nanosecond. This world, full of disruptive technologies and opportunities for the space of flows that encompass economic, social and human capital together environmental contamination, crime and tentative attempts at global citizenship, is lived through the everyday life practices of urban neighbourhoods and diasporic communities, of the phenomenological experience of glocal communication media and the connected lifeworlds of extended family networks that traverse time, space and culture [11]. Many professionals and para-professionals also tend to inhabit intellectual communities of interstitial spaces where transdisciplinarity, inter professional working and multi agency activity is an ideological given but where lifelong learning and education for sustainable development still needs to secure a greater purchase.

As the libertarian thinker Ivan Illich remarked forty years ago learning may take place more effectively and more democratically without the hierarchical power structures and restrictive practices that currently dominate formal education. Illich ([12], p. 86) writes of lifelong, lifewide and city wide learning where the market for educational opportunity would be far more various if only “the goals of learning were no longer dominated by schools and schoolteachers”. Indeed, this is quickly happening as new digital media redefines the ecologies of lifelong learning. That the cyber environment could be a liberating force is not a new idea and neither is it one that has yet been realised as the current cultural/digital revolution is likely to be forever in the process of becoming. But what the present moment suggests is that change and continuity are never just two sides of the same coin for one technology simply does not replace another just as neoliberal economics necessarily relies on a strong state and the economy as a whole relies on healthy environmental and eco system services. The human social world may be viewed as a set of interlocking or nested systems but this is does not deny the crucial significance of human agency. Nothing will come of nothing so the emergence of sustainable communities, urban regeneration and design, the development and application of low carbon environmental technologies can only arise from a network of learning webs, political and economic relations and structures, that draw on the resources, intelligences, skills and capabilities of institutions and organisations, groups and individuals that offer due recognition to being part of, rather than separate from nature. These webs need to be facilitative open spaces where knowledge exchange, collaboration and co-operation generates innovation, creativity, leadership and pragmatic sense of the possible. The present moment is consequently both an end in-itself and a means to a better tomorrow in which leadership is distributed, networked and fluid. The keys to a sustainable future depend on nurturing capabilities, social and environmental justice rather than the accumulation of skills [13]. To effect this, sustainability educators, learners and other practitioners must perceive themselves as cultural workers crossing borders and continually remembering that “intellectual leadership (...) depend[s] on superior intellectual discipline and imagination and the willingness to associate with others in their exercise” ([12], p. 101).

2NC/1NR – Framework

1. The critique is an impact turn – we access our offense in their framework.

2. The role of the ballot is to determine the best pedagogical strategy. View the plan and alternative as competing methods of instruction and determine the best educational model. Focusing on educational policy alone replicates the ignorance of policymakers and causes pedagogical underdevelopment and inconsistency.

Cohen and Barnes 93 – David K. Cohen, John Dewey Collegiate Professor of Education and professor of public policy at the University of Michigan, Visiting Professor of Education at Harvard University, Ph.D from the University of Rochester, Carol A. Barnes, Professor in the Departments of Psychology, Neurology and Neuroscience, Evelyn F. McKnight Endowed Chair for Learning and Memory in Aging, Director of the Evelyn F. McKnight Brain Institute, Director of the ARL Division of Neural Systems, Memory & Aging, and Associate Director of the BIO5 Institute at the University of Arizona, M.A. and Ph.D. in Psychology from Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, 1993 “Pedagogy and Policy,” Teaching for Understanding: Challenges for Policy and Practice, Published by Jossey-Bass, ISBN: 978-1-55542-515-9, Available Online at: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~dkcohen/downloads/CohenBarnesPedagogyPolicy.pdf, Accessed 6-12-17, p. 207-213)

Much has been written about educational policy, but little has been written about how policy educates. That is curious, for nearly any policy must be educative for those who enact it. Policymakers may not intend such education, and in fact often are blissfully ignorant of the learning that their creations entail for enactors. But policies and programs regularly propose novel purposes. If they did not, they would be completely redundant. Some learning is required to achieve any new purpose, and that would be impossible without some education, even if it is only hasty self-education on the job.

