Tom Friedman, a columnist for the New York Times, describes the schooling of Islamic boys and young men in the Middle East. Taught exclusively by clerics, the teaching style is a classic of learning by transmission only. We call it indoctrination. When they attempt higher education, and a professor asks them to think about an issue, they have no way to do it. They have never before been asked to think or feel, to solve problems, only to accept what they are told. They therefore revert to even deeper fundamentalism. Would a dictator like a learn to learn approach? Not at all; he wants and needs his subjects to be indoctrinated, not to think for themselves. Learn to Learn can be considered education for democracy.
I am member of a very interesting professional group known as The Association for the Process Philosophy of Education.
The APPE is largely devoted to understanding and promulgating the work of Alfred North Whitehead, known as a process philosopher. Whitehead's work has been basic to my thinking about education, and to the learn to learn concept. I'm sure Whitehead would support L2L!
An article in our journal, "Process Papers", decried the fact that Whitehead's work, though extremely relevant, is little acted upon in our schools. It was very evocative for me, and I wrote a response to it which appeared in the most recent issue. It has to do with "Walking the Talk"; that is not only knowing about Whitehead, but "doing" Whitehead. Since Whitehead can be considered the father of process philosophy and since since Learn to Learn is really a subset of process education- at least as I use the words- I thought you might be interested. My response to the article follows.
Walking the Talk
Malcolm Evans’ thought provoking essay in PP7 (“A Worldview for Whiteheadian Educators”) helped me to organize my thoughts about the very basic problem that he presents. The problem he describes is that education is focused on a limited vision of purpose; the student is seen only as an economic creature. Malcolm clearly and powerfully tells us that process philosophers and Whiteheadian educators, using a constructive postmodernist frame, can be agents for change.
Malcolm also recognizes that although the educational ideas of Alfred North Whitehead have been available since 1929, “...there is little evidence of the influence of these ideas on our educational theory or practice”.
I would like to share some thoughts from my own perspective. I am an educational practitioner - public school teacher and administrator, college and university teacher, and one who has conducted workshops about teaching methods for post-secondary faculty. I am somewhat familiar with Whitehead, but am surely not an academic or a philosopher or a scholar.
I agree completely with Malcolm’s statement of the problem. American education seems to me to be in dismal straits, and sliding in at least some ways in the wrong direction. The current harsh political atmosphere, the counterproductive “No Child Left Behind”, the emphasis on competition and accountability, all support the wrong goals.
And I completely agree that the potential of a Whiteheadian/process philosophy/constructive postmodernist approach is enormous. Malcolm’s book, “Whitehead and Philosophy of Education” is clear and convincing.
The hiatus between excellent ideas and their implementation, however, is quite common. Democracy is an enlightened form of political organization, and the idea has been around for centuries, but not every country is a democracy. My sense is that many professors of education or educational philosophy, who powerfully support Whitehead’s views, still do their teaching almost entirely by lecturing, not by providing a Romance experience, helping their students to find the Precision in the experience, and then to develop their own Generalities. ANW might well say, “You’re talking about it, but you’re not doing it”. I was surprised that the Dickinson APPE conference, in 2000, although useful and relevant, was about Whitehead, but, with the exception of one very exciting workshop, did not illustrate Whitehead. Most presentations consisted of the presenter reading a paper to us. Excellent papers, about Whiteheadian education, but not illustrative of him, not utilizing the “discovery” implied by RPG. Perhaps I should be saying, “Of course; conferences are all about reading papers.” But somehow I wish that a conference about Whitehead could do Whitehead.
Thus I sense that an appropriate worldview is necessary, but not sufficient.
The question is “How do we make it happen?”
The following are some rather disorganized musings, certainly to share, but primarily for myself. How can we make education better? How can we help move education in the direction of seeing the student as a whole, not merely an economic entity; move in the direction of the five goals of a Whiteheadian education that Malcolm presented, the curriculum he outlines, and the appropriate instructional strategies he describes. How can we bring about change. How?
