Not Left To Chance

Today I read this in Digitize This Book!: The Politics of New Media, or Why We Need Open Access Now :

…the very web-like structure of the Web often makes it difficult to determine where texts end – or begin, for that matter. All the cutting and pasting, grafting and transplanting, internal and external linking involved means that the boundaries between the text and its surroundings, its material support, are blurred and can become almost impossible to determine online – just as the boundaries separating authors, editors, programmers, producers, consumers, users, and commentators/critics are blurred.(p.66)

The blurring of textual boundaries interests me. Especially in academic texts, where citing other texts, other legitimate texts, is the necessary foundation for the building of new texts.

Yesterday I went to an event at UBC.

The MisEducated Imagination: McLuhan’s Creativity The lasting legacy of Marshall McLuhan has everything to do with his creatively disruptive thought: art as an early warning system of major technological change, media theory as culture probes, words moving at light-speed, texts as worm holes to alternative futures, a festival of seductive paradoxes in writing, images, and aphorisms. With McLuhan, technology simultaneously stultifies and mobilizes the imagination, does violence to the human nervous system and creates electronic breakthroughs. Arthur Kroker is Canada Research Chair in Technology, Culture and Theory & Professor of Political Science at the University of Victoria. Author of numerous books on technology and culture, including The Will to Technology, The Possessed Individual, The Postmodern Scene and Technology and the Canadian Mind: Innis, McLuhan and Grant. With Marilouise Kroker, he has edited the field-defining anthology, Critical Digital Studies and the internationally acclaimed electronic journal, CTheory (www.ctheory.net ).

One Code To Rule Them All… When all that has been solid melts into code, how do we rethink and re-make scholarly praxis — theory, research and pedagogy — built from and for a literate universe? Quality becomes quantity, arts and sciences are re-fused, media fluidly converge, and even the ontology of the body, this “too too solid flesh” of Hamlet’s distracted imaginings, becomes molten, as virtuality. This paper is part of a larger project which interweaves three strands of interdisciplinary scholarship: the conceptual work of forging a ‘digital epistemology,’ the technological challenge of developing a multimedia, multimodal research tool capable of taking the measure of the re-mediated subjects and objects of interdisciplinary study, and the pedagogical call for the resuscitation of ‘play’ as inseparable from and indispensable for teaching, learning and the advancement of knowledge under unprecedented conditions of uncertainty.  Suzanne de Castell is Professor and Dean pro-tem of the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University( http://www.educ.sfu.ca/research/decaste/). She’s interested in relations between media and epistemology, between ‘knowing’ and ‘tools of intellect’, in relation to print literacy, new media studies, and game-based educational technologies. Books include Literacy Society and Schooling (with Alan Luke and Kieran Egan), Language, Authority and Criticism (with Alan and Carmen Luke) Radical Interventions (with Mary Bryson) and Worlds in Play (with Jen Jenson). Her current work is on the ludic epistemologies of game-based learning, exemplified in several projects co-developed with Jenson: Contagion ( http://contagion.edu.yorku.ca/), a compelling game about public health , Arundo Donax , ( http://contagion.edu.yorku.ca/Tafelmusik/login/login.html), a gripping engagement with Baroque music, and Epidemic, a social networking site where your ‘friends’ are contacts you manage to infect. She co-edits the Canadian Game Studies journal, Loading…(http:// journals.sfu.ca/loading/ )

Dr. Arthur Kroker gave a concealed radical talk. He was saying something under the academic babble, something about a new consciousness that was to come, a change in our miseducation. That the new digital consciousness, new digitized body that we take on. Taken as a whole, if only for a moment, it was worth the two hour bus trip to and from UBC. That ride in itself, and the fact that it was bodies with ears listening to Kroker read from a laser-printed paper, should be enough to dispute what Kroker was saying, of course there was a very radical undertone, to the talk. Suzanne de Castell talk was much more concrete with her explanation of an experiment to expose the social construction of meaning. The need for such thinking in society, the ability to reflect on our constructions, entered the question and answer part of the talk. A question was asked of Kroker, it was more an expression of disapproval than a question. It went something like “You say there is a new digital body, a new digital future, but does this change the way we eat or love?” The answer given by de Castell was great. She said that the confusion between eat and love, that one is a physical need and the other a social, or literary, construction. We’ve been colonized by the word. She told of the creation of romantic love by literature. I don’t think the questioner “got it” but it was a very good point. Our categories, boundaries, the narratives, and meaning attached to our bodies are not solid. These are the necessary errors, the solidity, that with new insights melt into air.

