The question of land and fish

The other day I noticed a postcard in my office that read: “Land is a mystery to fish. By the time fish finds out about land, it’s too late”. The card was a business promotion, I don’t know for what, but still the quote caught my mind. I found the thought intriguing: is there something around us that we are not aware of, something that is crucial to us, but that we have not taken notice of?

I think there is, on several levels. I’m not going to investigate all of them here, of course, but concentrate on a cultural aspect. Some might be familiar with the concept of “tacit knowledge”, but even if not, all of us have made use of the knowledge itself. In every culture it is a tacit dimension, a dimension we are introduced to as children (if we are natives in that particular culture). Because of this knowledge, you know when you are greeted by another person; you recognise what a greeting looks like. Without this knowledge, all the members of a culture would have to explain every single action, and in practise that would be impossible to handle. This becomes particularly evident when we travel; arriving at an unfamiliar place we might observe strange activities and actions that the natives to not even seem to think about. We learn how to act and function in a culture not because (at least not exclusively because) we have been thought explicitly how to do things, but because of our very existence in that culture. We learn it by way of doing it. The things we cannot articulate is (of course) impossible to talk about; it has to be shown implicitly. This is also why we don’t question our practises; we might not even be aware of them ourselves. We have to get a person from another culture to ask us: “Why are you doing this?” This is actually quite interesting; to get someone to fundamentally challenge our ways of acting can be very rewarding.

This is one of the places where the much hyped term “literacy”¹ comes in. To be literate in our world it is not sufficient to be able to read and write mere text, with the term “literacy” we are concerned with being able to “read” and “write” an environment, to “unconsciously see” what is going on. And as our world has become fundamentally artificial, in order to understand what is going on we have to be able to make use and see the relevance of the different technological tools offered to us, and know how it is put to work in subjects that concern us. Technology has become one of the main building blocks of our society. And now (as an educator and interested in schooling) to the point: if we as a society agree that knowledge about technology is important in order to function in this society, why do we not let our pupils and students get more acquainted with it? Unlike fish when it comes in contact with land, we become more apt to the task, better prepared and more experienced when we meet new things in organised environments. Getting experienced with different sides of our culture is not lethal to us; not getting experienced with it might be (at least socially).

I came across jet another quote illustrating this: ”Figuratively speaking, it is as difficult for those who have become fully literate within a world dominated by print to see how their own literacy has been shaped – indeed limited – by the technology used to produce and disseminate printed materials as it is for a fish to think about the water in which it swims” (taken from Reinking ed. 1998).

Perhaps we have difficulties identifying what is most important in our society, depriving the next generation a head start managing it?

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Notes:

¹ This is a concept I will return to again on this blog, and hopefully in a more elaborate form.