Behavior and Transmission
Our shared understanding is forged not in isolation, but through the active transmission and careful stewardship of knowledge from one to another.
Behold here O reader! a thing concerning which we cannot trust our forefathers . . . who tried to define what the Soul and Life are—which are beyond proof, whereas those things, which can at any time be clearly known and proved . . . remained for many ages unknown or falsely understood. [0]
As we have seen, when we shift our perspective (back) to the more natural transmission model, our new (old) intuitions about instruction tend to better match our on-the-ground observations around teaching and learning—both inside and outside the classroom. Consider, for example, this episode, which happens in a similar way every day, all around the world, right in front of our faces:
At 22 months, Naomi asked: "Where's Daddy?" Her mother replied: "Daddy is working. Daddy will be home tonight. You'll see him tomorrow morning." One month later, at 23 months, a similar exchange occurred. Naomi again asked: "Where's Daddy? Daddy's in work?" Her mother replied: "Daddy's at work, honey." Notice the subtle but telling difference between the two conversations. In the second exchange, at 23 months, Naomi asks where her father is—as she had done one month earlier—but this time she also suggests a tentative answer: "Daddy's in work?" . . . [Also] at 22 months, Naomi asked "Where's the moon?" and received the following reply: "Where's the moon? The moon is sleeping. The moon is not out now" . . . During the same month, the following exchange took place. Adult: "Where's the moon?" Naomi: "Moon." Adult: "Uh huh. Where is it?" Naomi: "Moon sleeping."[1]
For constructivists, who are still, two centuries later, busily trying to rescue children from an Industrial Revolution that is long bygone or in general from a cruel, carceral, conforming adult world that never existed, Naomi's mother's (the adult's) words in these two episodes are mere data or raw material for the child—'triggers' for the child's learning activities or 'social contributions' that can just as readily be left behind as taken up by the individual, autonomous learner. The adult's words are not (and must never be) the direct content of the learning. Allowing that would be to admit the perfectly obvious yet unsettling fact that other people can make us do things and know things just by their say-so.
To avoid the messy, enacted, quarrelsome mutuality of the real world, constructivism has given us over the years various Rube Goldberg–esque descriptions of learning that desperately and unpersuasively try to explain it as a purely cognitive, solo activity. So, for instance, Naomi experiences a disequilibrium, you see, when she notices her father's (and the Moon's) absences. She anticipates the causal relation of absent → working or absent → "sleeping" and submits it, like a good 'little scientist' for confirmation, using, at 22 months, some form of hypothetico-deductive reasoning across a variety of experiences to somehow ascertain facts she doesn't (and can't possibly) observe herself.
While this may be a somewhat accurate, high-level, early twentieth-century sketch of what Naomi's brain is doing, it in almost no way describes what Naomi is doing, behaviorally, when she learns—what we can all see: she is receiving and accepting the say-so of an authority figure as knowledge:
These two serendipitous examples suggest that even before their second birthday, children can acquire new information via testimony [claims about unobserved events]. They can encode and retrieve information that they could not easily discover for themselves. Presumably, Naomi did not discover from firsthand observation that when Daddy was away from home, he was working. Nor, presumably, did she establish via direct observation that when the Moon cannot be seen, it is "sleeping." Rather, she had acquired both of these "facts" from talking to other people. [1]
Naomi has the private experiences of wondering where her father and the Moon are on separate occasions, she transforms these private experiences into public messages using what she knows about the communal code (her community's language), she transmits these messages to her mother because she recognizes that her mother is a cultural mentor who likely has the knowledge she is missing, her mother carefully curates responses that will teach her daughter the answers to the questions she asked, and finally, her mother transmits the message back to Naomi, who accepts what she is told and learns it.
While this transmission-model interpretation of learning is still wrong—to the extent that all models are wrong—and incomplete, it is much more useful than constructivism, because it captures three important realities of education that we know are true, which constructivism poorly accommodates: (1) teaching and learning are everyday activities, (2) teaching and learning are overt behaviors, and (3) teaching is as active and as important as learning. Although these realities overlap significantly, we'll try to take each one in turn, albeit out of order.
Teaching Is as Active and as Important as Learning
Each of us adopts teacher (speaker, actor, sender) and learner (listener, audience, receiver) roles in a thousand different ways throughout our lives. In our teacher roles, we have a causal effect not only on those who have adopted learner roles in relation to our messages but also, iteratively, on our shared joint-representational space. When we 'teach' ('speak our truth') that climate change is a real threat caused by humans, we help to maintain and strengthen that perspective in our joint-representational space. Similarly, when we 'teach' the Pythagorean Theorem, we maintain and strengthen that representation on the joint-representational plane. So, it very much matters that we speak, act out, 'teach' the truth (even if we repeat ourselves) and that we take care to know what we are talking about when we do so—because the same effects on the joint-representational plane are to be had by 'teaching' that the Earth is flat, that vaccines cause autism, and that constructivism is a viable learning theory.
