MDDE613+Unit+6

U nit 6

Welton, M. (2005). Out of the margins, pp. 7-21; The discourse of the learning society in the twentieth century, pp. 22-43; Citizenship in the age of information, pp. 150-179; and The lifeworld curriculum: pathologies and possibilities, pp. 180-209. In M. Welton, Designing the just learning society: A critical inquiry. Leicester: NIACE.

Welton argues that, if adult education has a significant role to play in the 21st century, then some formidable roadblocks have to be confronted along the learning journey.

Adult learning, we are told, holds the key to the 21st century. //Designing The Just Learning Society// exposes the gap between the inspiring rhetoric of the learning society and the grim realities of wasted human potential littering the global landscape.

"The tour taken through the contemporary intellectual world reveals the impossibility of thinking about a just learning society apart from the power, greed and privilege of those who hoard the goods and skew the learning processes in the service of the money-code. Our modestly resilient hope that a just learning society is a realistic utopia lies with the recognition that human beings have the capacity for self-determination and self-expression. But the contexts within which we make our living, live our lives as citizens and express our uniqueness enables or constrains possible courses of action and ways of interacting with others."

He asserts that achieving a just learning society calls for collective action to transform organizational and associational life with the recognition that human beings have the capacity for self-determination and self-expression. Welton contends that the alleged emergence of a ‘knowledge society’ or a ‘learning society’ cannot be accepted as either new or good, and that ‘learning is not an essentially good thing…"


 * Chapter 1: Out of the margins, pp. 7-21;**


 * Chapter 2: The discourse of the learning society in the twentieth century, pp. 22-43;**


 * Chapter 7: Citizenship in the age of information, pp. 150-179;**

**Chapter 8: The lifeworld curriculum: pathologies and possibilities, pp. 180-209**

 * Learning Society**
 * the era of functionalist and cognitive-based criteria for measuring economic value of knowledge
 * while maintaining and sustaining cognitive values of magnifying the capacity of human minds and brains in reflecting and creating knowledge.
 * The system is impelled along its learning trajectory geared to instrumental-rational efficiency; whereas, social integration, in contrast, is symbolically structured. (link)
 * Functionalist**
 * A doctrine stressing purpose, practicality, and utility.
 * Cognitive-Based**
 * Having a basis in or reducible to empirical factual knowledge.
 * Instrumental-Rational**
 * in which entities are measured by their exchange value

The concept of the lifeworld

 * Lifeworld**
 * is the ground of our learning capacities as human
 * ordinary conscious //experience// of everyday life (the lifeworld)
 * the everyday world (lifeworld)–is the intersubjective world of human experience and social action; it is the world of commonsense knowledge of everyday life
 * is constituted by the thoughts and acts of individuals and the social expressions of those thoughts and acts (e.g., laws, institutions).
 * The life-world (and its phenomena) is regarded as the primary object for study by the human sciences. Describing what the life-world consists of—that is, the structures of experience and the principles and concepts that give form and meaning to the life-world—has been the project of phenomenology
 * The society is a //social construction// based on how individuals experience //subjectively// the life-world, how they interpret it by interacting and comparing their experiences with each others
 * The background rules, assumptions, and commonsense understandings that structure how we perceive the world and how we communicate that perception to those around us. This kind of primordial, pre-reflective knowledge hovers on the periphery of consciousness, a shadowy frame to all we think and do.


 * The lifeworld has both individual and collective dimensions, which will produce similarity and difference between students in terms of their experiences, ideas, values and beliefs. In the (likely) event of disagreement arising from the acknowledgement of difference, the task of mutual interpretation is to achieve a new definition of the situation that all participants can share. If this attempt fails, ‘one is basically confronted with the alternatives of switching to strategic action, breaking off communication altogether, or recommend seeing action oriented toward reaching understanding at a different level, the level of argumentative speech’ (link)


