Phillip,
This is nothing new. Would not any cross-generational history of
immigrants point to a similar story. Usually at some point there is a
change in identification.
I would argue that in important ways the exact oppossite is ocurring.
Hey, kids go to before school care, school, and then after care. Then
many go to math and reading academies during the summer. Kids become
immersed in pop culture, and while it is a challenge to education, it is
rarely expansive. How do schools function in N.Z.?
I certainly do not see the picture you are painting of diverse
approaches to knowledge. More and more there are pressures to get
eveyone on the same page if its local standards or "dumbed down" federal
tests (what school wants a letter sent home notifying parents they can
transfer schools because there failing).
I guess part of me is still curious for an argument on how knowledge is
more democratic? How is a webpage more democratic than a teacher? In
many ways it would seem less so, particularily in the context of
re-mediating meaning.
Phillip Capper wrote:
> Hi Kevin et al,
>
> I broadly agree with Kevin, but I WOULD argue that more people have more
> ways of knowing and more diverse social contexts in which knowing occurs
> than in the past, and that there are consequences of that. Is not literacy
> itself a gateway to participation in more multiple contexts than are
> otthewise accessible?
>
> Let me take an example from my own country. Urban Maori youth today move
> daily between schools, which largely reproduce European - even 19th century
> European - social relationships and understandings of what counts as
> legitimate knowledge; iwi (i.e tribal) contexts with wholly different sets
> of social relationships, attitudes to authority and ideas about what
> constitutes legitimate knowledge; hip hop, rap and other appropriations from
> an alien culture that has been transmitted almost exclusively via electronic
> technologies (that is, boundary objects), and which aggressively discount
> much of mainstream legitimated knowledge; and families that are often a
> complex synthesis of all the foregoing. Many of them use the mechanical
> technologies of aeroplanes (a boundary object) to settle in New York,
> London, Sydney, where (as a recent excellent documentary (another boundary
> object) about Maori in New York demonstrated) they synthsise their existing
> sets of knowledges to enter the Julliard, the dockyards of New Jersey, the
> offices of the United Nations, or a hospital in the Bronx, without in any
> way rejecting or abandoning their essential essence as Maori. Then they have
> children......
>
> How widespread, and to what level of complexity, was such experience
> accessible even a hundred years ago? In such a world educational
> insititutions (and I include here the educational institutions of tribal
> tohunga and kaumatua) have ceased to be dominant mediators of knowledge and
> have to compete in a swirling marketplace of cognitive assonance and
> dissonance. It is my view that they are struggling in such an environment by
> trying to preserve the fundamentals of their historical practice.
>
> I acknowledge that if Kevin is correct, and things have not changed as much
> as I assert, then my thesis is flawed. But I have said why I do not share
> that analysis. However I do agree with Kevin when he talks about the ways in
> which educational institutions (as shaman before them) have engaged in
> pracices of mystification
>
> Phillip Capper,
> Centre for Research on Work, Education and Business Ltd. (WEB Research),
> Level 13
> 114 The Terrace
> (PO Box 2855)
> WELLINGTON
> New Zealand
>
> Ph: +64 4 499 8140
> Fx: +64 4 499 8395
> Mb: +64 021 519 741
>
> http://www.webresearch.co.nz
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Kevin Rocap [mailto:krocap@csulb.edu]
> Sent: Tuesday, 9 July 2002 1:33 p.m.
> To: xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
> Subject: Re: FW: ISCRAT: Epistemic Activity
>
>
> Dear Phillip et al,
>
> By your description Phillip can you really say that there are many more
> ways of knowing today than in the past? Well maybe a few technologically
> specific ways more ;-)
>
> But it seems to me that knowing and knowers were always already plural.
>
> The real hinge point seems, imho, to be the issue you raise of
> privileged ways of knowing.
>
> But even there it seems to me historically that there may have been many
> more acknowledged ways of knowing prior to the advent of schools than
> may currently be widely acknowledged even today.
>
> It seems that it is not knowledge that has been democratized, but
> perhaps rather that the awareness of how democratic knowing has always
> been is coming to the fore, after a period of school-induced
> mystification, and primarily coming to the fore for those who have up
> until now rather safely inhabited and believed in the realm of
> schools/colleges/universities as the appropriate sites for knowledge.
>
> So I would suggest that some of that awareness is likely fairly
> class-bound, and that many folks who were never part of the privileged
> academy did not tend to underestimate their own or others multiple ways
> of knowing in the way academicians may have. Just a thought.
>
> In Peace,
> K.
>
>
>
>
-- There is no hope of finding the sources of free action in the lofty realms of the mind or in the depths of the brain. The idealist approach of the phenomenologists is as hopeless as the positive approach of the naturalists. To discover the sources of free action it is necessary to go outside the limits of the organism, not into the intimate sphere of the mind, but into the objective forms of social life; it is necessary to seek the sources of human consciousness and freedom in the social history of humanity. To find the soul it is necessary to lose it. A.R. Luria
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