Scattered thoughts on children and learning; or: "children are born to philosophize"

Children and how they learn is a subject much on my mind of late. Play being of the utmost importance. (Piaget looms in the background, inevitably.)

We've received a book by Vivian Gussin Paley called A Child's Work: The Importance of Fantasy Play. I've only just begun it, but it's got me thinking. The ways in which children use fantasy in order to explore certain issues, in order to become who they are, reminds me of what Chris Knight and his colleagues have said and written about the human revolution. Very loosely, how in a sense the ability to make believe is what makes us human. Language being the ability to use symbols that are not in fact what they refer to. The ability to hold ideas in our minds, which are in a sense, fantasies.

It is in this context, among others, that I've often felt, though I remain an atheist, that the so-called rational drive to ridicule or eradicate religious belief is remarkably misguided.

Which reminds me of something Sarah Blaffer Hrdy wrote towards the end of her book Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding, about epigenetics, in which she wondered, speculated, at the possibility that those of our genes that have evolved enabling us to understand each other, and cooperate, both being necessary components of our becoming human, might at some point stop being "expressed", given the drastically changed and changing environment in which they have to operate on us, or to emerge. Which makes me double-back and think of our closed-off spaces, the unavailability of room for children to roam; and the current testing mania, teaching to the test, No Child Left Behind. How misguided, short-sighted, unsupportable it all is.

And the emphasis on play further reminds me of Gabriel Josipovici's work, and I think that literature is not a trivial matter, though we treat it like it is, though at the same time we nonetheless take it too seriously, too solemnly, when we take it at all, and that the best of it so often seems to embody a sense of play. The plays within plays of Shakespeare. The playfulness of Beckett and of Kafka (both all too often seen as dour). Kafka's work, and Borges', not unlike fables in their own way, in a sense, not unlike tales told by children, without the self-importance of literariness. . .

And just the other day, Skholiast noted the passing of two philosophers, J.T. Fraser and Matthew Lipman, only the former of which I'd ever heard, which means nothing. Both seem interesting, but Lipman is most pertinent here. "Frustrated by the apparent incapacity of college students to engage in critical thinking", he, among other things, wrote a series of novels aimed at pre-teens, intended, I gather, to explore philosophical topics. I love how Skholiast ends his post: "as a teacher of school-children I can confirm what probably ought to be obvious to anyone who thinks about it: children are born to philosophize, and what's more, ask far more ambitious questions than most grad students."

And I think, not for the first time, with some despair, that all of the elements are available, are accessible, for us to be better, but we seem bound and determined not to attend to what we know. We really don't know what we're doing, do we?

"all of us tend to be happiest and most effective when we have some say about what we are doing"

This is Alfie Kohn, from his book The Schools Our Children Deserve:

...all of us tend to be happiest and most effective when we have some say about what we are doing. If we are instead just told what to do [...], achievement tends to drop—right along with any excitement about what we're doing.

The more obvious this idea seems, the more remarkable it is that people are systematically denied the chance to make decisions about what affects them in real schools, real families, and real workplaces. Perhaps no other principle in our society is at once so commonly endorsed and so rarely applied as the value of democratic participation. [...] As one survey after another has confirmed, students are rarely invited to become active participants in their own education, whether they are in kindergarten or college. Indeed, the story of American schools is—and always has been—the story of doing things to students rather than working with them.

The opposite of being controlled is to be able to make decisions, to have one's voice heard. This goes well beyond conventional opportunities to choose, in which each individual selects one option from a menu: which book (from a prepared list) to write a report on, which (elective) course to take in high school or college, which activity to pursue during a narrow block of free time. [...]

...this kind of choosing is limited, to begin with, by the quality of their options. [...] And even when the options are more valuable, authentic decision-making consists of being able to generate the possibilities rather than just choosing among those provided by someone else. Nor does choice always have to be an individual matter: the benefits are multiplied if students can come together to decide. They learn to listen, to consider others' points of view, to argue carefully, to anticipate problems and work things out.

Bringing kids in on the process of designing their own education is particularly terrifying to the staunch defenders of traditional education, whose tightly regulated classroom procedures represent the polar opposite of something messy, something unpredictable—something, well, democratic.

Fed a steady diet of propaganda about traditional* schooling, parents may be resistant to the idea that children should be involved in decision-making. But the attraction remains—can you imagine what a difference it might have made in your life if you were involved in this way? Don't we yearn, still, to have some control over our lives?

This distinction between mere "choice" and "democratic participation" is significant. The implications are broad, because once children are allowed to participate in making decisions affecting their own education, they will not willingly give up the right to remain involved in decision-making. Educate enough children according to such principles, and you have a potential problem. For where else in society are people encouraged to think for themselves or to actually participate in important decisions? (What are important decisions? Food production? Housing? Energy? Growth, as such?) Nowhere. In this way, education is necessarily political. Education reform is political, and all sorts of people want a say in how reform is conceived and implemented. Most of the political battles we hear so much about are further reactionary retrenchments of an already conservative model. So building a new school, a progressive school that runs according to truly democratic principles, is a profoundly political act.

