No one has raised what seems to me to be the major difficulty in
encouraging widespread conversation and dialogue on PEN-L: incredible
amounts of over-posting. God help the poor soul who goes away for a
weekend, and returns to a mailbox full of hundreds of PEN-L e-mails
accumulated over the space of three+ days. It takes hours just to try to
figure out what is substantive, and what is not. Perhaps it is because no
political points could be scored from such an observation, perhaps it is
because the list of the guilty is long and from all quarters, but no one
has mentioned this problem. Short one liner contributions are a problem
primarily in the way they contribute to this immense volume; it is
obviously a lot easier to produce many of them than to produce many more
lengthy and considered pieces. Bottom line: one should be able to
participate in a listserv and still have a life which is not dedicated to
24 hours a day in front of a computer.
IMHO, Socratic discourse is more of a complex phenomena than has been
indicated here. It provides a model of a conversation, a dialogue, as a
basis of learning, and by contrast to the didactic, lecturing mode which
predominates at the post-secondary level of education, it is much
preferable. The problem with the Socratic discourse is the assumption that
one party to the discourse -- the teacher -- entirely controls it, and is
in possession, prior to the actual conversation, of the knowledge which
lies at its end. In short, the dialectic of the Socratic discourse, like
the Hegelian dialectic, is closed, with a pre-given, teleological end. What
is needed, of course, is an open dialectic in which the knowledge end is
not pre-given, and in which all sides to the conversation share a
fundamental equality in terms of an understanding that they can learn from
each other in a common pursuit of knowledge. This means, of course, that
there is nothing wrong, per se, with the e-mail response which simply poses
a question; the key point is simply that the question must be genuine, and
part of a larger commitment to egalitarian dialogue and conversation.
Leo Casey
United Federation of Teachers
260 Park Avenue South
New York, New York 10010-7272
212-98-6869
Power concedes nothing without a demand.
It never has, and it never will.
If there is no struggle, there is no progress.
Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who
want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and
lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters.
-- Frederick Douglass --
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