by Marion Brady
(continued . . )
Patterns for work affect in fundamental ways the quality of life. We are,
however, generally oblivious to the subtleties of those affects. Lacking
conceptual tools for tracing the evolution of our work patterns and for
contrasting them with those in other societies, we are captives of the
status quo. A model of reality that directs attention to patterns for work
allows us to imagine potentially liberating alternatives. It does the same
for every other pattern of action and every idea.
And it does something else. It tells us that the concept of "commonplace,"
as it applies to human experience, is a label attached only to unexamined
aspects of that experience.
"All right, what you've done for that ten seconds and this room,
do now for a slightly larger space and longer time. Choose some historical
event or contemporary situation and, using the model, take it apart. The
model will direct your attention to certain aspects of the event or
situation, and the event or situation will help you refine your model by
suggesting additional subcategories for actors, stage, plot and action."
The traditional curriculum is, generally speaking, a distillation of
expert opinion in various fields of knowledge. The student is expected to
read textbooks and listen to lectures presenting that expert opinion,
absorb it, and eventually demonstrate that some measure of what has been
read and heard can be remembered.
This view of educating casts the student in a passive role, neglects all
mental processes excepting recall, and assures that instruction will lag
behind developments in the disciplines. Perhaps the most serious flaw in
present practice however is the curriculum's essentially static nature.
Emphasis is on the transfer of existing knowledge rather than on the
development of the ability to create new knowledge. That will not do.
Given the rate of social change, even the best of today's solutions are
unlikely to fit tomorrow's problems.
It is easy to demonstrate the role played by a formal model of reality in
creating new knowledge. Because insight comes primarily from the discovery
of relationships between various aspects of reality, what is needed is a
model which makes those aspects clear. They can then be "mixed and
matched" in countless ways, and promising relationships can be
investigated.
Consider, for example, possibilities for the expansion of knowledge when
various perceptions of reality (plot) are juxtaposed with other aspects of
reality: What is the relationship between differing views of the nature of
time and intersocietal misunderstanding? Between assumptions about the
meaning of life and the functioning of economies? Between beliefs about
human nature and methods for controlling deviance? Between explanations of
cause and the thrusts of science? Between assumptions about the
supernatural and amenability to change? Between beliefs about the
structure of the self and approaches to health care? Between a sense of
community and population distribution? Between time segmentation and
attitudes toward work?
Or consider the challenge of questions generated by juxtaposing
environment (stage) with other aspects of reality: What is the
relationship between neighborhood design and interfamily dynamics? Between
long-term climatic change and local economies? Between supermarket design
and consumer spending patterns? Between resource abundance and political
stability? Between resource scarcity and attitudes toward
otherworldliness? Between household appliances and perceptions of family
roles? Between the content of visual arts and amenability to social
change? Between weapons size, cost and complexity and personal autonomy?
About demographics (actors): What is the relationship between population
size and individual self-concept? Between population size and
institutional flexibility? Between age distribution and incidence of
crime? Between age distribution and marketing strategies? Between sex
ratios and perceptions of aggressive behavior? Between sex ratios and
perceptions of work roles? Between physiological characteristics and rate
of resource use? Between physiological characteristics and disease
susceptibility?
And about patterns of action: What is the relationship between patterns
for work and intrafamily relationships? Between patterns for distributing
wealth and societal productivity? Between patterns for decision making and
institutional flexibility? Between rites of passage (or the lack of them)
and self-concept? Between patterns for ownership and the distribution of
political power? Between patterns for expressing emotion and physical
health? Between wealth dispersal and investment capital availability?
Between mass communication and personal autonomy?
Perhaps useful exploration of relationships like the foregoing seems
beyond the abilities of adolescents. It is not. Making explicit our
implicit model of reality will push education to an entirely new level of
sophistication.
For general education purposes, we must formally and deliberately sort our
conceptions of reality into our five natural categories, and systematize
and elaborate them as we have systematized and elaborated the traditional
academic disciplines. If we will do that, we will find that we have a
comprehensive, integrated model not only for the study of history, but for
all of reality--a supradiscipline. By any measure, it will be superior to
any discipline, combination of disciplines, or the totality of disciplines
now taught.
Why, given its absolute centrality in our thinking, is our culture's
five-part model of reality not discussed and argued about within the
academic community? Why is it not summarized in the fronts of our history
and other textbooks, providing, as it does, a rationale for all that is
taught and ignored? Why is our model of reality not the subject of
constant scholarly dialogue? Why are teachers not talking about the
relative merits of various ways of teaching students about that which
structures their every act and thought--the distinctive model of reality
imposed on them by the culture of which they are a part?
There are many reasons. One is simply our assumption of the adequacy of
what has always been taught. If we know something, and the "well-educated"
people around us know the same thing, we tend to assume that is what
should be taught to the young. We take comfort in lists of what the
"culturally literate" know, and are proud of our familiarity with the
items on the list. We shake our heads in despair at students who graduate
and do not know the name of the longest river or the tallest mountain.
Self-satisfaction comes easily, for what we do not know does not disturb
us. We cannot miss what we do not know that there is to know.
