t the power of culture, and its usefulness, comes from the fact that large parts of it are naturalized and serve to give form to the "blooming, buzzing confusion." However, when one experiences all culture as something that is merely acquired, something about which one does not make choices (except whether one does or does not want to pay for it), then the constitutive nature of culture becomes less a dynamic and more akin to a hand-me-down suit of ill-fitting clothes, a suit which inhibits rather than encourages movement. Jerome Bruner hints at this abdication when he tells us- It is the forum aspect of a culture that gives its participants a role in constantly making and remaking culture- an active role as participants rather than as performing spectators who play out their canonical role according to rule when the appropriate cues occur.... It follows from this view of culture as forum that induction into the culture through education, if it is to prepare the young for life as lived, should also partake of the spirit of a forum, of negotiating, of the recreating of meaning. 3 This then is my concern for my students. I think I detect in them a growing contentment to be these merely performing spectators awaiting their cues. Definitely satisfied to buy their cultural artifacts and activities or to see those few moments of making that they do engage in as merely serving the purpose of being hip, they, unfortunately, also show little tolerance for those who do take a more active role in creating culture (unless, of course, these folk have been valorized for their making through celebrityhood or notoriety). And this is where art enters the ...
