The Culture of Childhood and the Science of Learning
"In heaven there will be no law, and the lion shall lie down with the lamb ... In hell there will be nothing but law, and due process will be meticulously observed." *
Carl Hendrick's yeoman's work responding to this "lament" is a marvel to behold—especially for me, because I truly can't even with these kinds of opinions in education. (You should really check it out here.) But there was something intriguing to me in Dr. Jefferson's otherwise—just . . . comments, about the science of learning:
"Just something is 'off' with it for me as a person who celebrates diversity within pedagogy in order to make it more student-centred and inclusive, which is where I always come from."
"Off"—a term which, when uttered by a Ph.D. holder with "researcher" in their title, in an article basically about science, justifiably invites a correction. And Hendrick provides:
[The] complaint about 'student-centred' practices being marginalized betrays a deep irony. The science of learning is student-centred, and just not in the sentimental sense. It attends to the learner's cognitive architecture, not the teacher's preferred aesthetic. . . .
Feelings are not arguments. There's nothing wrong with instinct, but when faced with large-scale evidence, one should be prepared to adjust. If the evidence feels "off," it may be because it contradicts one's cherished assumptions . . . The science of learning empowers teachers to make better decisions in their classrooms. Decisions grounded in how students actually learn, not in how we might wish they did. It replaces intuition with insight, and replaces well-intentioned guesswork with clearer guidance.
But "something is off" in this context could also be the start of a tantalizing Holmesian mystery—a challenge—especially given the longstanding blood feud between research and practice in Western education. What is it that—we all sense—a year from now, will still be "off" about this relationship, with diversity, student-centered, sentimental, inclusive, feelings, assumptions, wishes, intuitions, guesswork, aesthetic, and evidence, cognitive architecture, science, arguments, cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and so on, still arrayed against each other in line infantry formation?
Teaching and Learning Are 'Natural'
Learning and teaching are 'natural' activities for humans, meaning that we use certain biological capacities (like joint attention and theory of mind) to engage in the activities of learning and teaching—though we may not call them that—every day, around the world, throughout our lives. Every time we communicate, we teach and learn, so to the extent that communication (in whatever form) is natural for humans, education is natural.
'Natural,' of course, does not mean "effortless" or "automatic"—we can work at both learning and teaching to get 'better' at them (along some spectra)—and it certainly doesn't mean, commonly, anything like 'socially uncoerced': if you tell me to not touch the fire and I don't, then you have taught and I have learned, in almost the exact same way as if the fire 'taught' me instead (by burning me); we can prefer the naturalness of "the fire told me to not touch it" story over that of "the man told me to not touch it" story, for all kinds of reasons, but we know that we don't make the story more 'natural' (by our common, communal lights) by subtracting all the human knowledge "tellers" and intermediaries from the plot. Social learning is just as 'natural' as asocial learning, in other words.
If we really don't like the idea of "the man told me," we could keep the tellers and intermediaries in the analysis, but just make them "see-through," more or less. We could argue, for example, that while you, the adult, make the teaching move of warning me to not touch the fire, what ultimately teaches me to not do so is either the fire itself (discovery), my personal, active construction of your message (mediated discovery), or some combination of the two—that is, maybe I essentially teach myself, regardless of whether it is through 'data' from the natural environment or from other people.
We could, and indeed should, be making this argument. But preferring it does not erase the 'natural'ness from the alternative, 'social control' view of the same events—that human beings coordinate and control each other as a community, in large part by using communication.
But There Are Different Views About 'Natural'
Why does this thinking about naturalness matter? Because when Dr. Jefferson and I both read something positive—or even just informative—about explicit instruction, worked examples, scripted instruction, cognitive load theory, etc., my sense of the natural is not disrupted; I can map the ideas to my view of the scene around the fire: the child is a student in the classroom, the adult is a teacher, the learning goal is "don't touch fire," our 'whys' are "because it will really hurt," "it will cause damage to your skin," "I said so," "the fire god Ra will punish you for it," or "if you are prohibited from touching it, then this will have the knock-on effect of keeping you physically distant from it, and I don't want you to end up like your arsonist uncle"—take your pick of reasons. The child is taught explicitly to not touch the fire, and this causes the child to learn to not touch it. We can certainly work to make this process of instruction optimally humane, efficient, and increasingly effective, but it is, without a doubt, thoroughly natural, warts and all.
