John Connell: The Blog

Just lis­ten.….

Sean Con­nery, in his thought­ful mem­oir Being A Scot, tells the story of find­ing him­self on a plane seated next to a com­pa­triot, a young woman. Talk­ing to her, he found that she was a lit­er­a­ture stu­dent at the Uni­ver­sity of Edin­burgh, and that she was cur­rently study­ing Dostoevsky’s Crime and Pun­ish­ment.

“Do you see any par­al­lels between Roskol­nikov, in the Dos­to­evsky novel, and the char­ac­ter of Robert Wing­ham, in James Hogg’s Mem­oirs and Con­fes­sions of a Jus­ti­fied Sin­ner?” he asked her.

“Oh, I haven’t read that,” said she, “I’m in the Eng­lish Lit­er­a­ture Depart­ment, not the Scot­tish.” Con­nery was bemused, but pre­sum­ably did not bother to ask why, given her odd per­spec­tive, she was study­ing a novel orig­i­nally writ­ten in Russian.

Con­nery had left school at 13 with lit­tle to show for his eight years in Scot­tish edu­ca­tion other than an abil­ity to read. But early in his act­ing career, a fellow-thespian had sug­gested a list of books that the young Con­nery ought to read, and he had sub­se­quently embarked on his own edu­ca­tion in fine lit­er­a­ture. His young trav­el­ling com­pan­ion, on the other hand, had suc­cess­fully com­pleted seven years of pri­mary school­ing, five or six years of sec­ondary school­ing, and by the time Con­nery met her at least a year or two at uni­ver­sity. So what was the dif­fer­ence between the famous actor with his paucity of for­mal school­ing and the lit­er­a­ture stu­dent with a decade and a half of insti­tu­tional edu­ca­tion behind her?

In the lit­er­a­ture stu­dent, I believe that we can see some­thing of the schooled mind at work, in this case some­one for whom the books she read were pre­scribed by oth­ers and for whom read­ing was largely a means to an end. In Con­nery, a lover of lit­er­a­ture, we can see the inde­pen­dent mind of some­one who has taken con­trol of his own learn­ing, some­one for whom read­ing was a plea­sure in itself, and noth­ing to do with pass­ing exam­i­na­tions or gain­ing qualifications.

It is inter­est­ing to pon­der the dif­fer­ences between the truly autonomous learner and the schooled mind, to explore the nature of learn­ing in an age where, although the oppor­tu­ni­ties for self-directed learn­ing are expand­ing immensely as the ten­drils of the Inter­net extend into every facet of our lives, the endur­ing insti­tu­tions of the school and the col­lege and the uni­ver­sity (all of which I am happy to refer to col­lec­tively and con­cep­tu­ally as ‘the school’) remain stub­bornly tena­cious. This durable social con­struct, one that has been shaped and adapted con­tin­u­ously through­out his­tory to suit the needs of time and place and wealth and power, has allowed the myr­iad social, polit­i­cal and reli­gious enti­ties that have sus­tained it, and that con­tinue to sus­tain it, to retain an often insid­i­ous and reduc­tive grip on the minds of those who pass through their hands. And, despite that con­stant refrain of ‘the school is dead’ that we have heard in dif­fer­ent times and in dif­fer­ent places, the school is arguably stronger in some ways today than it has ever been.

Of course, the tale of Sean Con­nery and the young lit­er­a­ture stu­dent raises more ques­tions than answers: the gulf between the autonomous learner and the schooled mind is rarely iden­ti­fi­able as a sim­ple dichotomy between the free spirit and the cap­tive will. The real­ity for most of us is that we find our­selves, through­out our lives, shift­ing back and forth along a con­tin­uum some­where between the two extremes, although we night hope that, as we grow older, we become more aware of the dan­gers of the schooled mind, and there­fore develop a greater capac­ity to break free of the con­straints placed on us by the school in our early years. Connery’s self-taught love of lit­er­a­ture was per­haps not entirely free of instru­men­tal inten­tions: as an actor, he rec­og­nized that an appre­ci­a­tion of lit­er­a­ture would be use­ful to him in his career, but it was his own recog­ni­tion, not one sug­gested by oth­ers or imposed from with­out. Equally, the young woman, we hope, would have taken up her course in Eng­lish Lit­er­a­ture because of a love of read­ing. But between those two routes into books, and most cer­tainly in the student’s response to Connery’s ques­tion, there lies a dis­cernible dif­fer­ence between the approach that each had pre­vi­ously taken to their mutual love of lit­er­a­ture. Con­nery, con­sciously or oth­er­wise, had dis­cov­ered that there is a higher and deeper and wider sig­nif­i­cance to learn­ing than can be gleaned from sub­mit­ting to the stric­tures of the class­room. The young woman had allowed her­self to be per­suaded that, like the over­whelm­ing major­ity of ‘edu­cated’ peo­ple, she had lit­tle choice but to accept those stric­tures as seem­ingly the only avail­able path to an edu­ca­tion in the dis­ci­pline that she enjoyed.

