Educational Research - the Ethics and Aesthetics of Statistics

188 I. Munday
We might also note that advocates of performativity may mount a defence in
regard to some of the claims made during the section ‘fixing the stats’. The fact
that some schools do not possess cohorts expected to achieve 30% 5 GCSEs is no
excuse for failure. Schools in the lowest income bracket have managed this, so every
school should be capable of success. If schools cannot attract teachers then it is their
own fault for being so ineffective and if physical education teachers are the only
people who command enough respect to teach literacy and numeracy skills, then
why not let them do it (teachers should be facilitators shouldn’t they?). Are history,
geography and physical education that necessary to the future careers or general
functioning of students’ lives or indeed the functioning of society? Is the notion that
a liberal education will be the best kind of education either coherent or sufficiently
up to date? Perhaps it is better that students take courses more in keeping with
either their dispositions or ability levels. Maybe insisting that some students take
vocational courses helps them to save them from themselves. That way, at least they
might get some form of qualification to put in their portfolios at the end of their
schooling. If vocational courses really are easier to do, well, then, this problem can
be ironed out by making them more difficult. There is an ethical aspect to this kind
of defence. Schools should be accommodating their ‘clients’ needs and demands. It
can be shown that ‘failing’ schools are failing their students.
We might note here that this defence is predicated on a number of assumptions
regarding (1) what good teaching is, (2) what is good for students, (3) what is good
for society and (4) the importance of being ‘contemporary’ or ‘fashionable’. Such
assumptions mark the metaphysics of presence as it inscribed through performativity.
They are haunted by what may arrive – the ‘arrivant’ is also a ‘revenant’. Let
us also note that easy equivalent GCSE courses have been offered for years now. It
seems unlikely that they will be made more difficult.
Lastly let us note that statistics need words (words, that is that are not numbers)
to humanise them. Though this often takes the rather inhuman form of the ‘slogan’,
slogans like all uses of language will contain elements that are iterable, their past
and future contexts belong to them. The suturing effects of the marriage of statistics
and slogans will not prevent language from bleeding. This chapter celebrates such
bleeding not in the name of humanism, but rather in the name of the ‘inhuman’ other
that may arrive at any time.
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