Re: power vs freedom in education

Eugene Matusov (ematusov who-is-at cats.ucsc.edu)
Sat, 20 Apr 1996 17:36:30 -0700

Phil, I really sympathetic to your points that either-or approach (either
adult-run or children-run education) is not very useful. However, I think
that a useful solution is not in-between but outside the unilateral
continuum (in practice of collaboration, in my view). And the solution is
not in relationship between adults and children but in nature of
sociocultural practices we all involved.

Eugene Matusov
UC Santa Cruz
At 08:40 PM 4/19/96 -0700, Phil Agre wrote:
>I have written and scrapped a couple of replies to Jay's views about power
>and freedom in education. Here is another try.
>
>I think it's too easy to advocate freedom for children in education.
>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. 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. The relationship between grownups and children is
>symmetrical in one sense: each occupy their own world, to which the other
>has limited access. 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. 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.
>
>Now, faced with a proposal that children be given freedom, not be coerved,
>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. 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. 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?
>
>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. Nor does it follow that children are entirely powerless, or that
>they ought to be. 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. 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".) 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, or at least offered for
>appropriation in a structured context in which the structures are themselves
>up for negotiation. If this is paternalistic then that's because children
>need fathers. My view may be extreme, but perhaps it will stimulate
>discussion about the space in-between.
>
>Phil Agre
>
>

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Eugene Matusov
UC Santa Cruz