............. I
Whv Education Is So Difficult
and Contentious
KIERAN EGAN
Simon? Frraser Uymersitv
Thibs artirle pIoposes to explain whv education is so difficult and contentious
by
arguing thaXt e(iuicaftianial thinking draws on only threefundamnental ideas-that
oJ
ociizali-ing
f/iailitatinm,
the Young, shaping the mind by, a disciplined aCademnic curriculum, and
the deve!opmnent of studenti' potentiiat. All educational positions are
madte tp of Zatriouts mixes of these idfeas. The problems woeface in educaztion aire
due
to flhe jfacft(tt etith of tiese ideisv is sigrifictl
tv flawed and ailso that each i.s
i.nconimatible in basic ways welith. the other two. U`ntil we recognize these basic incomn-
patibilities zwe will be unable to adequately respond to the proble?ms we face.
INTRODUCTION
It is onero-Lus to think abouit our ideas because they are the things we think
with. Thev serve Us like lenses that can greativ effect the image that we
see.
Mfostly- we take oaur lenses for granited anrd assume we see the world directly.
We doifnt. of course. and it is uiseful frequen.tly to try to reflect on our
fundamenital ideas. I will arguLe that thiniking about eduLcation during this
century has almnost entirely involved just three ideas-socialization. Plato's
academic idea, and Rousseau's developmental idea. W'e mnay see whv education is so di'ffictult and contentiotus if we examine these three ideas and
the ways thev interact in educational thini;king tolav. The combination of
these ideas governs what we do in schools and what we d(o to children in
the namne of eduscation.
Our problems. I wNill further arguie. are due to these three ideas each
beinig fatally,^ flawedE and being also incompatible with one other. I will take
them one at a time and try to show that each is fatallv flawed and that in
combiniationi thexy undermine the effectiveness of educational institutions.
The fatal flaws in each of the fotuncdational icEeas have been pointed out.
one way or anothe-, befor-e-ustuallv bv pr-oponenits of one or two of the
ideas t-Iying to undercutt the value of the third. Edutcational practice in the
20th century generally went forward itnder the assurmption that the flaws in
eac h idea vouid be compensated by the other ideas-that is. three wrong
ideas cain make a right idea. Alas, it doesn't work ancd hasn't worked thiat
w-av,
Tea,re'r, (Cu 'eg!' Recmy dVolmrne 103. Nutmber 6. December 2001. pp 923-94
1
(Cop%right
wvTeacher-s C(Alege, (Cotlumbia U niersitv
(l6Or .4'J
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Teachers College Record
SOCIALIZATION IS A GREAT IDEA FOR IIUNTER-GAThiERERS
For the educationalist: today, this first great educational idea we inherit
comes as a good news, bad news, worse news, and really bad news scenario.
I suppose our educational troubles began around a quarter of a million
years ago when our honminid ancestors ran into an evolutionary snag. Around
that time, it seems, hominid brains were increasing in size quite rapidly.
The snag was the limits to which the architecture of the female pelvis could
be stretched to enable the women to give birth to these larger brained
babies while also allowing the women to walk efficiently. The remarkable
evolutionary soltution was to give birth to the babies while their brains were
immature anid let therr, do most of their growing outside the womb. So we
are today born with brains of around 350 c.c., which is muich the same as
our chimpanzee cousins. Between birth and adulthood, chinmpanzee brains
grow about 100 c.c. whereas humans' brains typically grow more than
1,000 c.c., with most of that additional growth occurring by age four (Deacon, 1997; Donald, 1991; Mithen, 1996).
This peculiarity of human brains and human childhood created the
need for that exten ded care and instruction that has become a part of what
we meani by education. Along with the larger brains came language, and
language was used prominently to tell stories (Donald, 1991, Cli. 7). The
most important stories were desigrned to create for their hearers a conceptual image of what we may call the meaninig of life. They gave to the young,
and reinforcedl for the older, images of who "we" are and what we are doing
here-in this forest, on this plain, by this seashore, amiong these hills,
alongside these aniimals. under these stars-and where we are goinig nlext.
The stories typically told about gods or sacred ancestors who warranted the
niorims and valules that constituted the culture of the particular huntergatherer society.
The stories create conceptual images that serve as an explanation of the
conditions we find ourselves in as we come to consciousness. The good
news is that thie techniques invented inl hunter-gatherer society to create a
honmogenieous image of "our" society, of "our" individual roles within it,
and of the cosmos in which the drama of oUI lives is played out have
worked with great success for counitless generations. The continuing good
news is that the procedures we have inherited fromi ancieint oral cultures
remain today woniderfully effective in socializing our young.
For example. we still deploy stories to shape children's understanding
and interpretations of experience. Because we do not use traditional myth
stories in sacred contexts, we can easily fail to recogInize how this ancient
technique is ubiquitously used in mnodern societies to communicate and
reinforce who "we" are, what "we" believe, and how "we" should behave.
