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considered as primarily internal, each with its supports in the
environment” (52). Again, because of those “personal
investments,” whether those students chose to “progress” or to
“conserve,” it was, in the end, their choice alone: how they
chose to conceive of themselves, their world, and their place in
it. The reality of these. The “truth” of these. As Perry
concludes: “The students’ endeavor to orient themselves in the
world through an understanding of the acts of knowing and
valuing is therefore more than intellectual and philosophical.
It is a moral endeavor in the most personal sense” (54).
And the very “personal” nature of those students’ movement
across those nine positions held very definite significance for
Perry about how teachers could promote “diversity” and
“relativism” given that fact. The most crucial for me is his
advice about how teachers can try to avoid “cultural shock” and
welcome students to further and further relativistic ways of
perceiving reality and “truth.” For Perry, this could be done
through deliberate overtures to the “personal.” He explains:
“Our students’ accounts suggest that an assist might come from
explicit reference to analogies in those relativistic structures
which the student has already developed at more concrete levels
of experience” (211). However, Perry claims that an
instructor’s address to the “personal” cannot fully account for
an arrival unto the last position of the scheme, Position 9,
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