Message-ID: <Pine.SOL.3.91.961011150906.2054A-100000@abc.ksu.ksu.edu> Date: Fri, 11 Oct 1996 15:28:04 -0500 From: kerry miller <mailto:astingsh@KSU.EDU> Subject: 410: Of Cabbages and Sealing-Wax To: Multiple recipients of list DEVEL-L <mailto:DEVEL-L@AMERICAN.EDU>
Of Cabbages and Sealing-Wax kerry miller <mailto:astingsh@ksu.edu>...The five metaphysical and epistemological beliefs underlying modern rationality [identified as atomism, mechanism, objectivism, universality and 'monism'] are rarely the basis of thought and action by individuals, families and small groups. Today, the most innovative scientists and most successful entrepreneurs do not rely solely on these premises. Yet these suppositions are the only ones which are *publicly* held acceptable for use in *public* discourse and decision-making. The challenges of sustained human action with the biosphere require a public response. But arguments for environmental action that are rooted in other philosophical premises are weeded out of the public dialogue. -- Richard Norgaard, _Development Betrayed_ (NY: Routledge, 1994), pp 71-73:
Norgaard later says (p 90), "Modernization has entailed a considerable substitution of formal institutions and objective knowledge for culture and cultural knowledge as we commonly think of them." Taking this formalism to be the basis of the "public" discourse mentioned in the quotation, the kind of investigation of the underlying strata of value which he develops, and which I will try to pursue here, is in itself a return to "folk society." Not so long ago, men used to sit on the marbled corner of the bank to sit and watch the day go by and ponder life's complications. Rather more recently, I have experienced the same meditative congregation of neighbors on the veranda of a Nepali farmer, the gentle evening being too late to work yet too early to eat and retire.
Here, on this virtual porch, my friend Tinker is sitting and rocking. He is not a teacher - rather, we are all teaching one another. He does not cite learned references - rather, we all rely on each other's learning. The discourse is not the product of research - our discourse is entirely the product of our experience, our interests and concerns. Now, Tinker usually has a contribution to make to whatever story he has been listening to, but he'd been sitting pretty quietly today, so I asked him, "What have you been up to recently, Tinker?"
Well, he said, I've been playing with Penrose tiles - did you know, they make the first provably non-replicating tile pattern? You only need two shapes, 'fat diamonds' and 'thin diamonds,' and you can put them together to cover 2-dimensional space completely. What non-replicating means is, while square tiles can make a bigger square, these diamonds never make a bigger diamond, but there's another interesting thing about the business: there are 'illegal' ways to assemble, or start to assemble, a pattern, which leaves a fracture which can never be tiled over. You have to always pay attention to the context, the neighboring tiles, before you put a new one in place, to be sure it fits properly.
"Fascinating," I said, but I could tell he wasn't quite ready to stop yet.
Now here we've been, talking about technology and - at the same time - trying to distinguish good from bad. I haven't been saying much, because I've been mulling this question over in regard to my tile pieces. Obviously there's no sense in calling the tiles themselves good or bad. It's only when you look at the *pattern* they make that you can see whether a piece fits or does not fit; whether it makes a good pattern or a bad one, if we suppose that we really do want to tile over the whole space.
But what can I do, to teach you what is a legal 'play,' and what is not? I might be able to develop a few mathematical rules - but I'm not a mathematician and I couldn't guarantee they would be sufficient for every case. In any case, they would not be not simple rules, and you'd probably take more time trying to understand them than just going at the tiling slapdash. And really, if you just took some tiles and experimented, you'd catch on pretty quick to what 'fit' or 'fracture' means - a lot easier than by anything I can say, even if I was an expert.
"I see the parallel to good and bad, okay," somebody else said, "but are you saying that values can't be *taught*?"
Well (Tinker said), that's why I wasn't saying anything at first, you see. It's one thing to say, Here's a bunch of little diamonds, go see what you can make out of them, and another when you're dealing with real life. The whole idea behind teaching as a profession is that it should save people a lot of grief if they can learn beforehand and not have to go through bitter experience to learn a lesson. If every tile you put down *sticks* and cannot be changed, very likely you are going to end up with fractures whether you like it or not - and that's life to a T for somebody that doesn't get some help one way or another. So I have to admit, I don't see it's much use trying to teach values, per se, without having something like tiles to demonstrate how they work or what they look like in practice, which means, also how they should *not* look. Otherwise, all you have is ritual and dogmatism, not operational values.
I said, "Should we think of school as a kind of laboratory, a place to conduct experiments in living, where the pieces don't really stick, like you said?"
Since you used the word first, said Tinker, I'll assume you know what you mean by it. Ideally that's what school 'should' be. Ideally, of course, we shouldn't need schools - *every* encounter in this world should be reversible, and I wonder sometimes about a social system that is so sure it can operate without making mistakes that it can afford to put mistake-making off by itself in that kind of institution. But here we are, and that's the kind of situation we've got, except that the schools don't seem to have this ideal anymore: they seem to operate as if students aren't supposed to make mistakes - as if, in fact, *school* is the 'real world.'
"Whaaat!" somebody exclaimed.
Look: if you wanted to encourage somebody to make mistakes, *and learn from the experience, how would you do it? Obviously, you'd set up logical traps, or mislead them, you'd make up stories and illusions so that if they took anything at face value, they'd be sure to be wrong. But our schools don't do that (or when they do they try to 'correct' it); they give out facts, and just one set of facts at that, which the 'students' are supposed to swot up. They set exams which have only one correct answer. They get everybody working for one goal that they call excellence (as if everyone can excel!) and never mention that there are other goals. School, in short, has become a social institution in itself, manifesting its own particular values, instead of the kind of process laboratory which would lead people to think for themselves and see their own patterns - that is, decide their own values. So, if you think about it, it's no surprise that we get confused about what's good or bad, when the only chance we get to compare the patterns we see is after hours, sitting out here on the porch.
Nobody could think of anything to say to that, so he went on.
Well, its getting late, so I'll shut up in a minute; there's just this last thought I might throw out. If, with the tiles I was talking about, it's very likely you are going to end up with fractures whether you like it or not, then what if there might be a *pattern of fractures*? If perfection is so blessed hard to achieve, why not shift your ground a little to the pragmatic side, and consider if there might be some fracture patterns better than others? Good and bad can be measured relative to anything (as long as you've got more people agreeing with you than disagreeing, of course). In terms of this school business, do we shrug and say, like I just did, 'Well that's the kind of situation we've got,' or might we shift our ground a bit and consider that there are other, more dynamical - more flexible, as I've heard some folks say, but more *valuable*, I say - ways to look at the patterns human beings can achieve when they get together? That is to say, is our acceptance of it as an institution the *result* of our own schooling? How do we know we haven't made a mistake?
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