Lemke Ch. 7 Critical Praxis - Education, Literacy, Politics
class notes:
legitimate and illegitimate power
letting children in - power - scaffolding - expert novice

19 -1
"An ecosocial system, including the human community and culture that
form an integral part of it, changes constantly, driving itself toward new
patterns of self-organization by its very efforts to maintain the old ones,
opening new regimes of possibility that could not have existed before it had
created earlier ones. Social dynamics is inseparable from ecosocial dynamics;
social change is the normal, and largely unpredictable, course for an ecosocial
system. Ecosocial systems seem subject to more rapid and radical changes
than ecosystems that do not have the extra feedback loops provided by human
cultural systems. Ecosocial systems are more complexly interdependent, more
capable of amplifying small changes into large ones than are ecosystems
where complex cultural meaning and value systems do not couple material
processes to one another in new ways."
19 -2
capacity for change?
"We do not know, perhaps cannot know, from our limited perspective
within an ecosocial system, just how close or how far the system may be at any
given time from the threshold for major change and reorganization. We do
not know which combinations of factors changing in which directions may
push us over into a new dynamical phase. We can examine the processes by
which change is resisted, however, the systematic social practices which tend
to maintain, preserve and strengthen the social status quo. We can attempt
to uncover how these processes work, how our discourses and other forms of
activity, the beliefs and values that guide and shape our actions, play a role
in minimizing the possibilities for fundamental social change."

"Few of us
believe that our society as it is today is as free from exploitation, coercion,
oppression and injustice as its own values demand it should be. Many of us
feel deeply the contradi<;:tions between social values and social practices.
History records that the writers of many other times and places have felt as
we do. Yet we still take our own values for granted. We blame social conditions,
we create theories of human evil, we define categories of adversaries ... we
do everything except see the problem in ourselves, in the core beliefs and
values that we have adopted from the cultural system around us."

"Critical praxis is a shorthand way of saying that we need to examine
ourselves, examine our own actions, beliefs and values to see how they connect
up to the larger patterns and process of the system of which we are part,
to understand how we are part of the problem in order to have any hope of
becoming part of the solution. Praxis is a somewhat technical term for practice,
for action that stands in a dialectical relation to theory; what we do
should lead us to change our basic theories about our role in the world, and
our theories should lead us to change the roles we play. (See the Postscript
for further discussion of the theory-praxis relationship.)"

praxis unstable

20 - 2
Ways we participate:
"We all participate in the processes of social control, the processes that
work to inhibit fundamental social change. We participate in them through
systems of beliefs and values, embodied in the discourses we speak, even to
ourselves, and through all the other forms of social activity, of material physical
action in the ecosocial world in which we engage. We do what we do, time
and again, because of what we believe, what we value and how we make sense
of issues and situations according to discourse patterns learned from our
culture. We believe what we believe, value what we value and use the discourse
patterns we do out of all those others also available in our culture
because of what we have done, the life events in which we have participated
-events in which we were caught up in the larger patterns of an ecosocial
system. We are what we have done, what we have experienced. We are complex
self-organizing subsystems of the greater ecosocial system, and like it we
are composed of processes, including ways of doing that have meaning :ln
our community. We participate in intermediate levels of organization within
the larger system, as members of various subcultures, differently positioned
in relation to each other and the whole."

20-3
embodiment:
"Those of us who come from middle and upper-middle class subcultures, who
identify with intellectual values, tend to resist thinking about socialization
and social control in terms of bodies at all, and certainly in terms of pain.
We would rather focus on verbal modes of control, on belief systems and
value systems, on ideologies and discourses, on the purely textual politics of
our society, but in an ecosocial system actions lead to change through linkages
to other processes, linkages that are both semiotic and material. We do
not, we cannot participate in processes of social control purely in terms of
the meanings of our actions. Their physical effects must also function in the
material ecosystem of the community."

Pain:
"To maintain and reproduce from generation to generation any patterns
of social practices that can be seen by some participants in them as unjust or
inequitable, even in particular individual instances, will require that some
people impose these patterns on others by coercive, material force. Causing
the deaths of those who resist the imposition of these patterns can be very
disruptive to the social system, at least locally. Inflicting pain, with the threat
of greater pain, is the normal basis of social control in Western society and
in many others."

Dominance - violence  - difference between teaching in midwest and Maine
"The belief and value systems, the discourses that construct them,!
which we have called specifically ideological (Chapter 1, and see Postscript)
tend to produce this less violent condition in a society. It is extremely difficult,
however, to exploit people materially without some of them sensing in
at least some situations that they are being expected to act in ways that do
not benefit them, or that benefit others more, or that, at this moment, they
simply do not want to go along with. The more common such events are,
the more likely it is that they will lead to alternative beliefs and values that
contradict the dominant ideology, that these alternative views will spread inr
the exploited segment of the community, and the more likely it is that the
rlomin::~nt oTmm will resort to force and violence to oppose them."

21.1
various types of violence

submission

Historical - women trying to get the right to vote (Lorton Prison - also reminds me of Rabbit Proof Fence- how unexpected it was to read of young women on the offensive
135
"The distribution of who suffers pain in a society is a reasonable index of
which social groups and categories are unjustly oppressed, and the dominating
groups may usually be identified by their use of power to prevent social,
cultural and political deviation or change that they do not see as being in
their interests."

literacy codes
136
The basic function of schools is to teach the literacy code, but that code
is generally taught in relation to specific, highly valued written texts (the
Confucian classics, the Vedas, the Torah, the Qur'an, the Christian Bible)
which embody dominant cultural values and socially useful knowledge and
discourses. In this schools only extend the general program of education: the
attempt to rear each next generation to embody the beliefs and values of the
last. The difference is that schools are not representative of the full diversity
of social beliefs, values, discourses and practices. They inculcate only those
of the dominant group: the mandarins, the Brahmins, the Pharisees, the
imams, the establishment elites. They do so not only through the texts they
venerate and promulgate, but through the methods of teaching to which
they require students to adapt.

 I need not repeat here the many analyses of how modern systems of
schooling tend to reproduce social inequity from generation to generation
(e.g. Bowles and Gintis 1976; Bourdieu and Passeron 1977; Willis 1981; Apple
1982). They do so most fundamentally by labeling students as more and less
successful at tasks for which the children of the dominant groups are better
prepared by their experiences before and outside of schools, especially their
language socialization ( cf. Heath 1983; Hasan 1986b; Hasan and Cloran 1990)
. and their comfort with the methods of instruction and general normative
'culture of the school. Students often resist the imposition of schools' beliefs
and values, but this only makes it easier for them ultimately to be labeled
unsuccessful
137
Age group domination
"In our own modern, culturally European societies, the dominant power
is held not by the oldest but by an age-group mainly in its fifties and sixties.
This group (in alliance with their younger client age-groups) disempowers
the eldest group by such devices as mandatory retirements. Ideologically
functional beliefs about the feebleness and incompetence of the elderly
buttress this dominance. The dominant group often manages to take over
control of the management of the wealth and resources of their elders, and
the phenomenon of the physical abuse of elders, often to obtain this control,
is beginning to receive more public attention."
Interesting...
"In Western society citizens in the age-group from about
12-13 to 18-21 are denied most legal rights and are de facto wards and
chattel in just the same ways, or worse, that women were before the twentieth
century, and peasants, serfs and slaves before that. They are denied access to
most gainful employment, do not have exclusive financial control of their
own property, do not have the right to marry, to make their own medical
decisions, to control their own education."