These points hold for policies of all sorts, It is relatively easy to see that the very innovative policies would require considerable education for enactors. For example, recent efforts to transform mathematics instruction from rote memorization to deep understanding would require extraordinary learning for most elementary school teachers. After all, they know only a little mathematics and seem to understand less. More important, the math that these teachers know usually is routine and algorithmic rather than deeply understood. The recent policies seek to remedy the consequences for children of teachers’ weak knowledge. But teachers could hardly help children to cultivate a much deeper and more complex understanding of mathematics unless they learned a different version of math themselves. And few could learn something so different without considerable education.

Even much more prosaic policies require learning. When states reduced the speed limit to 55 miles per hour, motorists who had been in the habit of driving much faster had to learn to keep their speed down. Such learning was required even though drivers already knew, as a technical matter, how to slow a car down. Theirs may not have been very complex learning. Perhaps they had only to teach themselves to monitor the speedometer more carefully, or to begin their trips earlier. Simple though such things may be, each entails a bit of learning. And as many ticketed speeders can attest, such simple learning can be quite difficult. States and localities increasingly have organized driver reeducation programs to encourage the requisite learning.

Hence learning for enactors is essential, whether or not policies and programs recognize the need for it. Most policies and programs at least tacitly recognize an educational need, as they offer regulations, guidelines, and the like. We might regard these as the most rudimentary curricula of policy. They sometimes include step-by-step manuals for learning: they typically explicate the meaning of key terms; and they often define acceptable interpretations. In some cases the need for instruction is quite explicitly recognized, as when policymakers offer enactors formal “training” or “technical assistance.”

But that sort of education may be only a beginning. The ambitious changes in mathematics instruction mentioned above would require much more extensive teacher learning. In contrast, many other policies are thought to have no educational requirements because they demand only “compliance.” Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act required that federal funds be cut off if public agencies practiced discrimination, a provision that proved to be a potent tool in southern school desegregation. Regulations, guidelines, and other technical guides to learning plated a key role in enacting this policy. But as it happened, legal and administrative compliance required considerable learning of rather different sorts, and often quite extraordinary education as well. For example, federal officials had to learn how to use Title VI to produce desegregation rather than die-hard resistance, damaging political explosions, and enforcement failures. Many local officials also had to learn their own version of these things if they wished to defuse local political dynamite. In those troubled years, when few white Americans had any experience with the enforcement of constitutional guarantees for African-Americans, such learning was no simple matter. Compliance with the Title VI also required that many students of both races learn to go to school together, for if schools collapsed in race riots compliance would be impossible. Many local educators also had to learn how to tolerate biracial schooling, and even how to encourage and support it. At a time when few Americans had any experience with equal-status contact between the races, such learning was an extraordinary task for Americans of all sorts. Yet it was essential for the enactment of a policy that seemed only to seek legal compliance.

Our examples suggest that if the education of enactors is nearly always an element in policy, it can be a more or less important element. It has been increasingly important in education since the end of World War II, for policies and programs have made progressively greater demands for educators’ learning. The 1950s curriculum reforms sought to improve teaching, as did Head Start and Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965 and the “back to basics” movement of the 1970s and early 1980s. Each required that teachers learn a good deal in order to make the improvements that policymakers proposed, though these requirements seemed to go unnoticed by policymakers. The postwar policies and programs were educative in the general sense that is common to any policy. But they also were educative in a very specific sense: they sought to promote new pedagogies for pedagogues. That point holds with a vengeance for recent efforts to promote “higher-order thinking,” “teaching for understanding,” and much deeper knowledge of academic subjects.

To say that most policies and programs entail learning and thus some education is only to make a logical or psychological claim. It tells us nothing about the education that actually was provided. That is our subject here: what kind of education has educational policy offered to enactors? What has been the pedagogy of policy? To answer these questions we must inquire about how policymakers actually tried to teach teachers to teach differently, and to do that we must consider policy as a sort of instruction. Such a reading of policy is of course more suitable in some cases than others, but it seems marvelously suitable for post-World War II education.

