Your Becoming Self: The Existential Search by Laurence Robert Cohen - HTML preview

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Variations on rebellion as a response to fear and rejection—Classrooms and testing—September 6, 2011

 

Because the dominator model of learning felt a lack of control in classrooms, it came up with the idea of accountability through standardized testing.  Domination precludes students and teachers experiencing their learning and the benefits of that learning in their own terms, serving as the subjects and agents of their own learning. The dominator structure demanded that learning be conducted in such a way as to make the results objective and transparent through standardized testing.  The resulting statistics abandon and deny a sense of personal development among students and teachers.  "Objective" and "responsible" serve as a code for the dominator's constant scrutiny and judgment and the threat of punishment for actions outside the scope of domination.  Objectified results mean an objectified process and objectified participants.  They cease acting as the agents of their own learning.  Their sense of agency in learning becomes eliminated, and the agentic[31] person submits obediently to learning in the way the dominator wishes them to learn.[32]  The dominator enters the classroom in this way and determines the nature of learning and the nature of thinking as well. 

 

Freedom of thought and of learning becomes beside the point.  Development of the becoming self ceases to exist in the classroom.  Scores on standardized tests become the only valid and valued commodities that judge the supposedly objective growth of standardized thus predetermined learning.  Having their freedom of thought and learning limited, many students respond by simply cheating.  If the only value lies in the score of what we learn, then all we need to do is increase the score by whatever means, and we succeed in the terms offered to us.  What we do to make that happen doesn't matter to us.  The only question comes in making sure we don't get caught.  When the dominator limits if not eliminates our positive freedom, we can respond by increasing our negative freedom, so long as we don't get caught.  "Everything is lawful," so long as we don't get caught.  How far we can degrade ourselves becomes unlimited because only the external observation and action of the dominator has any validity on our lives, and as such, we fall into a state of distracted, personal anomie with no internal sense of right and wrong, so long as we don't get caught.  We lose our sense of personal freedom, responsibility, and growth in the face of the externalized judgment of our value not as a becoming self but our value as a manipulatable, disposal economic unit.