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Review by Joyce Wycoff
This is a wise look at learning by a woman with a long lineage of wisdom and learning. Continuing the work of her famous parents Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, Mary Catherine Bateson gives us insight into the conditions and intricacies of learning. Below, I've excerpted a few quotes that struck me. While this sampling does not display the richness of her stories and learnings from several world cultures, they do provide much food for thought --
Meeting as strangers, we join in common occasions, making up our multiple roles as we go along -- young and old, male and female, teacher and parent and lover -- with all of science and history present in shadow form, partly illuminating and partly obscuring what is there to be learned. Mostly we are unaware of creating anything new, yet both perception and action are necessarily creative. Much of modern life is organized to avoid the awareness of the fine threads of novelty connecting learned behaviors with acknowledged spontaneity.
Men and women confronting change are never full prepared for the demands of the moment, but they are strengthened to meet uncertainty if they can claim a history of improvisation and a habit of reflection.
... for all human beings live with strangers.
I believe that participant observation is more than a research methodology. It is a way of being, especially suited to a world of change.
Adaptation comes out of encounters with novelty that may seem chaotic. In trying to adapt, we may need to deviate from cherished values, behaving in ways we have barely glimpsed, seizing on fragmentary clues.
Essential themes are not clearly marked but rather visible only out of the corner of the eye.
The excitement of improvisation lies not only in the risk involved but in the new ideas, as heady as the adrenaline of performance, that seem to come from nowhere. When the necessary tasks of learning cannot be completed in a portion of the life cycle set aside for them, they have to join life's other tasks and be done concurrently.
Living and learning, we become ambidextrous.
It is reassuring to know that everywhere most of learning occurs outside the settings labeled as educational.
Ambiguity is the warp of life, not something to be eliminated.
There is a spiritual basis to attention, a humility in waiting upon the emergence of pattern from experience.
Our species thinks in metaphors and learns through stories.
For the rise of fundamentalism within any tradition is always a symptom of the unwillingness to try to sustain joint performances across disparate codes.
Insight, I believe, refers to that depth of understanding that comes by setting experiences, yours and mine, familiar and exotic, new and old, side by side, learning by letting them speak to one another.
Spiral learning moves through complexity with partial understanding, allowing for later returns. For some people, what is ambiguous and not immediately applicable is discarded, while for others, much that is unclear is vaguely retained, taken in with peripheral vision for possible later clarification, hard to correct unless it is made explicit. Beyond the denotations lie unexplored connotations and analogies.
Participation precedes learning.
The Western preoccupation with progress may be an effort to compensate for a personal sense of being condemned to regress. Many adults only take on the challenge of profound change when they are desperate. This is why so much of adult learning is packaged today as therapy and why it must often offer the compensation of membership in a new community or relationship.
The alternative would be to conserve the openness and need for new learning that we find in infants, by making it a part of identity.
Learning is perhaps the only pleasure that might replace increasing consumption as our chosen mode of enriching experience. Someday, the joy of recognizing a pattern in a leaf or the geological strata in a cliff face might replace the satisfactions of new carpeting or more horsepower in an engine, and the chance to learn in the workplace might seem more valuable than increased purchasing power or a move up the organizational chart.
For men and women, resumes full of change show resiliency and creativity, the strength to welcome new learning, yet personnel directors often discriminate against anyone whose resume does not show a clear progression.
The most profoundly original insights are only intelligible because they are phrased in recognizable form.
Without such a sense of continuity, change is so frightening that some are driven into reactionary identities. A tightrope walker maintains balance by changing the angle of the balancing pole.
When change itself becomes addictive, it seems almost bound to lead to trouble, yet not all acquired habits of constant change are degenerative: constant learning, for instance, is not.
Even as we compete to receive attention or struggle to know where to give it, it remains the elusive prerequisite of all thought and learning, always selective and always based on some implicit theory of relevance, of connection.
Concentration is too precious to belittle. I know that if I look very narrowly and hard at anything I am likely to see something new.
Fear is a poor teacher.
The most fruitful innovation in education may prove to be a new emphasis on collaborative learning at every level.
Curiosity is a good place to start if one is going to encounter the sacred.