Another mystery philosopher of education

Here are some more provocative quotations from yet another mystery thinker about education, another whose work should be better known in my view:

All knowledge, including scientific knowledge, is provisional, and always will be. We cannot prove that what we know is true, and it may turn out to be false.  The best we can do is justify our preference for one theory rather than another.....of course, we assume the 'truth' of our existing knowledge for practical purposes and are quite ready to do so; but we must be ready for it to be superseded....we cannot be sure that we have the truth: we can, however, systematically eliminate error.  the way we eliminate error is by testing.

Of course there have been many people with a sense of unease about the practice of education.  most important, there have been many teachers who have either instinctively or after worrying thought tried to organise learning rather than teaching.  They have encouraged 'discovery methods', project work and independent learning.  But they have been under attack, partly because these methods still sit uneasily in the rest of the system (how, for example, does one examine such work?) and partly because they have been unable to give as coherent an intellectual account of themselves as is claimed by traditional academics. This insecurity is no longer justified.  It is the traditional academic practice which needs to be defended.

What we have, in fact, is a continuum of learning, whose logic is the same, from the new-born babe (indeed, from the amoeba) to the research worker on the frontiers of knowledge.  Each is engaged in the formulation of problems, in solving them and in testing the solutions.  Most people will formulate problems that have been formulated many times before.  Their proposed solutions will be familiar; their tests commonplace.  But they will learn by this activity.  They will not learn better or faster if we parcel up received solutions to problems formulated by others: indeed this is an anti-learning process.  Moreover it inhibits the possibility of progress, because it is always possible that someone will formulate a common problem differently, will propose a different solution or a more effective test.

What is important is not a particular fact or even a particular ordered collection of facts, but method.  It is method rather than information which gives mastery, and it is method which must be the chief business of education.

The presentation of knowledge as bodies of organised facts is a way of ensuring its unhelpfulness to most people.

Since criticism is of the essence of the method, education must offer opportunities for students to be critical and to use criticism. 

Clue: All these quotations come from the same book, published in 1977.  They still appear to me to represent a radical critique of the basic assumptions of our entire education system, perhaps even more so now than when they were written.  Any ideas?  Answers in a day or two.

Mystery educational philosopher

All these quotes are from the same thinker, someone I didn't realise had written about education.  I will shortly be posting a review of the book I discovered them in.  Can you recognise the author?

I may be wrong, and you may be right, and by an effort, we may get nearer to the truth.

We do not discover new facts or new effects by copying them, or by inferring them inductively from observation, or by any other method of instruction by the environment.

(Picture by Chris Bradey)

We learn only through trial and error.  Our trials....are always our hypotheses.  They stem from us, not from the external world.  All we learn from the external world is that some of our efforts are mistaken.

The process of learning, of the growth of subjective knowledge, is always fundamentally the same.  It is imaginative criticism.

Institutions for the selection of the outstanding can hardly be devised.  Institutional selection may work quite well for such purposes as Plato had in mind, namely for arresting change.  But it will never work well if we demand more than that, for it will always tend to eliminate initiative and originality, and, more generally, qualities which are unusual and unexpected.  It has been said, only too truly, that Plato was the inventor of both our secondary schools and our universities.  I do not know a better argument for an optimistic view of mankind, no better proof of their indestructible love for truth and decency, of their originality and stubbornness and health, than the fact that this devastating system of education has not utterly ruined them.

There are no subject matters, no branches of learning - or rather, of inquiry: there are only problems, and the urge to solve them.

If I thought of a future, I dreamt of one day founding a school in which young people could learn without boredom, and would be stimulated to pose problems and discuss them; a school in which no unwanted answers to unasked questions would have to be listened to; in which one did not study for the sake of passing examinations.

[If] we produce many competing ideas, and criticise them severely, we may, if we are lucky, get nearer to the truth.  This method is the method of conjectures and refutations: it is the method of taking many risks, by producing many (competing) hypotheses; of making many mistakes; and of trying to correct or eliminate some of these mistakes by a critical discussion of the competing hypotheses.

Does this last one give it away?

Montaigne on Education

'I gladly come back to the theme of the absurdity of our education: its end has not been to make us good and wise but learned.  And it has succeeded.  It has not taught us to seek virtue and to embrace wisdom: it has impressed upon us their derivation and their etymology.  We know how to decline the Latin word for virtue: we do not know how to love virtue.  Though we do not know what wisdom is in practice or from experience we do know the jargon off by heart.....our education has taught us the definitions, divisions and subdivisions of virtue as though they were the surnames and the branches of a family-tree, without any concern for establishing between us and it any practice of familiarity or personal intimacy.  For our apprenticeship it has not prescribed the books which contain the soundest and truest opinions but those which are written in the best Greek and Latin, and in the midst of words of beauty it has poured into our minds the most worthless judgements of Antiquity.' (On presumption)

These arguments are very similar to those of modern educators and researchers who say that education has become much too focussed on learning that can be measured easily, at the expense of the education for moral and aesthetic judgement and of values: what is good (allegedly), rather than how to try to be good.  Another indication of how close we are to people of past ages - their worries are our worries too.

Walter Benjamin on Praxis, Knowledge and Education

'The slogan 'work and education' under which the patriotic associations of Schulze-Delitzsch had conducted workers' education, was countered by Social Democracy with the slogan 'Knowledge is Power'. But the party failed to perceive its double meaning. It thought the same knowledge that secured the rule of the bourgeoisie over the proletariat would enable the proletariat to free itself from that rule. In reality, knowledge with no outlet in praxis, knowledge that could teach the proletariat nothing about its situation as a class, was no danger to its oppressors. This was especially true of knowledge relating to the humanities. It lagged far behind economics, remaining untouched by the revolution in economic theory. It sought only to stimulate, to offer variety, to arouse interest.'

Walter Benjamin, in "Edward Fuchs, Collector and Historian", in Walter Benjamin Selected Writings, Volume 3 1935-1938, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2002, p260-302.

Compass Education for the Good Society Statement

The latest version of Compass's Statement on 'Education for the Good Society' can be found at:

http://compassoneducation.org.uk/education-for-the-good-society-statement-version-2/

Comments are warmly invited

Education for the Good Society; Compass Conference

EDUCATION FOR THE GOOD SOCIETY CONFERENCE
10.30am – 4.00pm Saturday 5th March at the NUT, Hamilton House, Mabledon Place, London, WC1H 9BD

The Education for the Good Society Conference will bring together those on the democratic left to discuss alternatives to the current neo-liberal education settlement.

The limitations of New Labour’s education project and the election of a Conservative-led Coalition Government, with its agenda of austerity, markets and traditionalism, means that we have to ask fundamental questions about the purposes of education and its role in building the Good Society.

Conference speakers will include specialists from education and those involved in wider democratic left politics –
Prof. Richard Sennett, Fiona Miller, Neal Lawson, Prof. Tom Schuller, Prof. Ewart Keep, Prof. Ken Spours, Martin Yarnit, Prof. Jane Martin, Prof. Gary McCulloch, Prof. Michael Fielding, Dr Tom Sperlinger, Matthew Horne, Dr Jeremy Gilbert, Rhona Downie, Donna Hayter and representatives from Labour’s education team (tbc).

Conference themes, based on commissioned papers, will include:

Education for the Good Society
Education and fairness
Schooling for the Good Society
Lifelong learning
Education and sustainability
Education, skills and the economy
Education and democracy
Education for inclusion
Education and innovation
A curriculum for the Good Society
Visions of higher education

The conference will be organised around plenary sessions and workshops and there will also be a special session on ‘Schooling in Alberta’ with Rhonda Evans of the Guardian in conversation with Fiona Millar.

The final conference session will discuss how we develop what some all the ‘triple agenda’ - a long-term vision for change, influencing the policies of Labour and other progressive parties over the next few years and, crucially, connecting with professionals and the wider public around key campaigning issues.

Participants will be asked to contribute £10 on the day towards the hiring of the venue.

If you are interested in attending and reserving your place, please email - info@compassonline.org.uk

Thought for the Day: A new educational paradigm

'The incidence of ADHD has risen in parallel with the growth of standardised testing' Ken Robinson, see this speech animated at RSA animate: http://comment.rsablogs.org.uk/2010/10/14/rsa-animate-changing-education

Talent is not scarce: most people can do most jobs

At a lecture called ‘The Social Craftsman’ given at University College London in November 2009, the eminent sociologist Richard Sennett argued that ‘Talent is not scarce: most people can do most jobs, given appropriate training and support, and therefore our obsession, particularly in the UK and the USA, to organise education primarily as a winnowing process, using continuous testing to weed out the few from the many, is wasteful to the economy as well as unfair in social terms.’

He started by asserting that successive governments in Britain and the US have effectively taken the view that ‘low-level’ jobs can be exported without damaging the economy, including service jobs such call-centre jobs as well as manufacturing jobs.

Robert Reich’s 1991 book The Work of Nations, articulated this view: ‘We are living through a transformation that will rearrange the politics and economics of the coming century,’ Reich noted. ‘There will be no national products or technologies, no national corporations, no national industries. There will be no national economies, at least as we have come to understand the concept. All that will remain rooted within national borders are the people who comprise a nation. Each nation’s primary assets will be its citizens’ skills and insights.’* Accordingly, developed societies need only foster ‘symbolic analyst’ jobs within their economies.

In Sennett’s view, this analysis initially appeared sound partly because of the exploitative, even imperialistic, way both the UK and the US think about foreign markets. The policies of our governments betray a restricted, static, non-developmental, non-social view of employment in relation to these lower level jobs. And what people in these foreign ‘client economies’ are achieving for themselves through these employment opportunities suggests this view is mistaken.

It is now clear that many people doing these jobs in other countries use their employment to build skills (starting often with learning English) and progress from being employees of a British company to employees of a local company to perhaps starting their own business, all a result of using their work to develop their skills. Sennett believes that almost all work, at whatever level, has this developmental potential – at least in principle – and that not seeing this is a serious and persistent mistake of UK and US employment and educational policy.

Sennett characterises the debate on how ‘skills’ are acquired as an ongoing argument between ‘endogenous’ theories of skill acquisition (in which learning is seen as a largely technical process common to all people and all contexts) and ‘cognitive situated’ theories, which see learning as deeply interconnected with the existing knowledge, understanding and motivation of each individual, and different in different contexts too. (He himself, ‘like any good Marxist’, he said, supports the second view.) We persistently try to ‘cut’ ability and talent much too finely, usually by using the blunt instrument of standardised testing in some form. His view on this is radical – he argues that most people can actually do reasonably well at most jobs – it’s only misleading test results and historic class prejudice that make us think differently.

In Britain and the US, it suits us to assume that talent is scarce and that it is therefore critical to identify the supposed one person in 20 who is capable. But in fact talent is not scarce. Most of the other 19 are just as capable in most circumstances, given the opportunity, educational support and the right social networks. Prevailing assumptions, however, lead us effectively to dump the 19, and to see the low status jobs they get (if they get a job at all) as not worthy of enriching with opportunities for professional or personal development.

We have limited awareness of, and generally little interest in fostering, the social and developmental dimensions of employment. Policy mostly ignores the potential of any work experience, provided it is sustained, to support the development of craft, social, civic and professional skills (understanding these in the broadest sense). The effectiveness for the economy of ‘just in time’ working patterns – repeated changing of jobs, short-term team working followed by dispersal, serial employment rather than sustained employment or careers – is exaggerated, while the disadvantages and costs of continual flexibility and volatility are systematically underestimated.

The net effect of this is that the UK and US exemplify a type of capitalism that (despite its rhetoric) is uninterested in developing human capital. The persistent idea that bankers and others in high-paid, privileged roles are by definition much more talented than those in lower status roles is an underlying cause of the recession and likely to mean that even after the recession, high unemployment and/or a significant ‘Macjob’ sector will continue to be toxic features of our economy, sustaining the vicious circle they are symptomatic of.

At the end of the lecture I asked him for his view on the idea that while too much testing was creating problems for sustained learning, at least it meant that there was less scope for discrimination in terms of access to jobs and higher education, Sennett responded with a story: one year during his stint as admissions registrar for Harvard University, an error in the admissions procedure allowed 90 students whose grades were clearly ‘not good enough’ to enter the university. All of them, he said, graduated brilliantly.....
* Reich, Robert B., (1991) The Work of Nations: Preparing Ourselves For 21st Century Capitalism

Richard Sennett
Born Chicago, 1943, studied piano and cello until hand injury in 1963
Attended University of Chicago & Harvard University, Ph.D. in 1969
1970s: Co-founded New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University
1980s: Advisor to UNESCO, president of the American Council on Work; teaching at Harvard
1990s to present: Divides time between New York University and the London School of Economics
Work: Social analyst interested in how individuals and groups make sense of material facts about where they live and the work they do
Books include: The Corrosion of Character, 1998, how middle-level employees make sense of the ‘new economy’
Respect in a World of Inequality, 2002, effects of new ways of working on the welfare state
The Culture of the New Capitalism, 2006, an over-view of change
The Craftsman, 2008, investigating the processes and work contexts which support people to develop the highest level of skill.

For more see http://www.richardsennett.com/

Topics for imminent posts

• The past is orange: if William of Orange had not died childless, would the UK and Holland now be one country?

• Private schools: the most important way to reduce class-based unequal outcomes in schools is to abolish private education. So argued an articulate working class teenage girl from Kirby, Lancashire, last week on John Humphreys' documentary.

• In a keynote speech during his visit to the UK last week, the Pope asserted that 'morality is founded on religious belief': most commentators failed to question this. Do you have to believe in a God to lead a good life?

• Incentive payments to achieve targets can actually make results worse: see a recent animated lecture on the RSA website.

• 'Most people can do most jobs' (Richard Sennett): talent is not scarce, and we need our education and training systems to stop operating as if it is.