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.

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.

• Every user has the right to free­dom of expression.
• Every user has the right to con­trol their own data.
• Every user has the right to choose and change their social ser­vices providers.
• Every user has the right to host their own social services.
• Every user has the right to com­mu­ni­cate with any other user, regard­less of their ser­vice provider.
• Every user has the right to take their data and rela­tion­ships with them.
• Every user has the right to choose their own name.
• Dif­fer­ent users have dif­fer­ent needs.
• Com­mu­ni­ca­tion must be decentralized.
• Com­mu­ni­ca­tion pro­to­cols must be standardized.
• The inter­net is capa­ble of more.
• Con­ver­sa­tions change the world.

If this sounds good to you then go look at the Tent Man­i­festo (and at Tent itself, of course)!

Thank you to Ben Werd­muller (of Elgg fame) and Stephen Downes (of Stephen Downes fame ) for the link.

All those cur­rently invest­ing mil­lions in Face­book stock should take note: Tent is just one tiny straw in the wind that will even­tu­ally blow that mon­stros­ity and so many oth­ers like it com­pletely out of the water.

Sim­pli­fi­ca­tions are legion, and emo­tions are a factor

“Schools kill cre­ativ­ity”, “Does Google make us stu­pid?” are press-worthy attention-grabbers, but the real­i­ties are more nuanced, for a world that refuses to deal with its nuanced self.…Everyone brings in their own biases to an edu­ca­tion con­ver­sa­tion (this author included), but most often fail to be aware of them as the biases they are.

My good friend, Charles Fadel, has offered his per­sonal list on www.thefivethings.org

They are all inter­est­ing points, but two in par­tic­u­lar caught my atten­tion because, to me, they are two sides of one coin. His point above is so true when we look at most edu­ca­tion ‘debates’ being con­ducted today, espe­cially, but by no means only, in the tra­di­tional media. Nuanced edu­ca­tional debate is a rare thing indeed in the press, and that includes the so-called qual­ity press. But too often, even in debates between peo­ple who ought to know bet­ter, the crude attention-grabber is king and the impor­tance of fine dis­tinc­tions, sub­tleties, shades of grey are thrown by the wayside.

Charles’ next point is equally valid, where he crit­i­cises the pre­pon­der­ance of ‘or’ debates over ‘and’ debates:

Con­ver­sa­tions about edu­ca­tion abound with false dichotomies, and abso­lutist views, that must be transcended.

The lack of a balanced-conversation mind­set leads to many OR debates; for instance:

- Knowl­edge vs skills
– Science/Technology/Engineering/Math (STEM) vs Humanities/Arts
– Didac­tic vs con­struc­tivist learn­ing
– For­mal vs infor­mal learn­ing
– All tech­nol­ogy or no tech­nol­ogy
– Char­ac­ter devel­oped at school vs at home

The bal­anced real­ity is that these are all AND propo­si­tions, work­ing in con­cert with each other, and rein­forc­ing each other, in a judi­cious, impact­ful feed­back loop.

It is just eas­ier, I sup­pose, to take a stand at one extreme or the other in an argu­ment. It is far harder to con­clude that both sides have merit, and then to set out your argu­ments for lean­ing more in one direc­tion than another, or set­ting out the par­tic­u­lar cir­cum­stances in which one side might have more merit than the other.

Scep­ti­cism is healthy; cyn­i­cism and bad faith are not.

Dis­putes and con­tro­ver­sies and dis­agree­ments abound in every sphere of human knowl­edge and activ­ity. That is the very nature of human dis­course. The world would be a dread­ful, bor­ing place if we all agreed with each other all of the time on every­thing (some peo­ple, strangely, would define their heaven in just those terms). A lit­tle less dis­agree­ment here and there might avoid wars and blood­shed and point­less death and destruc­tion, but that pos­si­bil­ity does not appear to be a uni­ver­sal like­li­hood any time soon.

Dis­pu­ta­tion and debate dif­fer in kind though from one sphere of activ­ity to another. We can, for exam­ple, con­trast the kinds of dis­putes that sci­en­tists might have with dis­putes between reli­gious ‘schol­ars’: the for­mer might arise out of dif­fer­ing inter­pre­ta­tions of evi­dence whilst the lat­ter are more likely to be debates char­ac­ter­ized not only by a com­plete lack of evi­dence but often by a con­tempt for same.

