On the topic of leadership, this quotation also seems striking to me.
He who loves community, destroys community. He who loves the brethren, builds community. Dietrich Bonhoeffer
With allowances for the androcentric language, which I’m confident Bonhoeffer meant inclusively, the observation is keen and apt. The idea as I understand it is that communities are built out of persons, not out of ideologies, and that one of the most insidious traps a leader can fall into is that of advocating community while evading engagement with persons in all their alterity, all their knotty complexities.
There may be a corollary here having to do with one’s relation to oneself. Perhaps integrity can be understood, in part, as self-leadership emerging from love of one’s own inner alterity, for the sake of being in ethical and respectful and productive community with others.
Possible connections here with courses of study as well. Each class is a particular community formed around a focused, time-delimited experience, but also an exercise in community, in what Bruner calls consciousness-raising about the possibilities of communal mental experience.
Memo to self: nota bene.
According to the Encyclopedia of Marxism, (http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/c/o.htm)
“Communists value community, but do not counterpose community to the capitalists; rather the real community is class-driven and includes the bourgeoisie as owners of the social means of production; but by exploiting the community’s accumulated productive forces as their private property, the capitalists violate the trust of the community.”
So, can the mental power of a classroom community be corrupted by the quest for higher grades or the attention of the teacher? Can persons in a community with all of their “knotty complexities” violate the trust of a community by claiming the achievements of the community as their own?
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Well, well, well. So the worm turns! The paradox is with the notion of alterity, it seems to me. It appears a bit cynical to suggest that ‘higher grades,’ or the ‘attention of the teacher’ is to suggest a mental corruption. Is the point to suggest that mental communities (communities of the classroom) need to level distinctions of excellence? But that’s the Marxist problem isn’t it? It’s the source of their ethical failure. Individual excellence can prop up a community, and certainly some of the contributions of the individual are both individually proprietary and communal, just as much as the inverse would be true. It would just as must violate the trust of the individual to the community to eliminate or erase his or her contribution to that community. There must be alterity, and therefore there must be distinction, or meaningfulness is eliminated.
The quantum theory notion of interference is the classroom–that the presence of the observer interferes with the behavior of the particles–is the legacy of certain kinds of pedagogical strategies, no? In my experience, the stronger students (in my absence) lead the rest of their colleagues to a kind of consensus–so how to break that pattern escapes me. I don’t trust consensus definitions, much, though, at least in some disciplines.
Am I just tired, or is it castles in the air?