The road taken by Con­nery was one that led not only to a knowl­edge of fine lit­er­a­ture but also, I would con­tend, to a greater chance for attain­ing a degree of self-knowledge that, if not actu­ally denied by school, has rarely if ever been an explicit aim of school­ing. The school, his­tor­i­cally, has not actively encour­aged inde­pen­dence of thought, nor has it cul­ti­vated the truly spon­ta­neous or cre­ative mind. We develop such traits despite school not because of it. School is fun­da­men­tally about train­ing the mind, devel­op­ing the intel­lect (as opposed to intel­li­gence), pass­ing on the knowl­edge deemed impor­tant by a soci­ety to those whose role it will be to per­pet­u­ate and pre­serve that soci­ety at all lev­els. As such, the school con­tin­ues what already is and what has been; its func­tion, what­ever the rhetoric, is essen­tially back­wards look­ing, seek­ing to main­tain the struc­tures and rela­tion­ships from the past and present on into the future with min­i­mal change.

But given the ubiq­uity of the school, we can­not sim­ply equate the schooled mind with atten­dance at school. To do so would be ludi­crous. If the schooled mind were to be iden­ti­fied merely by dint of some­one hav­ing attended school there would no chance of escape from the con­di­tion for most of us. But school­ing does imbue the stu­dent, the scholar, with cer­tain char­ac­ter­is­tics that the learner has to find the means to over­come either while at school, or more likely once school­ing is complete.

I will come back to what that schooled mind is all about, why we must not be con­tent with the intel­lec­tual frame­work that school bestows on us, and how crit­i­cal it is that we are able to over­come at least the most dele­te­ri­ous and per­ni­cious aspects of the school’s legacy on our own devel­op­ment as ratio­nal, free-thinking human beings.

I have enjoyed read­ing the reac­tion in the UK media fol­low­ing Eddie Mair’s typ­i­cally relaxed lac­er­a­tion of The Man Who Would Be King on News­night at the week­end. Mair, for me, as some­one who lis­tens to a lot of radio, has been one of the best radio jour­nal­ist in the UK since I used to lis­ten to him years ago on Good Morn­ing Scot­land on BBC Radio Scot­land. Talk of him finally mak­ing a move onto tele­vi­sion news is both wel­come and sad, since he will be undoubt­edly excel­lent on the screen (as News­night showed) but will be missed from radio if he comes to neglect that medium.

But amidst all the chat­ter about Mair’s per­for­mance and Johnston’s dis­mal show­ing, I couldn’t help notice one telling phrase used by Leo Bene­dic­tus in his Guardian appraisal of Mair on Mon­day 25^th March.

Born and brought up in Dundee, state-educated, the son of a lorry dri­ver and a nurse, he was as obvi­ous a broad­cast­ing prodigy as you could ever find.

It was ‘state-educated’ that caught my eye. Here in Scot­land, we would sim­ply call Mair ‘edu­cated’. That Bene­dic­tus thinks it impor­tant to add the qual­i­fier tells us so much about the con­di­tion of Eng­lish education.

In the 1980s, Ger­man philoso­pher and provo­ca­teur, Peter Slo­ter­dijk, pro­claimed ‘the end of the belief in edu­ca­tion’. Despite society’s dec­la­ra­tion that Knowl­edge Is Power, young peo­ple, he said, live…

…with the risk of learn­ing with­out prospects. Those who do not seek power will…not want its knowledge…and those who reject both are secretly no longer cit­i­zens of this civilisation.

