Not Left To Chance

Bill Mayer — He loves his mother!! I thought I’d start with that. Religulous, a film by the same people who made Borat, and Borat, too, was purposefully offensive, and it, too, was funny, but it never, not for a second took itself seriously. Borat showed us into some very serious territory. There was the blatantly misogynous college boys scene, and the dangerous war of terror scene, maybe it was the moustache, but the nausea producing, in a culturally discomforting sense, scenarios made us witnesses.  Borat, himself, was nearly invisible. Religulous does something different, and I didn’t like it. The scenes where Maher analyses what we just saw are all gawd-awful. He interviews some fairly stupid people, but Maher’s arrogance, which may have held up, especially with the cuts to clips from Superbad and Scarface, those were hilarious, his arrogance may have held up, but when he was on camera by himself, the weakness of those scenes reframed his arrogance as simply mean. Sure, he loves his mother, but he’s a mean mental weakling himself, bullying other intellectually challenged, differently intelligent people. There’s the difference, Borat’s misogynists exposed themselves and an oppresive cultural undercurrent, while Maher victimized the people he put on film.

The science is in. Consciousness is a chemical energy. Our perceptions are bodily. Chemical and bodily changes affect consciousness and perception. Philosophically I work from the premise that existence precedes essence. Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche and Sartre, if generally understood would make it easier to argue that we should educate and properly house and nourish everyone. What I’m saying here is that there is no God of Abraham, there are no angels, spirits, demons, heaven or hell, at least outside our language systems. Our language systems exist physically in our bodies, in this sense these things exist, they are within us and communicable. Maher had an opportunity to produce in incredibly informative film. He came close with the Andrew Newberg, MD (University of Pennsylvania research neuroscientist) interview. Newberg discusses the process of imaging people’s brains as they pray, meditate or speak in tongues, but no conclusive statement is made. He also brought in the consciousness changing properties of drugs, but again the neurophysiology that could reveal the chemical and physical contingency of consciousness was not explored.

Maher is content to promote doubt, but there is certainty that consciousness is chemical reactions within organic physical structures. We don’t know how exactly it works, but there is certainty that material is at work. These ideas can also be communicated, but Maher didn’t do the research. And understanding consciousness, the bodily manifestation of these belief, may have softened his, persecution, of these believers. Really what was he doing? In his interviews with Muslims, he was told twice that it was politics and not religion, that the motivation behind terrorists and extremists, but he didn’t accept it. He even made “fun” of the interviewee by writing a text message implying he was a terrorist. Later he analyses these scenes saying that they don’t want to admit to outsiders that there are problems with the religion. Doubt in this sense is not a tool for understanding, it is an analgesic for stupidity. What were the political motivations of the religious George W. Bush and what were the political motivations of the differently religious Osama Bin Laden? Maher is content to doubt everything and everyone.

In Saul D. Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals he spends an entire chapter “of ends and means” explaining how political interests are clothed in religious morality. “The Haves,” he writes, “develop their own morality to justify their means of repression and all other means employed to maintain the status quo.” What’s interesting is that Obama was schooled in the Alinsky tradition. Maher’s film is now an historical document. But Alinsky also taught respect for the beliefs and values of the Have-nots and spoke against arrogance. Politically, in the political system, I’m with Sven. This call for compassion, and understanding, when dealing with religious consciousnesses, is not a form of self protection, it comes from an understanding, limited sure, that our bodies and consciousness are totally intertwined, and a massive change, in our society, especially forced from the outside, well, it’s abuse.

And one last thing about embodied knowledge, especially the kind of knowledge that defines a persons existence. This is from wikipedia:

In Carl Jung’s psychology, metanoia indicates a spontaneous attempt of the psyche to heal itself of unbearable conflict by melting down and then being reborn in a more adaptive form. Jung believed that psychotic episodes in particular could be understood as existential crises which were sometimes attempts at self-reparation. Jung’s concept of metanoia influenced R. D. Laing and the therapeutic community movement which aimed, ideally, to support people whilst they broke down and went through spontaneous healing, rather than thwarting such efforts at self-repair by strengthening their existing character defences and thereby maintaining the underlying conflict.

