[Its.an.education.project] From Piaget

[Edward Cherlin]

On Sat, May 17, 2008 at 1:03 AM, Bill Kerr <billkerr at gmail.com> wrote:
> hi tony,
>
> not so much a "single cause" but trying to discuss the deeper philosophical
> and developmental issues associated with the word - and sorry if I gave the
> impression that I had clearly identified a single cause (I do have more to
> say than that)
>
> I would say there are many causes at a surface level - you list some of them
> - but what is important is to try to dig deeper to underlying more
> fundamental reasons (and the piaget article does do that)
>
> what do teachers / educators really need? one possible answer is better
> philosophy and understanding of epistemology - insofar as free software and
> green machines can be vehicles of that then that will mean success in those
> particular environments (more success than in environments that don't tackle
> those questions)

The fundamental epistemological error of Instructionism is a
deliberate one, the epistemology of The Right Answer, as decided by
the state. Don't teach children or teachers to understand. Teach them
to follow orders, in particular to accept that schooling is education,
and that the content of textbooks is clear, complete, and correct (my
mantra as a tech writer) even when it is incomprehensible,
fragmentary, or demonstrably false. Use "standardized tests" to
enforce this epistemology. Ignore the existence of ignorance and
doubt. Ignore the tentative gropings toward larger truths
characteristic of the history of the sciences, and present them as
guardians of established fact. Similarly for political and social
institutions. Whatever is, is what is supposed to be, now and
forevermore.

Once established as the dominant culture, this becomes
self-reinforcing. Most people are unaware that they are in a box. To
talk of thinking outside the box makes as much sense as talking about
thinking in the twenty-fourth dimension.

Instructionism grants teachers a flattering sense of power, but
demands that they wield it.

Constructivism/Constructionism suggests that every child creates an
epistemology adequate in some way to its experience (though not to the
standard of rigor some of us still know to look for in math and
science), and that the best way to avoid the error is to change the
experience. But to what? The Devil is always in the details. As in The
Life of Brian, the message of independence can easily become the new
conformity, given lip service, but neither practiced nor understood.
You cannot order people to have Constructionist experiences, but you
can pretend to.

To teach teachers Constructionism would require that we get permission
to put them through a remedial course of what they should have learned
in childhood. It would require that we create the complete
Constructionist course of study by Constructionist methods. But none
of us knows how to do that. We know how those who resist the
epistemology of The Right Answer can get to Constructionism, but not
how to rescue the lost souls who have embraced it, and who have
extended it within their own personal epistemologies to all of their
experiences; who have made it the basis of their ontologies and their
ethics all through their lives; who know no other, and have no
foothold or fingerhold left for introducing them to any other form of
experience.

It is not for nothing that Jesus said, "Except ye become as little
children, ye shall not see the Kingdom of Heaven."

-- 
Edward Cherlin
End Poverty at a Profit by teaching children business
http://www.EarthTreasury.org/
"The best way to predict the future is to invent it."--Alan Kay