In dispraise of
teaching as a subversive activity
Harry Fletcher-Wood
In many ways, Teaching as a Subversive
Activity made me a significantly better teacher.
In retrospect though, an insufficiently critical reading,
early in my career, led me astray.
This post considers some progressive promises I was
seduced by and have since recanted.
I’ll outline three problematic claims:
Problematic Claim
#1 – Everything is changing; everything must change
The authors contend that the ‘communications revolution,’
the ‘change revolution’
and ‘burgeoning bureaucracy’ mean that for graduates of
American schools:
“The best that can be said of you is that you are a
walking encyclopaedia
of outdated information.” In
consequence everything from previous ages should be jettisoned:
“You need a new kind of education.”
Is everything
changing?
I’m currently reading Something New Under the Sun:
An Environmental History of the Twentieth Century;
the opening paragraph highlights
that while “The ubiquity of wickedness and the vanity of
toil” are unchanged in millennia
“the place of humankind in nature is not what it was.”
The last century was
“unusual for the intensity of change and the centrality
of human effort in provoking it.”
Likewise, a recent article from John
Lanchester, entitled ‘The Robots are Coming’
reviews a book arguing we are on “the verge of a new
industrial revolution,
one which will have as much impact on the world as the
first one” (it also offers some reassurance).
But there are
excellent counter-arguments to be made.
For example, it has been argued (to my regret, I forget
by whom) that the telegraph
was a far more radical form of communications revolution
than the internet.
Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slatemakes a compelling
case for continuities in human experience:
History and culture, then, can be grounded in psychology,
which can be grounded in computation, neuroscience,
genetics, and evolution.
I think we have reason to believe that the mind is
equipped with a battery of emotions, drives,
and faculties for reasoning and communicating, and that
they have a common logic across cultures, are difficult to erase or redesign
from scratch, were shaped by natural selection
acting over the course of human evolution, and owe some
of their basic design
(and some of their variation) to information in the
genome.
We certainly face
new crises –
some analogous to those of the Sixties, some of our own
making.
But to argue the content and structure of schooling
should be rebuilt from the first steps
seems an over-reaction. Perhaps Machiavelli put it
best:
Whoever wishes to foresee the future must consult the
past; for human events ever resemble
those of preceding times. This arises from the fact that
they are produced by men
who have been, and ever will be, animated by the same
passions
and thus they must necessarily have the same results.”
Problematic Claim
#2 – Relevance and questioning trumps knowledge
The authors contend that teachers are out of touch with
their students and their wishes.
There is probably a grain of truth in this now, as there
was then. Their solution is starting – indeed, basing everything in
questions formulated by students. They contend that students
must be motivated before they can learn. The
idea that relevance is only a function
of immediate knowledge. In the process, the authors
take an axe to
“the kind of irrelevant curricula that comprise most of
conventional schooling.”
They take these ideas to their furthest conclusions in
their proposals for ‘City Schools’
(schools serving “urban disadvantaged children”).
They propose that these schools
should focus on a range of ‘processes’ designed on
problems of immediate importance
and relevance – community projects, including “rat
extermination,” ‘athletic services’
and a range of services geared immediate daily problems,
including repair services for household appliances and
equipment.”
In this light, the exemplary dialogue they offer, shown
below is interesting:
In another dialogue, to the teacher’s question – “What
does ‘civil rights’ mean?”
The first student reply is “Doesn’t it depend on who is
defining it?
I don’t think Stokely Carmichael and Thurmond would see
it in the same way.”
These lessons demonstrate a deeply critical
interrogation of the world. But they overlook
what made them possible. Students come to class
with an extensive vocabulary (‘lexicographers’!) marshalled in complex
sentences, and an excellent knowledge
of current affairs. The authors themselves cite
authorities including Shakespeare, Einstein,
AN Whitehead, Hobbes, Locke, Orwell and Plato.
Postman and Weingartner are steeped in,
formed by, and reliant on, the knowledge they decry as
irrelevant.
The idea that students from the most deprived background should be exterminating
rats
while (presumably) their luckier peers are understanding the
world
has been dealt with particularly compellingly by Michael Fordham.
Problematic Claim
#3 – Structure is worthless
The authors are no fan of existing educational structures
– they advocate running courses
in which all students are told initially they will get an
A and are then encouraged to learn,
accepting that “There are always a few who will view the
situation
as an opportunity ‘goof off?’ So what?”
It’s worth reconsidering the transcript above for a
moment here. Where are the interruptions?
Not a single dialogue (there are a number of pages of
them) contains a single reminder to listen
or to take turns. There are many classroom
discussions being held like this in Britain today,
but they are not usually the ones filled by disaffected
students demanding changes.
Students whose lives already lack structure are the ones
most likely to ‘goof off’
if they find that the teacher has removed all structure
in their lessons.
An overstatement
Late in the book, there is a partial retraction:
Before making our final suggestion, we want to say a word
of assurance about the revolution
we are urging. There is nothing in what we have
said in this book that precludes the idea,
at one time or another, of any of the conventional
methods and materials of learning.
For certain specific purposes, a lecture, a film, a
textbook, a packaged unit, even a punishment,
may be entirely justified” (emphasis original).
On re-examining the book to write this post, I
wondered whether I was over-stating
what they advocated. But I overlooked this caveat
entirely until this reading.
I’d suggest that any teacher could benefit from
considering the challenges the authors make.
But I regret following some of their proposed solutions
too closely.
http://improvingteaching.co.uk/2015/04/19/in-dispraise-of-teaching-as-a-subversive-activity/
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