Considering How One 'Sees' Things
Dear Diane,
I'm writing you while you are probably also writing me, on Sunday the 15th because I get up at 6 a.m. tomorrow to go to a board meeting at the Panasonic Foundation and then must drive five hours to Concord, N.H., where I'll spend a few days at the Upper Valley Educators Institute with Rob Fried. The institute runs a program where would-be teachers are placed in school four days a week and take classes one day a week—in order to earn a teaching license. It's the kind of "alternative" system I applaud and is just one of many which immerses interested would-be teachers inside classrooms—day after day. More later.
Yesterday I talked for hours with Dennis Littky whose new MET one-on-one college is coming to the end of its first year. The big turning point, he said, was sending young people to far-away lands largely on their own for a few months. Maybe it's one way of shifting their perspectives, going from seeing-like-a-teenager to seeing-like-an-adult, an American. Dennis is always learning on the job!
How we take in the world is so critical to what we can understand about it. James Scott's Seeing Like a State is a must read. It gets to the heart of our problem. Aside from those who truly believe that public enterprises are