Imposed order; domesticating the learner; dehumanisation
i am privileged to have worked with educators from across a wide spectrum of institutions and geographies over the last 19 years . Amazingly at this stage of my career, i find myself arriving at a tentative conclusion that education, especially formal education, is impossible. i risk rendering my work over the past two decades useless.
Order and Chaos
... everything I studied was not just useless but a well-organised scam... I started freaking out watching all these years of education evaporating in front of my eyes. - Nassim Taleb
On his first day at work, Nassim Taleb quickly realised that everything he learnt in university proved useless! Such an impossibility of education stems from its very design and location; the fracture is situated beyond the oft-mentioned dichotomy between theory and practice, which incidentally is false. Education is impossible because the classroom is well-defined, structured, hence order; whilst real-life is ill-defined, random, hence chaos.
Order, as Dr Jordan Peterson defines it, is achieving the results that you desire by doing what you believe would get you that particular outcome. That’s school. Teachers do what they do and if, in return, the students do as they are told, then the intended outcomes stipulated in the curriculum will be achieved. This is true insofar as the knowledge and skills being taught are well-established and (relatively) stable i.e. of the uni-structural and multi-structural levels in John Biggs’ SOLO Taxonomy. These levels point to outcomes that are quantitative in nature, where learning is marked by an increase in discreet knowledge and skills. Necessarily, such learning is focused on the reproduction of existing realities rather than the creation of an as-yet future. Tried and tested solutions are continually applied until inevitably the expected outcome is no more, then confusion and chaos!
Given that past solutions are often the causes of new problems, are we surprised?
Domesticating the Learner
False, imposed order disables learners’ natural instincts for creativity and negotiation hence domesticating them in the process. The majority of our children and graduates are incapable of surviving the VUCA world nor create their own future realities upon being “released” from school. Such a domestication is no different from keeping animals in the zoo where their abilities to hunt are dulled thereby rendering them incapable of surviving back in the wild.
Capabilities needed for new solutions are often associated with the remaining two levels of the SOLO Taxonomy - relational and extended abstract. These levels describe outcomes that qualitatively change the learner; often resulting in them seeing the world differently.
We can envision new ways that things could be better... The advantages of this are obvious: we can change the world so that the intolerable state of the present can be rectified in the future. The disadvantage to all this foresight and creativity is chronic unease and discomfort. - Jordan Peterson
Then there remains two options. One, to stop seeing and unreservedly accept what is told to us so that the present is tolerable. This option also tends to prevent creative “unease and discomfort” because nothing new is attempted nor contemplated. Other, reject the proffered orthodoxy and embrace passion.
As it currently is, only Option 1 is afforded in formal education.
Unfortunately, YouTube and Google probably fulfil this option better than schools and teachers. As such, it is impossible for formal education to make good on its promises to stakeholders.
Dehumanisation of Both the Teacher and Learner
Dehumanisation, which marks not only those whose humanity has been stolen, but also (though in a different way) those who have stolen it, is a distortion of the vocation of becoming more fully human. - Paulo Freire
Teaching and learning profound social actions that could empower. However, when reduced to a mechanical transfer of quantified facts from the teacher to student, the classroom as a lifeless conveyor belt of neatly packaged knowledge domesticates instead.
Whilst more people now have access to education, students are denied an education that is rooted in civility, politics and morals - a pedagogy that Giroux refers to as “a practice for freedom”. Freire believes that this loss of freedom disempowers students and by extension the teacher. Losing the ability to forge one’s own future is therefore dehumanising and oppressive.
This loss of vocation is exacerbated by the subjugation of formal schooling, especially in institutes of higher learning, to the service of the economic purpose and standardised testing. Ironically, the economic purpose is unable to be fulfilled precisely because students are incapable of solving real world problems given their inability to provide answers beyond the standardised tests. The vocation to be fully human is lost when the autonomy to create new realities and futures that are rooted in lived experience is lost.
Education is a human endeavour that has far-reaching consequences. In order to restore the being of our learners, dare we as teachers, say, “i do not know what the answer is."? Heck, why stop there? Allow surprises back in the classroom. Let teachers be free to declare "i’m not sure what you are going to learn today!”
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