AWVhile religious stories are perhaps the most obvious surviving examples,
i?7r,
Eduication Is So Di(ffidirt qad Contentious 925
thev jostle and sometimes compete with a huge varietv of more informal
stories-jokes and 'urban myths." family stories that reinforce certain. norms
and values (Rosenbluth, 1990), proverbial sayings and warnings echoed
from well-known stories, simplified national histories, accounts of office
politics, conventional plots of movies and TV shows. and so on. The story is
par-ticularly important among the socializing techniques we have inherited
because it orients the emotions of the hearers andt so more powerfulhl
shapes their commitments to the values and norms coded within it (Egan,
1988 ).
The bad news is that our evolution equipped uis to live in small, stable,
hunter-gatherer societies. We are Pleistocene people, but: our languaged
brains have created massive,, multicultural, technologically sophisticated,
and rapidly chaniging societies for tus to live in. Now that's not so bad in
itself as our brains also can adapt to a huge range of social conditions. The
bad newvs is tied into that ingenious evolutionary adaptation that led to the
extended growth of our brains otutside the womb. One result-wonderfullv
efficient for hunter-gather-er tribes-was to enable us to learn effortlessly in
otur earlv years a language, an image of our societv and its norms and
values, and images of the meaning of life, the universe. and everything. We
are equippecd, that is, very early and quickly to orient ourselves conceptuallv. WVhatever children learn from the stories thev are first told becomes
qcuicklv fixeci and serves as a template for future learniing. This rapid and
deeplv etched earlv learning served hunter-gatherer societies so well because
their stability and solidaritv was sustainedl by their members all sharing an
unquestioned and homogeneous worldview o! ideology.
If one were to trv to model human conceptual development, it would be
tempting to say that evolution equipped us with two kinds of learning.
There is, first, that largely effortless learning of our early years, which we
use to pickt up a language and those images of our societv and the cosmos.
It seems to wvork a bit like cement or plaster of paris: at first it is enormously
flexible, able to adapt to widely varied external constraints, and then graduallv it sets and becomes rigid. It also seems to be focused on verv specific
objects-like language, social behavior, and so forth. The second kind of
learning remains flexible throughout our lives and is a kind of all-purpose
utilitv. but it is more laboriotus and slow. The difference between the two is
often said to be evident in the efficiency with which we learn a language
and adapt to social customs in our early years. in contrast with the relative
difficultv and inefficiency with which we learn a new language and adapt to
new social customs later in life.
Jerry Fodor (1983) suggests we might see the rmind as having a set of
input systems and a somewhat distinct central processor. The input systems
are relatively specific to particLular parts of the normal brain; they are
focused on such things as totich. hearing, seeing, and language. and they
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Teachers College Record
are fast and "stupid"-we can't not hear or not learn a language in normal
conditions. The central processor is "smart" and is slow and general in both
brain location and operations. This allows verv fast responses to some things
by the "stupid" brain systems and contemplation and analysis by the other.
Fodor (1985) notes that "it is, no doubt, important to attend to the eternally beautiful and true. But it is more important not to be eaten" (p. 4).
Well, we might wisely be cautious in inferring such a sharp distinction in
kinds of learning as we are still unsure about the underlying cognitive
reality such distinctions refer to (Bruer, 1997). But for now it helps to clarify
the bad news that comes along with inheriting the idea of socialization as a
part of education.
Socialization relies heavily on the early "stupid" kind of learning and the
commitments it forms. If told that the earth is a flat disk that rests on the
back of a turtle, nearly everyone will believe this and see the earth in terms
of this belief. (An earthquake? The turtle shifted.) If told that it is a huge
ball that turns on its axis at high speed while also travelling unimaginably
fast around the sun, people will believe this. The cement-like learning of
our early years can accommodate almost anything; then it fixes and becomes
almost immovable. The other general purpose, learning capacity can, of
course, accumulate knowledge that contradicts the first-formed beliefs; and
we know that we can, as a result, change our earlier beliefs and commitments. We also know that this is rare and difficult for most people. The
stories we are first told, and the other techniques of socialization deployed
early, pretty well fix the values people hold until their death. Thev become
the things people think with, not the things they think about.
The bad news, then, is that we live in a world that requires flexibility in
adapting to changing norms, beliefs, and values; and evolution has equipped
us to be socialized in a manner that creates rigidity and unquestioning
commitment to unchanging norms, beliefs, and values.
The worse news, which follows from the bad news, is that if we are really
successful in socializing, we get someone who is indoctrinated. Now most
people tend to be verv acute at recognizing the ways in which "others"
indoctrinate their children but are largely oblivious to the forms of indoctrination they deploy themselves-"they" indoctrinate, "we" educate. Of
course, "they" think we indoctrinate and they educate-but that's only
because they have been indoctrinated to think so. Five-year-olds in Teheran,
Baghdad, St. Petersburg, Winnipeg, San Francisco, New Guinea, and so on
across the disk on the turtle's back have already learned complex sets of
beliefs and patterns of behavior whose validity they will never seriouslv
question. We label as indoctrinatorv those that are most in conflict with our
own.
