What follows is my first crack at articulating what I call the Official Dogma of Education. The Official Dogma is a set of presumptions and values that operate in the background of our educational discourse and which are accepted as true by most everyone without often being voiced out loud. The Official Dogma is ideology, in the old sense - that is, these are political stances that are not recognized as such; they are human points of view that are unconsciously accepted as truths of the universe. The idea is not that any individual person has ever expressed these beliefs explicitly. Indeed, the point of the Official Dogma is that its tacit nature helps to make it impossible for us to examine and critique it. The Official Dogma and its constituent elements are not universally accepted by all individuals, but an embrace of something like the Official Dogma is bipartisan, cross-ideological, and generally uncontroversial in contemporary American life. In particular, the Official Dogma is the doctrine of institutions. It is the philosophy of the nonprofits, the corporations, the political parties, the unsigned editorials and the corporate mission statements, the institutional cultures of organizations that shape policy. The Official Dogma, in other words, is the educational philosophy of managerialism, which is the truly dominant ideology of our times.
the Official Dogma of Education (version 1.0)
the Official Dogma of Education (version 1.0)
the Official Dogma of Education (version 1.0)
What follows is my first crack at articulating what I call the Official Dogma of Education. The Official Dogma is a set of presumptions and values that operate in the background of our educational discourse and which are accepted as true by most everyone without often being voiced out loud. The Official Dogma is ideology, in the old sense - that is, these are political stances that are not recognized as such; they are human points of view that are unconsciously accepted as truths of the universe. The idea is not that any individual person has ever expressed these beliefs explicitly. Indeed, the point of the Official Dogma is that its tacit nature helps to make it impossible for us to examine and critique it. The Official Dogma and its constituent elements are not universally accepted by all individuals, but an embrace of something like the Official Dogma is bipartisan, cross-ideological, and generally uncontroversial in contemporary American life. In particular, the Official Dogma is the doctrine of institutions. It is the philosophy of the nonprofits, the corporations, the political parties, the unsigned editorials and the corporate mission statements, the institutional cultures of organizations that shape policy. The Official Dogma, in other words, is the educational philosophy of managerialism, which is the truly dominant ideology of our times.