In considering the pedagogy of policy, we employ a scheme that is familiar to students of instruction. We begin with purposes: what pedagogical aims have state and federal policymakers pressed on teachers? Then we turn to methods: what educational approaches have policymakers used as they have sought to teach teachers to teach differently? We also inquire about consistency: how do the pedagogies that policies enact compare with those that they press teachers to adopt?

One thread in our answers to those question is paradoxical. Though policymakers have developed extraordinarily rich ambitions for schools, educational policies and programs have not been richly educative for enactors, The pedagogy of educational policy generally has been didactic, much as teaching often is didactic. Policymakers are practiced at telling teachers what to do, but they rarely have done much more than lecture. Like many teachers they focus more on broadcasting their message and covering the material than on figuring out what learners make of it and framing instruction accordingly. Cases in which policymakers or program managers engaged educators in extended instructional conversations that were designed to encourage the desired learning are even more scarce than cases in which teachers engage students in such conversations.

More troubling, policymakers seem to have learned little from experience. The pedagogy of policy remains quite undeveloped even though policymakers’ ambitions for classroom pedagogy have developed quite dramatically. In the last five or six years policymakers have advanced new and much more ambitious agenda for improving pedagogy, as they press schools to offer “higher-order thinking,” “teaching for understanding,” and the like. Yet for the most part these policies break little new ground in efforts to educate enactors. Though policymakers now seek dramatic revisions in classroom instruction, they make those instructional changes. Even that disjunction is only dimly and occasionally noticed by those who make policies and manage programs. Hence, we conclude by probing another issue: why has the pedagogy of education policy been so weakly educative?

Policy and Pedagogy

What educational aims have policymakers embraced as they have tried to teach teachers to improve their teaching? The answers vary, depending on the policies in question. We consider three of the great episodes in post-World War II education policy. The 1950s curriculum reforms sought intellectually ambitious instruction for America. Students were to become little scientists and mathematicians, “doing” mathematics and “messing about” with science. These were heady plans, especially in view of American educators’ previous efforts to do just the opposite. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, most educators and reformers had tried to concoct a “practical” education for most students on the grounds that few young Americans either wanted or needed anything more intellectually ambitious and that only a few could manage it in any event. If we view the fifties curriculum reforms against the background of such sad ambitions, it is probably unavoidable that they should seem elitist. Whether or not reformers intended improvements only for an elite, they did embrace a sort of academic seriousness that self-styled democratic reformers had been denouncing as elitist since 1900.

Head Start and Title I of the 1965 ESEA were the leading programs in the second great postwar policy episode, and they were hardly elitist: both proposed to improve education for the poor. Their approach was quite plain in one sense—to provide more resources for schools, teachers, and families. But in another sense the approach was quite unclear, for initially both programs were agnostic about instructional content and pedagogy. How the resources were to be used was not an issue at the outset. For example, the Head Start and Follow Through Planned Variation experiments in the late 1960s and early 1970s included everything from open education on one end to highly structured behavior modification programs on the other.

The “back to basics” movement of the 1970s and 1980s was the third postwar policy episode that we consider, and these reformers were not at all agnostic about curriculum and instruction. They believed that education had badly deteriorated for most students, including those from disadvantaged circumstances. They argued that students should at least be required to master the rudiments of knowledge, and pressed a largely traditional concept of the basics. Though some interpreted the basics as a traditional academic curriculum, most reformers adopted quite a different and much more narrow view of the ends of education, one that was light-years from the earlier curriculum reforms. Indeed, this movement was notable for didactic concepts of teaching and formulaic approaches to improvement. Reform and research abounded with lists and other tidy formulae, including the elements of “effective” schools and the steps in teaching with Madeline Hunter’s ITIP.

A fourth great episode may be in the making, though it is too soon to tell. In the last five or six years another group of reformers has taken off in yet another direction. They demand more thoughtful and intellectually ambitious instruction. They argue that students must become independent thinkers and enterprising problem solvers, and that schools should offer intellectually challenging instruction that is deeply rooted in the academic disciplines. These reformers envision instruction that is in some respects reminiscent of the Sputnik era. It certainly is much more thoughtful, adventurous, and demanding than was proposed by most advocated of back to basics. And it is a far cry from the rudimentary instruction that is found in most educational programs for the disadvantaged.

