Education, Part 6
Everyday Life and Learning
The big prize that is ahead
of us in our studies, and which we are pursuing in this course on education, is
a method that would serve to lift the entire population, as it is, to a higher
and common level of revolutionary culture.
In this pursuit, we have
looked, among others, at Paulo Freire’s “Pedagogy of the Oppressed”, N F S
Grundtvig’s “Schools for Life”, the Cuban idea of the “Universalization of the
University”, and we have touched on McLaren and Fischman’s treatment of Antonio
Gramsci’s concept of “organic intellectuals”. We have read about “People’s
Education for People’s Power” and we have understood Lenin when he wrote that
all education is political, and that therefore “we cannot conduct educational work in isolation from politics.”
Jean Lave and her correspondents
(the Activity Theorists) have arrived at the same point as ourselves by various
routes. They present us with another glimpse at the prize that we seek. Simply,
Jean Lave claims to have studied empirically, and then understood theoretically,
some of the process by which education takes place, as it has always done, in
everyday life, throughout human history and pre-history.
There are educative
mechanisms in everyday life that serve to educate the people. Life is in fact a
process of learning. Schooling may or may not be educative, but schooling in
our class-divided circumstances leaves most of the people branded, in varying
degrees, as failures and rejects, and schooling has no good answer for the
unemployed and the excluded that it leaves behind.
For the first time in any of
its courses, the CU now recommends a video, which is of Professor Lave giving
her lecture “Everyday Life
and Learning” at her home University of California, Berkeley, on 26
March 2012. The lecture itself is about 50 minutes long and in this form it is
very easy to take in, and it is enjoyable.
The first of several
surprises that Lave presents is that in workshops where apprentices are
employed, no teaching takes place. Rather, the apprentices learn from being
there, and from living through the experience. The second surprise is that the
technical skills learned are only part, and are not the main part, of what is
learned. The apprentices are learning how to be. Lave explains this very well.
The attached text is redacted
from a lecture given by Dr Lave the previous year at the congress of ISCAR (International Society for Cultural and Activity Research),
when she was summing up the congress. In some ways the two lectures are the
same lecture, but the version given in the video is more accessible, while the
one given to her colleagues at the ISCAR congress in Rome in 2011 is more
exhaustive and more exhausting, but also more politically explicit. The lecture
is published by Mind, Culture, and Activity,
a scholarly journal for Activity Theorists.
What can we take from this?
Jean Lave’s theories and those of her colleagues have all-round revolutionary
potential. A starting point could be to exploit the way that these provide a
place from which to criticise schooling. These theories strip away schooling’s
claims of unique, exclusive power in education. These theories can help restore
dignity to processes that have been dismissed by the rise of schooling, or more
specifically, by the rise of schooling of the capitalist kind, under
capitalism.
As can be seen from the
attached text file, Jean Lave is not shy to make the connection between her own
critique and that of Karl Marx, citing the Third Thesis on Feuerbach in
particular. Lave also calls on the assistance of Gramsci and of the Gramscian
scholars of today.
This is Jean Lave’s non-sexist-language
version of Marx’s Third Thesis on Feuerbach:
“The
materialist doctrine that people are products of circumstances and upbringing,
and that, therefore, changed people are products of other circumstances and
changed upbringing, forgets that it is people who change circumstances and that
it is essential to educate the educator her/himself. Hence, this doctrine
necessarily arrives at dividing society into two parts, one of which is
superior to society. The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of
human activity can be conceived and rationally understood only as
revolutionizing practice.” (Marx,
1845)
Below are more resources
thrown up by the CU’s researches around Jean Lave’s work.
Lave lectures on video
http://www.uctv.tv/shows/Everyday-Life-and-Learning-23201
(the “Everyday Life and Learning” lecture)
Lave lecture in PDF
“Activity Theory” resources
Wikipedia
·
The above is to
introduce the original reading-text: Changing Practice, Jean Lave, 2012.
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