How much more do Sloterdijk’s words res­onate today than they did three decades ago? Today knowl­edge is power, still, of course, but we can also say that knowl­edge is cur­rency, knowl­edge is eco­nomic lifeblood, knowl­edge is cul­ture, and so much more.

Edu­ca­tion for education’s sake is fine as a mantra, but in the real world, we need to be able to offer our young peo­ple hope. How many young, and not so young, peo­ple see lit­tle if any hope today? Too many!

Too many will there­fore ques­tion the point of edu­ca­tion in the for­mal sense. And who can blame them?

There is a con­spic­u­ous and abid­ing fal­lacy resid­ing at the heart of for­mal edu­ca­tion, namely that what is taught is what is learned, that what the teacher teaches is what the stu­dent learns. Edu­ca­tion sys­tems, schools, col­lege and uni­ver­si­ties around the world today rest, as they have done for much of their exis­tences, on an illu­sory foun­da­tion, and I believe that much of what is wrong with for­mal edu­ca­tion today arises from this endur­ing and mis­taken belief.

When we come to the full real­i­sa­tion of the actual rela­tion­ship between teach­ing and learn­ing, we begin to dis­cern the sheer point­less­ness of so much of what passes for edu­ca­tional pol­icy and strat­egy in today’s world. We know that human beings learn through inter­ac­tion with oth­ers, with ideas, with infor­ma­tion, with the world at large, but that ulti­mately they cre­ate and shape their own learn­ing. The inter­ven­tion of the teacher in this process is impor­tant and valu­able, but at no point in the inter­ac­tion of teacher and stu­dent, other than by occa­sional happy acci­dent, does the learner ‘learn’ what the teacher ‘teaches’.

An appre­ci­a­tion of this, the true nature of learn­ing, means that the com­plex edi­fices of cur­ric­ula, ped­a­gogy, assess­ment, accred­i­ta­tion, teacher edu­ca­tion and pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment, as well as the over­bear­ing struc­tures of insti­tu­tional man­age­ment and edu­ca­tional orga­ni­za­tion, start to crum­ble to dust before our eyes.

There are strate­gies that teach­ers and schools can employ to ensure that tech­nol­ogy becomes pur­pose­ful and sys­tem­atic. There can be lit­tle doubt that its poten­tial is very great, as it pro­vides the oppor­tu­nity for effec­tive teach­ing of skills, of find­ing and using infor­ma­tion within a con­text of high stu­dent inter­est. This unique com­bi­na­tion is too great a value to be wasted.

Celes­tine Kemu­nto Nya­mari lives in Kenya, where she attends St. Theresa’s Girls’ Sec­ondary School in Kithimu, a cou­ple of hours drive North-East of Nairobi. Celes­tine took part in the first student-led Edu­ca­tion Fast For­ward debate (in Novem­ber last year) as a guest debater and is set to join EFF6: From Learner Voice to Emerg­ing Lead­ers on Jan­u­ary 28, 2013.

The knowl­edge nec­es­sary to func­tion suc­cess­fully and fol­low a career was seen to already exist: it could be handed down from experts and lead­ers to learn­ers and work­ers. In the Indus­trial Age, cur­ricu­lum devel­op­ment was a mat­ter of select­ing the most impor­tant knowl­edge to trans­mit to stu­dents; experts decided what knowl­edge to mass-prescribe and in which sequence.

Jane Gilbert and Rachel Bol­stad (amongst many oth­ers) ques­tioned the tra­di­tional con­cept of cur­ricu­lum devel­op­ment in their 2008 book Dis­ci­plin­ing and draft­ing, or 21^st cen­tury learn­ing? Rethink­ing the New Zealand senior sec­ondary cur­ricu­lum for the future. Their words are quoted in a new White Paper, spon­sored by Promethean’s Jim Wynn, and authored by Gavin Dykes, Michael Fur­dyk, Sara Has­san and Jen­nifer Cor­riero for Edu­ca­tion Fast For­ward, enti­tled From Learner Voice to Emerg­ing Lead­ers (down­load­able PDF).

