Part Two
What you choose to honor in art, what you choose to read and,
more importantly, to discuss with others, is a decision about the constituents
of your culture and the meanings and images you will seek to share
with others.
One of the most significant facts about us may finally be that
we all begin with the natural equipment to live a thousand kinds of life
but end in the end having lived only one.
But there is yet another complication to all this business, and the
one which concerns me the most. And that is how all of this plays out in
terms of the often unrecognized fact that what we, as educators, are doing
is creating culture with these ideas, images, and language. As educational
psychologist Jerome Bruner tells us, culture is a "forum for negotiating
and renegotiating meaning..." and "[e]ducation is (or should be) one of
the principle forums for performing this function--
It follows from this view of culture as forum that induction into the
culture through education, if it is to prepare the young for life as lived,
should also partake of the spirit of a forum, of negotiating, of the recreation
of meaning (123).
It is clear that Bruner sees education as a dynamic process which
in its finest moments goes far beyond the simple model of information transference.
Rather, he understands it (as do I) as constitutive of who we are in both
personal and social ways; that is, of creating and perpetuating both culture
and the Self. But this sense of education as forum obviously demands an
engagement on both sides of the overhead projector. "Indeed, culture creating
of the negotiatory kind I have been discussing involves an active participant"
(130).
This is to say that education is a shared task, a task which relies
upon identities, taken on by both teacher and student, which are able to
embrace a personal involvement in the engagement. Obviously then, to encourage
our students to take on the identity of customer can only be an impediment
to this personal involvement. Which is not to say that Bruner's sense of
education as a forum for culture would cease to be relevant; on the contrary,
and this point is key, the process of culture formation of which he speaks
will take place anyway. That is, regardless of our awarenesses and intentions,
we are still socially creating knowledge both among ourselves and our students.
But this knowledge inevitably becomes naturalized, and soon is the
new and improved version of "that's the way we've always done it." The
novel metaphor soon becomes a dead metaphor and, as such, escapes detection.
(For example, does anyone anymore dwell on the metaphoricity of "table
leg," "kick the bucket," or a phrases like "I shot his argument down on
the spot"?) But, in its role as a dead metaphor, it still plays back into
the culture through its very naturalization. Then Bruner's sense of education
as culture formation goes underground, as it were, and, like an army of
the night, continues its work in subversive ways. Whether we enter into
the process consciously or not, make no mistake, it does continue.
In order for this last metaphor of subversion to make sense, and
for us to have a fuller understanding of what Bruner means when he speaks
of negotiating culture, we need to look at anthropologist Clifford Geertz's
understandings of this same negotiation through his cultural dynamic of
models of- models for. We will also take a look at rhetorician
James Carey's use of this same dynamic as applied to the field of communication.
In developing the style of anthropology which is now generally
known as interpretive, Geertz redefined the agenda for the anthropological
study of humanity, an agenda which continues to this day. In his 1973 collection
of essays and ethnography, The Interpretation of Culture, he explains
that-
[C]ulture is best seen.... as a set of control mechanisms- plans,
recipes, rules, instructions....- for the governing of behavior. [And]
man is precisely the animal most desperately dependent upon such extragenetic,
outside-the-skin control mechanisms, such as cultural programs, for ordering
behavior (44). [While these ideas are not new], the results of recent research
have made them susceptible of more precise statement as well as lending
them a degree of empirical support they did not previously have (45). The
control mechanism view of culture begins with the assumption that human
thought is basically both social and public- that its natural habitat is
the house yard, the marketplace, and the town square. Thinking consists
not of "happenings in the head" but in a traffic in what have
been called by G.H. Mead and others, significant symbols-- words for the
most part but also gestures, drawings, musical sounds, mechanical
devices like clocks, or natural objects like jewels-- anything in fact
that is disengaged from its mere actuality and used to impose meaning on
experience....(45).
One of Geertz's observations based upon this view is that, biologically
speaking, we are all unfinished, incomplete animals. That is, that there
is no such thing as human nature independent of culture. As he explains,
the development of the human nervous system, and in particular the neo-cortext,
was, and still is, influenced by culture. As it was shaped by culture,
it was able, more and more, to organize our experiences, that is, to create
meaning through significant symbols, through culture. This in turn fed
back into the process, reinfluencing the development of the nervous system-
a sort of biological hermeneutical circle, as it were. Geertz explains
symbol systems, therefore, not as expressions of our biological, psychological,
and social existence, but rather as prerequisites for it. "Without
man, no culture, certainly, but equally, and more significantly, without
culture, no men" (49).
We are, in sum, incomplete or unfinished animals who complete or finish
ourselves through culture- and not through culture in general, but
through highly particular forms of it..... We live, as one writer
put it, in an information gap. Between what out body tells us and what
we have to know in order to function, there is a vacuum we must fill ourselves,
and we fill it with information (or misinformation) provided by our culture
(50).
It is at this point that I would like to try and articulate Geertz's
model of- model for dynamic. However, we must first understand that
the term model has two distinct aspects- that is, we use the term to speak
of models of and of models for. While this
may seem to be a subtle, perhaps even a useless distinction in the short
term, culturally, it is more than a mere distinction: it is, in fact, a
dynamic. It is a self-organizing, self-perpetuating dynamic which drives
culture just as surely as it itself is driven by culture.
In this dynamic, cultural patterns, which include significant
symbols, model relations among various systems-- physical, organic, social,
psychological-- and help processes which are external to them take on form.
