Should we abandon the “legacy of the factory school” (Bonstingl)? Give more thought to the “theories that can guide our actions” (Schenkat)? Try to become more responsive to the “needs and preferences” of students (Schmoker and Wilson)? Absolutely. The relevant questions, though, are: (1) Why would these—or any other—legitimate educational objectives require us to adopt or even adapt a model from the business world? and (2) What are the potential harms of doing so?
Rather than acknowledging a difference of opinion between us, Bonstingl declares that I'm “ill informed” about TQM's benefits. Rather than addressing specific objections to thinking of students as workers, he simply states that students are and always have been workers. Such pronouncements, along with sweeping assertions about the need to focus on quality, seem to me neither persuasive nor useful.
Bonstingl is particularly offended by my observation that the introduction of TQM into the classroom is often driven by the interests of corporations rather than those of children. But he need look no further than Schenkat's response to see the emphasis there is on “productivity,” on helping “companies...to remain competitive,” and preparing students for “the new high-performance organizations.”
The raison d'être of corporations is to maximize profit for their investors. From this vantage point, it is logical to think about schools in terms of whether the students they turn out will eventually help these companies to make money. It may be tempting to assume this goal is perfectly compatible with helping children become lifelong self-directed learners, critical thinkers, and caring people, but experience shows otherwise. If we look at students and see future employees, we not only distort learning by reducing it to fiscal terms but also collapse the present into the future, ignoring the fact that what children need, experience, and deserve right now is intrinsically important.
And what of all the evidence suggesting that excessive emphasis on students' performance can undermine their creative thinking and interest in learning? The only response to this comes from Schmoker and Wilson who argue that athletes, writers, and singers require feedback to improve. True enough: performers need information about their past performance. But when the activity in question is learning, intrinsic motivation can easily be undermined by exactly the sort of preoccupation with results that corporate managers champion. As for Csikszentmihalyi's work, he has consistently distinguished between attending to performance cues within an activity and external evaluation. “When you make children aware of whether they're doing better or worse than they're supposed to,” he explained recently, they “switch completely from attention to the task to attention to the self and other people's opinion of [them].”
Like proponents of TQM, I passionately want to see our schools improve. Soaring rhetoric about “the joy of discovering how wonderful it can be to learn” is easy enough to endorse. But learn what? And how? And with what sort of motivation? At best, management-based models are silent on these questions. At worst, their answers are genuinely troubling.