From the CBC indepth profile on Svend Robinson:

1999: Alexa McDonough relegates Robinson to the backbenches after he tables a petition calling for the word "God" to be removed from the preamble of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

 

Svend Robinson at the March for Peace in 2004.

From the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms:

Whereas Canada is founded upon principles that recognize the supremacy of God and the rule of law:

Paul Cezanne  via The Revolutionary Carrot

The day is coming when a single carrot freshly observed will set off a revolution.

This is modified Marcuse from The Essential Marcuse:

The awareness of the transcendent possibilities of freedom must become a driving power in the consciousness and the imagination which prepare the soil for this revolutionary carrot.

I’ve attended a Philosophers’ Cafe in my neighbourhood a couple times now. The first topic was the compatibility of Human Rights and Capitalism, and the second was Marriage and Morals. I spoke up during the second topic conversation, but I don’t think my remarks were at all coherent or even comprehendible.

I’ve been thinking about "it" and the scare-quoted-it is all I can use to begin this post for much the same reason as another incoherrent attempt. I don’t know what I’m talking about. I say this in the deepest, most profound sense. I literally do not know what i am talking about.

The common sense of that saying would have me talking about something I’m not as familiar with as is another or as I myself think I should be. If I were talking about biology with a biologist a point would be reached where it could be said that I don’t know what I’m talking about. Of course I’m talking about biology, and I know that, just not as well as the judge in this case thinks I should.
 
When I say I don’t know what I’m talking about in the case of the Philosophers’ Cafe discussion I mean I was groping for a body of knowledge. No one, could have known what I was talking about. If anyone from the Cafe finds this, I apologize and thank you for the opportunity to think out loud. I won’t recount what I said because I can’t remember, but it was in response to a comment about the choice individuals make regarding relationships, and that persons fear of the ensuing chaos if individuals choose to live outside traditional/regulated relationships.

My concern with relationships (marriage) is its connection to social change.

Some points:

• Relationships are easy. In that what is desired is given. Gender Neutral: What is wanted is perfection. Reciprocal domination. We want to bow before the god who lifts us up.
• Relationships are impossible. Nothing is perfect. The ideal always exists outside our reality. The ideal is given and unnattainable.
• Communicating outside the given is difficult/impossible.
• Original creative attempts fall on no ground.
• Scene: Guy walks up to a table of women in a bar asks "What are you 4 doing tonight?"
• Changing the given relationship is analogous to changing the social.
• Consider the persistence of "soul" in relationships/love/marriage.

I also put a new paper-in-progress online. It deals a little with the ideas of "soul." I am completely open to any comments. The paper really is in-progress. I’ve also got some building and repair projects "in-progress" around the house. About those I’d appreciate you keep your comments to yourself.

Summary
In response to Clive Thompson’s A War of Words, in which he argues for scientists to begin speaking of theory as law, I write of the fascism in expediting social evolution through authority. I begin by reminding the reader and myself that evolution takes time and finish with a call for more theory. (While sourcing some of the material, I read the article Thompson based his piece. At least I think I read the source article. Helen Quinn is far more measured in her argument and doesn’t make the suggestion Thompson relays. He links Quinn’s argument with evolution, but I think Quinn had in mind "the potential dangers of anthropogenic interference with Earth’s climate system." Regardless, the Quinn "controversy" is worth reading.)

At Long Last

“At long last the search of knowledge will reach out for its due; it will want to rule and possess, and you with it!”

 

Darwin held back the publication of On the Origin of Species fourteen years. According to Joseph Carroll (2003) this was a good thing.

