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 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, 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 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 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.
- A PDF file of the reading text is attached
- To download any of the CU courses in PDF files please click here.
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