Democracy or Fundamentalism: which Educational
Model? (1)
by Antonio Rossin - completed on 5 July 2007. |
|
| Original April 18, 2007 version available:
at http://www.flexible-learning.org/.eng/demofunda.htm
|
Foreword |
I’m no official educator having institutional
responsibilities. I consider myself
a common
parent only, having family responsibilities.
I had but a job as neuropsychiatrist,
and
as such I asked myself whether most
of my
patients’ sufferings could have been
caused
by their own rigid conditioned demand
for
consent – when this demand had been
unanswered.
I had also a job as a family practitioner,
and as such I often heard too many
desperate
parents asking me: “Doctor, what could
we
do, to avoid that our child…”
So it happened that I asked myself
for which
could be the role of parents to condition
the development of children’s personality:
either rigidly dependent on the leader
authority’s
consent, or independent, autonomous,
flexible.
The involved age is that from zero
to three
years of the child, when she is self-fixing
her brain network and parents are the
only
teachers. I wondered whether there
is a link
between the first learning of language
and
the self-fixing of the brain structure
of
the child where she processes her believing
and behaving procedures.
I asked averybody – teachers, pedagogists,
education academicians, writers, reporters,
thinkers and tinkers, for they could give
me a practical clue on how a common parent
could have performed his educative task with
the needed knowledge – thus with a chance
of control – towards the wanted goal: in
my case, towards the formation of the independent,
autonomous and flexible personality, able
to unite freedom and responsibility.
Alas, no one was able to give me any answer.
Then, I had to search for it myself, empirically.
There resulted a new educative line, which
I named “Dialectic Education”. I educated
my children accordingly, with satisfaction.
Then I wanted to put the new educative option
at my colleague parents’ disposal; I published
my analyses, held conferences and activated
debates. I’ve also devoted an Internet web
site. Yet fourty years have passed, but I
did not see any official answer by the competent
authority. Plainly, the Institution needs
of being prompted further. This is the why
of this last labour of mine, that – let me
remark it – does not pretend to be conclusive
of an analysis that has not been still depened
as it should need to be, but it wants to
be the opening only of the needed debate.
The question
The age zero to three may be crucial in a
child's psycho-social scaffolding and enduring
basic assumptions. This is well known since
the time of Ignace of Loyola, the founder
of the Society of Jesus, who, we are told,
said: “Give me the first four years of a man’s
life, and I’ll turn him into a perfect soldier
of God.” This statement immediately raises the question:
what is the means and ongoing effect of the
educative imprinting to which the child’s
neuro-psychical structure is subjected during
those earliest years?
Five hundred years have passed since then;
many scholarly studies have been done in
both the psycho-pedagogical and the neuro-physiological
domains; and yet the link between a pedagogical
use of language as an imprinting factor and
the neuro-physiological framing of a child’s
personality has still not been critically
investigated as it deserves. Parents, who
are normally the only teachers of children
at that delicate age, have still not been
called to pay attention to the logical reasoning,
communicating, negotiating and consensus-seeking
mechanisms that regulate their primary formative
role. Actually, traditional education has
missed out on making families aware about
the knowledge tools which may allow them
to make an informed and responsible choice
of how to perform their irreplaceable educative
task. The “Dialectic Education” proposal, outlined in this essay, offers
a critical and constructive contribution
to this empty disciplinary domain.
Assuredly, what is at stake is not
negligible.
At an individual level, everybody knows
that
psychological dependence imprinting
represents
one of the greatest factors of risk
towards
drug addiction in youth. At a collective
level, it is equally known that the
absence
of any capacity for questioning authority
represents a basic, rather a fundamental
one, propensity to perform those intolerant
and violent behaviours whose extreme
form
appears to include the so-called “holy-war”
made by the kamikazes of today’s Islamic
religious fundamentalism.
The imprinting At this point, some
explanation
about the educative “imprinting” mechanism
seems necessary. We must keep it clear
that
the imprinted thing is not the recording
and the performing of a given behaviour
-
like the kamikaze’s. Really, the imprinted
thing is absolute obedience to the
authority
that may indicate or suggest a given
behaviour.
This authority can be a physical person,
or the collective agreement – or else
a book,
like the Christian Bible, the Jewish
Torah
or the Islamic Koran. What matters
now, is
the chance of diminishing the intensity
of
the imprinting in the child’s brain,
so that
she/he may be abler to put autonomous,
responsible
and critical attitudes of her/his own
into
action, with respect to the presumed
authority.
