Who do you want to be today?

Does it seem sometimes that your fantasy life is more important than your real one? That your virtual self is more real than your living, breathing body? Today I want to touch upon some aspects of psychology that are generally neglected by education assessment and measurement specialists.

Those worthies, though I'm sure they have childrens' best interests in mind, have learned to treat the world as something to be measured. In measuring it, they reduce its reality to a series of questions to be interrogated through hypothesis, measurement, analysis, and confirmation or disconfirmation. I'm talking about hardcore quantoid researchers, here, people. Please understand, I don't have a problem with statistically based research. I'm a big fan of using descriptive statistics to get a sense of the reality in which we live. However, a focus on the "empirical" can both obscure reality and neglect questions essential to the understanding of human cognition.

On the one hand, many educational researchers, especially those whose specialty is assessment, tend to try to make their jobs seem more simple than they actually are. When people assess student achievement, for example, they are primarily concerned about only two sources of error: reliability and validity. That is, can the same instrument produce the same results over time and it is actually measuring what it claims to measure. Noel Wilson (1998) suggests that there are at least thirteen sources of measurement error that can creep into such assessments (e.g., standardized tests, exit exams, etc.). So even there, researchers tend to assume a reality that is less chaotic, less messy, and, thus, more controllable than might actually be the case. Further, much of educational assessment tends to rely on a version of human psychology that pays a lot more attention to what we consciously think about and do than the darker, deeper, more occulted elements of the human psyche. Thus, it's important to think about fantasy and identification as two key elements of subjective life.

Think about it this way. Freud and Jung and Marx, among the various European philosophers who have located human motivation and consciousness outside of cognition, as such. While they have been critiqued by many, and for good reasons, we should not so easily dismiss a key element shared by their varied philosophies: We may not be completely in control. What we think and do may be based in part on volition and perception of empirical stimuli that guide that volition. It also, in many ways, is dictated by processes outside of our control or even awareness.

Freud, for example, introduced the notion of the unconscious, interpretation of dreams, and tried to explain how one's upbringing can result in conflicting elements within one's psyche, some of which is always outside of our knowledge and control. Certainly, he may have gotten a lot of things wrong, but at least he realized that we, as human beings, have a lot more going on in our brains that what we are aware of. Jung, similarly, tried to look at the bases of the human unconscious in symbolism and archetype. His approach, compared to Freud, was almost literary in its methods, relying heavily on the notions of narrative and symbolism. Both these theorists attempted to go beyond what experimental or behavioral psychology have attempted, rejecting the raw empiricist impulse, at least in part, in order to explore the deeper wildernesses of human thinking and motivation. Marx, in his own way, tried to do the same. In his case, he attempted to link individual consciousness with a kind of mass consciousness by applying poltical-economic elements to his understanding of society, its development, and its likely path. Note here, that Marx attempted to show the ways in which the material conditions of people's lives, and not just what was inside their heads, produced some elements of their consciousness of reality, whether they were aware of it or not.

My hero, Kenneth Burke, attempted to do this in a way that fused elements of Freud and Marx, among others. Let me add, here, the wikipedia article on Burke, as it makes as clear (or clearer) than I can, Burke's contributions:

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Kenneth Burke (1897 - 1993) was a major American literary theorist and philosopher. Burke's primary interests were in rhetoric and aesthetics.

Burke, like many twentieth century theorists and critics, was heavily influenced by the ideas of Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and Friedrich Nietzsche. He was also significantly influenced by Thorstein Veblen. Burke resisted being pigeonholed as a follower of any philosophical or political school of thought, and had a notable and very public break with the Marxists who dominated the literary criticism set in the 1930s. The political and social power of symbols was central to Burke's scholarship throughout his career. His political engagement is evident, for example, at the outset of A Grammar of Motives in its epigraph, ad bellum purificandum -- toward the purification of war, with "pure" war implying its elimination. Burke felt that the study of rhetoric would help human beings understand "what is involved when we say what people are doing and why they are doing it." Burke called such analysis "dramatism" and believed that such an approach to language analysis and use could help us understand the basis of conflict, the virtues and dangers of cooperation, and the opportunities of identification and consubstantiality.

Burke defined the rhetorical function of language as "the use of language as a symbolic means of inducing cooperation in beings that by nature respond to symbols." He defined "man" as "the symbol using, making, and mis-using animal, inventor of the negative, separated from his natural condition by instruments of his own making, and rotten with perfection." For Burke, some of the most significant problems in human behavior resulted from situations in which symbols used human beings rather than human beings using symbols.

In Burke's philosophy, social interaction and communication should be understood in terms of a pentad, which includes act, scene, agent, agency, and purpose. He proposed that most social interaction and communication can be approached as a form of drama whose outcomes are determined by ratios between these five pentadic elements. This has become known as the "dramatistic pentad." The pentad is grounded in his dramatistic method, which sees the relationship between life and theater as literal rather than metaphorical: for Burke, all the world really is a stage. Burke pursued literary criticism not as a formalistic enterprise but rather as an enterprise with significant sociological impact; he saw literature as "equipment for living," offering people folk wisdom and common sense to people and thus guiding the way people lived their lives.

Another key concept for Burke is the terministic screen -- a set of symbols that becomes a kind of screen or grid of intelligibility through which the world makes sense to us. Here Burke offers rhetorical theorists and critics a way of understanding the relationship between language and ideology. Language, Burke thought, doesn't simply "reflect" reality; it also helps select reality as well as deflect reality.

His principal works include:

* Counter-Statement (1931)
* Permanence and Change (1935)
* Attitudes Toward History (1937)
* Philosophy of Literary Form (1939)
* A Grammar of Motives (1945)
* A Rhetoric of Motives (1950)
* The Rhetoric of Religion (1961)
* Language as Symbolic Action (1966)



So Burke, similar to Jung, locates human consciousness in the human being, in the human being's symbol system(s), and in the human being's material and symbolic environment.

Of particular interest to me in all of these theorists of human consciousness is the idea that some things about human consciousness are quite hard to measure, if not impossible. More importantly, human motivation is incredibly complex, and not so simple to understand and control, even in the case of the young.

Sela (Pause and reflect)

What meanings, then, should we give to children's and teenagers' fantasy lives? How important are they? How important are their encounters with art, literature, and music? How does, as I suggested a few days ago, a lust for power and control result in the creation of a vivid and lived fantasy life? How does causing them to sit, learn, and obey virtually assure that they will find a place in their minds to go and be free. In some of my recent writing, I observed that:

... policy is one based not on humans as natural beings, with all that implies in terms of virtues and sins; instead of recognizing the elements of chaos and hope inherent in the enterprise of learning and living, [policy] views it much like a layman’s conception of a laboratory situation, where everything is known or knowable and everything under control. Real learning, like real science, is messier, and good policy, like good science, recognizes the potential for chaos, indeterminacy, and unexpected results.



One key element left out is the heart, the "gut music" as my friend Matt used to say, that drives us to do what we do. And where that comes from depends on the person. Freud, Marx, Jung and Burke each had an idea that it may not come from where we think it does. I agree.