Languaging and Democratic Knowledge

                We tend to think of knowledge as something that is transmitted.  This is especially true in school settings.  We assume an objective reality that we all share, and we assume we have the obligation to transmit what we know about that objective reality in school.  Maturana’s concept of ‘languaging,’ which I have written about earlier, cuts against these assumptions in some interesting and important way.  Languaging assumes that rather than a fixed and objective reality we constantly bringing forth a reality in the dynamic interchange we call culture.  In a languaging model of education, transmission is never a completely adequate description of how knowledge is created and shared.  In a democratic production of knowledge, languaging is a key component of describing how we make and share our view of the world.

                Even Maturana recognizes the need for transgenerational transmission of knowledge.  An autopoietic model of consciousness preserves the parts of the ‘background’, in this case cultural knowledge and protocols, that allow the members of a culture to coordinate behaviors with each other.  If every encounter were new and unscripted and every action was unprecedented and unknown, we would be in a constant state of anxiety and ignorance.  Without transgenerational transmissions, we would never develop the complex ways of being that characterize our world.  The issue is not that transgenerational transmissions shouldn’t happen, the issue is that they are only part of the knowledge making process.  An autopoietic view of our interactions also has to account for change, the part of the background that is being replaced or rearranged.

                The inevitable need to change, to adapt, must also be part of a democratic production of knowledge.  In traditional models, the change is controlled by elites and institutions who decide what gets preserved and what gets let go.  The hope is that some benign oligarchy of ‘experts’ is steering the ship in a prudent and safe direction, one that benefits the majority of the society.  As America has become less and less democratic, those elites have taken advantage of their role to steal the majority of the people blind and use our cultural institutions to insulate them from critique.  In the process, our role in bringing forth a world that we want to live in, one that conforms to our hopes and desires, or even just one that is environmentally sustainable, gets lost.  We need to think about how we use our institutional knowledge production to insure the role languaging plays.

                When children have to only learn what other people think they should learn, their minds are colonized in ways that make it hard for them to generate the energy and imagination it takes to bring a new order into being.  A nation of informed but uneducated and unimaginative people afraid of sharing the world with others leads to a collapse of democratic society.  We have educated our children not to participate but to spectate, and the result is a destruction of civic and democratic values and energy.  A real democracy needs the countervailing and dynamic postionalities that make a diverse and democratic society possible.  We learn about ourselves from interacting with others.  We learn about our world by seeing it through multiple sets of perspectives.  We learn about democracy by refusing to settle for one story.

                Life is dynamic.  Learning should be, too.  The saddest thing that happened to me every semester I taught was watching a new group of students trudge in and slump in a chair, already convinced that was about to happen was dead and deadening.  Some would revive, like hikers coming in from the cold, but many would not.  They didn’t want to play.  I assume at one point in their life they did.  I assume at one point they were the scared but excited kindergartener who couldn’t wait to climb on a bus and start a journey.  Their eyes told me that time was long past.  In a society where the 10%, the experts, make all the decisions, maybe the ones who still wanted to play will do.  In a real democracy, that’s not nearly enough.