Although they did not deal directly with issues of learning and pedagogy, today’s reading introduced important ideas that are crucial to understanding the very foundations and dialectics of education. The one common thread that runs through these readings is the important issue of the human and his/her social condition. In their essay, Berger and Luckman describe the human as an animal that depends on social interaction as an anthropological necessity. On this basis, they describe the development of social realities: As humans grow and learn in a social environment, they inherit social institutions which are born out of human habitual behavior and reciprocal interactions based in these habitualizations. History plays a huge role in the solidification and “truth” of an institution. Of course, there is no proof to be found that supports the notion that humans are biologically hard-wired with institutions to prove it as empirical fact, but there is a reality of institutions that are imposed on every participant within a given society. Berger and Luckman explain that through transmission from one person to another, institutions are learned and experienced as objective reality, no different from objective truth of natural phenomenon. Ultimately, the reality of institutions, a powerful external reality imposes itself on the individual in such a way that “he cannot with them away…they resist his attempts to change them…they have coercive power over him.” The most important points that the authors leave with us are three: Society is a human product, society is an objective reality, and man is a social product. Vygotsky’s thesis is similar: In attempting to resolve the “crisis in psychology” to reform the psychological and cognitive sciences, he postulates that individual development is dictated in large part by his social and cultural history. “Behavior can be understood only as the history of behavior,” and not in isolation.
Students at Sherman Institute, 1919. Courtesy Sherman Indian High School, Riverside CA.
1 comment:
I love the first part, on Berger and Luckman. Would you agree that "society is an objective reality"? I am also glad that you picked-up-on the historical dimensions of culture and learning here. Few things in this course are probably as important as that. There are multiple layers of interlocking histories to consider: biographical, familial, and various layers of social-cultural life that have their own histories. All learning is constructed within these processes. Now, the reading on Peirce that you did not mention (frustrating?) also reveals this dimension of time/history. All our cognitive understandings are possible only through the use of signs. All signs's meanings to various individuals are constructed through our histories--though the social construction parts have to interact with the ontological facts of our breathing, aging, perceiving bodies existing in a materiality we might construct in our imaginations but cannot reduce to our perceptions alone. This is where the course positions learning and offers you the challenge of contemplation on it: learning is a category of human relationships that socially and bodily inevitable and through it's entropy and its reproduction, learning generates cultures and cultural change over time (history). Now, how might such ideas--hypothetically--effect how we might understand what goes on in educational institutions? :)
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