In Just forty years, then, policymakers have embraced several different and sometimes divergent educational purposes. In fact, the aims of state and national education policy have changed so often since World War II that we can see no consistent vision of educational improvement in them. Yet these varied purposes have accumulated in schools and school systems. The ambitions for learning that policymakers pressed on teachers in the 1950s were only partly displaced by the new lessons that policymakers sought to teach in the 1960s. For instance, the innovative texts born in the 1950s continued in the use in many high schools—especially in the top tracks—throughout subsequent decades. And the 1960s lessons were only partly displaced by the newer purposes that policymakers pressed in the 1970s and 1980s. Chapter I and Head Start still thrive, and back to basics is alive and well in U.S. classrooms today, despite previous reforms and the subsequent turn toward teaching for understanding.

Education policy has been an inconsistent teacher. Americans have tried to solve many different problems with formal schooling, but we have been divided about what education is good, what it is good for, and how best to educate. We also have been politically fickle, giving only brief attention to one great problem before turning to another. Policymakers have tried to teach teachers several different and sometimes divergent lessons in quick succession.

What have teachers learned from this? They often say that whatever policy tells them today, it will tell them something different tomorrow. Upon hearing of a new policy or program, teachers often remind reformers and observers that they have been through something like this before. Though such evidence is important, it is only a beginning. To learn more about the educative character and effects of education policy, one also must investigate the specific instructional approaches that were employed and how they turned out. Those approaches varied, depending on how policy problems were framed and what policy instruments were used.

3. That’s predictable and fair – they should be prepared to defend the pedagogical value of the education system they propose reforming.

4. Modern schooling replicates flawed pedagogy and destroys the education of the affirmative. If we win our links, the plan can’t be separated from the system it reforms.

5. Debates about pedagogy are vital to stopping anti-democratic norms — addresses argumentative agency and leads to real change.

Giroux 12 — Henry Giroux, Global TV Network Chair in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University, Distinguished Visiting Professor at Ryerson University, 2012 (“Beyond the Politics of the Big Lie: The Education Deficit and the New Authoritarianism,” Truth-out, June 19^th, accessible online at http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/9865-beyond-the-politics-of-the-big-lie-the-education-deficit-and-the-new-authoritarianism, accessed on 10-12-14)

Extreme power is now showcased through the mechanisms of ever-proliferating cultural/educational apparatuses and the anti-public intellectuals who support them and are in turn rewarded by the elites who finance such apparatuses. The war at home is made visible in the show of force aimed at civilian populations, including students, workers, and others considered disposable or a threat to the new authoritarianism. Its most powerful allies appear to be the intellectuals, institutions, cultural apparatuses and new media technologies that constitute the sites of public pedagogy, which produce the formative culture necessary for authoritarianism to thrive.

While a change in consciousness does not guarantee a change in either one's politics or society, it is a crucial precondition for connecting what it means to think otherwise to conditions that make it possible to act otherwise. The education deficit must be seen as intertwined with a political deficit, serving to make many oppressed individuals complicit with oppressive ideologies. As the late Cornelius Castoriadis made clear, democracy requires "critical thinkers capable of putting existing institutions into question.... while simultaneously creating the conditions for individual and social autonomy."(41) Nothing will change politically or economically until new and emerging social movements take seriously the need to develop a language of radical reform and create new public spheres that support the knowledge, skills and critical thought that are necessary features of a democratic formative culture.

Getting beyond the big lie as a precondition for critical thought, civic engagement and a more realized democracy will mean more than correcting distortions, misrepresentations and falsehoods produced by politicians, media talking heads and anti-public intellectuals. It will also require addressing how new sites of pedagogy have become central to any viable notion of agency, politics and democracy itself. This is not a matter of elevating cultural politics over material relations of power as much as it is a rethinking of how power deploys culture and how culture as a mode of education positions power.

