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There are, it seems to me, some REALLY important issues here. Particularly when taken in the context of an earlier discussion we had about the wish of teachers at any particular level to have teachers at earlier levels prepare students for what they want to do (its "compliance all the way down"?). And I think the issues are relevant to all of us, whatever level we teach at and whatever populations of students we're working with (cf symphonies versus jazz).

Students do of course come to classrooms with different backgrounds/degrees of preparation in lots of respects, including "inclination to conform to rules," and we need to be aware of/responsive to that. I'm less comfortable with the notion that there is a different broad educational objective for some students than there is for other students, that, for example, some students need lessons in "compliance" and others don't. I'm worried that a focus on "compliance"would set the bar too low not only for students from "rough neighborhoods and low-income households" but also for those in "suburban schools where students receive lessons in compliance at home" (cf The Disadvantages of an Elite Education).

Sage and I had an interesting conversation about this one, from which come the following thoughts about how one might usefully reconceive the issues ....

The broad educational task, for all students at all times, is to enhance their own abillities to shape and reshape their own distinctive lives. Some facility at effective and mutually productive social interactions is one such ability, and clearly one that some students (for whatever reason, cf Temple Grandin) have more of than others. For students who have less of such skills, the task is to provide experiences that help them see what they have to gain from them in terms of their own enhanced capabilities to shape and reshape their own lives. Perhaps the route to development of enhanced social skills (like that to enhancement of all skills?) is not teaching "compliance" but rather encouraging distinctive individuation? And perhaps if we thought of encouraging ongoing distinctive individuation rather than compliance then the results of "elite education" would also be more useful to students?

On a broader scale, the issue here is whether we think of education as a process of "standardizing" our students (re social skills, re chemistry, re math, re whatever) as opposed to a process of encouraging the ongoing evoution of distinctive individuals. I suspect the former is more deeply built into many of our presumptions about education than we often recognize. And the latter would certainly make our classrooms less "orderly." But maybe there are advantages in that, not only for our students but for ourselves (cf. Emergent Pedagogy: Learning to Enjoy the Uncontrollable and Make it Productive)?

Symphonies do, of course, depend on different individual players ... and jazz combos do come up with some pretty spectacular music.