POLITICAL LANGUAGE AND COMPARATIVE EDUCATION

WEILER, HANS N. 이화여자대학교 동서교육연구소 1983 East west education Vol.4 No.1

Over these next two conference days we will all be engaged in a good deal of talking and listening. This is what meetings are for, and I hope we will all make good use of the opportunity. At the outset of this exercise in communication, however, let me suggest that we pause for a moment to reflect on the role which language plays in our professional pursuits. Language, after all, provides us with the ability to communicate, to build upon each other's work, to criticize, to accumulate insights over time and space ? in brief: with the ability to pursue knowledge as a social process. I will talk about what I would like to call "political language". Those of you who keep up with the literature in the social sciences will, of course, notice right away that I am borrowing a term which Murray Edelman, one of the more original and interesting writers in American social science today, has used as the principal idea and the title for a remarkable little book, the full title of which is "Political Language: Words that Succeed and Policies that Fail"(1977). In what l have to say here, I owe a good deal to Edelman's ideas in this book as well as in some of his other writings about the role and importance of symbols in politics (Edelman 1964; 1971), and I will refer later on in more detail to some of these ideas and to what, in my view, they may mean for our work in the field of education. Both Edelman and 1, however, owe a much more fundamental debt to the work of that great theorist of language, the late Roland Barthes of France, whose untimely death two years ago abruptly ended one of the most creative and prolific careers of thinking and writing about language and, above all else, about language as a social and political phenomenon. More than perhaps anybody else has Roland Barthes contributed to our awareness of the inextricable, symbiotic relationship between language and power, best perhaps in his Inaugural Lecture at the College de France in January of 1977: Indeed, it is power with which we shall be concerned... Our modern "innocence" speaks of power as if it were a single thing: on one side those who have it, on the other those who do not...And yet, what if power were plural, like demons? "My name is Legion," it could say; everywhere, on all sides, leaders, massive or minute organizations, pressure groups or oppression groups, everywhere "authorized" voices which authorize themselves to utter the discourse of all power: the discourse of arroganze... I call the discourse of power any discourse which engenders blame, hence guilt, in its recipient. This object in which power is inscribed, for all of human eternity, is language, or to be more precise, its necessary expression: the language we speak and write. Language is legislation, speech is its code. We do not see the power which is in speech because we forget that all speech is a classification, and that all classifications are oppressive... Thus, by its very structure, my language implies an inevitable relation of alienation. To speak, and, with even greater reason, to utter a discourse, is not, as is too often repeated, to communicate; it is to subjugate... (Barthes 1982, 459-460). It would be an intriguing task further to pursue Barthes' thoughts on the inherently overpowering nature of language (at one point, he calls language "quite simply fascist" (1982, 461); at another point, he speaks of "the absolutely terrorist nature of language" (1972, 278)), or to follow his explorations into how oppression and colonization affect the speech of the oppressed and colonized (1982, 137), or into "revolutionary language" as "the language of man as a producer", where "man speaks in order to transform reality and no longer to preserve it as an image" (1982, 135), or into his particularly penetrating analysis of the language of Marxist writing (1910, 22-25). But I will return to these ideas some other time. For now, the point which, with Roland Barthes' help, I would like to make about "political language" is that we ought to recognize much more clearly the force and the structure of power that is embedded in language already as language - that, in other words, the language we speak and write has an inherent propensity to function as a vehicle of control, restraint and domination. Murray Edelman adds to this notion a further perspective which claims that language not only has this inherent relationship to power, but that this powerful quality of language is being deliberately and purposefully used to achieve the political goals of those groups in a society which seek to establish or consolidate their power and control over other groups. He shows how, in any number of ways, the power potential of language is made to serve the objectives of the rulers of societies, and how language thus becomes not only, as we know from Basil Bernstein's work, a reflection of the reality of social class (1971; 1973), but a key instrument of social and political control: Language is an integral part of the political scene, not simply an instrument for describing events, but itself a part of events, shaping their meaning and helping to shape the political roles officials and the general public play (Edelman 1977, 4). These roles get defined, and their definitions reinforced, through the power of language and - "subtly but potently" (1977, 27) - by the typologies of linguistic reference. It is through these typologies that both of official and public language superimposes a grid of political meaning, of superordination and subordination, of domination and subjugation, of power and powerlessness upon the life of society. In the context of discussing the "categorization of enemies" through the means of verbal labels, Edelman notes that even "invisible" enemies, through such labels as "subversives" or "conspirators", are given a kind of reality which, he claims, "is not phenomenologically different from any other reality" (1977, 35). Similarly, we have had in this country (as in other countries) ample opportunity for observing the influence of invoking what Edelman calls "mythical populations as reference groups" (1977, 29-32). Richard Nixon's rather dubious claims about a "silent majority" of Americans supporting a tough stance on the war in Viet Nam fall into this category, as do more recent claims to "moral majorities" in support of rather-idiosyncratic objectives. Such is indeed the power of language to define, construct, or reconstruct social reality. For us as analysts of social and political reality, language must thus take its place as an equal partner next to action when it comes to understanding the effectiveness of the modern state in legitimizing its own continuation and reproduction: "Government rhetoric and action, taken together, comprise an elaborate dialectical structure, reflecting the beliefs, the tensions, and the ambivalences that flow from social inequality and conflicting interests"(1977, 19). Both Barthes and Edelman agree that one of the most important properties of language from the point of view of its political significance is its inherent capacity for classification, and it is this point which I would like to pursue a little further in the direction of what we are trying to do in much of our comparative research work in education. Language categorizes not only enemies, as we have seen, but in a much more pervasive way provides for the "linguistic segmentation of the political world" (Edelman, 1977, 40-41), and it tends to do so in such a way as to (a) reinforce and legitimize the existing distribution of roles, statuses, and power; (b) attempt to minimize existing cleavages, conflicts, and struggles; and (c) compartmentalize soical problems in such a way as to obscure their interrelationships and common causes. Edelman shows how these political effects of language occur in the field of social and welfare policy and in what he calls "the helping professions". This begins with how we tend to name and classify social "problems": problems get identified through verbal labels - "poverty", "crime", "drug abuse", "mental illness" - creating the impression that each of these "problems" has its own distinct identity, causes, and remedies. This impression tends to obscure the fact that to an overwhelming extent, these problems are an integral part of a given social and economic order which, as a whole, is characterized by insecure or no employment for a substantial portion of the work force, poorly paid and humanly degrading work conditions, and inadequate health care (1977, 26-27). Similarly, much of the language in which we deal with human problems connotes, as in talking about "drug abuse", "mental illness", or "criminals", an emphasis "on the alleged weakness and pathology of the individual, while diverting attention from their pathological social and economic environments" (1977, 27), not to mention the many pejorative connotations which have come to surround the very term "welfare". What I am arguing here, against the general background of the political nature of language, is that we have a similar phenomenon in talking about education, comparative or otherwise. Both the language of educational professionals and of educational officials (which are by no means always the same kinds of language!) are profoundly political languages, and very powerfully so. In education, as in other areas of social policy, language tends to betray the notion that problems are first and foremost a matter of the individual, rather than a matter of his/her environment. The "underachiever" is a case in point (even though many an "underachiever" achieves rather well considering the environmental conditions under which the competition for achievement takes place). The notion of "learning disabilities" reveals a similar bias; not only do we not speak of "teaching disabilities", but the very connotation of "disability" narrows the definition of the problem down to a primarily individual deficiency for which the social and political environment may assume remedial responsibility as a matter of charity and compassion, but not as a matter of cause. The notion of achievement itself, I submit, and the kind of language which surrounds it, has its own political agenda, in which a relentlessly competitive model of modern social life is only thinly disguised, and to which the claim of precise and standardized measureability is supposed to add a further dimension of credibility and prestige.

A Retrospective Analysis of Stroke Survivors’ Health-Related Quality of Life and Function

Kimberly Hreha,Caitlin Denzer-Weiler,Karen West Mackasek,Jeffrey Zhang,AM Barrett 대한작업치료학회 2020 대한작업치료학회지 Vol.28 No.1

Background: Health-related quality of life (HRQOL) is a construct of quality of life relevant to health. HRQOL can be measured multiple ways including self-perceived interpretation of one’s health status. Research has shown value in understanding self-perceived or person-centered HRQOL. Thus, these types of assessments have been integrated into health care systems, used to help patients set personal goals and to determine treatment success. The purpose of this study was to describe the group, examine the relationship between HRQOL and functional independence, and then determine the impact of standard care on the HRQOL (index and visual analog scale [VAS]). Methods: Retrospective clinical observation study. Descriptive statistics used to describe the stroke sample. Comparison was performed to explore the correlation between the EuroQol 5-Dimensions Questionnaire (EQ-5D) and the Functional Independence Measure (FIM) at admission and discharge. Paired-samples t-test was conducted to evaluate the impact of standard therapy on HRQOL on EQ-5D. Results: n=1325; mean age of 72 years (SD=13.28) and 65% females. A weak, positive correlation found at admission (r=.15, n=1325, p<.000) and discharge (r=.04, n=1325, p<.000). A paired-samples t-test revealed a statistically significant increase in HRQOL index and VAS scores (p’s<.000) overtime, with a large effect size (η2=.74 and .70), respectively. Conclusion: A weak relationship was present between HRQOL and functional independence, thus suggesting these assessments should be used independent of each other. Statistically significant change in scores suggest improvement in HRQOL overtime, supported by large effect sizes and mean scores higher than the minimal important difference range.

Involvement of the cAMP Effector System in Dopamine and Acetylcholine Release from Rat Neostriatal Slices

(Hwa Jung Kim),(Molly H . Weiler) 한국응용약물학회 1996 학술대회 Vol.1996 No.1

Effects of Age on Selective Antagonist Binding to Muscarinic Receptors in Rat Striatum

Kim, Hwa Jung,Lee, Sun Hyoung,Weiler, Molly H . 한국응용약물학회 1998 Biomolecules & Therapeutics(구 응용약물학회지) Vol.6 No.4

The objective of the present study was to investigate the effect of senescence on the binding properties of muscarinic receptors in the neostriatum of young (3 months), middle-aged (18 months) and aged (33 months) male Fischer 344 x Brown Norway hybrid rats by employing direct binding of selective radiolabeled antagonists. Using the selective M₂ muscarinic receptor antagonist, [³H]AF-DX 384, as the ligand, no significant difference in the maximal receptor density (Bmax) was observed in the neostriatum among any age-groups. In contrast, with the selective M₃ receptor antagonist, [³H]4-DAMP, a significant increase in the number of muscarinic receptors was observed in neostriatal membrane fractions prepared from the aged animals relative to that observed in the young rats. For each ligand there was no age-related change in its affinity (Kd) for the muscarinic receptors. These results indicate that the observed age-related changes in the muscarinic receptor density may not be necessarily decremental and depend upon the muscarinic receptor subtype examined.

Visualization of the Diffusion Process Using Open GL

Byung-Gul Lee,Yeon Yeu,In-Joon Kang,Thomas M. Lillesand,Frank L. Scarpac,Peter R.Weiler 대한토목학회 2002 대한토목학회 학술대회 Vol.2002 No.11

Where, When, and How mmWave is Used in 5G and Beyond

SAKAGUCHI, Kei,HAUSTEIN, Thomas,BARBAROSSA, Sergio,STRINATI, Emilio Calvanese,CLEMENTE, Antonio,DESTINO, Giuseppe,PÄ,RSSINEN, Aarno,KIM, Ilgyu,CHUNG, Heesang,KIM, Junhyeong,KEUSGEN, Wilhelm,WEILER 'Institute of Electronics, Information and Communi 2017 IEICE transactions on electronics Vol.100 No.10