I have the good fortune of being married to a fourth grade teacher who, like it or not, keeps me a more committed pragmatist than I ever could be on my own. A few nights before the start of her academic year, I launched into a stout-induced rant about the decay of our secondary education over a plate of London broil, potatoes and salad. At first she challenged the notion that good teachers are not already keenly aware that teaching and learning has nothing to do with testing. She said that all good teachers know ways of working around the system to educate, no matter how much governing boards try to stamp it out. But then she asked me what I might do differently. In other words, what is it that I take issue with, beyond the obvious naiveté of the current testing culture.
My issue is, precisely, the picture of reality on which our approach to teaching and learning is built. If I can boil down the fallacies I find particularly offensive, they would be the following (in no particular order).
(1) Education as an economic imperative.
Perhaps one of the most difficult and frustrating parts of the educational discourse in this country is that we believe the issues of poverty, oppression, unjustice, suffering, etc….can and will be solved through the school system. In other words, we live in a world which acts as though all of our problems would be solved if kids would all just pass their sixth grade math test. Here is the brute reality: the way the current education system is run it not only won’t solve the issues of poverty and oppression, it actually reproduces them. Further, in doing so, it allows us to launder our morals - in other words, we force kids to take tests which they can’t pass and - when they don’t - we call them lazy and stupid rather than fixing the system.
(2) Learners as independent, autonomous agents.
Part of the proceeding is made possible by a deeply entrenched philosophical fallacy in our culture: that of the essential or Platonic self. In other words, we believe that who we are is: (a) independent of those around us (e.g. we would still be the same ‘person’ if we had been born in a different place); (b) static and essentialized (e.g. we ‘find’ who we are, and are essentially the same person from birth until death); (c) always available and self-disclosed (e.g. we are aware of who we are and what we know). And yet, all three of these commitments are dead wrong. The self is, instead, (a) relational (i.e. the mind is social. In fact, the mind is not a ‘thing’ but a social action, a verb; (b) an event (i.e. always being revised, expanded, re/created), (c) only partially available. What this means is that we are all radically interconnected and thinking of learning as an independent process is nonsensical, because there is no such thing as an independent process for an interdependent being.
(3) Knowledge as facts and learning as the consumption of those facts.
John Dewey believed that the philosophic fallacy was the reification of categories. Major problems were created, in other words, when knowledge was seen as a destination rather than a process of revising, refining and recreating tools (conceptual and physical) for the purposes of surviving and thriving in the world. Knowledge, then, is not some set of facts divorced from use, but a set of dispositions and habits.
Further, much of the education system is grounded in something called the ‘conduit metaphor’ which is basically the idea that a mind is like a computer and that learning is like downloading information to that computer. In fact, the mind is nothing like a computer, knowledge is not facts, and, (most importantly) learning is not something imposed, but – in fact – is an emergent process of inquiry.
The danger, here, is that we are increasingly instilling a set of habits in our children which estranges them from their own culture and mind. We are not teaching them to fish, just to eat as fast as they can.
(4) History as progressive.
This is probably the least discussed and most dangerous fallacy on which our culture rests. It is the idea not only that history is progressive, but also that we are in some type of historical race to be able to ultimately explain, predict and control the natural world. Many thinkers, including Dewey, will argue this emerges out of the human condition: the impending chaos of death breeds a fever-like need to explain, predict and control something which is ultimately out of the realm of our control and ability to predict. This is partially the reason why the STEM fields are imposed on our children as the cultural necessity: their labor allows us to explain, predict and control, whereas the humanities and liberal arts are not able to perform such tricks.
This fever relies on the metaphor of motion and of speed as though life and learning were a race with deep consequences (e.g. ‘No Child Left Behind,’ or ‘Race to the Top’). What we most fear is being ‘left behind,’ but if we were to ask in what – exactly – being left would result, the metaphor crumbles. Yet, it is constantly invoked as an educational imperative – as though we will be ‘behind’ other countries. Needless to say that these comparisons are all fraudulent – a smoke and mirrors game, which plays on some of our deepest fears. The truth is that history is not progressive, it is responsive, and our obsession with control of the natural world is masking the problems of hunger, poverty and oppression which we have yet to begin to solve.
Needless to say, I’m WAY over my word limit. If you’d like me to build some of these sections out, offer more references, etc…just let me know.
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