Return to
Home Page
|
Education
Support Services
Thought of the Week Archives
February 2001
February 5
Meaningful choice involves some awareness of the other alternatives
that have not been selected. Through this awareness we learn something
about ourselves, our tastes and preferences. For example, if I stop to
ask myself why I'm not having grapefruit or tomato juice, I would know
it was not just that I wanted something cold, since all of them are cold;
and not that I wanted a citrus flavor, since both grapefruit and orange
offer that. Perhaps I wanted something sweet and citrusy. Distinctions
like this, in such minor but also in more important ways, make us aware
of how we are shaping our days.
- Ellen J. Langer
Mindfulness (p. 85)
February 12
A system of education must help those growing up in a culture find
an identity within that culture. Without it, they stumble in their effort
after meaning. It is only in the narrative mode that one can construct
an identity and find a place in one's culture. Schools must cultivate
it, nurture it, cease taking it for granted. There are many projects now
in the making, not only in literature but in history and social studies,
that are following up interesting leads in this field. We will have an
opportunity in later chapters to consider them in more detail.
- Jerome Bruner
The Culture of Education (p. 42)
-
February 19
The empirical method is the basis for all logical positivism, and is
responsible for incalculable developments in the physical and biological
sciences. But objectivity can be concerned only with objects; it must
transform into an object anything it observes. It assumes that it is possible
to separate the subject observer from the object he observes. ...perceptions
(observations) are determined by needs; they involve a subjective shaping
of experience. The idea of "total objectivity" is thus patently ridiculous;
objective observation will a priori limit its conclusions by asking
only questions whose solutions can fit within measurable parameters. Such
scientific observation is reductionistic, directed toward analyzing the
whole into its component parts. As Michael Polanyi has pointed out, analyzing
a machine into its component chemical and physical parts will not tell
you how it works, or indeed, even that it is a machine. You've got to
look at the whole picture.
- David McCarthy
"Gestalt as Learning Theory"
The Live Classroom: Innovation through Confluent Education and Gestalt
Comment:
We do not perceive the "outside" world directly. All of our perceptions
of it are filtered through our senses and processed as sensations by our
brain. That processing, or interpretation, is very much subjective. As
McCarthy writes, perceptions are determined by needed and involve the
subjective shaping of experience. We all know this at some level, yet
we cling to the 17th century idea of total objectivity and the machine
universe. In order for something to be measured objectively (as in an
objective test), that something must be made into an object (i.e., a response)
which can be measured by the test. In the case of a test, students must
be able to understand and express their learning and growth in ways that
the test can measure, so the test actually shapes the learning, the way
children perceive and understand the world. As much as the test makers
want to believe that the tests are objective, they are anything but objective.
They are formative. They create and shape the experience in their own
image, and then turn around and tell us how we measure up to the world
they have created for us.
How do you measure insight, growth and understanding objectively? How
can one turn the process of living and being into objects which a test
can measure? We can't, and if there is one indictment of the high-stakes
testing which is sweeping the country in the name of "accountability"
(corporate profit and political power are the real motives), it is that
they are dangerous. They will shape our teaching. They will shape our
children's understanding.
This is done in the name of an ideology, of education, of the need
to compete in the world market place. In fact, it has very little to do
with that. Power shapes the world and the people in it to perpetuate itself,
and we, but acceding to its demands become the tools of that power. As
Michael Foucault wrote in Power/Knowledge,
"I do not believe that what has taken place can be said to be ideological.
It is both much more and much less than ideology. It is the production
of effective instruments for the formation and accumulation of knowledge
-- methods of observation, techniques of registration, procedures for
investigation and research, apparatus of control."...power, when it
is exercised through these subtle mechanisms, cannot but evolve, organise
and put into circulation a knowledge, or rather apparatuses of knowledge,
which are not ideological constructs." (p. 102)
High-stakes testing, standardized curriculum, and measurable outcomes
are the tools of the mechanistic, reductionistic, pseudo objective power
which has controlled (and exploited) our world for more than 300 years.
In the name of education and fairness, it demands "objectivity", yet what
it wants is compliance, control and order. It wants a standardized product
(graduates) who will fit the system which power has created.
Unfortunately, the media, the parents, and even most teachers seem
to have bought into the program. This is most unfortunate, for if there
is any hope for regaining our humanity in the face of technological conformity,
it is the public schools and their original goal of being the great equalizer
in a democratic. As teachers, we must, I feel, resist the mechanisms of
power, for even the "controllers" of the power are, in reality, controlled
by it, and only by juxtaposing human values against the values of power
can we hope to restore some balance.
- Reg Harris
- Comments? Click here.
February 26
I agree with Sartre when he emphasizes, �We are our choices,� but I
would add, �within the limits of our given world.� We all are born of
woman, struggle through stages of growth the best we can, and ultimately
die; and what we think about it will not change these brute facts. It
will, however, vastly change how we negotiate this threescore and ten.
�Essences� must not be ruled out�they are pre-supposed in logic, mathematical
forms, and other aspects of truth � which are not dependent upon any individual�s
de-cision or whim. But that is not to say that we can adequately describe
or understand a living human being, or any living organism, or an �essentialist�
basis. There is no such thing as truth or reality for a living human being
except as he participates in it, is conscious of it, has some relationship
to it. We can demonstrate at every moment of the day in our psychotherapeutic
work that only the the truth that comes alive, becomes more than an abstract
idea but is �felt on the pulse,� only the truth that is genuinely experienced
on all levels of being, including what is called subconscious and unconscious
but never excluding the element of conscious decision and responsibility
� only this truth has the power to change a human being.
Rollo May
Existential Psychology (pp. 13-14)
(To share reactions, comments or ideas, contact us directly
at feedback or share your ideas with others
at the Roundtable.)
|
