| From: | DAVID FRANK <davidafrank1948(at)yahoo.com> |
|---|---|
| Date: | Fri, 4 Apr 2008 06:50:17 -0700 (PDT) |
| Subject: | Re: [WDDM] Democracy in progress: at which speed rate? |
Good morning, friends in Democracy.
For those of us who think of the progress of Democracy - in any of
its forms - that it is too slow, I'we prepared the following document.
Sorry for cross-posting.
yours as usual,
antonio
------------ Democracy in progress: at which speed rate? -------------
Last week I and three education officials met as a board to plan a “Parents Project”. Our aim was to increase parents' shared awareness and discussion among themselves and the kindergarten and primary school teachers about the best educative practices both inside the family and at school.
We noticed that parents — and people at large — are very reluctant to take upon themselves the aware responsibility for deciding and adopting educative practices and models, as if education policies were an institutional task of schools only. Very simply, parents don't want to attend public meetings where they are invited to discuss such problems and to share actively in deciding policies. Actually, they passively delegate to professional education authorities this decisive task. This fact prompts my role as a democracy activist.
Let me remark that people's reluctance to take direct responsibility for socially relevant parenting decisions is the same reluctance I have noticed to take on direct responsibility for politically relevant decisions and policies. At least, I notice among Internet discussions on Direct Democracy the same avoidance of the problems of Democracy. People escape Direct Democracy principles and much prefer being directed by the lords and experts of Representative Democracy. Actually, they avoid the political questions raised by Simpol — www.simpol.org - and dislike to adopt the Simultaneous Policies pledge, at least in my country.
In that first meeting the four of us agreed to prepare a letter to inform parents and teachers about the reasons for our “Parents Project”. I, no Education official, was invited onto the board because the others knew of my “Dialectic Education” theory project and took it as a starting point. As many of you may know, my DE project offers parents a technique for raising reasonably autonomous, flexible children, concentrating on their first three years — before schooling, while parents are still the only teachers. (the DE theory is described by Mirek Kolar at:
http://www.world-wide-democracy.net/common/education_for_dd.html —,
and the presentation I made at the CMS, India, is available at:
http://www.world-wide-democracy.net/common/Antonio.Lucknow.ptt
One of the education officials thus said:
...
“Today's education models at parents' disposal are countless. We must consider all of them as equals, all at the same level, without any forecast preference for this or that model, if we want to address every parent in a fair peer-to-peer relationship.”
I am familiar with this argument. I have discussed it several times through some democracy mailing lists — not so successfully still, I must confess — while trying to present my DE parenting model. This model aims to prompt people to share in discussing and applying democracy issues, starting from the Family where basic, largely unconscious principles and practice of democracy can be first built inside children's — future citizens' — minds. So I've trained myself to express my DE topic with more and more clarity, and am taking this opportunity to expose this matter to democratic lists, hoping to be more successful than in the past because of the increased clarity.
The essential premise is: a Parenting Project wanting to make parents and teachers informed about Education problems unavoidably performs “communication”. Thus it is useful, for logical consistency, to refer to the concepts expressed by Paul Watzlawick in his "Pragmatics of Human Communication", a book which many of us are familiar with.
With this in mind, we must account every time in which an interpersonal relationship happens, to be an act of communication (see P.W., 2.2, The Impossibility of Not Communicating). This act, in every teacher-pupil relationship and moreover in every parent-child relationship, becomes a reference model which children are bound by nature to look at, and follow: if not only, for reasons of familial and cultural emulation. In this sense, the educative models we “communicate” every day are countless and must be all taken into account at the same logical level.
The next step is to consider how all these models can be applied mainly by us parents and for which educative aim. So we enter the next logical level of meta-communication and of meta-models: — to wit, that of a “class” of models”. Accordingly, the novelty of my Dialectic Education theory consists in identifying two distinct classes of behavioral-educational models:
-- Class of models tending to incline children to a greater or lesser extent towards the rigid and absolute consensus, which I have called for convenience the “Fundamentalist Model";
versus:
-- Class of models tending to incline children towards autonomy and dialectical participation, which I have called the "Democratic Model".
I have stressed the political relevance of this matter in some writings of mine, namely “Fundamentalism or Democracy: which Education Model?” freely available at:
http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/rossin08.htm
and, with a scientific terminology: “From Einstein’s Relativity to Family’s Dialectics”, at:
http://www.flexible-learning.org/eng/einstein.htm
The novelty of the "Dialectic Education" proposal consists in informing people, especially parents, about the existence of these contrasting classes of models and the know-how for parents to distinguish between these two educative options. This information should enable them to awarely and responsibly choose their own prevailing parenting style.
These two educative options, Fundamentalist and Democratic, are not simple communication issues of family policy, but meta-models, i.e., classes of models that have social- and political relevance. Those of us who are responsible for educative and/or political information cannot assess them in the same way, that is, in the same logical level of all other communication issues of parent-child relationship which the child — future citizen - looks at as a basic model for her approach to society and democracy. Indeed, if the distinction between the different logic levels is not respected, we inevitably run into confusion and paradoxes (P.W., 6.2): and such an unfortunate event does not seem the much hoped-for new formula or paradigm for WDDM (Worldwide Direct Democracy Movement) activists who try to make effective information (education) about Direct Democracy and democratic issues such as SP. It would be as if the Simpol activists took the policy of adopting SP to be equal to the countless policies the SP adopters should decide about by voting when the time has come — which approach looks plainly absurd.
Plainly, both the “policy” of adopting Direct Democracy and that of adopting Simpol must not be accounted among the policies which DD and SP — their adopters, respectively — are called to decide about by voting. It was Bertrand Russell who first exposed this kind of logical fallacy, through the introduction of his theory of logical types. Very briefly, the theory postulates the fundamental principle that, “whatever involves all of a collection must not be one of the collection” (A.N. Whitehead and B. Russell, Principia Mathematica, 3 vols., 2nd ed., Cambridge University Press, 1910-13).
In conclusion, there is no doubt that the activists of Democracy — be it DD or SP, it doesn't matter — are more or less scientifically concerned with the people's behaving, i.e., whether the voters adopt Direct Democracy instead of being ruled by Reps, whether the voters adopt SP or not. To look at the results, there is some doubt, however, about whether these concerned Democracy activists are able to face their task at the appropriate logical level. In his 1964 essay “The Logical Categories of Learning and Communication” (in Steps to an Ecology of Mind, the University of Chicago Press, 1972) Gregory Bateson wrote on this matter: “Insofar as behavioural scientists" (let’s agree, Democracy activists should be such, if they really want to accomplish their task successfully) "still ignore the problems of Principia Mathematica they can claim approximately sixty years of obsolescence..” To date, those sixty years have become a hundred: how long will they still fall short?
by A.R., 01 April 2008 -
(English editing thanks to D.E.)