Lessons 5,6, 6.5

Social consciousness pedagogy

‘I am angry with myself when I discover
that I have been subtly controlling and
molding another person in my own image’
(Carl Rogers, 'A Way of Being', 1980)

We will start off this lesson by showing the movie 'Christabel' starring Elizabeth Hurley (1988) Color 147 minutes un- rated. Based on a true story centering on a young English woman who marries her German lover, with the married couple settling down to raise a family in 1930’s Germany. The rise of Hitler and the Nazi party gives way to Allied attack and the woman becomes torn between home schooling her children or allowing them to be publicly schooled, dealing with the scorn, cruelty and hate of the ruling German class; and so on. A brief discussion follows the film presentation.

Following the discussion at the end of the first class in the sequence, the instructor hands out reading material that describes the Nazi education action learning plan: where anti-Semitism indoctrination was fundamental 3rd Reich rubric: Nazi education reform and racial cleansing were major subjects of the curriculum: history maintained the stereotype of the Jew as a stateless wanderer; as a figure consumed with massing enormous amounts of money illustrated with drawings, panels and cartoons of this nature: was the thesis of the of course offerings; . There is enough time after the movie for a short discussion of the reading material content for the next class.

Lesson 1 part two

Content: “How German girls should act in the presence of a Jewish man; became the theme of a series of drawings by a 13 year old artist named Brunner; the first panel showed a street scene in which a Jewish man tips his hat to a German woman with the caption:

“A Jew wants to win over a German girl to himself”

But as portrayed in the second image he quickly experience the scorn of the German girl who greeted him with a slap to the face so hard that it knocked his ‘hat’ to the ground”

**Conclusion of the article writer: the political socialization reality of Nazi Germany culture was reinforced by this student art work.

The assignment for your middle school class with mostly 13 year olds to analyze and evaluate (deconstruct) the National Socialist lesson: Respond to one of the questions below.

If you were a German boy and your family was protecting and hiding some Jews, like Anne Frank in your house: how would you react to the message from your government and your teacher as a spokesman for this attitude, tone and purpose (genocide)?
If you were a girl and heard this lesson would you ‘slap the Jew so hard it would knock his hat off”? Or would you sympathize with him as a suffering discrimination; someone who is living the holocaust nightmare?
If you heard a talk show host or a night show comedian ridiculing and reviling a homeless person in his program/act how would you react to a joke such as? Why is it easy to date a homeless woman? (You can drop her off anyplace) heard on a TC sports talk station.

I would expect a short paper from the students; and then ask for volunteers who would read some of their comments once I had reviewed the assignment; or I might scan a few and post them on the video screen; basically creating a discussion of holocaust side effects as they percolate down through contemporary society, entertainment, arts, news papers and so on.


Lesson 2

Today we are going to be discussing a lesson from R.D Laing ‘The Politics of Experience”. In this prompt we see another spin on the same theme operant in the American school system: we are asking our 11th graders to evaluate this scenario: (we believe they are mature enough to evaluate a situation involving fifth graders, some of them may have experienced aspects of the situation; and be able to judge to some degree; we are trying to develop that ability; you as instructor are interested in how your students react to a manipulative psychologist/teacher.

‘[A]n observer just enters a fifth grade classroom the teacher asks “which of you nice boys would like to take the observer’s coat and hang it up?”

“From the waving of hands it seems like every student in the room would love to hang up the observer’s coat: believing it was an honor. The teacher chooses a favorite student to hang up the coat. The same situation arises when the teacher asks the students who would like to answer the next math problem and so on. From the flurry of hands relative to each assignment there was apparently much competition to hang up the coat and solve the problem” p. 68

As teachers with principles of freedom and democracy in the back of our minds at least; we realize this ‘drama’ is beside the point of any ‘academic’ learning, basic skills and so to speak. It can be classified under education roughly as values and ‘affective’ education. Laing is concerned with the totality of a situation in which children are conditioned to perform in conformity and unison to perceived social norms. Laing continues:

“ what strikes us here is the precision with which the teacher was able to mobilize the potentialities of the boys for proper social behavior. The large number of waving hands proves that most of the boys have already become absurd: they have no choice…A skilled teacher sets up many situations in such a way that a negative attitude can only be construed as treason”, p.69

For my group of juniors in an alternative school (there could be 9th through 12th graders) I would like them to tell me what they think of that teacher’s methods? And answer these questions
Would this type of teacher motivate you to be better in math? Would you conform to the lesson stereotype? Teacher or student?
What type of a report would you take home to your parents about what you learned in math today?
Look up the word ‘servile” and in a paragraph or two or write as much as you want; tell me if that definition means to you relative to the Laing anecdote

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Lesson 3 (for writing teachers)

The same class of fifth graders has just finished your last lesson on (psychological images) in poetry. If we take this analysis a bit further I think we can see that just maybe the monster that Louis Carroll was illustrating in ‘The Jabberwocky’ is an abstract ‘nonsense’ image designed to give the appearance of making sense. When in fact this insertion of the weird, the macabre, the grotesque may reflect the growing interest of writers in the science of psychology that was emerging at that time. And of course we are referring and relying on Laing’s inference that the social learning experience intruding in the classroom is in fact absurd, unspeakably more absurd and directly alarming than what is being reflected subconsciously by authors like Carroll, a child can respond to outside the range of ‘normal’ experience. (We know it has to be bothering them…what is going on in the world, atrocities, holocaust, senseless violence: but not in my teacher!)

The Newkirk (2001) article in the Elementary School journal indicates young readers enter the narratives they read to the extent they feel a part of the unfolding story; they are able to describe in their writing ‘the vivid detail, the physical positions they took in their writing that allowed them to experience the unfolding action’. Newkirk raises the question: do writers of fiction experience the same form of transportation into the worlds they create? And is this form of psychological instrument related to the pleasure students take in producing fictional worlds, that to the adult reader may seem devoid of any psychological reality?

One of the stories the author refers to is ‘Optimus Primal vs. Megatron”; it is a story filled with battles, force fields that mutate in ways that gain and lose power. What a student wrote creatively about the narrative is

“the optimas flew over out of the hatch and Megatron and their teams were close behind, trying to get to a mountain full of energon to make them more powerful”

When asked about the creative process that led to his story the student responded,

“When I write a story I sometimes get into it so much that I actually feel it is happening. I just write as fast as I can to get all my thoughts down because it feels like it is really happening like it’s war and I really have to think fast and be careful –the leaders(?) ” A classmate, Sarah, responded, “It’s kind of like watching a movie and your in it”.

I have very limited experience teaching elementary school children but I believe it is a mistake to indoctrinate, manipulate, underestimate the intelligence of, or attempt to shape perception of reality and psychological learning of the students at any stage of learning. Instead the instructor should be looking for ways to enable children, high school students, collegians and adults to use their creative mental resources to unload, unburden themselves as adults do, cope and find their way out of the myths, mazes, and boxes that Laing and the critics of social learning suggest, that adults or children have created for them. It is even more of a problem if the students do not have the reading ability and knowledge of conventions that will enable them to follow the leads, the leaders, or the bread crumb trail they (sometimes) leave behind.