My Opinion on 5 Works about Education, Teaching, and Learning - Volume 9

Buckle up. In this edition I cover a progressive educator criticizing progressive education, a school system founded on a new religion, a public school teacher turned homeschool advocate, a physicist selling computers as the answer, and creative schools from a small town in Italy.

'Experience and Education' by John Dewey 1938

Dewey was a popular philosopher and psychologist. He wrote a number of works on education. This is a short book that he wrote later in life and is better than his early books on education. Ideals often get corrected by reality over time.

Dewey was the leader of progressive education. He makes good criticisms of traditional education. But, he also points out that progressive education was largely just a rejection of traditional education. They rejected everything, the good and the bad, and largely just ended up with a different type of bad education.

I like a lot of what Dewey points out in this book. A lot of it seems like it should be obvious when it's said, but obvious things aren't always obvious, and they are often ignored in practice. He says: teachers shouldn't just tell students things to memorize, but they shouldn't just ignore the kid and hope that it turns out well, experience is made out of internal and external circumstance, experiences in the present are effected by the past and effect the future, spoiling a kid limits their ability to experience in the future, and being too strict does the same. Basically, there are two easy paths. One is traditional education, the other is the rejection of traditional education. The third path is the hardest, thinking through how to actually improve education.

Dewey is a big proponent that teachers should plan group activities where the students can work together on something, and the nature of this planned social environment with its explicit and implied rules helps to control behavior in a positive manner, with the teacher as a leader of group activities.

Dewey advocates for freedom as the end of education, and partially the means, but that there's an error in thinking it's the complete means and that "freedom from" is the end whereas "freedom to" should be the end. He notes, "The ideal aim of education is creation of power of self-control. But the mere removal of external control is no guarantee for the production of self-control."

In rereading this book Dewey's views support my structure of tutoring by combining the interests of the parents and student with guidance from the teacher very nicely.

An example of how Dewey thinks both traditional and progressive schools are wrong on how they tackle the subject of history: "The way out of scholastic systems that made the past an end in itself is to make acquaintance with the past a means of understanding the present. Until this problem is worked out, the present clash of educational ideas and practices will continue. On the one hand, there will be reactionaries that claim that the main, if not the sole, business of education is transmission of the cultural heritage. On the other hand, there will be those who hold that we should ignore the past and deal only with the present and future."

This book helped me realize that Dewey realized that traditional education wasn't suited to modern life, but progressive education had failed in its first iteration as well, and that arranging a new educational method was more difficult than either the traditional or the failed progressive methods. Western civilization has so far failed to find that better method. My method combining modern academic writing, ancient rhetoric, student interest, parent oversight, teacher guidance, and formal negotiation is the best method I've seen so far that does this. I didn't realize it before, but I seem to be working on solving the problems set by Dewey.

'The Education of Children from the Standpoint of Theosophy' by Rudolf Steiner 1907

Steiner was a type of spiritualist that started a new religious movement. Bigger than his religious movement has been his education movement, known as Waldorf education, with the first school opening in Germany in 1919 by one of Steiner's followers that owned a factory. Now they have well over 1,000 schools in the world, so it's worth looking at.

It seems to me that you would need to accept their religious assertions for the school to fully make sense. But parts of it can make sense without fully accepting their worldview, and I know there are people that send their kids to Catholic or other religious schools without strictly being of the faith, simply because the school is better than the government schools options. From the religion's standpoint it's a great way to grow converts as well.

Steiner said that there are three different significant phases of a persons life. These approximately align with biology and stages noted by psychologists, they're even close to the stages Montessori uses, Steiner just labels them oddly. He says, “Thus then, Theosophy must speak of three births of man.” Stage one is from birth to "second teeth" at about 7 years old, then from "second teeth" to puberty around 14, and then from puberty on.

During the first phase he thinks it's important for the child to mostly just experience good things and explore. He says, "It is not by moral texts, nor by rational precepts, but by what is done visibly before the child by the grown-up people around him, that he is influenced in the manner indicated. Instruction produces effects only upon the etheric body, not upon the physical, and up to the age of seven the etheric body is surrounded by a protective etheric shell, just as the physical body until physical birth is surrounded by the body of the mother. That which ought to be developed in this etheric body in the way of ideas, habits, memory, etc., before the age of seven, must develop itself “spontaneously,” in the same way as the eyes and ears develop themselves in the womb of the mother without the influence of the external light."

