Category: Self-Awareness

On Bias: III. Fun with Dialectics

Click here to read On Bias: II. Wrong Bias?

On Bias: III. Fun with Dialectics

Above-below, up-down, in-out… let’s understand these as some basic opposite pairings in English vocabulary.

Some pairings seem as rooted in tradition as opposition – love-hate, war-peace, success-failure – while some pairings automatically imply something else – just as ‘landlord’ pays its dues to ‘tenant’, so ‘parent’ only makes sense alongside ‘child’. Along the same line, as surely as ‘zenith’ is joined to ‘nadir’, something ‘ahead’ is followed by something ‘behind’. Conversely, it goes literally without saying that a ‘turn’ to face Thing 2 is the same pivot away from facing Thing 1. Being a duality, two moves at once, maybe this is why one good turn deserves another – after that, on we go.

Looking up the Odesa Steps… not the Eisenstein montage today
Looking down the Odesa Steps… only the landings are visible

Photo Credits by Oleksandr Malyon – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=94182671 https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=94182670

But our vocabulary is not always so obvious or easily taken for granted… something ‘ancient’ by contrast might only suggest something… well, less ancient: ‘modern’, ‘current’, ‘contemporary’, how about ‘fashionable’ – now we’re talking connotation as much as denotation. And with plenty of other word-pairings – ground-air, hard-soft, strong-weak, first-last – if any of these are less automatic than good-evil, to-from, wet-dry… well, they still seem just as opposite. Funny, though, a word like ‘moon’ implies ‘planet’, yet no planet requires a moon.

Actually, this post isn’t some attempt at anything formal although, if you’re up for it, knock yourself out.

Theory-practice, reflection-action, curriculum-pedagogy, classroom-real life, content-skill, teacher-student… education is all about such pairings. For the sake here, let’s consider these as ‘dialectical pairings’, where each concept is not merely reciprocal to the other but inextricably indispensible, such that the two concepts together comprise not a united opposition but a concerted reciprocity. And from the two arises something further, something more.

Matter tells space-and-time to curve; space-and-time tells matter to move: their fearful passage is the two-way traffic of our stage.

Maybe that’s a bit much. Let’s just stick with ‘dialectical pairings’, in a loosely Hegelian way that says, “You complete me.”

Here’s one we all know from education… ‘fairness’ balanced in concert with ‘unfairness’… in accordance to circumstance, fairness being the treatment of people without discrimination, marked by impartially, as conversely distinct from unfairness, discrimination marked by partiality. But without circumstances specified, this distinction remains ambiguous, such that one could argue fairness – treating every person impartially – as being equality, treating everyone the same, rendering unfairness as inequality. More recently has a distinction also been emphasised between (in)equality and (un)fairness such that the resultant outcome of specific treatment is considered (un)equal while the ongoing act of treating is described as a measure of (in)equity, the specific measure evidently being human rights, typically as these rights have been defined by some authority.

Anyway, let’s consider fairness-unfairness as having arisen from something else we’ll call ‘bias’ although that may actually be more of a Hegelian reversal, if you see what I did there. OK, so we consider this, but on what basis? What I’m suggesting is twofold…

(i) Bias is an always-thing, and utterly inescapable
(ii) No matter how exactly we do something, bias instils every decision with unintended consequences

As a result of everybody’s overlapping biases, i.e. that system of forces made real by everybody’s ongoing decisions, somebody somewhere along the way incurs some cost in payment of an outcome

Sidebar #1: We’ve been facing a lot of absolutes, thus far… inextricable, indispensible, utterly inescapable – let’s consider these inexorable. As for absolutes, let’s consider them unlimited by anything besides themselves.

Somebody pays a cost… I call it a cost, and depending on the circumstances, maybe we call it fallout, or unintended consequences, or collateral damage. Depending on the circumstances, maybe we call it a trade-off. But what it’s called doesn’t negate the truism that there is a cost to everything, which is sometimes described in education as the hidden curriculum.

