To paraphrase Pogo, "We have met the ends, and they are us." The way
I have been thinking about ends is that they are inherent in the
means. As opposed to the idea that we can stop children from
joining gangs, I might say that there is no way to stop children
from joining gangs because the reason there are children joining
gangs is because we have a social organization that believes having
children join gangs is beneficial to the collective. This idea isn't
as bizarre as it sounds. In 1888 T.H. Huxley wrote an article
saying that we should do nothing to intervene in the difficulties
of the lower classes because it acted as an important population
control. Unfortunately, I think that the society we live within
still has many of the same feelings.
This points to an important issue concerning education. That is that
educators can not see themselves as interventionists. Trying to
go in and solve problems in a single environment makes everybody
feel better, like we are doing something, but it is not going to
solve the problem because we are part and parcel of a society
that wants the problem to exist. This, in some ways, brings
me back to El'Konin's notion of the ideal. The true role of the
teacher is to be able to transcend the social cooperative motivation
and realize that, though unatainable, and impossible to physically
locate, that there is an ideal cooperative motivation to activity.
We present this as an event in our own lives, so it can become
an event in the lives of the students. But as Galina Zuckerman
so eloquently put it a while back on the network, this is a
frightening, difficult responsibility that man people do not want
to take. We have to understand our role as part of the problem,
and then be able to transcend that role, even when it might be
of benefit to us individually, and live our lives as the mediating
force towards the ideal.
Michael Glassman
University of Houston