Disciplined Minds: a critical look at salaried professionals and the soul-battering system that shapes their lives. . - Reviews - book review

Radical Teacher, Winter, 2001 by Brian Martin

Disciplined minds: A critical look at salaried professionals and the soul-battering system that shapes their lives.

By Jeff Schmidt. 304 pages: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000.

Why aren't there more radical teachers? Is it just the difficulty of being radical in a system built around compulsion, discipline, conformity, and reproduction of the class structure? Or is part of the problem the way that people become teachers? Indeed, why is it that so many educational radicals were never formally trained as teachers?

Jeff Schmidt provides an answer in his book Disciplined Minds: professionals, including teachers, are selected and molded to have politically and intellectually subordinate attitudes, thereby making their creative energies available to the system. In short, "professional education and employment push people to accept a role in which they do not make a significant difference, a politically subordinate role" (2). Schmidt's critique covers all professionals and is worth examining before returning to the specific challenge facing radical teachers.

The first step in Schmidt's argument is the claim that professionals-including police, doctors, lawyers, teachers and many others--think less independently than nonprofessionals. He cites opinion polls taken during the Vietnam War showing that support for the war was greater among those with more higher education. But what about the widespread perception that professionals have more progressive views on issues ranging from crime to capitalism? Schmidt says that professionals may have progressive views about distant social issues, but in the workplace--and in the work itself -- professional attitudes prevail, and they are uncritical. Specifically, they are against democratization in their own work. Indeed, do you know many lawyers who support free training for litigants to represent themselves, doctors who favor making it easier for people without medical qualifications (such as experienced nurses) to practice medicine or indeed many teachers who support opening jobs in schools to anyone, with or without degre es or teacher training--or letting students run classes without teachers?

Schmidt argues that what really makes an individual a professional is not technical knowledge, but rather "ideological discipline": "Those who employ teachers see them as more than workers who present the official curriculum to the students. A computer or television system could make such a presentation. An important role of the schools is socialization: the promulgation of an outlook, attitudes and Values. ... The professional is one who can be trusted to extrapolate to new situations the ideology inherent in the official school curriculum that she teaches" (32).

Professionals do "political work" but in a way that is not seen as political. Being "professional" is, in essence, accepting this hidden political role: "As a professional, the teacher is 'objective' when presenting the school curriculum: She doesn't 'take sides,' or 'get political.' However, the ideology of the status quo is built into the curriculum. The professional's objectivity, then, boils down to not challenging this built-in ideology" (32).

When teachers are fired, it is seldom for being incompetent teachers. Usually, it is for challenging the system m some way, such as not teaching the curriculum. Schmidt provides examples of doctors and other professionals with fake credentials who are able to survive quite all right in their jobs, as long as they have the right attitudes.

A key to creating docile professionals is professional training. Through their training, budding professionals learn to orient their intellectual effort to tasks assigned to them. Schmidt has a wonderful expression for this: "assignable curiosity." Children are naturally curious about all sorts of things. Along the road to becoming professionals, they learn how to orient this curiosity to tasks assigned by others.

Consider, for example, a typical essay in a university class. The teacher sets the topic and the students write on it. To do really well, students need to figure out what will please the teacher. If the teacher had assigned a completely different topic, the conscientious student would have directed effort to that topic. Well-trained students do not even think about writing about topics that are not assigned. They wait to be told where to direct their curiosity.

Schmidt has a teaching credential and has taught junior high school math in Pasadena, California and in El Salvador. However, it is his experiences pursuing a Ph.D. in physics that come through most strongly in Disciplined Minds. "Assignable curiosity" has a special significance for researchers. Military funding of science, for example, works well to direct research into military-relevant directions because scientists are willing to take up whatever project is offered or supported. When scientists put in research proposals to military funders, they anticipate what will be most useful and attractive for military purposes, while maintaining the illusion that they are directing the research.