In an earlier paper I have described how changes in the nature of the student population from young to older and from on-campus to off-campus have begun to affect the teaching of sociology. (McGehee, 1980) This change, I have argued, is compelling a reorientation in the way we think about and present sociology to this more mature, practical, community-based student population.
Now I would like to expand on some of the issues raised in that earlier statement and discuss some principles of off-campus teaching which I have found essential to communicate sociology to this new population.
There are at least ten principles which have come to form the basis for my off-campus classes. They are as follows:
(1) The course must be practical. By that I mean it must be directly applicable to the problems students experience in their daily lives.
(2) Since practical social action is at root a function of individual decision-making, the subject matter must be made to have a personal significance for the students in terms of their past, present and future decisions.
(3) Students already possess independent will, intent and knowledge, and as adults they already "know" the structure of their lives and the nature of the solutions to their problems. This is only implicit in their lives and they may not recognize it at the level of everyday consciousness. It is therefore up to the teacher to develop an immediate awareness of this implicit knowledge. This development is a creative process akin to carving a piece of sculpture. Just as it may be said that it is the sculptor's task to reveal the form buried within the wood by chipping away the layers surrounding it, so also is it the task of the instructor to chip away the layers burying that which the students as persons "know to be the case." (Cf. Ossorio, 1966)
(4) The basis of the course must be an adequate description of the subject matter. In social science, "scientific" language is not an adequate description of the subject matter since it is alien to all but the specialists who have created and use it. The ordinary language and only the ordinary language provides an adecuate basis for a description of the rules of a society, and then only through a systematic analysis of the implications of each linguistic concept. (Cf. Ossorio, 1966; Harre and Secord, 1973)
(5) The key to an adequate analysis of social behavior lies in creating an adequate definition of the subject matter. An adequate definition of something contains only those elements necessary for understanding. (A tree without a carburetor is not missing anything: a tree without roots is not a tree.) (Ossorio. 1966)
(6) The goal of the class should be to develop a sense of the interrelatedness of things: Everything is related to the price of eggs in China -- if we only know how to ask the right kinds of q.uestions. The students must learn to create relationships where none are obvious bv. examining concrete linkages and the implications of contradictions which exist in any state of affairs. (Cf. Mao, 1965)
(7) The students individually and the class as a whole are a valid source of theory and data for the class. The students are all products of and witnesses to the society in question, and individually are the only witnesses to their own internal states. (Harre and Secord, 1973)
While their experiences and theoretical consciousnesses may be limited due to factors such as social class, geography and historical period, and hence may need to be expanded and clarified, they are nevertheless important and should form the primary basis for any understandings. The method of discovering these data and consciousnesses is through establishing a dialogue. This dialogue must accomplish two things: (1) It must reveal social data following the investigative principle that "every witness knows more than he remembers and remembers more than he knows," and (2) It must bring out the "themes of consciousness" that the students, as members of the society, use to orient themselves to reality. (Cf. Freiere, 1970)
(8) Social living is ultimately a matter of values which are always concerned with being able to distinguish between right from wrong, good from bad, and appropriate from inappropriate. The question of the purpose of life, how to live and individual and collective goals cannot be separated from an analysis of the problems and structure of social life. These issues are not of a moralizing nature and are not matters of personal preference. They are rather concepts without which no society can survive. (Cf. Lewis, 1947)
9) Appropriate behavior, values and standards, even though complex, are inherently describable and may be communicated to others.
(10) Problems are dictated by interaction of conscious, intentional persons and material conditions. Changing individuals does not necessarily make the problems caused by material conditions go away, and changing the material conditions does not necessarily make the problems caused by individual consciousness go away.
Given, then, these principles, it is the task of the instructor in redesigning sociology for students in the community to act as an orchestra leader of sorts whose task it is to bring together the pre-existing talents of the members of the "orchestra" (i.e., the class) to produce systematic, coordinated insight into the nature of social life without feeling compelled to turn each player in the orchestra into a conductor. Following is a description of how I attempt such an orchestration in my own classes.
Starting with the proposition that students already possess consciousness, will, intent and knowledge independent of me or any educational system, it follows that if I have anything of value to offer them, it lies only in the ways I might facilitate arranging their experiences and developing their consciousnesses to better clarify and meet their goals. Since it is in terms of their "themes of consciousness," that is, the ordinary, everyday, practical knowledge, values and understandings in terms of which they have survived all of these years, that I am to establish the class, it is necessary to develop an ordinary language dialogue.
Persons have, of course, many themes of consciousness, and so it is the point of any specific class to develop only those themes relevant to the subject matter at hand. The linkage of these themes and the class begins at the point where the subject is defined such that it, no more and no less, is the topic of inquiry.
An adequate definition must derive from the social usage of the concept if it is to have significance for the people who live the problem. Thus, for example, in my Juvenile Delinquency class, we establish a definition by beginning a dialogue about the consciousness associated with the use of the term. I begin simply by asking the students individually, "What does the term 'juvenile delinquency' conjure up in your mind?" Since the students are accustomed to being told what "truth" is, the question may well make them uncomfortable at first and the answers may be stilted and contrived in the assuuption that I am looking for something specific.
Many themes of consciousness are expressed simultaneously, many of which overlap or contradict one another. Students are therefore encouraged to respond to one another's statements as an aid to clarification. At the outset it often seems that there are as many definitions of juvenile delinquency as there are students, but it is not the students' definitions or what they think about specifically that is at issue -- it is the common themes.
I have found, for example, that nearly every such session in the Juvenile Delinquency class produces about eight to ten specific and fundamental themes. Juvenile delinquency, it seems, involves (1) acts as opposed to mental states, (2) natural persons qua persons, (3) minority age, (4) adults in a rule making capacity, (5) acts outside adult supervision, (6) acts threatening to adult interests, (7) only adults in a position to do something about these acts through access to legitimate social institutions, (8) public law, (9) legal processes, and (10) attempts to eliminate the threatening behavior.
Put together in the form of a statement, juvenile delinquency can then be defined as "An act by a person, usually under the age of 18, which is beyond adult supervisory control and which deviates from adult standards for such persons thereby threatening the interests of adults in a position to call upon public laws and processes to enforce such standards with the result that legal processes are invoked to eliminate the threatening behavior."
This definition sets the direction of the class by calling attention to the proposition that juvenile delinquency is best understood if one looks at the nature of acts, persons, age, adults, social power, public laws and institutions, enforcement mechanisms and mechanisms of behavioral change, i.e., correctional institutions and programs. It is not a definition that says what kind of a "thing" juvenile delinquency is, nor does it say that delinquency is a quality only of persons or definitions. And since it was derived from the students' themes of consciousness, it can be changed as other themes emerge. But it is the kind of definition that says that if by the end of the course we have some understanding of those things it may be said that we have come to understand something of the problems associated with the concept of juvenile delinquency, which is the point of the class.
The implication of this definition seems to be that the problem of delinquency emerges from a fundamental conflict between the age-bound statuses of children and adults. It is compounded by the fact that all adults were, by definition, children, and most children will, in turn, become adults. This conflict seems to center on the fact that children enter, through no fault of their own, a world ready-made by others for the interests of others. Being quite helpless, children are necessarily dependent at the outset and quite incapable of social behavior. Adults bear the corresponding burden to care for the helpless infant and at the same time insure that it becomes a person who not only is cooperative and non-threatening, but also capable of assuming, when grown, the burden of of running and reproducing the society. It follows then that adults try to turn children into what they conceive to be "desirable persons."
It follows also that children, possessing independent consciousness and intent, may well see adults standing in their way and constituting what may be said to be "barriers" to the production of their own lives. One possible response to a barrier is to seek a way out of the impasse, and, so conceived, juvenile delinquency and many associated problems can be conceived in ordinary language as rational, intentional "ways out."
The analysis of the conflict between "the desirable person" and "ways out" provides the structure for the rest of the class. The first third of the class is devoted to describi"g the qualities of the desirable person and the problems these goals meet in a practical world. The second third of the class is devoted to examining means for "bringing about the desirable person," i.e., mechanisms of socialization such as reward, punishment and modeling, and the structural problems encountered in using or failing to use them. This section also contains an analysis of "where it all went sour," which is an analysis of how well-intentioned parents in an industrial milieu produce children said to be juvenile delinquents. (Marx, 1967; Tönnies, 1957) And the final third is devoted to the question of "what to do about it," that is, the system of juvenile justice.
In each section, themes of consciousness are examined again and in ever greater depth. The question, for example, "What does the notion of the 'desirable person' conjure up in your mind?" producing at the outset opposition in the form of "no one's perfect," soon gives rise to a set of ideal characteristics, characteristics that weigh heavily in social relations, such as honesty, responsibility, consideration, respect, generosity, gratitude, love, fun, independence, etc., etc. This list of qualities demonstrates such a consistently high degree of uniformity from class to class that I am convinced these themes of consciousness are far from ideosyncratic, and are in fact the very roots of social structure itself.
Further pursuing the proposition that these qualities are identifiable and linguistically communcable, a question, for instance, about how one can recognize an honest person and how one would communicate that quality to a child produces insightful, if sometimes painful, analysis. In the first place, this type of question calls on the students to reflect on the problems of adult society, which many are loathe to do since they still identify with the problems of children even though they themselves are chronologically no longer children, and in the second place it forces them to think about contradictions in their own, frequently naively idealistic, positions. Under intense questioning, it does not take long to become aware that honesty taken to its logical conclusion can in fact be socially disruptive. Another concept, then, "tact," emerges as a necessary tempering social characteristic to stabilize social relations. The fact that tact implies deviating from total truth in an effort to preserve the psychological and social integrity of another when most vulnerable, is the only thing keeping this act from being an act of dishonesty. It then emerges that children said to be juvenile delinquents are sometimes said to lack "social skill" which, among other things, may involve telling anyone what's on their mind -- a total, unbridled, tactless kind of honesty -- without any regard for the other person's feelings.
And so it goes with each of the characteristics. Generosity may be limited by the harm too much generosity can do to the interests others have in that which is being given away, and may unintentionally become an act of insensitivity or ingratitude. Failure to be appropriately thankful at someone else's presumed sacrifice may give rise to being said to be selfish and grasping. Calling a person of greater age, status or power by the first name without that person's permission, may imply disrespect. Good table manners and language skills call on a person to deny his own comfort so as not to offend others. Love requires not only the acceptance of hardship but also the willingness to entrust one's most vulnerable elements to another without fear that they will be exploited for personal gain. Responsibility, broken down into separate concepts of responsibility TO and responsibility FOR, requires in the first instance adherence to performance expectations in exchange for a reward, while in the second instance requires constant sacrifice with the distinct possibility of no reward, an insight which, incidently, comes to be linked with child-rearing difficulties experienced by many parents who thought they had learned responsibility through babysitting or delivering newspapers.
Many conflicts about the nature of these concepts which reflect the social conflicts in the rest of the society arise in class, with some making a case for dishonesty if the rewards are great enough, and others for absolute honesty regardless of the personal costs. Many have given up trying to find an "honest man" and have turned to religion as the only source of honesty in a dishonest world, or to political activism, hoping to create conditions which will promote honesty. In the course of such dislogues, reports of juvenile workers which indicate an association between lack of the qualities of the "desirable person" and the identification of many juveniles as delinquent gain considerable meaning.
The analysis culminates in a picture of the desirable person as one who puts the interests of others before his own, but at the same time is able to know when to assert his own interests to keep from being exploited. It further becomes clear that this is no easy task for the children of a society to become desirable persons since adults may not adhere to thestandards they seek to impose on the children. Indeed it appears that the "desirable person" may also be a "dangerous person" in that he not onlymay see through the hypocrisy and self-servance of the adult generation but also may be capable of acting to counter it.
The problem of the contradictions inherent in creating a "desirable person" is enhanced by the increasing awareness that all in the class have experienced the process as children and as adults will likely do many of the same things the adults in their lives did -- and apparently for good reason, for it is not clear that as adult members of society we can expect any less than "desirability" from our offspring without risking ruin, nor under the material conditions under which we live are we totally capable of fulfilling our own expectations.
By the time the class is over the students have come to think in terms of social relations, socialization, power structures, social class, social values and all the other usual sociological concepts without actually having used them. And yet they understand the principles and can apply them in their lives. They talk not only in terms of the concepts associated with the "desirable person" and "barriers," but also of parents' "buying affection" and "breaking a child's spirit," of "setting an example" and "being an example," and of the destruction of teenage dreams of parenthood when they find they have become "saddled with" children of their own. They talk about and cite instances of these problems in ways that convince me that they are seeing constellations of relations and cause and effect relationships in the ways Marx, Weber, Durkheim and others have seen them. Only at the end of the second third of the class are they briefly exposed to the standard theories, and then only to indicate that the "expert" possess no logic. The students have themselves come to the same conclusions on their own and more comprehensively, too.
Most of my classes are in the area of law and Justice. By this time, I teach each of them according to these principles, and with success. The definitional process is crucial since it establishes at the outset the important areas of difference between and similarity with the other areas. The problem of Criminology, for example, focuses on older persons in conflict with a broader, more institutionalized perspective called the "solid citizen"; Law and Society focuses on the institutionalized mechanisms for regulating a society; Punisbment and Corrections focuses on goals and means for behavioral change., and Child Abuse focuses more on specific types of behavior within a specific type of relationship. At the same time each is linked to the other through the defined similarities of social institutions, norms, values, and deviant behavior. Additionally, in the case of Child Abuse, since the question of identification is of key interest, I have also had to introduce forensic medicine into the course.
I cannot claim that all who have experienced this method have been enthralled. It does require students to think a great deal and to think on their feet, too. Some feel threatened or do not want to be bothered. But long distance calls reporting insights, reports of crimes solved and child abuse discovered in the face of "expert" ignorance, and continuing application of the principles analyzing other social concepts such as duty, honor and integrity, suggest to me a new-found independence of sociological thought which I consider success.
I might add, too, that even though this method was developed primarily in response to the challenge from older students off-campus, I have ultimately incorporated it into most of my on-campus classes with similar success. Thus, the title of this paper should perhaps not have been "Sociology Redesigned for Students in the Community," but simply "Sociology Redesigned."
Freire, Paulo
1970 The Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Herder and Herder.
Harre, R. and Paul F. Secord
1973 The Explanation of Social Behavior. Totowa, N.J... Littlefield, Adams.
Lewis, C.S.
1947 The Abolition of Man. New York: MacMillan.
Mao Tse-tung
1965 "On contradiction," in Selected Works, v. I. Peking: Foreign Languages Press.
Marx, Karl
1967 Capital, V. I, Parts IV, V. New York: International Publishers.
McGehee, Charles L.
1980 "What high status sociologists have to learn from low status sociologists, or the sociological dog-and-pony show has hit the road." The Wisconsin Sociologist, 17 (Spring-Summer): 51-58.
Ossorio, Peter G.
1966 Persons, v. I, II. Los Angeles: Linguistic Research Institute.
Tönnies, Ferdinand
1957 Community and Society (Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft). New York:
Harper and Row.
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