A Justice Site
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Created: January 31, 2002
Latest Update: May 4, 2002
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu
Cognitive Fix and Egocentric Parallel Conversation
Copyright: Jeanne Curran and Susan R. Takata and Individaul Authors, May 2002.
"Fair use" encouraged.On Saturday, May 4, Erik Davis wrote"
On saturday, May 4, jeanne responded:
Erik,If I understand correctly, you agree with my concern about the elitism of academic discourse. But I don't think throwing a nerf ball at my colleagues would help anything other than my own frustration at our inability to communicate effectively. I think almost all academics have difficulty explaining their ideas in a "down to earth" manner. I suspect that's why Jerome Bruner says that if we really know what we're teaching, we could teach it to fourth graders, because we would be able to explain it without jargon. And with enough effort we might be able to concretize some of our abstract ideas at least at a level that would permit the fourth graders to begin to grasp the issue.
Freire says pretty much the same thing when he admonishes the one who would teach revolution to grant validity to the learner's perspective of the reality of the learning life-world. Freire insists that once the teacher "knows" what the student must learn, he/she is no longer teaching. James O'Donnell, the Classics scholar, empathizes with the teacher who "must" give tests, but adds that in that case the teacher is not teaching very well.
Perhaps all this means that there is simply another academic role to which we have not yet adequately attended: that of helping to translate our thoughts into "down to earth" language. Habermas expresses a similar concern when he speaks of the "administered society," and bemoans our loss of the skills of public discourse. We no longer live in an age in which Mme. de Sevigne would be likely to write such beautiful letters to her daughter, as she could in seventeenth century Paris. But I am somewhat less pessimistic than Habermas and Craig Calhoun are about this, for I wonder to what extent "ordinary folks" ever did have skills such as those of Mme. de Sevigne and Andre Gide when it came to journal keeping. Wasn't that the dream of folks like Frederick Jackson Turner for the land grant colleges? That they would provide a liberal education, not training, but critical self-reflection and understanding to the "masses?" Of course, Turner didn't mean to let the masses have anything to say about what they needed to learn. Both Freire and Habermas would have objected that such an attitude would have led us astray, lacking the legitimacy of representative democracy.
More soon . . . . jeanne