Transmission and The Blank Slate
We stand our ground and change our mind—and we help others stand their ground and change their minds—together, in conversation.
We are admonished to not treat individuals as blank slates, passively awaiting the world to write on them—true enough—and almost simultaneously enjoined to imagine that the social world itself is a blank slate for individuals to eventually write on, which is patently false. [0]
Another defensive perseveration in modern education—a distant but noticeably pervasive second to 'children actively construct their own knowledge!'—is the similarly good advice to remember that 'children are not blank slates!' Here are four examples, plucked at random from an internet search:
Children are not a blank slate. They have knowledge, intelligence, and experience, as well as questions. The goal is to take advantage of what they bring with them to the process. We prefer to focus less on teaching and more on learning. This approach concentrates on helping children use their sensory motor skills, such as listening carefully, observing, speaking and doing, along with the skills of reading and writing.
Students are not blank slates, Childers-McKee says. They enter the classroom with diverse experiences. Teachers should encourage students to draw on their prior knowledge in order to contribute to group discussions, which provides an anchor to learning.
While maintaining the formal relationship between students and teachers, teaching through relationships, when done well, recognizes the human stories of the learners themselves (they are not blank slates), as well as that of the teacher. It is an approach that embraces our complex identities, biographies, and the stories we bring that serve to humanize the subjects we teach.
My local newspaper features an education reporter who shares opinions that are often far outside of my own beliefs and experience in the field. Recently, he ran a column that summarized the thoughts of a professor emeritus who is, according to the article, "one of our nation's most respected education experts." Without giving this "expert" too much airtime, one idea he proposes in his most recent book is that not only are children unable to make their own meaning of learning autonomously in any way, but also that their minds are, in his words, a "blank slate" . . . As a huge proponent of student-centered learning who believes in working to build the capacity of learners at all ages and stages, I find the concept of children as empty vessels to be absolutely abhorrent, not to mention inaccurate. To assume that a young human brain holds so little value masks an attempt to gain control over how cognitive development occurs. After all, why worry about what a child might be thinking if we can just impose our beliefs and viewpoints upon them and mask it as "knowledge?"
Indeed, children do bring "knowledge, intelligence, and experience, as well as questions" with them to school—"diverse experiences," in fact, and, yes, their own "complex identities, biographies, and . . . stories" as well. [1] But—and this is the crucial point: students and their schools belong to the same culture. The knowledge, experience, and stories—and the questions and the very identities—that students bring into the school have already been, and continue to be, formed and shaped in significant ways by cultural transmission.
Children everywhere live in an "artificial" cultural world, one in which language and tools are invariably found, [and] there is much for them to learn about the particular culture in which they live. Many of the findings presented in this book make sense if we think of young children as engaged in an ancient tutorial system that helps them to make sense of that specific cultural world. As a species, we depend for our survival on the cumulative maintenance of a local cultural heritage. Accordingly, selection will have favored developmental mechanisms for the transmission of that heritage from one generation to the next . . . children will be receptive pupils and . . . caregivers will be engaged and deliberate teachers . . .
Children’s early conversations nicely illustrate the operation of this ancient tutorial system. As we have seen, children's beliefs about the world can be altered on the basis of another person's say-so. When children hear about a transformation that they have not observed, they register that information and they act upon it. Admittedly, they sometimes ignore what they have been told in favor of their prior knowledge. Still, granted the psychological complexity of the tutorial process, it is remarkable that even 2-year-olds can engage in it and benefit from it. Moreover, children not only listen to what they are told and act upon it—they seek out information from other people. Faced with a puzzle or anomaly, they ask a question . . . many of these persistent questions are not about the natural or physical world, or about people's reasons and motives; they are about the complexities of the culture in which the child lives. They ask why the window cleaner needs to be paid, why roofs have slopes, why we milk cows but not pigs, and whether Grandma is in Heaven . . .
Instead of studying the world on their own, with each successive generation returning to Year One and beginning afresh, children can construct a view of their world as seen through the lens of multiple, successive generations. They effectively acknowledge, rightly or wrongly, that their own appraisal of the world may be less accurate, less complete, less deep, than the wisdom passed on to them by their forebears. This does not mean that children are indiscriminately credulous. As we have seen, they resist claims that flatly contradict what they can observe for themselves; but when they are uncertain, they are ready to listen.
