What is Education?- A thread on learning and teaching, the creative process, practice

[marct]

When you use the word metaphysical a circuit breaker in the back of my head goes "pop".

Thought it might .

Most of the time I've been playing with the problem with other academic colleagues, they have shied away from metaphysics as if it were the plague, even while they criticized certain aspects of the current model.

I've been wrangling with different curricula models for quite awhile. Integrative, distributed, etc.. etc... They all seem to role the basic principles of industrial era education in new ways. I've got a couple things on my website about it, but basically any new model should have.

1) A new delivery mechanism has to be based on reasoning.
2) A new delivery mechanism has to be investigative (discovery) based.
3) .... has to be truly interdisciplinary (e.g. learn science through history).
4) .... has to have physical as well as mental aspects for real holistic views (we don't want muscle bound idiots, or floating brain pans).
5) .... has to include a merit based promotion system for knowledge, skills, and abilities attainment (evaluation and assessment is still needed).
6) .... has to adapt internally to environmental and societal changes without breaking (doesn't happen currently).
7) .... has to give up determinism for ... something?

Interesting list, most of which I totally agree with. Hmm, let's see....

1 & 2. These two can be rolled together (along with some other stuff I'll touch on later), into a single concept where the delivery mechanism must be able to deliver different all "types" of knowledge (logos, gnosis, thumos).

3. Totally agree with. In fact, I would personally like to see "disciplines" shifted backwards to their original, mental / symbolic meaning (think "mental" or "religious" disciplines) and away from content areas. That would have the effect of matching "disciplines" with "learning styles".

4. Totally. I would also add in "performative" to the list, so integrating mind, body and "social". Think Musashi's Book of Five Rings or Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier; an integration of body, mind and "soul" as it were. BTW, I'm not pushing this one because I'm into performance arts, I'm pushing it because it complements and balances the others, which is one of the reasons I do it .

5. Granted that evaluation and assessment are still needed, but the form of them needs to be changed depending on the area of knowledge. So, for example, in areas of knowledge with high predictive validity, a "passing" grade needs to be near perfect; it's one of those "you can either do it or you can't at the moment" situations, where that "at the moment" is a crucial consideration.

"Promotion" is where we would have the most trouble, because it contains the implicit model of credentialization. Personally, I happen to like the medieval Guild model in Academia, but that can't be the solution, although I think it needs to be part of it. I'll have to think about this one for a bit.

6. Simpler to do when you are credentializing disciplines (as defined above) and areas of knowledge separately. The contents of the area of knowledge change, probably quickly, while the disciplines change slowly.

7. Non-deterministic adaptability in the Darwinian sense. Part of the problem with the modernist form of education is that it is predicated not only on a Fordist production model, but on the assumption that Spencer was right; and he wasn't. Maximal group survival is based on a) the amount of variation in the group and b) the ability of individuals in the group to rapidly move between immediately required selection criteria.

This last point, I think, is crucial to the future of PME since few other areas of social action have such an immediate operation of selection criteria (LE, and some others as well). So the area of knowledge, training and education both, would need to focus on a) multiple potentialities and b) rapid pattern recognition and shifting between framesets.

Mortimer Adler in the 1980s suggested The Paideia Proposal, but that just took current education of the time and re-prioritized it. With TRADOC and most education systems they say "don't fix what works". Well, it sort of works sometimes, but it isn't nearly uncorking the potential of the students. If mediocre to sub-par is the goal we're there. If vastly superior capability is the goal we've a long way to go. Learner centered education systems currently appear to be narcissistic and elitist to a fault. They also require large amounts of resources. Neil Stephenson wrote a book about how learner centered education could effect society. I don't agree with several of his premises but it does beg the question of if not that, then what.

Learner centered education, without internal discipline, will pretty much inevitably end up as elitist in the worst sense and narcissistic . The resource argument, I'm not so sure of. Certainly, if we rely on current models of resource production / distribution, you're correct, but that is a fairly recent (historically) development and there are a lot of alternatives (check out the Fourth Sector material on the economic value of volunteerism).

And on that note, I have to go prepare for an outreach concert at a couple of local schools (volunteer ).

Cheers,

Marc