Power relations in the institutional setting of the school and
university are centered around credentialing, grades, and
testing. Students (esp. by university level) will tell you (or at
least will tell each other) that what matters is to relate the
readings (or the lectures, or the dialogical seminar discussions
for that matter) to the tests. If there is time and interest left
over (and usually there isn't because of the pacing of the
curriculum), one might try to actually think about what all this
stuff means in relation to one's own life or wider issues.
Habermas is at least right about this: power relations distort
communicative social activities. They may not distort them
directly in relation to any undistorted ideal (that's where I
disagree with his analysis), but analyzing them can, I think,
help us answer questions like Robin's. JAY.
PS> Having now read Ana Shane's reply to your questions to me
(which I mainly agree with), I'll just add a couple more notes:
"Meaningful" is not really the word we want, I think. Every
experience means something to people, sometimes not very much,
sometimes something they'd rather forget. The Deweyan criterion
mentioned by someone else (too many posts flew past today!) of
lasting positive impact is a rather high standard, and still begs
the basic question of what's good (though Dewey answers that
elsewhere in various ways).
I would settle for a simpler approach: the best education for
anyone at any moment is what they want to learn about then. That
includes nothing, if nothing is of immediate interest. But
usually there are a few things, and they grow out of their life
situations, and/or the immediate circumstances, group
interactions, opportunities, tasks, challenges, agendas of the
moment. They are not solely 'individual' because being embedded
in group activity and a social-material world, we tend to share
common interests with others (near or remote).
What makes real learning and education happen, in this view, is
that the opportunity to satisfy one's learning needs in a rich
environment of information, challenges, and support leads to
'natural' change in our perspectives and practices, which in turn
leads on to new learning needs/interests. Call me Emile, but I
really do believe that efforts to coerce this learning/change
dynamic into the fixed and precharted courses of mass education
curricula is what produces the misery in our present system. When
you coerce people, the main thing (often the only thing) they
learn is how to cope with coercion.
If you want to diagnose student engagement, first remove the
coercion, and then see if they come to the lectures or not. If
you want to know if they benefit from the lectures, ask them (not
test them).
None of this is meant to imply that teachers should not engage
students in ways that may lead them to want to know things they
otherwise would have had no interest in (and vice versa). The
students' (and teachers') learning needs are very critically a
function of interacting with each other. I have seen many good
teachers teach badly because they felt 'under pressure' (i.e.
coerced); I have rarely seen students (except the youngest ones,
who haven't yet learned how to be vulnerable to our particular
forms of coercion) learning in schools except under coercion
(though many learn to identify with their kidnappers!).
Oxymoron of the week: Compulsory Liberal Education.
---------------
JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
BITNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM
INTERNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU