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When Pete made the following posting of the 14th March 2008 I said that it would take me several weeks to respond. The response, following Pete's posting below, includes a keynote address from last Friday at the International Conference of Teacher Research (ICTR 2008) in New York and a video of the keynote made available today from the University of Bath's streaming server. Pete wrote on the 14th March: Jack - For me, the problem's not the 'objectivity/subjectivity' thing but more the 'reification of consciousness' (and of 'the other') thing. You know the quote, because it formed the basis of my MA dissertation late last century i.e. ".... the Enlightenment project of liberating humanity from myth and the unknown has, by becoming an end in itself, turned into its opposite - a new and more powerful force of domination. The old terror before the unknown becomes a new terror: the fear of anything that cannot be calculated, standardised, manipulated or instrumentalised. Enlightenment progress in scientific- technological knowledge (=power), while creating the objective possibility for a truly free society, leads to the domination of external nature, society and inner nature. What Lukacs analysed as the reification of consciousness was the price the potential subjects of liberation paid for the progressive overcoming of material necessity. Throughout the course of Western civilisation, the rationality of myth, as well as the Enlightenment which replaced it as reason only to become a myth itself, exposes Western reason as a destructive force. Reason abstracts, conceptualises, and seeks to reduce the concrete and the non-identical to identity, to destroy the otherness of the other. Horkheimer and Adorno locate the irrationality of what Weber analysed as rationalisation at its deepest source - the identity logic which is the fundamental structure of Western reason. Human liberation could be conceived, if at all, only as a complete break with mere formal rationality and instrumental reason ...." (Roderick (1986)'Habermas and the Foundations of Critical Theory' drawing on Horkheimer and Adorno's 'Dialectic of Enlightenment' - page 40). That's it. - Pete Pete - I agree with the above. But just agreeing with this, as you know, isn't sufficient for me. I've gone on to explore the implications of questions of the kind, 'How do I improve what I am doing?' in my educational practice, from a perspective of inclusionality. Last Friday, in the keynote at ICTR 2008, I felt that with the help of the technology (see mms://wms.bath.ac.uk/live/education/JackWhitehead_030408/jackkeynoteictr280308large.wmv ), I'd cracked the problem of communicating meanings of flows of life-affirming energy, relationally dynamic awareness and gazes of recognition of the being of others, in explanations of educational influence. The affirming responses of the audience during and after the presentation provide some support that I'd communicated my meanings. The notes you can see from the video on the screen behind me can be accessed in full from http://www.jackwhitehead.com/aerictr08/jwictr08key.htm . What I'd really appreciate are your responses to this latest account from my research programme into the nature of educational theory. I'm thinking of responses that relate to my belief that I've not only accepted the points in your posting of the 14th March. Have I also shown that I am accounting for/explaining my educational influences in relation to flows of life-affirming energy, a relationally dynamic awareness and gazes of recognition of the being of the other? I'm wondering about the validity of my claim that, like Eleanor in her Ph.D., the presention, paper and video, constitute evidence of my love at work in education in an explanation of my educational influence? Love Jack.