>I have written and scrapped a couple of replies to Jay's views
about >power and freedom in education. Here is another try.
I appreciate the difficulty of this topic; I hope we all
appreciate the reasons for it, and why it seems to have 'hit a
nerve' for a lot of us.
>I think it's too easy to advocate freedom for children in
education.
I've always found it very _hard_ to advocate this freedom,
because adults really don't want to think about the possibility
that the practices necessary to reproduce their values and
culture may be morally unjustifiable in terms of those very
values and culture.
>There is an irreducible sense in which grown-ups have power over
>children: grown-ups have access to worlds that children do not
have >access to.
Power is not the issue for me. Adults have power for the usual
reasons: physical strength, control of resources. The power of
our 'knowledge' (see below), however, is much more contingent:
contingent on reproducing the systems of practices that give that
knowledge power. The fundamental power of adults over children is
the power to slap them silly with impunity, or let them starve to
death in the streets. The question is how this power is used;
whether coercively or not, and to what ends, and in whose
interests.
>If we believe many of the theories of learning that are
advocated >here, what children learn is not propositional
knowledge that gets >stored in their noggins, but rather skills
that permit them to occupy >certain structural locations in
society, construct and enact certain >identities, participate in
certain activities, "see" the entities >found within the complex
of functional relevancies that arise as those >activities unfold,
and so on. We have many ways of talking about >these things:
"tacit knowledge", "form of life", "apprenticeship", >"legitimate
peripheral participation", habitus", and so on.
I certainly agree with the spirit of this, and it is exactly the
coercion into a network of social practices that I am talking
about, not forcing kids to memorize however many boring facts,
'painful' as that activity might be for them.
>The relationship between grownups and children is
>symmetrical in one sense: each occupy their own world, to which
the >other has limited access.
I proposed a stronger symmetry: that adult culture and child
culture are each equally well adapted to their environments, that
the whole human developmental trajectory is adaptive, not just
its adult moments. (Note that both pre-30s and post-60s humans
are claimed to be deficient by the dominant power-holding age-
cohort in between; the rationalizing ideologies for these claims
are what I am pointing to as unanalyzed and a fundamental
obstacle to progressive agendas.)
>But they are asymmetrical in other senses: grown-ups
>have passed through (some version of) the children's world; the
>children are headed into the grown-ups' world but not vice
versa; the >grown-ups' world has a broader geographic and social
scope; and so on.
No, the children are not headed inevitably into the adults'
present cultural world! they are only inevitably going to age,
and perhaps to have children of their own, but the culture of
each next generation could be _very different_ from that of the
last, and it is the role of coercion to minimize the divergence,
and so the mainspring of fundamental social change. The most
basic asymmetry is not between the cultures, but between the
power of the collective memberships of these cultures. And does
the adult world really have a broader scope? I think that could
prove on close analysis to be an illusion, or to be true only in
senses that do not matter as much to the argument here as might
be thought. I am reminded both of the classic arguments about the
superiority of men's public vs. women's private worlds, of
middle-class extended vs working class localized networks and
interests, of European global imperialism vs. the local social
ecologies of 'primitive' and 'less advanced' cultures. The value
judgments on these networks are quite suspect, I think, though I
lean toward accepting Latour's hypothesis that the globalized
networks are somehow associated with superior power (though
whether extension augments power or power enables extension seems
too tangled to unravel).
>It follows that the relationship of grown-ups (such as teachers)
to >children (such as students) is not simply a matter of grown-
ups >hoarding a certain kind of knowledge-capital which they
withhold from >children. The relationship is much less reducible
than that.
Hoard and withhold?! _au contraire_, so long as they are the
right kind of children (these are distributional matters after
all), we can hardly wait to cram as much down their mental
gullets as fast as possible. This gives some of them some power
like ours, but mainly it reproduces to the extent possible the
system of practices which gives us our power, and gives our
knowledge the grounding in social activity which makes it
indirectly powerful.
