Peripheral Visions

life they were part of (cotillions, junior assemblies) was important, but because certain skills were a precondition of participation if I should ever want to do so. I learned both lessons: to dance (badly) and to regard social forms as things that could be learned when they become important for participation. Forty years after those tedious afternoons in velveteen frocks and Mary Janes, counting steps and bumping knees with little boys who loathed the whole performance even more than I did, when I told Vanni I didn’t know how to dance like her friends and increasing numbers of mine, she offered me the chance to learn by participation, saying, “Sure you do. Come on, let’s try it together.”
    Of course it is good that symphonic music is not swamped in improvisation and that we sometimes sit and watch the most rigorously trained ballet dancers. It would be well to do so more often. But some kinds of participation have become more elusive. It is not good if the availability of canned expertise on records and videos makes us all increasingly intolerant of amateur performance, of doing things less than perfectly. Many people now use their singing voices so rarely that they are shy even of singing lullabies.
    You can compare religious traditions and see a direct connection between the possibility of simply joining in or its absence and the effort to include. Orthodox Judaism is a thicket of detailed injunctions, Biblical commandments elaborated during centuries of prohibited proselytizing, functioning to limit interaction with outsiders. At the opposite extreme, Islam, still the most rapidly expanding of faiths, demands little immediate knowledge from those who would convert. The convert is permitted to enter and then to learn by participation, although there are plenty of detailed regulations and abstruse theological ideas to be pursued later, and the regulations do effectively separate believers from nonbelievers.
    Learning by doing is coming back, not only as an alternative educational doctrine but in areas where competence is most highly valued. Doctors in training are being brought into contact with patients earlier and earlier, so that learning becomes life-giving rather than grade-earning. Computer jocks play constantly at the very edge of their competence, seeking new paths rather than repeating correct ones. Perhaps in desperation, we are constantly inventing new kinds of instruction, and some of these are interactive and support experimentation. Computers and video games shape new forms of practice and attention.
    Traditionally, human beings have approached many of the most important activities of life with very little explicit training, but when households included grandparents and uncles and aunts and multiple siblings, there was a range of idiosyncratic models available. In today’s small and isolated families, new parents run the risk of bringing an infant home from the hospital with neither models nor experience to guide them. Adults may hear the news of a malignant tumor and have to improvise a response without ever having been close to another human being in the process of dying. The media air matters that used to be private—but private worlds used to be larger, so new forms of information and instruction may be the only way to benefit from the experiences of others in crises where participation is not optional.
    We are engaged today in a rapidly improvised mortal dance with our planet, in which we are going to have to work out ways of protecting the natural environment without full information—without, for instance, certainty even of the degree or significance of global warming. All behavior has potential impact. It is not possible to sit on the sidelines, saying, I can’t dance. Our dealings with the planet have always included actions taken before the results could be predicted, and this is unlikely to change, in spite of the achievements of science. Rather than assume everything should be mapped out beforehand, we might do better to develop rapid and fluid styles of midcourse correction. Little that we do is without risk, but not all risk is culpable. Assuming that all risks should be controlled in advance may lead us into danger rather than the reverse. Everything we do is subject to error.
    Living in a society made up of different ethnic groups offers a paradigm for learning to participate without knowing all the rules and learning from that process without allowing the rough edges to