“What then, if anything, did Darwin gain through waiting for fourteen years before writing the final version of his work? There are three main forms of gain: (1) vastly more detail both in apt illustration and in considered inference, (2) an extended compositional process that resulted in an extraordinary density, coherence, and clarity in the exposition; and (3) one new idea, or at least a latent idea rendered explicit and available for development.” (p.39)

I mention this first as a sort of mental massage. Seriously, take it easy. Breathe. We’re getting there. What follows, an unfocussed post on theory, most of it anyway, was set in motion by Clive Thompson (2007), but he can’t take all the blame. We live in fast times. Or we think we do. Darwin’s theory, or the theory of evolution bubbled up out of social consciousness over 150 years ago and we’re still dealing with it, and we’ll be dealing with it for a long time to come. There’s no need to get into a panic. Hofstadter’s Law is a law for our times. It states that everything takes longer than expected, even when you take the law into consideration. I’m presenting this as much as self-help as advice. I too, live in a city, drink coffee and move about in a perpetual state of anxiety, a whole lot slower than desire. So to me and you, a little perspective.

Everything is constantly evolving, but evolution is so difficult to understand because the timeline is beyond anything we can easily comprehend. The evolutionary timescale, the universe, or the multiverse, the limits of space, the realization that every star in the night sky is a solar system; you can think these things but they are a little big, a little intimidating. But that doesn’t stop you thinking. Only death stops thinking. The perfect example:

In Jesus Camp there’s a scene, a wavy blond-haired boy is sitting on the stage, (this is how I remember it) he’s surrounded by all the other kids, the camera is on him, and you can see him thinking and he says something like, “Sometimes I don’t know if I believe it.” All the kids look at him, I don’t want to read too much into it, but he stops talking and that’s the end of that scene and line of inquiry. Even in that environment you can’t stop curiosity completely. Even in that environment of conformism and information control there’s variation, and where there’s variation, there’s evolution, or, at the least, divergence. This process takes time.

happy in the knowledge that a constantly changing vision has been replaced by a fixed pole.
There is a war going on between the Jesus camp and the Science camp. On the one side they’re fighting for God or absolute social certainty in politics and the other’s interest is political funding and free pursuit of inquiry. There’s a very real conflict of interests here. So Thompson writes, A war of words: Science will triumph only when theory becomes law. The piece was "inspired" by a recent essay in Physics Today by the physicist Helen Quinn, who suggests (according to Thompson) that scientists stop using the word theory (and believe) and refer to evolution as law, because the public understands the authority of law. Thompson makes clear this difference of meaning for scientists and people. He writes:

“While it’s true that scientists refer to evolution as a theory, in science the word theory means an explanation of how the world works that has stood up to repeated, rigorous testing.”

“But for most people, theory means a haphazard guess. It’s an insult, really a glib way to dismiss a point of view: “Ah, well, that’s just your theory.””

Quinn, and Thompson through her authority, suggest that to people who “understand that law is a rule that holds true and must be obeyed,” scientist should refer to their findings with certainty as law.

Clive Thompson is not a fascist. In no way am I implying that Clive Thompson is a fascist. I say this because I want to use the word. I could say euphemistically that he errs on the side of expediency when he writes, “Public discourse is inevitably political, so we need to talk about science in a way that wins the political battle – in no uncertain terms.” And I could choose to see the play on words, the wit of “no uncertain terms” in the context of the article, but I choose, at this moment, to point out the fascism of those words in the social context. It’s probably best to refer you to Foucault’s Guide to a non fascist life. It’s a little too long to quote, but a very short manual for living, so I’ve typed it out in full here (not yet).

