The Passions of Learning in Tight Circumstances: Toward a Political Economy of the Mind

Abstract

Economies make their demands, and by necessity, people adjust, learn, and survive. People adjust to tight circumstances with passion and inge-nuity. Necessity and its passions are the stuff of reality and generally more than schools or educational research can handle. Mainstream theories of learning have captured economic constraints only statistically and symp-tomatically (as if being short on money means being short on ingenuity). A focus on the demands of necessity promises a more grounded view of educational possibilities. 1 It can deliver portraits of what people in trou-ble can do, rather than what they cannot do, and it promises research better tuned to the work of democracy. To illustrate the case, I invoke the power of novels to capture both the press of circumstance and the ingenuity of people facing difficulties. I do so in five sections: one on why novels are attentive to economic necessity; a second on political economies as learning environments; and three sec-tions on the passions of necessity in three novels that stretch the usual borders of research on learning. I am not asking learning researchers to write novels—Deus avertat!—but to reduce the limitations of educational research by modeling the success of fiction at imitating and expanding reality. Careful empirical studies of learning can profit from the attention of novelists to the nuances of necessity.