This component of teaching, of acting on the world, simply doesn't exist in constructivism, no matter how often the word 'active' is summoned. Individual learners skulk about the world, foraging knowledge from their natural and social 'environments' (i.e., other people). They do not receive or inherit their knowledge from any direct human teaching act—they simply find it scattered across the ground, and they assemble it by themselves. How could they, as a consequence of constructivist messaging, come to value the obligations of teaching, of speaking the truth, of defending, criticizing, maintaining, supporting, and repairing our shared joint-representational landscapes? To speak, to act, as a constructivist, is to corrupt, to colonize, to mansplain, to treat one's interlocutors as beneath you, to spoon-feed, to interrupt.
Teaching and Learning Are Overt Behaviors
When we take the bold step of including other people in our teaching and learning model, (re-)install teaching as a first-class activity in the model, and characterize learning as, at least in part, an important inheritance from others that must be maintained and developed—as the transmission model naturally does—then we begin (again) to conceive of our overt behaviors around acquiring and using knowledge as having real, necessary, significant social consequences.
Why assess students, for example? Because this captures overt behavior which indicates students' growing capacity (or not) for maintaining and contributing to their intellectual communities. While we can and should argue about the potential downsides of such assessments, we need these behavioral proxies (among many others), precisely because we cannot read each others' minds—we can only read behavior—and we need to know (and reform or redirect if necessary) what any individual is bringing to the social table. We are all busy keeping the same boat afloat, steering it carefully through turbulent waters; we're not about to hand any significant knowledge or responsibility over to some lubbers who aren't behaving as though they're on the same page as the rest of us.
If this sounds harsh, it is likely because we are mostly unaware of how automatically (and necessarily) we make judgments about people's knowledge and skills based on their behavior—or because we have been busy over the last two centuries trying to soften or remove unnecessary and painful judgments from the instructional process. Regardless, when other people are brought in to the teaching and learning model, then behavioral coordination and norms—for better and worse—apply.
This means that a few behaviorally overt duties are (re-)created around the (re-)adoption of the transmission model. To remind ourselves what these duties are, let us take a look at the lessons we once used to teach students these behaviors. We can start with the myth of Icarus:
Daedalus now had come to detest his protracted exile in Crete [expelled from Athens for the murder of his nephew Perdix] and was longing to visit his native country again, but his way was barred by the sea.
'King Minos can block my escape, by land or water,' he sighed. 'The air, at least, is still open; my path lies there. He is lord of the world, but not lord of the sky.'
So saying, he put his mind to techniques unexplored before and altered the laws of nature. He carefully layered some feathers, the smallest to start with, the shorter positioned next to the longer—you'd think they had grown like that—as sometimes rustic panpipes rise in a gradual slope with their reeds of unequal length; and then he bound them with twine in the middle and wax at the bottom. This neatly compacted plumage he curved in a gentle camber to imitate real birds' wings.
His young son Icarus, standing beside him and little aware of the threat to himself he was touching, smiled as he caught at the feathers fluttering in the breeze; and now and again he would carelessly soften the yellow wax with his thumb, enjoying his game as he meddled and interfered with his father's wonderful work. But soon the finishing touches were deftly laid, and Daedalus balanced his aged body on both of his wings, then beat at the air and hovered suspended.
Next he instructed his son: 'Now, Icarus, listen carefully! Keep to the middle way. If you fly too low, the water will clog your wings; if you fly too high, they'll be scorched by fire. Fly between sea and sun. No need to determine your course by Boötes, the Bear, or Oríon's naked sword, like a sailor. Simply follow my lead.'
As he gave his pupil his flying orders, he fitted the wings on the boy's inexperienced shoulders; and while he did it the old man's cheeks were wet with his tears and his hands were trembling in fatherly fear. Then kissing the lips of his darling son for the very last time, he rose on his wings and flew in front, as afraid for the lad as a bird escorting her fledgeling out of her mountain nest to float on the breezes. 'Follow!' he cried, as he taught him the skills that would prove his downfall. Moving his own two wings, he kept looking back at his son's. They were spied by a fisherman dangling his catch on his quivering rod, a shepherd at rest on his crook and a ploughman steering his ploughshare. All watched in amazement, thinking, 'They certainly must be gods to fly through the air!' . . .
