[lbo-talk] MH & DG on university

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Tue Feb 28 04:49:16 PST 2012


I think in this whole thread there is a profound misunderstanding of what schooling can provide. This goes back to the mystifications brought about by the ideological term, "educational system." There is no such thing. Given this, then the term self-education becomes a redundancy: that's what _education_ means: what the individual makes out of her entire life and her interactions with the world. That is the reason Henry Adams's title is accurate while Whitehead's title is a lie.

And if you start thinking abut the "Schooling System" (which does exist, which has its merits, which is also a prison [incarceral] system, but which as a _system_, as an artificial system created by u.s. political process, which cannot but have very _limited_ aims/results*) THEN some clarity might begin to emerge.

For example, it might be correct (and it might not be) to discuss the process of schooling in elementary arithmetic in terms of efficiency or inefficiency, learning or failing to learn. But when Joanna speaks of "deep learning" the discussion has gone over the cliff, for it involves (a) a confusion between schooling and (self)education, thereby obscuring the complex relationship (in_ schooling) between teaching and learning. I'm assuming that there are skills and knowledge which require teaching: it's a technical problem whether or not such skills/knowledge require a direct relationship between instructor and learner. For example, the process by which one non-medical person learns to give an anti-biotic 'infusion' each day through an installed IV (called a PICC). The first three days a visiting nurse demonstrated the procedure to Jan or watched her do it, making suggestions. That calls for _teaching_, and probably for a direct relationship between teacher and pupil. It _could_, perhaps, all be put in a manual (print or electronic), but that would be pretty damn inefficient -- perhaps lethally so. Now at the level of mere word usage it is of course correct English to call that "education": I'm not engaged in advocating word magic; I'm talking about a distinction in reality which, given the history of the words in question, is confused by ordinary usage of "education" but which can be more easily grasped if we make a verbal distinction: "schooling" vs "education." The latter word tends to conceal the existence of that distinction, with the result that there is endless confusion about what "real" education or "real" learning is -- those distinctions often being a clumsy way to get at the distinction between "[self-]education" and "schooling" I have been positing.

I think that if we kept this distinction in mind (through theuse of separate terms) we could more intelligently and with less confusion debate what should be and what shouldn't (or can't) be included in _schooling_, as well as debating the methods, etc which should be used in the u.s. system of schooling. In the realm of the Political Imagination, consider the following:

The carceral features of the public school system should be eliminated. This could be achieved by combing in the same building (a) a free & voluntary daycare system for all children from 4 to 16 and (b) (voluntary) schooling. (There would be no age serration in either). The schooling would include classes in reading, and the children and/or parents would decide whether they wished to attend those sessions. A child could simply drop out of a 'class' that was painful. And this is a practical matter. My younger brother went to school for a month or so, then said it wasn't working because they were having them read and he didn't know how to read. So he dropped out for a month or two while my father taught him to read, then went happily back to school. (This was in what was then called "Beginners" rather than "kindergarten," and reading was taught at that level.) Such a system would embody both Warehousing and Elementary Training. There would be no pretense that this was "Education" (except in so far as all human interactions are part of an individual's self-education). It would NOT involve certification. Businesses and universities would have to work out their own damn selection processes with their own resources. No more free help to personnel officers.

A proposal can be utopian (negative sense) in two ways: (a) it would be unworkable in practice (2) there is no political process by which it could be implemented. My proposal here is utopian in the second but not the first sense. Hence it _does_ offer a useful perspective on the present.

Carrol

-----Original Message----- From: lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org [mailto:lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org] On Behalf Of 123hop at comcast.net Sent: Monday, February 27, 2012 9:14 PM To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] MH & DG on university

That's a great and true statement: "Teaching and learning are inherently inefficient."

-- Repetition is key.

-- Deep learning requires forgetting.

-- Deep learning requires getting things wrong.

None of this is "efficient."

Thanks Jeffrey, that's a key notion to counter the factory model crap.

Everyone please amplify if you can think of other stuff to add.

Joanna

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