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Patrick Shannon – Nearly a century ago, John Dewey (1916) wrote that democracy requires continuous and thoughtful attention. He laid this challenge at the steps of schools, entrusting teachers with the future of our country. I appeal to teachers in the face of every hysterical wave of emotion, and of every subtle appeal of sinister class interest, to remember that they above all others are consecrated servants of the democratic ideas in which alone this country is truly a distinctive nation – ideas of friendly and helpful intercourse between all and the equipment of every individual to serve the community by his own best powers in his own best way. (p. 210) How shall we address Dewey’s challenge in times of greater centralized control over our lives in and out of classrooms?
One
approach is to consider how other groups have practiced democracy when
facing
heavily- funded, scientifically authorized, and government sanctioned
corporate
interests and to take up their examples as metaphors for how we as
teachers
might serve as the midwives for the rebirth of democracy for this and
coming
generations (Dewey, 1916-1917). In rural
Many groups have
formed to represent citizens in such struggles across our county and
state. Their efforts afford three lessons
for others
who face similar challenges. First, they
have the chutzpah to question science and the market as the determining
factors
in decisions about our lives. Second,
they identify direct connections between science and the market, thus
undermining the objective authority of either.
Third, they display a deeper freedom than the ability to
choose among
options presented to them. In what
follows, the struggles over corporate hog farms in Hog
Farms in As in many other states, Pennsylvanians are told that corporate hog farms will bring new jobs and new taxes to impoverished communities. They will make us players in the agricultural global economy. As I understand it, corporate hog farms are stops in the production of pork for public consumption. They are considered to be a logical extension of the manufacturing system for commodities in which science and efficiency are understood to be the most direct road to profit. As James Adams, the President of Penn Agris (a farm-industry trade organization) explained,” the corporate system is designed to get large quantities of high quality meat to dinner tables at the least cost” (as quoted in Avirl 2002, p. A 1). This seems reasonable enough. To act on this
design, however, agricultural corporations buy land, hire managers, and
then
ship 3000 to 5000 piglets from corporate breeding farms to the
fattening farms
in order to raise each hog’s weight from 10 to 250 pounds.
Farm managers load the hogs with considerable
amounts of grain and restrict their movement.
The job of these hogs is to eat and poop.
Each hog creates eight times as much waste as
one human, placing a great strain on communities’ eco systems. The
massive
amount of excrement produced on corporate farms is typically piped into
nearby
open-air “lagoons,” which hold up to 25 million gallons of waste each.
As the
waste builds up in the lagoons, farm managers periodically spray the
manure out
over nearby farmland. This practice
begins a series of reactions in the air, water, and soil.
Because the hogs are fed growth supplements
that contain heavy metals, their manure contains a high concentration
of these
metals, and when the manure is sprayed over farmland, the metals are
absorbed
into the soil and enter local watersheds.
The current and potential neighbors for corporate hog
farms are not
eager to deal with these reactions. One I don’t like the way they treat the animals. I don’t like the conditions for the farmer. I don’t like the smell. There is no escape from that. I don’t like the potential to damage the water supply. I don’t like the amount of antibiotics they use to keep the animals alive. (Avril, 2002)
In
more than eighty townships across The Franklin County Coalition (with members from ten townships, area businesses, and civic groups) published a study of farm ownership entitled, Concentrated Animal Operations in Franklin County: A County at Risk from Corporate Ownership. It reported that absentee corporations controlled eighty-two percent of concentrated animal operations in the county. Moreover, one-hundred percent of all complaints about concentrated farming were filed against these corporate owned farms. Rather than contributing to the local economies, corporate farms purchased feed, tools, and machinery from national firms outside the community. The study concluded, “corporate owned farms represent a continuing and ongoing threat to the health, safety, and welfare of residents of Franklin County due to the corporate shield of liability that corporate structure acquires, and also because of the out-of county character of these operations gives these corporations less reason to be good Franklin County neighbors” (undated, p. 8) By 2002, ten townships outlawed corporate farming altogether. “No corporation or syndicate may acquire or otherwise obtain an interest, whether legal, beneficial, or otherwise, in any real estate used for farming in this Township or engage in farming” (as posted on Franklin County Coalition website www.celdf.org/fcc/sus-manual.htm). To enact the ordinance, the township councils relied on the work of local citizens, the Franklin County Coalition report, and similar state laws from nine Midwestern states. They justified the act through provisions of state law (The Second Class Township Act, Article XV and XVI, code 53 P. S. 66501 and 66601), which requires townships to provide for the protection and preservation of natural and human resources and to promote, protect, and facilitate public health, safety, and welfare. The state,
corporations, and the Pennsylvania Farm Bureau have responded angrily,
arguing
that townships have no right to ban corporations from farming in their
communities. Legislators have considered
two bills (PA Senate Bill 826 and 1423) which would reverse the
townships’
decisions and remove their authority to pass such ordinances. Several corporations and farm trade agencies
have filed lawsuits charging that these townships have violated
corporations’
civil rights, denying them access to property as a class.
