Authenticity and Educational Change

Abstract

their nature, are so artificial? Are authentic things necessarily good and inauthentic ones bad? How do we decide on these things? Meier teases her readers with examples that provoke creative discomfort around the idea of authenticity, which she uses to push the discussion much further than other writers in the area have done. In the end, she finds some of the answers to these demanding conceptual questions in practice and draws upon her own experience of transforming Central Park East school in New York to do so. It is here, she shows, in attempts to build powerfuL meaningful learning for students in disadvantaged neighbourhoods that the possibi#ties of authenticity are ultimately to be found. Schools were invented as a replacement for the most authentic forms of education-those that stemmed naturally out of families, neighborhoods and work places. They were from the start, by their very nature, artificial. Schools have been in the business of imposing upon us, out of context, the stuff that "context", does not, it's assumed, naturally supply. It reminds me of modern nutrition: having taken all the natural nutrients out of food we spend a lot of money and energy devising systems for getting it back artificially. The dilemma is that artificiality is both the raison d'etre for schools and the stumbling block to their success. There are limits to how many nutrients we can absorb artificially, and how useful they are out of context; but there aren't alternatives unless we reorganize the entire society that surrounds us so that the raising of the young is once again woven into all aspects of modern life. We can probably only go so far in this direction, and the best solutions probably aren't accessible to vast numbers of our children at least in the near future. But artificiality doesn't have to be a bad word, and authenticity isn't a guarantee of good education. Playing scales on the piano over and over is surely "artificial" but so is the piano and what we do on it. Whether it's justified depends both on how much we value its end purpose and whether we conclude it's a good route toward reaching such an end. The proof of the pudding doesn't even depend on how boring the task may seem, or how easy or hard it is to accomplish. We can 316 A. Hargreaves' (ed.), Extending Educational Change, 316-335.