the (in)dignities of taylorism

only some types of labour are afforded the (in)dignity of taylorism. housework for example is hardly ever scientifically analysed or managed because then it might appear as work and as work that should be paid for.

school teaching has to some extent become taylorised. as a child of the 70ies horsemouth remembers being taught by teachers demobbed out of the military without teacher training qualifications, his mother (a teacher) attended a teacher training college in the early 60ies (and later did an education degee at cardiff university a hotbed of cultural studies). with lesson plan and stopwatch and formal qualifications to teach the 'profession' is remade as something less than a profession and made into just work.

and yet this is this construction of a 'type' of teacher, of a professionalism ( modeled on the medical profession - ofsted, inspections, professional bodies - the institute for learning for example) that gove is in some sense dismantling - in that the teacher is no longer required to have a dtls qualification to teach.

there may be institutional resistance to these changes - schools continuing to 'prefer' candidates who have the qualification for example. it may be that gove's strategy is more about 'divide and rule', more about expressing power through an ability to enforce arbitrary decisions (or at least appear to do so).

teachers who started dtls courses with an attitude that they had to do 'this bloody course' because they ' need(ed) it for work' usually, from horsemouth's experience, fell into either two camps at the end either, a) thank fuck that's over (it will be good to get my life back) or b) the enculturated who had 'bought in' to its logic.

university teaching (or lecturing) is much less taylorised (though there's a much resented research review procedure to taylorise lecturers knowledge production). this is perhaps because taylorisation reveals teaching as work but more because it reveals knowledge as product and commodity. education's status as commodity reveals the social status produced by it as a commodity also and casts doubt on the disinterestedness of the knowledge produced. for these ideas to functional socially (in reproducing workers, teachers, sociologists etc.) the educational content must appear to remain autonomous - its social production and function hidden.

our ideas of society are structured by inequalities (hierarchies) and equalities (democracies) if ones position in the social hierarchy can be learnt or taught (if there can be what was named on its deathbed as 'social mobility') then this is an egalitarian idea (or at least a meritocratic one). there is a counterposed idea that the hierarchies are natural (the rich are not just posher than us but smarter and more hardworking than the rest of us - a different breed). the post-war experiment with egalitarianism is over.