My own prin­ci­pal sphere of activ­ity, edu­ca­tion, is an intense and con­stant bat­tle­ground of crossed swords, con­flict and con­tention, and it falls, I would attest, some­where between those polar­i­ties of sci­en­tific and reli­gious debate. The vigour of the man­i­fold dis­putes in edu­ca­tion is a func­tion of its intrin­sic nature as one of the human­i­ties, as an activ­ity aris­ing out of the human condition.

As one of the human­i­ties, there is sim­ply no absolute right or absolute wrong in edu­ca­tion. We make judge­ments and take posi­tions based on our rea­son­ing, of course, but also based on our val­ues and prin­ci­ples, philoso­phies and ide­olo­gies, inter­ests and self-interests, prej­u­dices and, indeed, big­otries. There are, oddly, very many peo­ple — teach­ers, writ­ers, philoso­phers, politi­cians, thinkers and non-thinkers alike — who will tell you, cat­e­gor­i­cally, that their stand­point on any par­tic­u­lar aspect of edu­ca­tion is unequiv­o­cally right, and there­fore that any dif­fer­ing take on the same issue is plainly wrong. Some­times, these same peo­ple will point to ‘evi­dence’ that ‘proves’ their stand­point, all the while for­get­ting that under­tak­ing research on edu­ca­tion is a bil­lion light years away from under­tak­ing research on par­ti­cle physics (for exam­ple). Edu­ca­tional research is in the same league as research in phi­los­o­phy or soci­ol­ogy or anthro­pol­ogy: out­comes are heav­ily depen­dent upon the ques­tions asked and the posi­tions taken by the researchers. Evi­dence is use­ful, of course, but it will rarely if ever con­sti­tute ‘proof’ of any­thing in edu­ca­tion — it gives us a start­ing point, if we are lucky, but never absolute validation.

Those who under­stand this dis­tinc­tion under­stand there­fore that they can never claim any absolute valid­ity for their views on edu­ca­tion, since they recog­nise that their per­spec­tive on any or all edu­ca­tion ques­tions is inex­tri­ca­bly bound up in the val­ues they hold, in the polit­i­cal ide­ol­ogy to which they ascribe, in the psy­chol­ogy of their own learn­ing expe­ri­ences through­out their lives, in their (or their family’s, or their community’s) self-interest, whether con­scious or uncon­scious, and in so many other impon­der­ables in their lives.

Such peo­ple under­stand that they must argue and debate their stand­point con­stantly, and that they must be pre­pared to lis­ten to other’s views, to learn from oth­ers and to change their own views through debate with oth­ers. Equally we are per­fectly jus­ti­fied in seek­ing to explain and affirm our own philoso­phies in edu­ca­tion, and even to seek to per­suade oth­ers to see learn­ing and teach­ing and ped­a­gogy and all aspects of edu­ca­tion as we hap­pen to see them.

Don’t mis­take my argu­ment as one that endorses unal­loyed rel­a­tivism: we must always be will­ing to make crit­i­cal judge­ments on the basis of our expe­ri­ence and, yes, on the basis of what­ever evi­dence we can lay our hands on (going far beyond just the out­comes of aca­d­e­mic research). But we use expe­ri­ence and intel­lec­tual argu­ment and evi­dence to sub­stan­ti­ate and sup­port our own judge­ments, not to ‘prove’ that we are absolutely right and oth­ers are absolutely wrong. We must con­tinue to judge, to eval­u­ate, to dis­tin­guish between good and bad logic. Edu­ca­tion, as a human­ity, has to be based upon rig­or­ous intel­lec­tual analy­sis and rea­son­ing, as well as on moral and eth­i­cal considerations.

It is in that flux of ideas and con­flict­ing opin­ions gen­er­ated, main­tained and devel­oped by thought­ful, autonomous and ratio­nal minds that the beauty of coher­ent edu­ca­tional debate lies. We need not respect oth­ers’ views, but, mostly, we do need to tol­er­ate them (I am with Frank Furedi when he decries the mod­ern ten­dency to equate tol­er­ance with accep­tance and respect, and even the trend towards devalu­ing the mean­ing of respect itself). The caveat to such tol­er­ance, of course, will be the extent to which we feel that oth­ers’ views on edu­ca­tion are actu­ally phys­i­cally or emo­tion­ally harm­ful to chil­dren, to young peo­ple, or to learn­ers generally.

And that is a whole other debate in itself.