Whatever discipline you follow (and this doesn't even have to be about academic disciplines) will have a canon, a set of texts that are presumed to form a basic tradition, to define the structure of the discipline.

In my reading of the traditions I have studied (European literature and historiography), the canons have actually shifted quite a bit over time, perhaps two or three major shifts per century, although until relatively recently (1960s) the process of canonization itself was seldom challenged, and even the challenges have had a recognizable grounding in European thought, I would say.

Since I locate my own understanding of the theory of democracy in European historiography of the late Renaissance and Enlightenment (ie: not in the history of any as-yet realized state), while I am always happy to see the readings of that literature challenged and improved, I would be somewhat shuggled at the prospect of attempting to re-create structures and principles that guarantee liberty, equality, and sorority (ok: and fraternity too) by first tossing out the entire framework by which I came to understand how the creation and defence of those values works (mostly negatively).

I am interested in thinking about the problem, however. I am interested in thinking about how much of any canon has to be challenged in the interests of challenging ethnocentricity; about whether these questions even make sense in the canons of other disciplines -- I mean, in some they must: political philosophy and political economics most obviously, eg, but even in the sciences, I should think, including the applied sciences -- almost anything short of mathematics. Music and the arts, for sure.

Do you mean that people want to start an entirely new culture with no base in old ones? Or that they want to strip the dominant culture (?) of its power and create a mosaic, wherein all represented cultures are equal?

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but some statements made there about traditional studies that our schools could/should abandon in the interests of deconstructing an oppressively exclusive dominant culture

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History, for one.

And I suspect that, from the choice you offer earlier, proposition B would be the one that is on the table.

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Whatever discipline you follow (and this doesn't even have to be about academic disciplines) will have a canon, a set of texts that are presumed to form a basic tradition, to define the structure of the discipline.

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The canon I've had the most recent and disciplined/punished in is child development. It's Rousseau, Dewey, Piaget, Vygotsky (a recent addition) and Erikson. Most of us exposed to this canon are taught bare caricatures of the original thought with no reading of primary sources. The secondary sources are almost always strikingly positivist and crudely reductionist.

I was repelled by what I read of Erikson from the current canonizing texts in North America. On reading him I recognized a very intelligent dialectical kind of thinking. Piaget is reduced to a pile of truisms rather than the very thorough and very ethnocentric thinker he is.

To a simple back-woodswoman, then, it sounds as if somebody thinks they can eliminate prejudice from society by cutting children off at the cultural roots. And this is to be done by adults, who have their own roots. And these adults are largely unaware of the origins of their own thought process and value system. It's easy to see what must be removed from the school curriculum; less easy to imagine what is to be put in its place. Job-related skills, i suppose.

But what about parents? And teachers who can't help but be tainted by prior knowledge? And what about libraries? Or television, or video games or casual acquintances or the street? Children will be exposed to a system thought and mores, anyway.

Wouldn't this be simpler and more effective? Take children as soon as they're weaned; keep them, all kinds together, in a walled compound; have them tended and instructed in purely practical matters by robots and allow them no social contact but one another until they're big enough to enter the work-force.
(Not my idea: 'Macroscope' - Piers Anthony)

But who will those children be? Of what nation will they be citizens? I mean, before deciding how to educate the next generation, wouldn't it be useful to define and describe the society in which they are expected to function?

Aha! i found the original thread, but it didn't help much. I still can't frame the problem of education in racial or cultural terms.
The idea (and it is only an idea, not a reality in most people's lives) of non-bias is a recent, white, middle-class, liberal North American ideal. How can that be implemented, except by the generation and class that invented it? And how could it be implemented at all, unless that generation and class is dominant? Wouldn't they have to write a canon, convince everyone else that it's the best possible canon, and then finance and legislate the necessary changes?

[ 20 November 2005: Message edited by: nonesuch ]

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Originally posted by blake 3:17:

The canon I've had the most recent and disciplined/punished in is child development. It's Rousseau, Dewey, Piaget, Vygotsky (a recent addition) and Erikson. Most of us exposed to this canon are taught bare caricatures of the original thought with no reading of primary sources. The secondary sources are almost always strikingly positivist and crudely reductionist.

