The ideological‐historical context of an educational metaphor

logic of the system. In terms of the metaphor of accountability, the coercive nature of the rationally designed system has resulted in the further depersonalization of teacher accountability; the teacher is no longer accountable to another person but to an impersonal system. Furthermore, it is not so much the interests of the student and community that are served by the technological approach to accountability, rather it is the bureaucratic system and the impersonal experts who :run the system who are the primary beneficiaries. As the teacher accepts the expert's definition of the learning process (one scheme for writing behavioral objectives suggested that teachers forget about the words "understanding" and "appreciation" because they could not be measured) and adapts experience to the structure imposed by those definitions, the teacher accepts a dependency relationship with the expert who is continually working to improve the efficiency and reliability of the system. A third problem relates to the way in which an ideology influences what we are able to think about. Clifford Geertz has suggested that we think of an ideology in terms of a mental template that helps organize experience according to the deep structure assumptions and definitions that underly the ideology.9 It has also been suggested that an ideology can be viewed as a set of lenses that, to follow the metaphor, focalizes certain aspects of the experience, and de-focalizes other aspects. Technological consciousness provides this template or lens, thus equipping the person socialized to this mind set with a language containing the categories, assumptions, and definitions that give the individual the power to understand certain aspects of experience. As technological consciousness has been grounded in the positivist tradition that emphasizes (focalizes) the observable, measurable aspects of experience, the phenomenological aspects of experience the subjectivity of knowing and feeling -are disregarded (de-focalized) as irrelevant because they cannot be observed and measured. The connection between educational accountability and this technological mode of thought has resulted in reducing learning to observable behavior, and in creating an atmosphere of audible silence that surrounds the subjectivity of the teacher and student's experience. As in the example cited above, understanding, appreciation, insight, joy, anxiety, etc., cease to be real because technological consciousness lacks the language and conceptual means for explaining them. While technological consciousness appears to take account of concrete experience, it does so in terms of categories of thought that are context-free. For example, efficiency, data, system, etc., represent a form of categorical thinking where experience must either be seen in terms of the categories of technological consciousness (what is measurable, for example) or it ceases to be significant. The problem with the idea of accountability is not with the idea itself (nobody is arguing for eliminating the idea of accountability) but with the ideological framework educators have placed it in. The need, as Goodlad points out, is for a form of accountability that takes into account the actual context of teaching and knowing. The context of the teachers and students includes the social, economic and cultural conditions that influence the subjectivity of their life world. The context also includes the psychology of "reality maintenance" as teachers and students share with each other, and occasionally re-negotiate, the definitions that sustain the ongoing social setting. This involves maintaining some degree of symmetry between the self-identity of the participants in the symbolic interaction process that we call education, and the definitions and assumptions that represent the substance of the communication process. Lastly, the context of the teachers and students involves communication that either conditions or emancipates the students' consciousness, depending upon whether communication is limited to sharing taken for granted beliefs and assumptions or involves making explicit the taken for granted beliefs that give everyday experience its particular characteristic. The latter form of communication involves a mode of critical reflection that is not present in communication that makes the student subservient to the teacher's taken for granted knowledge. An ideological framework that takes account of the possibility of critical understanding, and the social and institutional forces that condition both the students' mind and behavior, would involve a dialectical mode of thought that would be far more appropriate to thinking about accountability in education. Unlike the technological mind set that wants to purge words like "understands," "appreciates," "truth," and "justice" from our vocabulary because they cannot be reduced to objective "measurable performance," this new conceptual framework for thinking about accountability in education should enable us to consider the possibility of an emancipatory form of education. This involves becoming concerned with the relationship between consciousness and the social and ecological crises we face, rather than with the problem of adjusting student behavior to the technological Volume XVIII, Number 5 321 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.45 on Fri, 02 Sep 2016 05:58:18 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms requirements of the larger social system. This adaptive stance of technological consciousness suggests that its basic metaphors are context-free, otherwise they would see the cultural and educational problems that lie ahead will only be solved, if they can be, by re-thinking our most basic categories of thinking, including those which underlie technological consciousness.