Sidebar #2: Ivan Illich is often credited with coining the term, ‘hidden curriculum’, and his meaning actually took to far wider critique than just education. Illich argued for the disestablishment of schools, comparable to the separation of church and state, on the basis that our most insidiously aberrant institution is compulsory schooling, which proliferates “the alienating institutionalization of life by teaching the need to be taught” (p. 34). Illich critiqued compulsory schooling’s duplicity, in which learning is ritualised myth-making, “something for which you need a process within which you acquire it” (p. 67), a problem defined by a self-justifyingly selfless solution:

“… other people told me [schooling] was… the most practical arrangement for imparting education, or for creating equality, [yet] I saw that most people were stupefied by this procedure, were actually told that they couldn’t learn on their own and became disabled and crippled… a new kind of self-inflicted injustice… a liturgy [for generating] the belief that this is a social enterprise that has some kind of autonomy from the law.… If the rain dance doesn’t work, you can blame yourself for having danced it wrongly.” (p. 66)

For Illich, words like ‘planning’ and ‘development’, ‘class’ and ‘equality’, ‘system’ and ‘assessment’, all central to North American schooling, are anathema to ‘knowledge as an intrinsic good’ and ‘coming to know things as inalienable living’ – those absolutes again.

And what it’s called doesn’t negate the responsibility to consider more than one perspective, on behalf of others, while weighing or enacting our decisions. If anything, bias demands responsibility unless, of course, your concerns lie elsewhere than somebody somewhere paying some cost. This, if you ask me, definitely falls to a matter of character, as does a sense of whether this post seems to have abandoned the whole ‘dialectical pairing’ thing.

Click here to read On Bias: IV. Right Bias?

Enacting ‘The WHY’

Featured Image by geralt on Pixabay

Click here to read Decisions, Decisions

To borrow an earlier phrase, teaching is not a matter of act but a matter of character. Someone may already agree with this before understanding what I mean.

That previous post considered the pondering of decisions with phronesis, practical wisdom – an acuity of discernment and a benevolence in the weighing of options, something we might generalise more simply as savvy good will. Where ‘savvy’ is internal, note with care that ‘good will’ is inclusive, which is to say external – others as well as you.

And if that’s somehow alarming, because not everyone is your friend, then note with added relief that practical wisdom is something we can exercise in concert with healthy scepticism. I say we can because, of course, not everybody does. On the other hand, the reverse is equally true: we can exercise our scepticism without practical wisdom. In any case, we implicate education – things people profess to know – and also teaching.

So then… a matter of character, specifically of teachers. Practical wisdom informing decisions is a nuanced thing: why to act, why under the present circumstances to pick ‘this’ decision over ‘that’ one, the kind of nuance that we often call ‘the Why’. Of course, every question asked, “Why… ?” is answerable as some sought-after outcome, the corollary “Because… ,” and ‘why’ might be offered in different ways at different times. Where there may be some clever reason to withhold ‘the why’ and keep people wondering, surely any such decision would be good will at its savvy best, lasting only as long as necessary.

But this continual reasoned weighing of possible outcomes is, in very large part, the daily work of teaching. Justifying each decision is arguably the greatest professional responsibility teachers face. So where some chosen course is the outcome of practical wisdom, then maybe let’s consider this to be meaningful teaching.

The continual reasoned weighing of possible outcomes is, in very large part, the daily work of teaching.

Something curious here… where ‘course’ often means Social Studies or Math, as we commonly say “course,” in this case it means something like a path, that decision weighed to follow ‘this’ way over ‘that’ as we aim for some objective or goal, i.e. taking some chosen course.

Note further that “curriculum” derives from currere, which likewise suggests a flow or path to be run, as we might say “a race course” or a river that “runs its course.” Curriculum is coming from somewhere, and heading somewhere, and in between these, it is dynamic and influential upon encountering whatever’s already there. Add one bonus mark if you’re now also noticing a temporal past-present-future quality, but for me, the relationship most central to curriculum, far less abstract than tangible and personal, is the one between teacher and student. They’re not only the ones who face each decisional fork-in-the-course, whether ‘this’ way or ‘that’, they’re also the ones who finally take action as well.

More colloquially, you may have heard curriculum described as what teachers teach, ‘the What’. If so, then you may also have heard curriculum paired up with pedagogy, ‘the How’, but these simplifications really do little to convey their complexities, much less their concerted interconnectivity, much less their significance within the holistic scope of school and education, where a lot is going on all at once. Overall, of curriculum and pedagogy, I might say it this way… the better we know someone, the more meaningful our interactions become, and I wonder if curriculum and pedagogy, as two concepts, are better considered as one.

For now, though, for space and sanity, I’m satisfied to describe curriculum as relational – ‘what we do with someone else’ – which has a lot to do with abiding respect and time spent together – and pedagogy as purposeful – ‘what we do for someone else’ – which has mainly to do with motives and objectives. On behalf of others as well as themselves, teachers must know with whom, for whom, and up against whom they might be taking action as well as what such action might look like when they take it and, finally, who will likely be paying the cost.