 * Historical materialism**
 * The part of Marxist theory maintaining that social structures derive from economic structures and that these are transformed as a result of class struggles, each ruling class producing another, which will overcome and destroy it, the final phase being the emergence of a communist society
 * **Materialism**
 * Always see the ‘material’ aspects of society as the most important [people making things (production), people working (labour), people acting on raw materials to make goods, humans transforming Nature for their use]
 * The ‘ideal’ elements of society are less important (morals and religion, culture)
 * **Historical**
 * looks at changes over time in material factors
 * social change produced by changes in material factors
 * Human history = changes in how people work & make things

Social evolution manifests itself along two axes of human learning:
 * one, an instrumental logic of learning how to find efficient (or successful) ways of producing and administering one's existence;
 * the other, increased potential for reflexive action in a rationalized lifeworld bound together through communicative processes. Increased reflexivity means that with the advent of modernity traditions are constantly questioned and revised. In all of his work, Habermas argues that the lifeworld is the source of human activity, connectedness and meaningfulness.

Habermas's ambitious (and often controversial) theory of communicative action assumes that post-traditional persons learn to adopt different attitudes toward corresponding worlds.
 * 'It is raining' refers to an objective world,
 * 'I have a headache' to the subjective world and
 * 'Abortion is morally wrong' to the normative world.

In some traditional cultures, for example, a statement such as `It is raining' is inextricably tied to the 'gods are blessing us.' For the experiencing subject, then, the lifeworld is 'constituted by interpretative patterns organized in language and handed down in cultural traditions'

Modernity not only uncouples the system from the lifeworld. It also produces separate institutional spheres (like formal schools for children and youth that originate only in the early nineteenth century) to
 * perform the work of making meaning (cultural reproduction),
 * stabilizing personal identities and solidarity (social reproduction) and
 * fostering individual skillfulness (socialization)

The lifeworld provides actors with narratives and vocabularies to orient their actions in and with the world and others. Actors make sense of their everyday world by drawing upon taken-for-granted funds of myths, sagas, sacred scripts, sentiments, common sense and science.

This stock of knowledge supplies interpretations as we come to an understanding about the objective world of natural things and processes, other people close to us and far away, and our inner selves. It also provides participants with norms to regulate their membership in social groups.

The lifeworld pedagogical processes produce the competences that enable actors to speak and act with confidence, resilience, verve and imagination, placing them in a position to take part in processes of reaching understanding and thereby asserting their own identities.

Perhaps each of these views captures a dimension of the ever elusive self.
 * The unitary view names the constancy of the 'I' even as time and circumstances change.
 * The relational self is sociologically credible. `I' am utterly dependent on the air surrounding me and the intricate web of relationships extending to the far reaches of the globe for my nurture, shelter, food and spiritual sustenance. (inter-subjective self)
 * The post-structural sense of the self captures the often distressing daily experience of conflicting passions, changing moods, uncalled for thoughts whistling through the mind, constantly shifting contexts and relationships


 * Post-structural practices** generally operate on some basic assumptions:
 * Post-structuralists hold that the concept of "self" as a separate, singular, and coherent entity is a fictional construct. Instead, an individual comprises tensions between conflicting knowledge claims (e.g. gender, race, class, profession, etc.). Therefore, to properly study a text a reader must understand how the work is related to his or her own personal concept of self. This self-perception plays a critical role in one's interpretation of meaning. While different thinkers' views on the self (or the subject) vary, it is often said to be constituted by discourse(s).
 * The author's intended meaning, such as it is (for the author's identity as a stable "self" with a single, discernible "intent" is also a fictional construct), is secondary to the meaning that the reader perceives. Post-structuralism rejects the idea of a literary text having a single purpose, a single meaning, or one singular existence. Instead, every individual reader creates a new and individual purpose, meaning, and existence for a given text. To step outside of literary theory, this position is generalizable to any situation where a subject perceives a sign. Meaning (or the signified, in Saussure's scheme, which is as heavily presumed upon in post-structuralism as in structuralism) is constructed by an individual from a signifier. This is why the signified is said to 'slide' under the signifier, and explains the talk about the "primacy of the signifier."
 * A post-structuralist critic must be able to use a variety of perspectives to create a multifaceted interpretation of a text, even if these interpretations conflict with one another. It is particularly important to analyze how the meanings of a text shift in relation to certain variables, usually involving the identity of the reader.


 * Structuralism**
 * was an intellectual movement in France in the 1950s and 1960s that studied the underlying structures in cultural products (such as texts) and used analytical concepts from linguistics, psychology, anthropology and other fields to interpret those structures. It emphasized the logical and scientific nature of its results.


 * Post-structuralism**
 * offers a study of how knowledge is produced and a critique of structuralist premises. It argues that because history and culture condition the study of underlying structures it is subject to biases and misinterpretations. To understand an object (e.g. one of the many meanings of a text), a post-structuralist approach argues, it is necessary //to study both the object itself and the systems of knowledge that produced the object.//


 * Human agency** (link)
 * Human agency is the capacity for human beings to make choices and to impose those choices on the world. It is normally contrasted to natural forces, which are causes involving only unthinking deterministic processes. In this respect, agency is subtly distinct from the concept of free will, the philosophical doctrine that our choices are not the product of causal chains, but are significantly free or undetermined. Human agency entails the uncontroversial, weaker claim that humans do in fact make decisions and enact them on the world.
 * Structure and agency forms an enduring core debate in sociology. Essentially the same as in the Marxist conception, "agency" refers to the capacity of individuals to act independently and to make their own free choices, whereas "structure" refers to those factors (such as social class, but also religion, gender, ethnicity, subculture, etc.) which seem to limit or influence the opportunities that individuals have.


 * Moral agency**
 * a person's capacity for making moral judgments and taking actions that comport (to be in agreement) with morality. (link)


 * The Extra Reading written by the prof about Habermas**


 * Idealism vs. Materialism ([|link])**
 * Modes of explanation in social science, How is reality known?
 * How do people analyze the causes of social events and phenomena? What do they focus on in their discussions and how do they define major concepts? What sort of forces do they cite as more "fundamental" than others?

Suppose: A causes B
 * Example**
 * Idealist**
 * A is an ideal factor.
 * mental
 * spiritual
 * Idealists emphasize "ideal" factors. Reality is basically made up of spirit. Spiritual forces or people's states of mind are the most important factors to look at to understand society.
 * idealism is the belief that reality is to be found in the contents of our own minds.

Materialist
 * A is a material factor.
 * physical
 * environmental
 * economic
 * concrete
 * historical
 * Physical, environmental, economic, or concrete historical conditions are the most important factors to look at to understand society according to the materialist.
 * The theory that physical matter is the only reality and that everything, including thought, feeling, mind, and will, can be explained in terms of matter and physical phenomena. (e.g. love is only a chemical reaction.)

Synthesis of 1 and 2 with emphasis on 2 + the philosophy of internal relations || //The Materialist Conception of History//: "The production of the material means of subsistence and the economic development of a people forms the basis for the social and political institutions created as well as for the legal conceptions and ideology that arises.(Engels) ||  ||
 * Dialectical materialism (Marxism)

Many philosophies of social science try to avoid determinism or reductionism. These approaches are often called dogmatic or fundamentalist. > Determinism: A causes B and it could not be otherwise. > Reductionism: B can be completely explained by reference to A (with no left overs).

Idealism and realism are philosophical theories propounded by the two Greek philosophers [|Plato] and [|Aristotle], respectively. In a layman's language, idealism is a theory that professes that reality exists only in ideas. It also states that ideally, everything and everyone should be perfect and flawless. Realism, on the other hand, has a more practical approach of looking at things. Realism states that things and people should be accepted as they are, that is, with all their defects and weaknesses. Now that we know the basic philosophy behind the two theories, let's start a deliberate on "Idealism vs Realism" on various counts.


