S e b l o g g i n g

“There is no one on earth who hasn’t learned something by himself and without a master explicator. Let’s call this way of learning “universal teaching” and say of it: “In reality, universal reaching has existed since the beginning of the world, alongside all the explicative methods. This teaching, by oneself, has, in reality, been what has formed all great men.” But this is the strange part: “Everyone has done this experiment a thousand times in his life, and yet it has never occurred to someone to say to someone else: I’ve learned many things without explanations, I think that you can too. … Neither I nor anyone in the world has ventured to draw on this fact to teach others. To the intelligence sleeping in each of us, it would suffice to say: age quod agis, continue to do what you are doing, “learn the fact, imitate it, know yourself. this is how nature works.” Methodically repeat the method of chance that gave you the measure of your power. The same intelligence is at work in all the acts of the human mind.

But this is the most difficult leap. This method is practiced of necessity by everyone, but no one wants to recognize it, no one wants to cope with the intellectual revolution it signifies. The social circle, the order of things, prevents it from being recognized for what it is: the true method by which everyone learns and by which everyone can take the measure of his capacity. One must dare to recognize it and pursue the open verification of its power–otherwise, the method of powerlessness, the Old Master, will last as long as the order of things…”

Jacques Ranciere (1991) in The ignorant schoolmaster.

“The term creative economy can be critiqued as a shibboleth, but as a high level metaphor, it nevertheless has value in directing us away from certain sorts of economic activity and toward other kinds. Much economic activity is in no way creative. If I have a monopoly on some valued resource, I do not need to be creative. Other forms of economic activity are intensely creative. If I have no valued resources, I must create something that is valued. At its simplest and yet most profound, the idea of a creative economy suggests a capacity to compete based on engaging in a gainful activity that is different from everyone else’s, rather than pursuing the same endeavor more competitively than everyone else. The ability to differentiate on novelty is key to the concept of creative economy and key to our analysis of education for this economy…”

Greg Hearn and Ruth Bridgstock (2010) in Education for the creative economy: Innovation, transdisciplinarity and networks

“For much of the twentieth century, learning focused on the acquisition of skills or transmission of information or what we define as “learning about.” Near the end of the twentieth century, learning theorists started to recognize the value of “learning to be,” of putting learning into a situated context that deals with systems and identity as well as the the transmission of knowledge… Although learning about and learning to be worked well in a relative stable world, in a world of constant flux, we need to embrace a theory of learning to become. Where most theories of learning see becoming as a transitional state toward becoming something, the twenty-first century requires us to think of learning as a practice of becoming over and over again. In order to understand both what that means and how it might be achieved, we need to examine some of the new modes of learning that have emerged in the twenty-first century. In particular, we need to consider the social, distributed, and networked dimensions of learning. More than this, we need to consider the broader economic and technological landscape in which these new modes of learning are forming.”

J. Seely Brown (2010) in Education in the creative economy

“Educators inspired by the technological approach often want to empower their students by equipping them with a powerful toolkit of socially important knowledge,skills, attitudes, and values that would open limitless possibilities for the students in their future. However, these educators seem to forget that what makes a tool a tool is individual desire. Without human desire of the individual, a tool is a dead thing. But for many school years, students’ desire remained unwelcome in the classroom as the students have to constantly do what the teacher assigns them to do throughout a school day, a school year, and the entire school term. Even when a student’s desire overlaps with the school curriculum, many teachers worry that the student’s lively academic interest can highly jeopardize their control over the flow of instruction and the curriculum preplanned by them (Kennedy, 2005)…”

E. Matusov (2011) in Authorial Teaching and Learning

“Human alteration of Earth is substantial and growing. Between one-third and one-half of the land surface has been transformed by human action; the carbon dioxide con-centration in the atmosphere has increased by nearly 30 percent since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution; more atmospheric nitrogen is fixed by humanity than by all natural terrestrial sources combined; more than half of all accessible surface fresh water is put to use by humanity; and about one quarter of the bird species on Earth have been driven to extinction. By these and other standards, it is clear that we live on a human-dominated planet.”

Vitousek et al. (1997) in Human Domination of Earth’s Ecosystems

“One further effect of our closer time co-ordination and our instantaneous communication must be noted here: broken time and broken attention. The difficulties of transport and communication before 1850 automatically acted as a selective screen, which permitted no more stimuli to reach a person than he could handle: a certain urgency was necessary before one received a call from a long distance or was compelled to make a journey oneself: this condition of slow physical locomotion kept intercourse down to a humane scale, and under definite control. Nowadays this screen has vanished: the remote is as close as the near: the ephemeral is as emphatic as the durable. While the tempo of the day has been quickened by instantaneous communication the rhythm of the day has been broken: the radio, the telephone, the daily newspaper clamor for attention, and amid the host of stimuli to which people are subjected, it becomes more and more difficult to absorb and cope with any one part of the environment, to say nothing of dealing with it as a whole.

The common man is as subject to these interruptions as the scholar or the man of affairs, and even the weekly period of cessation from familiar tasks and contemplative reverie, which was one of the great contributions of Western religion to the discipline of the personal life, has become an ever remoter possibility. These mechanical aids to efficiency and cooperation and intelligence have been mercilessly exploited, through commercial and political pressure: but so far – since unregulated and undisciplined – they have been obstacles to the very ends they affect to further. We have multiplied the mechanical demands without multiplying in any degree our human capacities for registering and reacting intelligently to them. With the successive demands of the outside world so frequent and so imperative, without any respect to their real importance, the inner world becomes progressively meager and formless: instead of active selection there is passive absorption ending in the state happily described by Victor Bransford as “addled subjectivity.”

Lewis Mumford in Technics and Civilzation (1934)

“In short: mechanical time is not an absolute. And a population trained to keep to a mechanical time routine at whatever sacrifice to health, convenience, and organic felicity may well suffer from the strain of that discipline and find life impossible without the most strenuous compensations. The fact that sexual intercourse in a modern city is limited, for workers in all grades and departments, to the fatigued hours of the day may add to the efficiency of the working life only by a too-heavy sacrifice in personal and organic relations…”

Lewis Mumford in Technics and Civilzation (1934)

Once you commit to working democratically, you have to take the leap of faith that says that people will make informed choices. And you must trust that if they don’t make the choices that you think in the short term are the best ones for them (like attending every class), in the long run, the experience of being in control will make them more responsible the next time they are able to exercise power.

Stephen Brookfield (1995) in Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher.

“To use Heidegger’s idea, one could say that the ultimate fear is that the “teaching machines” enhanced with information technology will work seamlessly together with technological rationality so that all emancipatory potential is finally lost.”

Juha Suoranta & Tere Vadén (2008) in Wikiworld: Political Economy of Digital Literacy and the Promise of Participatory Media

“I have always rejected fatalism. I prefer rebelliousness because it affirms my status as a person who has never given in to the manipulations and strategies designed to reduce the human person to nothing. The recently proclaimed death of history, which symbolizes the death of utopia, of our right to dream, reinforces without doubt the claims that imprison our freedom. This makes the struggle for the restoration of utopia all the more necessary. Educational practise itself, as an experience in humanization, must be impregnated with this ideal.”

Paulo Freire (1998) in Pedagogy of Freedom