Studying Teachers' Lives
Studying Teachers' Lives - an emergent field of study
Likewise in North America more conservative patterns of educational reform emerged during the Reagan years when William Bennett was Education Secretary; Aronowitz and Giroux provide a critical summary:
Bennett's education offensive stubbornly insisted that 'throwing money' at schools, even those with leaky roofs and broken boilers, was not the solution to what he termed the 'crisis of excellence'. Rather, he urged a massive curriculum revision, the central features of which were resuscitating math and science education, concentrating on transmitting the canonical works of Western civilization as a required part of the undergraduate curricula of elite colleges and universities, and emphasizing values such as respect for authority, especially in the family, as well as patriotism and other aspects of moral education, in the early grades. Bennett's curriculum strategy was more than a way to avoid frequent demands for more federal financial support for schools; it was a profound attack on many reforms of the 1960s, when students obtained from reluctant administrators more curriculum choice than was enjoyed by any generation of secondary and university students in recent educational history [i].
As part of the general reversal of 1960s patterns, the change in the patterns of political and administrative control over teachers have been enormous in the 198Os. In terms of power and visibility in many ways this represents 'a return to the shadows' for teachers in the face of new curriculum guidelines (in Britain an all-encompassing National Curriculum), teachers' assessment and accountability, a barrage of new policy edicts and new patterns of school governance and administration.
[i] Aronowitz, S. and Giroux, HA. (1991) Postmodern Education: Politics, Culture, and Social Criticism, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, p. 5.
