16/100

I. On Green Dolphin Street
If anyone in my immediate family isn't busy this Sunday (haha!) they should come and hear Jazz Sunday at my church. I'm doing a little bit of "research" by way of listening to Miles Davis and Bill Evans right now and feeling just slightly nostalgic about the way things were back when I was a jazz trumpeter first and a classical player second. I sort of wonder sometimes whether I shouldn't have my college students playing ballads out of the real book and learning how to play changes over bop tunes to teach tone color and quality, and how to see a transposition or an etude in its harmonic context.

II. Rowan Williams on School Choice
"For a decade and a half, we have been consistently told by government that the protection of 'parental choice' in educational matters is one of the most fundamental imperatives in a proper education policy. The appeal of this is genuinely powerful, because it has a ring of altruism--wanting what's best for a growing generation--at the same time as having a comforting ring of tribalism--wanting what's best for our own. The harder you look at these two sorts of appeal, however, the more difficult it is to hold them together in terms of choice. I want to be able to choose a 'better' education for my child, and so I must require educational institutions to furnish me with information about their relative success or failure; without this, there is not much sense in speaking at all about the right to choose, and it is quite logical that a policy stressing such a right should involve pressure on schools to provide a copious flow of information about their performance (test results, league tables, and so on). But who in such circumstances chooses a school identified as 'failing' (to use the current jargon)? Just possibly, a parent with a strong commitment to--say--education in a multi-ethnic setting might say that it's more important to equip a child to live acceptingly in a diverse society than to secure a particular cluster of qualifications, and might accordingly opt for a school with higher diversity and lower average examination results. But that is a consciously risky business, and it is a bold parent who is sure enough about this to jeopardise a child's possible vocational/professional future. Those doing so are obviously choosing, though on the basis of different criteria of excellence: they are not choosing what they see as failure. But more generally it should be self-evident that the notion of failure here already begins to limit the supposed availability of choice. To attract custom, a school must 'succeed'; and this almost invariably means selection by academic promise. Some will be rejected, and will end up in schools by definitition less 'successful'; and who wants to choose them? Yet they will be the only possibilities for some parents. The language of choice is beginning to look far from innocent.
If the parent (on the child's behalf) is a consumer and the school a provider or producer, the school competes in a finite market, a market where one producer's gain is another's loss (there is not a lot that a rival producer can do in this context to 'diversify' to avoid failure). A school's excellence, measured in the apparently straightforward ways specified in present policy, is bound up with its capacity to attract customers away from competitors. Within a finite geographical area, this becomes a means of attracting not only 'custom' but resources--local enthusiasm, the support of parents with managerial and fundraising skills; and so a model such as this necessarily involves a spiral of failure for the less successful competitors, and the consequence diminution of real choice for some parents. And a parallel spiral is set up among consumers: the 'successful' school can, to some extent, negotiate conditions, intensify its selectivity, setting terms that only a certain percentage of applicants can satisfy--a necessary move, since the school itself is a finite system whose resources have to be economically deployed. Parents can become caught in anxiety about their ability to negotiate with the school to establish the viability of their choice. The end result is a situation in which certain schools and parents are effectively without choice, because resources are slanted in one direction by the imposition of uniform standards of excellence, and the experience of choice for the more fortunate is shadowed by anxieties about how to meet increasingly stringent conditions for the exercise of that choice.
In short, the language of choice applied to the educational system is deceptive. By concentrating our attention on parental freedom to choose the 'best' available provision, it distorts both our moral and our more narrowly educational perceptions. It encourages us to ignore the context and effects of such choice, nudging us insistently away from the awkward question of how everyone's supposed right to choose could be honored in a framework like this. It also encourages us to assume that there is a single and fairly easily measurable standard of success in education. In both respects, the language of choice helps us to postpone or set aside questions about educations as something that has to do with expressing and fostering a corporate responsibility--the shared responsibility of inducting children into a social environment with at least some common values, and the providing of what is needed to understand and question that environment in terms of its success in embodying values. Since we currently don't seem to know, as a society, what we want to 'induct' children into or what we consider to be the foundation of our society's moral legitimacy (that is, what makes this society worth belonging to or defending), it isn't surprising that we take refuge in treating education as the process of purchasing blocks of training material. When our consciences are particularly tender on all this, we consider adding a block called 'moral education'. This will inevitably have a somewhat abstract feel to it--as does the valiant but rather elusive document on 'Values and Education in the Community' produced in 1996 for the School Curriculum and Assessment Authority. And it is a gloomy fact that left and right often mouth the same cliches here. By accepting the polarisation of 'academic' and 'vocational', by applying simplistic tests of relevance or accessibility, educationalists on both sides of the political divide can successfully bracket out the most fundamental issue: how are people to acquire a language in which they can think about the character of their society? For that requires fluency in the traditions, even the mythology of the society you're in, and a confidence sufficient to test and challenge its inconsistencies or deceptions. There was once a powerful socialist vision of education as learning tradition so as to make it a critical tool; but voices like those of Raymond Williams, Richard Hoggart, or E.P. Thompson are none too audible on the left these days.
'Choice' in education is a term that must be stripped of its false innocence. The prevailing use of the word conceals a deep scepticism about the whole idea of education as serving a common interest, providing a language for public debate and moral wrangling. Choice in this context looks remarkably like the successful assertion of will when you analyse it; and the supposed goodness of free choice in education is not very different from the desirability of my being able to defend and sustain my interest--albeit through another party, the child, whose interests are seen as an extension of mine...

Would be interested in any and all thoughts on the passage above. (And will post more of it if it's piqued anyone's interests.) Dr. Williams was formerly Archbishop of Canterbury, and as I'm discovering, wrote brilliantly on the subject of pretty much everything.