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Pedagogy

How do each of us come to know?

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I was introduced to philosophy by Professor Kranti Saran in my first term at Ashoka University. The class was ‘Mind and Behaviour.' What began as a compulsory course that had an intimidating-looking course pack, ended up being one of the most significant experiences in my life so far. For the first time in the course of my education, I began walking out of class with more questions than I had come in with. Intellectually, I was moved to inquire, in a systematic and reasonable manner, about aspects of myself and the world around me that I had taken for granted thus far. Emotionally, I was excited about what I was thinking and learnt to be more open-minded about different perspectives. I grew from the uncertainty that is crucial to thinking philosophically.

In view of how I was changing, the relevance of a philosophical self, i.e. a self that engages with the abstract and unsettled questions that govern our everyday life and choices, dawned on me at the end of my second year at Ashoka. Due to my simultaneous interest in education, I started to research about childhoods and learnt that children are naturally philosophical until their questions are neglected or undermined. I dreamt of the possibility of doing philosophy with children -- wondering freely, inquiring reasonably and reflecting frequently.

At Sholai school, I had my first opportunity to do philosophy with children. Through the experience, I pondered about the many constraints of a schooling system while wondering about the 'essentials' that ought to be part of every child's life.

In the imagined dialogue that follows, there is emphasis laid on an education that is:

1. Relevant and contextual
2. Non-competitive
3. Critical and inquiry focussed
4. Participatory in community work
5. Interested in helping children make choices and learning to learn

Imagined Dialogue

The imagined dialogue is between John Taylor Gatto (2) as John Taylor, John Holt as John Holt, Alison Gopnik (3) as Alison, Ken Robinson as Ken, Patrick Farenga (4) as Patrick, Alice Pitt as Alice, Sharon Todd as Sharon & Susanne Luhmann (5) as Susanne.

Q: What have you ‘taught’ children over the years?

John Taylor: Unfortunately, I have spent many years teaching children to be confused, to remain in their class positions, to be indifferent learners, to be emotionally and intellectually dependent, to develop a provisional self-esteem and to function under a constant watch/surveillance.

John Holt: We teach children through competition and examinations. It was the school itself, boring, threatening, cut off from any real experience or serious purpose, that made children dumb. As children are afraid of giving the wrong answers, wish to please teachers and other students and feel bored and confused about the content, they rely on bad thinking and problem solving strategies. (6)

Ken: We teach children how to create hierarchies. Every education system on earth has the same hierarchy of subjects. Everyone. Doesn't matter where you go. You'd think it would be otherwise, but it isn't. At the top are mathematics and languages, then the humanities. At the bottom are the arts. Everywhere on earth. And in pretty much every system, too, there's a hierarchy within the arts. Art and music are normally given a higher status in schools than drama and dance. (7)

There isn't an education system on the planet that teaches dance every day to children the way we teach them mathematics. Why? Why not? I think this is rather important. I think math is very important, but so is dance. Children dance all the time if they're allowed to, we all do. We all have bodies, don't we? Truthfully, what happens is, as children grow up, we start to educate them progressively from the waist up. And then we focus on their heads. And slightly to one side.

Alison: Schools have taught us to exclude by ignoring children who do not ‘fit’ in. Schools have largely replaced apprenticeship. Public and universal schooling was invented quite recently, in concert with the industrial revolution. It was designed to give people a new set of skills that were essential for success in an industrial world. School was invented to allow children to master the technical details of reading, writing, and arithmetic calculation. And not incidentally, it came to give children a protected haven while their caregivers were, for the first time in human history, far away at work. Children who don’t fit the demands of school are treated as if they were ill or defective or disabled. And this “disease” model is especially prevalent because many of the skills that are most important for school are far removed from the natural abilities and inclinations of most children.

Q: How can we ‘teach’ children differently?

John Holt: Children do not need to be "taught" in order to learn; they will learn a great deal, and probably learn best, without being taught. Children are enormously interested in our adult world and what we do there. Children learn best when the things they learn are embedded in a context of real life. Children learn best when their learning is connected with an immediate and serious purpose. (8)

Patrick: One excellent study in Great Britain, published as Young Children Learning, examined how young children learn by comparing the conversations of children in their preschool settings to the conversations they had with their parents at home. The researchers got permission to hide microphones and record the conversations in the schools and homes for these children and after studying hours of these talks they determined that regardless of the parents' education level, the conversations at home were deeper and richer than the conversations at school. In fact, they noted that in school it was often the teacher who needed to initiate the conversations but at home it was the children. And at home the children would ask very large questions—"Who is God?", "Why is the sky blue?"—but at school they tended to be cautious about asking about things that weren't prompted by the teacher.

