Education Pendulum? No, Meat Grinder
The irony of apt analogy is that when a comparison works it becomes overused, and thus, tossed eventually like so much waste in the cliché bin.
In education, possibly the most enduring metaphor is the education pendulum that represents the swings in educational policy since at least the beginning of the twentieth century.
However, the education pendulum metaphor represents the analogy that is enduring while also being horribly misleading; its power comes from the political and public misconceptions about education, in fact.
The education pendulum suggests relatively wide swings along a fixed continuum, one that implies an ideological left and right.
From historical examinations of education—such as Kliebard and Callahan—the evidence is overwhelming that U.S. public education committed in the first decades of the 1900s to efficiency and core knowledge, and schools have been governed within those ideologies (traditional, conservative) unto this day.
Progressivism, associated with John Dewey and vilified at mid-twentieth century, has only held weight in academia, but as Alfie Kohn carefully details, progressivism has never garnered any real value in official educational policy. Even when inklings of progressivism (such as whole language) have occurred, we have been left with “progressive in name only”; for example, when whole language was the official reading policy of California, the system failed whole language, but whole language did not fail students.
The only way to make the education pendulum analogy work is to envision the swing as minuscule, barely ticking back and forth along a technocratic continuum. Consider, for example, the pendulum swinging back and forth in fruitless pursuit of better tests between the SAT and ACT or between any state’s old high-stakes test and the new high-stakes test.
Here, then, in my home state of South Carolina, as I have documented before, educators in the state have been informed that due to the passing of new federal legislation, ESSA, State Education Pendulum? No, Meat Grinder | the becoming radical: