mary catherine bateson

more from her Peripheral Visions:

p. 8: self observation is the best teacher  (detox and swim videos)
p. 10: to enjoy and to live is a precondition for the capacity to learn
p. 48-50: what we have learned not to see, ... and what we have learned to impose
p. 62-63: membership both acknowledges and bridges separateness, for it is constructed across a gap of mutual incomprehension, depending always on the willingness to join in and be changed by a common dance. ...persons are human individuals shaped and succored by the reality of interdependence
p. 64: learning is fluid like the web, not linear
p. 109: to attend, to notice, ..... changes the world
p. 112: chocolate milk
p. 113: where boredom is simply irrelevant
p. 135: fractals (metaphors) make us endlessly fertile, perpetual beta
p. 138: our habits of attention work agains seeing
p. 139: groups dealing

p. 175: participation often involves skills in coping with ambiguity. "common sense" is often assumed to be truly common and to precede specialization, but it may be that "common sense" is mastered only in old age, when it is revered as "wisdom."
one conspicuous strand of contemporary debate attempts to inventory what every member of society needs to know, whether in curricula and proposed standard examinations in such more fanciful forms as e.d.hirsch, jr.'s cultural literacy, or in so-called canon. no one, it might be argued, is a full participant in american society who is not numerate and literate in english does not know enough of the rules of baseball and civics to take sides, and so on and so forth perhaps at very great length. depending on how we define full participant, it may be essential to have read melville or to understand the theory of relativity. it may also be necessary to know how to program a vcr or how to fill out an application for food stamps. no one, it might be argued is a full participant in american society who does not have some basic knowledge of histories and folkways of the diverse groups that compose that society. some knowledge of buddhism and some of vodun. but are there any competent participants in american society? young people must be prepared to feel like newly arrived immigrants through much of their lives. they need to know how to observe, how to learn, how to adapt, how to draw on other people's expertise. how to improvise and cope with only partial knowledge and how to imagine alternatives.