McGurl : complexité de la “diversité”

McGurl intensément analytique, en croisant histoire du progressisme éducatif (tradition Dewey et ses mouvements sur le terrain), histoire du différentiel racial, problématique de la voix (culturelle et politique), et bien d’autres tendons aussi qu’il s’agit de comprendre à l’œuvre. La complexité et l’intégrité de ce noeud, sa proposition même.

Recall that the earliest phases of the progressive educational project, with their Deweyan emphasis on learning by doing, had been pointedly assimilationist in intent, a way of preparing immigrants and Southern blacks for their roles as worker-citizens in modern America; and how in the 1920s and 30s it had moved to the suburbs’ to the country day schools, where it was dedicated to freeing the students’ proto-professional creativity from the deadening discipline of learning by rote. In the nascently multiculturalist schools of the 1960s the latter project continues, while the former – at least on the surface – is reversed: the problem of “conformity” to which “creativity” is a response is now seen in its racial dimension, as a capitulation of “white” norms. Thus progressivism allies itself with “difference” against “assimilation“. Even for the white student, the progressive educationalists argued, learning something about difference might prove salutary – enlivening and liberalizing at once. 261.

Comme les enjeux se croisent, dans des dynamiques qui courent ensemble dans l’histoire. Complexité. Exigences pour la lecture.

Then follows the endnote:

And yet, as many have pointed out [now where is this crowd and consensus, or chorus?], in a further turn of the screw this investment in “diversity” can itself become another, more supple technology of assimilation to the status quo, especially as aided by the romantic individualism that helps to cordon off the student’s fascination with his or her difference from broader social movements to which it might become attached. 442.