In a word, if we call “education” the
imprinting
of absolute obedience to authority’s
wishes,
what I’m going to describe is “dis-education”
– as the fundamentalist would call
it as;
but let’s us call it, more properly,
“dis-imprinting”.
I shall first apologize that to describe
the “fundamentalism” phenomenon I referred
to its more extreme side, that of Islamic
kamikaze fundamentalist – really, all
of
us know very well that there are far
less
aggressive sides of fundamentalism.
Indeed,
there is developing a more dialectical,
less
extreme and less fundamentalist trend
among
religionists, even Islamic, evidenced
in
some international multi-faith movements
and endorsement of Universal Rights
Declarations
by authorities professing to be Islamic,
‘people of the book' etc.; and despite
childhood
indoctrination some parents there develop
respect for egalitarian marriage stances
etc. But we also know very well that,
in
order to effectively explain any phenomenon,
one must figure out its more extreme
appearances:
and I’ve been unable to evade this
explanatory
principle.
Parents’ role
To know what happens in a person’s
earliest
years of life, what is the neuro-physiological
and pedagogical substratum into which
the
fundamentalist imprinting may happen
to exert
such iron a grasp that it so often
demands
the sacrifice of life, I refer to the
discovery
of the Nerve Growth Factor (NGF) that
earned
the Nobel prize for Rita Levi-Montalcini.
Her studies demonstrated that inside
the
human brain, at about two years after
birth,
under the effect of NGF, a sudden and
overflowing
proliferation of connections among
the nerve
cells takes place. From then on, a
physiological
process of re-absorption of the overflowing
connections starts, whose predictable
goal
is the conservation of those connections
that turned out as the more useful
ones for
survival aims. The final results of
this
selective process will be the young
individual’s
psychical framework final self-fixing,
that
will be, as Ignace of Loyola knew well,
that
of the ”perfect soldier of God” – but
whose
extreme side, as all of us are able
to see
everyday in the news, includes the
kamikaze
of the Islamic religious fundamentalism.
The pedagogic education mechanism controlling
this neuro-formative process is known
by
specialized students as “imprinting”,
and
seems to be to some extent irreversible.
Indeed, during those earliest years
of a
child’s life, her survival is bound
to her
parents’ agreement, she knows. The
selective
criterion ruling the suppression or
the conservation
of her brain connections is thus tied
to
the family educative feed-back the
child
obtains, in answer to her first behaviours
by the family authority. There will
be therefore
saved the nervous connections through
which
the behaviours in agreement with the
family
authority are processed, just because
of
the positive feed-back that those behaviours
will obtain. There will be vice versa
suppressed
the nerve connections that serve her
behaviours
eventually unwanted – or else punished
-
by the family leader. On this physiologic
selective mechanism, the first and
more basic
communication model that a child learns
after
birth is the mother/child hierarchical
relationship.
The original authority that the child
recognizes
as having an “all or nothing ” status,
as
all children do, and that she embodies
with
an imprinting effect, is thus represented
by her mother.
Very soon, a second authority enters
the
child’s world: her father. Now the
mother-father
communicating way becomes crucial.
The crucial
point is, if the mother submits to
the male
parent’s authority, the child learns
that
there is a further, more powerful authority
that exceeds and transcends the “all
” represented
by the one she acknowledged originally.
This
further conditioning element, having
a transcendence
implication, comes unavoidably to influence
the language-mediated hierarchic relationship
that the child is embodying (imprinting).
The intervention of this second element
allows
us to spot two distinct educational
models,
according to the particular way in
which
mother and father communicate.
We can indeed consider two basic parameters
of this communication way:
1. With the “fundamentalist” model,
the mother
submits her own opinions and her personality
to the male parent’s higher authority,
which
she obeys without even questioning
it in
anything. The family educative feed-back
and the child’s formative imprinting
will
run accordingly. The new hierarchic
situation
in fact binds the child to learn that
there
is a super-authority that transcends
and
dominates the original one, naturally
represented
by her mother, and that cannot be even
questioned
but only obeyed beyond any natural
necessity
of survival – even unto the extreme
behaviour
of the fundamentalist kamikaze. The
intensity
of the fundamentalist imprinting will
therefore
parallel the intensity of the hierarchy
-
dominated by the father but mediated
by the
mother - that rules the relationship
between
the two parents, starting from the
more delicate
age of the child. It is the “zero-to-three”
age, when she learns, together with
language,
also the communication-based inter-individual
and social hierarchy. Indeed, if both
parents
obey the rule of absolute consent,
as how
happens in the fundamentalist model,
one
parent’s authority adds itself to the
other
parent’s. Thence there is an intensity
increase
in the hierarchically dependent relationship
the child is necessarily bound to live
in
-- inside her family domain, and an
increase
in the subsequent imprinting as well.