Wondering about emerging research in brain development
138
fictions of research - why is this a fiction - have a hard time accepting this group as being oppressed opposed to other groups of ANY age
139
Is this changing? 
"Young adults have only a trivial choice in the directions and forms of
their education in the schools. They are not even consulted in the construction
of curriculum. Curriculum is constructed by people whose lives and
interests are vastly different from the lived experience of most young adults.
If we believe, as most critical educators today do, that traditional curricula
are biased against the interests of women because they are made mostly by
men, and biased against the interests of non-European Americans because
they are mostly Eurocentric, then how can we not suspect that they are also
biased against the interests of young adults because they are determined
mainly by a dominant age-group which is patently oppressing them?"
I think engagement is more appropo

agreed -
"V\That would happen if young adults were free to direct the basic choices
of their own educations according to their perceived needs and interests and
their preferred methods of learning? Many of them would abandon schools
that they believe are doing them no good at all. Many more would demand
changes in the content of curricula and in methods of teaching. Many who
initially left school would eventually return, better able to articulate their
needs in relation to the realities of the larger social world of which they are
kept ignorant in many crucial ways by older adults."
Worked with kids going around the city - responded more fully

information technologies - have made changes? privileged - phone? not technology but access to social opportunity.
Also thinking about "unregulated spaces" - lots of cyber bullying - a whole lot of sexualization of those 11 and 12 year old girls...(interestingly, drops off around age 15). 
What happened to this movement? 
"The power of specific curricula to dictate the precise content
of a student's education will decline in proportion to this diversity. It is even
possible, and in my opinion highly desirable, that we will move away from the
overt domination of detailed uniform educational criteria of assessment and
evaluation and toward the logical implications of the 'portfolio' model of
educational assessment; each student's electronic portfolio of accomplishments
will be subject to many different evaluations for many different purposes,
and no specific certification credential will be required. (Cf. Lemke
1994d)"Texas textbooks!

140

age - development - looking for citations - juniors
I wonder if Lemke ever taught middle school? 

"By what right do parents impose religious beliefs on their children, or
political beliefs, or social beliefs? They do so by ancient custom, but what is
the ground of this custom, and what are its effects on the social system? The
right adults claim to control the curriculum students learn in our schools,
and the rights parents claim to veto this curriculum or substitute another
more to their liking, even when the majority of society agree that the change
may not be in the child's interest (as in the case of extreme religious groups,"
It's pretty hard not to do this - "unschooling" - love to play video games
141
"The social control of children's behavior, beliefs and values is the single
most significant means of inhibiting fundamental social change. If the developmental
trajectories of their beliefs and values were to diverge significantly
from those of the previous generation at a relatively early age, then the
ultimate degree of that divergence by adulthood could be very great indeed."
142
"to a much wider range of information, and perhaps eventually of points
of view, than they now get through home life and school curricula. If they
can exercise free choice to sample every cultural viewpoint that is offered to
them, to pursue any interest and curiosity, this will be likely to increase the
rate of cultural change. It will not suddenly free children from the culture
of their parents - that culture is too pervasively written into every aspect of
their environment - but it will certainly oiier a potent rival to school curricula
and to the authority of both teachers and parents (Rodas 1994; Lemke
1994d). I predict that adults will strive mightily to censor and control juniors'
and even young adults' use of these technologies, and that they will inflict a
lot of pain in the effort to do so. I hope they will fail, that the technologies
lVill be designed in such a way that it will be nearly impossible to narrowly
control access to points of view and types of information for anyone."
Really? Seems completely oblivious to the concept of cyberbullying

146
"I think it is important in these debates to recognize that the genres of
power both empower us and limit us. They are resources that we can sometimes
use for our own purposes, but access to them requires that we collude
to some degree with the dominant cultural systems that have spawned them.
Failure to master these genres provides the gatekeepers with an excuse to
keep us out of places we may wish to go; these genres are conduits for the
power of the dominant group to control our lives whether we master them
or not. Of course we should critique them even as we teach them, and we
should teach them on request and not by compulsion. We should point out
the options and flexibility in genre forms and how their elements form a
vocabulary that can become a potent resource for innovation. We should also
point out, however, that one must already have power and credibility to get
away with breaking their rules, and that to use their forms successfully as a
resource we do indeed need to participate, critically, in the full activity in
which they function.
Without a mastery of these genres the realms of science, mathematics,
engineering, medicine, law, economics and numerous other important forms
of social activity are closed to us, just as they are in fact closed to many of
those critics who belittle their importance."

