Re: emotional bonds/education

Rachel Heckert (heckertkrs who-is-at juno.com)
Fri, 13 Feb 1998 16:47:31 -0500

Dear Kathy and List,

Unfortunately, your rephrasing doesn't really catch the essential point I
was trying to make - the idea that a nurturing person of any sort has
marked him/herself as disvalued according to mainstream norms, and become
implicated in creating a student who is likewise not "macho" enough to
survive in a competitive society. In other words, if I "nurture" my
students I am a) identifying myself as "feminine" and therefore
"second-rate" and b) I am not doing the student any favors because I am
not pushing them to "excel" and branding them as "unworthy" if they do
not "measure up." That is the point, no *more* and no *less.*

I make a point of not using politically-valenced terms like "disempower"
because I do not see politics and power as the essential factor in human
life, but as another among many processes we have chosen to isolate from
the ongoing "whatever-is-out-there" for analytical comment.

In fact, IMHO the taken-for-granted constant use of terms such as "power"
is to me a symptom of the larger problems we have, and does not
necessarily indicate progress toward solving them.

On Fri, 13 Feb 1998 09:05:41 -0700 Katherine_Goff who-is-at ceo.cudenver.edu
(Katherine Goff) writes:
>Rachel writes:
>
>>It seems to me that there is in American culture a tendency to regard
>>"nurturing" as an essentially soft, "feminine" form of activity,
>which
>>leads to the development of spinelessness on the part of the
>nurturee,
>>and grows out of a "touchy-feely" mindset on the part of the teacher.
>
>I would like to rephrase this sentence.
>
>"It seems to me that there is in American mainstream culture a
>tendency
>to regard nurturing as an essentially disempowering, over-protective
>form of activity, often associated with the role of the feminine
>gender, which leads to co-dependency on the part to the nurturee, and
>grows out of the culural norms of teacher behavior."
>
>Kathie
>
>^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>Life's backwards,
>Life's backwards,
>People, turn around.
>^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^Sinead O'Connor and John Reynolds
>Fire on Babylon: Universal Mother^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>Katherine_Goff who-is-at ceo.cudenver.edu
>http://ouray.cudenver.edu/~kegoff/index.html
>
>

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