We are only limited by what we can imagine.
I wonder if all that passes as professional, scientific, empirical writing is a form of science fiction, putting imagination up against what is and what might be, formulating u- or dis-topias -- nowheres where we can aim our small educator ships on asymptotic journeys of self-discovery.
Section 1: Situational Evaluations
Premise #1: All our thinking and understanding is based on our prior
knowledge, our experience. We have his/herstory but only select elements of
our past are available to be known, fewer still to be analyzed, and even fewer
communicable.
Post-modern concepts of relativity clearly owe Einstein, but Albert was only
one thinker among many growing relativist matrices. Tolstoy in War and Peace
ponders whether Napoleon was a product, a representative of his time or a formulator
and leader, an 'inventor.' Albert was as much embedded as unfolder.
Interestingly, chicken and egg ponderings do not result in conclusions. However, they can delineate parameters for possible solutions. Hence the famous argument as to whether light exists and operates as a particle or a wave was unresolvable because a collaborative theory of light was inconceivable in totality.
Our understanding cannot hold a theory whole in which particles and waves are
one, so we parse our images and deal with succinct, distinct qualities one at
a time, each as if opposed but actually incomplete without one another.
We are at all times and in all ways limited creatures. We must limit the world
in our conceptual systems in order to work, will, or think. It is impossible
even to contemplate the universe in its ontological splendor without segmenting
our wonder into particles or waves, objects or dynamics.
Premise #2: Our ideas and thoughts, theories and formulations are the
living coral reefs we continuously build while we live within them.
Ok, goals and purposes….urgh… we are often hearing the cliché that people are purpose-driven, goal-driven - and I think we see this especially in the United States where people seem almost incapable of sharing appreciative existential moments without a commercial or acquisitive aspect entwined.
Nevertheless, I question the fundament of this over-used proposition. The proposition
as presently used implies that people arise with a purpose. Well, if that were
indeed the case most therapists and educators would have nothing to do. It is
more accurate to maintain that we are driven to find purpose and meaning both
in the universe that surrounds us and in the multiverse that is us. Our drive
to illuminate purposiveness keeps away our terror of emptiness, death and abandonment.
We want to believe that we have purpose both as a species and as individuals.
If it is inbuilt to be purposeful then why is it so hard to train our students
to set and achieve goals? I think that creating purpose is fundamental to creating
communicable meaning. Educators become involved in the process of purpose building,
not for its own sake, but because without a sense of purpose, it is impossible
to create interpersonal, negotiable meaning, i.e. a viable identity.
Certainly there is tremendous evidence that human beings are meaning-makers.
We can make meaning out of anything. Meaning-making seems to be a quality of
human sentience. We create relationship with those things that seem significant
to us and as we name these relationships, we create communicable meaningfulness.
Creating metaphors, human participate in the dance of life. The origin of our
awareness certainly owes a great deal to survival and necessity but what makes
us distinctly human, what distinguishes us from other sentient beings, is our
ability to alter and create new meanings. And this we do always in the context
of an other, in the context of communication, in the context of relationship
with other human beings. Therefore, our uniquely human meaning-making capacity
is essentially and irreducibly social, relational, interpersonal.
I feel stifled and incapable of expressing myself. All around me are articulated
representations of warlike, competitive structures and their workings are ineluctable
- they work. All I can juxtapose to the war machine are stirrings in the loins
of my imagination, a generative need of my soul to birth ideas of collaboration
and co-operation.
Like Napoleon, we take part, we are embedded, in our time and place, and we
generate, we are leaders, each in our own way.
Premise #3: The shame of Nazi collusion haunts socially committed intellectuals
as we carry the weight of comprehending how fascism could have been so attractive
to intelligent people. And the fear that in this time we are as blind to our
own collusion with soul-destroying systems, keeps lamps burning and keyboards
tapping in the ghost-filled night.
We cruise time back to Socrates and see that hypocrisy has lain at the heart
of western intellectual thought: sophistry, betrayal, exorcism, slavery, early
democracy, oligarchy, the cult of demagogues, all show themselves in their budding
clarity.
And the debate as to the origin of writing: Was writing invented to keep track
of business transactions? Or did we begin to write to capture and share poetic
ecstasies? Or was religion the driving force? Or state control the original
impetus? Regardless of origin, there has evolved a tension between the thinking
and writing promoting special interests, and the thinking and writing promoting
community involvement. Special interests take on a militaristic guise, while
community takes on a mystical shimmering.
Mystical thinking perceived itself as elite as did the military mind and each
developed a unique type of teaching, both of which remain with us today. Training
for work takes its tone from the military, liberal arts from the mystical. The
hustle and bustle of everyday life has never had time for the reflection of
mystics and poets. Time for inner dialogue, visions, emotional searching, and
propositional argument is lacking in the more directed activities of engineering
farms, dams, and aqueducts. Plato was not original in prescribing the banishment
of poets from education and the republic. Poets by their very nature are anathema
to organized schooling. The nature of the poetic activity disdains the time
frames and place names suitable to a military-industrial complex.
