Deming philosophy in educ LO8993

Marion Brady (mbrady@digital.net)
Fri, 9 Aug 1996 07:19:31 -0400 (EDT)

Replying to LO8937 --

If said,

"I agree (with) so much of your message. Worth you coming back to
say it. One bit of logic I do not follow:

" EVERY SOCIETY HAS A MODEL OF REALITY--etc.

"As I read that it is saying that the optimum design for study is
the one that explicitly perpetuates the model of reality . . . (snip)
"Should we not be helping people to discover how to reveal and
question the underlying models? Sorry what have I missed?"

Yes, we certainly should, which is perhaps the strongest of all
possible arguments for my approach.
The version of our (at least Western culture's) model of reality
that I try to help students bring into consciousness--move from the
implicitly-known to the explicitly-known--emerges on paper as a mere
category system. The content of particular categories is "filled in" as
the ways of acting and thinking various societies are studied.
For example, one of the model's sub-categories indicates that all
societies have particular configurations of ideas about "the self." This
self sub-category, in turn, has sub-categories having to do with
attributes of the self--its nature, value, structure, stages, rhythms,
cycles, and so on. That's as far as the model goes. It's a conceptual
framework which, taken, say, to the dominant culture here in America,
yields certain responses, taken to England yields, in some cases, slightly
different responses, and taken to Java or Somalia yields, in some cases,
rather startingly different responses.
The model serves, first, the essential function of telling the
student that there are indeed alternative ways of viewing the nature,
value, structure, etc. of the individual (inherently evil? good? neutral?
of infinite worth or of only instrumental value? a single integrated whole
or composed of three loosely-related parts--body, mind, spirit, passing
through many stages of life with varying roles or only three or four,
etc).
Second, it facilitates a comparative study of some of those
alternatives. (To keep study manageable, I suggest that all students
study their own society (for most students around here, that'd be the
dominant Anglo-American society), any societies or sub-societies with
which they interact personally (around here, that'd probably be
Cuban-American), societies with the obvious potential for altering their
futures (China's power elite?) and one or two societies that demonstrate
the range of ways it's possible to be human (Hopi?)
Third, it makes the systemic nature of human experience abundantly
clear. Students can easily see, for example, that a "future" time
orientation" underlies middle American social institutions and behavior,
while a "present" time orientation underlies many of the institutions and
ways of acting of America's long-time poor (and long-time rich). And they
can see that, given the nature of other aspects of these sub-societies,
their respective time orientations are both understandable and functional,
even if they are often in conflict and make each other's behavior
irritating or unexplainable.
I think it's apparent that, rather than freezing a particular
model in place, what I'm advocating is nothing if not liberating, moving
students, as it does, from mere "knowing," to "knowing what they know,"
and suggesting alternative ways of knowing.
To those who for whatever reason react negatively to all this, I'd
remind that I didn't invent it, that I'm merely calling attention to the
fact that imbedded in our language and thought is a particular way of
segmenting reality (in essence, "who, what, when, where, why?"), and that
that way of slicing reality up for detailed description and analysis is
whole lot simpler and natural and a more useful way of modeling reality
for the purpose of general education than are the traditional academic
disciplines.
(Incidentally, IMHO, that same model is applicable to learning
organizations.)

Marion

<mbrady@digital.net>
http://ddi.digital.net/~mbrady

-- 

Marion Brady <mbrady@digital.net>

Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>