The authors agree with Gilbert and Bol­stad and state their posi­tion clearly:

…this model of cur­ricu­lum devel­op­ment is dif­fi­cult to main­tain given that: it is no longer pos­si­ble to accu­rately pre­dict the type of knowl­edge youth may need as they move through life, the rapid pace at which tech­nol­ogy is chang­ing and new knowl­edge is devel­op­ing, the rate at which career pos­si­bil­i­ties are pro­lif­er­at­ing (ones with which we are famil­iar and ones we have yet to imag­ine), and social, eco­nomic and envi­ron­men­tal chal­lenges are becom­ing increas­ingly complex.

They ask the question:

How can learner voice help address these uncertainties?

And the seem­ingly sim­ple answer?

By giv­ing learn­ers an authen­tic say in what and how they want to learn.

The White Paper will under­pin dis­cus­sion at the next Edu­ca­tion Fast For­ward debate, to take place as part of Edu­ca­tion World Forum in Lon­don at the end of this month. The paper, which will be pre­sented by Sara Has­san, of Tak­ing IT Global, join­ing the debate from Toronto, is an excel­lent sum­mary of the issues sur­round­ing this crit­i­cal ques­tion, and the authors have been able to offer a com­bi­na­tion of sound think­ing, prac­ti­cal advice and a way for­ward for those in edu­ca­tion (still too few, I would say) who believe that cur­ricu­lum design, ped­a­gogy, the role of tech­nol­ogy and national edu­ca­tion policy-making all should be influ­enced and shaped by the voice of the learner.

The event will com­bine a live pres­ence at EWF and a global pres­ence via the magic of Telep­res­ence, An artic­u­late group of young edu­ca­tion lead­ers will debate the issues around ‘From Learner Voice to Emerg­ing Leaders’.

The pri­mary aim is twofold:

And it will all take place across a truly inter­na­tional matrix of con­nec­tions, cross­ing coun­tries, cul­tures, and communities.

The event itself takes place on Mon­day 28^th Jan­u­ary at 11am and you will find the link to the live video broad­cast on the day itself on the Edu­ca­tion Fast For­ward page on Promethean Planet. Promethean’s Chief Edu­ca­tion Offi­cer, Jim Wynn, will be open­ing the EFF6 debate, which will once again be mod­er­ated by inde­pen­dent edu­ca­tion con­sul­tant Gavin Dykes. Dis­cus­sion will be led by Sara Has­san and three stu­dent pre­sen­ters. Clos­ing the debate will be Michelle Selinger, Direc­tor of Edu­ca­tion at Cisco.

Twit­ter users can fol­low the debate itself using the hash­tag #eff6, while there will be some inter­est­ing dis­cus­sion around many of the key issues in the debate using the hash­tag #learn­ing­mat­ters.

Finally, a reminder that you can down­load the White Paper.

Howard Gard­ner, speak­ing in a video on the DML Cen­tral site:

I don’t believe for a moment in tech­no­log­i­cal deter­min­ism. I believe any tech­nol­ogy can be used benignly and malig­nantly. You can use a pen to write beau­ti­ful poetry. You can also use a pen to poke peo­ples’ eyes out.

Gard­ner doesn’t ‘believe’ in tech­no­log­i­cal deter­min­ism, in the same way that some­one might choose not to believe in a deity or the exis­tence of Santa Claus. Fair enough. How­ever, the exam­ple he gives to sup­port his unbe­lief is not only mis­lead­ingly sim­plis­tic but also spe­cious. A pen used to poke an eye out is not being used as a pen and is there­fore not a pen at that moment in time. It is merely a pointy stick. If he had said that the same pen can be used to write beau­ti­ful poetry and also to sign the death war­rant of an inno­cent per­son, his argu­ment would have been a lit­tle more cogent, but still only within the some­what nar­row lim­its to which he chooses to restrict his notion of tech­no­log­i­cal deter­min­ism. We expect bet­ter from a Har­vard professor.

This much we can agree on: tech­nol­ogy is only tech­nol­ogy when it is being put to use. Oth­er­wise, it is merely pas­sive arte­fact. At the level of the instru­ment (such as the pen), tech­nol­ogy can be used for good or ill. But that is not a con­di­tion unique to tech­nol­ogy; it can be posited for vir­tu­ally every prod­uct of the human hand or mind. Richard Feyn­man put it suc­cinctly when he quoted a bud­dhist proverb:

To every man is given the key to the gates of heaven. The same key opens the gates of hell.