In fact, it is not remarkable at all "that people are systematically denied the chance to make decisions about what affects them in real schools, real families, and real workplaces". Given the material Kohn covers, that line strikes me as a bit disingenuous, since he must know full well that allowing people to make such decisions would entail a thoroughgoing transformation of the political and economic order. His book is a valuable contribution to the endless debates about education (drawing philosophically from Dewey and Whitehead, as well as from numerous studies demonstrating the pernicious effects of traditional education on students, including those students who "succeed", but especially those who do not) (he writes well about parenting too; cf. Unconditional Parenting), but he, perhaps unavoidably, sidesteps these sorts of broader political implications that leap out at me. Of course, the truth that we're happiest when we have some say in what we're doing can easily be twisted to fit into the sort of individual-rights framework we're so familiar with. Which is why Kohn's focus on cooperative learning and cooperative decision-making is so crucial (and equally anathema for political and corporate proponents of traditional models). If I am empowered to make limited decisions affecting my life, that's one thing. I may be better equipped to navigate the broader world, making effective important personal decisions as the need arises. But if groups of children learn to construct knowledge cooperatively, and if they necessarily must consider the voices of all before decisions are made affecting all, then it seems to me that they will be considerably more likely to value democratic participation—and inevitably notice the many incredibly important decisions that have long been out of the control of all but the smallest numbers of people. They might make collective demands and take back the right to make those decisions as well, transforming the nature of the available options in the process. It strikes me that the implications are nothing less than revolutionary.

* I am using the words "traditional" and "progressive" since they are the terms used by Kohn and other education writers, even though many of the so-called "traditional" modes are very recent indeed, and I've elsewhere made clear my unhappiness with the word "progressive".

Creating one's own being

Father's Day seems like as good a time as any to break the blog silence, especially since child-related severe sleep deprivation has been a major factor in that silence. Also, the topic is children and philosophy.

In a recent post at Larval Subjects, Levi Bryant writes the following:

My daughter, who is now three and a half, has precipitated a true revolution in my thinking about the world. Prior to the arrival of my daughter, I think, deeply influenced as I am by Foucault, Bourdieu, and Lacan I was unconsciously a sort of behaviorist in my understanding of human nature. I think I advocated a strong environmentalist thesis to the effect that persons are simply products of the environment in which they’re individuated. What my daughter has taught me is the withdrawal of objects from their relations. This is best thought in terms of my recent post on Luhman. What I’ve discovered through my daughter is that all substances are abyssal black boxes. They are influenced by their surroundings, but they relate to their surroundings through their own internal structure or organization, generating deeply surprising responses to the world around them. She quite literally constitutes and creates her own being. I can’t make her be anything and each way in which I influence her will be structured or transformed into states of her being through her own organization. When McLuhan says that “the medium is the message”, this is, I think, what he meant. The medium, the object, organizes the message that it receives in its own terms.

I've blogged a lot about how I've come very late to the reading of philosophy. This late-coming is both irksome and instructive: I'm annoyed that I have so much to catch up on, but on the other hand, I'm not already unduly influenced by any one or two philosophies or schools or whatever. I bring my 40 years of life to the reading of philosophy. What has struck me as I read has been the almost total absence of women and children, certainly the dearth of anything intelligent said about women or children. It has occurred to me that the history of philosophy would look radically different if philosophy had not been generated almost exclusively by men off on their own doing Important Work. (Not least because the most important work that is done is in fact the raising of children.) Because it seems to me that one cannot help but have one's philosophy radically affected by what children actually do in the world, if one actually watches them, at all. That is, something like what Levi Bryant has concluded in observing his own daughter should be readily apparent to any one who observes children. This ought to have deep implications in many areas of life, not just the development and writing of philosophy.

Birth. School. Work. Death

Does anyone remember a UK band called the Godfathers? When I was in college, in the late 1980s, they had something of a hit here in the States with "Birth, School, Work, Death". A glance at the lyrics reminds me that, though they mention Margaret Thatcher by name, the song isn't really political. Nevertheless, the title came rushing back to me as it neatly names topics I've been thinking and writing about for some time, and in its brief litany, captures something of the inevitability of our passage through these stages of life. Four big unavoidables, four areas over which most of us have very little agency, very little freedom. But four areas ripe for political activity.

Birth. We come into the world. But how does it happen? Where does it happen? At ladypoverty, our friend J.R. Boyd commenting on an article in the Wall Street Journal about the growing rate of caesarean sections in the United States, notes the unfortunate tendency for unpredictable vaginal births to infringe upon a doctor's personal life. How are pregnancy and birth treated? Who has agency here? Who do we trust? Who's in control of the process? What does that control say about what we value as a society? I've said more than once that I think it's crucial for women to have collective control over reproduction; I'll be expanding on that soon. But there is a lot bubbling up about birth in this country, people fighting back—women fighting back—in small but growing numbers, against the all-too-often unscientific methods of the establishment medical community. Why should we expect birth to be any different than the rest of our so-called healthcare "industry"?