During the second stage he emphasizes the need for heroes, says that memory work is important, and notes that everything should be thought of as having a deeper spiritual connection rather than things just being physical objects. He also says play is important, and I've heard of Waldorf education emphasizing music.

In the third stage is when he says people can fully awaken their astral bodies, but that it's important not to do this before people are actually ready. He also notes that these are just a few notes about education and not a complete program.

I've heard of Steiner before, but this is the only thing I've read from him. It helped me realize that a successful education movement can grow in a practical way from a new worldview with very different ways of communicating and thinking. This book is from over a decade before the first school was formed. But still, it surprises me that this has grown into a successful education movement. 

'How Children Learn' by John Holt 1967

Holt was a government school elementary teacher for several years. He realized the system doesn't work very well and wrote a book criticizing public schools. He became a consultant and tried reforming public schools. He realized that didn't work, and then started advocating for homeschooling.

Holt advocates for a student-led approach following the child's curiosity. Here are a few quotes that give an indication of his ideas:

"Most of the many things children learn, and that we all learned as children--to walk, talk, read, write, etc.--they learn by trying to do them, making mistakes, and then correcting the mistakes. They learn by what mathematicians call "successive approximations"; that is, they do something, compare the result with the desired goal (doing it the way bigger people do it), see some of the differences (their mistakes), and try to reduce these differences (correct their mistakes). All children do this, and all are good at it; even in the homes of the busiest mistake correctors, the children themselves correct many more mistakes than are pointed out to them."

"The worst damage we do with all this testing is to the children's own confidence and self-esteem, their belief that others trust them to learn and that they can therefore trust themselves. For every unasked for test is above all else a statement of no confidence in the learner. That I check up at all on what you have learned proves that I fear you have not really learned it. For young children, these repeated votes of no confidence can be devastating."

"What teachers and learners need to know is what we have known for some time: first, that vivid, vital, pleasurable experiences are the easiest to remember, and secondly, that memory works best when unforced, that it is not a mule that can be made to walk by beating it."

"All I am saying in this book can be summed up in two words--Trust Children."

This book helped reinforce my ideas about following the curiosity of the student. It also helped me see the progression of disillusionment that a number of people go through: from believing in government schools, to believing government schools can be fixed, to realizing that you need to get away from government schools.

'Beyond the Hole in the Wall' by Sugata Mitra 2012

I'm going to be more critical of this book than tech billionaires, artificial intelligence proponents, and transhumanists would like. But, they are all wrong.

Mitra was a professor of theoretical physics, but famous for an educational experiment called The Hole in the Wall. This was initially done in India. The basic idea is to make a computer available in a public space, such as the wall of a building, and let kids just use it. By playing with it the kids learn how to open files and the paint program, get on the internet, play games, etc. Naturally, some of the kids also learn information that the computer gives them access to. Also, if the computer has certain learning materials loaded on it then the kids learn about those things. This experiment had success and grew quite a lot. Mitra and the company he worked for developed specific technologies for having computers in public areas like parks, and received several patents.

You can imagine if you just randomly have computers in parks what's going to happen. People are going to play video games, scroll social media, and other things that aren't learning on the computers. There are obvious things you can do to try to limit this. You can make the computers shaped in a way that it's awkward for an adult to use them, you can put restrictions in the programs for what can be done on the computer, and you can have people monitor and enforce who uses them. Some of these things have been done.

The book itself alternates talking about these experiments with a fictional narrative of a child in the future around advanced technology. It's very idealistic about technology, politics, and human nature.

We can think about history and understand some of the limits and opportunities of this type of philosophy. This type of technological and institutional revolution has happened before. The printing press made information more available than it had ever been before. That brought with it good things and bad things, because people are both good and bad. It was easier to spread truth, and easier to spread lies.

We can think about the hole in the wall experiments in a more physical way. Imagine a giant bookstore with all sorts of things available on just about every subject you can imagine. But, you don't have to buy the books. You can just walk around looking at things, reading about anything you want, learning anything you want. This is a library. They've been around for a long time, and after the printing press membership libraries came into existence, and then eventually a large number of government libraries.

Libraries have had a huge impact on the development of the modern world. Benjamin Franklin started the first subscription library in the American British Colonies in 1731. Libraries transformed the lives of Andrew Carnegie and Thomas Sowell, one of the top industrialists and one of the top intellectuals in American history. Andrew Carnegie became the richest man in the world and donated money to build thousands of libraries around the world. They have been societally transformative, and grew prolifically.