 * Difference between Idealism and Realism ([|link])**
 * Realists are basically conservative people who follow the conventions of the society and thus, are more secure socially. Idealists, on the other hand, are nonconformists who are most likely to revolt against the set norms.
 * Idealism is a theory of the futurists. While, realism is the theory, of the people who live in the present.
 * Idealists aim for perfection. They set high goals for themselves and others. They believe that humans have vast potential, which should be harnessed properly to achieve excellence. Realists, on the other hand, settle for mediocrity. Realists only aim for achievable targets. That is why, to expect something extraordinary from them is out of question.
 * Idealism is very impractical in today's world. Idealists are basically dreamers, who only look for a paragon and that too in the future. Since they are out of touch with reality, they are most liable to fail. Realists, on the other hand, are more grounded in reality and are better prepared to deal with the world around them.

> There are five basic philosophies of education namely idealism, realism, perennialism, experimentalism, and existentialism. Idealism is based on the view that students should be taught wisdom through the study of literature, history, philosophy, and religion. The focus is on making the students intellectually sound and moralistically right, so that they can serve the society in a better way. The teaching methods used are lectures, discussions and dialogues, that is, all the methods which stimulate the mind. Moral lessons are taught by giving examples of people from history. In short, the focus is on education of the mind through intuition and introspection.
 * Idealism vs Realism in Education**

> Realism, on the other hand, is based on the view that students should learn about the world and the universe by studying science and mathematics. The focus is on making the students understand that reality is in the physical world, that is, what we see around us. Realism emphasizes on providing factual information to the students and teaching them the laws of the nature. The teacher presents the subject very systematically to the students. There is a standard curriculum, which is taught to all the students. Moral lessons are taught in the form of certain rules, which all the students have to follow. Focus is on education through experimentation and critical, scientific thinking.

> A combination of realism and idealism and all the other philosophies is a prerequisite for teaching children effectively. Take the example of American schooling, which borrows something or the other from each of the above mentioned philosophies


 * False Consciousness**
 * a Marxist theory that believes people are not consciously aware of oppression and other detrimental affairs. The inability for a person to fully comprehend a situation for what it truly is. ([|link])

> Lifeworld relies on the use of language, and more specifically, discourse. In order to understand fully the components of lifeworld, Habermas says we need to ask ourselves what tasks or functions require language as this medium. Habermas identified three functions: > 1) We need language in order to arrive at mutual understanding of an issue. While doing this, the stock of cultural knowledge is both passed on and renewed. > 2) Understanding-oriented communication coordinates action and contributes to social integration and the establishment of relations of solidarity; and > 3) Language is the medium through which socialization takes place and is therefore instrumental in the formation of personal identity. > These three functions of language help to maintain the three structural components of lifeworld (1987, p. 137).
 * Lifeworld**
 * aka world of everyday life - the total sphere of experiences of an individual which is circumscribed by the objects, persons, and events encountered in the pursuit of the pragmatic objectives of living. It is a "world" in which a person is "wide-awake" and which asserts itself as the "paramount reality" of his life" -->
 * lifeworld incorporates community-forming processes that actively and passively shape it into a social world. (Scott, 1998, p. 55)
 * think of social constructing your own reality.
 * Lifeworld is a culturally transmitted and linguistically organized stock of interpretive patterns that sustains collective identity and is to be understood as a “totality of what is taken for granted” (Habermas, 1987, p. 132). System is the ordering of society including its economic and material functions. Society cannot exist as lifeworld alone; it must also have material reproduction to carry out and order the production, distribution and consumption of goods and services (Baxter, p. 52). Habermas’ system is concerned with material reproduction, such as the economy, corporations and administrative systems, as opposed to the lifeworld which is concerned with social reproduction. ([|link])
 * Lifeworld, the collective identity of an organization, is maintained and reproduced by discourse, namely, communicative action.
 * The lifeworld is not a private world; it is intersubjective. The fundamental structure of its reality is shared by the members (1987, p. 131).
 * Lifeworld is built upon and maintained by language. Through the background of lifeworld, our life together as a society is created and reproduced through a network of communicative action. ([|link])


 * Intersubjectivity**
 * Term used in philosophy, psychology, and sociology to describe a condition somewhere between subjectivity and objectivity, one in which a phenomenon is personally experienced (subjectively) but by more than one subject. (link)
 * How people jointly construct their social lives through interactions with others and their rules for doing so. (link)


