I have been thinking lately, out of a conversation with a colleague that
catalysed some connections for me, about why mandates fail and how to think
beyond the reproduction-or-resistance model.
I loved Eugene's irony in pointing out that if school teaches students to
hate what is taught (and oh it is VERY good at that!), then it is better
that they learn to hate, say phonics, than to hate some wonderful works of
literature. I have in fact for many years heard again and again the
argument, never serious but always correct, that we ought not to teach a
particular work of literature in the school curriculum because it will
"ruin" that work for the students for the rest of their lives. After my own
school experience with _Great Expectations_ it took me decades to
re-discover Charles Dickens, whom I now admire greatly among English
writers. And remember that I was 'the perfect student' in school. I doubt I
shall ever hear the name of Thackeray without feeling nauseous. I should
probably like to burn the works of Jane Austen. In fact I can safely say
that nearly all the canon of English literature in the genre of the novel
has been ruined for me for life. I think most people would say that the
teachers who did this were well above average in their teaching ability by
common standards (no irony required).
At the same time, I gained a great love of ancient Greek drama, and Russian
literature (in translation), in large part I believe because these were the
works that (a) I chose myself, and (b) I read and studied independently,
outside of classwork and the curriculum, even though I wrote reports on
them and gave class presentations on my reading, and received quite a lot
of school credit and approval for what I did (even an honors award).
There is perhaps one minor lesson in these experiences: that our currently
fashionable theory that group and collaborative learning is best is highly
questionable. I believe the skeptical suspicions of those who say that it
in fact reflects a particular stage of late capitalist organization of
production, subtly transposed into educational orthodoxy may not be far
wrong. This is not to say that collaborative learning is bad; just that it
is not inherently good or superior either.
But I think there is a more compelling lesson here, too. It is in the
nature of 'mandates' that they are imposed in highly abstract and
categorial terms, at least in a large-scale society such as ours. They
therefore _cannot be about reality_. The categorial systems, whether of
languages or of specific cultural discourses, create illusions of reality
and specificity; they seem to ''cover" instances, but as realities
themselves they are the thinnest and flimsiest of cobwebs, seeming to
partition the space of concrete real happening and experiences and doings,
but actually, taken themselves as happenings, etc., they occupy only an
infinitesimal fraction of lived human experience, much less of possible
human experience. They are "thin on the ground", and have a vanishing
density in the flux of concrete doing/being. Most of the space of human
possibility, and human actuality, lies beyond them. The totality they seem
to define is really almost nothing; in the concrete lived world nearly
every human doing and possibility takes place and opens into a space
totally empty of, or outside of, what any system of categories can reach.
This is not a new point. Phenomenologists have made it for years against
structuralists. Lately I think Latour has been making it again against
'scientific realism' of the sort that foolishly takes the map for the
territory by believing that what can be described in categorial terms (and
so 'universally' as science requires) is anything more than a joke as a
claim to a complete, or even a substantially partial account of the
phenomena described. It can never be more than a trivial drop in the ocean
of the concrete heterogeneity and multiplicity of the actual and possible.
Perhaps even that trivial drop can be, combined with elaborate systems of
undescribed practice, practically useful, as much scientific knowledge is
... but it is only so _within_ those systems of practice, and not in any
inherent or independent way, and even then it is mostly an idolatrous
distraction from the vastly greater part of reality it must leave unessayed.
This sense of the enormous distance between abstract categorial mandates
and concrete applications of them was the basis for my earlier posting
about why laws fail, as it could just as easily be an explanation of why
social science can never amount to a practical basis for more than
short-term and trivial social engineering.
And its educational implication is that no curriculum mandated in
categorial terms can have the least relevance to the actual processes of
development and creation of meaning/works by students/people. Mandated
curricula are simply vast illusions, projections of the shadows of
categories over the realities of what students and teachers do and make and
become. It does not and cannot guide practice, for the gulf between them is
too great, indeed it is in principle unbridgeable. Only concrete practice
begets new practice. Such practice of course may include discursive
practice, and discursive practice may include categorial meaning and
reasoning, but these latter elements are indeed just as Plato portrayed
them ... large shadows on the wall of the cave, cast by very small eidola.
I could bring this argument back again to Ilda's data and to the large
research literature relating belief and action, codified law and case law,
scientific accounts and unaccounted actant-practice-networks, etc. It seems
unnecessary.
Some of you may be thinking this is a gloomy and pessimistic picture, but
it is just the opposite, for it points the way beyond "resistance" I think
... and will continue in a separate post. JAY.
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JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
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