[Icarus] ceased to follow his leader; he'd fallen in love with the sky, and soared up higher and higher. The scorching rays of the sun grew closer and softened the fragrant wax which fastened his plumage. The wax dissolved; and as Icarus flapped his naked arms, deprived of the wings which had caught the air that was buoying them upwards, 'Father!' he shouted, again and again.
But the boy and his shouting were drowned in the blue-green main which is called the Icárian Sea. His unhappy father, no longer a father, called out, 'Icarus! Where are you, Icarus? Where on earth shall I find you? Icarus!' he kept crying. And then he caught sight of the wings in the water. Daedalus cursed the skill of his hands and buried his dear son's corpse in a grave. [2]
Notice, first, how Daedalus the teacher, sender, father, speaker is portrayed—often in contrast to the 'student,' his son. He "carefully" builds a complex flying machine (two of them!), the devices are "neatly" compacted, and the finishing touches are "deftly" laid. Daedalus's student, on the other hand, is absent-mindedly catching at the feathers of these ingenious contraptions, he "carelessly" plays with the wax and enjoys his "game" of "meddling and interfering" with the gift about to be bestowed on his "inexperienced" shoulders. The instruction is clearly present in the story too:
Next he instructed his son: 'Now, Icarus, listen carefully! Keep to the middle way. If you fly too low, the water will clog your wings; if you fly too high, they'll be scorched by fire. Fly between sea and sun. No need to determine your course by Boötes, the Bear, or Oríon's naked sword, like a sailor. Simply follow my lead.'
The student's poor behavior while handling his father's instructions and the flying machine itself is, along with the inevitably terrible consequences, the very centerpiece of the lesson of Icarus:
[Icarus] ceased to follow his leader; he'd fallen in love with the sky, and soared up higher and higher. The scorching rays of the sun grew closer and softened the fragrant wax which fastened his plumage. The wax dissolved; and as Icarus flapped his naked arms, deprived of the wings which had caught the air that was buoying them upwards, 'Father!' he shouted, again and again. But the boy and his shouting were drowned in the blue-green main which is called the Icárian Sea.
Although the moral of this tale is often given as avoiding hubris or youthful pride, it can just as well be more specifically behavioral: handle inherited knowledge with care (attention), carry knowledge with you and keep it safe (memory), and deploy knowledge boldly, strategically, and for the good of one's community and self (recall and application). Indeed, this more specific moral appears in a number of different ancient and classic stories, all of which were used to teach young students both about the world and how to behave in it. Phaëthon is another, much longer, example, similar in many respects to Icarus, the Biblical story of Samson and Delilah contains a similar structure with similar morals (and as a bonus connection to Phaëthon and Icarus, Samson means "sun child"), the Epic of Gilgamesh, Pandora's Box, perhaps even the story of Adam and Eve is, in part, a warning about the consequences of not paying attention, remembering, and recalling the work and teachings of others for the good of the community.
Now the Lord God had planted a garden in the east, in Eden; and there he put the man he had formed. The Lord God made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground—trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food. In the middle of the garden were the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil . . .
The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it. And the Lord God commanded the man, "You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die."
The Lord God said, "It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him." Now the Lord God had formed out of the ground all the wild animals and all the birds in the sky. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds in the sky and all the wild animals. But for Adam no suitable helper was found.
So the Lord God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep; and while he was sleeping, he took one of the man's ribs and then closed up the place with flesh. Then the Lord God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man. The man said, "This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called 'woman,' for she was taken out of man." That is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh. Adam and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame.
Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, "Did God really say, 'You must not eat from any tree in the garden'?" The woman said to the serpent, "We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, but God did say, 'You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it or you will die.'"
"You will not certainly die," the serpent said to the woman. "For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil." When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.
Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden. But the Lord God called to the man, "Where are you?" He answered, "I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid." And he said, "Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?" The man said, "The woman you put here with me—she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it." Then the Lord God said to the woman, "What is this you have done?" The woman said, "The serpent deceived me, and I ate."
So the Lord God said to the serpent, "Because you have done this, cursed are you above all livestock and all wild animals! You will crawl on your belly and you will eat dust all the days of your life. And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel." To the woman he said, "I will make your pains in childbearing very severe; with painful labor you will give birth to children. Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you." To Adam he said, "Because you listened to your wife and ate fruit from the tree about which I commanded you, 'You must not eat from it,' cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat from it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return."