Introduction to the Non-Fascist Life

This art of living counter to all forms of fascism, whether already present or impending, carries with it a certain number of essential principles which I would summarize as follows if I were to make this great book into a manual or guide to everyday life:

• Free political action from all unitary and totalizing paranoia.
• Develop action, thought and desires by proliferation, juxtaposition, and disjunction, and not by subdivision and pyramidal hierarchization.
• Withdraw allegiance from the old categories of the Negative (law, limit, castration, lack, lacuna), which Western thought has long held sacred as a form of power and an access to reality. Prefer what is positive and multiple, difference over uniformity, flows over unities, mobile arrangements over systems. Believe that what is productive is not sedentary but nomadic.
• Do not think that one has to be sad in order to be militant, even thought the thing one is fighting is abominable. It is the connection of desire to reality (and not its retreat into forms of representation) that possesses revolutionary force.
• Do not use thought to ground political practice in Truth; nor political action to discredit, as mere speculation, a line of thought. Use political practice as an intensifier of thought, and analysis as a multiplier of the forms and domains for the intervention of political action.
• Do not demand of politics that it restore the “rights” of the individual, as philosophy has defined them. The individual is the product of power. What is needed is to “de-individualize” by means of multiplication and displacement, diverse combinations. The group must not be the organic bond uniting hierarchized individuals, but constant generator of de-individualization.
• Do not become enamored of power.

Thompson has crossed the line into fascism. (About retiring words, Thompson’s article suggests theory and believe, and fascism is a word that’s been socially retired, I’d suggest, obviously that we bring it back, not in the sense of Hitler, but as Foucault writes “The fascism in all of us.” We need the word to confront the tendency. Theory, again obviously I like the word, and concept, I keep wondering if the suggestion is satirical, if I am missing the play, or the wit. But believe, I’ve worked it out of my vocabulary. “if you wish to strive for peace of soul and pleasure, then believe; if you wish to be a devotee of truth, then inquire.” (p30 Portable Nietzsche). This brings up meaning. Believe as used by science and believers, and theory used by science and believers. Weiner has a good line about two different uses of language.

Leave the dictates and decrees to the government and church. Scientists when speaking to the public, should speak as philosophers and educators. Norbert Weiner (1950) writes, “The functional part of any science cannot escape considering uncertainty and the contingency of events.” This view of the world and facts as moving targets has had social impacts, but is far from a world view. What Thompson suggests is counter to the educative quality of science. It’s science and theory and the masses educated in contingency that have been taking on the absolutist state and church so far. What’s needed for theory to set us free (my interest in theory is a little different from institutional scientists) is not that it become authoritative and law, but more theory.

When Thompson writes that the best result of changing theory to law is the linguistic jujitsu performed, he misrepresents theory, misapplies the martial art and underestimates the opposition. If, and it won’t happen, the scientific community were to speak of evolution as a law, creationists would say “I believe in one law: God’s Law.” There’s nothing gentle in changing an inviting and unfinished process of theory building into an authoritative infallible law.

Not Enough Theory
The argument that a frustrated theory needs more theory is more than 200 years old. Kant (1793) writes that impractical theory may simply be incomplete and “in such cases it was not the fault of theory if it was little use in practice, but rather of there having been not enough theory, which the man in question should have learned from experience and which is true theory even if he is not in a position to state it himself and, as a teacher, set it forth systematically in general propositions.” In his descriptively named essay On the common saying: That may be correct in theory, but it is of no use in practice, Kant argues that “no one can pretend to be practically proficient in a science and yet scorn theory without declaring that he is an ignoramus in his field, inasmuch as he believes that by groping about in experiments and experiences, without putting together certain principles (which really constitute what is called theory) and without having thought out some whole relevant to his business (which, if one proceeds methodically in it, is called a system), he can get further than theory could take him.”

Quinn’s article is worth reading. An awareness of meaning is necessary for anyone interested in moving ideas around. The scientific idea of theory as practical or physical, the result of experience, the product of hypotheses, and Kant’s idea of theory a priori, of desire or metaphysical are both opposed to theory as an untestable whim. We can do without belief, at this point we could do without the word, but to take advantage of the meaning behind religious belief and substitute Law for theory is to trade on a notion of authority that the liberating power of theory and science has been subverting for only a few centuries now.

