Peter Smagorinsky makes some interesting points from his reading of
Sarason, though they are perhaps a bit oblique to my own. In saying that we
have built our whole system of education around the teacher, I meant that
we have made the teacher the indispensable element, the sole pipeline and
conduit, the medium and the messenger, the lynchpin of the system. I did
not mean that the system was designed to function in the interests of
teachers! far from it ... but neither is it designed to function in the
interests of students (most of them), as witness its typical results. The
prevailing wisdom has it that it functions in the interests of the ruling
caste, and I find it pretty hard to find evidence to the contrary.
University faculty members are just a bit closer to, or like university
graduates potentially more useful to, those interests. Universities much
more nearly run in the interests of their administrators, who are closer
still to the center of the social universe.
Gordon Wells returns us to the theme of how teachers really do change their
attitudes and practices, and I certainly agree that giving teachers a forum
and the space and time and tools to reflect on their own practice, to
create those feedback loops that let us watch ourselves and our co-actants
that help define our selves, is going to lead inevitably to change. But the
nature and directions of such change are not, I think, predictable, nor can
they be guided and controlled except at the price of destroying the value
of the entire process. And there's the rub ... at least for many educators.
Finally, I was very taken by Diane Celia Hodges' turn toward the issue of
compassion in educational and social theory. One finds it in Freire, I
think, in a rather pure form, but usually it has an air of condescension if
it speaks at all. Academic stances toward social phenomena tend toward the
'critical' more than the compassionate, despite the origins of 'critical
theory' in the fairly evident compassion of Marx. My efforts a while back
to understand the viewpoint of various sorts of 'conservatives' was a kind
of exercise born of compassion, or at least an effort toward empathy. If
social theory rejects an 'above it all' stance and recognizes that we
analysts and observers are also participants and very much 'in the fray',
then it should take seriously, as Diane suggests, the methods and metaphors
of insight that apply on one's own level, from one insider to another,
rather than those that take an outsider, or 'from a higher level' view. And
chief among the royal roads to insider insight is, in my term, empathy: the
skill (you have to learn it I think, or learn how not to refuse it) of
seeing-and-feeling from another's perspective, or at least of imagining.
Perhaps neither 'compassion' nor 'empathy' as terms have the full resonance
I would be looking for: that we open ourselves to feeling the pain that
others feel, that we use our own pain as a bridge across the gulf that may
separate us from an Other. Scholarship is for many people a way to escape
pain, their own and others'. If our culture teaches us that feeling pain is
not an intellectual practice, then we have to ask why it would say such
rubbish. Indeed we need to feel the pain that makes such a belief popular
with some people, and the pain that a culture which exploits this belief
inflicts on still others. JAY.
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JAY L. LEMKE
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
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