Quotes 5

"The difficulty with the exoteric argument of Illyich - as with so much of modernism - is that it confuses experience, in all its diversities, with knowledge. Experience has to be made conscious, and this is done, as Dewey remarked, "by means of that fusion of old meanings and new knowledge that transfigures both." 'Knowledge' is the selective ordering, and reordering of experience through relevant concepts. (Situational) Reality is not a bounded world, "out there", to be imprinted on the mind as from a mirror, or a flux of experience to be sampled for its novelties according to one's inclination (or its relevance for "me"), but a set of meanings organized by the mind, in terms of categories, which establishes the relations between facts and infers conclusions.

Nor need there be, in principle, a contradiction between a cognitive and an aesthetic mode in which, as alleged, the technocratic orientation is concerned only with the functional and the adversary culture with sensibility - much as this may be true in sociological fact. In the very nature of knowledge, as Dewey observed, there has to be an interplay between the two: the cognitive makes the variety of experience more intelligible by its reduction to conceptual form; the aesthetic makes experience more vivid by its presentation in an expressive mode. The two reinforce each other in a singular way.

What has to be common to both is a reliance on judgement - the making of neccessary distinctions and the creation of standards which allow one to sort out the meretricious from the good, the pretentious from the enduring. Knowledge is a product of the self-conscious and renewable comparison and judging of cultural objects and ideas in order to say that something is better than something else (or more complex, or more beautiful, or whatever the standard one seeks to apply), and that something is truer. Inevitably, therefore, knowledge is a form of authority, and education is the process of refining the nature of authoritative judgements. This is the classic, and enduring, rationale of education.

But to this is added a special burden of the post-industrial society. One need not defend the technocratic dimensions of education - its emphasis on specialization and vocationalism - to argue that schooling becomes more necessary than before. By the very fact that there are now many more differentiated ways in which people gain information and have experiences, there is a need for the self-conscious understanding of the processes of conceptualization as the means of organizing one's information in order to gain coherent perspectives on one's experience. A conceptual scheme is a set of consistent terms which groups together diverse attributes of experience or properties of an object, in a higher order of abstraction, in order to relate them to, or distinguish them from, other attributes and properties. To see what is common and what is different about modes of experience, is the function of education. And just as the resolution of identity crisis for individuals is the amalgamation of discordant aspects of growing up into a coherent whole, so is 'knowledge' an organization of experiences, tested against other patterns of experience, in order to create consistent standards of judgement.

The function of the university, in these circumstances, is to relate to each other the modes of conscious inquiry: historical consciousness, which is the encounter with a tradition that can be tested against the present; methodological consciousness, which makes explicit the conceptual grounds of inquiry and its philosophical presuppositions; and individual self-consciousness, which makes one aware of the sources of one's prejudgements and allows one to re-create one's values through the disciplined study of the society. Education is the "reworking" of the materials of the past, without ever wholly surrendering its truths or bending to its pieties. It is a continuing tension, the tension between past and future, mind and sensibility, tradition and experience, which for all its strains and discomforts, is the only source of maintaining the independence of inquiry itself. It is the affirmation of the principle of intellectual and artistic order through the search for relatedness of discordant knowledge."

Daniel Bell