Same old, same old

We had a seminar the other day, and the main event was a plenary given by a long-term resident of KSA. Among the many interesting points he had made, I feel it necessary to make a rebut to several.

One of his observations was that teaching is a kind of socio-cultural game, with expectancies, rules, roles, and purposes which Shakespeare at one time identified as coalescing around love, death, power, money, and ego. I would probably collapse all of those into a discussion of love, that the other pursuits are reactions in various complicated ways to a vacuum of that Life Force in some way or another, but that is another blog. The point I was piqued at was the ensuing comment, that teachers often "reproduce the conditions that limited them", presumably in more familiar contexts. Or, as the speaker was later to illustrate with Marx, "the workers are complicit in their own isolation." I don't know how accurate or contextualized the speaker's quote was, but the upshot of it was to pin the tail on the donkey: if your class is boring, maybe it's your fault.

Marx had a lot to say about the exploitation of labor, in fact constructing a whole theory around this construct. Some quotes include...

Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth -- the soil and the labourer.

KARL MARK, Capital

Hitherto, every form of society has been based ... on the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed classes.

KARL MARX, The Communist Manifesto

In other words, there is a conflict here, and this is summed up in the coercion interpretation of exploitation: how can the workers be complicit, choosing their lot, when capitalists exploit them?

 The worker in capitalism is not forced to engage in surplus labour in the same way that slaves and serfs were. In the case of the latter it was threat of punishment if they refused. Rather, what forces the wage-labourer in capitalism to engage in surplus labour is the fact that the capitalist owns the means of production. Lacking means of production of their own, the wage-labourers are forced to accept the wage offers of the capitalists to procure means of subsistence, and the wage contracts to which they are forced to agree bind them to perform surplus labour.

What is the case here in KSA? Is there coercion? I would say that a surplus of labor in the home countries of expats drove them out of financial need to come here. KSA owns the means of production: with significant oil reserves they can withstand recessionary pressures; but even more, they can adapt rather comfortably to the winds of change swirling around them. On a personal level, the teachers in Saudi Arabia accept the situations they face in classrooms, on campuses, and in shopping malls and city streets, because they fear a reprisal in the form of job loss, or perhaps even personal injury, recalling the threat of punishment characteristic of earlier times.

I work and sleep and rest with a constant sense of anxiety, which becomes naked fear sometimes, and at other times becomes nagging paranoia, as I watch every word and deed. The stress of walking on egg shells is what in part explains my constant fatigue: I go to bed tired, and wake up tired. Every day. It is not the workload; I have done 12 hour days installing solar panels in the middle of a heat wave out in a farmer's field. The physical exertion does not compare to this.

So then the game is not a friendly one of parcheesi or chess, where the only outcome of loss is a bruised ego, if that. It is a game of Russian roulette; you don't know when the next round in the chamber is live. That is, you don't know if tomorrow a student, or a fellow teacher, or the person driving in the car beside you, is going to change everything, suddenly and unexpectedly. Forcefully. Painfully. The best advice I have heard so far is to expect the unexpected.

The bottom line, though, is that the blame game the speaker said was characteristic of teachers is ironically and often a policy of blaming the victim. The dean who said he would have our back at a dinner just a few short weeks ago, recently advised the students in a large council meeting to report any teacher who transgresses the murky lines seperating discussions that are appropriate (women, religion and politics) from those that are haram. Why? Because the ills that our campus suffers from, can be captured and controlled by ostracizing the teachers? Is this the issue that will move education to the cutting edge?

The speaker talked of testing as a social act, of learning as lying on an unpredictable curve. Seriously? While we labor under the realization that our major tests have zero correlation with curriculum content, which is not only inefficient and pedagogically invalid, but has been called by some as morally repugnant (eg Finch 2002); while we are required to use a curriculum that has had little input or refinement by the professionals who use it, which does not encourage student choice and often does not reflect even coincidentally their major interests? And we wonder why there are disciplinary issues, which could be directly related to the student's sense of hopelessness or powerlessness, which is projected onto and often channelled by their teachers?

Confidence. Choice. Authenticity. Principles. These are universals that cultures world-wide accept and espouse. Theoretical constructs divorced from realities, and tainted by thinly veiled accusation, are not a step forward. They are merely the same old, same old.