A second reason the educational establishment has paid so little attention
to our culture's model of reality stems from our failure to study the
entities which generate such models. In the analysis of ordinary,
large-scale human affairs, we are concerned most with the actions of
nations--the United States, France, China, the former USSR. But as almost
every day's news reaffirms, it is societies, not nations, that are the
basic units of human organization. The mere drawing of a political
boundary around a group of humans does not make of those within it a
coherent entity, does not impose upon them a shared set of assumptions
about the nature and meaning of experience. Societies, not nations, create
models of reality, and no two of those models are exactly alike. Yet
nowhere in the traditional curriculum is there provision for the
systematic study of societies or of the images of reality societies
generate.
A third reason why we have not recognized the centrality of our "natural"
model for representing human experience is our preoccupation with the
particular fact, the particular incident, the particular event. Caught up
in the motions and memories of governing, exchanging, warring and other
matters, we are unable to see the patterns and regularities that reflect
and disclose our culture's model of reality. As our textbooks and
examinations show, the mental storing of discrete bits of factual
knowledge is treated as an end in itself rather than as a means to amass
sufficient data to allow the identification of patterns, structures, and
relationships.
A fourth reason why we do not recognize the role our model of reality
plays in organizing our thinking stems from our assumption of the
legitimacy of the traditional academic disciplines. We accept without
question the contention that economics, physics, government, chemistry,
geography and other studies are appropriate ways to segment reality. For
purposes of general education, however, the disciplines do us an enormous
disservice. Such specializations, and their interdisciplinary hybrids,
fragment reality and thereby obscure its systemic nature. To make matters
far worse, the very structure and organization of our secondary schools
and universities reinforce fragmented views of reality. Within
administrative divisions and departments, the various disciplines have
become so solidly institutionalized they have taken on lives of their own.
Now, instruction often appears to students to be more concerned with the
disciplines than with the phenomena the disciplines were created to
illuminate. Reality is all of a piece, but there is little activity within
the educational establishment that suggests an interest in creating a
general education reflecting that fact.
A fifth (and probably the most important) reason why we have not made
explicit our model for selecting and organizing information about reality
stems from the inherent difficulty of seeing the too-familiar. The old
saying, "A fish would be the last to discover water," suggests the
problem. The assumptions and premises which underlie our accounts of the
past and our actions in the present are not apparent to us. Reared within
the cognitive confines of a single society, we lack the awareness of
alternatives that puts our shared assumptions and premises in relief.
Insofar as human experience is explainable, our whole way of life is built
on a dozen or so assumptions about the nature of reality. Nothing that we
can know about ourselves is more important than an awareness of those
assumptions. But how many Americans--student or adult--can explain with
clarity their society's basic time orientation? Its assumptions about
causation? Its beliefs about the nature of nature? The differences between
their own and another society's assumptions about the structure of the
self? Nothing is more fundamental to an understanding of the human
condition than clear conceptions of the basic premises upon which ways of
life are built, but the traditional curriculum all but ignores them.
To summarize: General education should help us make sense of human
experience. Human experience can be understood only in the context of the
society within which it occurs. Societies must therefore be understood.
Understanding societies requires that we think about them. The success of
that effort hinges on the merit of the conceptual model used to select and
organize information. For those within the dominant society in America,
that conceptual model has five parts. General education in America should,
at a minimum, clarify and elaborate the five and their relationships.
A supradisciplinary curriculum that makes explicit our implicit model of
reality will eliminate almost every identified difficulty with the
traditional curriculum. Model awareness will tell us why we choose what we
choose to teach, allow us to establish instructional priorities,
enormously increase our understanding of ourselves, give us a
sophisticated tool for the description and analysis of every culture,
society and subsociety on earth, open the way to insightful analysis of
the dynamics of social change, guarantee curricular relevance, provide a
conceptual structure that meshes with what is known about how the mind
organizes information, end major arguments over the literary canon, move
us away from our emphasis on the mere mental storing of information toward
knowledge-generating activity, and show us vast, important areas of
knowledge neglected by the traditional curriculum.
And, finally, building general education upon our culture's accepted model
of reality will erase the artificial boundaries between disciplines,
courses and subjects, and logically relate and make mutually supportive
everything taught. Not only will such a curriculum more accurately reflect
the nature of our perceptions of reality, it will allow us to build a much
more compact general studies curriculum, thereby freeing instructional
time for students to pursue specializations reflecting their interests and
aptitudes.
Sweeping claims? Yes. All this for an action as simple as making explicit
our implicit model for the study of human experience? Absolutely. Skeptics
might consider the probable reaction of Sir Isaac Newton's neighbors if he
had called them out of their houses to hear that he had "discovered"
gravity. Would they not have said, "We already know about that"? And would
they not have been right? Nevertheless, Newton did an extraordinary thing:
He moved his neighbors from mere knowing, to knowing what they knew.
Reality had not changed, but perceptions of it had, and the consequences
revolutionized physical science.
Our situation is much the same. We "know" that our basic categories for
thinking about reality are humans, environment, meanings and values, and
patterned action growing out of those meanings and values, with the whole
set in time. We "know" that, within these categories, what is considered
significant is that which, if it were different, would cause significant
changes within other categories. These ideas are as simple, as obvious,
and as natural to us as the idea of gravity. But until we know what it is
that we know--until we make what we know explicit in the form of a formal,
conscious model of reality, systematically organize and elaborate that
model, and then tie all that is taught to it, we will fail to give our
young the conceptual equipment they need to make the most sense, and the
most, of human experience.
Marion Brady
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