The Thirty Years' War
From approximately 1980 to 2010, American educators seem to have reversed every opinion they've ever had about education in general. I say 'seem' because it's only a few of them, but they're very loud, and also because some of them are Canadian, which means they are American, but not quite.
In the past, you could focus on the huge centres of Chicago and New York and write a pretty convincing piece of educational research that would convince people around the world that this was the way to go. Somewhere around the mid-1980s, the World Bank and other iffy bodies with access to lots of data and opinions figured out that whatever worked for America wouldn't work in most other places elsewhere.
In fact, whatever worked for Chicago and New York probably wouldn't work for most other places in North America, let alone South America or any other continent. And then came increasing crises of confidence, with chroniclers such as Tyack, Cuban, Ravitch and commentators like Gardner and Fullan. 'Back to the basics' + 'look to the future' became 'back to the future while looking at the basics'. The whole thing started going back-to-front, culminating with endless refinements as Fullan gilded his lily with more and more pretty touches and Gardner's descent into the orthogonal aspects of intelligence became his ascent to the clearer state of enlightenment known as 'well I guess we don't know'.
Then from the mid-1990s, the idea of using functional MRI and other tools to probe the mysteries of the brain finally blossomed. We suddenly thought we knew a lot more about the brain, and started doing things based on that.
Unfortunately, the premise that the mind in the brain functioned separately from the rest of the body in the social context turned out to be yet another iffy proposition. It turns out that, as far as we now know, the way the mind works is embedded first in the body and then in the family unit and then in the surrounding culture. Our classroom assumptions are based on whatever stage of this argument we decided to stop at.
In fact, there is no complete theory of mind without everything including the liver, the skin, the words your neighbour whispered in your ear, and so on. The sheer vastness of this landscape tends to cause two equal and nominally opposed reactions.
Firstly, we have the idea of 'classical principles', which normally means a fall-back to Plato, goodness, truth and beauty. Secondly, we have the idea of 'man the naked ape', which normally means a fall-back to some near-animistic holism. The two are not completely irreconcilable (hence my use of 'nominally') but they tend to be characterized as 'civilised' (well, city-dwelling at any rate) and 'savage' (or naturalist, if you prefer) even if those words aren't directly used.
As we hit the 30-year mark in the 'modern discourse about education', one obvious problem is that education cannot exist without ends and tests, but we have no idea what these ought to be. The tests (and ends) have ranged from silly to pragmatic, from theoretical to practical, from numerical to aesthetic. But you have to test for something, and you have to make sure that testing for whatever you're testing has some sort of relationship to usefulness in society. Yet even testing has come under fire — testing of any kind.
The real problem of actually doing something about it, however, is that the one best system that could possibly have worked — the apprenticeship model (or the model apprenticeship) — no longer works because of the rate of change. Humans don't really change, but the things of the world around us do, and with increasing velocity. It's possible that you can no longer apprentice yourself or be apprenticed to a master because what he has mastered may no longer be relevant to what you will need to do.
As in the original Thirty Years' War of 1618-1648, the landscape around us is now full of barren wastelands, death, destruction, the upheaval of the world of states and the state of the world. But just like that war, a huge amount of opportunity and possibility may lie around the next corner. It all hinges on what we have learnt, what we might yet learn, and how we learn it.
In the past, you could focus on the huge centres of Chicago and New York and write a pretty convincing piece of educational research that would convince people around the world that this was the way to go. Somewhere around the mid-1980s, the World Bank and other iffy bodies with access to lots of data and opinions figured out that whatever worked for America wouldn't work in most other places elsewhere.
In fact, whatever worked for Chicago and New York probably wouldn't work for most other places in North America, let alone South America or any other continent. And then came increasing crises of confidence, with chroniclers such as Tyack, Cuban, Ravitch and commentators like Gardner and Fullan. 'Back to the basics' + 'look to the future' became 'back to the future while looking at the basics'. The whole thing started going back-to-front, culminating with endless refinements as Fullan gilded his lily with more and more pretty touches and Gardner's descent into the orthogonal aspects of intelligence became his ascent to the clearer state of enlightenment known as 'well I guess we don't know'.
Then from the mid-1990s, the idea of using functional MRI and other tools to probe the mysteries of the brain finally blossomed. We suddenly thought we knew a lot more about the brain, and started doing things based on that.
Unfortunately, the premise that the mind in the brain functioned separately from the rest of the body in the social context turned out to be yet another iffy proposition. It turns out that, as far as we now know, the way the mind works is embedded first in the body and then in the family unit and then in the surrounding culture. Our classroom assumptions are based on whatever stage of this argument we decided to stop at.
In fact, there is no complete theory of mind without everything including the liver, the skin, the words your neighbour whispered in your ear, and so on. The sheer vastness of this landscape tends to cause two equal and nominally opposed reactions.
Firstly, we have the idea of 'classical principles', which normally means a fall-back to Plato, goodness, truth and beauty. Secondly, we have the idea of 'man the naked ape', which normally means a fall-back to some near-animistic holism. The two are not completely irreconcilable (hence my use of 'nominally') but they tend to be characterized as 'civilised' (well, city-dwelling at any rate) and 'savage' (or naturalist, if you prefer) even if those words aren't directly used.
As we hit the 30-year mark in the 'modern discourse about education', one obvious problem is that education cannot exist without ends and tests, but we have no idea what these ought to be. The tests (and ends) have ranged from silly to pragmatic, from theoretical to practical, from numerical to aesthetic. But you have to test for something, and you have to make sure that testing for whatever you're testing has some sort of relationship to usefulness in society. Yet even testing has come under fire — testing of any kind.
The real problem of actually doing something about it, however, is that the one best system that could possibly have worked — the apprenticeship model (or the model apprenticeship) — no longer works because of the rate of change. Humans don't really change, but the things of the world around us do, and with increasing velocity. It's possible that you can no longer apprentice yourself or be apprenticed to a master because what he has mastered may no longer be relevant to what you will need to do.
As in the original Thirty Years' War of 1618-1648, the landscape around us is now full of barren wastelands, death, destruction, the upheaval of the world of states and the state of the world. But just like that war, a huge amount of opportunity and possibility may lie around the next corner. It all hinges on what we have learnt, what we might yet learn, and how we learn it.
Labels: Education, Odd Thoughts
etched with acid at 1:58:00 pm
4 Comments:
LIES
Canadians are more awesome.
Says the Canadian-born Singaporean.
/Sorrows
Sorrows: I don't see the inconsistency between what is posted and what you think. Do enlighten me.
"...they are American, but not quite."
I'm going wildly off-topic here, but how are Canadians "American, but not quite"?
/Sorrows
Sorrows: Canadians are certainly American. The problem is that the citizens of the United States have pinched that adjective for themselves. From a transatlantic viewpoint (say, an English one), the Canadians would be 'American, but not quite'. That's not to imply that they are 'not good enough' — it just implies that they are different, but not wildly so; perhaps, 'not bad enough'. Says the English-born Singapore citizen.
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