Adam named his wife Eve, because she would become the mother of all the living. The Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them. And the Lord God said, "The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever." So the Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken. [3]
The setup work done by the 'teacher' (God), the instruction he provides to his pupils Adam and Eve, their lack of attention in allowing the serpent to deceive them, and their ultimate forgetting of God's instruction—along with the terrible consequences of such forgetting—are all present here as they are in many Greek myths and other ancient stories from our species. In fact, another pattern present in the Genesis story that is also found in Icarus, among others—one that speaks powerfully to the pedagogical applications of these stories—is that of the caring teacher who blames himself for his students' failures. Daedalus, for instance, displays his teacherly concern for Icarus throughout the short tale:
The old man's cheeks were wet with his tears and his hands were trembling in fatherly fear. Then kissing the lips of his darling son for the very last time, he rose on his wings and flew in front, as afraid for the lad as a bird escorting her fledgeling out of her mountain nest to float on the breezes . . . Moving his own two wings, he kept looking back at his son's . . . Daedalus cursed the skill of his hands and buried his dear son's corpse in a grave.
The Judeo-Christian God, meanwhile, while perhaps even more regretful than Daedalus about the consequences of his actions, has a different way of showing it (albeit a classic god-like way):
The Lord saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time. The Lord regretted that he had made human beings on the earth, and his heart was deeply troubled. So the Lord said, "I will wipe from the face of the earth the human race I have created—and with them the animals, the birds, and the creatures that move along the ground—for I regret that I have made them." [4]
Teaching and Learning are Everyday Activities
What constructivism gets spectacularly wrong about teaching and learning is that it treats them, together, as entirely psychological, allowing us to believe that who we are as learners and as teachers is only in our heads. But this is not true! We are also—as learners, as teachers—what others in our community take us to be, based on our behavior. It is a reality of civilizational living that we cannot avoid, the price we pay for eating the apple: we become aware of how others see us, and how others see us (through our behavior) matters.
And these behaviors matter also because they happen every day. We expect that students will pay attention in class, not because they are in a special situation called 'school,' but because paying attention to others' messages in society is a behavioral norm, a signal of respect, a social lubricant (and also incidentally a behavior that makes it more likely that we will individually learn something). We expect that students will remember what they are taught in class, in large part because the knowledge we are transmitting to them is important, but also because remembering what another has shared with you is a behavioral norm, a signal of respect, a symbol of trust and reliability (and also incidentally something that dramatically improves our individual competence with knowledge work). And we expect that students will recall and apply what they have learned in class—if only in conversation—not primarily because this behavior facilitates individual learning (although it does), nor because we simply get sick thrills out of watching learners dance like monkeys for us, but because these public behaviors indicate a commitment—a fealty even—to the identity, history, and culture of one's community. To hold forth boldly and reasonably on a topic such as the Pythagorean Theorem, for example, regardless whether one is simply 'regurgitating' most of it or arguing that it is all wrong, is to send a signal to one's community that one is prepared (or preparing) to become an active contributor to our joint-representational life (in the area of mathematics)—defending, maintaining, and reshaping our cultural existence for the better.
Conclusion
If we can make this shift—(back) to the transmission model and away from some of the psychologistic and individualistic contortions of constructivism—it will allow us to finally (re-)recognize and defend our most natural intuitions about education. We become (re-)equipped with a framework we instinctively know how to work with, because its principles are the very ones we enact in countless learning exchanges every single day. By embracing transmission, we can reclaim a common-sense, everyday foundation upon which we can confidently build more effective and sophisticated teaching and learning.
Ultimately, like it or not, we are inextricably bound together within a shared joint-representational landscape. To change this landscape for the better, to introduce new ideas or challenge old ones, one must first be intimately familiar with its existing contours, its histories, its arguments. This engagement is inherently social, often messy, and frequently involves a robust conflict of ideas. But this is the only channel through which meaningful cultural and intellectual progress is forged. We cannot, as a purely constructivist approach might inadvertently suggest, simply retreat into our individual cognitive workshops, build our idiosyncratic understandings, and then expect these private constructions to be automatically valued or integrated by others without the hard work of explanation, persuasion, public defense, behavior. The world is shared, knowledge is shared, and the responsibility to engage, teach, and learn within that shared space is a burden and a gift we all carry.
References
[0] Da Vinci, Leonardo. "INTRODUCTION TO PERSPECTIVE:—THAT IS OF THE FUNCTION OF THE EYE." The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci — Complete. Project Gutenberg, January 1, 2004
[1] Harris, Paul L. Trusting What You're Told: How Children Learn from Others. Harvard University Press.
[2] Ovid. Metamorphoses: a New Verse Translation. Penguin Books Ltd.
[3] New International Version. (2011). The Bible (Genesis 2–3). Biblica.
[4] Ibid, Genesis 6:5–8.