For Dr. Jefferson, though, the scene around the fire—her enactment of the 'natural'—is, I would argue, totally different from the above. We both agree, with Lucretius, I think, that we should "align [our] expectations, aspirations, and desires to the natural order of the universe," but what that natural order looks like for teaching and learning, and what it should look like, especially for children—this is what will still be disputed years from now. The "tellers" in Jefferson's 'student-centered' scene function, to me, more like "Force Ghosts," like Obi-Wan Kenobi, or like Moana's Gramma Tala—mentors who gently 'guide' the individual hero indirectly—than they do like the real, in-your-face adults in our shared social learning view. They are knowledgeable and wise, but they can only pop up here and there to whisper in the hero's ear; they have no real direct methods of control over anyone's knowledge or behavior—they are data sources, just like anything in the natural environment can be a source of data for us. The child is told that the fire will burn, but she doesn't have to listen to this voice (she is independent, brave, and powerful); she decides to listen (or not) to the 'clues' around her.
What on earth are folks like Dr. Jefferson supposed to do with research on explicit instruction, worked examples, scripted lessons, if this is the basic student-centered view of naturalness? These research-backed protocols certainly don't map well to Jefferson's 'natural' student-centered worldview of teaching and learning (at least as I've guessed at it)—worse, they impliedly ask her to change this worldview wholesale, because this kind of research either assumes or directly implies the desirable presence of first-class, opaque, real, non-luminous beings made of "crude matter," true-blue, teacher-tellers, and these roles simply don't exist, except as harmful oppressors—or, only in part, as helpful ghosts—in student-centered views. "The voice inside is who you are," not the earthly out-of-touch opinions of your restrictive Uncle Owen or Chief Tui.
Another way of construing what is intended to be student-centered naturalness is as a representative of the idea that independent, individual activity can add up, in a self-organized way, to a collective good—an idea that has a long and mostly respectable history: Adam Smith's invisible hand, the wisdom of crowds, swarm intelligence, Hayek's spontaneous order, and so on. Mapped onto more of the contextual specificities of teaching and learning, these ideas create a scene where learning happens but the corruptive "teaching hand" is invisible, so to speak. Generations of students learn to not touch fires—and pass this on to their children—not because we have to coordinate and deploy knowledge and behavior as a culture, but because people just do what they do: caregivers be worrying about their kids all the time, and kids be always trying to play too close to the Sun. Some adults will issue warnings, some will physically block their children from the flames, some will stand back and watch—at the ready—and some won't even notice; some kids will listen to the warnings and never voluntarily touch a flame in their entire lives, most will listen but forget, some will do the opposite of what they are told, and some won't care one way or the other: "cats and monkeys—monkeys and cats—all human life is there!" We all follow our "individual paths," and all this activity (as long as it is reflective) adds up to learning to not touch fire, to organized, collective good in general.
Corruption can set in to this student-centered world as well—where the role of "teller" in the culture is either force-ghosted or, like cats and monkeys, neutered of any intent to control, influence, or modify others' minds. In the former reality, the corruption is already there. It's Chief Tui. It's all the power-wielding "teachers" out there who "tell me what to do and who to be" (kids are so adorably honest). In the latter, similarly, corruption and coercion are introduced to the picture by actors who have not yet gotten with the new program—those fuddy-duddies who would try to divert us from our 'paths,' to try to step back and organize and control free and independent people.
So What 'Natural' Should We Go With?