School. Compulsory, boring, stultifying, stunting, counter-productive. Education seems like a good thing, right? But what is school really for? How is it made to conform to the needs of capital? Doesn't public education in fact exist because of the needs of capital? Its need for workers and consumers? Does it have anything to do with what children need? What if it were designed with children's needs and capabilities and development in mind? What would that look like?

Work. And we work. Few of us are able to avoid selling our labor to another just to get by. We are free to do so, just as we are free to starve. Our choice! Of course, some of us get by rather well on this deal, but are overextended, still essentially living paycheck to paycheck. I'd like to revisit the work of the Midnight Notes Collective. I remember, while reading the essays in their essential collection Work, Energy, War, being struck by remarks that striking workers were trying to avoid work. So completely had I internalized certain notions of work—that workers shouldn't go too far in their demands, for one; not because they might be punished (which they were, oh yes: the essays in question were written just as capital was deciding the post-war deal it had struck with labor was not cutting it any longer, and the class war was kicked into heavy overdrive; we call this process, an utter disaster for workers, neoliberalism), but because I unthinkingly bought into the logic of the system whereby labor is made to feel it should be grateful to capital for the marvelous living it provides. I was appalled. But the more I think about it, the more I see that, in fact, that battle was the correct battle. That it failed at that time does not make it wrong. But to have agency over one's own labor, one's own time, to work for one's own community, with active participation in real decisions: this is the kind of work we might defend as necessary and noble. Not what we have now.

Death. Can we, finally, die with dignity?

How deep the ruts of tradition and conformity!

Two quotations from Walden, to begin:

The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity!

There is an incessant influx of novelty into the world, and yet we tolerate incredible dulness.

And one from "Civil Disobedience":

[T]hey who assert the purest right, and consequently are most dangerous to a corrupt State, commonly have not spent much time in accumulating property.

As I know was true of most Americans, and possibly still is, when I was in high school we were forced to read excerpts from Walden. I couldn't have been more bored. Is there any writer more out of step with high school students than Thoreau? A writer less likely to appeal to such readers? (Perhaps Hawthorne, whose The Scarlet Letter we were also forced to read, over the course of one interminable month. A month! The novel's not 300 pages long!) I used to make fun of Thoreau--not only was he boring, but he wasn't even what he claimed, was he? He wasn't authentic! He wasn't really out in the wilderness, right? Not that I knew what I was talking about, but I'd heard in passing something to the effect of this or that and certainly I was eager to find some reason to dismiss a writer, to feel as if I needn't bother. But, in any event, of course these concerns were not really the point. (And they were not helped by the fact that all we ever read were short excerpts, pretty much of anything, excerpts or short stories. The only full works of literature of any length I remember us reading were the aforementioned Hawthorne and the ubiquitous The Great Gatsby. Worse, these excerpts were packaged in such a way to almost invite dismissal--Thoreau of course would have been carefully placed in the section helpfully designated "The Transcendentalists"--particularly given how we were expected to relate to these writings, as works with Themes and Meanings and whatnot. I always struggled mightily with this: how was I to know what the right answer was?)

Why is Thoreau out of step, Walden in particular? Here is a guy who writes about nature, about divorcing himself for a period of time from the regular flow of society, about simplicity, about working with nature, not against it, about the flow of the seasons, the battles of ants and songs of birds and and rise and fall and freezing of ponds. Everything else we learn in school is geared towards speed, efficiency, in one way or another, and here is a guy from the ancient past--before the Civil War!--asking not only us but his already impossibly slow contemporaries (from our perspective) to slow down. More precisely, school is designed so that we learn how to fit in, how to be good cogs in the liberal capitalist world, how not to think for ourselves, or really when not to, how to shape ourselves for maximum value in the "real world".

Thoreau, in Walden as much as in "Civil Disobedience" (which if we read it at all in high school would have been framed in such a way so that its true import was necessarily muted), is pitched against all of this. What he offers, frankly, is a necessary rebuke. There are times, to be sure, when he sounds preachy, like a scold, but this is not what I mean. The book is a rebuke in its very essence. And reading Walden I had a feeling I've had often in recent years, the feeling that I am not free.

Noted: Ivan Illich

From Deschooling Society (thanks to Stan Goff for the pointer):

The American university has become the final stage of the most all-encompassing initiation rite the world has ever known. No society in history has been able to survive without ritual or myth, but ours is the first which has needed such a dull, protracted, destructive, and expensive initiation into its myth. The contemporary world civilzation is also the first one which has found it necessary to rationalize its fundamental initiation ritual in the name of education. We cannot begin a reform of education unless we first understand that neither individual learning nor social equality can be enhanced by the ritual of schooling. We cannot go beyond the consumer society unless we first understand that obligatory public schools inevitably reproduce such a society, no matter what is taught in them.