But, having libraries didn't fix all of education and learning. Theoretically they could, but in practice that theory would have turned out to be stupid. This thinking about computers and the internet as the solution to all learning and education is similar. Theoretically it could fix all of education and learning, but a century from now that theory will turn out to have been stupid. Having access to a computer and the internet is like having access to a library, just a lot more information. For some people, they need very little else, but that's a very small percentage of people.

Where this idea really shines is in places where people don't otherwise have access to information and technology. India is so poor and has so many bad areas, even as it's developing, that it's a good place for this. In a similar way that setting up libraries in those areas would help kids. (Also, notice computers are a normal part of the services that libraries offer because that's part of our technological world.) But, the computer kiosks are cheaper to set up than a library, cheaper to operate, have access to more information, and can do things books can't like audio and video. So, it's like putting into place a leveraged library, which makes sense.

Mitra promotes what he calls Minimally Invasive Education (MIE), and based on seeing kids naturally work in groups organized Self-Organized Learning Environments (SOLE) where an adult oversees the children as they work on answering questions that the adult has asked them to solve by using the computer in groups.

He states that only three things really need to be taught now: 1) reading comprehension, 2) information search and analysis, 3) a rational system of belief. With these he says a child doesn't really need school, they just need a teacher to ask them questions and the kids can go find the answers, and learning will emerge. Some of this is correct. With artificial intelligence you can even replace the teacher asking questions with the computer asking questions if you really want to. But, there's at least one glaring issue, teaching the rational system of belief. Ideologies and religions have been fighting about those pesky belief systems for as long as humans have existed, and will continue to do so. Probably not so easy to check off item number three as his list seems to present.

Mitra likes acronyms and has a few others which largely amount to kids having access to computers. I like part of the direction he's going, it even aligns with mine, but he's way oversold the idea that computers are going to somehow fix education. It broadens access to people and information. I can have a video call with a student on the other side of the world, and we can look up anything we want almost instantly. That's amazing. But it hasn't fundamentally changed the nature of learning.

This book helped me realize that a lot of the hype about computers and learning is surface level understanding from intelligent people that seem like they should have deeper insights, but don't seem to have a historical perspective. I also realized that the type of education he's promoting is a simplified form of self-education that I like (a lot of my education has been through reading books on my own and discussing ideas with people informally), but that his learning ideas could be enhanced by incorporating more of the tutoring aspect that I talk about along with some overall structure and direction. It's just amazing to me how overhyped this discovery of the obvious is, I don't know of a single person that doesn't realize children learn technology faster than adults. That has good and bad to it, but it's certainly not the solution to all the world's problems. (I think there's a good chance the tech billionaires will be able to eventually convince people to give the minds of their children over to artificial intelligence though, and that'll go like you would expect in a science fiction dystopia.)

'Working in the Reggio Way' by Julianne Wurm 2005

Reggio Emilia is a town in Italy. After WW2 they started unique elementary schools based on the ideas of Loris Malaguzzi. The students choose what they are studying and show their work with projects, which sounds like my ideas, so I wanted to explore the concept. It seems to be a growing movement, and I didn't realize that thousands of schools around the world have implemented Reggio inspired approaches. I wanted an audiobook that I could listen to while hiking and found this one. This book is by an American teacher that went and lived in Reggio Emilia while working in one of their schools.

They build the environment specifically for the benefit of the students instead of the teachers, such as the bathrooms being kid size. They consider the environment its own type of teacher. They let the kids learn in their own time. They let the kids develop their own projects. Both the child and the teacher keep different types of documentation, with the teacher making documentation reports of the child doing their projects both individually and with groups. It's quite fascinating. 

Wurm quotes Malaguzzi in the book as saying, "What children learn does not follow as an automatic result from what is taught, rather, it is in large part due to the children's own doing, as a consequence of their activities and our resources." That applies to humans in general.

This book helped me realize that many of these ideas that I and others have concerning education are convergent because they are true, and that they can emerge at any time and any place (including post-war smalltown Italy), the key is that they need to be allowed to grow, which is rare. 

Conclusion

It astounds me how all of these pieces can fit together. There are themes that run through all of these. For instance, the balance between structure and freedom, order and chaos. And, who the decision-maker is. These foundational shifts orient the entire theory and practice of education along different paths. That's what we see in this wide variety of approaches, where they converge and diverge. We can learn from each of them.

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