So it's not a matter of being smart and well-trained in pedagogical techniques that helps children learn, but a matter of being open, welcoming, and truly conversational with them—not a quiz or psychological probe disguised as a conversation.

Sharon: Pedagogy seesaws between the “bringing more than I contain” that teaching aspires to and the “receiving beyond the capacity of the I” that learning strives to achieve. Within this movement, of course, there are many surprises and shifts, and the roles marked out for teachers and students are not so rigid as perhaps they appear.

Q: What is important to keep in mind when it comes to children’s learning?

John Holt: Children learn out of interest and curiosity, not to please or appease the adults in power; and they ought to be in control of their own learning, deciding for themselves what they want to learn and how they want to learn it. Children are most intelligent when the reality before them arouses in them a high degree of attention, interest, concentration, involvemen t-- in short, when they care most about what they are doing.

Children also do much of their learning in great bursts of passion and enthusiasm. Except for those physical skills which can't be learned any other way, children rarely learn on the slow, steady schedules that schools make for them. They are more likely to be insatiably curious for a while about some particular interest, and to read, write, talk, and ask questions about it for hours a day and for days on end.

Then suddenly they may drop that interest and turn to something completely different, or even for a while seem to have no interests at all. This usually means that for the time being they have all the information on that subject that they can digest, and need to explore the world in a different way, or perhaps simply get a firmer grip on what they already know. Therefore, we do not need to "motivate" children into learning, by wheedling, bribing, or bullying. We do not need to keep picking away at their minds to make sure they are learning.

Timetables! We act as if children were railroad trains running on a schedule. If a child doesn't arrive at one of these intermediate stations when we think they should, we instantly assume that they are going to be late at the finish. But children are not railroad trains. They don't learn at an even rate. They learn in spurts, and the more interested they are in what they are learning, the faster these spurts are likely to be.

What we need to do, and all we need to do, is bring as much of the world as we can into the school and the classroom; give children as much help and guidance as they need and ask for; listen respectfully when they feel like talking; and then get out of the way. We can trust them to do the rest.
(9)

Patrick: As researchers note, children learn from both spontaneous exploration and explicit instruction, but educators and policymakers have succeeded in making explicit instruction the norm. The change is not without serious side effects on children—the loss of curiosity that spurs intrinsic motivation, personal discovery, and the sense of mastery one gets from that knowledge.

In “The double-edged sword of pedagogy: Instruction limits spontaneous exploration and discovery” (by the researchers at Univ. of California, Berkeley), it is seen that, after direct instruction from teachers, “children are less likely to perform potentially irrelevant actions but also less likely to discover novel information.” In other words, the kids are compliant but less adventurous in their thinking.

Once we grasp that we learn all the time—even while sleeping our dreams can reveal or internalize new learning for us—we can develop new models and places for children and adults to learn and share their knowledge.

Q: How have children learnt in different societies over time and what can we learn from them?
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Patrick: In many rural land-based societies, learning is not coerced; children are expected to voluntarily observe, absorb, practice, and master the knowledge and skills they will need as adults –– and they do. In these societies –– which exist on every inhabited continent –– even very young children are free to choose their own actions, to play, to explore, to participate, to take on meaningful responsibility. “Learning” is not conceived as a special activity at all, but as a natural by-product of being alive in the world.

Researchers are finding that children in these settings spend most of their time in a completely different attentional state from children in modern schools, a state psychology researcher Suzanne Gaskins calls "open attention." Open attention is widely focused, relaxed, alert; Gaskins suggests it may have much in common with the Buddhist concept of “mindfulness.” If something moves in the broad field of perception, the child will notice it. If something interesting happens, they can watch for hours. Children in this state seem to absorb their culture by osmosis, by imperceptible degrees picking up what the adults talk about, what they do, how they think, what they know.

Q: What are the dangers of a school that separates children from the rest of the world?

