by Marion Brady
(Classroom Discussion)
"Yesterday we introduced ourselves and took care of the
getting-class-started stuff. Unless someone has leftover questions, we'll
begin today by jumping right in to the study of history.
"Here's what I want you to do first: The second hand on the clock is
approaching twelve. For ten seconds, while it's moving between the twelve
and the two, I want you to think about this room and what's in it. Nothing
else. Ready? "Start. . .
"Okay, time's up. Now, tell me something that was true in this classroom
during those ten seconds. Melanie?"
"I don't think I know what you mean."
"Well, I don't mean anything complicated. Just tell me
something--anything--that was true here during that time."
"Uh, well, somebody's stomach growled. And they giggled."
"Good. That's two things that were true . . .two 'facts.' I'll put two
tally marks on the board to represent them. Okay, who else has a fact?
Yes. Tony."
"You mean just ordinary stuff, right?"
"Yes."
"Well, I was sitting at this desk. Playing with my pencil. Trying to
figure out why we're doing this. Breathing. Staring at the clock."
"Good. That's five more tally marks. Jenny?"
"I don't know whether I have the right idea or not, but if I do, I can
give you dozens and dozens of facts like that . . .hundreds . . .maybe
thousands."
"Just for this little 30-by-30 foot space and ten seconds?"
"Sure. Put down 25 marks for everyone's hair color, and 25 for their eyes.
Fifty more for our heights and weights. Those were all facts. You could
say dozens of things that were true just about the carpet, hundreds or
thousands of things about the clothes we were wearing--textures, fits,
styles, materials and so on. Then there's all the furniture in the
room--what it was, where it was, what it was made of, how it was made. In
fact, just describing the clock or the pencil sharpener--how they're put
together and how they work. . . I have no idea how many facts there'd be
in those descriptions, but I know it would be a lot."
"I agree. So, how many factual statements might it be possible to make
about that little slice of space and time?"
"You could fill every blackboard in the school with tally marks."
"Well, if that's true, how many facts might there be if we expanded the
space and time to include what's usually studied in American history--all
of the North American continent for 500 years? Or what if we took in all
of human history, from this moment back?"
"It boggles the mind."
It should boggle the mind. If it does not, it is surely only because
we have not thought about the question. Past reality presents us with an
infinite number of facts. From those facts we select an infinitesimally
small number and build stories about America, about western civilization,
about the world, stories now so familiar we have difficulty imagining
alternatives. Yet that same reality contains the raw material for
countless other stories, stories little or not at all like the ones we
teach but just as true and perhaps even more important.
Does that seem improbable? Hundreds of different American histories
already exist in the memories of Indian tribes, ethnic minorities and
other groups and nations with whom we have had dealings. In many
instances, the stories are not mere variations on our textbooks; they
differ in fundamental ways. Black Elk, an Oglala Sioux who as a young boy
witnessed the Battle of Little Big Horn, told his life story in Black Elk
Speaks. In his recollections of the past, his memories of visions play a
role which has no counterpart in textbook versions of American history.
We recall and record what we think is important.
Our assumptions, beliefs and values shape our histories. Most of the names
and events highlighted in our textbooks reflect our interest in power and
wealth and our belief that pursuit of them explains significant past
action. If we believed that what mattered most was not power and wealth
but a sense of community, our accounts of the past would be different. If
we agreed that what was most important about human existence was movement
toward a particular moral code, not a page in our history books would read
as it does now. If we thought that the highest good to which humans could
aspire was creativity in the arts, that all else was incidental and of
little consequence, yet another history would take shape. Given each of
these assumptions, our whole conception of past and present reality would
be different.
"Okay. We've established that there's no end to the amount of raw
factual material we could draw from to write history. So how do we decide
which facts to use and how to organize them?
(Silence)
Well, let's cut the problem down to a more reasonable size. Think back to
this room and those ten seconds. How would you decide which of the
available facts to use to write a history of just that?"
(Long silence.)
Few students are prepared to deal with the question of how
historical accounts are shaped. Few history teachers are any better
prepared to deal with it. Preoccupied with the near ritual of repeating
(with minor variations) the standard stories of the past, little thought
is given to why a particular story emerged, or whether there might be
other, more revealing or more useful stories.
Well, how should we go about writing a history of those ten
seconds?
When we give thought to the human condition, what we really want to know
is, "What's going on here, and what does it mean?" Our expectations for
history are very much the same. We want it to tell us what happened and
what we should make of it.
Is that not what is in our history textbooks? To some degree, yes. But we
ordinarily approach the task of describing human affairs in such a
superficial way, tying the story together with little more than proximity
in time or space, or supposed "cause-effect" relationships, that much of
what is vital to real understanding never makes it into our students'
heads. Having no conscious model to guide the task of fact selection, we
teach a great deal that does little to expand our understanding of human
experience, and we omit much that is absolutely essential.
How can we decide which facts are important? How can facts be ranked in
order of significance and arranged in the most useful way? How can we tell
when information of critical importance is missing? Philosophically final
answers to these kinds of questions are not accessible, but we can do a
far better job of answering them than our present general education
curriculum suggests.
"Tell me: What do maps, miniature cars and airplanes, recipes,
dress patterns, mathematical equations, chemical formulae and photographs
have in common?"
"Well, they're sort of copies of the real thing."
"Right. They're models. A model is a simplified representation of a more
complex reality. Models tend to leave out details and emphasize the
important parts of whatever they represent. Are there models of human
activity--'made up' versions of life?"
"How about soap operas?"
"Good! What do you need to produce a soap opera--not to televise or
broadcast it--just to put it on?"
"Well, you have to have some actors. And a stage or studio. And some
kind of plot or idea."
"Is that all?"
"Oh! The actors have to actually do something. Move around. Act."
"Right. Stage. Actors. Plot. Action. And of course, the whole thing takes
place in time, which is a fifth element. Those are the basic requirements.
It might be helpful to have a producer, a director, stagehands, an
audience and so on, but they're not absolutely essential. If we're trying
to model human activity, we organize it with those five elements. And. . .
pay close attention. . . we decide which facts about actors, stage, plot,
action and time are important by deciding which facts, if different, would
cause other important facts to be different. The assumption that something
is important because of its systemic relationship to something else is as
automatic and natural as is our use of the five categories.
"Think about the idea of systemic relationship for awhile, and talk about
it with your team members."
From the perspective of Western culture, all comprehensive accounts and
models of human activity contain five basic elements: (1) the time of an
event or an occurrence, (2) its participants, (3) the location or
environment in which the activity took place, (4) a description of the
action, and (5) the meaning attached to the event, action or occurrence.
Even in accounts of aspects of reality which appear not to include
actors--for example, descriptions of natural phenomena, scientific
experiments and the workings of machines--human presence is implicit in
the role of observer, experimenter or commentator.
Note the ubiquitousness of the five categories: The newspaper
account of a bit of reality tells us where an incident took place, when,
who was involved and what happened. Why it happened--whether from human
intent or due to the operation of chemical or physical law--is usually
implicit in the description or is taken for granted by the reader. Drama
(a direct model of human experience) requires a stage, actors, a plot and
action, and is set in time. A police report of a crime will include a
description of the scene, the probable day and hour, the name of the
perpetrator or suspect, a possible motive, and a description of what
appears to have happened. The novelist provides us with a setting,
characters, a plot, a description of action, and sets the story in time.
Including these elements in our descriptions of past and present
reality is all but automatic. If one or more of them is left out,
questions will be asked to complete the picture. In the simplest of
statements--"Molly and I like to go downtown to shop on Saturdays,"
"Soon after midnight the angry crowd moved toward the prison,"--our
"natural" model of reality is displayed.
In this familiar territory lies the key to an educational
revolution. We need a discipline for the ordinary, the commonplace, the
whole of human experience. Devising formal subcategory systems for the
five components of our model of reality will give us that discipline, a
general education discipline of unlimited breadth and depth. And
recognizing that the categories are systemically related will give us the
long-sought goal of an integrated curriculum, a curriculum in which
everything can be logically related. Once in place, the discipline will
open for us a presently undreamed of level of insight into human affairs.
"How many of you took biology last year? Let's see hands.
"Hmmm. A bunch. Well, between us we ought to be able to remember something
about biological classification systems. What is it biologists study?"
"Life."
"And the major divisions of living things are . . .?" "Plants and
animals." "Okay. For the benefit of those who haven't had biology yet, or
have poor memories, I'll put the word 'life' on the board, with a branch
leading to plants and another leading to animals. Like . . .so. Now, where
do we go from animals?"
