Judy - perhaps your explanation got lost for me in the multiple emails
that have passed through these last few days - but i've got a question:
you suggested that there is a particular ethics within activity theory
itself - what ethics are you thinking of?
i've finished YE's third chapter and now i'm wondering about Bateson's
multiple admonitions against purposive, instrumental activities, and
contrasting this to chat and chapter three.
could you help me out here, you Judy, or anyone else?
in Steps to an ecology of mind, Bateson (1972, pg. 160) quotes Margaret
Mead "Before we apply social science to our own national affairs, we must
re-examine and change our habits of thought on the subject on means and
ends. We have learnt, in our cultural setting, to classify behavior into
'means' and 'ends' and if we go on defining edns as separate from means
and apply the social sciences as crudely instrumental means, using the
recipes of science to manipulate people, we shall arrive at a totalitarian
rather than a democratic system of life."
and i'm struck by this position of Bateson's with the implicit position
in chapter three that the end of education is to bring strudents to level
iii thinking through the means of disruptive double-bind learning
activities. Nelson alluded to this in an earlier posting - but it seemed
to have disappeared.
on page 164, Bateson writes: "When Dr. Mead tells us that we should leave
off thinking in terms of blue-prints and should instead evaluate our
planned acts in terms of their immediate implicit value, she is saying
that in the upbringing and education of children, we ought to try to
inculcate a sort of by-product habit rather different from that which we
acquired and which we daily reinforce in ourselves in our contacts with
science, politics, newspapers, and so on."
YE uses two examples from literature in which he identifies level iii
learning as a result of a double-bind, but these examples are the actions
of social-outliers (rather like in The Borderliners), responding to the
double-binds of social institutions, one of them being education. yet,
how could a social institutions insitutionalize activities that place
itself at risk - and, not everyone within a given chat want to see the
institution of education problematized - in fact, to judge by the
barrage of state sanctioned tests to enforce academic standards, it could
be said that many wish to not problematize the institution of education,
but rather the opposite. and are their values and beliefs to be ignored?
i'm finding myself conflicted - but not in a double bind (;-) .
phillip
* * * * * * * *
* *
The English noun "identity" comes, ultimately, from the
Latin adverb "identidem", which means "repeatedly."
The Latin has exactly the same rhythm as the English,
buh-BUM-buh-BUM - a simple iamb, repeated; and
"identidem" is, in fact, nothing more than a
reduplication of the word "idem", "the same":
"idem(et)idem". "Same(and) same". The same,
repeated. It is a word that does exactly what
it means.
from "The Elusive Embrace" by Daniel
Mendelsohn.
phillip white
third grade teacher
doctoral student http://ceo.cudenver.edu/~hacms_lab/index.htm
scrambling a dissertation
denver, colorado
phillip_white@ceo.cudenver.edu
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