Tuesday, March 10, 2009
The ability to think
In this reading, Arendt focuses on the ability to think and how it affects other aspects of life-moral judgments, guilt, responsibility, etc. For my service learning, I have been working in a preschool where "thinking" as defined by Arendt does not necessarily ever take place. Children follow directions and the group (the so called mores and customs) and do not have an internal dialogue to decide how they feel or what they believe. Arendt writes: "Cliches, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality, that is, against the claim on our thinking attention which all events and fact arouse" (160). So by the children adhering only to their observations and the environment around them, are they in a sense being protected "against reality"? Or, could it be that first children must absorb the environment around them in order to later think and make their own judgements and reveal a reality? Does Arendt's writing on thinking only apply to adults or does it reach out to all people regardless of age and background?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Interesting question--when do we enter the "age of reason" where we can be expected to cultivate our thinking capacities and that 2 in 1 dialogue that Socrates speaks of? Personally, I think that this starts very young. If we are conscious, then we taking the first step which is, as Arendt tells us, discerning difference and otherness (184). Children are already doing this as they are forming their own identities/egos--we know that they are differentiating. So, they are already laying the ground for the kind of thinking that Arendt asks us all to be engaged in. The environment/parenting/teachers/all kinds of experiences are going to inform how they develop their capacity for thinking. This is part of what Geoffrey Canada is paying attention to with his work in Harlem--just by asking parents to read to their kids, use time out instead of corporeal punishment, and providing learning environments that treated kids as thinking beings.
ReplyDeleteOn page 160, Arendt also asks "Is our ability to judge, to tell right from wrong, beautiful from ugly, dependent upon our faculty of thought?"
ReplyDeleteTo further extend her questioning, does one have to be knowledged in order to be appropriately given enough credit to have a good sense of judgment? I don't think so. I don't think it is a matter of intelligence. Children might follow orders absently because they are still learning, but what of teenagers? The students I am working with at CCS seem to be very aware of their actions. They know that every thing they do has some sort of punishment or reward. So, it is not a matter of intelligence.
A person doesn't have to be intelligent to have a good sense of judgment. The reason I mention this is because it might be implied that in order to think at more sophisticated levels, a person has to be educated...which is not always the case.
What is intelligence and how do you know that the CCS students are not intelligent?
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure that intelligence and having a lot of "knowledge" are the same things either. Being educated doesn't insure either having knowledge or being intelligent. I agree that having good judgment is not linked to one's level of /or think more about some of your terms, Sally.