Read Online Peripheral Visions by Mary C. Bateson - Free Book Online
Authors: Mary C. Bateson
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long-established kibbutz, with a factory in addition to farming, and being startled to be handed a key to my room, because “there are so many people one doesn’t know”—startled only because until then everything had seemed so open. The best airport security system in the world still relies on the assumption that Jews do not blow up airplanes. As a sixteen-year-old, I lived alone in Jerusalem and went for long walks, far into the night. I hitchhiked all over the country with friends, striking up conversations in the street. Community, like the sacred, is an idea that becomes reality because we believe in it, not vice versa. In Israel, many families skipped a generation in which children grew up without grandparents present, but today, with the aging of a new generation, the grandparents are there again, for the idea of treasured and respected grandparents has survived.
The lessons of school gain authority because they are layered onto earlier informal learning in the home, which is where we learn how and what to learn and how to transfer knowledge from one situation to another. These vital skills mostly remain outside of awareness. Looking at how much has been learned within a few weeks of birth proposes a new kind of respect both for nonschool learning and for the capacities of the very young. Children and traditional peoples, even illiterate peasants who have had enough exposure to the city to regard themselves as profoundly ignorant, have vast amounts of knowledge long before teachers and social reformers get to them. An awareness of the complexity of the knowledge they already possess could in itself be a revolutionary force.
Not only do we not know what we know, we don’t know what we teach. All societies pass on complex patterns: conventions of human relations; languages roughly comparable in their basic complexity, whether or not they have ever been written down; details of the environment; skills for survival; abstract notions of causality and fate, right and wrong. Some are learned by play and experience, as when a little boy takes his own dugout canoe out on the reef; others by observation, watching the grown-ups operate the elevator in an apartment building. Everywhere there is some teaching, mostly by family members who, like Parvaneh and Joan, are not teachers and have no systematized knowledge of the material they are passing on. There is tremendous variation in formality, in the demand that a performance be correct the first time, in styles of reward and punishment—“He’s just a child; he doesn’t understand”—and the list of individuals who are allowed to play an active role.
My classroom at the University of Tehran, where the students were confronted with strangeness and asked to behave in unfamiliar ways, is a metaphor of the world we live in today, pressed by change and by contact with other ways of thought to question premises learned even before language. The students knew, almost as deeply as Shahnaz knew the meaning of the transition from carpet to floor, without ever having put it into words, what was supposed to happen in classrooms, and that knowledge limited their capacity to learn by observation.
The problem of an outsider as teacher is to enrich students with new learning skills, not to replace the old ones, and this demands an awareness of differences. At Damavand College, American teachers struggled to convey their rules against plagiarism without being aware that the notion of ideas as property that underlay them was itself foreign and unfamiliar. They believed they had no wish to disrupt the society they were working in, yet they tried to persuade students that it was appropriate in the classroom to question the expertise of the professor. On the other side of Tehran, my husband and his colleagues were teaching students of management to learn from case discussions rather than by memorization. The most basic assumptions are rarely made explicit by either teachers or
The lessons of school gain authority because they are layered onto earlier informal learning in the home, which is where we learn how and what to learn and how to transfer knowledge from one situation to another. These vital skills mostly remain outside of awareness. Looking at how much has been learned within a few weeks of birth proposes a new kind of respect both for nonschool learning and for the capacities of the very young. Children and traditional peoples, even illiterate peasants who have had enough exposure to the city to regard themselves as profoundly ignorant, have vast amounts of knowledge long before teachers and social reformers get to them. An awareness of the complexity of the knowledge they already possess could in itself be a revolutionary force.
Not only do we not know what we know, we don’t know what we teach. All societies pass on complex patterns: conventions of human relations; languages roughly comparable in their basic complexity, whether or not they have ever been written down; details of the environment; skills for survival; abstract notions of causality and fate, right and wrong. Some are learned by play and experience, as when a little boy takes his own dugout canoe out on the reef; others by observation, watching the grown-ups operate the elevator in an apartment building. Everywhere there is some teaching, mostly by family members who, like Parvaneh and Joan, are not teachers and have no systematized knowledge of the material they are passing on. There is tremendous variation in formality, in the demand that a performance be correct the first time, in styles of reward and punishment—“He’s just a child; he doesn’t understand”—and the list of individuals who are allowed to play an active role.
My classroom at the University of Tehran, where the students were confronted with strangeness and asked to behave in unfamiliar ways, is a metaphor of the world we live in today, pressed by change and by contact with other ways of thought to question premises learned even before language. The students knew, almost as deeply as Shahnaz knew the meaning of the transition from carpet to floor, without ever having put it into words, what was supposed to happen in classrooms, and that knowledge limited their capacity to learn by observation.
The problem of an outsider as teacher is to enrich students with new learning skills, not to replace the old ones, and this demands an awareness of differences. At Damavand College, American teachers struggled to convey their rules against plagiarism without being aware that the notion of ideas as property that underlay them was itself foreign and unfamiliar. They believed they had no wish to disrupt the society they were working in, yet they tried to persuade students that it was appropriate in the classroom to question the expertise of the professor. On the other side of Tehran, my husband and his colleagues were teaching students of management to learn from case discussions rather than by memorization. The most basic assumptions are rarely made explicit by either teachers or
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