No
wonder then, if such children, once
coming
out of their families and being entrusted
to the “madrasas ” schools demanded
by some
Islamic cultures, where they learn
by heart
the Koran laws, will be fundamentally
disposed
to exert absolute obedience only –
something
else but autonomous criticism – to
the authority’s
suggestions.
2. With the second model, that I call
“Dialectic Education” even though we could call it “democratic”
in antithesis to the first one, the
two parents
discuss together and confront each
other
in a peer-to-peer relationship, seeking
the
utmost reciprocal respect for any possible
divergence of opinions. They both discuss
in front of the child too, without
concealing
from her the dialectic comparison between
their eventually different personal
opinions.
(2) This way, the child will not suffer
imprinting
conditioned by a transcendental super-authority
placed beyond and over the natural
authority
she has already embodied naturally.
Without
any peremptory obligation of consent
by the
dialogue between the two family authorities,
every time the two parents confront
and question
each other, one’s authority will exert
a
decreasing effect onto the other’s
authority,
to the child’s eyes, so that the intensity
of her family hierarchy ('peck order
') imprinting
will be decreased as well. So, if the
pedagogic
model being adopted by parents tends
to coincide
with the one I concisely described
here as
“Dialectic Education” - being characterized
by the full transparency of every critical
confrontation between parents, and
by parents
speaking “second” to the child in order
to
provide a space for her demands and
to bring
her initiative out - she will learn
and develop
her own critical and constructive thinking,
and put into action autonomous, self-conscious
and responsible behaviours of social
sharing-in
to what is known as Democracy. Not
only,
but also her personality will become
more
resistant to the risk of drug addiction.
(3) Hence two different educative models,
the “fundamentalist” and the “democratic”
one, are defined, tied together in
each of
us in varying proportions, with opposing
approaches to a dialectical thesis-antithesis
relationship -- the extreme opposite
poles
of a behavioural continuum. Between
these
two opposite poles, countless intermediate
positions are obviously encompassed,
that
are “moderated” according with the
greater
or smaller intensity by which the hierarchical
obedience to the family authority is
imprinted,
and with the greater or smaller place
- in
an extreme case no place - which parents
provide for the child’s initiatives.
However,
the education model being adopted by
each
family and each parent could not but
tend
towards either one only, or the opposite,
of these two pole positions of our
educational
continuum.
The current parenting model
Now let us consider in this perspective
the
educative behaviours commonly adopted
by
our families in our western civilization.
It is common evidence that parents
tend to
conceal every even least occasion of
critical
confrontation of their own, because
of their
quite groundless presumption to obtain
in
that way a greater validity of the
family
structure. Mostly the mother, who is
the
first educator, tends to prevent or
anticipate
every even least necessity of the child
and
so conditions the latter to an excessive
degree of psycho-dependence in what
is called
“seduction by love”; and she usually
asks
the other parent for consent, thereby
submitting
herself and the child to the super-authority
of the male parent. We can therefore
conclude
with confidence that the educative
model
commonly adopted by families in our
western
civilization tends towards the pole
position
here concisely described as “fundamentalist”,
even though it is far from the extreme
of
the family model being adopted by those
civilizations
where religious fundamentalism is the
only
rule.
Anyway, all of this happens because
parents
are let believe that concealing any
occasion
of confrontation from children makes
them
stronger, and that preventing any initiative
of the latter is a sign of love. And
yet
the voluntary sacrifice of women’s
autonomy
that characterizes the fundamentalist
model
has proven itself not only useless,
but also
producing the contrary effect, as we
can
see from the crisis of so many of today’s
families, and of democracy itself.
Indeed,
some of the youth of today have become
more
and more intolerant of any parental
and social
hierarchic communication, which they
rebel
at, by leaving the family communication
space
- but lacking autonomous critical initiative
- to enter without any defence the
world
of transgression and drugs.