Signs of this tutorial system are apparent even in preverbal infants. Csibra and Gergely (2009) point out that human caregivers indicate—via expressive signals—when they intend to provide pedagogic information. They make eye contact, they talk directly to the infant, and offer a demonstration of an object's function. For their part, infants are sensitive to those signals and treat them as conveying generic information (Futó, Téglás, Csibra, & Gergely, 2010). . . .
It has sometimes been claimed that children’s learning in traditional or preliterate cultures proceeds without such a two-way tutorial system. Instead, the learner merely watches an expert over and over again (Lancy & Grove, 2010). In fact, however, adults in traditional rural communities also engage in the deliberate instruction of young children. Even if such teaching is informal and intermittent, it happens . . . By implication, we should not think of the deliberate teaching of young children as a modern offshoot of formal instruction, something that overrides children's true cognitive predilections. Preschool is part of our biological endowment. It underpins our cultural heritage, rather than being a modern practice foisted on unreceptive pupils. [2]
Thus, what students "bring with them" into the school—along with their idiosyncratic experiences and stories—is a minimal but shared culture, facilitated in large part by testimony and transmission; they have a shared code alongside their private ones; shared concepts and private ones; and perhaps more variable-quality instructional environments at home, but a shared school. Following the transmission model, we would look to build, through schooling, on this shared, joint-representational space, while keeping close to our hearts the admonition to not undervalue students' private experiences and ideas. With a good school and a good teacher, students come to 'see themselves' in the culture, and the culture can start to make room for more and more of us.
This, however, is not the vision on offer in education, as we can see, in part, through the examples of the four quotes above. The goal of recognizing students' ample 'slatedness' is not to facilitate building on shared knowledge, but instead to run away from this collective project, arguing (over and over) that students require minimal (oppressive) transmissional teaching, and to promote and defend an instructional model that centers students' individualistic and psychologistic modes and experiences while backgrounding everything else.
In other words, here again, with the concept of 'the blank slate,' we are confronted with an idea—like 'active construction of knowledge'—that was snatched off the university library shelves, motivatedly misunderstood, and then cut up into bumper stickers to support a dopey, discombobulated vision of instruction that obsessively seeks to overturn the notion of "might makes right," not, as Lincoln did, by moving to reverse the terms—"Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it"—but by randomizing all the pieces on the board, in a consequential fit of pique, leaving neither right nor might, neither negotiated meaning nor influence, just a jumble of individual "stories," told past each other.
The Actual Blank Slate
This is what John Locke (the person to whom the phrase 'blank slate' has been attached, though the idea goes back to Aristotle) actually said about the blank slate:
Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper void of all characters, without any ideas. How comes it to be furnished? Whence comes it by that vast store which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it with an almost endless variety? Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this I answer in one word, from Experience. [3]
When we move away from a constructivist mindset, where all knowledge (of value) is found knowledge, not inherited knowledge, to a transmission-model mindset, where we are allowed to see quite clearly that most of a person's knowledge is inherited, we can interpret Locke's statement more charitably and, it seems to me at least, more accurately.
In a phrase, Locke is simply referring to "cultural knowledge"—the missing "ideas" from the "white paper" of the mind—not to private, episodic knowledge or individual psychological capacities. This interpretation gains some weight when we learn what Locke was trying to challenge—that people are "born with mathematical ideas, eternal truths and a notion of God" [4]—versus the knowledge that he specifically mentions—the man-made "furnishings" of the mind, the painted record of all the "busy and boundless fancy" of other people, many of them long dead, the "materials of reason and knowledge." It is clear that Locke is not trying to argue about the character of the content of the mind, but about the process by which some of that content is populated: inborn or "from Experience." The content in question is thoroughly cultural, regardless which process is chosen.
And, though it may be the product of too much squinting, it is at the least interesting to note that Locke uses the singular, not the plural, throughout his initial statement, to describe our "vast store" of cultural knowledge—almost as though he is describing this "white paper void of all characters" as a kind of single, joint-representational plane that contains and provides for the transmission of knowledge.
