Local Flavor March-April 2008 article: Growing More than One Garden by Pari Noskin Taichert:
http://www.santafe.com/articles/growing-more-than-one-garden
Please read this article and consider:
Education is a life-long process. It is not bound by the confines of university studies. University degrees are the necessary vectors in our culture by which we gain access to, and influence over, the broader conversations including environmentalism. Analysis of the lanuage currently, and potentially, in use to influence those conversations is vital to successful integration of lived experience and rhetoric skill in effecting that influence. But the foundational authority is conferred by lived experience in the subject matter at hand, by intimate knowledge of the world as it IS, not simply as it is described in texts.
We each have a responsibility to employ our expertise for civic benefit, to move beyond meeting our own immediate needs into the realm of betterment of our communities - locally and globally. I've fed my community, taught my community to feed itself (and still do), i've provided meta-knowledge and lived experience. I've made and spent piles of cash, grown my businesses, and consciously and deliberately provided tools and resources to my immediate community for years. I've met my action goals and checked off every item on my to-do list in life. What remains is to share my extraordinary experience with an ever broader audience, to cultivate the gardens of knowing beyond my own self, family, and local community, to make a lasting impact in the global garden. To make a difference that will be felt long after this little body becomes part of the garden itself.
Its a big garden, this world, with opportunities for growth and improvement increasing exponentially every day and with every iota of knowledge we create and nurture. The fact that each of us is here, now, demonstrates that we each have a role to play. We can each ask ourselves: what will my role be?
I agree that education is life-long and isn’t bounded by the university – and don’t really know anyone who would disagree. But I have questions about this assertion:
ReplyDelete“. . . the foundational authority is conferred by lived experience in the subject matter at hand, by intimate knowledge of the world as it IS, not simply as it is described in texts.”
“Foundational authority” according to whom? According to the majority of people generally? According to you? Also, you seem to be making a clear distinction between reality as a concrete thing (the world as it IS) and as represented in texts, but I would argue that these are hard to separate, and that one always informs the other. Whether we grow up intimately connected with the land or as removed from it as we can be, our perceptions of the natural world are shaped by cultural forces that rest on the lived experiences of those before us AND on iconic texts from Walden to The Waltons. Likewise, and as you point out, change occurs through actions that are both discursive and concrete. Both, though, not just one, make up the world as it is.
Tell me if I’m off base here, but I sense in your posts a priveliging of your own experience. Certainly a hands-on knowledge of the natural world is priceless, and gives you a certain level of authority that others who lack this knowledge simply don’t have. But when you divide the world into concrete reality and text (which I assume must be a lesser form of reality if it rises to the level of reality at all) and then use that division to claim that one is superior to the other, and that superior form just happens to be the form that you possess, I think that’s problematic. At this point, I think it starts to resemble religious rhetoric, in the sense that it’s a dichotomy that sets up an absolute claim of what’s good and what’s less good, and then defines the debate from there.
It’s true that even though I’ve done my share of manual labor, I’m more comfortable in a classroom than on a farm. But I would never assert that a knowledge of texts has some inherent superiority in the environmental debate to other kinds of knowledge. I might argue that a knowledge of texts is more useful for persuading certain audiences, and I would accept it if you claimed that hands-on knowledge is more persuasive to certain other audiences. But I don’t accept the broad value judgment that one conferrs “foundational authority” while the other does not.
wow, that's a lot to read into my comment - cool!
ReplyDeleteto clarify: authority comes, as I said from lived experience and not simply texts. by this I mean both, not one more than the other. no dichotomy here. its not balcak and white, its the synergy of full experiences and knowledge gathering.
i don't see it as "priviledging" when there is expertise involved. authority is conferred by experience. just as a freshly minted phd is considered less an expert than the tenured professor, lived experience in other fields DOES confer authority as well.
again, faundational auhtority is not conferred by either alone - its the synergy of multiple, and multiply-experienced modes of learning and experience that confer the authority that is felt, respected, and recognised by one's community.