Stony Brook University - SUNY Digital Repository
Stony Brook University - SUNY Digital Repository Stony Brook University - SUNY Digital Repository
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, 154
where students perceive “all knowledge and values […] as contextual and relative” yet also realize “Commitment as an ongoing, unfolding activity through which he expresses his life style.” For this to happen, there needs to be something more. As he explains: The efficient fostering of competence in the skills and disciplines of contextual meta-thinking does of course require […] the further development of those ways of teaching which encourage risking, groping, analytic detachment and synthetic thought. But our students’ reports reveal that this competence alone would tend to result in a development no further than that expressed in our scheme of Position 5. (212) And that “something more” that would seem to be a realization of a “social” relationship, a “social” responsibility. Furthermore, that “something more” is a dialectic, a “dialogue” between the “personal” and the “social,” both influencing each other as relative thought and commitment shape and reshape – “mutually deform” - each other. To the rhetorical question, “What environmental sustenance most supports students in the choice to use their competence to orient themselves through Commitments – as opposed to using it to establish nonresponsible alienation?” (213), Perry offers the following answer: For the majority, […] the most important support seemed to derive from a special realization of community. This was the realization that in the very risks, separateness and individuality of working out their Commitments, they were in the same boat, not only with each other but with their instructors as well. (213, emphasis mine) Beyond this, there is also the necessity for students of “reciprocal acts of recognition and confirmation” (213): not 155
- Page 111 and 112: the tendency of that reality to mak
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where students perceive “all knowledge and values […] as<br />
contextual and relative” yet also realize “Commitment as an<br />
ongoing, unfolding activity through which he expresses his life<br />
style.” For this to happen, there needs to be something more.<br />
As he explains:<br />
The efficient fostering of competence in the skills<br />
and disciplines of contextual meta-thinking does of<br />
course require […] the further development of those<br />
ways of teaching which encourage risking, groping,<br />
analytic detachment and synthetic thought. But our<br />
students’ reports reveal that this competence alone<br />
would tend to result in a development no further than<br />
that expressed in our scheme of Position 5. (212)<br />
And that “something more” that would seem to be a realization of<br />
a “social” relationship, a “social” responsibility.<br />
Furthermore, that “something more” is a dialectic, a “dialogue”<br />
between the “personal” and the “social,” both influencing each<br />
other as relative thought and commitment shape and reshape –<br />
“mutually deform” - each other. To the rhetorical question,<br />
“What environmental sustenance most supports students in the<br />
choice to use their competence to orient themselves through<br />
Commitments – as opposed to using it to establish nonresponsible<br />
alienation?” (213), Perry offers the following answer:<br />
For the majority, […] the most important support<br />
seemed to derive from a special realization of<br />
community. This was the realization that in the very<br />
risks, separateness and individuality of working out<br />
their Commitments, they were in the same boat, not<br />
only with each other but with their instructors as<br />
well. (213, emphasis mine)<br />
Beyond this, there is also the necessity for students of<br />
“reciprocal acts of recognition and confirmation” (213): not<br />
155