GREG S. GOODMAN

5. SCHOOL SUCKS! DECONSTRUCTING TAYLORIST OBSESSIONS

Every day I come out of there I feel ripped off. I’m getting the shit kicked out of me and I’m helpless to stop it. A good day’s work is being tired but not exhausted. (Morgan, 1989, p. 55)

INTRODUCTION

In the early twentieth century American workplace, Frederick Taylor was the icon of industrial efficiency. Taylor’s time and motion studies were used to regulate worker’s regimens and to constitute success in the new modernist science of mechanizing workers to maximize productivity. Taylor’s creation, Scientific Management (Taylor, 1947), had a profoundly dehumanizing effect upon the workplace (Morgan, 1989). In his most cited study of the movement of pig iron, Taylorist applications generated a four fold increase in the amount of labor produced by one man. Essentially, this was accomplished by exploiting workers under the guise of increasing productivity to raise wages. As Taylor (1947) himself observed after a particularly manipulative conversation with an uneducated, immigrant worker:

This seems to be rather rough talk. And indeed it would be if applied to an educated mechanic, or even an intelligent laborer. With a man of the mentally sluggish type as Schmidt it is appropriate and not unkind, since it is effective in fixing his attention on the high wages which he wants and away from what, if it were called to his attention, he would probably consider impossibly hard work…. (p. 46).

The effect of Taylor’s scientific management was to reinforce the modernist thinking that all problems could be solved with a rational, logical, and empirically based algorithm. Exploitation of workers was fair if it increased the profitability of the corporation. In the words of one worker discussing General Motors’ use of this management style: “When the company gets a bug up its ass to improve quality, they come down on you for every little mistake” (Aronowitz, 1974, p. 28). Traditional educational psychology has followed Taylor’s work with an obsession for modernist thinking and scientific rationalism: quantifiable conceptualizations of normative outcomes through an educational process governed by controls and

T. Corcoran, (Ed.), Psychology in Education, 71–81. © 2014 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved. G. S. GOODMAN assessments. School Sucks! Deconstructing Taylorist Obsessions examines the deleterious result of the over-use of the Taylorist and colonialist dominations in the operations of schools. This chapter defends the potential of a critical educational psychology to liberate minds for the creative enterprise of living in a truly democratic society.

SEARCHING FOR AN ANSWER

If critical educational psychology had a face: what would it look like? The beard of Paulo Freire; the eyes of Lev Vygotsky; the mouth of Karl Marx; the brow of Shirley Steinberg; the moustache of Peter McLaren; the chin of Audre Lorde? Critical educational psychology is the artistic and philosophically infused amalgam of consciousness created by individuals who have raged against the ubiquitous tyranny of the measures of central tendency, standardized minds, and woeful allegiance to conformity masked as a scientific rationality. Critical pedagogy, the pedagogy of hope and the progenitor of critical educational psychology, is the struggle to expose traditionally situated public and non-secular schools as the agent of society responsible for perpetuating cultural reproduction and maintaining a “race-, class-, and gender-divided society” (Duncan-Andrade & Morrell, 2008, p. 23). My connection to critical pedagogy is visceral and precedes my introduction to The Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Freire, 1970). As I continue my work as a professor of education, I try to always remember that my professional purpose is tied to my life experience; my perezhivanie. Perezhivanie was Vygotsky’s (1994) term to describe our subjective experience of seeing and being engaged in our own lives. Knowing that experience is subjective and personal shapes my perspective of critical pedagogy by creating a catharsis with my students’ struggles to overcome the damage done to their creativity by years of oppression from No Child Left Behind’s dogmatic and authoritarian assessment-driven schooling. Although I was too young to articulate that I was in fact oppressed by my early school experience, I now understand that this is the lesson of hegemony. Your oppressors are not going to volunteer that your vapid schooling is a training ground for conformity. And if you want a different experience, you must change it for yourself! The oppressor, whomever that may be, wants you to stay right where you are. Question not! Hegemony depends upon the surrender of the flummoxed and weak to the overpowering force of authority, be they police, politician, or schoolmaster. I have always resisted. Following Foucault, “At every moment, step by step, one must confront what one is thinking and saying with what one is doing, with what one is” (Miller, 1994, p. 9). When I was a young child, my family was very poor. My father was a veteran of World War II, and I was born the late 1940’s baby boom. Although my parents were employed, their income was marginal. We lived in a two-room apartment

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