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I think this is central. For general education purposes, I think it is more important to spend time teaching critical thinking skills and teaching them well than deciding which authors to include in the curriculum. This includes contact with primary sources and analysis of the reporting of others on those primary sources. A reasonable attempt at balance in the curriculum should be made, but I'm satisfied to let it lie there when talking about secondary education.

For post-secondary education, advanced studies: haggle away about who to include! It's vitally important there, I believe. I say this as someone who spent a fair amount of time studying art historiography -- I truly do believe it is important to think about what we call the canon.

So what I'll say now is applied: it's about handling this issue in the school system. Specifically, it's about using an ethnocentric curriculum. There are other ways, but they are more in the realm of philosophy and less in the realm of what can be done on a mass scale.

I believe that for liberation to be possible, including liberation from oppressive Western constructions of identity, the individual must be able to negotiate and analyze those constructions himself. In other words, it's not enough for the tenth grader to receive an afro-centric history curriculum full of secondary and tertiary sources and little critical analysis. It's not enough for a teacher to tell a student "the history that's been taught here is Eurocentric." The student needs to be exposed to primary sources, exposed to good writing and reasoning, and taught to read, analyze and write well himself.

The end point should be him/her looking at a typical Eurocentric history book and saying, not just "this is Eurocentric and I can explain why," but "this is
bad history and I can explain why."

Teaching those skills requires that the student come into contact with a canon. Taking art history for example: it would be theoretically possible for a teacher to spend a year teaching emergent and unknown artists. Many theorists in art education think this would be ideal. It would probably be fascinating. The amount of work required in producing such a curriculum would be overwhelming, however. And more importantly, the student would be cut off from many opportunities for self-education and continuing education. The local art museum is a much richer educational experience when you are familiar with the canon. Instead you'd be sucking at the teat of the teacher -- relying solely on her view of art to negotiate the world for you. It's unlikely that any great critical thinking skills would develop from this education.

Regardless of your opinion of what is included in the canon, access to quality primary sources and the strains of thought that they are likely to encounter in further study are necessary for the development of these critical thinking skills. To me it doesn't matter so much what is included in the canon as that the student is taught to effectively analyze it. Now there is a point where the content taught will be so Eurocentric as to make effective analysis impossible for many students (especially those not of European background). That's why I think we need to find a reasonable balance. I just don't think that the entire canon needs to be scrapped, and students educated in alternative ethnocentric schools, for intellectual liberation to occur.

Now what is a reasonable balance? That could be debated endlessly.

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Originally posted by vmichel:
It's unlikely that any great critical thinking skills would develop from this education.

Regardless of your opinion of what is included in the canon, access to quality primary sources and the strains of thought that they are likely to encounter in further study are necessary for the development of these critical thinking skills. To me it doesn't matter so much what is included in the canon as that the student is taught to effectively analyze it.

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vmichel, the one problem I have with this part of your post is that there is no mention of students/children who are naturally gifted with critical thinking skills. Critical thinking is not necessarily a learned skill, and I do believe that it is not rare for people to be born with this ability. There is a problem with many educational institutions (including families) not doing enough to nurture this already existing ability to analyse critically, and the skill can be lost over time because it is rarely used. However, it is entirely possible that a child/student is able to retain this skill even if it is not nurtured by family, teachers or society because critical thinking is an inherent part of the student's intelligence (character) --- case in point: me!

However, I do agree with your conclusion, vmichel. I don't think we need to get rid of canons altogether to achieve political liberation. There is virtue in teaching pride in tradition, all the while making sure to teach that no one culture is superior (wholly or in part) to any other. Using this as a base, I believe that we can teach our children to be open to change and to respect differences in cultures.

posted by nonesuch:

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This is where being undereducated is a severe drawback: i don't speak the language.

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Me too, nonesuch! I am wondering if anything I just typed makes any sense at all to those who tend to use more academic language. Oh well, I'm glad it doesn't stop us from posting!

posted by nonesuch:

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To a simple back-woodswoman, then, it sounds as if somebody thinks they can eliminate prejudice from society by cutting children off at the cultural roots.

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This is possible.... I think. As far as I am aware, I do not have any prejudices against people of different race, culture, gender, sexual orientation, religion, etc. I was cut off not only from my own cultural roots, but exposure to other cultures as well. Though, again, I don't believe it would work for everybody.

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And this is to be done by adults, who have their own roots.

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And what if the adults ignore the child for the most part, thereby imposing as few of their own prejudices on the child as possible?

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posted by nonesuch:
Take children as soon as they're weaned; keep them, all kinds together, in a walled compound; have them tended and instructed in purely practical matters by robots and allow them no social contact but one another until they're big enough to enter the work-force.
(Not my idea: 'Macroscope' - Piers Anthony)

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As horrid and barbaric as it sounds, this very accurately describes my childhood! Of course, we weren't raised by robots, but we might have very well been. Our parents and teachers repeated the same biased beliefs and histories over and over again, in the same fashion, and somehow managing to give us very little information. We didn't have access (or rather, we were denied access) to many different quality primary sources of education, as vmichel suggests we should. Your perfect cookie-cutter world. And there were only a certain group of people we were allowed to mingle with till we entered the workforce.

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But who will those children be? Of what nation will they be citizens?

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These questions sort of help me with what I was trying to get across to vmichel. If we go back to the original premise, we are weaning children, and putting them, all kinds together, in a walled compound. It is near impossible to answer the categorical question "who will those children be?" when each of these children have different personalities, different levels of IQ and EQ, different genetics, etc. They all have the same upbringing, but they will never all turn out to be the same, or even similar. Some will grow up with deep mental/emotional problems, some will grow up survivors who struggled to get out of that walled compound, some will grow up hating all cultures they haven't been exposed to, some will grow up yearning to embrace the cultures they haven't been exposed to, some will grow up with not a care in the world, and so on.

"Of what nation will they be citizens?" - well, there are the legal notions of 'citizen' and 'nation'. And then, there is the feeling of belonging (or not belonging) to any one particular place in one's heart. Myself, I have deep respect for all traditions (except Christmas - I intensely and passionately despise Christmas), although I can't identify with even one. There are many countries and cultures that I love, but I know I will never belong wholly to any one. There is always a lonely feeling of somehow being different from the rest of the surrounding population because I didn't grow up as a part of any one culture.

Far from escaping, it seem to me they'd be difficult to dislodge from the compound. We'd have to keep building wall to accomodate more children. They would form their own society and want nothing to do with ours - least of all serve it. Eventually, when they were numerous and strong enough, they would probably eliminate the outsiders.

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Originally posted by nonesuch:
No, no, no! The point about the walled compound (Picture the Garden of Eden, not a penal colony!) is that the residents are not exposed to any kind of prejudice while growing up. Robots have no value system, no social attachment, no religion, no history, no bias. They are programmed to impart only technical information.
The children are all colours, all backgrounds and genders, and - after a while - various ages. All their physical needs are met, fully and impartially; no competition. No laws, taboos, moral contstraints, discipline or etiquette is imposed on them. There are no role-models or pre-existing social constructs. The children are completely free of the past and completely equal (at the outset) among themselves.

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Originally posted by ephemeral:

These questions sort of help me with what I was trying to get across to vmichel. If we go back to the original premise, we are weaning children, and putting them, all kinds together, in a walled compound. It is near impossible to answer the categorical question "who will those children be?" when each of these children have different personalities, different levels of IQ and EQ, different genetics, etc. They all have the same upbringing, but they will never all turn out to be the same, or even similar. Some will grow up with deep mental/emotional problems, some will grow up survivors who struggled to get out of that walled compound, some will grow up hating all cultures they haven't been exposed to, some will grow up yearning to embrace the cultures they haven't been exposed to, some will grow up with not a care in the world, and so on.

"Of what nation will they be citizens?" - well, there are the legal notions of 'citizen' and 'nation'. And then, there is the feeling of belonging (or not belonging) to any one particular place in one's heart. Myself, I have deep respect for all traditions (except Christmas - I intensely and passionately despise Christmas), although I can't identify with even one. There are many countries and cultures that I love, but I know I will never belong wholly to any one. There is always a lonely feeling of somehow being different from the rest of the surrounding population because I didn't grow up as a part of any one culture.

I guess I am uncomfortable with this thread because, from my understanding, it appears to be searching for one method that will achieve liberation and democracy. Do I believe that we will ever be able to completely wipe out prejudices from all our different cultures and sub-cultures? No. Do I believe we can move closer toward that goal? Yes, but we all have different ideas of how to do that, and as vmichel said, we can debate endlessly about it.

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ephemeral you are right -- I do not mean to suggest that critical thinking is some external ability that must be imparted via the teacher. I think of it more as something innate to all of us that can be cultivated through education. When I say "teach critical thinking," I mean practice, improve upon, and refine those skills.

I wasn't thinking about achieving liberation and democracy, but rather about avoiding ways of teaching that might hinder those achivements. I don't know that a good curriculum can liberate a person, but I do think that a bad curriculum can reinforce a lot of non-liberating ideas. It's an interesting question you've raised: in terms of identity, etc. what exactly do we expect a formal education to do for us?

[ 20 November 2005: Message edited by: vmichel ]

[ 20 November 2005: Message edited by: vmichel ]

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Originally posted by nonesuch:
[QB]No, no, no! The point about the walled compound (Picture the Garden of Eden, not a penal colony!) is that the residents are not exposed to any kind of prejudice while growing up. Robots have no value system, no social attachment, no religion, no history, no bias. They are programmed to impart only technical information.
The children are all colours, all backgrounds and genders, and - after a while - various ages. All their physical needs are met, fully and impartially; no competition. No laws, taboos, moral contstraints, discipline or etiquette is imposed on them. There are no role-models or pre-existing social constructs.
The children are completely free of the past and completely equal (at the outset) among themselves.

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But the very obvious flaw in all of this is that none of us are ever born equal. For example, men, in general, are physically stronger than women. Physical strenght is an easily visible trait. How would you ensure that patriarchy (gender bias) never raises its ugly head? And to boot, we are all born with emotions - both positive and negative. It is entirely conceivable that emotions such as love, jealousy and rage could lead to prejudices of one type or another. And even if the walled compound were built as a true Garden of Eden, and not a penal colony, as human beings, I think we all need a little bit of conflict in our lives, or I imagine that some of us would want to die from boredom.

Also, is there room for people from different backgrounds in the colony to develop their own cultures and languages, and their mini-societies amongst themselves? If everybody ends up assimilating into one culture, there would be more room for boredom and depression. If not, it would be important to somehow emphasize to the children in the colony that differences in religion, gender, culture, etc. need to be respected - just like in the real world.

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They would form their own society and want nothing to do with ours - least of all serve it.

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The point is, you cannot make people anything other than human. Humans are naturally tribal; when the population reaches critical mass, they will always draw territorial boundaries; they will always divide into insiders and outsiders, winners and losers, leaders and followers, bullies and victims.

See, it's not enough to say: "Take this bad stuff out of education," and everything will be all right. It won't be very different next time than it was last time, or the first time.

So then, consider the alternative. Starting from where we are right now, as a multi-faceted, multi-coloured, sort-of-decent nation, with a dominant culture and many secondary cultures.
Define the objective. How do you see this nation in 20 years? In 50? What do you want the next generation to become? What must the children learn and what should they not learn? To what aspects of our past and present should the children be exposed, and from what must they be protected? What kind of moral code should we instill in them? What do we expect of them - by age 9, 15, 21 and 40?

Now that a total absence of a canon has proved unacceptable or impractical, write the new canon.

[ 21 November 2005: Message edited by: nonesuch ]

And engaging in all this IS education...the hard part is getting to the point where discussion is possible, since for so many people the canonical stuff is not interesting enough simply to read by themselves.

You can burn over a forest community and the initial regrowth of fireweed might look attractive, but it does not last. As some one else mentioned it gets kind of boring and as time progresses more varieties creep in.

If you want a different forest changing the climate might be more effective in the long run.

[ 21 November 2005: Message edited by: Bubbles ]

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Of course some cultures are superior to others.

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Anyone contesting this better be ready to justify slavery, infanticide, cannibalism and similar cultural values

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General principles such as respect for all human beings clearly distinguish, I think, inferior or superior cultures and allow us to judge that 1930's and 1940's Nazi Germany, for example, was inferior to other cultures and nations which did not engage in deliberate, calculated genocide. Now this ability to tell good from wrong is a separate faculty of the human mind, I would argue - separate from our deductive reasoning abilities, for example. We cannot arrive logically at proofs of good and evil. This is a reflection of the limitations of reason, rather than an argument that good and evil are unknowable. My criticism of deconstructionism and related philosophies is based on my belief that these currents of thought are so based in abstract verbal reasoning at the exclusion of all the other dimensions of human life that they become useless or worse. The folly of moral relativism is the result, which ultimately leads to an unacceptable inability to distinguish between SS concentration camp torturers and Tibet monks.

Finally, to say that an appreciation of the difference between good and evil may not be ultimately founded on reason and logic alone does not preclude discussion and reasoning about the nature of good and evil in specific cases; but this does not permit facile judgements of the superiority of one culture over another in many cases - only perhaps, in the most egregious examples. In theses cases (Nazi Germany, Cambodia under Pol Pot, etc.) any system of reasoning that fails to find moral inferiority is itself deficient - like deconstructionism, perhaps?

[ 25 November 2005: Message edited by: looney ]

vmichel's refined description of what she means by "teaching" critical thinking is very close to the process that Rousseau dramatized two and a half centuries ago in Emile. It's more a process of drawing out and liberating, then regularly scooting back to a bit more discipline that allows one to be liberated at a slightly higher level, and so on -- that's Rousseau's notion of how we create citizens, not just people who can read and write and compute, but citizens.

People might be misunderstanding what I mean when I talk about democracy. I'm not talking about any state realized in history so far. I'm talking about democracy, about the basic structures and principles that safeguard the maximum liberty for all individuals within a given group.

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How do we evaluate the superiority of inferiority of cultures? The same way we assess individual behaviour, including our own. With the innate sense of right and wrong, justice and injustice that all human beings are borne with.

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All morality is cultural. And you cannot rid yourself of the basic tenets of your culture. So, you think cannibalism is this huge awful thing that only really bad people do, because your culture has a tabu against it. (Most cultures share this tabu. If cannibalism were originally, innately repugnant, why did anyone need to make a law against it?) And yet, Christian cultures do not recoil from the Eucharist. Odd.

Similarly, we judge individual behaviour - others' and our own - according to our cultural milieu. We define crime and perversion according to how far the behaviour digresses from the norm of our culture. We can easily spot something in another another culture that would be a crime according to our laws, while remaining blightly oblivious to the destructive practices that are commonly accepted in our own culture. We only notice anomalies when a nation, a regime, or an individual divergesses too far from the standard morality of its own culture.

The recurrence of these universally held beliefs points very clearly (to me at least) towards a sense of values and justice in human beings much deeper than can be accounted for through presumed simple evolutionary processes. I think the theorists of consciousness have pretty much agreed that human consciousness represents an increase in many order of magnitude over the rest of nature (but I wonder about dophins).

My favourite story. . it's true. A number of years ago in the winter time , an American domestic airline flight crashed on takeoff into the Potomac(?) river. Survivors in the frigid river water waited in the darkness as valiant search and rescue crews worked to find them in the pitch darkness and wretched weather. One group of survivors had formed a huddle in the river, and when the helicopter, which could only pick up one person at a time, came back each time, one man, a stronger swimmer than the rest, was the one who could manage to grab the dangling rope-chair and each time, offered it to another, in more desparate staights. Of course, when the copter came back the final time for him, he had gone under. He had given his life for 5 or 6 total strangers. I suggest to you that most people, including you and me, would perform similarly, and that the magnificence of the human spirit, of what it means to be a human being, is so beyond expression that we can scarely comprehend it.

This is a view of humanity, you'll note, which makes no claims on God whatsoever. I don't think we have to adopt a faith to perceive that human beings are creatures of such capacities of consciousness, that an inborne sense of moral compass, an alignment to the true harmonies of the universe, if you will, is not that huge an assumption. And most critically, for the sake of this argument, this "conscience" (whose existence is admitted to by all the cultures it is supposedly subservient to) is in its origins, utterly free of and transcends any culture anywhere. Cultures are about (arbitrary) rules. Knowing the difference between right and wrong is a different kind of knowing entirely.