Both of the viewpoints of 'the natural' laid out above—the 'social control' version and the 'no teachers' version (in both its flavors, as I see them)—can admit problems and frustrations. Neither is a utopian vision. Both are very real possibilities for ways to organize ourselves socially in order to teach and learn. Which vision, then, of the world is implied by the research, one where we control and are controlled, or one where we are epistemically alone?
A further significant issue we face before we can answer that last question is the tendency of both viewpoints to claim that they are student-centered, when one of them is clearly not, and the tendency of both viewpoints to claim that they are oriented to controlling the inputs and outputs of instruction, when one of them is clearly not. (It should be no surprise to us, incidentally, to see these two views misunderstand each other—and misunderstand themselves in relation to each other—since they have spent the last nearly two centuries talking "past each other.") They need to be more honest with themselves and with others.
Clarifying the Choices
For starters, proponents of (what I'll be calling, just to keep things distinct) 'social control' naturalism, as we have outlined it above, are decidedly not at all student-centered. This has something to do with the 'control' aspect of this viewpoint. Since I, the adult, the teller, the teacher, in the circumstance of instruction have taken on the duty of transmitting knowledge and trying to control the immediate and longer term consequences of that teaching, there's just no way that I'm going to get 'student-centered' with 30, 40, 300 individual students. But this logistical limitation to 'social-control' naturalness is mostly irrelevant. Even if that viewpoint were responsible for just one student at a time, it would not be student-centered. It would still be something like this going on with the teaching:
"Look at this interesting thing called the double-slit experiment that our ancestors invented. Before you (and I) were born, we (not white men, not 'gilded men', not 'positivists'—we!) have been mapping out this area we call "physics," and we have discovered that this experiment is a kind of load-bearing example for some of the work in that area. We take it to mean this, that, and the other, so far, and it works like this or that other idea you sort of know about. You are now an initiate in this community of knowledge. When other people discuss or mention the double-slit experiment, you will recognize what they are talking about, and maybe you will want to, and be able to, join in the discussion. Your 'take' on this knowledge is very important, and whatever it is, we want to hear it—even if it is simply repeating it, because this strengthens its presence in the community—but because this is such an important cultural tool, we feel the need to control, collectively (including the student), how that knowledge appears and how it is used in that community (so, there will be assessments). We expect it to be handled carefully, demanding your attentiveness, we expect it to be kept safe—inside your memory—and we expect this knowledge to be wielded appropriately: whether you want to amplify it, critique it, remix it, or reject it, you agree to do so through the proper channel—the collectively owned transmission model of culture."
There is nothing 'student-centered' about this still very natural (and ancient) view of instruction.
For its part, though, the student-centered view also has some honesty to face up to. If proponents of social control must see that they are not student-centered, then proponents of the student-centered view must see that they are. This means, I would argue, admitting that their view of naturalness is more aspirational than real. It is a kind of uncovered, unburdened, pick-your-nose-and-adjust-your-bits, naked naturalness that we gave up when we ate of the fruit of the tree of infinite communal knowledge, not the postlapsarian naturalness of living in a community, figuring out how to till the soil together, all of us made of the same dust to which we all, so far, return.
Student-Centered Just Doesn't Work
As I've tried to frame it above—from behind my own eyeballs, certainly, but also more or less honestly, I hope—the student-centered view tries to represent the child's view of naturalness by removing the major source of child oppression: knowledgeable caregivers and other adults who take tradition and transmission seriously (most of us, most of the time) and who act in the world with these beliefs. Not only is this view mostly unworkable in reality, especially without a pre-existing landscape of social-control mechanisms, it is entirely muddled with failed empathy:
We should empathize with the elderly who don't get enough food, the victims of religious persecution, the poor without adequate health care […] But we can't. Intellectually, we can value the lives of all these individuals; we can give them weight when we make decisions. But what we can't do is empathize with all of them. Indeed, you cannot empathize with more than one or two people at the same time. . . .
