I wasn't in particular asking how can we make schools better

[koganbot]

Dave wrote in a comment back here:

I feel like I can slip in the door and really contribute important ideas that, e.g., you (and your friends and our mutual friends, etc.) have internalized but haven't made their way into broader understanding yet. That is, your articulation of the hallway/school split, and its significance, hasn't quite exploded in actual schools, or academic theory about actual schools.

Well, what I was trying to do in my attack on the hallway-classroom split (originally back in '90-'91 in WMS,* then in that '01 essay for the Xgau festschrift) was to make sense of the rock-critic psyche and the behavior of a lot of contributers to my fanzine ("why doesn't Frank Kogan shut up and play his guitar?" and "I think visceral response is the most important" were two comments that I especially treasure). So to a big extent my subject was writing. Also, I was trying to come up with a better - more relevant - dichotomy to target than the ones that Christgau had chosen: his tendency would be to draw the line between intellectualizing versus partying or significance versus pleasure or some such, and then question those dichotomies without altogether abandoning them. (E.g., he thought that in P&J voters' were voting for significance when voting for albums but for pleasure when voting for singles, and then he'd say but we have to do right by the significance of singles etc.) I was talking about the psyche but I wanted to speak in social terms, about behavioral conventions and where and how they arose. The social spaces became my metaphorical categorization for a tension that I think underlies a lot of clichés (thinking versus feeling, intellectualizing versus living) and a lot of acting out.

But I wasn't in particular thinking about "What is going on in schools, and how they can be made better." The progressive education movement of the first half of the last century embraced John Dewey's attacks on the theory-practice split and on what he derided as the spectator theory of knowledge, but he never had much of an explanation for the hold that such a split continued to have on us a hundred years ago or now. His dime-store psychologizing laid the blame on the ancients' having little technological control over a dangerous and unpredictable physical world; my dime-store psychologizing puts the focus on fear of personal and social conflict, and I think I've got a better dime store. Such conflicts really can rip up a classroom and paralyze teaching, and people do need a rational response to that threat.

Dave (and whoever), I recommend that you ctrl-F my comments on this old ilX Meltzer thread, where I not only ask a question about Richard Meltzer's nastiness that I've never seen asked, or answered ("What is the intellectual value of Meltzer's nastiness? And I don't mean just that while angry he makes a lot of brilliant points in brilliant ways, which for sure he does. Do the anger and cruelty themselves make a point? What do we learn from them?" Luc gave an answer that sidestepped the question), but also wrote about Dewey choking on his contradictions: I quoted Dewey, "Intolerance, abuse, calling of names because of differences of opinion about religion or politics or business, as well as because of differences of race, color, wealth, or degree of culture are treason to the democratic way of life...." and I said that this passage was brimming with tension; Dewey puts his finger right there on a trouble spot that he's then altogether incapable of addressing in his philosophy.**

*Unfortunately I've run out of those two issues (6 and 7), though some year I'll make it to a photocopy shop, I hope.

**As far as I know. He wrote scads of books and articles, of which I've read very few.

Comments

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

I kind of came to this backwards, of course, and I recognize that your actual argument as written is describing two polarized modes of thought that (potentially) hamper a conversation among (for the most part) adults. So what I'm saying is, "hey, could this metaphor be more literal than I usually read it to be?" (the answer so far being, "kind of, sort of, well it's complicated because...").

My main point in that post isn't really directly related to the hallway/classroom discussion as you wrote about it, per se, but introducing the kind of critical probing and reflection on ideas (and advancement of ideas) through conversation, but within this particular milieu that I've found myself in, somewhat accidentally. Basically, I want to know what Frank Kogan (et al) has to offer educators, and whether or not educators have anything to offer FK et al.

Such conflicts really can rip up a classroom and paralyze teaching, and people do need a rational response to that threat.

This is pretty much the answer I've come to myself -- the impetus for teachers to introduce the split and then focus outside of the "lived experience" (the messiness and promise of it) is because doing that stuff introduces very specific problems with discipline that require radical (and creative and difficult) skills in pedagogy that would require more compensation, for one thing, and different pedagogy models.

I think that Dewey began addressing the issue of education's impact on democracy as a political process later in his career -- it's unclear to me exactly what he wanted to happen, but I think his tension was basically around authority -- and specifically the authority of the teacher to create a "model" of democratic processes without stepping on the toes of students' own (nascent) beliefs and opinions and (more importantly) actual experiences. But I'm also projecting what I know of educators NOW to what Dewey may have struggled with -- and I'm becoming convinced that (now, anyway) one issue is that we really aren't clearly saying, "this is what the best practices in teaching and leading look like." In the context of a rock critical convo, that means forcing people into rooms together, and giving (1) leaders the incentive for providing the rooms (and, occasionally, the force) and (2)contributors (perhaps co-leaders) the reason to stay.

In the context of education, the two problems are basically the same: why should teachers abandon an older (reliable in many ways) model for this new one? The answer is "because the new one is better," but the trouble is really proving that without the infrastructure being in place for it already to be happening somewhere, so that you can point to it and say, "see? This is how it's done well." When it has been done well (as in "emergent curriculum" in Italy, certain pedagogy practices in Russia at the turn of the century, and some strains of both constructivist education and media literacy education) it's largely been in smaller pockets, without a cogent way of replicating or sustaining itself.

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Nix the "addressing the issue later in his career" bit, the essays I was thinking of are pretty much in the midway point -- misremembered publication date of something I'd read earlier in the year, I think. But my point still stands that it's far more clear how Dewey wanted to connect lived experiences to classrooms and move beyond "recite and absorb" teaching philosophy than it is how democracy factored in. (Similarly, in media literacy education right now we use the wiggle term "civic engagement" to mean a number of seemingly contradictory things about democratic participation toward peace and equality, despite the democratic process frequently undermining these things. I think both constructivism and media literacy -- and maybe rock criticism -- have an authority problem: not the resentment of authority on principle, but more simply not knowing what the hell to do with it or how to use it.)