Teaching in Moloch: Toward a Prophetic Pragmatic Critique of Pedagogical Fundamentalism‪.‬

Introduction Today increasing numbers of teachers and students are suffering under the rhetoric and bureaucracy of a narrow and impoverished conception of accountability. This discourse and the bureaucracies that enact it conceive of accountability as having at least three elements: (1) the explicit articulation of predetermined standards, (2) objective measures of achievement or non-achievement of those predetermined standards, and (3) interventions based upon the results of these measurements. In many educational settings three additional elements are increasingly common: (4) the stipulation of prescribed methods and materials for achieving predetermined standards, (5) the public dissemination of measurement results, and (6) the enabling of constituents' exercise of choice within limits authorized by those framing the accountability discourse. Thus are the basic mechanisms of capitalist economics--free markets, choice and competition--deployed to bring public education into a more explicit conformity with the technological rationality of what Marcuse (1964, 12) long ago termed a one-dimensional society. Such reforms are supported by a powerful coalition of conservative social, economic, and religious interests (Berliner 1995, Lugg 1996, Spring 2002). They constitute, I will argue, a form of pedagogical fundamentalism against which purely social or educational critiques are necessary, but insufficient. An effective critique of this movement must engage it on all three fronts--social, economic, and religious. I will argue that a Dewey-inspired pedagogical critique infused into the culturally, economically, and religiously informed critical discourse of Cornel West's (1989) prophetic pragmatism offers just such a critique.