For example, we can see how a real dam works by constructing a flow chart.
This is an example of a model of reality, that is something which makes
a physical relationship apprehensible through a symbol system. Models for
reality, however, provide the information for doing or being, just as the
very same flow chart helps us in building the dam. That is, we create a
model of reality but then use the same model to create reality, and as
Geertz tells us, "[t]his is true for cultural models that we would ordinarily
refer to as 'doctrines,' 'melodies,' or 'rites' ' (74). He goes on
to explain this dual aspect of cultural patterns--
They give meaning to social and psychological reality by shaping themselves
to it and by shaping it to themselves...The concrete symbols involved point
in either direction. They both express the world's climate and shape it.......The
intertransposability of models for and models of which symbolic formulation
makes possible is the distinctive character of our mentality (77).
Geertz explains that the models of-models for process works because
of an individual's dual awareness of the world; that is, that there is
a world as it is and a world as it ought to be and that one's sense of
the everyday is always seen against a sense of the ideal and vice versa.
It is through the functioning of the models of- models for that an individual
brings these two senses of world together. They are fused into what Geertz
calls the "really real," a mood which is created by "making the [world
as it ought to be] intellectually reasonable by being shown to represent
a way of life adapted to the [world as it is], and by making the [world
as it is] emotionally convincing by being presented as an image well-arranged
to accommodate such a way of life" (86). Geertz likens this to hanging
a picture up on a nail hammered into its own frame, an image which gives
a sense of why people outside of any particular perspective have so much
trouble understanding it.
With this brief, and trust me, very incomplete, explanation of the models
of- models for dynamic, I would now like to sharpen our understanding
by turning to James Carey who has applied Geertz's thinking to his work
in the field of communication. In his Communication as Culture,
Carey develops a view of communication which starts from a distinctly social
constructionist view of his discipline and is therefore very instructive
for our discussion of education for education certainly is a "highly particular
form" of communication. He defines communication as a "symbolic process
whereby reality is produced, maintained, repaired, and transformed" (23).
This is obviously a very broad definition which embraces both the transmission
view and the ritual view of communication. But it is also a definition
which acknowledges that, as in any invented cultural system, it both informs
and reflects what Carey calls a "hunger for human experience."
Rather, reality is brought into existence, is produced, by communication--
by, in short, the construction, apprehension, and utilization of symbolic
forms. Reality, while not a mere function of symbolic forms, is produced
by terministic systems- or by humans who produce such systems- that focus
its existence in specific terms (25).
Carey sees, therefore, communication as the process whereby our
reality is made, where our significant symbols are formed and understood.
This being the case, he also sees communication, then, as driven by the
models of- models for dynamic.
We not only produce reality but we must likewise maintain what we have
produced, for there are always new generations coming along for whom our
productions are incipiently problematic and for whom reality must be regenerated
and made authoritative. Reality must be repaired for it consistently breaks
down: people get lost physically and spiritually,.... threats to
our models of and for reality that lead to intense repair work (30).
Following Geertz's notion of thought being both publicly and
socially constructed, Carey sees these attempts at constructing, maintaining,
repairing and transforming reality through communication as publicly observable.
"We create, express, and convey our knowledge of and attitudes toward reality
through the construction of a variety of symbol systems: art, science,
journalism, religion, common sense, mythology" (30). However, Carey, through
his examination of this particular cultural pattern called communication,
takes his vision farther than Geertz's more universal position allows
for, asking harder questions about how groups struggle over their various
definitions of what is real-
Finally, let me emphasize an ironic aspect to the study of communication,
a way in which our subject matter doubles back on itself and presents us
with a host of ethical problems. One of the activities in which we characteristically
engage....is communication about itself. However, communication is not
some pure phenomenon we can discover, there is no such thing as communication
to be revealed in nature... We understand communication insofar as we are
able to build models or representations of this process... In one mode,
communication models tell us what the process is; in their second
mode, they produce the behavior they have described. Communication can
be modeled in several empirically adequate ways, but these several models
have different ethical implications for they produce different forms of
social relations (31).
As a way of pulling together the various perspectives I have introduced
into the discussion thus far, I would like to ask what might be accomplished
if we were to slightly amend this last quote to read--
However, education is not some pure phenomenon we can discover,
there is no such thing as education to be revealed in nature...
We understand education insofar as we are able to build models or
representations of this process. In one mode, education models tell
us what the process is; in their second mode, they produce the behaviors
they have described. Education can be modeled in several empirically
adequate ways, but these several models have different ethical implications
for they produce different social relations.
".....different ethical implications...." ".....different
social relations." How are we now to understand this last phrase?
Does it not make a claim on us as educators, as communicators? Does it
not recast the discussion to finally put it in terms of human agency, to
remind us that these are choices we are making, choices which have consequences,
consequences which are not all equal? And, most importantly, choices over
which we do have control?
Obviously, I believe that thinking about these choices is important
and that the decision about how we speak about what we do does make a difference.
So, the question, for me, and I hope for others, becomes a two-part question:
Can we speak of our students as consumers without also speaking of the
product which they consume or of teachers as the "sales clerks" who help
them to choose or use the product, or of the possibility of introducing
TQM techniques and philosophies into the educational process in order to
purvey that product without also reducing the process (even further) down
to numbers which can be crunched into some sort of bottom line that itself
can be translated into success or failure. And the second part, and most
important, asks us to consider whether we will be able to step back and
assess the wisdom of such attitudes and practices once they have become
attitudes and practices; that is, once our models of become ou |