This sort of effect takes us back to the metaphor of empathy as a spotlight. The metaphor captures a feature of empathy that its fans are quick to emphasize—how it makes visible the suffering of others, makes their troubles real, salient, and concrete. From the gloom, something is seen. Someone who believes we wouldn’t help if it weren't for empathy might see its spotlight nature as its finest aspect. But the metaphor also illustrates empathy's weaknesses. A spotlight picks out a certain space to illuminate and leaves the rest in darkness; its focus is narrow. What you see depends on where you choose to point the spotlight, so its focus is vulnerable to your biases.
Thus, often, our nostalgia for childhood, along with its Edenic representations reinforced in the culture, biases our 'empathy' for children as a group into believing that they, like us, want to live forever in the mythical land of coercion-free innocence. So we conjure for them an otherworldly Eden, pretending that we are just giving them what they want—no coercive authority, no rules (except for when we need them). In reality, most children display a fairly strong desire to be a functioning, capable, knowledgeable member of adult and peer culture as fast as they possibly can, not to make a home of childhood. Indeed, how could they want to make a home of it when they have been nowhere else to compare it with? Perhaps, in the end, given our uncrossable distance from childhood, we have no choice but to make of it what we want, not what children need:
To live—is not that just endeavoring to be otherwise than this Nature? Is not living valuing, preferring, being unjust, being limited, endeavoring to be different? And granted that your imperative, "living according to Nature," means actually the same as "living according to life"—how could you do DIFFERENTLY? Why should you make a principle out of what you yourselves are, and must be? In reality, however, it is quite otherwise with you: while you pretend to read with rapture the canon of your law in Nature, you want something quite the contrary, you extraordinary stage-players and self-deluders! In your pride you wish to dictate your morals and ideals to Nature … to see Nature FALSELY.… But this is an old and everlasting story: what happened in old times with the Stoics still happens today, as soon as ever a philosophy begins to believe in itself. It always creates the world in its own image; it cannot do otherwise.
But Maybe We Should Make It Work
Even if we agree that social control represents how communication—including teaching and learning—hums in our everyday, adult society (with all its failings), perhaps it is better for child culture to be different in fundamental ways. As adults, we follow all kinds of "rules" without knowing much about them, and we write rules for others to follow. Both activities require reflection and cultural understanding, but maybe we should focus, with students, just on co-writing rules because this is empowering, not coercive. As adults, and as children, we learn cultural knowledge almost exclusively by being told things, but maybe we should focus our emphasis in the classroom on learning independently because this is empowering, not coercive. As adults and children, we absorb a huge amount of knowledge that is scripted, but using it in instruction is perhaps not a good idea, given that it "disappears" the classroom teacher while simultaneously making her the very model of authoritarianism and control, as many of her words and moves are chosen for her—unfreedom, sanctioned by the community and on full display—coercive, not empowering.
Perhaps there is a robust culture of childhood, where adults do in fact sort of 'fade in' more and more as the child matures—a fading in of control and cultural expectations, with a concomitant fading out of epistemic solitude. The challenge we face, then—what is "off" here—is how we should operationalize this culture of childhood and facilitate a transition from it to adult culture. Too 'adult,' too fast can perhaps impair identity formation, stunt creativity, and instill a debilitating fear of failure; too slow and children may miss out on developing adult social skills and the ability to navigate adult environments, they may develop boundary issues and issues with authority, of course.
If this is the case, if this is our common challenge, we will need to face that challenge together with discussions inside adult culture, with adult norms. Which means that we don't get to just complain about the world being 'off' and have everyone scramble to figure out what we're talking about, riding to our rescue to address our solipsistically expressed concerns. And it means that we don't get to just do our own things in education, rolling our eyes at the opinions from other viewpoints, shielded by either the clatter and clockwork of research procedures or by the mesmerizing sheen of nurtural infallibility. We have to use our words, have a presence, and make sense to other adults in our community, who likely don't agree with us totally or at all.
We have to teach.
