Crying Theater! Theater!

General Education
 
What do we talk about when we talk about general
education if we talk about general education; and
if we DO talk about general education, well:
what do we talk about?  
 
I can either be moving on down the road or
I can be fooling around, standing in one place
going no where.
       
 
Heisenberg’s Indeterminacy Principle applied
to General Education: a   fundamental either/or
and it behooves us to acknowledge the
incommensurate  values associated with
covering ground (on the one hand) or
 just standing there, putting it in play.
 
    2 discrete Economies conceptually!
  In real-time—always a  foe dichotomy . .
 
I  can do some justice to one or the other
but not both without an attitude adjustment.
They are Hostile, like hell and ice-cream:  
Velocity or Position? Road Trip or Place?
 
There’s a difference. I implore myself: do not
conflate, collapse, or confuse these 2.  At
least conceptually: keep them immaculate.
Day-to-day? Well, that’s a course
of an other color.
 
Conversationally:
consider an exchange among two or more
gathered in the name of  discourse & there’s
a felt sense of momentum emerging —velocity,
so to speak: strategic planning  happening,
SACS statements falling into compliance,
assessment & evaluation of measurable goals
getting hammered & nailed down  until someone,
anyone, says
 
 “Well  what do we actually mean by
“sustainability?”   “rigor?”  “innovation?”
“community?”  “critical  thinking?”
“greening?” “empowerment?”. . .  .
 
And then, if the fool persists and the others turn
to play the daemonic game, an entirely different
conversational environment emerges, and  what
felt  like progressivism now feels like spinning
wheels & the slow always painful revelation that
meanings are not bed rock but paper & scissor-
cut shared agree abilities to stay under-determined
so as to getRdone: we're walking on water so to
speak, in manners of speaking.
 
A conspiracy & shared narcissism:
we hold these words & meanings
to be collectively self evident so as
to get stuff done which we can do
as long as we don’t try to look
at them closely.
 
This makes good common sense. Just trying to describe
here.  The Basics. Foundation for a general education.
 
Velocity or Position. Road Trip or Place.
Move on down the road or just stand there
& play with it. Radically opposed, but —we
know and maybe wish to embrace —
complementary. Theres a Just Get Along
relationship if only we could figure out
HOW. .
 
Pedagogically.  I advise students:  don’t try this
“well-whatta-you-mean-by___”  in your other
classes. Ok to play with it here  because we’re in
 “school” mode reinventing wheels up from old
scratch, inviting emergent phenomena coming to
some terms of our own.   . .
 
But to raise questions of definition & challenge the meta
forces in a class covering ground to comply with syllabus
and measurable aims & objectives so as to move on down
the road,. that’s as demoralizing as improvised explosive
anti-tank devices..
 
“Don’t just Do Something,”  said Father Berrigan,
“Stand there!”  
 
Good advice in terms of general education in general,
but if the general environment  is always  urgent  to be
covering ground & getRdone: trying to get folks to stick
around & smoke it over is futile.  Might as well cry
Theatre! Theatre!  in a crowded fire.

xxxooo, Sam