I made that point in a post back in 2006 when I com­pared cer­tain char­ac­ter­is­tics shared by edu­ca­tion and tech­nol­ogy: they are both instru­ments that can be put to good and bad uses; they are both instru­ments that can be truly trans­for­ma­tive or deeply destruc­tive. Given those shared attrib­utes, I used that post to appeal for care in how we choose to bring about their con­junc­tion. But these are attrib­utes that bear no rela­tion to whether or not tech­nol­ogy is deter­min­is­tic; hence the prob­lem with Gardner’s position.

If we want to see how truly deter­min­is­tic tech­nol­ogy can be, and is, we must ele­vate our point of view so that we can see beyond the indi­vid­ual instru­ment and allow our­selves to com­pre­hend the broad vista of the tech­nol­ogy land­scape within which that sin­gle instru­ment is utilised. Whether a pen can write beau­ti­ful poetry or con­sign a per­son to their death really tells us noth­ing about how, at a much broader level, sys­temic shifts in the under­ly­ing nature of tech­nol­ogy undoubt­edly do influ­ence soci­etal inter­ac­tions and, quite sim­ply, how we do cer­tain things, amongst them, edu­ca­tion. To try to pre­tend, for instance, as Gard­ner must inevitably do with his ‘unbe­lief’ in tech­no­log­i­cal deter­min­ism, that the way we learn — or for that mat­ter, the way we teach — can remain the same in the dig­i­tal era as it has been for cen­turies of print is just naive.

Karl Marx, writ­ing in The Poverty of Phi­los­o­phy in 1847, under­stood that bet­ter than the good pro­fes­sor obvi­ously does today.

The hand-mill gives you soci­ety with the feu­dal lord; the steam-mill, soci­ety with the indus­trial capitalist.

The dig­i­tal era — the com­puter, the net­work, the Inter­net, the Web, social tech­nol­ogy, uni­ver­sal search, and so much more — changes rad­i­cally all of the rela­tion­ships that are crit­i­cal to how we learn and how we teach: the rela­tion­ship between teacher and learner; the rela­tion­ship between the learner and infor­ma­tion; the rela­tion­ship we all have with the con­cept of learned author­ity; and the social rela­tion­ships between our­selves and the rest of the human race. It is of course a hugely com­plex process of deter­mi­na­tion, with nuance lay­ered on nuance, but it is undoubt­edly true that broad global shifts in tech­nol­ogy, such as that between print and dig­i­tal, deter­mine how learn­ing can hap­pen and there­fore should (and inevitably will) deter­mine what it means to teach.

A uni­ver­sity is not a sci­en­tific hot­house with some frills around the edges – such as the human­i­ties – gen­er­at­ing off-the-peg ideas for busi­ness to patent and com­mer­cialise. It is an inde­pen­dent, autonomous insti­tu­tion hous­ing mul­ti­ple aca­d­e­mic dis­ci­plines whose cross-fertilisations and serendip­i­ties lie at the heart of the capac­ity to enlarge the knowl­edge base. It is con­se­crated to deliv­er­ing knowl­edge as intel­lec­tu­ally held in com­mon – why the free­dom to research, to pub­lish and to dis­sem­i­nate is the sine qua non of aca­d­e­mic life. It is a pub­lic, open insti­tu­tion, so a pri­vate uni­ver­sity is a con­tra­dic­tion in terms. Knowl­edge, and the qual­i­fi­ca­tions that go with it, is nec­es­sar­ily pub­lic currency.

Will Hut­ton, in today’s Observer.

The knowl­edge econ­omy is mas­sively depen­dent on the intel­lec­tual pow­er­house of higher edu­ca­tion, and a crit­i­cal ingre­di­ent of that is its capac­ity to sus­tain high lev­els of post­grad­u­ate train­ing and devel­op­ment. That capac­ity is under threat at the present time from the con­comi­tant effects of the huge rise in under­grad­u­ate fees and the deci­sions by the research coun­cils in the UK to with­draw sup­port from taught mas­ters courses.

Just another exam­ple of the cur­rent UK Government’s will­ing­ness to allow ide­ol­ogy and self-interest to trump what is good for the coun­try in the long run. As in schools, so in higher edu­ca­tion too.

[This is a cross-posting from my new blog at I Am Learner]