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Thought of the Week Archives
December 2000
December 4, 2000
If we are serious about becoming free in our lives, we are forced at
some point to go over the edge -- to undertake a great act of surrender.
This amounts to a profound leap of faith. At some point, something happens
that forces us to let go of our attachment to everything we ever did,
everything we ever thought, and all the momentum, effort, work, and development
we ever imagined we were creating. We are forced to give up everything
we thought we had done and everything we thought we were, discovering
in the process that the reasons we thought we had for doing these things
now seem ridiculous.
- Swami Chetanananda
Will I Be the Hero of My Own Life (p. 95)
December 11, 2000
- [French philosopher Michael Foucault used Jeremey Bentham's panopticon
prison design, which would keep prisoners under observation 24 hours
per day, to explain how constant observation can be used for subjugation.]
In contrast to [force] you have the system of serveillance, which...involves
very little expense. There is no need for arms, physical violence, material
constraints. Just a gaze. An inspecting gaze, a gaze which each individual
under its weight will end by interiorising to the point that he is his
own overseer, each individual thus exercising this surveillance over,
and against, himself. A superb formula: power exercised continuously and
for what turns out to be a mimimarl cost. When Benthan realises what he
has discovered, he calls it the Colombus's egg of political thought, a
formula exactly the opposite of monarchial power. It is indeed the case
that the gaze has had great importance among techniques of power developed
in the modern era, but, as I have said, it is far from being the only
or even the principal system employed.
- Michael Foucault
Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and other Writings (p. 155)
Comment:
This constant gaze, constant serveillance, is what standardized testing
is doing to schools. These tests are a means of serveillance, and the
more teachers keep them in mind while they are planning and teaching,
the more they internalize the power of the system and become their own
intellectual "prison guards." There really is no conspiracy involved.
The mechanistic system perpetuates itself by creating the need for standardization,
for workers trained and conditioned to fit it when they live school. It
would seem that this power is being exercised against the individual (teacher
and student). It is. But by doing what the system needs, we actually are
exercising the power even while the power is exercised against us. It
is a self-perpetuating loop. I doubt that this standardizing, dehumanizing
loop will be broken "out there," in real life. The school is the only
place it can be controlled, but the testing, the standardizing, the defining
of the ways we must understand life by the structure of the test, is finally
destroying the school's ability to function as an agent of social observation
and critique. All this is accomplished by putting schools, teachers, and
students under constant observation. Foucault calls this "power through
transparency", subjection by "illumanation." It makes people unable and
unwilling to do anything which the system would find wrong.
- Reg Harris
Comments?
December 18, 2000
In the first quarter of this century, something crucial happened to
thinking people. Let us call it "the interpretive turn." The turn first
expressed itself in drama and literature, then in history, then in the
social sciences, and finally in epistemology. It is now expressing itself
in education. The object of interpretation is understanding, not explanation;
its instrument is the analysis of text. Understanding is the outcome of
organizing and contextualizing essentially contestable, incompletely verifiable
propositions in a disciplined way. One of our principal means for doing
so is through narrative: by telling a story of what something is "about."
But as Kierkegaard had made clear many years before, telling stories in
order to understand is no mere enrichment of the mind: without them we
are, to use his phrase, reduced to fear and trembling.
Understanding, unlike explaining, is not preemptive: one way of construing
the fall of Rome narratively does not preclude other ways. Nor does the
interpretation of any particular narrative rule out other interpretations.
For narratives and their interpretations traffic in meaning, and meanings
are intransigently multiple: the rule is polysemy. Narrative meanings,
moreover, depend in only a trivial way on truth in the strict sense of
verifiability. The requirement, rather, is verisimilitude or "truth likeness,"
and that is a compound of coherence and pragmatic utility, neither of
which can be rigidly specified.
- Jerome Bruner
The Culture of Education (p. 90)
December 25, 2000
Living is seen as a continual process of completing gestalten, of completing
wholes. The example Perls gives is that of a person reading a book. The
book is the figure, the reader's body is the background. As he reads,
he becomes aware that he is thirsty. The sensation of thirst is his throat
now emerges as figural, and the book becomes part of the background. Perhaps
our reader now imagines a glass of water or a can of beer. He gets up,
satisfies his thirst, and returns to his reading. His actions have been
determined by his need, the need of his organism to be in a state of balance,
a state of wholeness. Thus, needs organize perception and behavior. The
parallel with the learning situation is obvious. If there is no need to
know, learning will not take place. Gestalt learning theory deals with
creating such needs; it also deals with the obstacles, such as repressions,
fantasies, and other blockages, which prohibit these needs from emerging
naturally. Thus, Gestalt learning theory concerns itself not only with
learning about the world, but with learning how we prevent ourselves from
doing so.
- McCarthy, David N.
- "Gestalt as Learning Theory,"
- in The Live Classroom, Yomans, Thomas, and Grizzard, Liles,
ed.
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