美国学校教育反思:世界主义和社会排斥的视角

长期以来,在美国学校教育中高扬的"世界主义"(cosmopolitanism)原则,即超越传统民族国家忠诚归属界限,带有普世价值的全球公民意识,被认为是推动社会和个人进步的重要思想,进入学校课程系统,贯穿于教学实践的各个环节.理性与合理性精神、时间概念的转变和进步主义思想的推动,使得世界主义在美国公立学校教育中长久不衰.它以改造儿童的方式推动社会变革,对人文学科,特别是教育学、心理学产生了深刻影响;同时,世界主义又是一个主张包容、却推行社会排斥的系统,主要体现在:它通过问题解决、赋权原则、自由解放、言论开放和选择权利等手段,引导儿童的成长;但又对学校教育中的学生进行分类,以换喻、分类等方式,塑造不同类型的学生.终身学习概念的提倡和为了"一切儿童"的口号,都反映了其中蕴含的比较思维方式在追求平等同时,又在制造新的不平等,造成抑斥的状态.体现了世界主义原则通过创塑儿童来改造社会的双重特征.     

Historicizing the Future: Educational Reform, Systems of Reason, and the Making of Children Who are the Future Citizens

Educational reform and reformist research are not merely about school improvement. They embody a field of cultural practices that constitutes the objects of schooling – the teacher who administers the reforms to the child and the distinctions and differentiations about who the child is and should be. Our interest is in the rules and standards of reason assembled through the cultural practices of school reform. Reason is a cultural practice functioning to enact a change in the conditions of people but also invests people with particular capacities and capabilities. This investiture of capacities and capabilities produces particular human kinds or categories of the determinant qualities of the individuals schools administer. Using studies of educational governance and social inclusion/exclusion in Europe and on US educational reform, the discussion focuses on the overlapping practices of system management and curriculum reforms that map different human kinds. One human kind is the child as a lifelong learner, an individual whose qualities entail actively and flexibly participating in communities through problem-solving strategies. The characteristics and qualities of the lifelong learner are differentiated from those who do not embody the norms of participation –the child left behind. The study of the systems of reason that govern the objects of reflection and rectification in school reforms is a strategy to consider the politics of reform, change, and social inclusion and exclusion.     

The sociology of education as the history of the present: fabrication,difference and abjection

The paper explores the fabrications of human kinds in pedagogical research. It examines the social and psychological sciences of education as producing independent spaces for the study of people in order to act on them and as a cultural thesis for people to act for themselves. Further, it explores the principles generated about who the child is and should be. It is argued that the making of human kinds embodies particular historically generated modes of representing the possibilities of life; and these modes function to divide, differentiate and abject particular qualities of people and populations into unlivable spaces. This comparativeness produces inequality as it strives for equality. The analysis engages educational studies in a conversation with history, philosophy, political and cultural studies that draw on particular European studies brought into the US to challenge its philosophical, analytical and social/psychological traditions.     

Ideology and social formation in teacher education

Teacher education contains codes of culture that are shaped by two important dynamics of American life. One is the process of professionalization: Certain occupations have cultural and social authority in controlling realms of meaning and definitions of reality. The second is the predicament of schooling: Social issues of power and interest are incorporated into the discourse of pedagogy and give direction to teacher education. The realization of administrative control and “practical” reasoning occurs within contexts of power that relate to these two dynamics.