Chuck
If we are to follow Hutchin's view of lightly equipped minds that enable
individuals to take part in socially shaped, trained, tooled, and
distributed activities, and as well a vygotskian view of cognitive
development enabling increased social participation as well as the
formation of a reflective/evaluative mind using the socially provided
tools and individual improvisation upon them, it is hard to maintain a
radical view of individual impulse privileged over the present but
changing social environment. Many of us on this list, like Jay and myself,
have a strong attachment to our own individuality of perspective, life
path, and life directions, and to pursue our lights without the kinds of
pressures towards conformity, exclusion, marginality, etc. that we have
felt. Often in that struggle, our greatest personal ally and culturally
available ideological resource has been the ideology of radical
individualism and individual conscience, particularly fostered by
reformation theology (every person
reading a personal bible and forming a personal relation to god,
individual inspired by that innerly perceived relation, and individually
accountable only to god as perceived through individual perception of
that relation). This ideology, however, is one that not only goes
against much of what socio-cultural theory has taught us, it is
unacceptable to some of us on many other grounds. This tension is behind
much of our puzzling over the status of the individual, agency, judgment,
etc. on one side and on the other the specter of social domination,
coercion, the dead hand of the past, patriarchy, etc.
Various people (on this list and in various literatures) have offered
useful comments toward a more modest understanding of the individual,
actions of conscience, forging individualized paths, the single--though
located-- person as a source of evaluation and action. To that I would
like to add just one comment, that the "lightly-equipped mind" has
several warrants for its own individuality of judgment: 1) it exists in a
particular position (bourdieu may be very useful to think about this if
we we do not take so seriously what he considers a necessary agonism and
competitveness and self-seeking in occupying a position in a field and if
we softenthe personal and social boundaries that he draws among fields)
2) no other lightly equipped mind sits so closely to that individual
position, and thus cannot see so completely what things look like from
that position; 3) the individual paths and trajectories of that lightly
equipped mind through various social experiences and possibilities; 4)
the variable equipment gathered by that lightly equipped mind in its
travels through the world; 5) the relation of that lightly equipped mind
to a particular body with its own needs, desires, possibilities and
limitations and neurochemical relationship with that mind.
However, even respecting those judgments appropriate to other
lightly equipped minds, not standing in the way of those embodied,
socially interacting minds to appropriately follow their own lights, we
still my frame our words and actions to those others in light of our own
judgments, positions, experiences and resources. One consequence of such
a line of reasoning is that while each generation may create itself new
from its own positions, we also have the opportunity to make available
all we know and do, insofar as we can interest others in hearing.
Schooling is inevitably a negotiation between what we have to offer and
what students will listen to, and with what level of participation.
Members of a highly conservative society may decide to enforce certain
uniformities of experience (as much as students can be made to sit still
for) and to limit other potential resources and experiences that might be
socially available if they were not suppressed. I will not go on
speculating about under what conditions this works for which individuals
and for which social orders. Other social arrangements can offer different
ranges of resources, boundaries of the acceptable, and student choice making.
In all arrangements, however, the ultimate fate is in the uptake by the
students. This last point is a perception I imagine almost everyone on
this list would share.
One further consequence is that perhaps the best
we can do educationally is make available for students those things we
value most in the form that will attract and reward students (and that
reward may entail some fairly disciplined and passingly painful
processes--but which are perceived ultimately to be worth it for the
student.) That is, pedagogical work is finding ways
that will orient students toward and bind them to the things we would
like them to learn. The best way to do this, however, may be to watch
where they are going and align what we have to offer with where they are
headed. After all we are both lightly equipped and do not easily suffer
excess baggage. And if individuals have strong impulses to go in
directions we do not offer (and we deem not to be destructive to the self
or society --there is the rub, is the line drawn at mass murder or
violation of what is perceived to be the socially stabilizing effects of
traditional family structure or beliefs in particular heirarchies), then
we need to understand the futility, unpleasantness on both sides,
and malign consequences of maintaining the fiction that others should
want what we offer to them. And then we again need to ask, what useful
can we offer to bind individuals into the complexes of life forms
available or as transformable to accommodate each new participant. We all
have some stake in social cohesion.
Chuck Bazerman