(Corporations gained the rights of full
citizenship in the A Practice of Democracy The hope that I see for democracy lies in the vivid demonstrations of literate democratic habits of mind and core democratic values among these citizen groups. They are poring through texts – legal, scientific and economic – in order to learn more about themselves while testing their understandings of their history, cultures, and values. By doing so, they assert their autonomy to develop their own life plans and to take responsibility for their lives. Note that their commitments to family farms, community well-being, and local business in the early coalitions’ documents convey a search for a fundamental equality among community members. They sought and continue to seek to level the playing fields among real and corporate citizens in each township in order to allow majority rule after careful deliberation. These citizens compared their emerging self and community awareness against the social structures put in place to guide those lives and found that federal and state standards were not representations of their collective wills. Rather distant governments encouraged absentee corporations to build in local communities, privileging corporate rights to make profits over the community’s rights to health, safety, and quality of life. During the citizens’ affirmations of local cultures and searches for alternatives to what the state and corporations had to offer them, they became aware that those structures and their lives could be more in their control. This growing awareness and their continued study caused citizens to form coalitions across previously antagonistic groups. Old and young, farmers and townspeople, left and right politically came together in order to limit the growth or possibility of corporate hog farms in their communities. The strength of these coalitions is demonstrated in the legal successes in some communities. Moreover, some of the coalitions have pushed beyond hog farms to larger issue.
All
these acts are examples of sophisticated literacy at its best, and they
belie
the rhetoric of a literacy crisis in rural A Metaphor for Literacy Education
Many
teachers from preschool to college face a similar dilemma as those who
struggle
over corporate hog farms in Questions about Science and the Market The first lesson from the struggle over hog farms is to raise questions about the power of science and/or the market in schools and reading programs. I don’t mean that the citizens doubted the scientific conclusions or the economic predictions about hog farming. None of the coalitions’ reports, newspaper editorials, or ordinances rejected science or capitalism. The farmers hope to improve their farming through the prudent use of science, and all know that their communities must generate capital in order to continue to exist. However, the majority in each of those communities refused to elevate the scientific and market facts above the facts that they discovered and developed about their lives in their communities.
Communities acting on this
bold decision to
trust themselves did not automatically accept the modern tradition that
objectivity is always preferable to the subjective.
Rather they sought and continue to seek to
subordinate science and the market to their subjective, ethical
analyses of
their situations. In order to take this
step, they realized that science and economics are social constructions
and not
natural, universal or eternal. They
realize that people developed science and the market over time and
people work
to maintain them as disciplines of authority in our lives.
The idea of the market is only four hundred
years old beginning with the rise of the merchant class in Renaissance
Europe. The scientific method (the
foundation of scientific objectivity) is not much older than the house
that
those grandparents built on their farm in
Although
the excesses of advertisers should have taught us to be wary of the
marketplace
(
The scientific method consists in the careful and often laborious classification of facts, the comparison of their relationships and sequences, and finally in the discovery by aid of the disciplined imagination of a brief statement or formula, which in a few words resumes a wide range of facts. Such a formula is called a scientific law. (p. 77) That “disciplined
imagination” is
now defined as experimentation – forming a hypothesis to make
predictions about
some phenomenon, testing that predictions against one or several
control groups,
and accepting, rejecting or revising the hypothesis based on the
results with
the intension to add significantly to the development of an explanation
of the
world and all that is in it. This
scientific method bears little resemblance to the science that
Copernicus,
At
its best, science is a human endeavor which requires a combination of
imagination, creativity, prior knowledge, library research,
perseverance, and
often blind luck – the same combination of intellectual resources
available to
all in differing amounts when trying to solve problems.
Members of the coalitions across Teachers or groups of teachers who raise questions about science and/or the market as the determining factor for reading education need not reject them completely. Rather they can work to understand how science and the market offer opportunities and constraints as they face the complexities of teaching within the dynamic interactions of local and global social systems, the biographic and cultural stories that play in and out of their own and students’ lives, and multiple visions of the future. Moreover, they can ask questions about why and which groups struggle so hard to maintain the authority of the scientific method and the market in classrooms. By raising such questions, teachers seek to validate multiple ways of thinking about teaching, learning, and reading. Money
Recognizing
that science is anthropomorphic leads to a second lesson.
These rural citizens identified ties between
the science of hog farming and the money in the hog farm industry. This is science at its worst.
