Date: Sat, 20 May 1995 09:51:22 -0700 (PDT)
From: Scott London <london@rain.org>
Subject: PERIPHERAL VISIONS by Mary Catherine Bateson


Book Review:
~~~~~~~~~~~~

PERIPHERAL VISIONS
Learning Along the Way
By Mary Catherine Bateson
New York: HarperCollins, 1994, 243 pages


Bateson describes this as "a of book stories and reflections strung
together to suggest a style of learning from experience."  It is a
beautifully crafted look at how we make sense of our lives, make
connections between seemingly random events, and find the underlying
patterns at work behind ordinary, and sometimes not so ordinary,
circumstances.  Bateson offers a series of original and often profound
reflections on the broader implications of education and, what is perhaps
most impressive, she manages to convey very complicated ideas in lucid and
often quite poetic English. 

     The narrative travels to and from four countries: Iran, where Bateson
lived in the 1970s (before the revolution) with her husband and young
daughter; the Philippines, where she taught and did fieldwork; Israel,
where she went to high school and later returned as a researcher; and the
United States, where she has worked as an anthropologist and educator at
several universities.  She uses the learning from her experiences in these
various settings to illustrate a central point: that our traditional
understanding of education is too narrowly defined.  Most of our learning
in life, she says, takes place outside the settings commonly labeled as
educational and include intuitive and empirical dimensions all too often
overlooked in our customary approach to learning.  While formal schooling
is a necessary part of learning, it is only a part and should not be
strictly differentiated from "real" life. 

     Bateson uses several metaphors to describe the ways in which we
learn from experience.  The first and most central of these is what she
calls peripheral vision: "Sometimes change is directly visible, but
sometimes it is apparent only to peripheral vision, altering the meaning
of the foreground."  While our society puts a premium on specialization
and devotion to one pursuit at a time, narrowly focused attention tends to
limit our learning and hamper our ability to make meaningful connections
between different life experiences.  Another central image of the book is
the spiral.  Always expanding, yet always circling back on itself, the
spiral is a metaphor for how we learn, according to Bateson.  "Spiral
learning moves through complexity with partial understanding, allowing for
later returns.  For some people, what is ambiguous and not immediately
applicable is discarded, while for others, much that is unclear is vaguely
retained, taken in with peripheral vision for possible later
clarification."

     Bateson insists that "it a mistake to try to reform the educational
system without revising our sense of ourselves as learning beings."  This
involves exploring the "improvisational base" of learning, how we think
and make sense of the world through stories, how we learn from experience,
whether we learn best through participation or through instruction and in
what order these are most effective, the role of play and imagination, and
a number of other questions.  Above all, she believes, we must get beyond
the idea that learning is a function of formal schooling.  "Trying to
understand learning by studying schooling is rather like trying to
understand sexuality by studying bordellos."

     Bateson's reflections on education and experiential learning are
presented against the backdrop of what she describes as an increasingly
"motley, dappled, [and] diverse" society.  How we negotiate cultural
differences and find coherence amid diversity is one of the keys to
understanding how we learn.  She stresses again and again that the
confrontation with the unknown forces us to reexamine our assumptions and,
in a sense, reinvent ourselves.  The debate over diversity in our schools
tends to miss this point by confusing "identity multiculturalism" -- the
yearning of many groups for their own traditions to be honored -- with
"adaptive multiculturalism" -- an educational strategy that "enhances
everyone's capacity to adapt by offering exposure to a variety of other
traditions."

     Bateson is perhaps best known for her previous book, "Composing a 
Life," to which this is something of a sequel.  She has also written 
several other books, and she was featured in Bill Moyers's "A World of 
Ideas" series.  She teaches at George Mason University in Virginia.

     "Peripheral Vision" took me a long time to read and digest.  That, 
I think, is a measure of its quality and significance.


                                   Scott London * london@rain.org