Where Is the Middle Ground?

By William G. Durden

Dualistic, mutually exclusive thinking permeates precollegiate education in this country. A pervasive set of educational either/ors--ability grouping vs. cooperative learning, phonics vs. whole language, "exclusion" vs. full inclusion, and homogeneous grouping vs. heterogeneous grouping--is involved, and the potential harm both to educators and students is immense.

Teachers are asked daily by theoreticians and their supporters in professional associations and the public at large to make choices between polar opposites. They are deprived of a reflective professionalism. Each pole of their choice range is championed as a solution for an astonishing and dissimilar array of education problems. Moreover, their decision must be made between dualities in which one of the poles is politicized and ideologically framed, and where often there appears to be only one "politically correct" choice.

In essence, choice is illusory and the basis of selecting instructional strategies becomes more a matter of advocacy than of scholarship. The distinction is not without consequence. Educators, in this way, are asked to be intellectually acquiescent in the face of...