[lbo-talk] MH & DG on university

[Jeffrey Fisher]

There is a part of me, though, that is getting on board with Carrol's
insistence that there is no such thing as "education" (or, perhaps better,
that the way we use it has no referent). I may very well not be
understanding him correctly, but my own thinking about it is that we are
using this term to cover a million different things, many of which are only
fairly loosely like each other. there's teaching and learning going on, but
the methods and aims are very different in, okay maybe not a million areas,
but more than a couple. and so the idea of "teaching teachers" is a bad
idea if it's as generic as our use of the term "education". and I agree
with shag that this is a dead end; indeed, i think the insistence on it is
much of what is wrong in educational thinking these days -- the pursuit of
the holy grail of the One Right Way to teach, etc. etc.

fwiw in the middle of a busy day.

On Tue, Feb 28, 2012 at 7:25 AM, Wojtek S <wsoko52 at gmail.com> wrote:


> Carrol, I do not mean to get personal, but your communication would
> greatly improve if you avoided judgments about your interlocutors'
> understanding of the situation. This is the fundamental principle of
> direct democracy - never question other people's intentions or
> understandings.  What you write makes a lot of sense, but only if one
> makes a deliberate effort to disregard off-putting comments like  "I
> think in this whole thread there is a profound misunderstanding of
> what  schooling can provide" or " when Joanna speaks of "deep
> learning" the discussion has gone over the cliff, for it involves (a)
> a confusion."  Why should people pay any attention to a posting that
> berates them?
>
> A better way would be to open your posting with a statement like "This
> discussion does not seem to take into consideration X, which I think
> is important because ...."  or "I am not sure if I understand Joanna's
> concept of Y, which  could be interpreted as either X or Z, so please
> clarify."
>
> I understand that it is a male thing to speak with authority, define
> situation for others, don't ask questions or admit doubt - but one
> positive thing that I got from reading Graeber's ethnography of the
> anarchist movement is how far these folks go to control that tendency.
>  It is one thing that all lefties and progressives could learn from
> these guys.
>
> PS.  I agree with your idea that learning is a life-long process on
> which schooling can, but does not have to, be built, and that there
> could be substantial learning outside the school system.
>
> Wojtek
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