Whose world is it anyway?

One of my co-workers sometimes leaves his satellite radio at work, and when he does I get to listen to CNN or BBC news in the morning. I felt like having propaganda blatantly thrown at me this morning, so I clicked over to CNN and this is what I heard:

“Well, Alison, coming up we have the story of how a Cincinnati school has fired its entire teaching staff and principals, as well as trashing its curriculum.”

Of course, my interest was peaked (piqued? I'm never sure on this on). Predictably, this abrupt and total sidelining of an educational center was due to the lack of funding they were receiving after repeatedly not raising the students evaluative test scores a la “No Child Left Behind.” Instead, it seems, every child was getting left behind the 8-ball. The drastic revamping is certain to give the stable learning environment that will grant confidence to underperforming students. Please forgive me, my ability to write sarcastically is still in its infancy.

“That's disturbing, yes indeed,” I can hear you saying at your screen, “But what in Dante's Frozen Hell does it have to do with the readings?” I'll tell you now. In his discussion of the four camps in composition related pedagogical theories, James A. Berlin points out that “We are teaching a way of experiencing the world, a way of ordering and making sense of it.” (268) Coupled with the current prolific dominance of the Current-Traditional camp and its technical/scientific emphasis on procedure and quantification you can see that the failure in my CNN example may be with the standards and the reward/punishment method of their enforcement. Perhaps the problem lies in the theory that motivates No Child Left behind and the (tacitly wrong-headed) definitions of successful learning it creates.

What impressed me most about Kinneavy's “Basic Aims of Discourse” was its scope in such a short piece. While the idea of an exhaustive survey is laughable, this was comprehensive. Meaning that his use of the charts made the huge listing of names and descriptors comprehensible to me. Call me a follower, but I loved the 'built from existing speech' classification by Bertrand Russel. Oftentimes I found the more detailed version to seem overly detailed. It just seemed that bothering to subdivide the category of Reference (Russell's Informative) into Informative, Scientific and Exploratory didn't really add anything. (132)