It is almost by definition that our view of the joint-representational, cultural "slate" appears blank at birth—because it requires other people's ideas to fill it, senders as well as receivers (and intermediaries), and, at birth, we haven't met anyone yet. Soon, though, we cross paths with our early caregivers and their ideas, then perhaps siblings and other adults (mostly family members), then doctors, clergy, teachers, Arabic letters, English words, Babylonian time-telling, currency counting, temperature reading, the unwritten rules of playground games, the rhythms of popular music and the steps to the accompanying dances, the subtle art of sarcasm, the shifting fashions of dress and slang that define peer groups, as well as stories of historical triumphs and tragedies that define national and global identities, how to behave on first dates, at a first job, how to manage your other online identity (the internet one) along with your social one, how and why we vote and serve on juries, driving, marriage, parenthood, and learning how to live with the loss of another (the loss of an 'other'). This kind of knowledge simply can't be had—or shared!—without the presence—and action!—of others, and it comprises a good deal of what we consider important in life. It is "boundless," valuable, and not so easy to come by. It is not always used to merely inform. And, as we have seen, no matter what 'tribe' you come from or how 'smart' or 'active' you are individually, you can spend a lifetime collecting and organizing this cultural knowledge and still, standing back at any time, quite honestly describe what you see of it, as 'blank.'
Our Blankness Is Wonderful, and Fragile
So, I'm inclined to read Locke—or at least that one paragraph from him—more charitably, largely because I believe he is describing something we all know (even if he didn't): that 'slates' are used metaphorically as communal objects [5]—'clean slate,' 'blank slate'—and that they can be blank—all the way from 'we have nothing in common,' 'we're not on the same page,' for God's sake, to a total loss of faith in institutions, the erosion of shared values and social cohesion, a loss in capacity to organize change, and "economic, intellectual, and cultural decline."
The "blankness" of our slate(s) practically defines us as a species. Untethered from instinct and automatic behavior (to a degree), we are free to change ourselves (to a degree) to better adapt to our environments. Yet it is possible that by "blank slate," someone could intend to mean "that a young brain holds . . . little value"; they could be intending, with that statement, to "gain control over how cognitive development occurs" and to "impose their beliefs and viewpoints" on children. Anything is possible. If these statements are indeed "absolutely abhorrent not to mention inaccurate," then it is good to write an article challenging them. This is how joint-representation and transmission—culture, the 'slate' [6], society work: we promote (sometimes by pure repetition) ideas we think are right and true and challenge, rework, and attack ideas we think are wrong and harmful. By doing so, we can even use the transmission model to attack the transmission model. We can demonstrate a knowledge that the sender and his message have social importance ('professor emeritus,' 'education expert') and that the transmitted message can have a direct impact on receivers ("Without giving this 'expert' too much airtime . . .")—that is, we can believe in and utilize the structure of the transmission model—even while professing that all or part of the transmission model is total crap.
This is how it should be. We stand our ground and change our mind—and we help others stand their ground and change their minds—together, in conversation. This means that we have to put in the work, and be ready to be challenged. If you're going to say that you don't want to give a professor emeritus 'airtime' because you don't agree with him that children are blank slates, then you should be ready for someone to come along and provide the link to the content in question and to reveal that the author is criticizing E.D. Hirsch, Jr.'s recent book American Ethnicity, which I've excerpted and discussed many times on this site.
That Hirsch is the object of this scorn gets to the heart of the matter. The "blank slate," read reasonably, was never a statement about a child's intrinsic capacity, but about their profound need for a cultural inheritance. By championing a vision of the learner as a solitary creator, modern education does not liberate children. Instead, it moves in the direction of severing them from the very body of knowledge that gives individual contributions context and power. It mistakes our shared, cultural ledger for a private diary and, in doing so, risks producing a generation of authors with a story that only they can read.
References and Notes
[0] Fisher, Josh. "The Coordination Problem." Text Savvy, 14 Oct. 2023.
[1] Steven Pinker's 2002 book The Blank Slate lays out the huge number of ways in which we are certainly not intellectually 'blank' at birth.
[2] Harris, Paul L. Trusting What You’re Told. Harvard University Press.
[3] Locke, J. (1690). An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.
[4] Pinker, Steven. The Blank Slate. Penguin Publishing Group.
[5] There's the school slate, of course, film slates (clapperboards), historically, ships' logs and financial transactions, as well as restaurant menus and political 'slates'.
[6] "[The internet magazine Slate] was originally going to be called Boot, in tribute to the protagonist of Evelyn Waugh's novel Scoop. Then someone informed Michael Kinsley that "boot" was slang for "vomit." So Kinsley picked Slate instead. In our inaugural issue, June 24, 1996, he wrote that the name 'means nothing, or practically nothing. We chose it as an empty vessel into which we can pour meaning. We hope Slate will come to mean good original journalism in this new medium. Beyond that, who knows?'"
