Ben Compton, replying to LO9385, says that he has to "challenge
again the notion that there is something wrong with educating people for
work., and that he has "never, never, never, heard a clear description of
the problem."
I can appreciate his criticism of those who define "work" narrowly,
and can agree with him that education that helps individuals "think clearly,
articulate clearly, and take action that is congruent with their thinking"
is fundamentally work related.
However, when he gets down to specifics and says "Early education
should focus on reading, writing and arithmetic, " and that these skills
provide access to all else, I get a pretty skeptical. My "thing," as just
about everyone on this list should know by now, is that the PRIMARY task of
general education, at every level, is to make explicit the implicit mental
models--personal, societal, and cultural--that guide our individual and
collective action and thought. For me, not merely reading, writing, and
arithmetic, but ALL disciplines are mere means to this end.
If I'm right (and I welcome with enthusiasm the views of those who
disagree) I'm left to wonder about just what sort of apprenticeship
experience might lead to this particular outcome. "Hands on" educator that
I am, I'd be elated to discover that such was possible (and accessible to
all students).
I'm certainly no defender of traditional education with its emphasis
on the mere mental storing and recall of existing, secondhand knowledge. But
neither do I believe that workplace apprenticeships are an adequate path to
a general education-- enormously valuable, and being operationalized to some
degree in magnet schools, but not nearly enough. I advocate a third and
much more radical approach to general education--the one noted above (making
explicit our emplicitly held models of reality). To that end, I maintain
that the FIRST task at every level is to help each student describe and
analyze IMMEDIATE experience (I mean that literally), and then formally,
systematically organize the product of that description and analysis to
provide a comprehensive, systemically integrated picture of her or his
mental model of reality. (Yes, kids can do this.)
As unlikely as it may seem, what emerges from this process is a
comprehensive intellectual tool that couldn't possibly be more practical, a
tool of immediate applicability in, say, deciding the placement of
production equipment on a shop floor, or troubleshooting an ineffective work
team, or patching up a troubled marriage, or making far more sense of the
morning newspaper (including almost always a perspective on the relative
significance of news stories that differs radically from that which
determines their location in the paper).
And a great, great deal more. If we really believe our rhetoric
about the virtues of freedom, I know of no surer path to real freedom than
the making explicit of the implicit, unexamined premises that shape us as
individuals and as societies. Not until we "make the familiar strange," not
until we move students from "knowing," to "knowing what they know," will
they be able to begin to explore their enormous, untapped potential and we
to enjoy the benefits of that exploration.
Our assumptions about the nature and purposes of education, and of
the capabilities of the young are, in my view, disastrously pedestrian.
--
Marion
<mbrady@digital.net>
http://ddi.digital.net/~mbrady
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations
For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>