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Originally posted by looney:
The short answer, Nonesuch, is that there exists a universally

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held set of beliefs about right and wrong that transcend all cultures.

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It's wrong to murder your parents for base profit and self-interest, for example.

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It's really not ok to eat your own children.

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Certainly the avid anthropologist will find a culture that actually holds these values, but that's rather a case of the exception proving the rule, isn't it?

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The recurrence of these universally held beliefs points very clearly (to me at least) towards a sense of values and justice in human beings much deeper than can be accounted for through presumed simple evolutionary processes.

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I think the theorists of consciousness have pretty much agreed that human consciousness represents an increase in many order of magnitude over the rest of nature (but I wonder about dophins).

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.... He had given his life for 5 or 6 total strangers.

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Cultures are about (arbitrary) rules.

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Knowing the difference between right and wrong is a different kind of knowing entirely.

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Originally posted by nonesuch:
Wouldn't this be simpler and more effective? Take children as soon as they're weaned; keep them, all kinds together, in a walled compound; have them tended and instructed in purely practical matters by robots and allow them no social contact but one another until they're big enough to enter the work-force.
(Not my idea: 'Macroscope' - Piers Anthony)

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I think that was "The Lord of the Flies" before it was "Macroscope."

The problem with all efforts to avoid corrupting children is that children are born evil, and left to themselves that evil just flourishes.

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People might be misunderstanding what I mean when I talk about democracy. I'm not talking about any state realized in history so far. I'm talking about democracy, about the basic structures and principles that safeguard the maximum liberty for all individuals within a given group.

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rsfarrell:

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I think that was "The Lord of the Flies" before it was "Macroscope."

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looney:

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What I am suggesting is the the potential ability to make moral distinctions in human beings exists prior to any cultural immersion.

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.... Psychology and biology are not physics, and they have their own sets of rules and conventions.

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BTW, I agree with you that humans have a built-in prediliction for violence and self-destruction.

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(PS - I don't know about your boat. Mine is a cute, scary little thing in the Winnipeg museum.)

[ 26 November 2005: Message edited by: nonesuch ]

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Originally posted by vmichel:

For post-secondary education, advanced studies: haggle away about who to include! It's vitally important there, I believe. I say this as someone who spent a fair amount of time studying art historiography -- I truly do believe it is important to think about what we call the canon.

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Originally posted by vmichel:

Taking art history for example: it would be theoretically possible for a teacher to spend a year teaching emergent and unknown artists. Many theorists in art education think this would be ideal. It would probably be fascinating.

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Originally posted by rsfarrell:

The problem with all efforts to avoid corrupting children is that children are born evil, and left to themselves that evil just flourishes.

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I can't let this pass unchallenged Nonesuch, because I have a background in psychology and specific training in experimental design. Out of a desire to be seen as serious and "hard" a science as physics or biology, experimental psychology has long been as rigorous a scientific discipline as any, I think you'll find. Some subsets of Psychology, like neuropsychology, are clearly as empirically based , replicable and logically as sophisticated as any other science, including physics. The "science" of consciousness is a much trickier question, though. Ultimately I think this is a misguided way of regarding human beings, to think that they are completely knowable scientifically. Human consciousness contains realms of mystery that will forever be inaccessible to empirical science, and the idea that all should be acessible to science relects a misreading of humanity, and of the proper scope of scientific investigation.

[ 28 November 2005: Message edited by: looney ]

[ 28 November 2005: Message edited by: looney ]

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The problem with all efforts to avoid corrupting children is that children are born evil, and left to themselves that evil just flourishes.

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If you lived alone on a desert island, morality would be irrelevant. Once you relate to even one other being, some rules are necessary. If you must relate to dozens, hundreds, thousands or millions of other beings, the social contract becomes increasingly complicated.

What happens if you must relate to millions of others and want that society to serve all their disparate needs, as well as its own long-term needs? Could any one person, or even a single generation of thinkers, frame an adequate system of laws? Where would they start?

looney:

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Ultimately I think this is a misguided way of regarding human beings, to think that they are ultimately knowable scientifically.

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[ 27 November 2005: Message edited by: nonesuch ]