Persons

Persons, not individuals

Persons

---

Infants
Child
Adolescent
Adult

---

Predecessors
Contemporaries
Successors

---

Users
Participants
Organizers

Ah! Good! You know, I was getting a bit tired of so much attention to Verbs and Concepts, so much language. Glad to see some real people on the horizon.

Well, don't forget that verbs indicate what persons do and concepts help them do it. But you sense correctly. LearnLiberally.org aims to help us as persons, forming our personal capacities for living autonomously, by our own judgment. We better concentrate on persons as experiencing agents.

And you'll be happy to know that I've been just that as I've poked around the worksite on my own, and I have some questions. I found your essay on Formative Justice and read some in the main part, which is pretty clear and interesting. I even looked a little at the "Annotations" which glimmer here and there, but mostly seem dense, covering your academic butt! One caught my attention a bit—"Persons, Not Individuals," at least the beginning paragraphs.

Persons live, or have lived, or will live; they have inner lives, they feel appetites and drives, they have emotions, they perceive, act, and direct themselves as best they can, coping imperfectly with real constraints; persons think and reason, they experience their world, they suffer, enjoy, fear, and hope.

Your description of the person is pretty clear, but I don't really get why you think the person differs so sharply from the individual.

Both refer to one human. The person indicates more specifically this or that human, a whole, living human; the individual signifies a human in the abstract, an instance of the general category of human being. We can of course use the two terms interchangeably, but that muddies a useful distinction.

How does the distinction work in practice?

OK. Unfortunately, my wife and I live with it all too inescapably. Several years ago, she had a serious stroke with devastating effects: her balance is shot, she walks with great difficulty, and her left arm and hand are useless. Prior to the stroke, as an individual, she was in the lowest category of risk for having a stroke: her relevant indicators, compared to those of other individuals, put her in the cohort with the fewest strokes per 100,000 individuals. Yet she the person, suffered one of the few strokes individuals in her cohort have. And as a person it was devastating for her. Her low risk rating as an individual wasn't wrong, but it meant nothing to her as one of the very few persons in the cohort who actually do suffer a stroke. What researchers learn about us as individuals applies to us in the abstract.

Well, why then don't we just stop thinking about the abstract individual and deal only with particular, flesh and blood persons?

In very primitive circumstances, that's what people do, I suspect. But life as we know it wouldn't work without thinking about the anticipated behavior of the individual in various contexts.

Do you mean, for instance, that I would have a hard time driving home from work if I had to judge what each person behind the wheel in other cars was going to do? I very rarely know anything about the persons driving other cars on the road around me. On the road, I'm thinking about other drivers as individuals, not as persons, making judgments about what I expect other individuals would do.

Yes. You might assign one individual driver to a category of super-safe-pain-in-the-butt driver and another as a risky-fool driver and take that into account in interpreting what's happening around you on the road. But if there were an accident, the consequences would affect the persons involved and the risk category of individual drivers would be irrelevant—whatever those were, the accident took place.

But if we need to anticipate individual behaviors in many things, why do you exclaim, "Persons, not individuals!"?

Important question. And it can get difficult, too. Why do you think that people get upset with police profiling?

Well, I guess we've been talking about profiling in general. I imagine by compiling data about individuals committing crimes, the police can figure out that those with certain characteristics are more likely to commit a crime, say carry unregistered guns or sell dope or running it up the Interstate, and when they see individuals with these characteristics they may be extra inquisitive or even act preemptively.

And why would that be hurtful?

Well, most people with the targeted characteristics going up the Interstate are just folks on their way home, eager to get there, and the stop for no reason except how they look would be upsetting, and should they panic or something the consequences could be serious.

How does the individual wrongly stopped manifest the upset?

Uh.... Oh, I get it—it's not the individual that gets upset or panics, but the person, and we would have to know more about the person to know whether the upset would be passed off with a repressed curse or in a continuing feeling of rejection, resentment, or despair, which could be reinforced if the person had repeated experiences like that or frequently heard of family and friends experiencing similar things.

Yes, actions relative to categories of individuals has complex consequences for persons. We get concerned about the misuse of profiling in law enforcement because it adversely affects many persons mistakenly singled out, but frankly I think law enforcement and the adjudication of criminal and civil law does a better job of concentrating on personal actions and consequences than many other large civic concerns. Techniques of manipulating individual behaviors have nearly destroyed our political institutions, which have rested on assumptions about the integrity of personal judgment on the part of citizens and their representatives in office.

Not only political life! People say we have a market economy, but really it is a marketed economy. And by the time people get out of the system of formal instruction, they are thoroughly inured to being treated as individuals, not persons. I went to a school that prided itself on individualized instruction, using portfolios and other techniques. But really it all amounted to ticking off a fuller set of individual characteristics that the typical standards-based program, and in the end the complex assessment rubrics would keep us aligned with the overall system that we really were inching through.

Don't get me started. I've struggled to make the person central to educational theory and practice through a long career. It won't happen in formal instruction, and formal instruction won't go away as one of the two or three great preoccupations of civilized life. That won't change. But when I exclaim—"Persons, not individuals!"—I'm seeking something in addition to formal instruction, educational activity that starts and ends with and for persons, a matter through and through of self-education.