 * Communicative Action**
 * In other words, communicative action is the process by which the members of community further reinforce their collective identify and undertake actions consistent with that identity. This goes beyond notions of a ‘corporate culture’ and includes common ways of understanding and meaning-making, common goals and purposes and non-coercive dialogue which aims to understand the other.
 * The concept of communicative action refers to at least two subjects who are capable of speech and action, and who establish, by verbal or non-verbal means, an interpersonal relationship (Eriksen and Wiegard, p. 36). Their aim is mutual understanding in order that they may be able to coordinate their actions. This is done in a linguistic process where each has the opportunity to present their respective interpretations of the situation to ascertain that they understand things in the same way (Habermas, 1984, p. 86). These interpretations will be presented as criticizable utterances which other participants may accept or reject as valid. Other participants can try to influence one another’s interpretations by presenting new criticizable utterances, always with a goal of arriving at a definition of an issue or situation which is shared by everyone and which is defensible. ([|link])

An actor is aiming for success in achieving some end, as opposed to communicative action, in which the actor’s aim is to build mutual understanding.
 * Strategic Communication ([|link])**

Two types of strategic action: Strategic action does not contribute to lifeworld, which is dependent on the relationships built through rational communicative action.
 * 1) open, where all participants are proceeding strategically and all are aware of this, and
 * 2) concealed, where at least one participant falsely believes all sides are acting communicatively (Baxter, 1987, p. 40).

> Participants pursue their individual goals under the condition that they can harmonize their plans of action on the basis of common situation definitions (1984, p. 286). There is, then, an interdependent and synergistic relationship between lifeworld and communicative rationality; lifeworld is dependent on communicative rationality which is oriented towards common understanding, and in turn, lifeworld provides the shared horizon which fosters communicative rationality.
 * Communicative Rationality ([|link])**

> Is concerned with material reproduction, such as the economy, corporations and administrative systems, as opposed to the lifeworld which is concerned with social reproduction. While the components of lifeworld are maintained by discourse, namely, communicative action, system is maintained by strategic action and guided by money and power (Habermas, 1987, p. 154).
 * Habermas’ System** ([|link])

> Habermas sees in modern society a tendency for lifeworld to be shunted aside by system. Purposive rationality, as opposed to communicative rationality, has extended beyond its natural borders. “Through this one-sideness, the project of enlightenment has entered into a self-destructive course, in which the spread of a life form based on instrumental and success-oriented reason is about to destroy its own social and normative basis” (Eriksen and Wiegard, p. 101). Habermas calls this the colonisation of the lifeworld by system.
 * Colonization of the lifeworld by system**

Scenerio: Women laying tiles in her garage. (link)
 * How she is laying the tiles may or may not be rational. She may do it in such a manner that she tiles herself into a corner and can get out or in such a manner that she can get out.
 * The "how" or the "way" is Communicative Rationality.
 * Now, if someone through a grenade into the garage and she continued to tile the garage, her action is not rational. How she lays the cement is still rational, but evaluating the action itself, one can see that it is not rational to continue tiling and this is Purposive Rationality.
 * There is a difference between evaluating the //way// in which a thing is done and evaluating the //action itself//.

> This colonization overtakes value-rational acts and replaces them with instrumental rationality: the person is now an object or resource to be used, and his or her acts are means toward a goal rather than laden with meaning and purpose in and of themselves. Rather than being concerned with the "means" of acts, this colonization is only concerned with the end, the telos of the act. (link)

> Habermas' theory about the colonization the life-world by the economic system points to the problem of the marketplace colonizing the academy, basic information, and news, entertainment, and government. Why do the corporations control the media, television, and radio, and have the right to brainwash people to become consumers? All the fragments of the former life-world are repackaged as market items. Techné subverts phronesis. The “means” subvert the ends. (Definition of phronesis: wisdom in determining ends and the means of attaining them. Phronein in Greek means to think.) Habermas’ praxis “recovers” the inherited life-world and rationally “perfects” it. Does a university turn out products? Is a university the same as a business, a company? Have students become products who have to sell themselves? Have things become ends in themselves, and human beings become disposable? Or rather the “totaling market” requires endless consumption. (link)

