Re -- estranged learning and revolutionary alternatives
"Revolution" has a nice romantic ring to it (apart from the reality, of
course), but I'm finding more mileage these days in the term
"re-engineering", which the capitalist dogs and their running lackeys say
they are interested in, in the name of greater efficiency in the era of
globalizing uncertainty ....
The idea of re-engineering is simple and appealing (perhaps appealing in
the same way the Trojan Horse was appealing?): you find new institutional
arrangements to serve existing and still needed functions. What exactly are
the functions that education (NOT "schooling" as such, which is just one
institutional arrangement that allegedly supports education) serves in a
complex diverse society? the MINIMAL functions? (minimal because I am
looking to model alternatives, and that requires paring things down to the
root when the core system of social-economic relations is as complex as it is).
IF we did not have schools or colleges WOULD it really be necessary to
re-invent them? or would something else come along to fill the niche? what
the niche is now, its precise functions (e.g. credentialling, sorting for
class futures, teaching workplace skills, etc.), would not necessarily have
to be the same ... and I am not assuming that the surrounding social
context itself remains exactly the same, either. But neither am I assuming
some Wizard will waive a wand and either start a revolution or be able to
control how it turns out. I am assuming that the interactive effect of a
number of key changes could lead to a discontinuous jump to a new
configuration (and that it would probably take some collective action by a
significant number of people over an appreciable time to have anything more
than a random impact in the midst of other changes being initiated by other
groups). What I want is to start to get a sense of what might be
realistically possible, a sense that is neither the product of wishful
thinking (alone), nor mistakenly pessimistic about radical change because
it doesn't understand how complex systems can change suddenly after looking
pretty stable for long periods.
In some ways a key point in this analysis is an old question Mike has often
been drawn to: Does literacy beget schooling? Consider also some variations
on the question: What does beget schooling? both the original kinds and the
current kinds? What are the implications for educational institutions in a
society when literacy needs to be more widely distributed (how widely?)?
What else that's going on in a society most strongly conditions the
relationships between widening literacy and the kinds of institutions that
support it?
I'm defining institutions in terms of the practices that consitute them,
including their exchanges with their environments (which include resources
flows, people flows, information flows, etc.), and in terms of their
sustainability in relation to some niche in the social ecosystem (or the
socio-technical network). I'm defining literacy as a system of practices
that use persistent material representations of information as a medium
through which meanings are exchanged across time and space in relation to a
system of interpretative practices applied to the medium/text (so this is
not limited to writing, or to language; the medium could be architecture,
and there's no guarantee that the meaning-read is the same as the
meaning-written, it's just more likely as more interpretative practices and
contexts are shared).
I am also assuming that teaching-learning practices and institutional
organization are closely interdependent. I don't think we're going to get
_sustainable_ un-alienated practices inside of institutions that function
as part of a highly alienating larger social system. If it were that easy,
capitalism would long ago have mutated into something more benign (actually
in some places it probably has, but not sustainably or on a large enough
scale). But it's also not true that you have to (or can) revolutionize
everything in a society at once, or totally change all power relations, or
re-organize from the top down with a revolutionary state apparatus ... nor
that the higher levels of organization totally control what happens, say,
in the classroom. We don't KNOW how the system actually works in relation
to multi-decade change. And most of our models so far are either too
optimistic or too pessimistic, and too short-term or too long-term.
So, again, I'm asking: What are the minimal conditions that give rise to
schools? and what other functional niches and institutional alternatives
are lurking about nearby in the space of all somewhat similar
social-ecological systems?
JAY.
At 12:01 AM 12/16/2002 -0700, Martin wrote:
> From conclusions I derive from the reading, it is a tall order to come up
>with an institutional model that is devoid of estrangement. ...
>...
>Lave and McDermott ... leave it for us to ask whether our
>educational institutions are capable of reform or whether revolution is
>the only logical extension.
>
>Other writers, notably Jay Lemke, take the logic one step further,
>suggesting a vision for a postmodern revolution in education. Is it
>possible to conceive of education deviod of established curriculum,
>objective assessment, competitive achievement, privileged expertise, and
>the other vestiges of our 200-year old model of modern education?
---------------------------
JAY L. LEMKE
Educational Studies
University of Michigan
610 East University
Ann Arbor, MI 48109 USA
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jaylemke
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