Sources

Thompson, Clive. (2007) A war of words: Science will triumph only when theory becomes law. Wired 15.11 p.102 November

Quinn, Helen. (2007) Belief and knowledge — a plea about language. Physics Today.
January 2007, page 8

Letters Language of science I: Theories and laws

 

July 2007, page 8

Letters Language of science II: Degrees of knowing

July 2007, page 11

Technorati Tags:: Clive Thompson theory language science evolution

"The reason why this study is important is because it emphasizes something educators already know - our classrooms and our schools do not exist in vacuums. Our students come to us with lives and backgrounds that are far more influential upon their academic potentials and performances than whatever I do for 45 minutes a day, 183 days a year.

This means that if we really want to address the achievement gap in education, we have to look outside the school system for some of the solutions to the education problem."

Is that what the study means? If those who really want to address the achievement gap have to look outside the school system, why do we even have schools? That’s a serious question. If socialization predicts educational success or failure and future economic situation, as research shows, what are schools doing?

Schools exist in an environment, not a vacuum, just like every teacher knows, but you walk into any classroom in North America and it looks pretty much the same as any other classroom in North America. The teacher’s methods and the curriculum are pretty much the same across this vast land with its multiplicity of languages, cultures and communities. The environments are different. The methods work in some environments and not in others.

There’s the problem.

The solution could be experimenting with method and curriculum. Imagine for a second that teachers don’t know everything. I’d bet that the majority of teachers in less successful schools drive in from outside those communities, meaning they don’t really know who they’re teaching. Teachers in these communities need to become learners. Teachers need to become experimental, and really what have you got to lose? The kids are failing anyway. Get the kids talking, you’ll need to learn their language, and then with you at the helm (A role model for students is a learner not a teacher.), you’ve got a learning environment.

It’s not that easy. Most experiments fail. But things aren’t working right now inside the school. Schools in different communities should look, learn and sound different, because they are.

It looks like I might have to read and write about Marx. It’s got to be best to avoid mentioning the name, but if I want to use the concept of alienation, even if I want to transform it a little, I should have some idea of how the concept was originally used. I thought for a moment deterritorialization might work, but that’s even more academic and not really synonymous, either way, alienation has a common meaning that circulates outside the academic world.

The wave we’re after, or on depending on your place in the spectrum of alienation, is capitalism’s third. Again back in Harris’ Ontario I saw the effects of policy geared toward business interests on community. The funding for Ontario’s arts organizations was threatened. And these once community based and minded organizations began appealing for funds with business and economic based arguments. The shift in thinking swept these once autonomous community groups up with the wave of capitalism.

Something very similar is happening with this call to catch the knowledge wave, if we understand it as knowledge wave capitalism. Much has been written about the commercialization of our schools and the resulting uncritical acceptance of product placement. But I’ve also read somewhere that capitalism is illiterate, I could look into this and its effect on literacy.

If literacy is seen as being in harmony with a culture’s body of knowledge, then alienation and illiteracy are connected. Developing a method to bring each child individually into harmony with our cultural body of knowledge would be a "micropolitical means of subversion."

Preface
This post, which is essentially a review of the summer issue of Education Canada, might turn out to be some statement of purpose for Not Left To Chance. My main concern today is a proposal for study in a local graduate program. Of course, being afflicted with a philosophical disposition, I tend to space out when defining a field.

It shouldn’t be too difficult to work out a focused study. My interest is literacy and I have a very practical agenda. I want to study tested methods for improving literacy so I can become a better teacher.

A little background: At some point in my efforts to change the world by changing a local media scene, I decided that education could be the field where the work of changing the world holds the most potential. I enrolled in the local Faculty of Education and a year later was a qualified teacher. At that point I went back to work in local media.

A little more background: The time and place of my turn toward the field of education was Harris’ Ontario. Education was overtly politicized by the governing body and teachers and their unions were essentially destroyed. It was a bad time for education in Ontario, and in the spirit of full disclosure, a good time for a middling student to get into a Faculty of Education.

My first complaint is with the education I received. I recall one telling incident every time I bring up teacher education. The lecture based section was led by instructors who told you what to do in the classroom. Once, and only once, I questioned a teaching practice. The instructor looked at me, (it wasn’t like I was out of line, the instructor had asked if there were any questions) and said "This would be a higher level discussion." then continued with the lecture as if no question had been asked. Teacher education generally exercises only lower level recall skills.