Towards a solution
I’ve stressed elsewhere (4) some problems
that see a common origin in the family
communication
model characterized by the fundamentalist
tendency. In this essay I wanted to
underline
the part of the mother as she has the
greater
responsibility for this conduct, because
she is its main actor but also – after
children
- the main victim. Other scholars -
from
Bettelheim to Bateson, to the Italian
psychoanalyst
Carotenuto - have exposed the relevance
of
the mother-mediated family educative
imprinting,
as a possible source of psycho-pathologies.
The mother only, therefore, can put
an end
to the sufferings of the fundamentalist
psycho-dependence,
provided only she can perform a role
of autonomy
and parity within the family, by avoiding
or diminishing the intensity due to
the educative
imprinting of the non-critical psycho-dependence
on fundamentalist authoritarianism
and the
monsters it generates: drug addiction
and
fundamentalist extremism.
The same Democracy, which the world
of today
shows it is in an even greater need
of, does
not seem likely to be dropped - or
bombed
- from the authority top-down onto
the people.
Therefore making it spring and flourish
from
children and the grassroots bottom
up, thus
from the family education model, looks
rather
a must. But, how could we tell others
to
abandon their bent to the fundamentalist
educative model, if we were unable
to get
rid of it - or even denounce it - at
home?
Let me conclude.
Parents, mothers most of all, have
to be
properly informed about the parenting
chances
at their disposal, such as the pedagogic
theory “Dialectic Education”. This
theory,
as the “Objective Flexibility” project,
has
now become a part of the European project
Socrates Grundtvig 2 “A New Chance”
(5).
It is "work in progress",
as the
“Objective Flexibility” project is
free,
at everyone’s disposal, no copyright.
“Tertium non datur…” At this point, this work of mine could
be considered as ended. The missing information
has been put as educative theory, and the
subsequent proposal is been spread as European
project. Yet please allow me a last passage
from the strictly pedagogical domain to that
of Philosophy. As a philosopher, I consider
myself an amateur; nevertheless, I’ve come
to the firm belief that human language, for
its own nature, cannot express the “Absolute
Truth” , but only represent the thesis or
the antithesis of a dialectic context, from
which the “truth” could be withdrawn as a
median synthesis as an element of thinking,
upstream-before of spoken language. Successively,
if uttered in words, this synthesis-thought
would become the thesis or the antithesis
of a further dialectic context, and so on
in a endless sequence. By confronting these
concepts in my on-line discussions, I stumbled
over a “Law of the Excluded Middle”, which I initially adjudged to Kant. And
I wondered whether this could have been the
“Absolute Truth” that the German philosopher
dis so peremptorily exclude from the general
universe of human discourse. I asked an historian
of Philosophy, Silvano Borruso (6). He punctually
corriged me “ The aphorism "tertium non datur" does not come from Kant, but the Scholastic
philosophy. It says that in the middle of
two contradictory statements ( A is / A is
not) no middle way is admissible. This, but,
is valid if only the truth is respected as 'adaequatio intellectus et rei '. If truth is not respected, or it is modified
like Descartes did, and Kant and Hegel followed,
the two contradictory statements become thesis
and antithesis, and from their clashing together
a synthesis comes out, which is but a prerogative
of whom advances the reasoning… “
and added:
|
“Truth is absolute if its contradictory is
unthinkable. To stay in the example,
‘tertium
non datur’ is absolute truth
because its
contradictory ‘tertium datur’
is unthinkable.
Provided only we adopt the same
definition
of “truth” as 'adaequatio intellectus
et
rei' , that Aquinas (1225-74)
adopted from
Avicenna (980-1037).”
|
But then, I guess, just the historical
application
of this principle into the family educative
communication, could have been the
factor
that deprived the child – who represents
the ‘tertium” inside the family – from
the
logical context which is necessary
to withdraw
a synthesis from the dialectic confrontation
between her parents. But todays, after
Heisemberg’s
“Principle of Indetermination” and
Goedel’s
“Theorem of indecidibility”, most of
all
the last discoveries of Physics, the
denial
of a “tertium” and the exclusion of
a “Middle”
do not seem to be sustainable any further.
In this light I tryed to rationalyze
the
common barebone structure of both educative
communication and the same family,
seen as
a system of interpersonal relationship.
I
present it as such to the patient Reader.
