Gentle Readers:
Edryce seems to suggest that the job of educators is to teach methods of
learning rather than content, for no educator's view of knowledge can
(apparently) take precedent over another person's. This represents a classical
argument over teaching methods: specifically traditional versus more modern
methods. There is a strong taste of postmodernism in the "modern" view/method.
(I sympathize with postmodern views--but it's wrongly applied here.)
Traditional teaching methods focus on what cognitive scientists have
termed domain-specific knowledge. More process-oriented (and more modern)
teaching methods have tended to teach procedural knowledge (how to learn and
where to find data). Traditional teaching has tended to teach models and their
rigorous application: viz., what are data and what are the best ways to
organize them and understand them?
The research in cognitive science--if it has had anything at all important to
say about learning--soundly contradicts the more process oriented teaching
perspectives. To learn about any subject at all, a person has to build on
previous knowledge (viz., domain-specific information) which in turn makes more
learning possible (hence the critical distinction between naive, novice, and
expert subjects). Contrarily, learning in one knowledge domain rarely
significantly aids or accelerates the ability to learn in other knowledge
domains. The ability to read physics, let's say, does not lead to increased
abilities to read and understand Shakespeare, American History, or Management
because each subject has its own vocabularies and concepts. That is, knowledge
games are fundamentally language games.
While one domain's knowledge may assist one to investigate and understand
another domain's knowledge (because no knowledge domain exists
completely independently of others), one must begin with a competent working
knowledge of at least one domain. The point of higher learning is not to
cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing, but to extend the number
of operations which we can perform without thinking about them (a point made
later by more than a few cognitive scientists--and Alfred Whitehead).
This means that students must first learn rules well; then they must learn how
to apply the rules; then--and only then--may they fruitfully go beyond or break
the rules. Breaking the rules of any knowledge domain (or learning how to break
them and when) is a clear sign of transcendence, which is what higher and higher
learning and education is all about. It is how grade schoolers matriculate to
secondary levels, and so forth to university levels of knowledge.
I suspect that many of today's teachers want to use procedural teaching methods
because it is easier and because the world has become less of a certain and
well-defined place than it once was. Students have become much more cynical and
wise to the subtleties of authority and knowledge.
Well, so what? No one ever said that teaching was supposed to be easy.
The difficulty of teaching in today's postmodern world is no reason why any
teacher should relegate his or her responsibility and put the burden of teaching
on students' shoulders.
I argue that we will add considerably more value to our students lives if we
teach the fundamentals first and make sure they really get it. I don't
think we've been doing that very well.
There is very poor empirical analysis to show that teaching *processes* have
enhanced the performance of naive or novice subjects in knowledge-specific
domains.
Cheers to all,
M.
Michael Levenhagen
High-Technology Strategy & General Management
College of Business, Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, CA