Unity-N-Diversity is tackling this topic just as I did at NHEN beginning five years ago. I had progressed from the old legislative email list to the forums. I started a thread titled, “Individualism versus institutionalism” but as you’ll see reading through these notes, a homeschool dad persuaded me to change the “versus” to be less exclusionist in my language, and change my thinking to match.
NHEN.org Legal & Legislative Forum
(choose “printer-friendly” icon if needed, to read whole file)
Topic author: JJ Ross
Subject: Individualism and Institutionalism
Posted on: May 02 2005
This thread is to consider individualism and institutionalism — understanding how the tension between them has affected public perceptions of home education, the resulting political/legislative environment, and what it suggests for the future.
This topic arose on Kay’s HS legislative watch list and is being expanded here to be as broad and/or detailed as the participants care to make it. JJ
From 2002 on NHEN’s original legislative list:
“Public schooling in practice today is a socialist collective. Home
education is an individual repudiation of that collective. Every debate among us homeschooling individuals seems to rest on this tension between the claims of the collective and the yearning for self-determination — for ourselves AND our own children.
No wonder home education is viewed as such a threat by collectives
like unions and government bureaucracies, who perversely claim they can strengthen and support individuals by subsuming them.
. . . Maybe the real issue is not homeschooling versus
e-schooling, but community versus collective. . .”
It just occurred to me this topic’s elephant in the living room may turn out to be “church” —
personal faith is individual while organized religion is institutional.
So, is anyone balancing personal faith and organized religion within their homeschooling already coping with this tension between individualism and institutionalism?
What could we learn from that?
*************************************
In news coverage of the Schiavo case, one story detailed its individual versus institutional tensions, and even showed them reversing position over time. I wonder if the personal and institutional tensions in education are having a similar reversal, from similar influences:
* involvement with a “cult of experts” who may not agree between
themselves or with family members, and whose professional interests can
conflict with individual or family interests,
* mistrust of strangers and large, impersonal institutions;
* subjective personal standards of morality, pragmatism and respect for
human life and dignity, coupled with a sense that one’s personal views
are too important for “compromise” of any sort;
* lay people latching onto complex (or misleading, even purposely false)
ideas and information spread across the Internet, ideas and information
fiercely held beyond all reason;
* the pendulum-swing nature of institutional change and public opinion;
* the rule-making, objectifying, standardizing thrust of government in
even the most personal, private human decisions;
* and as always — love and money, of course.
by Pam Belluck
BOSTON, March 26 – For years, when families and hospitals fought over
how to treat critically ill patients, families often pressed to let
their loved ones die, while hospitals tried to keep them alive.
But in the last decade or so, things have changed.
Now, doctors and ethicists say that when hospitals and families clash,
conflicts often pit families who want to continue life support and
aggressive medical care against doctors who believe it is time to stop. . .
**************************
“You can’t be a sweet cucumber in a vinegar barrel.”
Too much to summarize or excerpt – Stanford psychologist details how “place” can win over “person” through concepts like institutionalization, escalating dehumanization, stress and stereotyping, the seduction of boredom, the evil of inaction and much more.
Hard to read. Important ideas that do seem to apply.
********************************
Jeanne wrote:
We are deviant. We tend to deviate as individuals by not participating in this enormous social institution. However, there is also a concept of positive social deviance, and that’s how I see homeschooling.
A third-millennium book this brings to mind is “The Deviant’s Advantage” by Mathews and Wacker.
I’ve written about it before at NHEN (I’ll look around) and included it in our Thinking Parent Resources at the PDE website. The authors use this definition of positive deviance:
“Deviance is nothing more than marked separation from the norm, and it is the source of innovation, the kind of breakthrough thinking that creates new markets and tumbles traditional ones . . .”
That book came out in 2002, but the new Daniel Pink book says the same thing and in more poetic, developmental language imo — “A Whole New Mind” says in the flyleaf that it’s all about “what it takes for individuals AND organizations to excel.” Then just this week, there’s a national surge of emphasis on the same point, that the future belongs to those who think for themselves, who look ahead to innovate individual answers and create new meanings, rather than those well-trained by hidebound, standardized institutions (be they schools, employers, or governments) in regurgitating a codified piece of any past.
Newsweek’s current special report says our children’s future will be “China’s Century”, and how American schools can’t adjust but some enlightened families and individually motivated students are rushing to prepare. Even China itself is innovating rather than following traditions and old ways — its most powerful cultural export right now isn’t Confucianism or communism. It’s the movies, and it’s not the old chop-sockey stuff either.
Chinese and Asian cinema hybrids now are deviant, multiculturally diverse and open in some very influential ways. Hollywood has been cross-pollinated and neither the studio system or the governments involved matter much in determining how it will all turn out, nor could they prevent it.
Then Tom Friedman’s column in the New York Times this morning refers to how individual students can “positively deviate” from schools and universities while enrolled, without trying to change the institutions in any way. (He got to thinking about all this on his latest book tour for “The World is Flat: The Wealth of Yet More Nations”):
. . .there’s a huge undertow of worry out in the country about how our kids are being educated and whether they’ll be able to find jobs in an increasingly flat world, where more Chinese, Indians and Russians than ever can connect, collaborate and compete with us. In three different cities I had parents ask me some version of: “My daughter [or son] is studying Chinese in high school. That’s the right thing to do, isn’t it?”
Not being an educator, I can’t give any such advice. But my own research has taught me that the most important thing you can learn in this era of heightened global competition is how to learn. Being really good at “learning how to learn,” as President Bill Brody of Johns Hopkins put it, will be an enormous asset in an era of rapid change and innovation, when new jobs will be phased in and old ones phased out faster than ever.
One ninth grader in St. Paul asked me, then “what courses should I take?” How do you learn how to learn? Hmm. Maybe, I said, the best way to learn how to learn is to go ask your friends: “Who are the best teachers?” Then – no matter the subject – take their courses. When I think back on my favorite teachers, I don’t remember anymore much of what they taught me, but I sure remember being excited about learning it.
What has stayed with me are not the facts they imparted, but the excitement about learning they inspired. To learn how to learn, you have to love learning – while some people are born with that gene, many others can develop it with the right teacher (or parent).
Don’t you LOVE that?! Learning is an individual spark, not an institutional requirement, and it passes person-to-person through authentic human relationships, not government mandates. What could say it better: “To learn how to learn, you have to love learning — many . . . can develop it with the right teacher or parent.”
. . .In short, our own institutionalism in the West may be a bigger threat to our children’s education and future than the rise of rival nations. The mantle of power we perhaps should worry most about losing may be neither money, oil, or military force. It could be instead the one thing we always assumed was uniquely American by divine right – the Power of the Individual.
***************************
Churches that arose out of the new testament era were eventually institutionalized by the help of the Emperor Constantine. As a result, a hierarchy was established and the rule and the governing power went out of the hands of the ordinary people and into the hierarchy. I think a similar comparison can be made in early American education as schools have become an institution, individualism has in many ways gone out the door.
Yes, good example of what I was thinking about personal beliefs versus organized church hierarchies. (Emperor Constantine also was an example of church and state combining to rule? Imagine trying to fight THAT off to keep your own individual identity!)
Another book I read recently is called “A Sideways Look at Time” in which the author suggests the Christian patriarchal church literally standardized and prescribed the structure of time — hours of prayer every day, days of worship every week, months of the calendar every year– to control not the clock but the people. The idea was that the much more humanly satisfying “wild time” of children and women made pagans ungovernable.
Lots to think about!
******************************
Paul D. wrote:
“This thread is to consider individualism versus institutionalism”
I should like to make a very strong plea at this point to drop the opposition of these terms. Most characteristics of human organisations and individuals involve a spectrum, and introducing that little word “versus” forces us to come up with a definition by exclusion, a partition into the groups of “individualists” and “institutionalists” (or “institutionalised”?).
We’ve already seen the harm this can do in the case of the definition of “home schoolers”. Thinking and arguing in this way not only distorts our perception of reality, it also tempts us to attribute benefits illegitimately to the group we favour, unnecessarily raising the temperature of the dispute.
Very helpful point, thanks Paul — changing topic heading now.
The spectrum (or spiral?) image is helpful too, as a much better way to understand complicated connections and contrasts.
I did choose the -ism suffix for a reason, to mean something that’s become a sort of dogma in itself. Like scientism is sometimes used to mean elevating science to a sort of worship or all-purpose imperative, beyond what’s rational or directly supported by science itself. Too much of one good thing to the exclusion of all others, perhaps?
In this sense, individual-ism and institutional-ism would indeed be opposing mindsets set against each other. Jeanne’s earlier point was that home education can get squeezed by that tug-of-war between -isms and (thus I inferred) that it helps to learn more about how this has happened with these particular two -isms.
So I’m thinking that while WE ourselves don’t want to set them against each other in destructive or limiting ways, we need to realize that it’s often done by others, and to examine how both individual-ism and institutional-ism have negative effects on our freedom (one word I’ve never heard morph into an -ism!) And maybe figure out more about where home education catches the most light on that spectrum of the individual and the institution?
