Since I left Vienna one of the areas I've learned the most about is education, since I have an M.A. in adult education and 60 credits towards a doctorate in the same (I didn't like my options once I realized what they probably would be after completing those studies, so I dropped out). I initially chose the Master's degree subject because the program in which I studies allowed for studying both women's ministry/religious education and English as a Second/Foriegn Language instruction. I'm bringing this up to talk a bit about philosophy of education.
There's a huge range of what adult education is like around the world, but in the USA (but not only in the USA) there is a tendency for education to have a socialization role, in that it is designed to help learners to fit into a specific, pre-existing context, such as a business or society at large. In this approach to adult education the learner learns to adapt to the way things are and function well within that established social configuration and normative setting. This assumes a conservative approach to teaching in which the only change is in the individual.
The Vienna mission's approach to socialization was like this, as are most work place socialization processes. To understand the philosophy of the teaching ministry of the mission, I think it is helpful to compare it to other career training programs. Usually, part of the objective of such programs socialize students into the field they are studying for. They aren't particularly taught to change the field, but rather become a part of it, much as other kinds of socialization. That isn't to deny, however, that once in the field the students might need to have garnered knowledge and skills which might help them with problem solving and perhaps even a certain amount of effecting change, such as policies and procedures of a workplace or department as pertain to the individual's job and sphere of expertise. These kinds of skills are expected to be able to fulfill the position effectively. In this way, the student of a career position is socialized into their field, although that might include some limited ability to affect change.
However, there are other options and other paradigms and for teaching, several of which are well-developed and in great use in various institutional settings and societal cultures. Here are a couple of which I'm reasonably familiar.
Folk education , in brief, empowers the individuals and groups via collective discussions, learning and problem solving to effect gradual change in their lives and environment around them.
Popular education, again in brief, empower groups to understand societal constraints on their lives and to wield changes that improve their existence.
Many theoreticians believe that whether you take the more traditional conservative education perspective, the perspective more akin to folk education or a critical education stance, the decision you make in this regard determines what kind of political impact you expect or want the education to have. The conservative approach vies for and supports the status-quo, the folk education vies for limited localized and possibly segmented change, while the popular education perspective aims, in the long haul, at broader and more extensive social structure change. The point here is that even a choice for the conservative approach is a political choice.
As far as the mission's teaching ministry was concerned, it was not intended to, as far as I ever knew, have any other impact other than spiritual, so any potential impact would be intended to be limited to that sphere. But even if you consider limiting impact to the spiritual realm, I think you'd have to say that the teaching was conservative in nature, although in praxis aspects of subject matter taught (but not theology, for example), there could have been some folk education-type influence on the teaching.
[4/9/11 comments: The mission did intend its teaching ministry to have a more far-flung influence, however, which could have nudged it towards "folk education". However, in (classic) folk education, information is not just handed down from one generation to the next (as in "serial" socialization), but to a certain extent the group also creates its own knowledge by studying its particular issues (i.e., not just abstractly) and tries to come up with context-specific solutions. The mission might have included elements of this in its teaching of ministry skills (the applied elements of the teaching content) but I think it's much less likely that it would have done this with its more basic/fundamental theological content.]
But this is actually still conservative education, anyway. Consider, for example teaching English as a Second/Foreign Language. I want my students to not only be able to ask yes/no questions, use the present perfect, or understand bus schedules in class; I want them to take this and apply it to their everyday lives outside of class. This means they have to be able to use the knowledge learned in class in such as way as to mix and match what they learned appropriately to come up with English language utterances (or understandings, as in the case of the receptive language skills of listening and reading). Moreover, if I'm teaching in the typical ESL program in the USA, I want these students to use these skills to be able to successfully function in the USA (using English). This involves some creativity, but the students are intended to use their skills and knowledge (that they've gained in class) in a conservative manner. That is, the student changes, but the society doesn't. (This isn't to say the student has to assimilate; there are other ways to change, such as adapting.)
If, however, the mission wanted more than this, so that the student might not only use what is taught by the mission, its instructors and its textbooks creatively but also use it to change their surroundings in some way, then we're moving more towards a classic "folk education" position.
And if the mission wanted to effect something akin to Freire's conscientization, in which the students of the mission actually change their frame of reference for understanding their situation to the end that they will go out and attempt to instigate systemic change in their surroundings, the mission would be using something closer to "popular education."
I think that the mission was closer to the classic "folk education" in its teaching ministry, and if there was anything closer to "popular education" involved it either wasn't intentional (on the part of the mission) and/or would have been an implicit (rather than explicit) secondary or tertiary objective of the ministry. I wouldn't rule this out, because of the other things I know about the mission. I'm speaking here of what was or might have been in 1987 to 1989 when I was with the mission. I can't speak at all for the present or what happened after I left. Also, note that I specify "classic" folk education, because a lot of what is called folk education today is significantly different from how Grundtvig originally meant it to be. I'm not making a judgment here on the change, however; I'm just noting that there has been a change and that this needs to be clarified in order that we're all dealing with the same understanding of the term.]