And the practicum was just as bad. The student teachers who could most closely ape their mentors were highly rewarded. I learned to mimic tone, gestures and catch phrases for positive appraisal. This wasn’t as foolproof as it sounds. An outside appraisal was also part of the student teacher’s report. My outside appraiser was a retired principal and a strict disciplinarian. During his first appraisal I was being mentored by a teacher with a soft touch. This retired principal gave me a near failing review. Luckily for me, when he came around for my second appraisal I was aping a strict disciplinarian who was retiring from teaching at the end of the year. My second and final outside appraisal was a glowing report, with stars and extra comments written in the margins to note my striking improvement.

In most teaching positions this kind of education/training isn’t a problem. In front of a group of similarly socialized students, you perform an act prescribed by governing bodies and the results sought appear. As long as you are doing what you’re told, remain dependent on outside regulators for instruction, you’ll be a success at the job of teaching. The direction of education is left to policy makers. Teachers have learned not to question, their success is dependent on their ability to unquestioningly do what they’re told. You could clearly see that dependence in Harris’ Ontario. Teachers were powerless to defend the work they do from a government that didn’t have the best interests of education written into their policies. Grudgingly, the teachers followed the governments new prescription.

And in the end what did it matter? Literate households and communities continued to produce reading ready children. Schools continued to stream the children of professionals into academic areas while the kids from lower socio-economic backgrounds were streamed into holding cells. All the exercising and testing helps to reinforce the stigma and heighten awareness of who has what and who doesn’t.

In middle class neighbourhoods differing social situations and physiological states lead to a diversity in the classroom. Teachers in these situations, drawing on their training will have many successful students and a few challenges. These challenges are what interest me. You can generally predict based on social situation which children will succeed in school. The curriculum and teaching methods were formed around normal socialization. Outside the norm, the methods fail. The one or two kids socialized outside that norm will not connect with the methods. The teacher will pass 28 kids and fail 2. The systems/methods failure labels the child.

And still some more background: One thing led to another and I got call from a principle in an isolated community. A teacher hadn’t returned from a vacation and they were in a bit of a bind. Two days later I was in this isolated community. I quickly realized that my training was useless. Most teachers in the community had been flown in from the outside, most thought the problem was the kids. It was clear to me that I was the problem. I’d like to say that I modified my method and achieved some result, but that’s not what happened. I never really connected with the kids. I tried, and something was happening toward the end of the first year, and then the second year with a different class I started all over again. I was isolated, inexperienced, an outsider and in a school that had modelled itself on "normal" schools.

That said, I did learn a lot, and have been haunted by the problem since. I was in a classroom filled with kids less socialized-in-preparation for traditional teaching methods than the one or two that fail in middle class neighbourhood schools. I don’t have the answer, but this drives my desire to research different methods of improving literacy. I do have an experience that informs my critique of traditional methods, and also witnessed first hand the uselessness of traditional methods in the same situation, as employed by a teacher with 25 years experience.

The teacher with 25 years experience successfully employing traditional methods, however, put the failure on the kids. While it was clear to me that the school was failing, I was also incapable of solving the problem. The problem in this case is that the school isn’t a learning environment. In this case with grade eight students testing at grade three levels, the failure to create a learning environment was clear and documented. The problem in city schools is that the diversity of the student body makes all propositions untrue. Different children relate differently to a school environment. My concern is that the constructed school environment fails to bring about learning in some children. These children could learn in a differently constructed environment. Some sort of change is needed for these children to learn in school.

And now the review: The latest issue of Education Canada, themed Encouraging Subversion, acknowledges a need for change in the system. The editorial does a good job of capturing the mechanistic quality of the debate, but unfortunately sums it all up with one line: "That’s the way it’s always been."

Perhaps an educational revolution is in the works, if so, you won’t find it written in these pages. Maybe it’s there somewhere behind the words in the conclusion to Andy Hargreaves‘ article The Long and the Short of Educational Change. I don’t expect the germ of revolution to grow out of our national debate.

