Eugene Matusov
UC Santa Cruz
At 08:40 PM 4/19/96 -0700, Phil Agre wrote:
>I have written and scrapped a couple of replies to Jay's views about power
>and freedom in education. Here is another try.
>
>I think it's too easy to advocate freedom for children in education.
>There is an irreducible sense in which grown-ups have power over children:
>grown-ups have access to worlds that children do not have access to. If
>we believe many of the theories of learning that are advocated here, what
>children learn is not propositional knowledge that gets stored in their
>noggins, but rather skills that permit them to occupy certain structural
>locations in society, construct and enact certain identities, participate
>in certain activities, "see" the entities found within the complex of
>functional relevancies that arise as those activities unfold, and so
>on. We have many ways of talking about these things: "tacit knowledge",
>"form of life", "apprenticeship", "legitimate peripheral participation",
>habitus", and so on. The relationship between grownups and children is
>symmetrical in one sense: each occupy their own world, to which the other
>has limited access. But they are asymmetrical in other senses: grown-ups
>have passed through (some version of) the children's world; the children
>are headed into the grown-ups' world but not vice versa; the grown-ups'
>world has a broader geographic and social scope; and so on. It follows
>that the relationship of grown-ups (such as teachers) to children (such
>as students) is not simply a matter of grown-ups hoarding a certain kind
>of knowledge-capital which they withhold from children. The relationship
>is much less reducible than that.
>
>Now, faced with a proposal that children be given freedom, not be coerved,
>etc, most non-academics will probably say something like, "If you just
>let them do whatever they want then they'll run wild and never learn
>anything, any more than *you* would have studied diligently in college,
>much less in grade school, if nobody was holding grades over your head and
>frowning at you when your attention wandered". We academics seem to know
>better than this, somehow, in that we are free to posit a world in which
>knowledge carries its own motivations, or is presented in a sufficiently
>motivating way. But I want to point at one element of truth in the non-
>academic's complaint, which is that the very nature of knowledge implies
>that children *cannot* direct their own learning. That is, they are not
>in a position to even *imagine* what it is they do not know, much less
>evaluate its importance, or the relative importance of different things
>that they might learn. If the stuff-to-be-learned really were a supply
>of propositional facts-in-the-noggin then we could sit down ahead of time
>and discuss which ones were going to get learned. But the fact is that
>it is only possible to identify the stuff-to-be-learned in a vague and
>approximate way. Children not yet inducted into the grown-ups' world are
>not simply lacking for facts in the way that they might lack for money,
>and they cannot choose what to learn in the way that they might choose
>what to buy. No: they are literally *lost* in the grown-ups' world,
>literally and necessarily *clueless* in that world. In some sense they
>are not even "in" that world at all yet. How could they possibly choose
>what to learn, and when and why and how, without this kind of epistemic
>access to the endpoint of the learning process?
>
>It does not follow, of course, that children's opinions are without value,
>or that no room exists for negotiation about the structure and manner and
>interactional styles and logistics and values and goals of the educational
>process. Nor does it follow that children are entirely powerless, or that
>they ought to be. It *does* follow, though, that grown-ups -- or at least,
>in some sense that deserves further specification, the grown-ups' *world*
>-- must structure children's learning to some significant extent. Attempts
>to deny this fact -- epidemic among liberal American teachers imbued with
>certain kinds of constructivist educational philosophies -- lead to all
>sorts of weird hidden agendas and mixed messages, in which children are
>reduced to guessing what they're supposed to do, learning to pick up on
>indirect cues from the grown-ups, forever paranoid that they aren't doing
>it right, when the official ideology is that they are running the show,
>constructing knowledge themselves, expressing their spontaneous natural
>selves, and all sorts of other good things, all having originated in
>opposition to the soul-deadening drills of yore. (Valerie Walkerdine
>has described this in Foucauldian terms as (I believe) "discovering the
>natural child".) Much better, in my opinion, to be explicit about what
>children can and cannot do, what children can and cannot know, and what
>is valuable about the grown-ups' knowledge and values and activities
>and cultures that deserves to be passed along, or at least offered for
>appropriation in a structured context in which the structures are themselves
>up for negotiation. If this is paternalistic then that's because children
>need fathers. My view may be extreme, but perhaps it will stimulate
>discussion about the space in-between.
>
>Phil Agre
>
>
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Eugene Matusov
UC Santa Cruz