The problem Gardner writes about is just the same as Montaigne complained of. In Montaigne's day, the richness and abundance of understanding which should have come to all students from literacy through an education in the classics, had too often descended into dry pedantry.
The nineteenth-century reformers saw the dry pedantry and assumed it was the classical curriculum that caused it. The really bad news, then, is that some kind of magic or technique we don't understand is required to bring back to new life in a new mind the desiccated written codes in which knowledge was stored by some other, perhaps long-dead, human mind.
But even if we can manage the magic, I'm afraid there is even worse news than the really bad news. That is, even at its best, Plato's academic ideal can't deliver on its promises. Plato describes an educational program that will carry the mind from the confusions and illusions of the folk-physics, folk-psychology, folk-sociology learned effortlessly in our early years, through a curriculum of disciplined knowledge, to an understanding of the true nature of things.
It is a program that requires the sacrifice of easy pleasures, and the deployment of our laborious general learning capacity to remake all our early false knowledge, converting our minds always towards rationality and truth and away from the seductions of beliefs, myths, superstitions. We are to climb beyond personal interest in looking at the world and to see it objectively.
It is not clear that Plato's, or anyone's, curriculum can deliver these benefits. It is not clear that the products of high literacy include justice, objectivity, truth. Plato believed these were the fruits of his educational program and justified the austere discipline necessary to gather them.
It is probably a better educational idea than anyone before or since has had, but it is not adequate. For the sake of symmetry, it would be nice to link this third educational ideal with the invention of printing and the new learning and "Enlightenment" it seemed to many in Europe to promise.
Even if the causal connection is not quite so easily made, the printing press was certainly importantly complicit in those intellectual changes which included the radical re-thinking of the nature of education in the work of John Locke , Etienne Bannot de Condillac , and, crucially, Jean-Jacques Rousseau Their reconceiving of education seems, in retrospect, a part of the new learning most signally represented in Isaac Newton's Latin Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy This work looked like the triumphant confirmation of the Enlightenment belief that scientific observation of nature could produce data that could, by the application of reason, disclose the laws according to which the whole cosmos worked.
Rousseau argued that human beings also have a nature and a natural process of development that could be disclosed by careful observation aided by reason. As we can observe the body's regular pattern of development from birth to senescence, so we can, with more difficulty perhaps, observe the mind's regular pattern of development.
Education was reconceived as the activity of supporting the fullest achievement of the natural process of mental development.
The good news was that it promised to solve a problem that Plato's idea left us with. Rousseau acknowledged that Plato hitherto had been the greatest educational thinker.
He had recognized how knowledge shaped the mind and how particular kinds of abstract knowledge, and the disciplines they required, shaped the mind to understand the world in more adequate and effective ways. But it had become clear that this wasn't enough. The common product of a Platonic education was asses loaded with books, informed pedantry without imagination, originality, or vigor. Rousseau proposed that the missing element was the knowledge that we could deduce from careful observation of the natural course of development.
So Plato, Rousseau suggests, was right about the importance of knowledge in education, but his insight was of limited value without recognition of the stages at which the young can best learn the various kinds of knowledge. Plato failed to recognize the mind's autonomous growth, and so his conception of mental development was just a mirror-image of his conception of the logic whereby knowledge was elaborated.
By understanding the autonomous growth of the mind, one could co-ordinate the logic of knowledge elaboration with the psycho-logic of mental development. The continuing good news is that educationalists more or less universally now believe that it is important to attend to the nature of the child's learning at particular developmental stages, to different "learning styles," and to that range of sensitivities to learners that became a hallmark of progressivism.
Once attention to the distinctive psychological development of the child was made central to educationalists' understanding of their task, a number of considerable benefits followed. The first and perhaps still the most important was the recognition that failures to learn the curriculum might be due to faults other than the child's recalcitrance. It might, for example, be due to the method of teaching, or the "stage" at which a topic was being taught.
This recognition led to relieving children's school lives of the constant fear of violence for failures to learn. It took a long time from Locke's and Rousseau's formulation of the educational ideas from which this benefit followed, but we should not underestimate the importance of this humanitarian result of attending to the nature of the learner.
The combination of Plato's idea about knowledge and Rousseau's idea about the mind was launched by Rousseau with the promise of a revolution in learning. The enterprise of psychological research in education that tries to discover the nature of learning, development, motivation, etc.
The bad news is that the revolution in learning has stubbornly refused to occur. It seemed, and still seems to many, that research which discloses increasing knowledge about children's development and learning must lead to, at least, evident improvements in general education.
The trouble with promising a revolution in learning is that people expect to see some evidence of it in the learners. What did become evident was that the commitment to freedom for natural development didn't take one very far. As an educational idea, it makes it difficult to determine a curriculum, and tends to leave the selection open to local prejudice, charismatic enthusiasts, or blind chance. To keen progressivists, this doesn't matter that much because the curriculum isn't the point.
We have had a century of fairly intensive experiment in implementing varied forms of the idea we have inherited from Rousseau, and progressivism's interpretations of it, and educational psychology's attempts to flesh it out scientifically. It seems fair to observe at this point that something is still missing. Plato's and Rousseau's ideas together are not able to bring about for most children the kind of learning we see in some, and the kind of learning that it doesn't seem unreasonable to expect from hugely expensive schools.
The promise of Rousseau's idea has not been delivered. Alas, it hasn't worked. The worse news There is worse news than that it hasn't worked? The worse news follows the observation that human beings don't have a nature.
There are obviously regularities in human mental development, but they are so tied up with our social experience, our culture, and the kinds of intellectual tools we pick up that we can't tell whether the regularities are due to our nature, to our society, to our culture, to our intellectual tools, or what. We can't simply measure the regularities, which turn out to be pretty irregular from person to person, and see through them to our nature, or to some autonomous developmental process.
Vygotsky pointed this out as a fatal flaw in Piaget's theory in the s, but it is only now, with the generally recognized foundering of Piaget's theory, that the force of Vygotsky's criticism is coming home to many. It's a bit like Gertrud Stein's Oakland, there is no nature of mental development there. The really bad news is that Rousseau put in place for the modern educational world a binary distinction between an autonomously developing mind and an "external" body of knowledge.
Once education became thought of in terms of knowledge and mind content and method, curriculum and instruction , the problem became how to get them back together again. If you begin to think of education as facilitating the ideal development of individuals' minds, you have the problem of dealing with the role knowledge is to perform in this process. Progressivism emphasized the general uselessness of the "traditional" classical curriculum and the value of useful knowledge that responded to current social needs.
That is, Rousseau's dichotomy undermined Plato's "epistemological mind", in which particular kinds of knowledge were learned because of the benefits that accrued to the mind. Tatters of the old classical curriculum hang around, partly out of an intuition that there might be something in Plato's idea and partly to satisfy the minority who still want that old-style "ornamental" education.
Rousseau's dichotomy, adopted by Spencer, Dewey, and pretty well all other progressive educationalist, has given us a century of polemical battles between supporters of "child-centeredness" against "subject-centeredness. The polemical battles are one result of the really bad news resulting from Rousseau's idea.
We obviously haven't inherited these three great educational ideas in the more or less discrete packages described above. We don't, of course, think of our conception of education as a composite, but rather as a unitary idea. But those three ideas have become entangled with each other through the centuries, and have produced our contemporary schools and curricula and teaching practices.
We have come to live with these "tensions" so long that most see them as inevitable and as a management problem. This is how we disguise confusions from ourselves, conceptually papering over deep fault-lines in our thinking. Each of our three ideas, then, is really bad news left to itself. Judicious application of one or another of the ideas supports or constrains the third; each solves problems created by the others. Ah, the best of all possible worlds! Another way of putting it, of course, is to say that our three defective ideas prevent each other from doing too much damage.
