Subject: Re: Shades of Neil Postman!!
From: Ania Lian (ania@lingua.arts.uq.edu.au)
Date: Tue 04 Apr 2000 - 10:44:13 MEST
Date: Tue, 4 Apr 2000 18:44:13 +1000 (EST) From: Ania Lian <ania@lingua.arts.uq.edu.au> Subject: Re: Shades of Neil Postman!!
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On Tue, 4 Apr 2000, Muhammad Betz wrote:
> I suppose that what Ania's "subversion" is
> aiming towards is something akin to Descartes' "methodical doubt."
More than aiming at anything, I would like to invite reflection upon all
possibilities. But if I can assist here, Descartes would suggest
methodological doubt as a product of the inevitable subjectivity of all
our statements. But, as I can also add, why is it that we trust people? Is
this trust purely subjective? Do we enter a plain knowing that the fact
that it can fly is based purely on the belief of its designer and that it
has no other form of legitimation? Or should we believe the designer in a
Kantian way (as possibly Crispin Weston would) because we *know* that the
designer created the plane the way it *should be*?
For those who enter the plane for reasons that match neither approach, I
ask: why do you do this? Along the same lines we may ask: how can we
facilitate conditions which allow our learners to believe withoout making
these beliefs neither a product of the TEXT (i.e. a text that cannot be
doubted because ot is always true) nor a product of a single text (e.g.
one's own imagination)?
> The
> subversive approach targets only one type of learning or one domain, related
> to the catharsis of the individual learner, in a philosophical sense.
and practical? In other words, if you have no beliefs, how can you live,
work, do anything? Question is: how far can your beliefs take you and who
is leading your hand? If we want to talk politics, there it is: Who leads
whom and why? Whose interests do those leaders serve? How can we show that
it is thhe interests of *individual* learners that are given precedence
here?
> What of the medical student?
Talk to me more about them. Apart my very best and loved friend is nobody
else but a medical researcher who lives out of his own patents. And he
does nothing else but subversin in teh strongest version of this word.
Looking differently at things is the name of his game. But subversion does
not mean anarchy: it means facilitating ways for seeing differently. And
since we all differ than we cannot look at things EVER the same way. So
subversion is nothing else but facilitating learning on a truly equal
basis, in my view. And, if we were to pursue the medical line: how do the
models of the nobel prize winners like those of Edelman's theory of phasic
re-entrant signalling, or plasticity theories of Hubel and Wiesel fit your
thinking? If you do not know them, any other references can you show
us that could strengthen the way you think about both learning and
medicine?
> Is her learning also to be subversive?
Like anywhere else. If you want an instant gratofication: do what your
profesor does. If you want to stand on your strong paws, do what you think
will make you strong. Subversion here is nothing else but positiong
oneself against teh arguments of others'.
> No, I disagree here. I see education, in the mainstream in
> particular, as a generally mundane enterprise. That conceptualization does
> not preclude personality or intellectual development.
I see education in the mainstream making education a mundane enetrprise.
It is a disgrace to both humanity and to every single individual who has
to sit through this process!
> Should teachers help students to alleviate false truths.
No: just to form beliefs in which they believe.
> Perhaps, if
> teachers can identify false truths without taking the role of God in the
> process. The point is that if teachers presume that learning must be
> subversive, then it follows that teachers, not technology, are the brokers
> of biased values.
every value is biased so there are no brokers: all there is just ways of
seeing. I cannot see why teachers' point of view should be privileged
here.
> Last but not least: this notion that contemporary educators are either of
> the "modern" or "post-modern" school is erroneous.
true. There were good educators always and there will be bad teaching
models in teh future. Question is: who is right, who knows and how can we
tell?
Ania Lian
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