The Problem of the Public
Most of us can conveniently divide our lives into public and private spheres. We are use to it and it makes sense. I take it for granted that I am engaged publicly when I am out of my house and in the midst of institutionalized, organized activity - schools, courtrooms, hospitals, churches - the organized places where I spend my time and attend to important experiences. What I think of as education is schooling, health is medicine , religion is church, protection and security are police. In my mind, they are one.
On the other hand,I think that when I am in my house what I do is private. All that has become associated with the household is private. Matters of intimacy, care, shelter, shelter, etc. are private and personal. Because I have designated so much of my life as personal I live with new realities - "responsibility," "control," "freedom," etc. The attribution of responsibility for large dimensions of our lives (childcare,etc.) to those who are in the private and personal realm becomes a crucial issue for us.
There is a lot of consequence to the split we have in our private/public worlds and the way our lives are shaped because of it. Consider one obvious dimension of this split - the spaces we occupy. We have physically altered our social space to maximize private space, minimize communal space and separate out institutional space (schools,etc.); our architecture reflects and sustains our ideas and practices. Just consider the difference between Lynnwood, Tumwater or Olympia and Xilokastro or Athens or Zagreb or Budapest.
But there are other serious consequences; we have learned to accept enormous contradictions in our understanding of public and private. I want to emphasize two. First, in relegating dimensions of our lives to the "private and personal" sphere we have failed to explore and develop (and act on) the real, communal nature of them, we have failed to make public what is of common concern to all of us. And, secondly, in assuming aspects of our lives to be private, and not public, we live with illusion, misdirected. Last spring I had to go before a judge in Thurston County Superior Court to present a parenting plan. It was unnerving to plead my case and to have decisions made about me and my children, a relationship I had experienced as very personal, in such a public way. I felt like all the meaning I had woven around my relationship with my children was stripped away and laid open to, and ultimately dependent upon, public judgment and norms. I felt like I had had a huge, callous joke played on me. I learned something about the consequence of the confusion I live in today between what I assume to be private and what is public.
Here is another example. The Olympia School District presents itself as a school system interested in helping each child develop and learn. As the parent I found most of the parent/teacher conferences focused around my child's individual interests, abilities, problems - child-centered. Regularly the teacher, my child and I would make a contract around what he was interested in, what he had to do in school, what we were to do at home. In the most concrete and explicit ways life in the school was experienced as personal, individual; my child's learning was done collectively but he was also the center of attention. As Bill said, classroom as collections of individuals.
Then last year my youngest son was assessed at "below grade level" in reading - that was an institutional, normative judgment I had never heard before and with that judgment came the full force of the institution's response - tests, labels, remedial programs, experts. Where had this ugly monster been hiding during all of those teacher conferences? I realized that something else was going on, children are learning within a model that takes its definition, not from a child's perspective, but from the larger, public world of education. Fooled again.
We live as though we had a private and personal world when in fact our lives, our most intimate lives, are publicly shaped. The consequences of this seem daunting to me and affect how I begin this program. Two questions emerge for me: How has the idea of public/private split, particularly the attribution of so much of our lives to the personal realm, affected our lives and our views of education? If we saw all dimensions of our lives as public, in common with others, how would that change how we live?
What do we mean by public? Beginning To Pat Attention to This Problem
Hannah Arendt, in her inquiry into the nature of the public realm and what she calls the vita activa, writes the following:
No human life, not even the life of the hermit in nature's wilderness, is possible without a world which directly or indirectly testifies to the presence of other human beings.
I like the simplicity of this sentence. It relieves us from our current distinctions between public and private and allows us to just think of our common life as that which "directly or indirectly testifies to the presence of other human beings." I take that to mean that in what we do or say we take account of others, that we see the world as populated with people (ourselves included) who have consequence for each other. In a more fundamental way it means that we see ourselves as social And while we experience the world in personal and intimate ways we are not really distanced from or disengaged ourselves from others. A recognition of personal experience does not lead away from others, rather it offers us the substance of our conversations and discussions, our communal work.
If I go only on my experience, I can't dispute the difference in what I experience individually and collectively. But to see whole dimensions of my life as exclusively "personal" or "public" is to ignore the essentially public and social nature of our lives. To relegate such matters as learning, sexuality, reproduction, marriage, child care, happiness to the personal realm is to deny that we live lives that "directly or indirectly testifies to the presence of other human beings."
There are others who have influenced my thinking and help me see better the problem I am in. C.Wright Mills in his book the Power Elite writes about the "community of publics" which he distinguishes from the "masses." He writes about the way in which people, each of whom has his or her own personal experiences, can live and work together as a "public" community. He describes such a "public" in the following way:
In a public, as we may understand the term, (1) virtually as many people express opinions as receive them. (2) Public communications are so organized that there is a chance immediately and effectively to answer back any opinion expressed in public. Opinion formed by such discussion (3) readily finds an outlet in effective action, even against - if necessary - the prevailing system of authority. And (4) authoritative institutions do not penetrate the public, which is thus more or less autonomous in its operations. When these conditions prevail, we have the working model of a community of publics, and this model fits closely the several assumptions of classic democratic theory.
He offers the following possibility if people can create such a public life:
The knowledgeable man in the genuine public is able to turn his personal troubles into social issues, to see their relevance for his community and his community's relevance for them. He understands that what he thinks and feels as personal troubles are very often not only that but problems shared by others and indeed not subject to solution by any one individual but only modifications of the structure of the groups in which he lives and sometimes the structure of the entire society.
Paulo Freire also adds to our understanding of the relationship between private and public. In developing his views on learning, what he terms critical consciousness, he recognizes the importance of using personal experience as a basis for reflecting on public matters. For example, in his literacy program, a woman who daily carries water home in a bucket is asked to think about that routine in her life. Why is it only she who carries the bucket? What if she asked her young son to carry the bucket? What are the tasks she doesn't do? Who is affected by the way people in her house carry out their tasks? Who else is served by this? In Socratic fashion, Freire asks his students to think about their lives and draw out of their experiences what they know about their place in the public world. There is no question in his mind that everyone participates in the public world; the issue for him is whether we recognize it and recognize the affect we have in the public world. For Freire, it is through this process of inquiry that the public/private split may dissolve and the relationship between the two realms made clear.
For Freire and Mills "public" is not used to distance a learner from their personal life but rather do as Mills also argues "bridge personal troubles and public issues." To be public then would be to find a common focus and a social process to bridge personal experiences with collective and common issues. To be public is to contribute to the common good.
Let's try this thinking out on a few, controversial, highly personalized issues. Think about the abortion debate with me. On both sides, the issue is presented as a personal one - for those who support abortion it is argued as a matter of a women's right to choice, for those who don't support abortion the argument is made for the individual rights of the unborn fetus. How would the debate over whether to allow abortions or not be changed if we saw abortion as a public issue? In other words, if we abandoned arguments about individual rights, how then would we talk about abortion? What about abortion would matter to us?
Let's try another one. Religion is seen largely as a private and personal affair. Most Americans are disturbed and incredulous over the conflicts in the Balkans, in the middle east, and elsewhere where religion is inseparable from politics and history and people engage in horrible conflicts over "religious" differences. What is it about our experience of religion that would have to change in order to understand religion as a public experience?
What are the implications for those of us in this room?
Is "public" education, as distinguished from public schooling, possible? What would it look like? What abut education would have to change for it to be public?
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