>Now, faced with a proposal that children be given freedom, not
be >coerced, etc, most non-academics will probably say something
like, "If >you just let them do whatever they want then they'll
run wild and >never learn anything, any more than *you* would
have studied >diligently in college, much less in grade school,
if nobody was >holding grades over your head and frowning at you
when your attention >wandered". We academics seem to know better
than this, somehow, in >that we are free to posit a world in
which knowledge carries its own >motivations, or is presented in
a sufficiently motivating way.
I don't believe our academic knowledge is much desired by most
people, children or adults. The dispositions toward it are rather
sparsely inculcated in our ecosocial system. A lot of the
knowledge students do desire is not available in the curriculum,
is actually refused to them (even, say, life-saving knowledge
about condoms or anal sex; many adults would rather see children
_die_ than diverge from their adult cultural values). Left to
their own devices, or better, assisted by the means to procure
the knowledge and participate in the activities they do want,
students would fashion a vast variety of unpredictably different
educations for themselves. They would also evolve worlds to which
these educations would be adaptive, but they would not
necessarily resemble our worlds more than necessary.
>But I want to point at one element of truth in the non-
academic's >complaint, which is that the very nature of knowledge
implies that >children *cannot* direct their own learning. That
is, they are not
>in a position to even *imagine* what it is they do not know,
much less
>evaluate its importance, or the relative importance of different
>things that they might learn.
What determines the relative importance of most of the knowledge
that could be learned? The present system of adult practices. It
is only the _assumption_ that this system must be mainly
reproduced that implies that adults can know better what
knowledge is most worth having. What knowledge of today will be
most worth having in 15 years? if society changes at the maxmimum
tolerable rate? what fraction of the total knowledge of a 12-year
curriculum plausibly belongs to this charmed subset?
And why is the choice one between total coercion and total
abandonment? Students will seek adult advice, guidance, and
counsel. They will consult our books and media, participate in
our activities, interact with us (we are part of their ecology,
after all). But according to their own evolving decisions,
reasons, and interests.
Hereafter brackets for Phil rather than >-signs:
[If the stuff-to-be-learned really were a supply
of propositional facts-in-the-noggin then we could sit down ahead
of time and discuss which ones were going to get learned. But
the fact is that it is only possible to identify the stuff-to-be-
learned in a vague and approximate way. Children not yet
inducted into the grown-ups' world are not simply lacking for
facts in the way that they might lack for money, and they cannot
choose what to learn in the way that they might choose what to
buy. No: they are literally *lost* in the grown-ups' world,
literally and necessarily *clueless* in that world. In some
sense they are not even "in" that world at all yet. How could
they possibly choose what to learn, and when and why and how,
without this kind of epistemic access to the endpoint of the
learning process?]
The "endpoint" can hardly be identified with our present adult
world, except insofar as we work to insure social and cultural
stasis. Our discussion here is not about 4-years olds, after all,
but mainly about 6-18 (20?) year olds, most of whom do indeed to
a large extent live in our adult world already. Many of them have
quite a good, and among the disprivileged quite a starkly
realistic view of many aspects of adult society. As, in my
hypothesis, an oppressed group, younger humans are more likely to
have a better understanding of their oppressors than vice versa.
As women have to understand men more than men do women, etc.
[It does not follow, of course, that children's opinions are
without value, or that no room exists for negotiation about the
structure and manner and interactional styles and logistics and
values and goals of the educational process.]
What kind of negotiation takes place with such an enormous power
imbalance? It is not negotiation when one side bargains only with
the leave of the other.
[Nor does it follow that children are entirely powerless, or that
they ought to be.]
So, how easy would it be to advocate more power for younger
humans? Money allowances? employment opportunities? the right to
keep and bear arms? the civil franchise? the right to sue at law?
the right to determine their own guardians? the right of separate
maintenance? The total disempowerment of younger humans is
essential to the maintenance of our present social order.
