[AAACE-NLA] Social Capital

[tsticht@znet.com]

Debbie: Social capital refers to the social groups and networks (churches,
clubs, gangs, etc) with which an individual interacts and which motivate
and support him/her. Literacy programs can help form social capital by
having team activities, small group instruction in which members of the
group support each others efforts, social parties, holiday parties, invited
community members to tell how community groups support the learning
activities of learners, etc. As the following paragraph indicates, in my
1997 Functional Context Education notebook, which argues for the social
basis of mind, I mentioned how motivation of learners to persist can be
formed in social communities as "social capital" terms first formed by Jim
Coleman and colleague in 1987).
Tom Sticht

>From FCE notebook of 1997:
Motivation and the value of learning.  It has been argued that cognitive
ability alone cannot account for achievement. In addition to language and
other cognitive tools transmitted to new members of society, there are
important motivational conditions transmitted as well.  These motivational
states help to determine the level of achievement by community members.
Cognitive sociologists have referred to the motivational aspect of social
communities as social capital. ( Coleman, J. & Hoffer, T. (1987). Public
and Private High Schools. New York: Basic Books.


The Importance of Mind Sharing

Tom Sticht
International Consultant in Adult Education

Quote: "No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe;
Every man is a peece of the Continent,
A part of the maine;

If a clod bee washed away by the Sea,
Europe is the lesse,
As well as if a Promontorie were,
As well as if a Mannor
Of thy friends or of thine owne were;

Any mans death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in Mankinde;
And therefore
Never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee. " End Quote
[John Donne in his Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions XVII, Meditations,
written in 1624]

In a newspaper for adult literacy educators and learners that friends and I
produced several years ago we borrowed John Donne's idea of No Man Is An
Island and changed it to No Mind Is An Island for the newspaper motto. One
issue of the newspaper included the following brief article that expresses
how as human beings we are all connected through our minds. As one
progresses the journey through education they should connect to as many
minds as possible.


"No Mind is an Island"

There is a basic, yet perplexing truth of the human condition: on the one
hand, we are physically separate, individual beings; on the other hand,
through communication our minds are inter-connected.The words we use, the
ways we put them together, and even the thoughts we have, including what is
important to think about,  have their origins largely in the minds of
others. All human minds are connected through the medium of an
informational culture of symbolic communication. It is in this sense that
no mind is an island.

It is the idea that the mind is largely a socially constructed activity of
the human brain that makes the formulation of a vision for adult literacy
education of such great importance. What makes such education more
important than might be imagined is evidenced by the statistical data from
national assessments that repeatedly show that parent’s educational levels
are strongly and positively related to (1) how many years of  education
their children will complete, and (2) how well their children will  perform
on any of hundreds of literacy tasks at ages nine through adulthood.

This evidence for the intergenerational transfer of education and literacy
skills from parents to their children is offered as a primary, indeed,
almost a prima facie, line of evidence for the need for an adult literacy
education system that increases the literacy and educational achievement of
adults and, through mind sharing,  raises the probability  that the
increased literacy of adults will be transferred across generations to
children.

While the group is made-up of individuals, the individual’s mind includes
the means to connect to and to draw upon the resources of the other minds
in the group, which include resources for the sharing of thought. To
elaborate a bit on this individual-in-the-group conundrum,  physically,  
at   birth,   after   we    have    been    separated   from    our  
mothers    by    the severing of the umbilical cord, we are individual
beings. We grow and develop by ingesting and metabolizing other physical
things- food, air and water.

But,  for our psychological development, that is, the growth and development
of our minds, we need to "ingest" psychological things - knowledge, ways of
thinking, language and emotions. Assuming the reality of the process of
natural selection, operating over evolutionary time,  apparently our brains
have evolved structures and processes that grow and develop in a cultural
medium made-up largely of symbolic communication among our own and other
people’s minds.

Just what is the human mind and how does it develop? In its developed form,
is it solely the result of biology? Clearly, the biological organism, and
especially  its brain, is necessary for the human mind to exist. Yet
biology alone  is totally insufficient to account for the types of minds
that we humans have. Indeed, it is very likely that the type of brain that
humans have reflects to a large degree the type of mind that humans have
evolved over the eons, not to help us survive as rugged individuals but as
social beings sharing thoughts through communication.

>From this point of view, then, in terms of evolutionary theory, the brain
has evolved in response to the survival value of communication among human
minds. That is, biology, in the form of the brain, has evolved in response
to the sharing of thought among groups of human minds. Areas of the brain
that permit human communication through speech, such as Broca’s and
Wernicke’s areas in the left temporal lobe, appear to have evolved not
because of the individual’s need for a mind that deals simply with the
physical environment of the earth, but to deal with the social need to
share itself with the minds of others for better survival. Evolution has
selected brains that facilitate human communication for survival. In short,
we have the brains we have because of our socially constructed minds, not
the other way around.

The ability to speak and comprehend oral language is a hallmark, and perhaps
the defining characteristic of the social human mind. And this capacity has
evolved in response to the need for each of us to share our minds, not
merely as a means for us to develop as individuals.

In the search for just why some children start school poorly prepared and
why teachers have so much difficulty helping them to learn  mind-sharing,
language-based knowledge and skills, it is natural to look to the homes,
families, and communities  in which children begin to share their minds
with those of others before they start school. Here we ask, just how have
the child’s parents, other adults, siblings, and friends, those who provide
the "social capital" for cognitive development,  shared their minds with
their children’s minds to develop them towards greater mind-sharing
ability. In other words, we recognize, naturally, that the child’s
"potential" for learning  as expressed through mind-sharing resides not
only in the child’s own biological make-up, but also in the make-up of the
other minds with which the child can communicate.

Indeed, the very language that a child acquires originates not within his or
her own mind, but in the minds of others. And the basic concepts - the
things, the places, the events - that a child, and later an adult,  comes
to think about and to communicate about through language come from the home
and community environments and, more broadly speaking, the socially
constructed culture into which the person is born. And the culture is,
itself, the product of millions of shared minds interacting across time and
space.

An adult continuing literacy education system, like the preschool,
kindergarten through 12th grade, college and other post secondary education
systems  is an important component in our culture’s educational technology
for facilitating the growth of individual minds so that ultimately there
may be a greater sharing of minds. Overall, adult literacy education , like
the other components of our educational system, serves the general purpose
of improving the entire network of minds in the society  in which we live
and helps to maintain our very survival as a society of human beings in
contemporary times.

Like our other educational components, adult literacy education deserves
recognition and support for the contribution it makes to forming bridges
among minds and insuring that no mind is an island.

Thomas G. Sticht
International Consultant in Adult Education
2062 Valley View Blvd.
El Cajon, CA 92019-2059
Tel/fax: (619) 444-9133
Email: tsticht at aznet.net