“Trapped Between Stories”

From: http://weblogg-ed.com
By: Will Richardson

I’m poking around in “Presence” by Peter Senge (and others), a book about “profound change in people, organizations, and society.” (I can hear the chorus of boos already…why another non-education book to figure out education?) And when I say “poking,” I mean it. As I’m sometimes wont to do, when I got it from Amazon a few days ago, I just kind of broke it open somewhere in the middle and started reading. (I do plan on taking the cover to cover route at some point…)

What I landed on was more or less a conversation between the four authors that took place about four months after 9/11. And a lot of it resonated in terms of this discussion about schools and education. For instance, that this is a time of “epochal change” and that “traditional mind-sets and institutional priorities are under great threat, and they are fighting to preserve themselves.” And that “as the need for reflection and deeper learning grows, the pressures against that need being fulfilled grow too.”

But there was one part that really jumped out. Senge quotes Thomas Berry who says that “the primary problem of the present era is that we are ‘in-between stories.’”

The old story that bound Western culture, the story of reductionist science and redemptive religion, is breaking down. It simply no longer explains the world we are experiencing or the changes that confront us. (217)

And other myths are breaking down as well. The hero myth, that someone is going to ride in and save the day. The economic myth which focuses on short-term self-interest as a way to success. All of these stories and structures are being challenged, and, as Senge puts it, we are “trapped between stories.”

For the whole story here: