Category: Teaching

Discussions of teaching and curriculum.

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The Problems With Scale and Scalability

The notion of scale can provide a powerful perspective to understanding. However, “scale” also can create greater confusion and deeply entangled, nasty problems.

Developing an understanding of the scale of the Solar System can be eye-opening. But, if not done appropriately can result in even greater confusion. In textbooks, the solar system may show the Sun and planets in scale according to size, but it is physically impossible to show the arrangement and distances to the same scale in a textbook. And, then there is a third dimension that is almost never represented or discussed, and that is time. To do a truly representative scale model of the Solar System, one has to find a do-able scale for size and distance. With my students, I’ve used a 1 to 20 billion scale. However, to do so makes replicating the size difficult, but the distances are pretty reasonable to scale down. We made the Sun and planets out of modeling clay, with the Sun at 6.95 cm and the Earth at about 0.6 mm (which was difficult to do and when done, was easy to lose). With each object constructed, we walked out the distances, which extended over 2.5 American football fields in length. When we included Pluto (it will always be a “planet” to me), Pluto averaged about 290 meters from the Sun, but Pluto’s orbit is elliptical and extends from inside the orbital path of Neptune to about an equal distance beyond the 290 meter scaled distance. To include the time dimension, we would need to scale down the orbital speeds by the same ratio. You can then add scaled down rotational speeds, as well. But, even doing all of this scaling down, we still misrepresent the actual solar system. And, this problem goes back to Korzybsky’s notion that the “map is not the territory.” Our representations, whether in our minds or with objects, can never completely represent the actual “thing” we are trying to represent. But, we can get close, and working towards accurate scale models can help us to refine our cognitive models.

Physical and mechanical systems are easier to scale, but not without issues. Physical and mechanical systems, such as cars, computers, etc., may be very complicated, but they are not complex. Complex systems are living systems. Such systems are unpredictable, self-regulating, and self-maintaining. Mechanical and physical systems are more predictable, but not entirely. Climate and weather systems are more unpredictable than other physical systems, such as planetary motion. And, this unpredictable quality is due to the interdependencies between climate systems and ecological systems. With mechanical systems, we may scale up some transportation system, say from bicycle to motorcycle to car to semi to ship to train to airplane. At each level of scale and change in context of use, the devices become more complicated. At each level, the variables that affect and are affected by the increase in complicated-ness make it more difficult to fully predict. And, then when we add the human component to the system, the complicated mechanical system becomes a merging of complicated and complex systems, which adds even greater uncertainty to the functioning of the complicated—complex transportation system.

Another application of scale that can be interesting, but which can become problematic involves working across levels of scale. Let’s say we identify some pattern in the dynamics of a relationship between two people or between a person and a dog. Maybe this pattern involves a lopsided control issue. One person tries to control the other or, in the case of the person and dog, the person or dog may be the one trying to control the other (I’ve seen both of these patterns of human—dog relationships). Then, say, you see two nations behaving in a similar way, where one nation is trying to control the other. This comparison across levels of scale can be insightful, but not without issues. The specifics of this more general pattern of relationship are not scalable. The danger is that we may get stuck assuming that there are more similarities to the dynamics than there really are. Within the general pattern of lopsidedness control, there are all sorts of other patterns occurring that are specific to the contexts involved. The dog—person contexts are completely different from the person—person and the nation—nation contexts. So, more generalized patterns may be interesting and informative to compare across levels of scale, while the more contextually specific patterns are much more difficult to compare.

Another version of “scalability” that is problematic from the start involves applying some strategy or approach that works well at a small scale and then trying to apply that same approach at a larger scale. The minute we try to “scale up” some approach that in any way involves living or social systems, all sorts of unexpected problems pop up. We may try to scale up the idea of community gardens then lose sight of the contexts that allowed one community garden to be successful. Every community has different characteristics, dynamics, issues, needs, and so forth. And, every community is comprised of distinctively different people. And, communities exist among diverse types of ecosystems, from deserts to rain forests. The “idea” of scaling up some great approach in one context seems wonderful, but that “idea” does not account for the complexity of each individual context or set of contexts, and especially in terms of the exponential increase in complexity encountered when “scaling up.” Even naturally increasing sizes of “things” creates tremendous difficulties. When a democratic form of government was first established in the the United States shortly after getting its independence, the designers of the system were dealing with a population of about 2,000,000 non-slaves and non-indigenous people. And, of people who could vote, that population was about half that size (women could not vote). The contexts that were at play involved a history of colonization, of a dependence on slavery, of women as of lesser status than men, of the natural and physical environments in which people lived, of the technology of the time, and so on. Even from the beginning, the democratic process was bumpy. And, much of this bumpiness arose from the unpredictability of complex social systems. As contexts change, the entire political system can crumble or, at least, face huge challenges in maintaining its stability and functionality. And, as the population increases — a naturally occurring scaling up — the difficulties of maintaining the original system increase exponentially. These “created” complex social systems never seem to address ways of adjusting to major shifts in contexts, major challenges to the viability of the system, and so forth. In the U.S., we seem to be at just this point of near collapse of the original system, where scalability fails.

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What Needs to be Taught? — Part I: A History

During my career as an educator, which started off as a leap off of a cliff into a raging fire, I became increasingly concerned with the issue of “what to teach.” I began teaching as a middle school science teacher in New York City. It was a great environment with good, but challenging, students. However, I was generally clueless, even though I thought I had a lot to offer. With the help and support of my principal and a French teacher, I began to see the errors in my thinking and approach. I began questioning many of the assumptions I had about teaching and learning. And, then I studied with Gregory Bateson for an intensive summer program on education. That summer turned everything upside down. Bateson’s ideas slowly soaked in over many years and even decades as the processes of developing deeper understandings percolated. About 8 years after the Bateson program, I entered graduate school. I entered the graduate program with a kind of selfish attitude. I said to myself that “I don’t care about grades or the professors’ styles of teaching. I am going to learn as much as I can from this experience… just for me.” As I finished my masters degree, then doctoral degree, I left feeling like I was embarking on a path of continual learning, of challenging my and others’ ideas. And, now, having retired from the academic path, I am still learning and challenging.

But, what was it about the learning that occurred during this initial period that changed the way I approached my interaction with the world? I certainly slogged my way through many boring and seemingly irrelevant courses, which were really quite deadly. However, there were many more professors who enlivened the material being studied and who focused heavily on challenging the status quo. And, studying with Gregory Bateson was entirely a process of upending the assumptions of how we think, learn, relate, and live.

However, the big issue is how the system of education fails our children and, for that matter, many, if not most, adults going through colleges and universities. This issue has been plaguing me for decades. From the institutions of education, we get more “national standards,” more “teacher accountability,” more “testing,” and more “teacher-proof curricula.” All of these actions just continue to deaden the entire system of schooling.

Today, I started reading an old book by the noted philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead. His book, The Aims of Education, was first published almost a century ago in 1929. Below, are two short summaries with quotes about “what to teach” and “testing.” Reading books from this time period is slow going. The way the English language was used was different, so I’ve summarized most of what he wrote, but have included key quotes.

What to Teach (from page 13 in The Aims of Education)

In teaching children, “…above all things we must beware of what I will call ‘inert ideas’ — that is to say, ideas that are merely received into the mind without being utilized, or tested, or thrown into fresh combinations.” …. Throughout history, education at one point may be “alive with a ferment of genius,” but in later times, education becomes pedantic and routine. “The reason is, that they are overladen with inert ideas. Education with inert ideas is not only useless: it is, above all things, harmful—Corruptio optimi, pessima.” [The corruption of the best, the worst — from https://www.latin-online-translation.com]

Testing (from page 17 in The Aims of Education)

Whitehead describes the issue of how best to teach as dependent upon the teacher (intelligence, knowledge, etc.), the students (intelligence, knowledge, etc.), the students’ potentialities for later life, and the contexts (physical, social, cultural, etc.) in which the students live. “It is for this reason that the uniform external examination is so deadly.”

And, here we are almost 100 years later still suffering from the “deadly” approaches to schooling. During the mid- to late-1800’s, politicians and those with influence over education were quite explicit about not providing a good education for the masses. In John Gatto’s well-researched chapter, “Some Lessons From the Underground History of American Education,” he describes a pattern of control exerted over education that had the intention of control over children in order to control them as adults and keeping all but the very elite under-educated.

Here are a few choice points from this chapter:

A School or A Prison?
  • 1857 — effort to have schools take complete control over children through behavior modification, so that they took over the role of parent.
  • 1906 — William Torrey Harris (U.S. Commissioner of Education said on page 279, “Ninety-nine [students] out of a hundred are automata, careful to walk in prescribed paths, careful to follow the prescribed custom. This is not an accident but the result of substantial education, which, scientifically defined, is the subsumption of the individual. — The Philosophy of Education (1906, p. 270)
  • Just before World War I — Woodrow Wilson said on page 272: “We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class of necessity, to forgo privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.”
  • 1917 — (page 272) “…the major administrative jobs in American schooling were under control of a group referred to in the press of that day as ‘the education trust.’ The first meeting of this trust included representatives of Rockefeller, Carnegie, Harvard, Stanford, the University of Chicago, and the National Education Association. The chief end, wrote the British evolutionist Benjamin Kidd in 1918, was to ‘impose on the young the ideal of subordination.’”
  • And, in the contexts of present-day education, not much has really changed. We do not use the same words and phrases to describe what should happen in schools. Instead of being straight forward with our intent, we couch our language in words and phrases that may imply more positive goals, such as “raising standards” and “holding teachers accountable.” The strategies used to dumb down our children, to segregate the classes, and to control our children have become more insidious, but are still the major influences on what is taught and how that information is taught.

We have done a wonderful job of preparing our children to be adults who welcome authoritarianism, who will be obedient and subservient, who will not question authority, and whose thinking abilities have been blocked and strangled. And, here we are in 2021, in a society dying from decades of psychological violence against its citizens.

References

Gatto, J. T. (2002). Some lessons from the underground history of American education. In R. Kick (Ed.), Everything you know is wrong: The disinformation guide to secrets and lies (pp. 274–287). New York: The Disinformation Company.

Harris, W. T. (1906). The philosophy of education. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University.

Whitehead, A. N. (1929). The aims of education. New York: Mentor Book/New American Library (Macmillan).

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Learning Authoritarianism — Insidious and Pervasive

Reposted from The Nook Blog

The following image and images like it have been bouncing around Facebook, Twitter, and other social media. In such posts, the reader/viewer is struck at an emotional level while appearing to be a rational question to a specific issue. But, the image, the question, and the entire context of this “problem” point to a deeply embedded and insidious pattern of education in the U.S. and elsewhere.

A Facebook Post that Continues to Make Its Rounds in the Virtual World

This post can grab you emotionally and get you to make a definitive decision about the issue of cell phones in classrooms. Because is states “share if you agree!” and the post continues to repeatedly make its rounds, one must assume that viewers agree that teachers must take away student cell phones while they are in the classroom. And, as pictured in the post, the students seem to be quite compliant with the teacher’s mandate.

However, this “issue” of cell phones is not quite so simple. In fact, this post points to a much more complex set of contexts, issues, and patterns of schooling and society than one may think. But, we all have been “processed” by the same contexts and patterns of schooling. As a result, we look at this photo and it feels familiar. The patterns of response are ingrained in our thinking. And, we automatically know –whatever that is– “right” from “wrong.”

Hmmm…. And, this situation is what frightens me the most.

Schools in this country have been designed — for well over a century — to produce compliant, conforming, and obedient adults who do not question authority and who have been “educated ” just enough to function in society as a worker and to be easily influenced and manipulated “voter.” The power elite — politicians and big money brokers — have never wanted a society of deep and critical thinkers, who have been well-educated. Such people are a threat to their holding onto money, power, and control.1

Schools have not been designed to teach children how to participate in a democracy. Nor have they been designed to develop children’s innate intelligence and abilities to think deeply, complexly, creatively, critically, independently, and interdependently. They are not taught to care, empathize, develop a strong and deep sense of integrity, and understand other people across an array of wonderful differences. Schools — and let me state right here that it is NOT the fault of most teachers who are subject to the same dysfunctional pressures as children — have failed our students and our countries.

Underneath this schooling agenda is an agenda geared to support authoritarianism. From the beginning, the hidden curriculum of schools focused on the rules and nature of authoritarianism. The “explicit” curriculum promoted the teaching of fragmented and decontextualized bits of information, while portraying itself as rigorous, deep, and extensive. Such a portrayal was “enhanced” by curriculum standards, high-stakes testing, and accountability. But, the bottom line of this entire approach to education has been to keep our population dumbed down. And, again, the “blame” is not with the students or people who have been dumbed down by the educational system. Our entire society functions as a support system for the system of dumbing down. Such processes of dumbing down and rewarding those who have succeeded in that system are difficult obstacles to overcome.

As is evidenced in the photo, above, people immediately are drawn into agreeing with the teacher depicted in this scenario. We assume that teachers are the authorities over knowledge, behavior, and thinking. We have been unwittingly taught to behave, obey, conform, comply, and keep our noses clean.

The authoritarian approach only creates further issues. Such approaches undermine and break relationships that are so vital to creating classroom communities, where students can learn how to participate in a democracy. And, where they can learn to care for others, to question and explore all kinds of ideas, and to develop identities of creators of knowledge through the arts, sciences, and humanities, if we care to separate these inseparable ways of knowing. Authoritarian approaches promote distrust, resentment, and hatred. These approaches undermine the development of responsibility, initiative, caring for others, and so forth.

If phones are seen as a problem, the problem is much more extensive and complex than the phones. In a democratic classroom community, any problem that arises is a problem for the community. Of course, if this were a real classroom community, where students had a sense of ownership over and responsibility for the community, the problem such as phones probably would not arise in the first place. But, if it did, the problem would have to be discussed and remediated in some way by the entire group or classroom community.

Authoritarianism is threatening our country as we read this blog post. And, much of the “welcoming” of authoritarianism has its roots in schools, as we’ve just discussed. It’s not a big leap from growing up in a mini-authoritarian culture to feeling comfortable in a larger authoritarian context. 

If we create classrooms and schools as caring, thoughtful, democratic communities, we just might produce citizens who resist authoritarianism and fascism. 

Footnote

1 Gatto, J. T. (2002). Some lessons from the underground history of American education. In R. Kick (Ed.), Everything you know is wrong: The disinformation guide to secrets and lies (pp. 274–287). New York: The Disinformation Company.

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Learning, Complexity, Improvisation, & Relationships

Many years ago, during my second year of teaching middle school science in Brooklyn, New York, we took our students to a 5-day long, environmental studies program. The program took place at a summer camp during its off-season. It was late May in the Adirondack Mountains. We had taken these same students to a different program in Vermont the year before, which is where the students, who were new to the middle school, went this particular year. The principal of the middle school and several teachers went with the group to Vermont and several of us who had gone the previous year went with the “veteran” students to the Adirondacks.

Middle school kids during the first trip to Vermont.

When we arrived at the camp, the kids came off the buses and cars and started running around in their typical fashion, while cursing and laughing and letting off steam after a long ride. Shortly, after arriving, the camp personnel held a meeting, where they laid out the RULES. “This is an elite camp. There is no cursing. The boys’ cabins are off-limits to the girls and the girls’ cabins are off-limits to the boys. Blah, blah, blah…” And, so it went on for 30 minutes. We, the teachers, were looking at one another and rolling our eyes. The kids were squirming and rolling their eyes.

Afterwards the kids were sent to unload their packs in their assigned cabins. The teachers obediently went to the cabins to which we were assigned. When I walked into my boys’ cabin, they were diligently unpacking, while cursing and laughing and groaning about the camp personnel. I, of course, cursed at the kids to stop cursing. It broke the tension.

We then met for the first set of activities. It was hot and humid, and the black flies (if you are not familiar with black flies, they are small and aggressive biters) were eating everyone alive. The activities were boring and lifeless and mostly involved being talked at by the camp people.

The next day was rainy and very chilly. The kids and teachers survived another day of dreadful activities. And, the kids were amazingly patient with and tolerant of the people running the program, but their patience was running thin. In the middle of that night, a camp counselor came into my cabin and woke me up. “I just wanted to warn you that we’ve had 2 feet of snow and all of the power and phone lines are down, and the roads are impassable,” he whispered.

No one packed for winter. We arrived in shorts and sneakers. I packed rain boots and a raincoat, with a sweater and light jacket. In addition, a small group of our kids went on a 3-night survival trip… in sneakers and light clothing. By the time they arrived back at the camp after their first night out, they all had hypothermia. A few of the boys, who in most schools would be the troublemakers, leapt into action. They went around to all of the cabins talking other kids out of extra blankets to use to get their hypothermic classmates warmed up.

The entire trip became a survival trip, which in an odd way saved this trip. All of the rules were dropped and everyone helped in dealing with this unforeseen event. On the last day, the principal who had gone to the Vermont trip, showed up. The other camp had had the same snowstorm. He left that camp as soon as he could to come check on how we fared.

It took a disaster to prevent a disaster at the Adirondack trip.

In looking back on this trip, the school, the teachers, and the kids, a few things jump out at me now. Although I really liked the kids, the teachers, and the school at the time, I was still near the bottom of my multi-contextual-learning-about-teaching arc. I don’t want to call it a “learning curve,” because the learning doesn’t go up and then down, the learning just keeps going, while getting deeper and more integrated with one’s life. But, now with many years of experience and learning under my belt, I’m finding this story, and many others, to be very interesting. In one sense, which I will not go into here, there are glimmers of various themes that developed and grew into major guiding “frameworks” for my own thinking and practice as an educator and ordinary human being — by the way, I don’t like the word “frameworks,” because it is much too static. In the other sense, I can look backwards and see how “advanced” we were at the time, as well as to see how many of the ideas involved in complex systems were remarkably evident.

Relationships

As far as I can remember, as teachers, we never really talked explicitly about relationships. But, most of us seemed to work on developing relationships with the kids and with one another. Going to the camp and sitting through that awful initial meeting was a shared experience of shock and disappointment. The teachers knew it and the kids knew it. And, my going into the boys’ cabin and saying, “Stop the *$@#& !&%@#! cursing,” was a way of connecting into that shared sense of relationship. The kids laughed and we moaned together, while comparing how different this year’s trip was to the previous year in Vermont. But, the relationships went much deeper. We all showed our vulnerabilities, even though some of the kids tried to hide them. We also trusted and respected one another. The kids were never shy about giving teachers advice, any more than we were shy about giving them advice.

Taking the helm. These kids could always be relied upon in a pinch.

As teachers, we tried to work with the kids to share in the running of the school… in making decisions, dealing with issues, and so forth. We weren’t always successful in this endeavor, but I do think that such an emphasis played out in situations where they could step out and take control, such as with helping the kids with hypothermia on this trip and on a sailing trip where most of the kids were seasick and the ones who were not sick manned the helm and ropes, when the others couldn’t. No adults ever needed to tell them what to do.

Complexity

In order to understand complex living systems, we need to see the webs or matrices of relationships that are involved, that arise, and that disappear. There’s a fluidity in these relationships. When the kids were reprimanded in the beginning of the trip by people with whom they had no relationship, it broke the relational potentiality and trust. But, as a group of kids and teachers who had developed relationships of trust, at least some degree, the group “identity” and relationships were maintained. Had we, the teachers, sided with the camp counselors, we would have threatened the integrity of our complex system. As it was, the interaction between the two systems of the camp and our school group was problematic, but to our own group system, this interaction was more of an interruption or interference to our more established system. Our group system recalibrated and adjusted, while maintaining our own relationships within the system. After the snowstorm, our more established system recalibrated again and self-organized to meet the newly imposed demands. The camp system became irrelevant except as the source of local knowledge.  

Improvisation

The highly structured and mechanized system of the camp with its strict set of rules and regulations (could be policies, laws, etc. in other contexts), had little flexibility to address drastic changes in the context. Even though the individuals within that system changed their approaches, the camp system faltered. The relational “structure” cracked. However, the school group system was inherently flexible. Middle school children are in the midst of testing limits, exerting their own control, and of becoming adults. Trying to restrict and solidify the boundaries and processes in this age group is self-defeating. But, this school’s approach provided the space and contexts for children to develop within a supportive environment and, in reflection, as a complex living system. As a result, flexibility was built-in. With such flexibility, the kids and the teachers were free to improvise. The notion of being a leader was not some static and singular entity. Yes, the teachers were leaders, but not autocratic. The children were free to jump in and be leaders.

Having been prepared for a spring trip, but finding ourselves in a winter environment, forced kids and teachers to improvise. My summer rain and shallow wading boots along with layers of socks became tolerable winter boots. Layers of clothing worked for everyone helped us deal with the cold. Improvisation became a survival strategy.

Learning

The learning that took place was more aligned to the type of learning described by Nora Bateson: Symmathesy or mutual contextual learning (SEE the symmathesy chapter in Small Arcs of Larger Circles: Framing Through Other Patterns). This type of learning is at the interface between contexts, systems, groups, and/or individuals.

Note that individuals, groups, contexts, and systems are all the same. Each of us is a context made of contexts, as are groups. Each of us is a system made of other systems and connected in various ways to other systems. You can even use “system” and “context” interchangeably.

We are not always aware of this kind of symmathesetic learning. It occurs in the immediacy and intimacy of our interactions with others and other contexts. It seems to me to be the most fundamental of learning that occurs at the level of perception. Although this learning is not the same as what we usually think of as learning, such as learning facts, concepts, theories, and so forth, symmathesy feeds the raw nuggets of information on relationships to this other area of learning that creates what we can think of as our individual and social epistemologies or sets of knowledge.

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The Dissolution of the Personal and Social Fabric

by Jeff Bloom
posted 2020-02-07
first posted in the Exploratory Nook & Store Blog

Disconnected Connections… New York City (Jeff Bloom, 1970)

From individuals to families to society to the global context, the connectedness or integrity of individuals, as well as social integrity is crumbling. Although throughout history there have been conflicts and acts of incredible aggression towards one another, we seem to be entering a new and frightening era of disconnection at all levels of scale.

We disconnect with ourselves, while falling into patterns of not engaging in our worlds, not being kind to ourselves, feeling sorry for ourselves or feeling somehow entitled, or acting out in ways that are hurtful and dishonest. Family life for many is similarly disconnected from the beginning. And, as families grow older, family members disperse with varying degrees of disconnection to others in the family. Schools and classrooms have become more like factories, where teachers, by not particular fault of their own, attempt to mold children into some sort of clones of “normality,” while focusing on teaching to tests and forgetting about the beautiful diversity, creativity, emotions, and individuality of each child. In societies, people rarely interact with one another in meaningful and empathetic ways. We’re divided by politics, religion, skin color, language and accents, nationality, livelihoods, how much money one has, or how many and what kinds of “things” one owns. We also suffer from lack of long-term relationships. People move away from their childhood community, then continue to move chasing dreams and money or running away from oneself or various forms of aggression, loss, and upheaval. The same patterns of disconnects are occurring globally. As we’ve become a global “society” of sorts, we’ve also increased the psychosocial, emotional, and cognitive demands on people from extremely diverse cultures and belief systems.

The pressures on individuals and social groups that have been leading to massive changes in the dynamics and relationships within oneself, between people, and even to our environments and to learning itself, has not been a recent onset of some singular cause. This trend has been going on for millennia.

From the beginning of humankind, people have clustered together. We are social animals, after all. We have always wanted to be loved and appreciated. At the same time, we have helped and cared one another, we have protected our social groups, and we have worked to maintain the integrity of our group. Some current tribal cultures that have kept and valued important aspects of their lineages, of their belief systems, and their ways of life. As a result, they have been able to maintain a certain individual and social integrity. David Maybury-Lewis’ wonderful TV series and book, Millennium: Tribal Wisdom in the Modern World, provides a powerful examination of the wisdom found in such tribal societies. And, that wisdom is based on notions of connectedness and interdependency, as well as on the relationships to their environments, to their ancestors’s wisdom, and to one another.

However, the increasing disconnectedness across most human societies has been due to a variety of changes in technologies, in the way humans have organized their societies, and in the way that philosophies and religions have viewed people and the living natural world. From the first wood and stone tools to huge passenger jet airplanes, humans and their societies have undergone huge and dramatic changes periodically. This sort of pattern of big changes after periods of very little change is similar to Stephen Jay Gould’s idea of punctuated equilibrium in biological evolution. I suppose we can refer to these big social and cultural changes as “punctuated equilibrium in cultural evolution.”

Some of the big moments of changed occurred with the technological advances of manufacturing of wood and stone tools and of controlling fire. All of a sudden humankind could hunt more easily, keep warm, and cook food. Pottery allowed food to be stored and even transported. And, with each transportation advance can huge changes in the mixing of culture and trade. Horses, the horses pulling vehicles with wheels, boats and ships allowed travel up and down rivers, across lakes, and then across the oceans. Trains provided for fairly rapid travel from one place to a distant location. Motorized vehicles suddenly made huge differences in travel to places of work and even migrating across one’s country or to other countries. Propeller planes and then jets made travel across the country or halfway around the world possible in only a matter of hours instead of days, weeks, or months. Each such change made huge differences in how we related with one another, with our environments, and with ourselves. These changes transformed violent conflicts from face-to-face battles in relatively contained areas to remote killing and destruction from an armchair or from miles above ground. The extent of disconnection has seemed to increase exponentially. Even when driving a car, we can curse and disparage other drivers and drive in ways that are like video games, but with much greater risks. We can shop without ever talking directly to another person. And, we can sit at family dinners and be totally engrossed in a remote world, while never even talking to our families. We can walk through forests listening to music or talk shows and never hear a cricket, a bird, or the wind rustling the leaves of trees. We no longer allow time to relate to our own experiential worlds or to wonder about big questions.

Although all of these advances are not necessarily “bad,” we have allowed the technologies to usurp our hearts and minds. As with technologies, we also have succumbed to ways of thinking that separate us, from the Biblical notion of the Earth is here for humans to use as desired to the separation of humankind from nature by René Descartes to the Ayn Randian ego supremacy and to the notions of technology as savior. As a result of all of these changes mixed with greed for power and money and the separation of the elite and wealthy from everyone else, we are now facing major intertwined issues across all sectors and contexts of our lives and our environments.

As Robert Bly discusses in The Sibling Society, we live in a society of adolescents and run by adolescents. The lineage of increasing disconnects and superficial learning and thinking promoted by schools, families, and societies has brought us to a point where our fellow citizens do not have “the thinking and conceptual tools” that have been side-stepped by the politics of schooling, where the agenda, under the guise of raising standards and improving teacher accountability, is to keep the general population “dumbed down” so that they can be controlled. A wide assortment of resources that discuss aspects of this agenda can be found in the Learning and Teaching section of The Exploratory Nook & Store, where many of authors follow the history of intertwined contexts and agendas that have contributed to our current state of affairs. Other authors offer ways to counter such agendas through the way we can create contexts of deeper learning and complex thinking.

© 2020 by Jeffrey W. Bloom

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What do Schools Teach Children?

Paul Birtwell posted a graphic that listed the following criteria of schooling:
What does school really teach children?

  1. Truth comes from authority.
  2. Intelligence is the ability to remember and repeat.
  3. Accurate memory and repetition are rewarded.
  4. Non-compliance is punished.
  5. Conform intellectually and socially.

…

Yep… and it’s been this way for a long, long time.

There are a few exceptions, including schools influenced by John Dewey’s ideas, Reggio Emilia schools and those influenced by these schools, and a spattering of others. But, for the most part, public, charter, and private schools in the U.S. and most other countries, these 5 points are the overarching framework.

In a democracy:

  1. Authority should be questioned. Truth is something children should be seeking through their play, exploration, inquiries, and talk.
  2. Intelligence is not what can be regurgitated, but involves the abilities to question, think, analyze, imagine, create, and so forth.
  3. The abilities to construct good arguments, to create novel works in the arts (dramatic, musical, visual, etc.), to analyze, to question, etc. should be valued (I don’t want to say “rewarded” since it wreaks of behaviorism and our tendency to treat children like they are rats).
  4. Non-compliance should be an indication of issues with the nature of the classroom community and should lead to re-evaluating the way the community is maintained. Non-compliance also is an indication of a disconnect between the child and the adults and/or community, which the intelligent child intelligence is seeing. We should value non-compliance as an expression of intelligence and courage.
  5. Conformity should be suspect. The individuality of each child should be valued and celebrated. Diversity and variation are what keeps all types of systems viable and healthy, and are what provides for growth, development, and change.
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Corporatization of Colleges and Universities

“Corporatization of Higher Education” from Salon.com

The above linked article from last October is a good short piece on a few of the problems involved in the corporatization of universities.

This change in how universities are run is a huge problem. University decision-making used to be based primarily upon “learning,” which included bringing in high level tenure-track/tenured faculty (who shared in the governance of the university); materials, equipment, and teaching facilities; libraries; student academic support; and research. But, now almost all universities make decisions based on money, with learning way down the line of priorities. Advertising, distance learning (which is an abomination and a learning scam), sports and recreational (country club-like) facilities, student (resort-style) housing (where they live in fancier housing than many faculty and staff), and high administrator salaries (and too many administrators… way more than are necessary) have taken over the budget sheets. Faculty members tend to be the “enemy” as seen by administrators. Administrators create a culture of fear and use whatever tactics they can to try to intimidate and control faculty. Gone are the days of faculty governance, faculty autonomy, and academic freedom. Faculty members inflate grades to keep students happy, so that they can get high end-of-semester evaluations. These student evaluations of faculty hold way too much weight in decisions about retention, promotion, and salary increases. And, students suffer the consequences. Their learning has been trivialized and is shallow at best. And, faculty suffer, as well. They are no longer supported in issues with teaching. When students complain about language, ideas discussed, teaching style, grades, etc., administrators tend to support the students views and not the actions of the instructor or professor. Many faculty suffer from stress related health issues. And, this stress is way beyond that of doing the work (teaching, research, and service to the university community) required of the profession. The additional stress from negative treatment, fear, lack of voice, and a loss of one’s academic freedom and ability to make appropriate decisions about course content, teaching, etc. is enough to create havoc with people’s health.

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“Knowledge and Thought Have Parted Company”

“If it should turn out to be true that knowledge… and thought have parted company for good, then we would indeed become the helpless slaves, not so much of our machines as of our know-how, thoughtless creatures at the mercy of every gadget which is technically possible, no matter how murderous it is.”

— Hannah Arendt (1958). The Human Condition (p. 3)

Knowledge and thought are parting company due to the politics that has perverted our educational system under the guise of “raising standards” and “teacher accountability.”

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Brainwashing

The brainwashing discussed in the article about the Dalai Lama, below, also applies to other areas, such as our thinking about schooling/education, the nature of our world, how we view others, relationships, life in contemporary societies, and much much more. We need to question all of the assumptions that underlie everything we do. It’s difficult, but essential. I’ve tried to get my students to do this about teaching and schooling, but most students just don’t want to think about it. They just want to move through their lives as zombies (of course, they don’t think they’re zombies). They don’t want to think about the issues that can shake their nicely packaged worlds (or worldviews). They just want to be told what to do, so they can jump through the hoops with minimal effort.

This same situation seems to characterize much of society. We just want to live our lives and not have to shake the foundations of our little fortresses. It must be too frightening to think about lose the ground upon which we think we’re standing. But, if we do shake up and challenge our worldview and the assumptions we make, we may find the result to be exciting and refreshing…. like waking up on the shore of a mountain lake at dawn in early spring or like taking the red pill in the Matrix. We need to take the red pill…

Important article…. Follow the links (added below), too. The second one is a very long video, but the text will give you an idea of what’s going on. The first link is a short video from Democracy Now, and is quite upsetting.

Links from this story:

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Epistemology, Epistemological Shock, and Schooling: Part 1

I want to elaborate on a discussion that followed a re-posting of call for university students to stop whining and suck it up when “scary new ideas that challenge your beliefs…” (supposedly by Larry Winget) are presented. In my re-posting, I said:

Mary Catherine Bateson called this experiencing epistemological shock. I have felt that as a teacher (even when I was a grade school teacher) I was obligated to provide opportunities for students to experience epistemological shock. For what other reason was I in the classroom? Reading, writing, and all the rest were important, but the most important reason was to provide opportunities for children or adult students to grow, to learn how to think more deeply, to re-evaluate what they thought they knew. Everything else was secondary. Some of my own and biggest epistemological shocks occurred in junior high and high school. And, I don’t even think the teachers knew what they had done to me, but the impacts were huge. I’ve tried tracking them down to thank them, but by the time I found them, they had already died. They had given me a great gift. I hope they knew.

The more I think about it, the more this idea of epistemological shock seems to be of critical importance to teaching. We formulate epistemologies or explanatory ideas for just about everything about our world: cultures, relationships, communities, natural phenomena, living things, technology, and so forth. We are epistemological beings, but then most living things are probably epistemological beings. Dogs, cats, horses, rats, and birds certainly have epistemologies. They have understandings of their social and physical worlds and their relationships. They have expectations of their relationships. My dog expects to go to the dog park or go for walks at certain times during the day. She knows where the rabbits hang out. And, she knows where each PetSmart store keeps their Guinea pigs. My cats expect to be given attention, especially if we are sitting on the toilet or sitting at specific locations. The rats I’ve had acted much like dogs and had expectations for petting, cuddling, and receiving treats. I haven’t had horses, but from what I’ve heard they have complicated expectations and thought processes. I suspect epistemologizing (to make it a verb) is a common characteristic of living systems. Bacteria, plants, fungi, protists, and the full range of animals most likely have epistemologies that provide frames for understanding or making sense of the world.

That’s what we do… we create epistemologies to help us make sense of the world. But, such epistemologies do not guarantee any sense of accuracy or truth. They just provide a frame of reference that may seem to work. A racist may have an extensive epistemological framework that justifies his or her views of the world. Every input seems to make sense in terms of this framework. If it doesn’t make sense, then it is dismissed as nonsense, as a lie, or as some other blasphemy. At the other extreme, we may create what seems to be a fairly equitable and accurate epistemology. But, whatever epistemologies we create, they certainly are not absolute truths. They are subject to change, no matter how much we’d like to solidify them and believe that they are absolute truths. Every time there is a scientific revolution at whatever scale, there is an epistemological shock running through a particular scientific community. The scientists in that community may have thought they had pretty solid evidence for a specific theoretical framework, then all of a sudden it’s turned upside down. People get defensive, angry, and lash out. But, the old epistemological framework no longer works.

As teachers, at whatever level (K-graduate school), we are faced with the responsibility of confronting a vast array of personal and “official” epistemologies. These epistemologies may have to do with the subject matter we are teaching or they may have to do with students’ assumptions about the nature of the professional community or the nature of our professional work or the nature of one’s relationship to oneself as a learner or inquirer or whatever. If we take our work as educators seriously, we examine where our students are and teach to their particular needs or situations. We may feel obligated to cover certain material (depending upon our field and the particular course), but somewhere along the continuum of [student situation—-to—-subject matter] we are going to address epistemologies of students and epistemologies of the field.

However, the way the institution of education is moving, grade school is more concerned with subject matter coverage than with any concern for epistemology, whether personal or official. The approach is to memorize content to pass a test. The content doesn’t have to make sense, which would be an epistemological concern. At the university level, we’re not that far away from the grade school version. We don’t have the high stakes tests, but the underlying drive for profit is still there. Online learning, large classes, and multiple section classes that follow the exact same template are all aligned with the same approach to minimizing a concern for epistemology, while maximizing superficial coverage of content.

There were times when I was teaching multiple sections of the same course when I felt like I needed to keep all sections at the same point along some arbitrary continuum of content and to cover the exact same material. But, every time I tried, I found it impossible. Each group of students took the material in class in different directions. They had different questions, different ideas, and different interests. Each section became its own distinctive epistemological context. And, this epistemological context is what we need to remember when teaching. Each individual makes sense of the material in her or his own way by drawing on individual experiences, previous epistemologies, and all kinds of idiosyncratic contexts of meaning. Put a bunch of people together in a room and you have a social context of epistemologizing that can’t be replicated.

To view teaching as an epistemological endeavor, you need to see classrooms as social contexts where students are trying to make sense of whatever it is they are studying. As an epistemologizing mentor, you as the teacher need to encourage exploration, inquiry, questioning, critiquing, challenging, and examining things from multiple perspectives. You need to encourage your students to be scientists, poets, artists, writers… and not just get stuck in one perspective. We should be encouraging epistemological flexibility.

Epistemological shock occurs when a solidified structure is shaken by a new insight that undermines the solidified epistemology. If we can help students create flexible epistemologies based on the idea of changeability, maybe the shocks will not occur, but will be part of the expected changeability.