This leads to a conundrum. "We" distinguish indoctrination from education on the openness of inquiry the educator encourages about the
liYx E£dtitionn
S Dzfficalt an(id C(vterdtiois 927
.S
valuies tautght. whereas the indoctrinators teacth "their'" values as unquestiotnable truths. But wve dlo not typically encoturage otur children to qtuestion
the xalue of' otur kinid of "opennless of inquiry"-we teach its value as an
unquiestioniable truth. We'll return to this after considering the reallv bad
news. which restults from onc of the effects oni otur thiniking that comes
along wvith language.
Thtinking in language leads us to recognize and nanme things as distinct
from all other thinigs-x is what not-x is not, goes the logic. Whether this
results fromn the hard(wiring of our brains or fromii the way language shapes
oUr- consciousness. wse have a powerful tendency to construct our conceptual grasp on the wvorld in terms of opposites. Ou-r sense of "good" is tied
to our sense of "bad," big to little, brave tO cowardly, safety to security, and
so onl. ('The d'eveelopmiient of language in humans ... represents the current ultimiiate in struicturing the world by its features, for each word represenits a feattire. The r-eal world is continuous, bt}t our inner world of features
is discrete because feattures elicit a binanr ves/no response" [Stewart and
Cohen, 1997. p. 1681).
When hunter-gatherers distinguished who "we" are, the distinction was
*ith who "they" are. This characteristic of socializationi we have also inherited. For the hutnter-gatherers. "we' are recognized faces and are treated as
friends; -theyv are unknown, potential enemies. ancd one must be prepared
to kiI tthemil before they kill "ls." AsJar-ed Diamond (1997) puts it: "With
the rise ot' chiefdomiis around 7.500 x'ears ago, people had to learn, for the
first timze in history, how to encounzter strangers reghlarh' wvithout attempting to kill thenm." (p. 273).
Socialization today not onlv fits uis to a particular social grotup. but also
identif'ies "us" to ourselves as distinct from other groups. Becoming American or Canadian or Encglish. still involves learninlg about the distinctive
qualities that characterize the excellence of one's nationi by contrast with
other nations wvhich lack those qcualities. Even within the countrv, whichever "we" belong to, we Nil1 identify ourselves again in contrast with others:
so we conservatixes or liberals identif% oLurselves in some degree by contrast
with those liberals oE- conservatives.
Our seeminglv inescapable tendencv to oppositionial thinking produces a
horrible resuilt wshen it wvorks in socializing. it sets people against each other
in greater or lesser degree. T'he trick, as Richard Rorty (1989) suggests, is to
increase the t-ange of people we include as "we," thuis widening our solidaritv with others. But oulr history suggests that we then will begin to make
divisions wvithin the group rather than. or in addition to, with outsiders.
Even the local stamp clutb or choir develops factions with bewildering ease.
ForI
iiuch
of' thie time. in groups. we are a contentious animal.
Nows this is all a bit odd, as we can't give up socializing our childreni
despite these probletns. Even if socializationi does require some degree of
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Teachers College Record
indoctrination, some homzogeniizinig, some degree of fixing certain beliefs
and values beyond the easy reach of rational reflection, as long as those
beliefs and values are decent, can we surely do nothing else but go along
with the process? If our values include tolerance and a positive attitude to
other races and cultures, socialization that, fixes these values firrmlv will
surely prepare our children well for these complex multicultural societies
we have made? If the indoctrination part of socializing discourages our
children fi-om questioningf the valuc of tolerance, how can that be so bad?
Socialization as an educationial ideal worked well in hunter-gatherer
tribes. But today we canit. easily avoid squirming a little about the dilemma
it creates for IIs. On the one hanid, for otur children to become familiarly at
home in our society, we have to allow considerable scope for socialization
to occtur unimpeded; and, on the other, our commitment to rationalitv in
our everyday affairs is affronted by the indoctrinatory element in successful
socialization. On the third hanidi, to fail to socialize adequately produces
alienation. Our general solution to the dilemma has been to recognize that
single-mninded socializationi-a la Hitler Youth-is unacceptable, and that we
need double-mnindedly to give rational reflection a large role in the process.
The difficulty of buildiing flexibility into socialization creates a discarding of generations, as the conditions thev were conditioined to deal with
change under their feet. The flcxibilitv was to comiie from being able
rationally to reflect on evenits and adapt to tlhemii where appropriate. And
that's where we try to plug Plato in.
THE ACADEMIC ID)EAL AND ASSES LOADED WITIT
BOOKS
The next really big development in humnan intellectual cultur-e after the
development of language was the invention of literacy. While literacy mav
be counted as one of the nmost productive of hulmani inventions, transforming our conditions of life and the conidition-s of our minids like no other, for
the poor educationalist it is the source of another huge set of problems.
Clearly literacy hias been in general a good news scenario, but it also carries
for the educator soiime bad news, souse worse news, and some really bad news.
The good news is easy to see. Literacy has allowed generations of people
to record their knowledge and experience. Further generations can compare that recorded knowledge with what they can see or discover and leave
a more accurate record; and thev can compare other's experience with
their own, enlarging and enriching their expericnce in consecuence. Todav
we have stored vast amounlts of knowledge in written records and we have
access to a vast array of varied human experience. These enable our minds
to transcend our owni time, place, and circumstances.
Eric Ilavelock (1963. 1982, 1986) argued that, Plato's great achievement
was to work out how to think once alphiabetic literacv because common.
1
07i Edwcaton Is So' DIficuit
and (Cwinfr'tious
929
The result is both described and, if vouf'll excuise the term, paradigmatically
exemplified in Plato's dialoguies. When the best accutimulated knowledge
coded in writing is learn)ed, Plato taught, it transforms the mind of' the
learners and eniables them to understand the wotrld more accturatelv and trulv.
The bad news in this for today's edufcators is that they have to work out
w-hat, amnong the vast accumulation available. is the best knowledge for
chEildrene
to learn. Her-bert Spencer (1966, Ch. 3) was confident that lis
answer to the question "W'hat knowvledge is of most worth?" was ulnassailable. Biut, of coutrse. everyone assailed it. Is the best. kncowleclge that of the
"timeless classics,' 'the best that has been taught and said," as Matthew
Arniold (i1986, p. 458) argued. or of urgent knowledge about currelnt social
conditions, or of economically produlctive skills. or should childrenis own
interests determinie their curricula. or shoutld our school currictdla be a
smnorgasbor-d of' all thle above laid out by committees of "stakeholders," or
sholottd wve have different cfurricula fEor different people, or a common or
cfore curriculum for all, or-what? The bad news is not so mtuch that we don't
know the answer in any generally agreed wav. but we doni't seem able to
agree oni how wve miiight go about r-eachinig an agreed answer. In the absence
of' any convincing theoretical grasp on the qttestioni, it is left to politicalE
power-to the comnmnittees of "stakeholders" laying out the smorgasbord.
This mnight be a good soluttioni if wve thinik of education simplv as socializing.
blut it iS a l(ousV solutioll if we thinik education has sofmethling to do with that
ideal Plato ar-ticuilated for enablinig uEs to understanld the world and tran-
scendl the tsocializedi conventions of ouir time and place.
The wforse news is that, whlatever the knowledge som-Ee group ctecides is
wvorthiest for iniclusion in. otur curricula, most students find literacv a sufficient barrier- that thlev wvill be unable to access it anyway. It ought to be easy
to teach children to read and write. The great cultural breakthrough made
by the invention of the Greek alphabet-from which all modern alphabets
are derived-dcemocratized. one might sav, reading and writing. One had to
learni onlv 20 or- so svniols that coukl be comibined to approximate the
sounds of languLage. But becomninig liter-ate has never been as easy as it seems
it ought to be. Most people f'ind reading a lot of text very difficult. and
when not compelled to do so, don't. Wheni it comes to writinig. most people
find it almost inmpossible to compose a coherent piece of prose that can
express what. they think with economy, claritv, and elegance. A note or e-mail
message in dull convenitional terms is as mtuch as the maioritv can manage.
For mIost childreni, school disrtupts and signif'icanitlv destrovs the oralitv
of their earlv veat-s by insistently trying to teach literacy ansd the klnowledge
coded in literate forrms. For mllost children. school fails to provide the
glories of literacy and to provide access to literacy's transcendent culture. A
complainiE of aboriginial people on the west coast of Canada who had been
compelled to send their children to schools has been that "thev taught
930 Teachers College Record
them to read and made them stupid." The schools disrupted and significantly destroyed the children's native oral culture and in its place were able
to put only a crude and debased literacy. This is analogous to what we do
to most children in schools.
The really bad news is that there isn't any knowledge stored in our
libraries and databases. What we can store are symbols that are a cue to
knowledge. People can read the symbols ancd not understand the knowledge or partially understand it, or have a vague sense of what it means. This
happens in schools to such an extent that we expect it and grade children
by the degree of understanding we think they have achieved.
The problem here is that knowledge exists only in living human tissue.
and the literacy codes we use for storage are cues that need to go through
a complex transformation before they can be brought to life again in
another mind.
Many educationalists, and even more non-educationalists, confuse the
codes with knowledge. They assume that if the students internalize the
codes they will have the knowledge. Alas, this is not so. W`e can relatively
easily compel or persuade or seduce people into internalizing literate
codes-so they can pass exams and seem knowledgeable. This kind of
learning has been the banie of insightful educators down the centuries.