On that note, I haven’t even addressed power and authority, which of course are central considerations to this broader relational concept – that last emphasis being my way to ask whether the common phrase ‘of course’ means anything more for you now than it did before. Of course it does, I’m sure.

So… a matter of character? practical wisdom? …remind me again how we arrived here? One last thing I should probably mention: that previous post was an obliquely political critique since, for all their connection to policy and legislation, the branches of politics just hang so low that, honestly, who can resist but be tempted. But true to healthy scepticism, any take on practical wisdom can probably do better than those posturing purveyors of politics, and me being a teacher, and there being nothing whatsoever political about school and education… well, therein the physician must minister to himself, I guess, and besides, you could always go start a blog of your own.

Seriously, which seems harder to sustain: being persuasive or being in control?

They’re obviously not, but say these were really the only two choices: which work would you rather be doing? How would you prefer to spend your efforts? Because wouldn’t that tell us something more about you.

Decisions, Decisions

Featured Image by WikiImages from Pixabay

Where margins are thought of as something like the political left or right, I wonder whether Aristotle would have us default to a more centred position. I can hear him now… the centre as a virtuous place to dwell, and then the margins, which gradually tend to widen toward greater vice, be it a deficiency of too little or an excess of too much.

In fairness, I suspect he’d also grant that pushing and pulling from the margins is what steers the middle course, as in the margins are essential – albeit marshalled by the strictures of “a certain principled inflexibility” by which a centred majority maintains its stability. As such, any move out from centre would seem to oblige careful consideration of multiple perspectives and possible outcomes on behalf of everybody by which, really, I mean everybody.

But, as more people come to critique the milquetoast middle – do-nothings whose tolerance is negligence by omission – so also more people tend to vacate the central fringe. The margins populate and steer more massive moves – more volatile moves – in what must come to resemble the anomie of culture war.

At this point, I am assuming readers cast the stage with a host of their favourite players… and yes, well, need I say more.

From the centre, Aristotle would suggest – and, indeed, from any established centre – what can help a decision to vacate the middle for a margin is phronesis, our practical wisdom, which resides within us as a simultaneous dynamic: an acuity of discernment and a benevolence in the weighing of options. Phronesis is exercised in a process he called praxis, a committed act of ‘doing’ informed by reflective ‘thinking’. In an instance of vacating the centre, practical wisdom – yours, mine, anybody’s – could help determine at the given moment which margin to favour for some particular reason.

And, as I said, if we’re right to inform any such decision by accounting for more than one perspective, then our so-called ‘best’ decisions would seem to be our most informed decisions, irrespective of an eventual outcome… albeit with a certain flexibility of principle to be weighed by pragmatics – it’s ‘practical’ wisdom, remember? We’re not wisdom machines.

You wouldn’t believe how many spheres on Google seem to be there thanks to math.

So here let’s grant margins beyond the fatuous dichotomy of political left and right. In fact, let’s think of anyone’s position as centred to every direction in a sphere of infinite margins, where any one direction is uniquely no other, no matter how slightly another tangent may point: for some, this is nuance; for others, pedantic babbling and, for those, I have but two words: perspicacious circumspection. Ah-ha yes, well… for someone located in their centre, listening seems virtuous, too.

All this is not a matter of act but a matter of character. Practical wisdom informing decisions is a nuanced thing: why to act, why under the present circumstances to choose ‘this’ margin and not ‘that’ one. This kind of nuance we often call ‘the Why’, and it’s distinctly different from some marginal course change that evacuates the centre – the latter strictly an outcome, the former a reasoned weighing of possible outcomes. In so many words: when a chosen course is an outcome of practical wisdom, it’s not the other way-round. But nuance is anathema to ideology whereas stupid is as stupid does.

When logic rests upon a false ‘either/or’ dilemma, act supersedes wisdom, and criticism can only be aimed at outcome because decision – while not entirely removed from our responsibility – is severely curtailed: your false dilemma is my ultimatum.

Character suffers at the hands of dogma, and if he were around today, I can only speculate that Aristotle would feel a little hard done by for being so alone in a world of centres. It’s never easy being the silent minority, not when your silence is really just a drowned-out appeal that goes unheard.

Click here to read Enacting ‘the WHY’