> Habermas means that concepts, values and modes of thought associated with the market have intruded into daily life to such an extent that individuals become increasingly unable to think–or act–outside the hegemonic system. Everything gets (re)packaged in market terms–that is, everything is (eventually) assigned a price. This impoverishes our world and our relationships, as if we eliminated words, images and gestures from our communication, and replaced them instead with number systems like binary or hex. More “efficient” and “precise”? Possibly. But can those qualities really be traded off against the powers of allusion, metaphor, and symbolism? (link)

in which entities can be measured on their own terms, and cherished for their own sake
 * value-rationality**

in which entities are measured by their exchange value
 * instrumental rationality**

The increasing dominance of instrumental rationality is linked to the process of modernity, and it not only “flattens” the world by reducing everything to its value vis-a-vis something else (usually money), but it reduces our own autonomy as humans. The life-world, by and large, characterized by value-rationality, begins to be eclipsed and absorbed in instrumental rationality, making persons become means to political and economic ends not in their interest, nor under their control. (link)

Some people have no real “autonomy” or “control” in the market system. According to Habermas, and to Kant, when you live in a world turned upside-down, where instead of socio-economic structures serving human needs, humans become subordinated to the systems, you have no means to mount an effective challenge. (link)

Habermas divides the political sphere into the
 * socially integrated public sphere, where our political opinions are created, and the
 * administrative system sphere, where the decisions are made (bureaucratic and power structures which ‘run’ our modern society and which are influenced by political parties and special interest groups) The basis for interaction in this sphere is not communicative action, but steering media (Eriksen and Wiegard, p. 8).

When lifeworld is colonized, the public sphere loses its rigour and its role in society, and we experience a loss of freedom. Individuals in society move from being citizens to being taxpayers and consumers. Colonization, therefore, has significant affects on the public and therefore the political sphere ([|link])

Public Sphere
 * a virtual or imaginary community which does not necessarily exist in any identifiable space.
 * the public sphere is "made up of private people gathered together as a public and articulating the needs of society with the state"
 * Through acts of assembly and dialogue, the public sphere generates opinions and attitudes which serve to affirm or challenge--therefore, to guide--the affairs of state.
 * In ideal terms, the public sphere is the source of public opinion needed to "legitimate authority in any functioning democracy"
 * The public sphere is an extension of the lifeworld in many respects;


 * The lifeworld is the immediate milieu of the individual social actor, and Habermas opposed any analysis which uncoupled the interdependence of the lifeworld and the system in the negotiation of political power. It is thus a mistake to see that the system dominates the whole of society. The goal of democratic societies is to "erect a democratic dam against the colonizing encroachment of system imperatives on areas of the lifeworld"

What characterizes modern society is that action within comprehensive areas, such as the marketplace and political-administrative systems, are relieved from the demands of justification which are otherwise implicit in the validity claims raised in communicative action. Instead, relatively autonomous systems of action have been developed and are coordinated through success-oriented behaviour typically expressed through profit and utility maximizing actions (Eriksen and Weigard, p. 86). ([|link]) (Like the women that keeps tiling the garage floor even when the grenade is thrown into the garage.)

Warning: Habermas says that society will inevitably disintegrate if we do not make room for actions oriented to reaching understanding, and operate with a lifeworld which is communicatively integrated and which establishes the necessary foundation on which system is built (Eriksen and Weigard, p. 86).([|link])

System is instrumental and functions through the steering media of money and power, attached to empirically motivated ties. Habermas calls the transfer of action from communicative to steering media the “technicizing of the lifeworld” (1987, p. 183). Even public administration has interchanges similar to the economy, with ‘citizens’ becoming ‘clients’, a clear correspondence to an economic, consumer-oriented model (Sitton, p. 77). The public sphere, lodged in the lifeworld, loses its ability to steer the administrative system, and instead, becomes steered by it. We move from being citizens to consumers. This erodes the public sphere. Habermas argued that the uncoupling of lifeworld and system alone did not cause this phenomena; colonization is the cause. ([|link])