"Many students, especially those who are poor, intuitively know what the schools do for them. They school them to confuse process and substance. Once these become blurred, a new logic is assumed: the more treatment there is, the better are the results; or, escalation leads to success. The pupil is thereby "schooled" to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new. His imagination is "schooled" to accept service in place of value. Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of community life, police protection for safety, military poise for national security, the rat race for productive work. Health, learning, dignity, independence, and creative endeavor are defined as little more than the performance of the institutions which claim to serve these ends, and their improvement is made to depend on allocating more resources to the management of hospitals, schools, and other agencies in question."
Down here (Australia) you hear "highly qualified" very often. It's used interchangeably with "highly skilled," which is the Governments' favourite phrase. Drives me bananas.
I've also lived in Ireland & heard this terminology used a bit.
Which reminds me of the Polya quote that "[m]athematics, you see, is not a spectator sport. To understand mathematics means to be able to do mathematics. And what does it mean [to be] doing mathematics? In the first place, it means to be able to solve mathematical problems."
The terms "school" and "society" in the same breath always compel a random dissection. I will make sentence-per-sentence marks.
___ We are all involved in schooling, from both the side of production and that of consumption. ___
I don't believe that we can distinguish these sides anymore in western culture, nor can we believe that we are all involved together, in anything.
___ We are superstitiously convinced that good learning can and should be produced in us-and that we can produce it in others. ___
Superstitiously, yes, but not in others. Learning inherently differs from knowledge. It reins in the whole of one's own life experience into a worldview and ability to perceive through those of others. Knowledge is a commodity, cf. "the end of history," and schooling, as the nearest authority on anything, will tell you that it's worth it, the ends justify the means. The poet Rilke compares scholastic commencement to "slavery."
___ Our attempt to withdraw from the concept of school will reveal the resistance we find in ourselves when we try to renounce limitless consumption and the pervasive presumption that others can be manipulated for their own good. ___
For instance: "resistance" "try" "renounce" "pervasive" "presumtion" "manipulated". . . as an example, can you recall completing a year of primary, secondary, or post-secondary school without seeing at least three of your classmates held to systematic humiliation?
__ No one is fully exempt from the exploitation of others in the schooling process. ___
As is no one of us truly involved with everyone in the schooling of others.
___ School is both the largest and the most anonymous employer of all. Indeed, the school is the best example of a new kind of enterprise, succeeding the guild, the factory, and the corporation. ___
Its first and final claim to fame.
___ The multinational corporations which have dominated the economy are now being complemented, and may one day be replaced, by supernationally planned service agencies. These enterprises present their services in ways that make all men feel obliged to consume them. ___
Bet you can't eat just one. I don't like the stark ambiguity in the use of "supernationally." The connotation is dubious.
__ They are internationally standardized, redefining the value of their services periodically and everywhere at approximately the same rhythm. ___