[It *does* follow, though, that grown-ups -- or at least,
in some sense that deserves further specification, the grown-ups'
*world* -- must structure children's learning to some significant
extent. ]
"Must" is a tricky modal in US English. I quite agree that the
adult social world _does_ necessarily structure in part the
course of younger humans learning. I only object to coercive
amplification of its influence, and to attendant rationalization
that it _should_ do so more than it would inevitably.
[Attempts to deny this fact -- epidemic among liberal American
teachers imbued with certain kinds of constructivist educational
philosophies -- lead to all sorts of weird hidden agendas and
mixed messages, in which children are reduced to guessing what
they're supposed to do, learning to pick up on indirect cues from
the grown-ups, forever paranoid that they aren't doing it right,
when the official ideology is that they are running the show,
constructing knowledge themselves, expressing their spontaneous
natural selves, and all sorts of other good things, all having
originated in opposition to the soul-deadening drills of yore.
(Valerie Walkerdine has described this in Foucauldian terms as (I
believe) "discovering the natural child".)]
Here Phil and I are in perfect agreement. The only thing more
heinous than punishing people for not doing what we want them to
is not telling them what we want them to do, and then punishing
them for not doing it. But the excesses of constructivism lie
more I think in its practitioners' unwillingness to accept its
views about reality. To expect people to freely inquire and then
come to the same conclusions we have assumes that a fixed reality
coerces the beliefs of us all. It is a comforting belief for off-
loading responsibility for telling learners just which arbitrary
interpretation of experience our culture insists is the right
one.
[Much better, in my opinion, to be explicit about what children
can and cannot do, what children can and cannot know, and what is
valuable about the grown-ups' knowledge and values and activities
and cultures that deserves to be passed along, ... ]
Better still to be explicit about our power and coercion. To tell
them that we care only about our own immortality, that they exist
only to carry on our beliefs and values, and that we would rather
kill them than let them create the world they will live in along
the pattern they evolve rather than, to the extent we can control
it, ours. But that wouldn't work very well, would it? It would
bring the whole structure of our own rationalizations crashing
down on us, and it would move them to implacable resistance.
[... or at least offered for appropriation in a structured
context in which the structures are themselves up for
negotiation.]
Well, offering up for appropriation is just what I'm proposing.
The context is inevitably structured, but that is not the same
thing as coercive, and would not at all insure maximal
reproduction. And as far as 'negotiation' goes, that brings us
back to the power imbalance.
[If this is paternalistic then that's because children need
fathers. ]
I'm afraid my experience is more that children need mothers, and
that fathers are rather a risky optional add-on. Mothers don't
seem to be quite so coercive as fathers, and perhaps having their
generative immortality more palpably confirmed, seem less hell-
bent on reproduction of (patriarchal?) culture. Perhaps that's
romantically idealistic, but I think fathers are more likely than
mothers to kill or expose/abandon their deviant children. In any
case, what younger humans need from older ones, so far as the
sort of learning schools are concerned with goes (a very limited,
but important agenda), is mainly _access_ (which we regularly
deny them at every turn) to knowledge, to resources, to
participation in activities, and _guidance_ to what's there, what
seems important as things now stand, and finally _critique_, to
the extent we can really see what's wrong with our present adult
world better than they can. For the reasons I've outlined, we are
pretty big on guidance, but pretty poor at the other two.
[My view may be extreme, but perhaps it will stimulate discussion
about the space in-between.]
My own view is _definitely_ extreme, but I believe that is mainly
because the prevailing view is so incapable of reflective self-
critique, so deeply naturalized, serving such a profound interest
of such a powerful group, that only a radical critique of it can
make a dent. How often, after all, can we remind ourselves that
in this century the absolute inferiority and intellectual-
political incompetence of women, workers, peasants, and most
people of color were incontestable matters of scientific fact,
supported by the overwhelming evidence of everyday experience on
all sides (for middle-class European adult males, that is). We
were dead wrong about the 'childlike' natures of all those
humans, and I believe we are dead wrong about the nature of both
pre-adult and post-adult humans as well.
Thanks, Phil, for laying some grids over this space.
JAY.
--------------
JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
BITNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM
INTERNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU