TIRP 2

Positively Relative


In Patricia Bizzell’s essay, “William Perry and Liberal Education,” she examines and analyzes Perry’s view of cognitive development of young adults going through a liberal arts education. She first discusses the three stages Perry outlines in his model: Dualism, Relativism, and Commitment in Relativism. Each is a particular mindset that Perry believes undergraduates go through in their college career, beginning with the idea of absolutes and authority and ending with a recognition of the lack of absolutes in the world, but “knowing the world means understanding what has been rendered important”. Bizzell continues to argue that, though the model Perry presents is important for the academic community, it is not value-neutral, meaning it would not occur without being prompted by higher education and instructors. Value-neutral occurrences would be things such as Piaget’s childhood model, stages that arguably take place due to genetics and consistently occur across culture barriers. Bizzell states that the instructor’s role in leading young adults through the three stages of Perry’s model is a value-positive experience.

One of the first papers I wrote when coming to Florida State was for LIT 2230, Introduction to Global Literature. We were expected to come up with a theoretical term based on the readings we had completed in class and use the novels read throughout the semester to support the term. I remember being introduced to the idea for our final paper on syllabus day. It was my first semester in college, and the thought of trying to create a theoretical term to be used to analyze texts terrified me. I was still in the stage Perry considers to be Dualism. Even with being a Creative Writing major and favoring essays over exams, I still thought of questions having a right answer and a wrong answer. During that first semester, I began my transition into Relativism, realizing that there are not only two sides to an issue. I still viewed my professor in a Dualistic mindset in that he was the “Authority,” as Perry puts it. I did as I was told and did not consider going to my professor for guidance outside of class hours.

I remember procrastinating to the last possible moment before trying to come up with a theoretical term that would work with the literature we had covered in class. The terms I remembered studying were Ideological State Apparatuses, which are structures that hold together the idea of community and culture in people’s minds, and used examples such as the media and school systems. The other term I focused on was Imagined Communities, which are groups people think they belong to but do not really have a way of quantifying. I came up with the term imagined values to tie together the two terms I focused on and the East versus West literature that we had studied. As a freshman, I did not give enough thought to the assignment that I would give now. It was too difficult, in my opinion, for me to have put so much energy into trying to understand. As a result, my essay fell back onto repeating the same ideas with different wording. My main focus was achieving the word count that my professor required of us.

Bizzell points out that Perry’s model shows the instructors as rhetors, teachers of rhetoric. She states that professors “persuade students to [their] values through [their] use of language” and the assignments they use. She also says that this view of instructors is a positive one, but in no way a neutral one. Each instructor leaves a particular impact on their students, especially when dealing with writing. Though my essay was not the best at theorizing or analyzing what we had learned that semester, I did learn how to look at an assignment and realize that more than one answer was freeing, not hindering. Introduction to Global Literature led me to the next stage in higher education, one absent of the absolutes of Dualism, and to a better understanding of rhetoric.