For CogTools we’ve been reading both John Dewey’s Democracy and Education and Frank Smith’s The Book of Learning and Forgetting. While it doesn’t necessarily intersect course wise, I’ve been reading Art of Possibility by Zander in parallel for the Design Course, and I mention this because throughout the last week I’ve started to weave together a central theme of all the readings, which is the narrative that we all learn in a social environment.
Note: When I write about my experiences in “education” and “learning technology” it should be understood that, mostly by fault, I will be referring to American adult and higher education.
Dewey’s argument follows a very logic driven model that education and growth is a product of societies need to rear future generations in a way that allows the society to function long term.
In directing the activities of the young, society determines its own future in determining that of the young. – John Dewey
Through this argument, Dewey makes the notion that education is not something that is necessarily compartmentalized in subjects, disciplines, and a time period, but, rather, it’s a fluid lifelong process or struggle.
Growing is not something which is completed in odd moments; it is a continuous leading into the future. – John Dewey
As societies evolve, there is inevitably an attraction to formalizing some aspect of education:
As a society becomes more enlightened, it realizes that it is responsible not to transmit and conserve the whole of its existing achievements, but only such as make for a better future society. The school is its chief agency for the accomplishment of this end. – John Dewey
Both Smith and Dewey also place a heavy emphasis on the role that language plays in this evolution of society:
Language gets so much attention because it is a primary way by which we establish our own identity and also the primary way by which we identify and categorize other people. – John Smith
Education happens through interaction and is the transfer is vastly enhanced through language. The question then becomes, in a formalized setting, how do you create a environment that allows for this (or eliminates everything that takes away). It would be hard for me to successfully argue that an environment where students are individually tested and concurrently rewarded for their success maximizes this theory.
To be completely honest, I started reading both books cold with no research into who Dewey or Smith was. In fact, as I started reading Dewey several of the things he criticized about formal education really resonated with me, leading me to believe it was a more recent publication.
Why is it, in spite of the fact that teaching by pouring in, learning by a passive absorption, are universally condemned, that they are still so entrenched in practice? That education is not an affair of “telling” and being told, but an active and constructive process, is a principle almost as generally violated in practice as conceded in theory. Is not this deplorable situation due to the fact that the doctrine is itself merely told? It is preached; it is lectured; it is written about. But its enactment into practice requires that the school environment be equipped with agencies for doing, with tools and physical materials, to an extent rarely attained. – John Dewey
While that could have been published somewhere today, I was taken back when I first realized this was published in 1916. Come to find out, I started to find Dewey pop up in an article I was reading as a godfather of education philosophy on a blog I frequently read called Hybrid Pedagogy. In fact, he has been cited several times throughout the blog posts. I noticed that another education philosopher frequently in the articles is Paulo Friere a Brazilian educator and philosopher who wrote Pedagogy of the Oppressed in 1968. He was one of the first to criticize the notion that students were empty banks just waiting to filled with our knowledge.
Suddenly I started to realize that there is a widely recognized philosophy that aligns with my general view of education. One thing I’ve struggled with recently are “learning objectives” and building a course from the perspective that you know exactly what someone will get out of your instruction and you can develop assessments to approve they know what you want them to. I could very well have a novice perspective of the idea, but I think it’s almost arrogant to believe you know what a student will take away from your instruction. You can’t possibly forsee the prior knowledge in which the student is going to attach new knowledge to and how they will synthesize those together.
The tragedy begins when you look at how far off formal education and the philosophy of education are and how little proper practices are exchanged between educators. I’m going to start sounding punk rock, but the institution has really got in the way of the initial purpose of education and extracted all of the healthy nutrients of education through social interactions. The best analogy that I can come up with is that education is the equivalent of the chicken nugget.
It tastes good (debatable but highly loved by my daughter) and we sell a lot of them, which our society. But its percentage of actual chicken is highly questionable and the “nugget” is hard to find within poultry anatomy. Education has a similar amount of artificial ingredients that look, smell, and taste close enough to call education but have little nutritional value.
So where am I right now in all of this? I’m stuck in a struggle. Working in education technology, I’m starting to see where implementation of certain technologies actually adds more limitations on what you can learn rather than igniting it. I believe this happens because the decisions on technology are usually made by the beings in control, who want–more than the opportunity for learning–to make sure they still have the ability to do more of what they get paid to do: control. Control what you learn so rather than learning what most interests you, you learn how to do and interpret something the same way the original instructor did. “Guiding them” to the answer they wanted them to come up with (the “learning objective”) in the way they wanted them to come up with it. Rather, how can we guide students to find answers in which interests them and in which they value while, along the way, teaching them the values of society.
So that was a bit rant-y towards the end. I thank you for making to this end of my chicken nugget analogy.
Update: I woke up this morning to an email about a Slate article.
As these online course products have improved, more and more schools have plugged them into their curricula. The result is a creeping homogenization of basic classes throughout many U.S. universities. That’s raising some uncomfortable questions, starting with: Why should I pick one school over another if they offer the exact same classes? And: Why are universities buying ready-made frozen meals instead of cooking up their own educational fare?
Maybe my chicken nugget analogy wasn’t so bad.
[su_note note_color=”#e7e7e4″]Note: This is the first post in a series of weekly reflections for the CogTools strand. All related posts can be viewed under the CogTools tag.[/su_note]