WThat it prodluces is not knowledgeable people, but, as Michel de Montaigne put it, asses loaded with books.
This well-schooled, exam-passing, information-loadedi person has always
exasperated the imajor educational thinkers. That bookish man who described
how his own early reading set his mIlin( afire-I. J. Rousseau 1762/
1979)-in a characteristic outburst famously wrote: "I hate books: they only
teach one to talk abouit what one does not know" (p. 184).
Howard Gardner (1991. Ch. 1) describes a modern rediscovery of this
phenomenon in what were the most successful science students at leading
universities. When given problems based on principles they had learned
but in contexts different from those in which they had learned the prin-ciples, tbey typically responded incorrectly in much the same way as a typical
unschooled five-year-old. The students drew on the intuitive folk-physics
they picked up in those early vears of effortless learning. Their dozen years
of physics ih school and tuniversit) was an insecure accumulation compared
with the foundational knowledge of their preschool years. The trouble is
that the intuitive folk-physics is whollly inadequate to a scientific understanding of the physical world.
We all recognize the difference between genuline knowledge and accumulated codes-we talk of education as against training, wisdom as against
"book learning," insight as against literal thinking, and so on. But our
schools are not good either at recognizing the difference or, consequently,
promoting the genuine article rather than the cotnterfeit. And, as usual,
ffig.
..........-
1IQr?Ed:urati?? IA So Dl.7icult ty?d C 't!entious
f931
Greshan's law applies-debased coin drives out good. T. S. Eliots "Where
is the knowledge we have lost in information:" cannot be answered if one
doesn£t recognize a difference.
The problem Gardner (1991, Ch. I I wsrites about is just the same as Montaigne complained of. In Montaigne's day, the richness and abundance
of
understanding that should have come to all students from literacy through
an
education in the classics haci too often descended into dnr pedantry.
The
19th-century reformers sawv the dry pedantnr and assumed it was the classical
cuirri-culnm that causecd it. (Arinyone wiho has passed through the regular gradations of a classical eduication, and is n7ot made a fool by it, may
consider
himself as having had a very narrow escape" [Hazlitt, 1.826/1951, p. 147D}.
So
in its place they created a more 'relevant' currictulum, and their progressive
stuccessors through the 20th centur.- have remaineo puzzled that it has produced similar and even worse results-not so mtuch peciantrv but ignorance
so extensive that there has been nothing much to be pedantic about.
The reallv bad news, then, is that somne kind of magic (or techniqtue we
dofn't understand) is required to bring back to new life in a new mind
the
desiccated written codes in which knowledge was stored bv some other,
perhaps long-dead, human mind. But even if ve can manage the magic.
I'm afr-aid there is even worse news than the really bad news. That is, even
at its best. Plato's academic ideal can't deliver on its promises.
Plato describes an eduscational prograin that will carryv the mind from the
confuisions and illusions of the folk-physics. folk-psychology, folk-sociologx'
learn1ed effortlesstv in our earh'r vears through a curriculum of disciplined
knowledge to an understanding of the true natture of things. It is a
program
that requires the sacrifice of easy pleasures and the deployment of our
laboriious general learning capacit, to remake all our early false knowledge:
converting our minds always towards rationality and truth and awav from
the seductions of beliefs, mvths. and superstitions. U'e are to climb bevond
personal interest in lookiing at the world and to see it objectively. It is not
clear that Plato's or anyone's curriculum cani deliver these benefits. It
is
not clear that the products of high literacy include justice, objectivity.
and
truth. Plato believed these were the fruits of his educational program and
justified the austere discipline necessary to gather them. It is probably
a
better educational idea than anxone before or since has had, but. it is not
adequate. The worst news, then, is that the academic ideal of education
is
designed to achieve a kind of un1derstanding it simply can't deliver-its
justification is an ideal that is unrealizable.
THE IDEAL OF DENTVLOPMENT
I liniked the two previous educational ideas/ideals with, first, the
develop-
mnent of langtuage and, second, the invention of literacv. For the sake
of
932
Teachers College Record
the
symmetry, it would be nice to link this third educational ideal with
seemed
it
invention of printing and the new learning and "Enlightenment"
quite
to many in Europe to promise. Even if the causal connection is not
in
complicit
so easily made, the printing press was certainly importantly
the
of
those intellectual changes which included the radical rethinking
Bannature of education in the work of John Locke (1632-1704), Etienne
Rousseau
not de Condillac (1715-1780), and, crucially, Jean-Jacques
(1712-1778).
Their reconceiving of education seems. in retrospect, a part of the new
atlearning most signally represented in Isaac Newton's (1642-17271) Mathem
the
like
looked
work
ical Principles o01\7atural Philosophy (1687; Latin). This
triumphiant confirmation of the Enlightenment belief that scientific observation of nature could produce data that could, by the application of
reason, disclose the laws according to which the whole cosmos worked.
Rousseau argued that human beings also have a nature and a natural
process of developmient that could be disclosed bv careful observation
aided by reason. As we can observe the body's regular pattern of development from birth to senescence, so we can, with more difficulty perhaps,
observe the rmind's regular pattern of development. Education was reconceived as the activity of supporting the fullest achievement of the natural
process of mental developm-lent.
This idea came as good news for educationalists, but also-you guessed
it-there is bad news, worse news, and really bad news that came with it.
The good news was thiat it promised to solve a problem- that Plato's idea
left us with. Rousseaui (1762/1979) acknowledged that Plato (hitherto) had
been the greatest educationial thinlker. He had recognized how knowledge
the
shaped the mind and how particular kinds of abstract knowledge and
more
in
world
the
understand
to
mind
disciplines they required shaped the
adequate and effective ways. But it had become clear that this wasn't enough.
The common product of a Platonic education was asses loaded with booksinformed pedantry without imagination, originality, or vigor. Rousseau proposed that the missing element was the knowledge that we could deduce
from careful observation of the natural course of development.
So Plato, Rousseau (1762/1979) suggests, was right about the importance
of knowvledge in education, but his insight was of limited valuie without
recognition of the stages at which the young can best learn the various
kinds of knowledge. Plato failed to recognize the mind's autonomous growth,
his
and so his conceptioni of mental development was just a mirror-image of
understandBy
elaborated.
was
knowledge
conception of the logic whereby
ing the autonomous growth of the mind, one could coordinate the logic of
knowledge elaboration with the psycho-logic of mental development.
The continuing good news is that educationalists more or less universally
now believe that it is important to attend to the nature of the child's
1Wy ELdz'catiwftl is SS MI/ficUdt rind (;ontertnous 933
lear-inlg at partictular developmental stages. to different learning styles, and
to that rangc
Of
sensitivities to learniers that became a hallmark of progres-
sivismn. Once attention to the distinctive psychological development of the
child was madie central to educationialists' understanding of their task. a
number of considerable benefits followed. The first and perhaps still the
most importan-t was the recognition that failuires to learn the curriculum
might be due to fatults other than the child's recalcitrance. It might, for
example, be diue to the method of teaching, or the stage at which a topic
was being tatught. This recognition led to relieving children's school .ives of
the constant fEar of violenice for failuires to learn. It took a long time from
Locke's I6939'/1964i and Rtousseau' s (1762,/1979) formulation of the educational ideas fronm. which this benefit followed. but we should not utnderestimate the importance of this humanitarian result of attending to the, nature
of tTh
learner.
The combinationi of Plato's idea aboult knowledge and Rousseau's (.1762/
979) idlea aboit the minid was latuched In Rouisseau with the promise of
a revolttion inElearninig. Through the 20th. century. each. claim to have
more tcleqeutatelv exposed the developmental process-most notably li tEhe
work of Jean Piaget-has le(i to renewal of the promnise of a revolution in
learning. The enter-prise of psvchological research in education that tries to
discover the natutr-e of learninig, development. motivation, and so forth has
gonie fOrward on. the promise-as oine of its earlv prophets put it-of 'pedaCgogical possibilities now undreamed of" (Hall, 1904. Vol. 29 p. 9222.
Thle bad news is that the revoltution in learning has stubbornly refused to
oCcur. It. s('tucned and SLitl seemils to inianiv that i-esearch which discloses
increasing knowledge about children's development and learning must lead
to at least evident improvements in general educationi. The trouble With
promnising a revolution in learnitig is that people expect to see some evidence of it in the learners,
What di(i become evidcent was that the commitment to fireedom for
nattiral development didnS't take one very far As an edtucational idea, it
mnakes it diflicult to determinie a cuirrictiluim anid tends to leave the selec-
tion open to local )rejudice, charismiiatic enthusiasts, or blind chance. To
keen progressivists. this doesn't matter that mTLch because the curriculum
isIn't the point. We have had a century of fairlv intensive experiments in
implemienititug varied fornms of the iclea wve have inherited from Rousseau
(1]62'/1979.i
of progressivism's interpretations of it, anid of educational
psycholog-y's attempts to flesh it otlE scientifically. It seems fair to observe at
this poinlt. that somiething is still missing. Plato's and Rousseau's ideas together
are nfot able to bring about. for- most childlren the kind of learning we see
in
somile anid
the kind of' learninrg that it
doesn't seemnunreasonable to
expect fromn hugely expensive schools. The promise of Rousseau's idea has
not. beeni deliverecd. Alas, it hasni't wsorked.
934
Teachers College Record
The worse news.. . What? There is worse news than that it hasn't worked?
Yes-that it can't work. The worse news follows the observation that human
beings don't have a nature. Well, that overstates it-to underline a point.