The struggle over hog farming in This connection does not suggest that all scientific research is tainted. However, one of the most dramatic trends influencing the direction of science during the past century has been its increasing dependence on funding from government and industry (Rampton & Stauber, 2001). Today, mainstream scientists are engaged in expensive research, which requires considerable financial support from grant agencies or corporations. This trend is noticeable in the soft as well as the hard sciences (National Science Board, 1998) – and our field is not immune. It would not be difficult to track the variation in reading research topics during the last three decades to the ones mentioned in federal calls for proposals for research. The editors of the International Reading Association’s Reading Research Quarterly just implemented a conflict of interest standard to ensure its readership that connections between science and money would be completely disclosed for all articles published in the journal. Stephen Metcalf (2002) detailed the connections between market and science behind the scenes of No Child Left Behind. The smell of money, then, contradicts the objectivity of the scientific method. In other words, the collective interests created by the concerns for the funding agencies compete with the individual interest created by the scientific method. What freedom? The third lesson is to expand the notion of freedom. The corporations, professional organizations, and government officials who promote corporate hog farms promise more pork on our tables and value efficiency and profits most highly. They present a “freedom to farm” package which offers all farmers license to farm as they see fit, diminishing their accountability to the community and the rights of other community members to hold farmers accountable for their actions. From the state’s point of view, corporate hog farms mean more stable local and state economies. Rather than accept this promotion, however, the citizens of these ten townships decided that they are willing to eat less pork and to pay more for it. They value clean water, fresh air, and local control. They have established a different set of criteria on which to base their present and to work for their desired futures.
This
power to develop the criteria before choosing is a freedom seldom
mentioned in
the debates about schooling and reading instruction in the Practices of Democracy In order to formulate ideas about the future, we must state the values that we intend to realize and identify the threats to those values. Following the lead of the rural coalitions, we can ask ourselves individually and collectively – do we share the values of those who are telling us what materials to use, how to teach, and when to test as if they know better than we do what to use, how to act, and when and if we are successful? I choose the pronoun, we, consciously for two reasons. I am a teacher at a university whose authority over my instruction is being threatened by commercialism, government policies, and scientific facts. Second, I am a citizen who sees that my personal concerns about my freedom when teaching are really a part of a larger social problem which threatens many groups and individuals in my community and other communities around the nation (and the world). I am, we are, in this struggle together with the farmers, merchants, workers, artists, and many others.
Because
the stakes are so high, these struggles are often loud and not always
polite. The battle over literacy
education is no exception, and of course, it is not made among equals. Advocates of some positions have considerably
more power than others in the debate.
That power – be it from government sovereignty, think-tank
money, or
professional organizations – makes those positions more available to
teachers
and the public. Selected expert
testimony makes those positions seem more legitimate than alternatives. Historically, this imbalance in power has
enabled educational publishers to basically dictate the future of
literacy
instruction, as teachers and others abdicate their responsibilities and
allow
their futures to be made by default ( Consider three predominant positions in reading education: moral literacy, high standards/high stakes testing, and best practices. Moral Literacy Moral literacy has a long history dating to colonial times when the sole purpose of learning to read was to avoid that Old Deluder Satan. Recently, the McGuffey Readers of the nineteenth century are making a comeback because some groups value the protestant and capitalist moral messages included in the stories and the drill and practice pedagogy. As Former Secretary of Education William Bennett (1996)concluded, American youth need “a maximum dosage of moral tutelage from parents, teachers, coaches, clergy and other responsible adults” (p. 57) in order to overcome rampant crime, poverty, drug use, and teenaged pregnancy. Leaving little to chance, Bennett and other advocates of moral literacy have designed and published anthologies, curricula, television programs, websites, and professional textbooks with which adults can teach children and youth the appropriate moral maxims. By learning to read this corpus of work, students become morally literate people who know “what virtues look like, what they are in practice, how to recognize them, and how they work” (Bennett, 1993, p. 11). Within moral literacy, the assumption is made that texts have single and fixed meanings. Moreover, advocates assume that individuals, and not society, are completely responsible for society’s troubles. With current Secretary of Education Rod Paige stating that Christian values should be reproduced in public schools, moral literacy has the power of government, business, and conservative think tanks behind it. Paige explained, “in a religious environment the value system is set. That’s not the case in public school where there are so many different kids with different kinds of values” (as quoted in Schemo, 2003, p. A 24). The choices left to teachers and students within moral literacy are limited to the methods through which the morals will be ingested. Visit William Bennett’s Book of Virtues website and television show. Note the sponsors. Bennett’s absolution of the state and business from moral responsibility in the dilemmas presented garners considerable financial sponsorship for moral literacy projects and products. Literacy as Cultural Capital Current advocates of high standards and high stakes testing emphasize one of the original nineteenth century rationales for common schools - schools can benefit both the individual and society by educating productive workers. Former Secretary of Education, Richard Riley 91997/ wrote: Literacy can help give people the tools to make the most of their potential and prepare them for the twenty-first century, when a fully literate workforce will be crucial to our strength as a nation. It is in the interests of all of us to do all we can to ensure the reading success of every young child by the end of the third grade. (p. 83) According to this position, most of America’s competitive advantage in the world economy faded by the mid-twentieth century, making American bureaucratic organization of business and school into “liabilities rather than assets” (Marshall & Tucker, 1992). Throughout the mid-1980s, philanthropic organizations negotiated and brokered consensus among politicians, business leaders, and media pundits concerning the necessity for school reform, sponsoring public meetings and hearings on these matters and inviting select expert testimony. Without authority over public education, but supportive of this position, the Clinton Administration funded the development of national standards in most academic subjects and offered financial incentives to states if they would follow this lead.
