I started my PhD at the beginning of September so I will be posting again. I am uncertain of how to bring old and new thoughts together. And, I don't want to rush that collaboration because it is something that has already been a slow two year process so I decided to start this separate page and see where it goes. This is also part of a course I am taking and a forthcoming post will include another return to old thoughts (not mine) but those of Plato and Locke and of course my emerging thoughts on these philosophies and their early influence on educational theory and practice.
1: Spaces of Play and Excess: On William Kentridge's Lecture and Finding Words for the Studio and Classroom
Earlier this year I had the opportunity to see
a presentation by William Kentridge (2013) hosted by the faculty of art at the
University of Toronto. I have been interested in Kentridge’s work for a few
years. His compositions touch boundaries between ideas and visual art, using
images to explore places that words cannot describe and in turn forcing the
viewer to thought. Ideas about political, personal, racial, class and psychical
divisions are both integrated within Kentridge’s method and invoked through the
viewing of the works. In some of Kentridge’s more recent pieces he has narrowed
in on the tension between language and image where points of rupture might be
engaged. In the talk I saw narratives depicted slips of memory found through
misunderstood words from childhood and strange histories repeated in
misconstrued utterances. These stories drew focus to the messy qualities of
language and were taken as entry points for visual explorations and as points
of departure for putting some of the ideas related to the images into words.
I am not sure there is anything that truly
compares to the artist’s studio. And yet, through connections made while
listening to this talk, I want to consider the potential for thinking about
both the classroom and the studio as spaces of play and excess. Kentridge
described the violence inherent in taking work from the studio and taming it
for a lecture or other forms of presentation. This worry is reminiscent of some
of the ways we speak of education, as the excesses of the classroom have
already been tamed for the purposes of describing and explaining experiences of
teaching and learning to ourselves and others. The question of what is
generated in the classroom then appears to take on new meaning when thinking of
the creative excesses of the artist’s studio. Rather than jumping into
questions of learning and not learning, the studio presents a space for
grappling with meaning and its representations, embracing belated
interpretations and considering words as a medium to be engaged with (not
entirely unlike the mediums of charcoal, paint, film, etc.). I found a talk
given by Kentridge (2012) posted online which draws from some of the material
presented in the talk I went to see. Here, the artist’s hesitant leap into the
medium of words necessary for the lecture is not cautionary but rather an
opening onto the potential for a thoughtful engagement with a new medium.
Kentridge, W.
(2012). The norton lectures: William Kentridge on 'drawing lesson one: in
praise of shadows' [video file]. Retrieved
from http://mahindrahumanities.fas.harvard.edu/content/william-kentridge-drawing-lesson-one-praise-shadows
Kentridge, W.
(2013, September 30). Second-hand reading. Toronto, ON: The Ydessa
Hendeless Art Foundation Distinguished Lecture in Fine Art.
2: Natural interventions: Rousseau's education of Emile
To document a theory of “education
according to nature” as depicted through Rousseau’s (1993/1762) education of
Emile opens space for inquiring into what might constitute an intervention in
education (p. 69). To follow this thread further through the concerns that
preoccupy Rousseau’s text we can also ask what difficulties, worries and
anxieties might arise when teaching and learning come to be viewed as
interventions in the child’s natural development. By Rousseau’s account “the
first impulses of nature are always right” (p.66) and unsurprisingly many of
the child’s instincts and initial tendencies are privileged over words,
knowledge, the chains of social institutions or physical directives associated
with man. Rousseau posits a single text which might exemplify and facilitate
the “education according to nature” which he imagines for Emile—namely,
Robinson Crusoe. He sites it as the ideal text as the character grows up on an
island apart from men where he is not swayed by other passions so he might first
learn from experience and develop what Rousseau views as the single natural
passion: “self-love or selfishness taken in a wider sense” (p.66).
The contradictions abound in
Rousseau’s work then appear necessary to preserve or rescue this theory of the
child’s innocent and natural development and to ease Emile’s educator’s mind
from worrying that any word, interaction or technology might serve to corrupt
the child’s natural goodness. In this sense, while Rousseau opens the book by
stating that “God makes all things good; man meddles with them and they become evil”—
the goodness which the child is granted from birth in this view cannot protect
the child from the adult’s concerns about what the child might learn (p.5). And
so Rousseau is quick to remind readers that while the child may be good, “the
most dangerous period in human life lies between birth and age twelve,” as “it
is the time when errors and vices may spring up and, while as yet there is no
means to destroy them” (p.67). So, while the child could be left to do nothing
and benefit from this rather than being taught useless knowledge or things
beyond his reach, Rousseau is not content to leave Emile to his own devices but
rather strives to help Emile discover things of natural interest and purpose:
As soon as we have contrived to
give our pupil an idea of the word ‘useful,’ we have got an additional means of
controlling him, for this word makes a great impression on him, provided that
its meaning for him is a meaning relative to his own age, and, and provided he
clearly sees its relation to his own-well being (p. 169).