There are obviouslv regularities in human mental development, but they
are so tied up with our social experience, our culture, and the kinds of
intellectual tools we pick up that we can't tell whether the regularities are
due to our nature, to our society, to our culture, to our intellectual tools,
or what. We can't simplv measure the regularities, which turn out to be
prett' irregular from person to person, and see through them to our
nature or to some autonomous developmental process. V7ygotsky (1962)
pointed this out as a fatal flaw in Piaget's theory in the 1920s; but it is only
now, with the generally recognized foundering of Piaget's theory, that lhe
force of Vygotsky's criticism is coming home to manv. It's a bit like Gertrude
Stein's Oakland, there is no nature of mental development there.
The really bad news is that Rousseau (1762/1979) put in place for the
modern educational world a binarvy distinction between an autonomously
developing mind and an "external" body of knowledge. Once education
became thought of in terms of knowledge and mind (content and method,
curriculum and instruction), the problem became how to get them back
together again. The history of educational thinking in the 20th century
prominently involved a bizarre war between these two-between those who
were "child centered"' and those who were "subject centered," between
progressivists and traditionalists.
If you begin to think of education as facilitating the ideal development
of individuals' minds, you have the problem of dealing with the role knowledge is to perform in this process. Progressivism emphasized the general
uselessness of the "traditional" classical curriculum and the value of useful
knowledge that responded to current social needs. That is, Rousseau s
(1762/1979) dichotomy undermined Plato's "epistemological miind.' in which
particular kinds of knowledge were learned because of the benefits that
accrued to the mind. Now the mind is asstumed to go through its own
autonomous process, given "natural"/normal interactions with its environment, and knowledge is selected for the curriculum based on its social
utility. Tatters of the old classical curriculum hang around, partly out of an
intuition that there might be something in Plato's idea and partly to satisfy
the minority who still want that old-style "ornamental" edutcation. For the
core of the new progressive curricula, however, utility; trumps transcendence every time-Career and Personal Planning or Drug Education or
Economics for Everyday Living or Computers 101 trump Latin hands down
in the competition for limited curriculum time.
Rousseau's (1762/1979) dichotomy, adopted by Spencer, Dewey. and prettv
well all other progressive educationalist, has given us a century of polemical
battles between supporters of "child centeredness" against "subject centered-
1071. Ehdiraafirm Is Sa IDhffiwch and Cnntenr'tNios 935
ness.' Wk'e are, of course, suckers for a neat dichotomv-whyv else do we go
to war TThe polenmical battles are one result of the really bad news resulting
from Roousseat& s idea.
INSTITUTIONS BASED ON INCOMPATIBLE IDEAS
WVe obviouslv haven't inherited these three great educational ideas in the
more or less discrete packages described above. We don't, of course, think
of ottr conception of edLucation as a composite but rather as a unitary idea.
Btut those thl-ee ideas have become entangled with each other through the
centuries and have produced our contemporary schools and clurricula and
teachinig practices.
When we do note differences between the competing demands of these
three ideas-when,. for example. p,oliticians or businesspeople demnand from.
the schools more relevant social knowledge or work skills or when some
neoconservatives demanid we concentrate on developing academic
kn(owNledge-wse sav that. there are 'tensions" among the requirements of
the vxarious -stakeholders." Thejob of the good educational administrator is
to balance these tensions so that the requiirements of all the major stakeholdet-s are met to an adequate degree. We have come to live with these
tensions so long that most see them as inevitable and as a management
problemii. This is how we clisguise confusions from ourselves, conceptually
paperiiig over deep fatult lines in our thinking.
Each of onr three ideas, then, is really bad news left to itself. Wvell, of
course-has beenl the response since thei
mid-l9thl century-that's why we
put them together. Judicious application of one or another of the ideas
supports or constrainis the third; each solves problems created bv the others. The academic idea has been uLsed to provide support for individual
development. and to put a brake on excessive socialization: socialization has
beenl usedi to give individual development a sense of clirection and to
provide a check on the elitism of the acaclemic idea; ancd individual development has been used to check the excessive intellectualism, of the acadermnic idEea and to enrich. enlarge. and diversifY socialization. Ah, the best
of all possible worldst
Another wav of pUttiTng it, of course, is to sav that our three defective
ideas prevent each other from doinlg too mtuch damage. So, we socialize,
but we undercut indoctrination by the academic program calling societyvs
values into qtuestioni and bv the commitment to individual development
reducing society s claims on anv particular individual; we pursue an academic program, but wve undercut intellectual development by egalitarian
pressures from socialization and attention to other forms of individual
development; we encoturage individual development, but we undercut its
fulfillment bv the homogenizing presstures of socialization and by the stan-
936
Teachers College Record
dardizing brought about by a common acacdemic curriculum. Ah, what a
wondler of compromise is our modern conception of educationl
Can it really be true that our conception of education has three main
components, each one of which leads to undesirable results bv itself and
which work together only by each one interfering with the adequate implementation of the other tvwo? Surely this is a pessimistic fantasy? Do the
schools that have been built on this tripartite conception of educationthat is, nearly all modern schools-fail to provide students with an adequate academic education? Well, there has certainly been a chorus of critic:s
who have vociferously argued over the years that typical schooling leaves
students woefully ignorant of their cultural heritage. Do they provide inad-
equate socialization? Certainly critics have constantly coniplained about
students' alienation on the one hand and their common lack of civic values
on the other. And do they provide inadequate indivicdual tlevelopment of
students' potential? WVe do still hear loud criticism abotut the irrelevance of
much schooling to students' individual needs.