With this in mind, really, what the fuck was Maher doing? He loves his mother, but he’s still an ignorant fuck. Had he actually broken through the defences of these people he was attacking, he would have precipitated a moment of realization in which everything previously known is wrong, leading possibly to a physical and mental breakdown. In one scene Maher’s mother reminds him of how upset he was when he discovered Santa Claus wasn’t real. The equation of a childhood fantasy game, with god consciousness or a bodily awareness of god, is ridiculous in itself. In my utopian thoughts after the consciousness of our interconnectivity is widespread, when we are concerned with the care of each other, the issue of religion will have faded away, but until then we need to work toward our own understanding. 

I went to the Philosopher’s Café tonight at Cafe Kathmandu on Commercial Drive. The topic was "Empiricism and the State of Evolutionary Biology in an Age of Faith-Based Fundamentalism." It was a discussion about ways of knowing that pitted the knowledge of science against the knowledge of God. The discussion is never-ending. Listening tonight, hearing the old familiar lines, it occurred to me that maybe the church isn’t the obstacle to enlightenment it’s made out to be. Over the past 150 years the values of Capitalism have replaced the values, however similar, of the church. So I asked the question: "Can it be a fluke that children are in the capitalist state run school system from the ages of 5 to 17 and at the end of those twelve years have no understanding whatsoever of their material reality?" The way I see it, Darwin’s Origin of the Species is a revolutionary work, and a true understanding by the population would change the world. What’s so scary about evolution?

This Café was part of the Vancouver Evolution Festival.

The idea that both religion and capitalism might have a stake in keeping quiet the notion that free and uncontrolled variation, the variation that makes evolution possible, has been considered. Check this out: from Jihad vs. McWorld:

To the extent that either McWorld or Jihad has a NATURAL politics, it has turned out to be more of an antipolitics. For McWorld, it is the antipolitics of globalism: bureaucratic, technocratic, and meritocratic, focused (as Marx predicted it would be) on the administration of things—with people, however, among the chief things to be administered. In its politico-economic imperatives McWorld has been guided by laissez-faire market principles that privilege efficiency, productivity, and beneficence at the expense of civic liberty and self-government.

For Jihad, the antipolitics of tribalization has been explicitly antidemocratic: one-party dictatorship, government by military junta, theocratic fundamentalism—often associated with a version of the Fuhrerprinzip that empowers an individual to rule on behalf of a people. Even the government of India, struggling for decades to model democracy for a people who will soon number a billion, longs for great leaders; and for every Mahatma Gandhi, Indira Gandhi, or Rajiv Gandhi taken from them by zealous assassins, the Indians appear to seek a replacement who will deliver them from the lengthy travail of their freedom.

In his introduction to Chomsky on miseducation, Donaldo Macedo writes, "As our society allows the corporate cultures to reduce the priorities of education to the pragmatic requirements of the market, whereby students are trained to become "compliant workers, spectorial consumers, and passive citizens," it necessarily has to create educational structures that anesthetize students’ critical abilities, in order to domesticate social order for its self-preservation." (Chomsky, 2000, p.4) 

This is hard stuff for teachers to swallow, but Macedo goes on to say that teachers "are technicians who, by virtue of the domesticating education they receive in an assembly line of ideas and aided by the mystification of this transferred knowledge, seldom reach the critical capacity to develop a coherent comprehension of the world." (p.10) I don’t think teachers can swallow this. They may "know it" in the sense that they know there was once an emperor who pranced about in the finest robes until a child saw that he was naked. We "know" this story, but do we experience it in the world? Can we experience it in the world and continue to function in the world of transferred knowledge, can we continue to consciously live "life within a lie." (p.6)

 This is dangerous business, to allow our critical capacity to develop a coherent comprehension of the world. The tradition of Critical Theory is peopled by the unemployed (fired and quit), silent, suicidal, assassinated and insane. It’s easy for Macedo to write that "We must first read the world — the cultural, social, and political practices that constitute it — before we can make sense of the word-level description of reality." (p.11) When Macedo writes that Chomsky "energetically stresses, teachers need to sever their complicity with a technocratic training that de-intellectualizes them so they "work primarily to reproduce, legitimate and maintain the dominant social order from which they reap benefits.""(p.12) can he not see that this voluntary severing from the dominant social order will also sever them from that benefit?

Who has a coherent comprehension of the world? Even if teachers, or anyone who is part of an established social organization, were to sever themselves from the functioning word-level world, the world-level meaning does not become immediately available. Most thinking people have glimpsed the horror of the world, but few can sustain the necessary study of that horror to communicate any meaning. The task is dangerous, but necessary if we are to meet Feire’s challenge to educators, "to discover what historically is possible in the sense of contributing toward the transformation of the world." (p.13)

 

Here are a few notes I’d like to add to some previous posts that will eventually be rewritten, but for now the notes.

