Teaching and Time: Foundations of a Temporal Pedagogy
2005; Volume: 32; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0737-5328
Autores Tópico(s)Religious Education and Schools
ResumoIntroduction Most federal reform agendas over past two decades have echoed 1983 A Nation at Risk report that the basic purposes of are to reestablish America's once unchallenged preeminence in commerce, industry, science, and technological innovation. Such pronouncements pound home political message that primary function of schooling must be goal of educating worker-citizen (Spring, 1976). By this view, only type of intelligence that matters is what can be psychometrically evaluated and managed to produce efficient and uncritical agents of transnational, capitalist project of creating and dominating markets (Giddens, 1990). In this article, I will discuss this agenda as a world-historical project of colonization that has grievous educational consequences. By colonization I mean imposition of a particular model of time to exclusion of all others. This hegemonic time (I will call it corporate time) being strictly linear, impersonal, and mathematically manageable, is ideal medium for maximizing productivity and profit. It is same type which, beginning in early 20th century, informed social efficiency experts' vision of public schools as streamlined extensions of industrial capitalist state (Kliebard, 1986). When time is only time that is considered legitimate, then other experiences and embodiments of time come to be seen as threatening, even deviant. Such pathologizing of non-standard time has had a wide range of negative effects on theory and practice of psychotherapy (Slife, 1993). I will discuss parallel effects in education, where students whose worldviews rest upon alternative temporal commitments become to be reeducated and cured by very educational means that often created problems in first place (Foucault, 1980; Jeanierre, 1977; Ricoeur, 1976). Finally, I will discuss how teachers and students can resist these negative effects in classroom through constructing, sharing, and enacting life-narratives that embody alternative visions and projects of psychological, cultural, and transcendent time. A Brief History of (Commodified) Time Most historians of Western conceptions of time agree that three interrelated phenomena were especially important in growth of modern obsession with mathematical, impersonal time: The emergence of capitalism in 14th century, growth of towns, and invention of mechanical clock (Aguessy, 1977; Boorstin, 1985; Whitrow, 1988). The rise of guilds signaled emergence of early capitalism in Europe (Marx, 1976). At same time villages, growing larger and more complex in their means and relations of production, were supplanted by towns, some of which would soon become great industrial centers of Europe (Gurevich, 1976). And it was clock--created in this proto-industrial context--that, perhaps more than any other single invention, best symbolized and advanced early capitalism (Whitrow, 1988). The clock's effects were immediate and dramatic. It measured (and in measuring, radically changed) lived experience of passage. The clock was a teacher. For generations, town clock was one complicated machine that hundreds of thousands saw every day, heard over and over again every day and night. It taught them that invisible, inaudible, seamless time was composed of quanta. Like money, it taught them quantification (Crosby, 1997, p. 85). The varied patterns and purposes of agrarian life--vegetative, biological, familial, cultural, and mythic--began to yield to mechanical time, parsing experience by novel grammars of measurement (Boorstin, 1985, p. 369). The need for making more precise and standardized measurements of bodies and surfaces, space and time, began to be felt. Merchants needed to be able to cover distance between trading centers more quickly. …
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