• It’s not enough to be right. Whose right? yours?, mine? ANW’s?, Dewey’s, George Bush’s?, John Kerry's? The degree to which ideas are utilized is not entirely related to how “good” the ideas are.
• It’s often the way that ideas are expressed that determines the extent to which they are accepted. Whiteheadian education implies, it seems to me, that ideas need to be appropriated, so that the learner has a sense of ownership. Democracy, important as it is, in order to be appropriated, must be discovered rather than imposed. Democratic structures, seen by the Iraquis as “ours, the Iraquis” will succeed; seen as “theirs, the Americans’” will fail. The task then becomes helping the Iraquis to discover democracy and appropriate it for themselves, not using military force to impose democracy on them. Quite different.
Simply telling people the right answers can create dependence and fundamentalism.
• I took a motorcycle trip across the heart of America a couple of years ago, partly to see what the culture of Middle America was like; the “Red” areas, the states that voted for Bush, as distinct from the “Blue” areas, the brackets on the east and west coasts, where Gore was the winner. It was when Bush was trying to build support for his invasion of Iraq. I stopped for breakfast at a small cafe in Southern Missouri, in the lovely Ozark country. I was the only customer. The only other person in the cafe was a motherly and pleasant woman; she was the owner, the cook, and the waitress. She wore a name tag that said “Helen”. After my delicious breakfast, I asked her, “What do you suppose people around here think about the the plan to invade Iraq?” She had never heard of the idea, and I think did not know that Iraq was a country. She said “All the people around here talk about is whether or not it’s going to rain”.
Jefferson was right when he said that a democracy requires an educated populace. And somehow I think that Jefferson would have appreciated ANW’s process ideas, in the hopes of creating not only learned people, but also learners. Another point - Helen undoubtedly voted for George Bush, and there are more “Helens” in the country than there are “Eds” and “Malcolms”.
• A very brief piece in the New York Times a few weeks ago was written by a man who lives in New York city, and was walking to work near Central Park. A truck came perilously close to hitting him. He yelled at the truck driver, something like ”Watch where you're going, stupid! You almost ran me over!”. To his chagrin, the truck stopped, the driver leaned out the window and said, also angrily, “Can’t you read? That sign says ‘No Pedestrian Crossing’”. The man looked, and sure enough the driver was right. Still angry, he said “OK, you're right, but does that give you an excuse to run me down?”. The truck driver thought briefly, said “No”, and drove on. The article ended with the words “Armageddon Avoided”.
Somehow we all have to learn, in the political world and the educational world and the interpersonal world, to be integrative, to work with those whose beliefs are not the same as ours. We don’t have to convince them of our worldview. Conflict can be OK, but we need the skills of resolution.
A few admonitions to myself, for myself-
• I need to engage in less “telling“, more listening.
• I need to teach and lead my workshops with the Romance-Precision-Generalization model, which I have translated for myself to “Experience”, “Analysis”, and Theory”. It’s inductive; it’s discovery oriented. It’s Whiteheadian, but I don’t even need to tell anyone that.
I need to be sure that I am not overly dependent myself, so that I don't need a big daddy to tell me what to do, and also be sure that I don’t engender excessive dependence in my students.
• I need to behave less as an expert, more as one who orchestrates resources around a person, and helps them, through EAT, to learn from their own experiences.
• I need to illustrate as much as I can being a critical thinker, a problem solver, a process person.
• I should reward the process of discovery more than the traditional “achievement”.
• I must be careful to avoid arrogance; having the right answer. Maybe I should be a bit tentative without losing passion.
• I need to be flexible, Protean, looking at both sides, saying “On the other hand...”; not fundamentalist
• I should try to be less adversarial, finding value in the other viewpoint.
• I should help people learn processes more than content, “how” more than “what”.
Ed Johnson
