Borderland

Maxine Greene’s Teacher as Stranger was written for teachers who want to look beyond slogans and conventional beliefs about education in order to discover what is demanded of us as we engage in the work of shaping human consciousness. The book was written over 30 years ago, but the questions Greene posed are strikingly apropos in our present time as calls for educational reform become increasingly shrill.

It is to become clear as well about the preferences with respect to “good” and “right” which motivate pressure groups, bureaucrats, community representatives, and parents when they make demands of the schools. What teacher today can ignore the contesting notions of relevancy, appropriateness, value? What teacher can escape the challenges and complexities of decision making in the midst of a not-always-friendly world? (Greene, p. 7)

She argued that teachers need to become aware of our taken-for-granted views about human beings so that we can evaluate the effects we produce as we intervene in the lives of our students.

…there is a whole spectrum of visions, with man as animal at one end, man as paragon or god figure at the other. At each point in the spectrum, there is a distinctive approach to education, usually derived from a definition of man or a definite vision of man-in-the-world. Most of these approaches share the conviction that no matter how sacred the child or how close to the divine, something specific has to be done to enable him to become a true human being-to enculturate him. (Greene, p. 71)

Artichoke responded to a comment from me in which I suggested that our definitions of human beings might impinge on what it means to teach and to learn, and she captured the issue with imaginative flair, pointing to a story by Terry Bisson, They’re Made Out of Meat.

This was coincidental with my return from a fishing mission to Chitina where Alaskans can net 30 salmon from the Copper River to fill the family freezer. Standing on a canyon rock above a boiling glacial river holding a long-handled net, hands and feet covered in blood and slime will provoke thoughts about mortality and the “meatiness” of beings. I was scraping bugs off my license plate and washing the grit from my truck after getting home when I noticed the slogan, “The Last Frontier,” on the plate. It may have been a frontier for some people in the previous century, but I believe the boundary has moved.

Artichoke sees herself as cyborgian as she uses her computer to record her thinking, and she asks

Is Doug right? Is part of the disquiet over learning in schools simply that some of us want learning experiences, and success criteria, suited to the behaviours of “cyborgian machines” and others are hanging on to the hope that we are still “sentient meat”.

I believe that it may not be “simply,” a divergence between two competing conceptualizations of humanity. There are probably other possibilities, but I suspect Artichoke has identified the extremes. I’d been thinking the issue over a bit, and felt that I’d made some progress with it until I ran across the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Commentary by Ray Kurzweil, Embracing Change, where he moves the cyborg imagery a little closer to center of things. Kurzweil speculates that within 30 years

“nanobots” – robots the size of blood cells – will keep us healthy from inside, indefinitely extending human longevity. These nanobots will also go inside our brains through the capillaries, and interact with our biological neurons.

And Kurzweil asks, “Will we still be human?” So there we go again, and I’m left having to consider this notion of techno-personhood when I’ve got enough problems untangling the mortal mess we’ve got with the biological beings on hand now. And I am compelled to wonder, “How, or what, do we teach cyborgs?” We should probably begin working on an answer to this question soon.

The last frontier, despite what it says on my license plate, is undoubtedly the boundary of what we mean by “human nature.” Our discoveries in the world will ultimately tell us new things about ourselves as beings. Teachers don’t need to decide once and for all about the essential qualities of human nature in order to proceed with their work because it is an open question with many answers that depend on circumstances. As we intervene in students’ lives we should be conscious of our doing so, and remain mindful of the beliefs that inform our decisions. Ours is increasingly a job that demands circumspection and deliberation because we can’t assume that traditions or conventions will hold meaning in a future that is up for grabs.

Even our assumptions about the usefulness of literacy may be out of line. Whose literacy will we teach? Ours, or one that is yet unknown? What is necessary is to try to determine how to best help people orient themselves to the society they live in and to create themselves as beings, to explore their potentials and to dream, not choosing what to become, but how to be.