"Vertebrates and invertebrates."
"All right, two branches from animals, one to vertebrates and another to
invertebrates. Now, if we follow the vertebrate branching . . .?"
"Uh, I think that takes us to fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and
mammals."
"Sounds right to me. Okay, five lines extending on from vertebrates. This
kind of diagram is sometimes called a conceptual tree. You can see why."
"Maybe, then, you should have drawn it from the bottom up instead of
sideways."
"Yeah, probably. But you've got the idea. All this, of course, is just a
tiny part of the classification system biologists invented for thinking
and talking about the part of reality they're interested in."
In our attempt to understand human experience, we have created
elaborate conceptual structures for the description and analysis of
certain parts of reality--trees, personality, DNA, aircraft, classical
architecture, for example. What we have not done is distance ourselves
sufficiently from experience to create a conceptual structure organizing
and integrating the whole of it. Without such a structure, our perceptions
of parts of reality lack context, and our perceptions of the whole lack
comprehensiveness.
Preoccupied by our narrow specializations, we pay little attention to
ordinary experience. Familiar environments, daily routines, the premises
underlying those routines--all lie largely unexamined. We should not be
surprised by the widely shared student view that general education has
little value. It is of little value. Only tangentially does it deal with
life as it is lived. It does not deal with the whole of it at all.
Academia's neglect of the ordinary is indefensible. Ask students to
describe any familiar activity in sufficient detail to allow someone
unfamiliar with that activity to visualize it, and they cannot. And
because they cannot, because they have not been taught to think about the
commonplace, the implications and consequences of familiar experience are
rarely understood and appreciated.
Without question, the most powerful of all instructional resources is
immediate experience. The here and now is available, moment by moment, in
every school in the nation. It costs nothing to use, and is inherently
interesting and challenging. Yet nowhere in traditional education is
provision made for its study. Every school day our children sit in
three-dimensional reality, in a rich and diverse microcosmic culture, and
are not led to look at that culture. Immediate experience bombards them
with messages about their worth, about their place in the scheme of
things, about power and status, about human relationships, about the
nature of the past and the possibilities in the future, about the larger
culture within which they must function. And in the midst of all that, we
give them textbooks to read and worksheets to complete.
Our five-element model of reality, adequately elaborated, makes accessible
that which familiarity does not presently allow us to see.
"Okay, you know what a conceptual tree is, and you know the major
elements in our perceptions of reality. So put the two together to
organize your thinking about that ten second slice of reality. Create a
conceptual tree with reality as the trunk, and stage, actors, plot and
action as the main branches, then think of sub-categories for each of the
four categories."
"I'm still not clear. Give us a start."
"Well, for actors, how about 'number of' as the first branch? Certainly
the size of the class is useful information. And climate as a subcategory
of stage or environment is surely appropriate. If the temperature in the
room during that ten seconds had been below freezing, other facts would
almost certainly have been different." "Yeah, I'd have been outta here."
"There! Hear that? That's an example of systemic relationship. Change the
temperature in the room and the number of actors probably changes. Or,
stated more generally: There is a relationship between the environment and
demographics. That's a useful idea in human affairs.
"Okay, get on with the project. You have 'number of' as a branch for
actors, and 'climate' as a branch for stage or environment. Keep analyzing
the ten seconds, and add as many similar branches to the four main
categories as you can."
The pedagogical power of a model of reality is most apparent out at
the tips of the branches of the conceptual tree. There, abstractions
become concrete, propositions are often quantifiable, hypotheses can be
tested. Students know, for example, that technological innovations have
brought changes to the world of work. What they do not know is how to to
explore the many implications and ramifications of those changes. But when
the general proposition is translated into specifics suggested by the
categories of our model of reality, the nature and impact of the changes
begin to be apparent. Students comparing familiar patterns for work with
those of an earlier era will be struck by differences in the amount of
time parents and children ordinarily spend together, in childrens'
familiarity with adult occupations, roles and responsibilities, in the
workday accessibility of husbands to wives and wives to husbands, in the
quality and quantity of interactions between friends, workmates, neighbors
and strangers, in the amount of exposure to those of different social
class and race, and those holding different values. The changed patterns,
in turn, affect attitudes toward self, family, coworkers, the larger
society, authority, power, status, work itself, and much else.
Continued > > >
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