Contextual learning

146
 The children of privileged and dominant social groups have long been
better prepared to pick up the necessary skills for reading and writing verbal-visual-
symbolic genres, and they are now becoming better prepared, thanks
only in very small part to school curricula, for the multimedia literacies of
the near future. If members of other groups wish to pass these gates and
obtain these forms of power, they will need far more help than they are now
getting. Even if our goal is to critique and change these forms of power, that
is far better done after having learned to understand them and how they
work, and far easier accomplished politically if those who practice them are
representative of the full diversity of our society rather than only of the subculture
of the presently dominant groups.

149
Discourses of democracy
"The modern discourse of democracy clearly shows its ideological origins
in this historic European struggle for power. Its notion of justice depends on
the concepts of individuality and equality. To be an equal is to be the same
as Us, those who had political power before you. To be admitted to the body
politic as a full citizen, you must behave and think like the dominant caste:
like a middle-aged male, like an upper-middle class northern European. You
must share their values and their beliefs."

"The discourse of democracy is profoundly anti-communitarian. It dissolves
the social order into a set of independent, autonomous, equal individuals
without regard for the communities through which individuals
construct their identities, learn their beliefs and values, or access power and
resources through social networks. It conceals the unequal power and resources
of the dominant subcommunity by denying the political relevance of
communities as such. It shifts the debate from one about the real inequities
between communities and categories of people to one about the equality and
inequality of individuals."
150
anti-diversity
claims - communities/ groups (solidarity)
151
"Communities are not defined by unity, by solidarity, by shared beliefs
and values. The system of social practices that constitutes a community is too
complex and diverse to be known to or practiced by any individual. The set
of social practices that defines a community is differentially distributed over
individuals according to age, to gender, to class, to caste, to subculture. Any
one individual enacts only a small fraction of the total system of practices
that defines the community. What makes a community is the interdependence
and interaction of these practices, both their functional integration and
their systematic conflict. vVhat makes a community is not homogeneity, but
organized heterogeneity, not the sharing of practices but the systematic articulation
of differences."

"This is not the view on which the discourse of democratic political values
is based. In this alternative view, individuals are not the natural unit of
society; social practices are. Social practices form integrated, or at least articulated,
self-organizing systems of practices which are distributed over individuals,
and which intersect in individuals who participate in them. Individuals,
accordingly, can participate in practices from different subcultures and
subcommunities, and even from historically distinct cultural systems. We are
permeable to cultures; we are not consistent, not all of one sort or all of
another. We are all hybrids, mixtures, and not nearly as well integrated as we
are supposed to pretend we are. Neither are cultures and communities the
pure types they are supposed to be. In so far as multiplex individuals participate
in them, cultural systems are also permeable to social practices, to beliefs,
attitudes, values and norms that came historically from other cultures
and communities."

multiculturalism - mosiac
152
post-democracy

"Beyond even the critique of democracy as the ideal solution to the
problem of human justice is the more radical problem of whether human
values in our own Western culture are proving themselves maladapted to the
survival of our species and the health of larger ecosystems to which we belong.
Centuries of humanism have put the interests and viewpoint of our
species at the center of the value universe, where we once placed immortal,
unhuman gods that stood for what is greater in our universe than ourselves.
Today American culture is struggling toward a post-humanist system of values
because we have begun to realize that we cannot rationally or morally place
human interests above those of the ecosystems on which our survival depends,
nor even on an equal level with them. Our cultural value systems must
adapt themselves to the overall viability of the ecologies of the planet."
complicated picture:
153
"My principal concern here is not with presenting alternatives to
democratic or humanist discourse, but with opening up the possibility for
analyzing and critiquing them. In politics, as in education, as in literacy, the
issue of central concern is how our discourses, our texts, mediate the meanings
that actions and events have for us, and so how we act. Discourses enable
and they limit. They play a crucial role in processes of social control. They
are critically linked to all the rest of our culturally meaningful, materially
embodied social practices, especially those by which we exploit the vulnerability
of human bodies to pain in order to control not only individual
behavior, but the rate and direction of social change."
154
play