One article that clearly illustrates a major problem in the direction advocates of educational change are heading is Catching The Knowledge Wave: Redefining Knowledge for the Post Industrial Age. (The article is available as a PDF download here.) I’ve written elsewhere about the wave jumping phenomenon, but here the wave catching is clearly conscious.

First, the author Jane Gilbert has some interesting current projects. Take this passage out of one recent report:

Schools are highly complex organisations that are, for all sorts of reasons, set up to deliver their services to groups of students. Because they are set up in this way, it is not easy for them to deal with children who don’t fit conventional patterns, and as a result these children (or, more accurately, their families) tend to be seen as problematic. Turning this around, it is possible to argue that it is because schools are organised in the way they are that these children are seen as problematic and/or deficient: that is, that it is the schooling system that needs to change, not individual children, if this “problem” is to be solved.

Writing the awareness of different patterns within society, should lead to critique of the capitalization of knowledge hiding under cover of a "social shift." But in the Education Canada article Gilbert presents the desire of corporate media and the resulting government policy as a rational for reorganizing education.

The media is full of references to the knowledge economy and the knowledge revolution; business discussions now routinely talk about knowledge management, knowledge resources, knowledge clusters, knowledge work, and knowledge workers; and policy documents argue for the need to ‘catch’ the knowledge ‘wave’.

She goes on to write "[Knowledge] is now understood as being more like energy, something defined by its effectiveness in action, by the results it achieves." This definition confuses knowledge with agency, or equates the two.

According to Lyotard, learners will be encouraged to develop an understanding of an organized stock of public and/or professional knowledge (‘old’ knowledge), not in order to add to it, but to pursue ‘performativity’ – that is, to apply it to new situations, to use it and replace it in the process of innovation. They will be encouraged to understand the rules or established procedures of a discipline, profession or trade, not in order to follow them, but in order to see how they might be improved.

How do you read Lyotard? Is he reporting or advocating? And isn’t this exploration for improvement already the intended direction of the experimental scientific method? Knowledge in this passage exists in the ‘old’ sense. Knowledge isn’t performativity, an understanding of a body of knowledge becomes performativity. "With a creative hand they reach for the future, and all that is and has been becomes a means for them, an instrument, a hammer."

In the Knowledge Age everyone needs the kind of knowledge and skills traditionally only provided in post-secondary education. We need new ways of organizing education based, not on the one-size-fits-all, production-line model, but on new models that allow flexibility, multiplicity, and new ideas about ability. Secondly, we need a new way of thinking about what we teach and why we teach it, a new way of thinking about the traditional disciplines that underpin the school curriculum.

What needs to be understood about the Knowledge Age is its increased complexity. To say that we are in a post-industrial age gives the meaning that the industrial society is no longer in existence. Just recently I drove through the mountains from Vancouver to Dinosaur Provincial Park. On the way I saw that railways are still moving goods across the country and cattle ranchers still use horses to do their work. Perhaps what’s happening here is a desire for change, a desire for a new way of thinking that’s uncritically married an accepted or legitimate call for change.

People’s understanding of time, space, and place are changing, and the boundaries between countries are breaking down. We are developing new forms of information, new ways of presenting information, and new forms of money. There are new more complex forms of personal identity, and people are connecting with each other in new and different ways.

All this while people continue to connect as they always have. People continue to go to church. In certain zones of our society the alphabet is an unworkable concept. It’s just not true that everyone needs the skills traditionally provided in colleges and universities. Some jobs involve hanging headless bleeding chickens by their feet on a conveying wire. What Gilbert is expounding in the preceding passage could be called folklore. Schools needn’t be concerned with changing to keep up with social folk tales. The preceding passage expresses a reality that’s suspect. Another writer could easy fill space with tales of thickened political boundaries. Again today, right now there are children two weeks away from entering the foreign culture of their neighbourhood school where they’ll learn nothing but an affirmed sense of alienation.

A question: Would teaching methods successfully developed to improve literacy in children from non-literate backgrounds be useful for teaching children from literate homes? In other words, if teaching methods were based on the needs of non-literate children, how would the learning of pre-literate children be affected?