Re: mind-sets in a democracy
Katherine Brown (kbrown who-is-at weber.ucsd.edu)
Fri, 22 Sep 1995 15:21:18 -0700 (PDT)
Well, here's the preamble to the constitution to thicken the pudding.
"We the people of the united states of America in order to form a
more perfect union, establish justice and insure domestic tranquility
provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare and secure
the blessings of liberty, for ourselves and our posterity do ordain
and establish this constitution for the united states of america"
Now, to make this more interesting is that I have just typed this from
memory, not of what I learned in school, but from what I learned on
t.v., from watching a program called "schoolhouse rock" between cartoons
on Saturday mornings as a kid. The lyrics come to me in my minds ear,
as a song, sung by a woman accompanied by a guitar, with a montage
of colonial-cartoon images floating around in my minds eye. I also
know some rules about interjections and conjunctions and prime numbers
(and the process by which a bill makes its way through capitol hill)
from watching this t.v. program and buying the album that was sold
with it.
(I think it is still around somewhere, along with Marlo thomas and
somebody doing "free to be you and me" on an album).
What is my point? I don't know, except that I enjoyed learning
things by having music make it easier to remember, and that I was
pretty good at memorizing things this way. I was not at all engaged
in critical analysis of what the words meant, it was recitation,
rythym and repetition. The social context of performance was interesting,
there were status-points for kids on the playground who could sing all
of the songs from the t.v. show Schoolhouse Rock, so it w{s really
about expertise in t.v. knowledge at the time. There was also something
perverse about seeing how pleased our schoolteachers were that we "knew"
all of this school-valued stuff, even when we kids were "getting away
with talking about cartoons" during classtime, with the tone usually
being that t.v. talk was not allowed during school. SO there is this
odd sense of compliance with and subversion of school-valued material
that I associate with this memory.
Questions about who "the people" were, what union was more perfect
than what alternative, and what blessings were being secured for
whom at whose expense came much much later.....along with songs to
sing in times of protest.
Just sharing...
Katherine Brown
UCSD/LCHC