If this just seems confusing or anyone has a better way to capture this meaning, please do! Read the rest of this entry »
If You’re Here Fresh From “Unity-N-Diversity”. . .
22 12 2007. . .then you need to read this first, from last spring right here in my capital city hometown where we’ve unschooled for almost 20 years. THIS is why homeschooling has problems, the kind of escalating problems that Unity-N-Diversity is broaching. If you can’t quite grasp what I’m saying here, do your homework, then maybe rejoin the conversation in a few years when you’ve earned your spot and some battle scars online. OTOH if you grasp it all too well but resent the hell out of it, hey! We’re finally communicating.
****************
Not sure when it happened, that the Trinity of God, Government and Guns took over again. I have been slow to notice, with all this gentle, loving, respectful and mannerly pretense that religious education is a private non-governmental realm of the spirit, not the State.
National Day of Prayer State Capitol Rally Thursday, May 3, 2007
Homeschoolers are invited to take part in this important day of prayer for our state and nation and participate in the children’s prayer walk. If older youth would like to help stamp prayer passports, please email — Volunteer time is from 10:30 am – Noon, report to the tent in the courtyard
Children’s Prayer Walk
Location: Capitol Courtyard
Time: 11:00 am-Noon
Emergency Response & Military Vehicles will be on display in the Courtyard as part of the Prayer Walk.
Each child will be issued a prayer passport to take to each stations and pray for the personnel. They can tour the vehicles as well.
National Day of Prayer Rally
Location: Capitol Courtyard
Praise & Worship: 11:30 am
Prayer Rally: Noon-1:15 pm
Governor Crist, Lt. Governor Kottkamp and other leaders will be taking part in the service.
We did have Easter at the Governor’s Mansion this spring– a very important holiday, said Governor Crist — but at least in the newspaper, his Easter Bunny gig played as a secular hospitality for a few Florida kids who might or might not have been Christian, a ceremonial family occasion and photo op, not associated with the state sausage-making of the Legislature down the street nor with public prayer walks on the Capitol Plaza.
And nothing to do with home education at all.
But now comes a special day for masses of children where the Governor himself will stamp prayer indelibly onto home education “passports”, and not on a weekend at his home but on a legislative workday at the Capitol, in front of all the lawmakers, not in a bunny suit but in his official governing suit and tie. Prayer flanked with tanks and guns for real action, followed by ambulances to mop up all the blood and waste, the way elephants are followed in parades. Talk about Power of Story!
God, government and guns. No wait, that’s not the sponsors’ exact slogan, let me get it just right, oh here it is: Governing Florida with Prayer and Action” which isn’t tricky to translate — “governing Florida” is plainly the dominion that their version of god’s will (prayer) commands them to exercise over the secular State and all our laws. And how will this be accomplished? ACTION. The spiritual realm translated into physical reality, warfare on every front in this world and time.
Resistance is futile?
I personally prefer this version but I digress . . .
The point is I get the meaning of the purpose and method. Dominion through warfare. But when it comes to the education this all represents, I have knotty translation problems.
Does mixing home education with military might — bringing the kiddos along to get their draft cards stamped, whoops I mean “prayer passports”, the better to learn how God wants them to govern Florida — just chill me to the bone? You betcha, particularly the same week as the much more directly child-protective lessons of National Spank Out Day! (which needs prayer and action too, but these folks had no Capitol rally for THAT, didn’t even acknowledge its existence. I doubt the Governor noticed either, or prayed for the kids against whom god is being invoked as commanding their punishment.)
Does this mean child beating has become both corporal and capital punishment?
Whatever happened to peace vigils and humble candlelight, praying for strength to endure, for guiding hands to heal, not hurt? This sounds like state-sponsored prayer for the strength to fight and win and take over! Read the rest of this entry »
Comments : 15 Comments »
Categories : Accountability, Bullying and control, civil rights, Cynical Stuff, Discipline-behavior, Dominionists, Ethics and Philosophy, God, Holidays, Homeschool Blog Awards, homeschooling, HSLDA, Human Networking, Identity, Institutions and Individuals, Intellectual and Academic Freedom, Intelligent Design Debate, Leadership, Liberal, Liberties and Rights, Literalism, Memes, organizational behavior, Partisan Politics, Election News/Commentary, Photography, Political Frames, Public Communication, Punished By Rewards, Rage, Reason, Religion, Research and Science, School versus Education, Separation of Church and State--the First Amendment, Socialization, The South, Thinking Parents, Unschooling, Vocational Education, Voting, War, What's In a Name?