Classrooms were stage sets for the drama of education from the time of Sumer, where schools were invented, to some time in the late 18th century when the idea of a state-run institution put paid to the guild- and church- run schools. After the state concept took hold, it wasn't long until the assembly line concept took hold, and et voila the modern school.
It has been my belief for thirty years that some form of apprenticeship->journeyman->master system needs to be restored because real 'learning' is always going to occur in the context of feelings about people, not things.
We can store and retrieve instructions and facts, but those are not the content or context of education. My experience getting two sons through school to some degree has completely confirmed this belief. When they had successful relationships with their teachers they did great. When they were at odds with their teachers they screwed up royally or went into retreat or displaced behaviors. It couldn't be clearer to a parent...but it still seems opaque to those who would design our 'systems' of education. They can't design systems of respect or affection or admiration...and those qualities cannot be ignored if you are talking about human beings and the reality in which their choices are made.
The apprenticeship system is prey to abuse, of course. But it doesn't pretend to be impartial, objective, and systematic. It admits it is highly personal, and succeeds and fails honestly on that basis. The pretence of universality that fosters aggressive state investment in education is bankrupt. Corporations will lead the way out of the concrete jungle, as it were, when they begin to adadvocate aggressively for sustained and sustainable human relationships again.
We are squeezing out the unknown in the "official" educational equation, and leaving a flatland maze for educating rats. We have been saying that since the first critiques of mass education began to emerge in the fifties. According to recent studies the rats are doing better. But the natural human propensity for breaking complicated things and overdoing simple things will destroy the "system" per se, and leave the individual adventure intact.
The individual adventure always trumps the cheese in the maze
27.4.06
13.4.06
heroes and community
Heroes are not antithetical to community. If you look at the real folk heroes of various traditions, such as Irish, Vedic, etc, and get past the comic book versions, you find a complexity that Aristotle tried to codify in his definition of the "tragic". Before American comics (and they even have their own chiaroscuro aspects) only the melodramas had two dimensional heroes that were all good, going up against villains that were all bad. ( It is no accident that the word villain comes from the same root as the word village, and the derivation points to the melodramatic distrust of the urban which is harbored in the stereotyped "rural" heart.)
Melodramas in their turn were the spawn of the medieval morality plays, which created the exaggerated polarization of right and wrong, good and evil. Prior to the rise of the high middle ages theocracy of the Catholic Church, you would have a hard time finding such "cartoonish" versions of human existance.
Heroes for the greatest span of recorded time were tragic figures, called out of the comforts of community to deal with an extraordinary threat to the community. It was common knowledge, then, that once so touched by fate there was no happy ending. In the tradition of the Golden Bough, the "hero" was an aspirant to a divine state that played out with his being killed at the end of a year. Whether the year was figurative or literal, doesn't matter. What matters was, the role of the hero was the role of the doomed, who met greatness with a knowledge that it was fatal. What is antithetical to community, is the hubris that attempts to subordinate the community to the conscious will and ego of the hero...the hero who tries to escape the fatal implications of being "called out." That hubris links many modern leaders in a chain of fantastic mischance befalling otherwise great nations, tribes, cultures.
This is the shadow side of community that doesn't fit easily into platitudes about doing good, taking care, working "together."
In the normal cycles of any groups career through time, individuals are called out to be either leaders or scapegoats, and both classes are doomed in their own way. The "fatal flaw" of leadership is the stuff of real tragedy. The injustice that is meted out to scapegoats gets less scrutiny, and is even less well understood. But it is all of a piece, and the community creates the holon. The community isn't the victim of the extreme cases that defy its norms. The community is the cauldron that boils up and ejects the leaders and scapegoats alike in its mindless but wonderous stewing.
When Marx reified "society" as though it were an organism seeking equilibrium in the greatest good for the greatest number, but having to go through various distorted forms to find that equilibrium, he loosed a stubborn meme that still filters out sense in many discussions about society and culture. It has become simplified to a formula: evil=misfortune. If you are unfortunate, it is because of someone elses evil, or your own. This is the nadir of human philosophy. It sets every fortunate person against every unfortunate person in a suffocating arena.
The old stories, which included heroes who were not antithetical to community, allowed that misfortune could occur to virtuous people, and fortune could attend the petty and dishonest, for a season or so. The old stories had room for you and I to struggle, without being shamed by the mere fact that we face adversity. "Community" is not a palliative of the nature of pain or misfortune, and heroism per se is no measure of a man or woman's ultimate fitness, in virtue, or survival itself.
Melodramas in their turn were the spawn of the medieval morality plays, which created the exaggerated polarization of right and wrong, good and evil. Prior to the rise of the high middle ages theocracy of the Catholic Church, you would have a hard time finding such "cartoonish" versions of human existance.
Heroes for the greatest span of recorded time were tragic figures, called out of the comforts of community to deal with an extraordinary threat to the community. It was common knowledge, then, that once so touched by fate there was no happy ending. In the tradition of the Golden Bough, the "hero" was an aspirant to a divine state that played out with his being killed at the end of a year. Whether the year was figurative or literal, doesn't matter. What matters was, the role of the hero was the role of the doomed, who met greatness with a knowledge that it was fatal. What is antithetical to community, is the hubris that attempts to subordinate the community to the conscious will and ego of the hero...the hero who tries to escape the fatal implications of being "called out." That hubris links many modern leaders in a chain of fantastic mischance befalling otherwise great nations, tribes, cultures.
This is the shadow side of community that doesn't fit easily into platitudes about doing good, taking care, working "together."
In the normal cycles of any groups career through time, individuals are called out to be either leaders or scapegoats, and both classes are doomed in their own way. The "fatal flaw" of leadership is the stuff of real tragedy. The injustice that is meted out to scapegoats gets less scrutiny, and is even less well understood. But it is all of a piece, and the community creates the holon. The community isn't the victim of the extreme cases that defy its norms. The community is the cauldron that boils up and ejects the leaders and scapegoats alike in its mindless but wonderous stewing.
When Marx reified "society" as though it were an organism seeking equilibrium in the greatest good for the greatest number, but having to go through various distorted forms to find that equilibrium, he loosed a stubborn meme that still filters out sense in many discussions about society and culture. It has become simplified to a formula: evil=misfortune. If you are unfortunate, it is because of someone elses evil, or your own. This is the nadir of human philosophy. It sets every fortunate person against every unfortunate person in a suffocating arena.
The old stories, which included heroes who were not antithetical to community, allowed that misfortune could occur to virtuous people, and fortune could attend the petty and dishonest, for a season or so. The old stories had room for you and I to struggle, without being shamed by the mere fact that we face adversity. "Community" is not a palliative of the nature of pain or misfortune, and heroism per se is no measure of a man or woman's ultimate fitness, in virtue, or survival itself.
6.4.06
When grasses die, they leave beautiful husks. When men die, their abodes decay, and become symbols of a fall from grace. Plants die into grace. Man dies away from it, and does not return. But that is his choice. That is how he chooses to put language and identity between him and the innate beauty of his bones.
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow
When grasses die, they leave beautiful husks. When men die, their abodes decay, and become symbols of a fall from grace. Plants die into grace. Man dies away from it, and does not return. But that is his choice. That is how he chooses to put language and identity between him and the innate beauty of his bones.
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow
There are carvings in this stone, but they are merging with the effects of time and water. The ancient power of the stone returns and sweeps all human pretence aside. We can try to preserve it, to store ourselves against time. Or we can accept the indifference and majesty of time as a gift.
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow
There are carvings in this stone, but they are merging with the effects of time and water. The ancient power of the stone returns and sweeps all human pretence aside. We can try to preserve it, to store ourselves against time. Or we can accept the indifference and majesty of time as a gift.
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow
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