I too have become very interested in the idea of what you call
institution mediated mind. There are two places where I have found
some important ideas on this subject. In the last section of
Leontiev's book _
Activity, Consciousness, and Personality_ he suggests that the individual
in a complex society understands his or her own activity in terms of
the larger social institutions. The complexity of the social system,
and the complexity of the work involved in surviving the social system
forces individual motives into the deep background. Motives such as
attaining food still drive our activity, but there are so many social
layers over it that we no longer recognize it. Thus we find ourselves
on an assembly line, taking the motive from the institution, that we
have to do a good job in order to keep our job. The distance between
why we do things, and what we actually do is enormous. I was reading
your description of what occurs in school, and it seems to me that this
is purposeful. The society is training the individual to find motive and
goal in the institution at a very early age. A second place where I
have found interesting ideas on the institution mediated mind is in
the second volume of Habermas's -Theory of Communicative Action-. He
talks about how we are forced, through the sheer weight of complexity
(I think it is very similar to Leontiev) to turn over our important
decisions to institutions created by the social organization to make
those decisions. The issues behind going to war are so complex for
the individual we turn them over to a military establishment. The
issues behind morality so complex we turn them over to a legal
establishment. We knowingly allow institutions to take these roles
in our lives.
Michael Glassman
University of Housotn