This structure is shaped like a cross,
and
divides in four sectors the general field of communication:

|
TO GIVE |
|
| 2 |
|
1 |
| CONSENT |
|
CONFRONTATION |
|
0 |
|
| THESIS |
|
ANTITHESIS |
| 3 |
|
4 |
|
TO HAVE |
|
(a chart. vertical axis with the diciture
"to Give" in the up and "to
HAve" in the down end. Horizontal
axis
with the diciture consent - thesis
in the
left and Confrontation-Antithesis in
the
right end. a "zero" in the
middle
point.)
Here we will get, conveniently
- an upper half, the “to Give – to Answer”
domain;
- a lower half, the “to Have – to ask” domain;
- a left side, the “ Thesis - Consent” domain,
- a right side, the “Antithesis – Confrontation”
domain.. |
and subsequently, four participation options
by whoever speaks:
1. an upper right quadrant, the “Giving
in Confrontation” domain;
2. an upper left quadrant, the
“Giving in Consent” domain;
3. a lower left quadrant, the “Having in
Consent” domain; and finally
4. a lower right quadrant,
the “Having in Confrontation”. |
We shall immediately notice that, for
whoever
speaks “in Consent”, thus from the
2. and
3. left quadrants of our structure,
the 1.
and 4. quadrants of communication are
not
necessary any more, rather it becomes
absurd.
This is the case of the education model
here
described as “Fundamentalist”. A thesis,
to be stated as absolute, dogmatic
Truth,
does not need of any antithesis. Hence
the
resulting dialectic structure of communication
will thus be amputated: there will
be no
“synthesis” chance at the disposal
of the
family “tertium, to wit, the child.
Vice versa, to whomever speaks “in
Confrontation”,
from the 1 and 4. right quandrants
of our
structure, the 2. and 4; quadrants
look absolutely
indispensible. Any antithesis, to be
such,
needs of a thesis having been previously
stated. In this case, the thesis is
not taken
as axiomatic truth, but as an hypothesis
to be systematically subjected to critical
verifying, at the advantage of the
final
user – the “third”, the child in the
real
family and the People in the social
family;
This way, the syntesis domain is open
to
them, “Tertium datur”, and “the Middle
is
included”... This is the model I described
as “Democratic”, with the name of Dialectic
Education. According with this “democratic”
model, the barebone structure of communication
becomes actually enriched and completed
by
the dialectic confrontation thesis-antithesis,
in full respect and valueation of every
diversity.
Therefore, as shown above, the language
of
whoever speaks or writes can be partisan
only: either thesis or antithesis,
either
consent or confrontation. In every
dialectic
consent, that is, whenever there is
a divergence
tra one thesis and one or many antitheses,
the possible sysnthesis becomes an
element
of thinking, upstream of language.
This “middle”
synthesis cannot be expressed as impartial
truth because - if so - it would become
absolute
trut, and the absolute truth does not
belong
to human language. Indeed, within the
overall
structure of communication, encompassig
Education,
no “Tertium” is given the chance of
speaking
from the “middle” position, between
thesis
and antithesis. This “middle” position
would
correspond to the “zero” point of tha
Cartesian
chart (see in the figure)
A less crucial question but remains.
Could it be enough a schematic rationale,
such as the shown above one, to grant
full
awareness to whoever is charged with
educational
responsibilities? In my experience,
I would
answer it isn’t. In the middle position
of
the chart, between the two voices of
thesis
and antithesis, a third presence becomes
necessary, that of Love: “Love yourselves
like I loved you”, that voice told
us.
Antonio Rossin (4)
Notes:
(1) - First version at the “Ferrara
Estense”
Lions Club (district 108 1/Tb) meeting,
March
16, 2007 - Last version at the 3rd
Reading
on ’EDUcare’ of "Imago Ricerche"
(www. imagopsyche. org), Bolzano Bozen,
April
18 2007
- English editing thanks to Doug Everingham
(2) - Details at: http://www.flexible-learning.org/eng/einstein.htm
(3) - Health authorities recommend
parents
to perform educational messages aimed
to
develop the same characteristics of
child’s
personality - see for instance the
Oct.
20, 1984 blueprint n° 84 by the Italian
Superior
Institute of Sanity, become an integral
part
of the Italian law on Drugs, containing:
Indications about interventions of
Primary
Prevention against drugs addiction.
(4) - http://www.flexible-learning.org
(5) - http://www.flexible-learning.org/eng/objective-flexibility.htm
|