| Successful Failure: The School America Builds. J AMES P AUL G EE University of Wisconsin at Madison jgee@education.wisc.edu Successful Failure: The School America Builds One of the most powerful American metaphors for education "makes it a race on a field so perfectly level that only individual merit determines the result" (p. 106). Even those who decry the many ways in which the "playing field" is not, in fact, level still go on to assume an ideal in which people compete "fairly" and get sorted into successes and failures. And, in the end, most people fail most of the time, for there is nearly always someone with a better "grade." Varenne and McDermott seek, through a variety of careful studies of social interactions, to highlight the fact that success and failure are "arbitrary and limiting" categories that can never "capture the good sense of what children do" (p. 3)or adults, for that matter. Varenne and McDermott consistently refuse to ask or answer questions about why people succeed or fail, to place themselves "within the long tradition of work that has toyed with why questions" (p. 208). This tactic is often frustrating to the reader, who is, of course, still caught in the cultural webs of inevitable questions about success and failure and, thus, prone to want to know "why Johnny cant read" or "why many minorities dont do well in school." Varenne and McDermott argue that the answers to such questions "make too much common sense to be trusted" (p. 208). One class of answers roots success and failure in individuals: it is Johnnys mind, brain, emotional state, or early childhood that is "defective," or, perhaps, it is his parents or his genes. Another class of answers roots success and failure in sociocultural groups. People in Johnnys ethnic, class, racial, or gender group do not succeed in school because of their history, poverty, or cultural differences. Varenne and McDermott readily concede that oppression, poverty, racism, and cultural differences explain why things like school failure and getting "acquired by special education" are "not distributed randomly across all the groupings of the body politic" (p. 209). Nonetheless, such "answers" prevent us from "confronting American Education as a cultural system, that is, as institutionalized discourses and rituals" organized to sort people (p. 209): "In America, no | |
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