So, we socialize, but we undercut indoctrination by the academic program calling society's values into question and by the commitment to individual development reducing society's claims on any particular individual; we pursue an academic program, but we undercut intellectual development by egalitarian pressures from socialization and attention to other forms of individual development; we encourage individual development, but we undercut its fulfillment by the homogenizing pressures of socialization, and by the standardizing brought about by a common academic curriculum.
Ah, what a wonder of compromise is our modern conception of education! Can it really be true that our conception of education has three main components, each one of which leads to undesirable results by itself, and which work together only by each one interfering with the adequate implementation of the other two? Surely this is a pessimistic fantasy? Well, there has certainly been a chorus of critics who have vociferously argued over the years that typical schooling leaves students woefully ignorant of their cultural heritage.
Do they provide inadequate socialization? Certainly critics have constantly complained about students' alienation on the one hand and their common lack of civic values on the other.
And do they provide inadequate individual development of students' potential? We do still hear loud criticism about the irrelevance of much schooling to students' individual needs. Well, of course there are such criticisms, you might reasonably complain. This is a democracy, after all. Even optimists don't expect perfect implementation of all three ideas. The great success of our education system is to have achieved and generally held a balance among three somewhat distinct aims.
Schools provide an exposure to academic material to all students, and clearly allow some to excel in academic work; they socialize all students in a basic way while avoiding fanatical extremes; and they attend to the general development of all children and provide special help to some who clearly need it.
I think this complacent view is mistaken, and that the three ideas undermine each other rather than complement each other. Consider this scenario: Let us say you are a movie fan and enjoy going out to a cinema once each week But the government imposes a new requirement on cinemas. As you come out of the cinema, you will be required to take a test on the movie you have just seen. You will be asked the color of the villain's car in the chase scene, or the adequacy of the motivation of the leading woman's sister, or the gist of the alien's speech before it transmogrified, or the name of the brother-in-law's pet dog, and so on.
Your score on the test will determine your salary for the next week, when you will face another test and another salary adjustment. Consider for a moment how such tests and their consequence would likely influence your watching movies. At the very least, they would change what was carefree entertainment into anxiety. You would also spend a lot of effort watching movies trying to second-guess the kinds of questions you are likely to be asked and the focus of your attention would be shifted to fit your expectations of the test.
What does this remind you of? There is no problem with having two aims for an institution, except if the aims conflict with each other. If one of our aims for an educational institution is the pursuit of academic knowledge, we will interfere with that in all kind of destructive ways if we then impose a social sorting role on the institution, and use academically inappropriate testing to do that social sorting. That is, this kind of undermining of separate and conflicting aims is precisely what we get if we try to make the school an institution that tries both to socialize and implement the academic ideal at the same time.
The result is that neither is adequately or sensibly achieved, as, in the cinema scenario, neither carefree entertainment nor an appropriate manner of determining salaries is achieved.
Yet we have created such an institution and keep trying to make it work to realize conflicting ideals. Adequate socialization requires successfully inculcating a set of beliefs, values, and norms of behavior in the growing child. The academic program is specifically designed to enable the growing child to question the basis for any beliefs, values, and norms of behavior.
The two aims pull against each other: the more successfully one socializes, the less one achieves the academic ideal; the more successfully one inculcates disciplined academic thinking, the less easy it is to socialize successfully. Socialization requires acceptance of beliefs, values, and norms that the disciplined academic mind sees as stereotypes, prejudices, and homogenization. Consider this scenario: You are fifty-five and have had a successful career as a lawyer. You have a spouse and two successful children.
You are a pillar of the community, active in church, community center, and children's sports activities. But it has recently become disturbingly clear that you will not remain vigorous forever, and that time is closing in.
It is a disturbing call, a distressing echo, that grows louder by the day. Increasingly you feel it is a call from the real you, a call from your buried life; from the you who somehow got lost in all those legal tussles and in the social round and the kids' soccer and ballet and then their colleges and marriages, and now that ghostly you calls to be recognized and brought to life.
Well, fortunately, you can enroll in the required government program, ReTRY. It is mandated by law to assist citizens' psychological adjustment to later middle-age. Success in the program is measured by the degree to which people return satisfied to their old routines of life. Hang on. How can an institution designed to help you find the real you measure success by convincing you that the old you is the real you?
Shouldn't you be encouraged to head out yonder to the pearl seas or the South Pacific, or at least take up kayaking or building a Japanese garden? Socializing strives to homogenize; individual development strives to bring out the uniqueness of each person. Hard to aim for both in the same institution and expect success. And we expect our schools to do both successfully.
Consider a third scenario: It is twenty years in the future and the government's educational authorities have become convinced that the route to the fullest development of each individual's potential is to design different kinds of schools to support the main styles of learning and kinds of intelligence people deploy.
There are twenty-seven kinds of schools, each designed for one of the twenty-seven distinct intelligences now identified by Dr. Gardner at ground zero. Enormously sophisticated testing apparatus and procedures are applied to children to determine which school would most fully develop their particular strengths.
Huge amounts of money have been spent on designing the schools, outside and in, to respond to, and stimulate, the needs of the kinds of students they house.
The curriculum in each kind of school is, however, identical. The children follow a rigorous academic program designed to carry their minds from the ignorance and confusion of their originally unschooled condition towards a disciplined understanding of their cultural heritage.
There are no electives, until university specialization, because the authorities have also been convinced that the only proper aim of education is to empower children's minds with the best material human beings have created, and that is precisely what the disciplined forms of understanding provide. Now such a system would surely be self-contradictory. The academic commitment to shaping the mind by teaching disciplined forms of understanding isn't compatible with the belief that the minds of different people can be optimally developed by knowledge chosen to suit their particular style of learning, kind of intelligence, needs and interests.
One cannot have two masters, especially when both mandate different things. We can't construct a coherent educational institution using radically different criteria. But, of course, that's precisely what we require of our schools today. We require that they acknowledge, and accommodate as far as possible, different styles of learning and different ends of the process for different people. We require also that the academic ideal be acknowledged, which recognizes education only in the degree to which minds are shaped by progress in understanding the range of disciplines.
The result, of course, is not a coherent curriculum, but one that tries to accommodate both conflicting principles. The result, also, is perpetual strife by adherents of the conflicting principles, fighting about which should have greater influence over children's education. We have inherited three foundational ideas about education.
Each one of them has flaws, at least one flaw in each being fatal to its ambition to represent an educational ideal we might reasonably sign on to. And the worse news is that each of the ideas is incompatible with the other two. These warring ideas hovered around the cradle of the public schools, proffering their gifts.
The schools eagerly took them all, and so education remains difficult and contentious. Bruer, John. Education and the brain: A bridge too far. Educational Researcher, 26, 8, Deacon, Terrence W. The symbolic species: The co-evolution of language and the brain. New York: Norton. Diamond, Jared. Guns, germs, and steel: The fates of human societies. Donald, Merlin. Origins of the Modern Mind. Egan, Kieran. Primary understanding: Education in early childhood. New York: Routledge. Fodor, Jerry.
Hall, G. Adolescence: Its psychology and its relations to physiology, anthropology, sociology, sex, crime, religion, and education. New York: Appleton. Havelock, Eric A. Preface to Plato. Roam on Sundays Subscribe Sign in. About Archive Help Sign in. Share this post. Create your profile. Only paid subscribers can comment on this post Already a paid subscriber? Log in. Check your email For your security, we need to re-authenticate you. Top New What is Roam on Sundays? Ready for more? See privacy , terms and information collection notice.
Roam on Sundays is on Substack — the place for independent writing. Our use of cookies We use necessary cookies to make our site work. We also set performance and functionality cookies that help us make improvements by measuring traffic on our site. For more detailed information about the cookies we use, please see our privacy policy.
This site requires JavaScript to run correctly. Please turn on JavaScript or unblock scripts. May 10,
0コメント