Stop Me Before I Vote Again

The living theater work that Augusto Boal has pioneered in Brazil is an excellent example of what I think of as quality teacher education, or certification, if you must, because the participant in such a process has to learn from the jump how to listen, how to hit the ground running, how to adjust, and how to check his or her categories at the door.

Boal uses the term “joker”. The “joker” is not necessarily a humorist, sometimes that person is serious as a heart attack. But the challenge of the “joker” is the avoidance of monologue. A “joker”, or a good teacher, is someone who knows how to facilitate questions and follow up questions across disciplines and technique, with the aim of establishing an internal quest for academic rigor among each of one’s charges.

Questions are the process wherein people not only learn, but figure out what their own reasons are for embracing any given discipline. Such a process can keep all educators and students engaged in the actual world, where the students we deal with, both young people and adult, rarely fit the schematics or the theory offered up in the materials distributed by the “standards” groupies.

Good teacher certification is the same task as that of setting reasonable (flexible) academic expectations for the learner: establish a goal that is agreed upon by people committed to open learning, create a massive financial expenditure that can actually accomplish the goals set, and get the hell out of the way.

The public has long been conditioned to blame educators for the horror show that late capitalist culture has become. This is why dodos like Duncan can actually repeat the mantra that “the task of education must create a workforce that is internationally competitive” and not be embarrassed.

No, Arne. The task of education is to assist in the emergence of people who know what their own reasons are for embracing the work or discipline or study they chose in life, and a big part of helping people get there is allowing as many people as possible as many options as we can, and the material resources to follow whichever path they need to for as long as they need to. And if we make that kind of a commitment to comprehensive education, the economic question will take care of itself, and generate some possibilities the like of which the Arne Duncans of this world will never come close to. And if the bossman can’t afford that, because he’s bankrupted everybody in the world, then let him take his medicine and get the hell out of the way.

For the time being, however, there’s a war on critical thinking within education, and painful though it may be, committed teachers will have to devise cagier strategies for themselves and their students until full open confrontation with the war speculator society is a possibility. And given that this conflict is a necessity, everybody who teaches needs to take on the classic counsel from James Brown in “The Big Payback”:

I don’t know karate, but I know ka-razy.

Those who set out on the path of the mad leap have to employ the classic strategy of running with the hare and hunting with the hounds. Like the fool in the classic tarot image, we have to be ready to have one foot on solid ground, and the other in the realm of uncertainty, absurdity, the grand guignol, the kuntu drama. .

The question of public education and teacher certification is the question put to a section of the workforce, education professionals, who are in a better position than many other people who work for a living to undo our worker-ness, as the Old Moor might have phrased it.

Right now, most people who teach for a living can’t or won’t see this reality, which is not good, because we can be very sure the people who own this society can see. That is why they are clamping down on the education workforce just as hard as they can in a national push to toughen certification, lengthen the work day, introduce something called “merit pay”, cancel deferred compensation provision in teacher contracts, thereby destroying one of the worthiest gains made by any group of organized workers, the two to three months of time away from production demands teachers have every year.

Duncan and Obama haven’t said it explicitly yet, but one of their main aims is to break what feeble work floor organization we currently possess in the AFT and the NEA.

Bad as the teacher’s unions are, they’re a hell of a lot better than nothing, which is all the labor power teachers will have if the educator union critics have their way.

I’m an old warehouse and service industry worker, and was for a decade and a half before I became a teacher, and when I hear most teacher union critics talk, they don’t sound any different to me than anti-union jackasses sounded back in the early 1980s.

We can see what those beautiful ideas have done to the “non-skilled” workforce. To be sure, we’ll have to fight the union bureaucrat mercenaries and push them aside on the certification question as well, but that’s just the way of it. Nobody gets through this mess with an unchipped heart.

The question of teacher certification is more than a liberal concern, or just bureaucratic in-talk, it is a transitional and revolutionary question, if you’ll allow me the terms, that requires those of us who can see it to push back harder and harder. A concentrated struggle about teacher certification is not an internal, bureaucratic liberal reform, but a vital question that affects a sizeable portion of organized public sector workers – and just about everybody's kids.