| |
 Print
Back to School part 2
9-20-2017
Summer is over. Fall is here and, all over the country, schools are back in session. From pre-school to doctorate programs, students trust their teachers to provide them with a worthwhile educational experience and society trusts the educational institutions to produce honorable, educated citizens. In our last column, we explored the perspective of Dr. Kieran Egan, renowned professor at SFU, whose lifework is to show that our current education system is a muddle of three competing ideologies – each of which is worthy on its own, but incompatible when mixed together resulting in a tenuous balance that fully satisfies very few people. Schools end up jumbling together socializing the young so that they adopt acceptable beliefs and behaviours; delivering a rigorous academic curriculum that prepares students for more advanced material as they progress through the grade levels; while simultaneously creating space for individual relevance, motivation, and exploration. These three foundational goals are at odds with each other.
Last time, we explored the goals of socialization and the academic mind. An ever-growing number of functions that historically were the privy of the home, community, and religious organizations are now offloaded onto schools. Lessons in daily physical activity, social media dangers, drug awareness, and sex education illustrate how schools are increasingly being called on to deal with society’s problems. On the other hand, high stakes testing, rampant in the US, and the mounting pressure of getting into top universities compel schools to design rigorous academic programs that pack young minds full of facts and figures. Caught between these two oscillating goals, far too often what students really learn is how to please (or annoy, depending on their preference) teachers and how to do well on tests.
If this was not enough, modern education also aims to “follow the lead of the child” in a developmental way through attending to each student’s ability level, learning style, aptitudes, and sensitivities. Teachers work hard to create lessons that are relevant in the lives of the students by focusing on real world problems and hands-on activities. In this model, educators are expected to alter their teaching techniques instead of blaming a student for not learning. Indeed, Egan states, “These are ideas that have become a part of the "common sense," taken-for-granted folklore of so many educators today. It would now be considered strange not to recognize the importance of students' varying learning styles, the value of methods of teaching that encourage students' active inquiry, and the significant differences among students at different ages.” Furthermore, in a developmental approach, “The construction of a common core curriculum for all children therefore is not simply undesirable but actually impossible. Each child's experience, even of the same curriculum content, is necessarily different. We should recognize this, and let the unique experience and needs of each child be the determiner of the curriculum.” BC’s revised curriculum embraces this philosophy as evident in the loft status bestowed on inquiry-based learning and universal design strategies.
In Egan’s thinking, this student-centered approach should have revolutionized education a hundred years ago. But it didn’t. Education can’t advance because we’re stuck at the basic level of determining the purpose of education. Until we stop debating the “why” of education, we can’t competently address the “how”. Egan likens the situation to “blind men who encounter an elephant, these ideas bring limited perspectives to the discussion. Worse yet, they bring views that often stand in direct contradiction to one another.” He goes on, “Until these deep fault lines in thinking of education are resolved, then education will continue to be contentious.”
Thankfully, Egan’s purpose isn’t to solely bemoan the current state of educational affairs. He boldly offers an alternative goal of education, although he doesn’t claim it as original, instead presenting it as “simply a reorganization of long-known ideas into a coherent scheme.” In his Cognitive Tools Theory, education is “reconfigured in a way that preserves adequate socialization, academic cultivation, and individual development disconnected from the educational ideas we have inherited. We have to hang onto the babies while tossing out their dirty old bathwater.”
By focusing on the development of distinctive kinds of understanding through the use of cognitive tools, Egan offers a fresh look at education that traces its roots to the birth of humankind. In the next column, we’ll learn how to really go “back” to school, and that by going back through the history of our human development we can create a harmonized present and vibrant future.
Zainab Dhanani is a life-long educator. She can be reached at z_dhanani@yahoo.ca
Footnotes:
|