Note 1: In the Britney post I used homelessness as an example of an unseen spectacle. And recently there was a front page story on a group of researchers who found that a housing fix could be implemented with the same funding dollars in current circulation. The story is here on the Tyee. There’s something about the front page article here.

Note 2: A while back I wrote about an article that used Lyotard’s term "performativity" as though it were a desirable approach for education. Dewey called for Education as an end in itself. Life as an end in itself is a Utopian Notion. The issue of homelessness and a desire for performative education are linked. Lyotard makes note in 1979 of a system that can solve life’s problems but doesn’t because it won’t improve the systems performance.

"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.

Last night I went to Evolution of Darwin’s Finches, a lecture by Rosemary and Peter Grant. Luckily I got to the lecture hall a little early, because the place completely filled up. Even the aisles were filled. There was a nice article about the lecture in the Georgia Straight (notice the comments are about God), but I think the popularity of the speakers, was simply a result of 35 years of work. The room was filled with birders, and biologist, academics both institutional and independent, students, teachers, children, teenagers and the very, very, old. I’m guessing the majority in the room were academics of some sort. This couple has got to be a kind of role model for anyone interested in this branch of science.

I subscribe to Google Alerts with the search term "education." Every day I get a page of news articles and blogs to go through. The other day I saw this:

More Education Woes
By nospam@example.com (Gman)
And, is anyone disturbed by the fact that poor kids are to blame for the drop in average scores? I refuse to accept the mindset that poverty is a barrier to learning. That mindset has led to the dumbing down of education and the mess …
mtpolitics.net - http://www.mtpolitics.net/

The sentence, "I refuse to accept the mindset…" struck me immediately. I’ve been thinking about it, I’m still thinking about it. After reading the very short post and the comments I left a comment of my own. I had to ask, "Do you refuse to accept that malnutrition is a barrier to athletic performance?"

When poverty is seen as a lifestyle or culture choice its physiological effects may be ignored. Poverty and hunger and malnutrition are barriers to development. More testing doesn’t help feed hungry children. What is the point of education for children living in poverty?

That’s not a cynical or rhetorical question. What is the point of education? What is the point of literacy? Or what are the limits of education and literacy? Is education about solving problems? And if so, at least in part, do children living in poverty need education or nutrition?

I thought I’d put out a little more about code. I’ve mentioned the technical code and Feenberg’s Questioning Technology before in relation to education as a technology. On this blog I also tried to get across the point that "computers are tools for communication, but the form of that communication is dictated by code." Lawrence Lessig in his Code Version 2.0 puts the point across with a little more authority.

Law can change social norms as well, though much of our constitutional jurisprudence seems dedicated to forgetting just how. Education is the most obvious example. As Thurgood Marshall put it, “Education is not the teaching of the three R’s. Education is teaching of the overall citizenship, to learn to live together with fellow citizens, and above all to learn to obey the law.” Education is, in part at least, a process through which we indoctrinate children into certain norms of behaviour — we teach them how to say no to sex and drugs. We try to build within them a sense of what is correct. This sense then regulates them to the laws end.

Plainly, the content of much of this education is regulated by law. Conservatives worry, for example, that by teaching sex education we change the norm of sexual abstinence. Whether that is correct or not, the law is certainly being used to change the norms of children. If conservatives are correct, the law is eliminating abstinence. If liberals are correct, the law is being used to instill a norm of safe sex. Either way, norms have their own constraint, and law is aiming to change that constraint.

To say the law plays a role is not to say that it always plays a positive role. The law can muck up norms as well as improve them, and I do not claim that the latter result is more common than the former. The point is just to see the role, not to praise or criticize it. (p.129)

Here’s some more from the book about code:

“People could communicate in ways that they had never done before. The space seemed to promise a kind of society that real space would never allow – freedom with out anarchy, control without government, consensus with out power. In the words of a manifesto that defined this ideal: “We reject: kings, presidents and voting. We believe in: rough consensus and running code.”

