Obviously I liked the images of the trains that move too fast to get on,
whose access doors aren't spaced the right distance apart, which don't come
back around to give us more chances to climb aboard. Sounds very much like
science education to me, and like a lot of other mechanisms of exclusion in
our society. Leigh wrote:
>So I moved to another train, the social science
>one, that had many more kinds of doors, closer together, and moved at a
>pace I could articulate with my life (needing to work odd jobs, do
>community organizing, grow up).
"At a pace I could articulate with my life" ... resonates not just with the
times of formal education and early career, but with the times when the
pace of my life has gotten so hectic, the leisure moments to try something
new coming so briefly and so far apart, that it hardly seems there are any
new trains I can get on. Of course I have always sort of hopped back and
forth among trains moving at much the same pace relative to one another,
perhaps always trying to catch the train that is furthest ahead at any
given moment, going in the direction I currently want to go (the Semiotics
Express, the Phenomenology local, the Great Western monorail, the P O M &
O, etc.). Once you are on one of these trains, it's not hard to catch
another; their relative speeds are not so different, and their tracks run
parallel for long enough distances to allow a fairly safe jump from one to
another.
In the narrowest of educational applications of this metaphor, think how
little _variety_ of pacing is allowed for learning. The rate at which
courses are taught, examinations scheduled, does not vary even within a
single order of magnitude. And some subjects speed by relentlessly, in some
unfathomable hurry to get to their destinations with as few passengers
aboard as possible (science most clearly, mathematics along the early part
of its run; contrast the leisurely pace of the humanities, with the same
stations re-visited again and again, more like a Caribbean cruise line or
those loop trains for shoppers, get off and stay as long as you like, get
back on, no extra fare).
In my reply to Mike, I agreed that we need to focus more on the issues of
synchronies and dyssynchonies within levels as important to understanding
the possibilies for emergent processes at N+1. The more I have thought
about this since, the more critical it seems to be. In a next stage of
refinement of the model, we need to really understand better the logic of
the (N-1, N) and (N+1, N) relations. There is good evidence in complexity
theory (e.g. Prigogine's germinal work on entropy in non-equilibrium
systems) for the crucial important of temporal coherence information in
systems (what classical physics call 'phase' relations). If you just
momentarily stopped all the processes at all scales in a living human, they
might spontaneously re-start, but they wouldn't synchronize and coordinate
properly with one another, wouldn't support one another, be there at the
right moments for one another, and the higher scales organizational levels
would begin to degrade and disintegrate. Like missed connections on the
train system. This 'synchronization' information is what makes many systems
'irreversible' as collectivities, even though basic Newtonian physics says
that each constituent interaction is reversible on its own. It's the
ratchet of order in the cosmos, and in our lives.
So if we are looking to better understand not just Giddens' regionalization
(itself of course important), but the boundary maintenance that keeps the
time-space slices and the activities that inhabit them walled off from one
another (or not), and so keeps different social castes in their Places, and
our individual life trajectories hemmed on all timescales from a
day-in-the-life to life-chances in the long term, then perhaps we should be
looking at the relative rates, synchronies, and dyssynchronies between the
trains we're on and the trains that pass us by.
JAY.
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JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
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