Although
earlier versions of high standards and high stakes testing (America
2000 or
Educate Best Practices
Much
of the substance of the best practices position on literacy education
is
captured in the final words of The National Academy of Science report
from the
Commission on During the Clinton Administration, the federal government gathered groups of experts to proclaim that the scientific method is the only official means to verify best practices for teaching reading and to select appropriate research findings to name those practices. These groups provided scientific legitimacy for current federal reading policy. Although many within reading educators question the government’s methods and motives in convening these groups (Allington, 2002; Coles, 2003; Cunningham, 2001; Garan, 2002), the critics share the values of the best practice position. That is, most critics consider reading a goal in itself and seek the right science to establish the best practices. Some advocates of best practices suggest that schools become a marketplace of ideas in which administrators and teachers sift among recent scientific evidence to determine the best practices. In this free market of ideas, the best practices will drive all other methods from schools. The marketplace metaphor assumes at least three conditions are in place at all times:
Perhaps, it is
not news to report
that these conditions are not and have never been available in most
schools
across the country. Without this
possibility of complete rationality in school, the marketplace fails to
be a
fair and equal means to make decisions.
Powerful groups can press their values upon teachers and
students
through simple, bureaucratic and technical control.
Consider the
What Can We Do?
None
of the popular positions – moral literacy, literacy as cultural
capital, or
best practices – affords us the time or space to develop our own
criteria for
how we want to live in and out of our classrooms. Within
those positions, we are too busy
delivering someone else’s vision and values to discover our own. We are faced with the similar dilemma as the
rural
Some
existing groups demonstrate how we might start.
The Coalition for Educational Justice unites parents,
students, and
teachers in efforts to transform the public schools in The remaking of
democracy in our classrooms might begin with our engagement in
democratic
practices. Like the coalitions which
struggle over hog farms in References Allington, R. (2002).
Big brother and the
national reading curriculum. Anderson,
R., Hiebert, E., Scott, J., and Wilkerson, I.
(1985). Becoming a nation of readers. Avril, T. ( Bennett, W. (1993).
The book of virtues. Bennett, W. (1996).
Body count.
Coles, G.
(2003). Reading the naked truth:
Literacy, legislation, and lies. Cunnigham, J. (2001). The national reading panel report. Reading Research Quarterly, 30, 326-335. Dewey, J.
(1916). Nationalizing
education. Vol. 10
Essays (1916-1817), The middle works of
John Dewey. Dewey, J.
(1916-17). The need of
an industrial education in an industrial democracy.
Vol. 10
Essays (1916-1917), The middle works of
John Dewey. Edmondson, J. and
Shannon, P..
(2003). Reading
first initiative in rural Feyerabend,
P. (1993). Against
method, 3rd Ed. Garan,
E. (2002). Resisting
reading mandates: How to triumph with the
Truth. Kuhn, T.
(1970). The structures of the scientific
revolutions,
2nd Ed. Metcalf,
S. (2003). National Science Board. (1998). Industry trends in research support and links to public research. www.nsf.gov/pubs/1998/nsb9899.htm. Pearson, K. (1896).
The grammar of science. Rampton,
S. & Stauber, J. (2001). Trust us we’re
experts! Riley, R.
(1997). Corrrespondence. Schemo,
D. ( Shannon, P. (1989).
Broken promises:
Reading instruction in 20th century Shannon, P. (2001).
ISHOP you shop:
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Shannon, P.
(2002). Turn, turn, turn:
Language education, politics and freedom at
the turn of three centuries. In C.
Dudley-Marling & C. Edelsky, (Eds.) The fate of
progressive language policies and practices. Patrick Shannon
teaches at |