The Passions of Learning in Tight Circumstances: Toward a Political Economy of the Mind
The Passions of Learning in Tight Circumstances: Toward a Political Economy of the Mind
复制标题
困境中的学习热情：迈向心灵的政治经济学
作者：
R. Mcdermott
经济提出自己的要求，人们也必然会调整、学习和生存。人们以热情和聪明才智来适应紧张的环境。必要性及其激情是现实的东西，通常超出了学校或教育研究的承受能力。主流学习理论仅从统计和症状上捕捉到了经济约束（就好像缺钱意味着缺乏创造力一样）。对必要性要求的关注可以保证对教育可能性有更扎实的看法。它可以描绘出陷入困境的人们可以做什么，而不是他们不能做什么，并且它有望更好地适应民主工作。为了说明这一情况，我利用小说的力量来捕捉环境的压力和面临困难的人们的聪明才智。我分五个部分来阐述：第一部分讲述为什么小说关注经济的必要性；第二部分讲述为什么小说会关注经济的必要性；第二部分讲述为什么小说会关注经济的必要性。第二个关于政治经济学作为学习环境；以及三部小说中关于必要性激情的三个部分，这些小说拓展了学习研究的通常边界。我并不是要求学习研究人员写小说——Deus avertat！——而是通过模仿小说在模仿和扩展现实方面的成功来减少教育研究的局限性。对学习的仔细实证研究可以受益于小说家对必要性细微差别的关注。
Economies make their demands, and by necessity, people adjust, learn, and survive. People adjust to tight circumstances with passion and ingenuity. Necessity and its passions are the stuff of reality and generally more than schools or educational research can handle. Mainstream theories of learning have captured economic constraints only statistically and symptomatically (as if being short on money means being short on ingenuity). A focus on the demands of necessity promises a more grounded view of educational possibilities. It can deliver portraits of what people in trouble can do, rather than what they cannot do, and it promises research better tuned to the work of democracy. To illustrate the case, I invoke the power of novels to capture both the press of circumstance and the ingenuity of people facing difficulties. I do so in five sections: one on why novels are attentive to economic necessity; a second on political economies as learning environments; and three sections on the passions of necessity in three novels that stretch the usual borders of research on learning. I am not asking learning researchers to write novels—Deus avertat!—but to reduce the limitations of educational research by modeling the success of fiction at imitating and expanding reality. Careful empirical studies of learning can profit from the attention of novelists to the nuances of necessity.