By introducing a concept of ‘usefulness’ to the child and
the reader Rousseau seemingly preserves a connection to his natural schemata by
introducing what might be inherently useful. And yet, through this introduction
he simultaneously locates a means by which he might manipulate his pupil. In
this sense Rousseau offers a pedagogy whereby he might naturally intervene in
the child’s development. In this paradoxical view Rousseau is able to establish
a relation between educator and pupil or child and adult amidst a depiction of
child’s world set apart from man.
Rousseau, J.J. (1993). Emile. (B. Foxley, Trans.). London:
Everyman. (Original work published 1762).
3: Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed
Paulo Freire’s (1970/2008), pedagogy of the oppressed,
offers a plea for critical consciousness and action which in many ways must be
viewed as a long term and incomplete project.
Drawing attention to the interaction between people and the world which
surrounds them in Marx’s theories, Freire also notes the potential for humans
to consciously act to change the hierarchical structures we have created:
Just as objective and social
reality exists not by chance, but as the product of human action, so it is not
transformed by chance. If humankind produce social reality (which in the
‘inversion of praxis’ turns back upon them and conditions them), then
transforming that reality is an historical task, a task for humanity. (Freire,
p.51)
For Freire this task of transformation is tied directly to
the freedom of the oppressed from the oppressor. This freedom in turn calls upon
a raising of consciousness as the oppressed must confront the binds of
dehumanization and help the oppressor to recognize their own dehumanization,
which has occurred through the oppression and objectification of others. In
this sense Freire’s praxis brings together thought and action through dialogue
and may be seen as a vital site for restoring a complete subjectivity—or for
working towards becoming more fully human. In our current society, the legacies
of colonialism may leave us feeling alienated from direct relations of
oppressor/oppressed and yet these relations continue to structure everyday
interactions and exchanges through the hierarchies of capitalism.
Freire, P.
(1970/2008). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New
York, NY: The continuum international publishing group.
Plato and Locke and the Language of Education
This brief post returns to a recurring theme in the other
posts on this page. Primarily, I briefly look to a couple central ideas from
Plato’s Republic and Locke’s, Some Thoughts Concerning Education,
through questions of the child’s passions and education’s role in intervening
or censoring these desires. For Plato’s Republic, one of the central concerns
is the pull of the poets and worries that narrative might add sway to any
process of rationalization. As Plato addresses the questions of what kind of
cultural education might be included in the republic he imagines, the question
of what must be excluded also naturally arises:
‘Isn’t the prime importance of
cultural education due to the fact that rhythm and harmony sink more deeply
into the mind than anything else and bring grace in their train? [….] It’s
analogous to the process of becoming literate, then,’ […]. We weren’t literate
until we realized that, despite being few in number, the letters are
fundamental wherever they occur, and until we appreciated their importance
whether the word which contained them was great or small, and stopped thinking
that we didn’t need to take note of them, but tried hard to recognize them
everywhere, on the grounds that literacy would elude us until we were capable
of doing so. (Plato, p.62).
Plato’s concern with the emotions that accompany the
introduction to language and that hold sway influence the selection of texts
for children and adults in the imagined republic. Literacy is viewed in this
quote as central to enculturation and so the question of what kinds of texts or
narratives the child should be introduced to during his or her early years
comes into focus. Locke, on the other hand holds a similar interest in rationalization.
He notes that children might be reasoned with as soon as they begin to
understand words. Privileging the model of a blank slate, Locke seems at times
less concerned by the pull of other words or materials and more interested in
what we might consciously expose the child to in their early years for their
benefit. Locke approaches this question through the initial steps of the
child’s health, advising that the child not be too warmly clothed but rather
permitted to be exposed and develop a resiliency. As Locke looks to the
question of which languages to teach the child, he is less concerned by the
sway of poetics and instead focuses in on the question of utility. In this
sense both Plato and Locke root the child’s development in the environment and
the education on offer takes different form through the intermediated languages
and cultural tools offered by the adult.
Locke, J. (1692).
Some thoughts concerning education. Available
from http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1692locke-education.asp
Plato.
(2001). From Republic. In W.E. Cain, L.A. Finke, B.E. Johnson, J. McGowan,
& J.J. Williams (Eds.), The Norton
Anthology of Theory and Literary Criticism (pp.49-80). New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company Inc.
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