John Connell: The Blog

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.

Evgeny Moro­zov dis­man­tles the lazy think­ing and the fun­da­men­tally anti-progressive notions out­lined in Gavin New­som’s recent book: Citizenville:How to Take the Town Square Dig­i­tal and Rein­vent Gov­ern­ment [bad book, so no link!]. California’s lieu­tenant gov­er­nor is taken apart in an arti­cle in Book­fo­rum.

[It is his] lack of any basic curios­ity about the tech­no­log­i­cal solu­tions that he advocates—and espe­cially about their unin­tended consequences—that makes Newsom’s account so sus­pect. Pub­lic insti­tu­tions such as the BBC might be ter­ri­bly inef­fi­cient and scan­dal prone, but they still do a better—and more systematic—job at root­ing out cor­rup­tion than Newsom’s citizen-hackers armed with data­bases and sophis­ti­cated visu­al­iza­tion tools.

I don’t agree with every­thing Moro­zov writes (his Net Delu­sion described some crit­i­cal blind spots in our under­stand­ing of the Net today — delu­sion was too strong a word, but I sup­pose it helped to sell the book) but this piece gets it spot on with respect to Newsom’s Ayn Rand-induced, hacker-worshipping, anti-democratic nonsense.

Most of all, Moro­zov exposes the fun­da­men­tally con­ser­v­a­tive and regres­sive phi­los­o­phy that so many thought­less, slow-minded and mantra-spouting lovers of technology-for-its-own-sake mis­take for cre­ativ­ity, ‘think­ing dif­fer­ent’ and enlightenment.

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 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.

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]