| Chapter 1: | What Happens? What Is to Be Done? A Paean to Bricolage |
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Though this is a variation of the venerable humanist project of seeing the world through the eyes of another, it is also an extension and a development of that project in being consciously, even methodically, located.
Recognition, the first criterion, and the liberation of creative energy in reading, the second, are fundamental and extended from the realm of private interpretation to group dynamics in the third phase. The emphasis in all three of these phases is shifted from an interpretation of literature focussed upon the retrieval of original matter and put instead on interpretation as a virtually limitless, polymorphous act of recreation.
The model standing behind this is an idealised version of the Greek demos—and none the worse for that, since every reality has first to be fixed in as a template or image from which a fresh version of reality can be constructed. Even ‘unrealistic’ ideals often serve us better than a discredited or exhausted reality. The icon of such a gathering is a perfect circle of equals, all of whom will know differently from each other, some of whom will know better (in a perfectly formed, equitably hierarchic, non-entropic world, these would be called ‘teachers’, or ‘lecturers’, or ‘seminar leaders’), none of whom will be provided with the organisational or institutional means to usurp the place of others who happen to be in the room.
Since this pattern of the demos for education is far from being new in its fundamentals, it will be useful to offer a brief description of its differences from other versions of the colloquy of rational enquiry first formulated for the post-mediaeval university by Immanuel Kant in “The Conflict of the Faculties” and developed by Humboldt, Fichte, Schleiermacher, and Jürgen Habermas, among others. The fundamental difference bears upon the matter of consensus, which stands as a destination of enquiry in the earlier models, but not at all in the present model. A recent account of what is taken to be the collective German Idealists’ vision of education puts the matter clearly: