The Case Against Teaching

In my quest to understand how Education can be Learner Driven, I hope to look at books, articles, and experiences in my life, community, and around the world in light of LDE principles. While I realize that the best way to discuss something is when everyone else has read the entire text as well, my hope is that these posts in and of themselves will be enlightening, inspiring, and a great opportunity to ask the questions that will lead to further enlightenment and inspirations.

The first text I wanted to discuss was the article that really sparked the direction for LDE entitled “The Case Against Teaching”. This is a speech that was delivered by Professor Larry Spence of Penn State, given in 2001 at Chautuaqua.

As a spoiler for those who haven’t read it, Spence is really bucking a system, or in other words the business of education, that puts teaching first, rather than learning. This begs the question for me of “Why haven’t Learners fought this?” I think there could be lots of answers to this question, (and I would really love to hear your answers!) but my response is that Factories, which it could be argued provides the model for the current educational system, don’t teach their Product to have a role in its own production. This is an important reason why this article spoke to me. Not only do we need to teach Prime Learners how to better facilitate Learners driving their education, but we also need to train and build confidence in Learners so they can speak for themselves and what their intuition tells them. We also need to train them so that they can confidently use the most effective tools to Drive their Education.

Anyway, so here’s the first quote from this article for us to look at:

Why is education more resistant to innovation than business, agriculture, or communication? Because parents, reporters, citizens, children, politicians, and professional educators share an unshakable image of what teachers and students are supposed to do. A common machinery of schooling prevails from kindergarten through corporate training programs. And these accepted arrangements and practices are what we think a "real" school, a "real" university, or a "real" training program ought to look like. Its assumptions are that teaching is telling, learning is absorbing, and knowledge is subject-matter content.

Given that Education is such a hot topic and with so very many people discussion so many solutions to the ‘problem of education’, I find it ironic that the problem could really be a uniformity and stubbornness of thought.

But the question now is what can Prime Learners do to really help Learners drive their own education in a confident and effective way?

Spence focuses his thoughts primarily on understanding how Learners learn. He gives us two examples of learning (and teaching).

First Example:

We are born to teach. Like speech, teaching is an instinctive and unconscious human ability. Listen to a grownup talk to a baby.  . . . Researchers like Alison Gopnik and her colleagues tell us that "motherese” like this is a universal phenomenon (see Resources).  . . . "Motherese" is just one example of the way we respond automatically to children's need to learn about language objects, rules, and about the multiple and complex nuances of the cultures that they must master in order to survive. In such situations, human beings seem to be unconscious teachers. Adults function as tools that children use on an as-needed basis to solve particular learning problems. Researchers who watch parents with babies remark on all adults' instinctive ability to give children just the information they need to progress.

It seems to me that somehow in this learning situation, we’ve been able to trust our instincts. It makes me wonder what we could learn here about how to help Learners in other situations as well. I’ll address this more later, but a situation that comes to mind, particularly since we currently live in a foreign country, is that of learning a foreign language. What can we learn from ‘Motherese’ that would help Learners and Primer Learners facilitate learning a foreign language?

Second Example: (yeah, this is long, but it’s sooo good!)

Learning begins with curiosity. I was curious about how to make an explosion and I started with what I knew. I knew gunpowder exploded and that it was in my dad's .22-caliber shells. Billy and I began by collecting and taking .22 shells apart. The dangerous process was long and morally destructive. Then, one sleepless night, I remembered castaway pirates used charcoal to make gunpowder. The next step seemed obvious. I went to the library determined to find a recipe for gunpowder.

 . . .

Notice how quickly Billy and I began experimenting. We actually failed our way to large and satisfying blasts. Researchers now know that even babies start out with complex models or theories of reality. Like scientists, they predict. When their predictions fail, they change their models. Children, as Roger Schank points out, are failure machines—and that makes them powerful learners (see Resources'). Watch children. Their play is a form of inquiry and questioning. They expect results and when they don't happen, they question and revise their actions and expectations.

 . . .

The findings of cognitive science contradict the notion that the mind registers reality like a tape recorder or a camera, and that learning is merely absorption. Instead, the mind builds mental constructions that help us order experience. The brain represents rather than records reality. Even sight is an act of construction and depends as much on brain processes as on the actual world it seeks to represent. Like an artist, the brain selects, discounting most signals, and seeking constancies that make up our image of the world. From sound and light waves combined with previous models, it constructs information like: “The cat is eating a mouse." And it creates knowledge like “Cats eat mice" that can be used later to predict and control.

Learning is an active process of making changes in the mind’s representations by reasoning about the world-not just taking it as it comes. Learning means breaking, making and remolding connections in our brains.

The idea that the brain represents rather than records is pretty appealing to me. I’m sure there are exceptions to this. I’m know there are individuals whose brain really does record, but I know mine doesn’t like to. I do memorize things, but I only do it occasionally when I REALLY feel motivated to.

If “Learning means breaking, making and remolding connections in our brains”, what does that mean for Prime Learners? How can Learners use that to make the most of learning opportunities? And what about children as ‘failure machines’? If we really saw learning as a process of failing A LOT, how would that change how Learners approached Education?

Spence’s final thought reminds me of a quote from Dr Robert Bradley’s Husband-Coached Childbirth: The Bradley Method of Natural Childbirth, “An obstetrician should have a big rear end and the good sense to sit calmly thereupon and let nature take its course.”

Our future lies in creating educational environments and experiences that will support our inborn human desire and ability to learn by doing.  . . . There are too many students, too few teachers, and too little money for traditional institutions to survive unless they reinvent their operations. We are hovering on the edge of a transformation of undergraduate education from a practice based on habits, hearsay, and traditions to a science-based practice—similar to the transformation of medicine in the 20^th century. I'm convinced that we will be successful. But only if we remember the motto that has guided my work in the last decade: "It's not the teaching, it's the learning, stupid."

What does it mean to you to put the Learning, rather than the teaching, first?

~vbb

P.S. The full text of Spence's article can be found at: The Case Against Teaching
Also, a cool abbreviated video version of this talk can be found on YouTube.