Re: emotional bonds/education

Rachel Heckert (heckertkrs who-is-at juno.com)
Thu, 12 Feb 1998 09:41:00 -0500

Hi list,

The problem is not just one of a cognition-emotion split, but IMHO has to
do with which emotions are valorized. Starting about the time I was in
the New Left back then the emotion most prized was righteous indignation
with an ideological base. Your "RI quotient" indicated the height of
your raised consciousness, and hence your status as a member of the
Enlightened. Mercifully, there are now other currents circulating
through various discourses, but there still seems to be a certain status
advantage accruing to the indignant/aggressive/in your face type of
discourse.

Unfortunately, the emotions involved in teaching - after all, a form of
nurturing - are in many ways orthogonal to those required in a good
revolutionary. Things like patience, open attention and responsiveness
to the other, valuing the student as a specific individual who may or may
not behave as we wish, and just plain old humility in the face of a
frequently uncooperative world, are not given the same "air time" in
discourses which are centered on such things as power, hegemony and
economic structures. They may be good tools for analyzing society at the
macro level, but they fail to speak to the specific, unique human
situation at the teacher-student level of learning.

Just my two cents.

Rachel Heckert
On Tue, 10 Feb 1998 12:19:18 -0800 (PST) Mike Cole <mcole who-is-at weber.ucsd.edu>
writes:
>Thanks, Roberto, for the note on emotional attachments and learning.
>I know some of the sources you cite, like Friere, but had not thought
>of him in htis context. I was actually puzzling on the way to work
>about how this query seemed not to connect on xmca. I believe it
>(the question) is a reflection of the consequences of the habitual
>dualism between cognition and emotion. I noted the other day that the
>journal "Cognition" is now called "Cognition and Emotion." Sort of
>progress?
>mike
>
>

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