Dear Organlearners,
Doc Holloway <learnshops@thresholds.com> writes in LO15735
> Yes, Rol--I agree. Categorizing people dehumanizes all of us (those who
> are categorized and those who do the cataloging). We had a similar
> discussion on a thread sometime ago (I believe the topic was about
> dysfunctions?).
Doc, May be agreeing with you, but you wil have to make sure of it.
English is not my mother tongue so that I frequently have to look up the
meaning of words. The word categorise means to make an sure (unequivocal)
connection.
In my 25 years of teaching I have learnt how important it is to consider
each learner as a unique individual. In other words, I had to make very
sure of each observation of or connection with a learner. In other words,
I had to act categorically!
I have also learnt how devastating it can be to exactly the opposite.
This happen when we place a person in a arbitrary class without any
definite reason. The word which I have discovered in the dictionaries to
describe this opposite of categorising is demarcating.
Thus I would like to change your sentence to "Demarcating people
dehumanizes all of us". Is this what you have meant, then I agree
violently with you. What do you say?
On a side note: we in South Africa are now living in the era after
Apartheid. Few people really understand what were the two pillars on which
Apartheid rested. They were fragmentation and demarcation. Fragmentation
is the opposite of wholeness while demarcation is the opposite of
sureness. There are seven essentialities of creativity. Wholeness has
very much to do with the essentiality "associativity- monadicity" while
sureness has very much to do with the essentiality
"identity-categoricity".
(You will remember that a few weeks ago I somebody asked me to list all of
them. I did it with great hesitation because denoting each essentiality by
one word gives the impression that they ar all simple. I stressed that the
dichotomous name of each one must remind us of the incredible complexity
of each essentiality).
I am an Afrikaner. Apartheid was a very clever formalisation by the
Afrikaners what other peoples intuively have been doing do all over the
world for ages. They forced by law demarcation and fragmentation on all
the peoples of South Africa. They did it because after 300 years they
began to think that it is impossible for two cultures form two different
continents to coexist peacefully in the same contry - the European culture
and the African culture.
Well, they made a tragic mistake by invoking demarcation and
fragmentation. Apartheid is now of the past and history is now ticking
towards 350 years. The problem still remains: how do two cultures coexist
peacefully? The present ANC goverment invokes affirmative action and
restitution because they suffered the exploitation of them as human
resiurces by the white people's regime. sources. But what they fail to
realise, is that they are now doing increasingly the same, exploiting the
white people as human resources, causing more and more suffering. Thus,
for example, white people are emigrating the country at a rate of several
hundred thousand a year.
The ANC government has become very sensitive to fragmentation, but
unfortuantely not to demarcation. Furthermore, they are even more
insensitive to a third essentiality of creativity, namely "quality-
variety". For example, they use English wherever they can to replace the
fourteen main indigenous languages. They also try to force a
collectivistic culture on all South Africans The previous white regime was
very sensitive to this third essentiality despite its insensitivity to the
other two essentialities. Thus we are not so much better off in the New
South Africa. We are not on the road to recovery because demarcation and
homogenisation have become the new ailments of our society.
What is even worse, the new homogenous culture is based on the
"coca-culture" which is exported from the USA through its mass media to
the rest of the world. Were the Soviet still in power, the new homogenous
culture would most probably have been based on the communism which the
Soviet had been exporting. In such a case all hell would have immediately
have broken loose in South Africa.
Please note that I am not saying that the USA is exporting this
"coca-culture" - it would be most demarcatory to do so. There are many USA
citizins in almost every organisation who are extremely worried about this
exporting of the "coca-culture".
At de Lange
Gold Fields Computer Centre for Education
University of Pretoria
Pretoria, South Africa
email: amdelange@gold.up.ac.za
--"Mnr AM de Lange" <amdelange@gold.up.ac.za>
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>