Failing Systems 9

I don't mean to disparage Lochlan's school or his teachers. I do believe they are doing their best with the resources they have and within the educational model that has been prevalent for at least the last hundred years (The Schools Our Children Deserve, 6), and that it's the whole model that needs to change, and society-wide priorities that need to shift (and I think are shifting).

Right now, we've got a model heavily influenced by men like B.F. Skinner. Harvard University's Department of Psychology profile on Skinner says, "Skinner was influenced by John B. Watson’s philosophy of psychology called behaviorism, which rejected not just the introspective method and the elaborate psychoanalytic theories of Freud and Jung, but any psychological explanation based on mental states or internal representations such as beliefs, desires, memories, and plans."

For every theory out there, a new one develops to build on or dismantle an old one (Derrida, anyone?). Skinner believed everything we do is in response to stimuli. He was an empiricist and empiricist ideas were nothing new to public education in the United States when Skinner came on the scene in the mid-20th century. Aristotle's influence had been touching American public education since the Puritans (Reynolds and Kendi, 16-17).

In Schools for Growth, developmental psychologist Lois Holzman takes the build on or dismantle idea further: "Like other societal institutions in Western culture, schools are committed to the philosophical position that human life and growth require some way of knowing the world. This belief, thousands of years old, has rarely been challenged; indeed, it is taken to be as 'natural' as our upright stance...in my opinion, we need to question whether knowing itself—not merely the kind of ideologically biased knowing that schools perpetuate—is the source of our problems. Might it be that centuries-old philosophical biases about what it means to understand, to mean, to learn—to be human—have as much to do with how schools run as do politics, economics, and pedagogy?" (Holzman, 5-6).

Reading and copying that over just now kind of blew my mind. It reminds me of the interview we read for this class with psychoanalyst and psychiatrist Jacques Lacan, in which he said, "We often hear it said that we have to give meaning to this or that, to one’s own thoughts, aspirations, sex, life. But we know absolutely nothing about life. Experts run out of breath trying to explain it to us."

I wrote this!
READ MORE https://fuckedupandwonderful.blogspot.com/2024/10/imagine-world.html