reminders from "A Relational World"

Recently I read the essay A Relational World by John McDermott where he discusses the implications on global culture derived from the work of John Dewey and William James.   The essay reminded me of the nudge Barry Lopez gave me from his essay Landscape and Narrative.  Lopez writes “One learns a landscape finally not by knowing the name or identity of everything in it, but by perceiving the relationships in it – like that between the sparrow and the twig.” This thought nudged me to Wittgenstein, who through a series of passages in Philosophical Investigations deconstructs the classic idea of an essence, (Plato’s chair in the sky) and replaces it with a family of relations.   McDermott cites James, who in 1909 (before Wittgenstein) wrote “Things are ‘with’ one another in many ways, but nothing includes everything, or dominates over everything.  The word ‘and’ trails along after every sentence.  Something always escapes.  ‘ever not quite’ has to be said of the best attempts made anywhere in the universe at attaining all-inclusiveness.”  McDermott summarizes James by saying “things, events hang together by relations, in a network which in the long run is empirically vague, no matter what proximate clarity we may attain.  Nothing can be fully understood by itself, for every experience we have reaches, potentially, every other perceivable aspect of reality.”

Later, speaking of Dewey, McDermott writes “Dewey also knew that the enemies of such growth (liberated individuals’ growth) were not simply errant or bad persons but more often the very way in which we construct our social, political, and educational institutions.” Citing Dewey he writes “To fill our heads like a scrap book, with this and that item as a done-for thing, is not to think… To consider the bearing of occurrence upon what may be, but is not yet, is to think.”

I think Dewey is implying that our institutions, such as public education, are rooted in Plato’s “Chair in the sky,” not as such relational processes that James, Wittgenstein, and Lopez speak of.  Witness the dominant approach to curricula of public education where working through a program towards standardized goals (such as a reading program) is considered foundational.   In such programs the anomaly, the vague student, are considered “statistically irrelevant.”  But, at the risk of stating an absolute, those students will always appear in any programmed form of learning.  It would be an anomaly if any program actually worked for every student.  Programming teaching experiences seems to me, to remove teachers from the lived moments with their students, they are not acting in the performative actual moment, but rather they are acting out someone else's theoretical approach.