In cyberspace we must understand how a different “code” regulates – how the software and hardware (i.e., the “code” of cyberspace) that makes cyberspace what it is also regulates cyberspace as it is. As William Mitchell puts it this code is cyberspace’s “law.” “ LexInformatica” as Joel Reidenberg first put it, or better, “code is law.” (p.2)

Lessig writes, "Its code, in other words, sits in the commons. Anyone can take it and use it as she wishes. Anyone can take it and come to understand how it works." (p.148) What he’s talking about specifically is computer literacy, but literacy in general works on the same principle. Really, can anyone use Unix as one wishes?

What follows is a response to Chris Sessums blog so it might read a little out of context. I put it here because I wanted to add some links to it. ::

Here are a few people in opposition to computers in the classroom.

A back-to-nature movement to reconnect children with the outdoors is burgeoning nationwide. Programs, public and private, are starting or expanding as research shows kids suffer health problems, including obesity, from too much sedentary time indoors with TV and computers. The post could use some formatting, or maybe that’s just part of the anti-computer ethos.

Theodore Roszak The Cult of Information “...the best approach to computer literacy might be to stress the limitations and abuses of the machine, showing the students how little they need it to develop their autonomous powers of thought.” (p.242) The first edition 1986 the second edition 1994

Neil Postman Technopoly “…technology must never be accepted as part of the natural order of things, that every technology – from the IQ test to the automobile to a television set to a computer – is a product of a particular economic and political context and carries with it a program, an agenda, and a philosophy that may or may not be life-enhancing and that therefore require scrutiny, criticism, and control.” (p.185) 1992

I’m not quoting these “progressive” “left” or “ultra-left” critics/activists out of complete agreement, more out of respect for the diversity of the back-to-basics movement(s). The neo-luddites are more than neo-conservatives (who can also have us nodding our heads in agreement to their arguments here and there) they’re also ultra-progressives. Dewey didn’t use a computer. Like Roszak says, we don’t need it.

I disagree almost completely with Roszak and Postman, while I strive towards their end goals with my work, I wonder also about the possibilities of these machines.

To your question What can computers really do for kids in the classroom? Stephen Downes answers They can teach them how to use computers.

Downes is completely correct that the computers themselves could teach children how to use them. GUIs are so intuitive, that computers are easier to use than the timer on the oven in your kitchen, not to mention older technology like the 8-track tape (who ever got the hang of those things?). This freaks teachers out that a machine can replace them so easily. Why is it that kids learn more, easier, faster, better in the glow of a GUI? Another question is “do they?” but what we hear is that kids are learning slaves to the machine, and unteachable by humans.

So the question is literacy. Most teachers are politically illiterate, at least in Canada where the governments and media squash them at will and with frequency. Most teachers are computer illiterate, and as such are unable to teach through the machines. If teachers are being replaced (not today, but maybe a not-so-distant tomorrow) it won’t be the machines, but coders who are their replacements. In this day to be politically and technologically illiterate is to be philosophically illiterate, and that’s a whole lot of illiteracy in those claiming to teach literacy to our children.

So yes, the computer itself will teach children how to use it. The fear is that the coders are unaccountable. What are the values they code into the machine? And really how does this differ from Dewey’s constructed environments? Did Dewey propose a system in which those being educated were unconscious of the preferred result? With the computer interface are the graphics using or being used? This interface could be a very powerful metaphor for teaching, but students need to learn to use a computer beyond using programs. And of course the problem with this is a person with the knowledge to code/script/program a computer has an earning potential and interest area that excludes public school teaching as an option.

This is the second time I’ve typed this out and I’m still meandering, but if I’m trying to say something it’s that computers are tools for communication, but the form of that communication is dictated by code. Knowledge of the code allows the users to infuse the form of communication with a personal set of values. This understanding is key for promoting the tool in the “progressive” sphere. All the players in education should be critical of the tools, programs and their uses; they should also have the knowledge to alter those programs to create forms more consistent with their values.

I’ve been thinking about the coming blockade action, and am at a point where I’ve lost complete control. I have no answer, not that I expected to write one, but as well I have no convictions. That said my head isn’t all that empty. I’m not indigenous to this land, so my role can never be more than that of a spectator.

So why am I bothering to think the situation through? If nothing else just to answer that question. But somehow this situation will shed some light on Canadian education. The concepts of identity, nationality, culture and difference are alive in this situation, and education, any discussion of education needs to be shaped with these recently sharpened conceptual tools.

 

Technorati Tags:: conceptual tools culture difference education identity nationality