But as far as socialization to the mission was concerned, the mission seemed to use a strictly conservative approach, because the mission was not open to change and did not have any change mechanisms, grievance structures, etc. in place. (And if any of these were in place, it was to the same extent that the right to study German and to have time off when supporters came to town were in place and effective.) So the socialization was purely and simply conservative in nature and the new recruit was expected to accept it as such. If the new recruit had any questions or disagreements with how the mission did things or why they did them, I think the only two ways one could have dealt with such issues were either to resolve them by somehow learning to accept the mission's ways and reasoning, or to leave. So for 2 years, basically, I lived in the limbo between those 2 and had an existence with the mission consisting largely of a sequence of negative reinfocements, punishments, and extinguishing, punctuated by an occasional positive reinforcement. At least that's one over-simplistic way one could view my 2 years with the mission.
The other interesting thing about education and learning is that it involves a lot of aspects. For example, I did my M.A. thesis doing classroom observations, semi-structured interviews of English instructors and teacher training professors, analysis of syllabi, textbooks and exams (all of the preceding were done in Irkutsk, Novosibirsk and Krasnoyarsk), as well as literature review (both in Russia and the U.S.). My classroom observations involved two kinds of guides: one regarding how much time was spent on different kinds of activities and the other involving more descriptive aspects of what was happening. I also took notes about desk formation and posters on the walls, for example. In other words, there's a lot more to teaching than just lecturing, for example. Taking my research as an example, if an instructor said that the communicative aspects of the language were the most important, but tested only on sentence structure and verb formation, for example, in the end it would appear that grammar might in fact be more important than communicative skills. This is just a very simple example, and I'm not saying it happened, but it's the kind of thing I was looking for to try to find out what was happening in these Siberian institutions of higher education against a specific teaching paradigm. When I get to that part of my chronology I'll post parts of my notes and things, I'm sure.
So if I was going to do this kind of analysis of, say, my first five months with the mission, using everything that might have been included in my socialization, what would I come up with? What would I determine was really happening and to what end? Socialization is an educational process, after all. There's a lot I could do with this, I hope you understand, and I might well come back to it. If only today I had all those now missing cues, data and original sources... now that would be interesting!
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I saw the ENT doctor this afternoon and he's ordered a swallowing study, which is now scheduled for the 19th.
But now back to the text...
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I'm skipping a lot and picking up in the chapter section "Distinguishing Countercultures and Subcultures."
"As in any act of deviance (see Chapter 5), the prevailing culture may act to stop counterculture activity, initially devoting a great deal of attention to the deviant in an attempt to get him back into the fold. If this does not work, it frequently attempts to wall the deviant off, building a protective wall around the original culture, essentially isolating the deviant by other means." (p. 137)
These things are not easy for me to distinguish when looking at my time in Vienna. That is, it is clear that the last few months were of the kind where I was "walled off," etc. And early on, after it was determined that I wasn't falling right in their lap like a helpless fledgling lost in a strange world or something, I was subject to what seemed to me to be a rather intensive effort to try to get me back on track, namely, to submit totally and completely, which, of course I never did. But the time in the middle between these two more clearly demarcated treatments that more or less serve as book ends to my Vienna mission experience, it was not always so clear to me what was going on, and I got a lot of mixed signals (they seemed mixed to me), but they might have been likewise unsure about me too. That is, there were points when pretty much everything seemed like a punishment or negative reinforcement, and there were times (in the middle) when I got a mixed hodgepodge of positive and negative feedback. Nevertheless, I think most of the time I was with the mission I was subject to one or the other of these treatments. Since so much of my time was spent like this and I seemed to be the only one with this much trouble, I did wonder, though, if there was anything I could have ever done to please them, and if not, then probably my dad's work was a mediating factor. I'm not sure now, and I wasn't sure then about this, but it wasn't like I ever expected anyone would admit to this kind of thing if it was true, so then I was stuck just trying to put together the pieces I knew (or later, could remember).
The time in Vienna took on even more importance than it might have if leaving the mission had been the end of my troubles, but it wasn't end of them (which you'll see eventually, if you haven't picked up yet in little bits and pieces I've dropped along the way). So then, in looking back over my life, I had to put the Vienna years in the context of what also came afterwards, which might have raised more questions than it answered.
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This citation is in the "Organizational Socialization" section of the chapter.
"Because socialization is an ongoing process, it has a feedback loop. As newcomers are socialized, the socializer monitors the degree to which they fit the organization. Where fit is good, they are given more socialization. Where fit is too minimal - where the newcomer shows potential signs of deviance or at least nonacceptance of the corporate culture - the newcomer is either eliminated or given less of the secret information. Businesses want 'team players.'" (p. 138)
This pretty well sums up my time with the Vienna mission, I guess. The most interesting part of the paragraph, though is the part about giving "less of the secret information." I want to talk about this a bit here.
It should be pretty clear by now that security issues were of vital importance, and I have also mentioned some about the division of knowledge and the applicability of the "need to know" approach to knowledge (only having access to knowledge you need for your job, nothing more). Knowledge was one of the key things (along with, say, people, for example) all the security efforts were meant to protect, so it would be almost natural for them to withhold organizational knowledge from anyone they didn't completely trust. And this they did. But this paragraph doesn't really go far enough in my case, because towards the end of my time in Vienna I was also subject to (I believe) disinformation and/or misinformation efforts to, I imagine, make sure I didn't leave with any reliable information (like what I've been writing about on this blog, for example) or be so confused as to not know if the knowledge I had was reliable or not.
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I need to stop here to do some other things, but we'll continue with some other discussions about socialization from this text next time.
