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

Nearly half of Disciplined Minds is devoted to selection of professionals, a process that weeds out most of those whose attitudes are not appropriate and molds the survivors into a narrow political mind set. On entering professional training, Schmidt says, students are optimistic and idealistic. On leaving they are "pressured and troubled" because they have gradually submerged their ideals and become willing to join the occupational hierarchy. So different are they on completion of training that "the primary goal for many becomes, in essence, getting compensated sufficiently for sidelining their original goals" (121).

What drives this transformation? One factor is discrimination. A nasty dimension is sexual and racial harassment in training for careers in the police and engineering, for example. However, this type of "selection pressure" has the disadvantage of being widely recognized as inappropriately discriminatory. Far more accepted is the role of examinations, which are seen as neutral but which, Schmidt argues, are actually quite political.

Many students are terrified of exams, especially qualifying exams that can determine whether or not students can enter their occupation of choice. Failing is humiliating and represents a waste of enormous effort. So most students put plenty of effort into making sure they will pass. means that they have to set aside what they'd really like to learn and instead to prepare intensively for likely questions. This is further training in assignable curiosity, but now the stakes are higher. Exams usually present tasks that are small components of the actual work of a professional. This, plus time pressures, encourages a narrow, instrumental approach to learning.

Students who prefer to follow their own curiosity are more likely to be put off by the exam system and drop out, or to do poorly. Those who are most eager to do well not only study likely questions intensively but also do what they can to ingratiate themselves with teachers and to better understand what is expected of them. Exams thus favor those least critical of the status quo. "The social framework imposed by the examination problems and by the rest of the qualification system maps out a domain of allowed activity that ultimately becomes the playpen of the nonradical credentialed expert and the cage of the individual working for progress in the social structure" (178).

The system raises the aspirations of many but provides winning tickers--coveted professional jobs--to only a few. 'What of the disgruntled losers? Why is there not more protest about the unfairness of hierarchy and privilege? Schmidt argues that the system, to reproduce itself effectively, has to "cool" losers off. One way to accomplish this is to give advice to students. A recalcitrant (namely, self-directed) student might be told that, to succeed, she will have to work harder at mastering the requirements set down for her: perhaps understanding key theories, solving standard problems or looking at things from a "balanced" viewpoint. A student given such advice may then "decide for herself" that she doesn't really want to pursue the grueling road of redirecting her interests in teacher-specified ways.