John Taylor: Children and old people are penned up and locked away from the business of the world to a degree without precedent: nobody talks to them anymore, and without children and old people mixing in daily life, a community has no future and no past, only a continuous present. In fact, the term “community” hardly applies to the way we interact with each other. We live in networks, not communities, and everyone I know is lonely because of that. It is absurd and anti-life to be part of a system that compels you to sit in confinement with people of exactly the same age and social class. Schools need to stop being a parasite on the working community. Discovering meaning for yourself as well as discovering satisfying purpose for yourself, is a big part of what education is. How this can be done by locking children away from the world is beyond me.

Freedom writers film: One of the important themes of Freedom Writers is that teaching and learning do not take place in a vacuum. Rather, the classroom is a microcosm of the larger society where a host of social, historical, political and economic factors converge in the classroom and directly impinge on the education process. This plethora of factors influence the educational process and how effectively a teacher can teach.The school serves as a microcosm of the larger society where oppression was even more pervasive and detrimental.

Q: How can pedagogy help us understand ourselves and our world?

Sharon: We must understand the delicacy of engaging students in their interests, in offering them interpretations or theories of their experiences, in providing for them a structure through which they might think of themselves in relation to the world.
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Q: How is ethics important while thinking about education?
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Sharon: Ethics, insofar as it potentially offers us a discourse for rethinking our relations to other people, is central to any education that takes serious issues of social justice.
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In instrumentalizing ethics through education, or, rather, in viewing education as an instrument for ethics, there is a tendency to read ethics as a problem of knowledge. Ethics often is construed in educational terms as, “what and how do we need to know in order to live well together?” The ethical question thus gets rerouted along an epistemological path. What constitutes the “right” kind of knowledge becomes highly significant to teaching and learning encounters. Consequently, education becomes focused on two things: how best to encourage the acquisition of ethical knowledge through teaching, and, how best to embody, or model, ethical principles and concepts. Education, then, is seen to be about applying ethical concepts: it is a kind of knowledge in practice.

But what if one begins from a slightly different place? What if one begins with the “messy and ambiguous” nature of human reality? What if one reflects upon the failure and uncertainty of the demand for learning to become?

Shifting the focus from education as a scene where one ought to apply this or that principle to a scene where the conditions or contingencies of ethicality may be found means no longer simply thinking about education in relation to ethics; rather, it means thinking about ethics through education. This means exploring the day-to-day details of pedagogical encounters to see what they might offer in putting forth an understanding of education as a site of implied, rather than applied, ethics.
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Q: There seems to be an important difference between learning ‘about’ and learning ‘from’. What might that be?
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Alice: Learning about content is not the same thing as learning from it. In other words...learning is something more than a series of encounters with knowledge; learning entails, rather, the messier and less predictable process of becoming implicated in knowledge. (10)
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Q: In what ways can we think about a queer pedagogy?
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Susanne: The making of selves begins with an other—the other in the text, in speech, the teacher, the student. The queer pedagogy that I imagine engages students in a conversation about how textual positions are being taken up or refused, for example when reading lesbian and gay texts or when listening to somebody speaking gay. What happens to the self in this dialogue? What does the student actually hear and how does he or she respond to the text? Can queer teaching, rather than assuming and affirming identities, take on the problem of how identifications are made and refused in the process of learning?
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The queer curriculum worker lives queerly because she or he (a) digresses from mainstream “official” discourse; (b) challenges the status quo by queerly reading texts (uncovering potentially radical politics), or queering texts; (c) understands that curriculum is gendered, political, historical, racial, classed, and aesthetic; (d) sees herself or himself as a co-learner with students. (11)

Citations

(1). Introductory Question: How do we come to know and how is knowledge produced in the interaction between teacher/text and student? From Queer theory in education by William F Pinar

(2). Dumbing us Down by John Taylor Gatto

(3). The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us About the Relationship Between Parents and Children by Alison Gopnik

(4). A Quick History of Homeschooling and the Rise of Self-Directed Education by Patrick Farenga
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(5). Queer theory in education
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(6). How children fail by John Holt

(7). Do schools kill creativity? by Ken Robinson

(8). How children fail by John Holt

(9). How children learn by John Holt

(10). Subjects in tension. Engaged resistance in the feminist classroom. by Alice Pitt

(11). Queer theory in education

Thinking Rhizomatically

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