In the underlying flow of a poet's dialogue with the ontological, lies a subtlety
not simple but tensile. The premise of nuclear power is that if you break the
bonds whose nature is to hold life together, you release an astounding amount
of energy. So the obverse must be true, there is a tremendous power holding
life in its flow. And poets are the interpreters of this power called life.
Premise #4: The figure/ground nature of perception suggests that any
thing that exists in the material world is held together, maintained, and shaped
by the world around it. This is not so much a process of communication as a
process of will. Breaking this will destroys the universe.
Can technology enter education without destroying its will? I believe it can.
It seems to me that traditional education was often rightfully critiqued for
destroying the will of students. Technology might give students the strength
to balance the power that teachers hold in the classroom. Technology might bring
in the revolution that the sit-ins and riots of the late 1960's did not.
Perhaps the end of the world that the millennium predicted was really the end
of the world as we have known it, the end of an idea of how the world ought
to be. Even the stodgy Wharton Business school academics write in great detail
of the importance of collaboration to sustain global competition. Perhaps what
we are never really changes, perhaps only our way of interpreting what we are
changes. Perhaps now we are ready to notice collaboration, co-operation, creative
conflict, negotiated meaning-making. These things were always there but war,
famine, greed, accelerated commercial activity got our attention.
Even in Plato's time there were people who owned stuff and people who didn’t.
The people who owned stuff owned so much stuff that they couldn't use it without
getting the people who didn't own stuff to run it for them. The people who didn't
have stuff still needed to eat and be sheltered. In short, people without stuff
needed to be around stuff. That's how people without stuff ended up working
for, or even enslaved by the people who owned stuff. It's not so different today.
George Carlin said he knew the secret of life in 3rd grade: DON'T DIE. So you
can look at the workers and the owners, the masters and the slaves, the managers
and the labor force, the elite and the masses - and you can concentrate on what
divides them. Or you can look at these groups as actuating primitive means of
co-operation. So too with teachers and students.
Always the old is dying and the new is being born. By the time we ready our
presentations and stand up to teach, what we have to say is old. The young are
listening with their hands and minds full of newness that we cannot know. Some
relational dynamic between us is necessary, it does not have to be one of intrinsic
or ultimate worth. We need each other. They need to know what we know. We need
them to live. We are the subjects as well as the authors as we stand in front
of our students.
Section 2: Analytic Evaluations
Learning is change, alterations made to consciousness. Even as we design those
changes and are pleased to see the alterations we, as teachers, have planned
for our students, some alterations will shock us and perhaps not be as pleasant
as we would have wished them to be.
Agents of learning: Is the agent of learning the teacher or the student?
Is the one who conveys the information the agent or the one who receives the
information? I would say that if they are both changed, if it is an authentic
conversation with the unknown-answer questions as vital as the known-answer
questions, then the learning is co-agentic. Any other kind of learning, from
learning alone to didactic lectures, lacks the power of co-agentic learning.
Traditionally we only allow co-agentic learning at the very highest levels
of authorship. Many years of training are the pre-requisite to entering the
conversation as a partner who has enough authority to be given the rights of
co-agency. No amount of expertise or training gives one human being more value
than another. But our culture believes that we can increase the worth of persons
by increasing their training. We take for granted that a nuclear physicist is
more valuable to our society than an AIDS patient or a homeless person. On exactly
the same grounds we take for granted that men are more valuable than women and
that white people are more valuable than any other kind.
Feminist Resistance to Industrial and Military Purposes: Who determines
the purposes of education? Only dealing with the United States for now, since
our experience of democracy is quite unlike that in any other country. The mandate
for public education is justified as necessary to maintain democracy. Democracy
requires of its citizens participatory responsibilities and these are understood
to be deliberative and careful deliberation is known to require education.
It is a feminist axiom that the way we presently story information and the
type of information that we choose to store reflect patriarchal values. Even
if a woman achieves brilliant success in her lifetime, her work is made to disappear
from written histories. So each woman must recreate herstory each time she wishes
to contribute to society, she does so without access to knowledge relevant to
her struggles to make meaning in her existential now. Just so the stories of
those who have worked collaboratively, educatively, outside of industrial, military
purposes has been allowed to disappear, making it onerous for those of us who
wish to do that work today.
Resisting the feeling of isolation is important. Peace work has been going
on throughout time, it is only now that we may have a chance to carve our stories
into an electronic, decentered, shared knowledge base.
Finally
Conversations do not reveal knowledge, they constitute knowledge. We need to
be together to know. Silence is not a good choice, silence is incarnate loneliness.
We can make our students less lonely, we can share the conversation with them.