Standardization, schooling, and Vico

After this week’s readings it becomes far more understandable how the current education system came to be shaped. The question that came up repeatedly in my games course last semester was, “Why are we doing education like this?” We looked at current models of schooling and their limitations and how gaming structures might help. Given more time, it might have helped to do a historical perspective that begins with the Enlightenment.

            The Enlightenment is the dawn of many influential ideas that still hold sway over politics and society today. The one that I want to focus on is standardization. I see the move toward standardizing discourse (both oral and written) as being symptomatic of the 20^th century model of schooling.

            In my last blog entry I talked about the societal norming of women—that female rhetors had to find common ground and build their ethos in relation to the male-dominated power structures of the day. But again, these examples are symptoms of a larger movement. Bacon’s taxonomies do reflect the tendencies of Aristotle (including the restoration of invention) (793); however, the Baconian taxonomy is not divided into areas of skill so much as it anticipates the areas of usage—or its job in other words. This idea of functional rhetoric is further exemplified by Bacon’s dismissal of style.

            The elocution movement (802-03) is another example of standardizing discourse. By itself, this, I realize, is not great insight. But when coupled with the revival of delivery and put into the larger context of societal norming, we can see that the idea is not so much understandability as it is mass dissemination with the implicit intent of reproducing its original mode of production. In more concrete form, we see this with Johnson and the production of the first material dictionaries (lost page number, sorry). The mindset that is developing—and is reflected in Locke and Smith’s work—is typical of the age: Complex ideas are made of the simpler parts working together to perform an action. It’s mechanization. It’s the seed of the Industrial Revolution, which is ultimately what shapes our current, highly-standardized, education system. [Locke describes words as ideas that “are very complex, made up of a great number of ideas put together” (818). On the same page, he bemoans the lack of standardization in nature, describing words as “assemblages of ideas.”]

            If there is one thinker who fully realizes the impact of this societal movement, I think it’s Vico with his stages of history. If we look back at the rhetorical tradition outlined by BizBerg’s book, we can apply Vico’s stages (outlined on 800 and again on 863). The poetic stage with its development of knowledge through metaphor is probably best represented by the Classical thinkers like Plato who use allegory and fable to express their ideas. As we move into the heroic, I see the medieval thinkers with their subordination to the Church and formation of monarchies as representing this societal movement. Here, in the heroic stage, I see the contact between cultures (another form of othering and difference) as being essential. The contact with other cultures moves the society from introspection into the cultural dialectic I wrote about a while back. Now, in Vico’s final, human stage, the individual and democracy (humanism) becomes the societal focus.

            Vico predicts that after the human stage, everything pretty much falls apart and then the process starts over (864). Given the year of the revolution in 1848, it seems that he was onto something. I just want to know if we really revert all the way back to the poetic—is that what postmodernism is?—another iteration of the poetic? At what point can we move beyond the Industrial Revolution in schools? Or are we bound to the modes of production as my lit buddy Fred Jameson says?