James Baldwin, the legendary African-American writer and civil rights activist, argued that the big lie points to a crisis of American identity and politics and is symptomatic of "a backward society" that has descended into madness, "especially when one is forced to lie about one's aspect of anybody's history, [because you then] must lie about it all."(42) He goes on to argue "that one of the paradoxes of education [is] that precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience, you must find yourself at war with your society. It is your responsibility to change society if you think of yourself as an educated person."(43) What Baldwin recognizes is that learning has the possibility to trigger a critical engagement with oneself, others and the larger society - education becomes in this instance more than a method or tool for domination but a politics, a fulcrum for democratic social change. Tragically, in our current climate "learning" merely contributes to a vast reserve of manipulation and self-inflicted ignorance. Our education deficit is neither reducible to the failure of particular types of teaching nor the decent into madness by the spokespersons for the new authoritarianism. Rather, it is about how matters of knowledge, values and ideology can be struggled over as issues of power and politics. Surviving the current education deficit will depend on progressives using history, memory and knowledge not only to reconnect intellectuals to the everyday needs of ordinary people, but also to jumpstart social movements by making education central to organized politics and the quest for a radical democracy.

They Say – “Permute – Do Both”

Note* The cards/Blocks under Reforming Schools Possible should be used to answer the specific permutation in affirmative answers.

1. Not possible – the affirmative calls for a reform of schools while the alternative is a complete rejection of schools. The permutation either links or severs. Reject severance and intrinsic permutations because they make the affirmative a moving target that can dodge DAs and competition.

2. The alt is mutually exclusive because the system they aim to reform would no longer exist. Including the neoliberal perspectives of education policymakers in a permutation tanks alternative solvency by undermining its radical praxis while co-opting the formation of transition areas – that’s Blewitt.

3. If we win framework, they don’t get a permutation and the plan can’t be separated from its pedagogical strategy of reform. Evaluating competing pedagogical methods requires that those methods remain separate.

4. Pedagogical inconsistency DA – the continual provision of different educational methods causes enactor confusion and undermines each method introduced. The perm undermines alt solvency.

5. Every link is a DA to the permutation – proves including the plan in any way is bad.

6. No net-benefit – the alternative solves the whole case.

They Say – “Educational/Reform Policy Crucial To Pedagogy”

Educational policy fails as a pedagogical tool.

Cohen and Barnes 93 – David K. Cohen, John Dewey Collegiate Professor of Education and professor of public policy at the University of Michigan, Visiting Professor of Education at Harvard University, Ph.D from the University of Rochester, Carol A. Barnes, Professor in the Departments of Psychology, Neurology and Neuroscience, Evelyn F. McKnight Endowed Chair for Learning and Memory in Aging, Director of the Evelyn F. McKnight Brain Institute, Director of the ARL Division of Neural Systems, Memory & Aging, and Associate Director of the BIO5 Institute at the University of Arizona, M.A. and Ph.D. in Psychology from Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, 1993 “Pedagogy and Policy,” Teaching for Understanding: Challenges for Policy and Practice, Published by Jossey-Bass, ISBN: 978-1-55542-515-9, Available Online at: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~dkcohen/downloads/CohenBarnesPedagogyPolicy.pdf, Accessed 6-12-17, p. 207-213)

Conclusion

The pedagogy of educational policy has been didactic and inconsistent. Policymakers have told teachers to do many different, hugely important things in a short time. And in each case policymakers have acted as though their assignment was to dispense answers, not to provoke thought, ask questions, or generate discussion. The pedagogy of policy has been teacher-centered. As policymakers taught, they created few opportunities to listen as schoolteachers and other educators tried to make sense of new demands. Nor have policymakers cast policy as something that might be revised in light of what they learned from teachers’ experience.

These features of policy seem ubiquitous. The curriculum reformers of the late 1950s and early 1960s were distinguished academics from great universities, yet they addressed teachers in quite didactic fashion. The reformers did not consider teachers as thoughtful learners and seemed largely unaware of vast problems that most would have in learning from the reforms. A didactic orientation is not peculiar to professors. The reformers who planned and operated Head Start and Title I of the 1965 ESEA were hardly professorial; they were cabinet officers, legislators, program managers, bureaucrats, and advocates for the poor. Yet they addressed teachers no less didactically than the professors, and they seemed similarly unaware of the great problems of teacher learning. Nor is didactic orientation peculiar to certain types of policies. The advocates of back to basics pressed relatively simple ideas about instruction on teachers, while the 1950s curriculum reformers pressed very complex ideas on them. But like other reformers, the advocates of basics acted as though teaching was active “telling” and learning was passive accumulation.

How can we account for this uniformly didactic pedagogy of policy? In the back to basics crusade reformers urged a set of changes in the classrooms that fir relatively well with the established practice, which itself was didactic, teacher-centered, and oriented to skills and facts. They presented the reform ideas in practical, easy-to-adopt formats, and blanketed American education relatively effectively. The pedagogy of the reform fit quite nicely with the pedagogy that reformers urged on teachers.

The 1950s curriculum reforms urged a very different sort of instruction that would have required immense changes in teaching. But while these reforms were pedagogically very ambitious, they were much less effective in reaching teachers. Reformers only weakly understood practice and the problems their ideas posed for practitioners. The changes that they urged would have been extraordinarily difficult to pull off even if reformers had been exquisitely sensitive to teaching and extraordinarily thoughtful in the education of teachers. In policy as in classrooms, learners ordinarily find it much easier to grasp material that is familiar and consistent with what they already know than material that is unfamiliar and inconsistent with extant knowledge.

Another reason for the generally didactic pedagogy of policy lies in American politics and political organization. This is a vast nation, in which several states are larger than many foreign countries. Local control is a tradition of school governance that is dearly held in states large and small. American government is extraordinarily fragmented at all levels and Americans are deeply divided about many matters of education policy. Under these circumstances it often is very difficult for state or national governments to do more that formulate policy and announce it. Given these circumstances and the political, administrative, and educational resources that a more ambitious pedagogy of policy would entail, a simple and square approach has been all that state and federal policymakers could manage in most cases.

Most local school boards and administrators have not cultivated more sophisticated pedagogy in dealing with teachers, so politics alone cannot explain the prevalent pedagogy of policy. Americans’ expansive belief in the power of education is another explanation for the very limited pedagogy of policy that we have described. The 1950s curriculum reformers urged fundamental change on schools without considering that teachers might have to relearn their practice. Reformers believed students would learn quite nicely on their own if only they had good materials. The 1960s advocates of Head Start and Title I pressed sweeping changes in the education of disadvantaged children without much attention to what teachers would have to learn, in part because they believed students would learn much more if only they had more teachers and better materials.

These reformers shared a characteristic American faith in the power of education. That faith allowed them to avoid careful consideration of instructional design, for if teaching and learning were as easily shaped as Americans have been inclined to believe, why spend lots of time carefully designing instruction? If learning and teaching were not difficult practices, reformers could easily imagine that students would learn independently from exciting materials and that teachers would find it easy to improve their practice. Lacking a sense that learning and teaching were often difficult, why should policymakers include instructional design framing policy?

A last explanation for the limited pedagogy of policy is rooted in teaching itself. We have argued that policymakers behave little differently than most teachers. Like teachers, reformers have been in the habit of telling learners what they would learn, without much attention to what teachers thought, or already knew, or made of the policy. Like most teachers, policymakers have made few efforts to engage their students in conversations that could illuminate their grasp of the material or their interpretation of policy. Hence policymakers, like most teachers, have not been able to use learners’ ideas and understanding to revise instruction and advance learning. Like most teachers, policymakers focus on “putting the material across.” They have learned to consult various interested parties as part of the politics of policymaking, but they inquire little about what enactors may have to learn in order to respond constructively to policy, what it may take for them to learn, how they might best learn, and how policy might be redesigned in consequence of learners’ experience. Policy generally has been inattentive to learning, much as teachers often are inattentive.