Well, of course there are such criticisms, you might reasonablv complain.
This is a democracv, after all. Even optimists don't expect perfect implementation of all three ideas. The great success of our education system is to
have achieved and generally heldl a balance among three somewhat distinct
aims. Schools provide an exposure to academic material to all students and
clearlv allow somne to excel in academic work, they socialize all studients in
a basic way while avoiding fanatical extremes, and they attend to the general development: of all children andl provide special hielp to sonme who
clearly need it. Of course there are tensions amnong the three general
educational ideas that drive our schools-successful educationi is achieved
by fin ding the right community-supported balance.
I thinik this complacenit view is mistaken and that the three ideas undermine each other rather than complement each other.
Consider this scenario: Let us sav you are a movie fan and enjoy goinlg
out to a cinema once each week. The government imposes a new requirement on cinemas. As you come out of the cinema, Vou will be required to
take a test on the movie you have just seen. You will be asked the color of
the villain's car in the chase scene, or the adequacy of the motivation of the
leading womiian's sister, or the gist of the alien's speech before it transmogrified, or the name of the brother-in-law's pet dog, and so on. Your score
on the test will deternminle your salary for the next week, when you will face
another test and another salary adjustment. Consider for a moment how
such tests and their consequence would likely influence your watching
movies. At the very least, thev would change what was carefree entertainment
into anxiety. You woIl}d also spend a lot of effort. watching movies trying to
second guess the kinds of questions you are likely to be asked and the focus
of your attention wotild be shifted to fit your expectations of the test.
....
lt7rv Eduration I.s So MifiridI and Canteritioto 937
WUhat does this reminid VOLn of?' Right. School. The above absurd scenario
creates a social institution-with, no doubt, huge testing services andi solemn1l officials and entrepr-enieut-s setting up test-coaching companieswvhich conftuses twvo conflicting aims. There is no problemn with having two
aims for an institution except if the aims conflict with each other. If one of
our aims for an eductational institution is the purstuit of academic knowledge. we wsill interfere wvith that in all kinds of dest,ructive wavs if we then
imupose a social sorting role on the institution and use academicallv inappi-opriate testinig to do that social sorting. Also the social sorting role would
be conftused becauise academic prowess-which we are only marginally testing foi any wvav-is hardlv the most important determiner of social valuLe.
That is. this kind of undermining of separate and conflicting aims is preciselv wsh at we get. if we trv to make the school an instituition that tries both
to socialize and implement the academic ideal at the same time. The result
is that neithler is adeqtuatelv or sensiblv achieved, as. in the cinema scenario,
neithier carefree entertainmeent nor an appropriate manner of determining
salaries is achlieved.
Y'et wve have created such an instituition and keep trying to make it wYork
to realize conflicting ideals. Adeqtiate socializationi requires sticcessfuilly
inculcating a set of beliefs, values, and norms of behavior in the growing
child. The academic program is specifically designed to enable the growinig child to qfuestion the basis for any beliefs, values, andl norms of be-
havior. The twEo aims puill against each other: The mnore sticcessftlllv one
socializes, the less one achieves the academic ideal: the more successfullv
one inctilcates disciplined academic thinking, the less easy it is to socialize
successfully. Socialization req,uires acceptance of beliefs, valuies, and norms
that the disciplined academic mind sees as stereotypes. preiudices, and
homogenizationi.
Consider this scenario: Yotu are 55 and have had a successful caareer as a
lawver. nott have a spouse and two successfPil c hildren. You are a pillar of
the community, active in churchl, community center, and children's sports
activities. But it. has recently become disturbingly clear that you wiII not
remaini vigorotis forever and that timne is closing in. Something in you is
uinsatisfied. like a distant echo from a life path you somewhere missed
taking. like a call fro0£ another voUtwho was not realized-but, still might
be. It is a distur-binig call, a distressing echo, that grows louder by the day.
Increasingly yoti feel it is a cali from the real Votu, a call from youlr buried
life. from the Vo£ who somehow got lost in all those legal tussles and in the
social rotind and the kids' soccer antid ballet and then their colleges and
marriages. Now that ghiostly you calls to be recognized and brought to life.
Well, forttinatelv. voti can enroll in the reqtuired government program.
ReTRY. ReTRY-an acronmn for Realize the Real You-is slickly operated
by the cointrv's best anid mnost expensive psvchologists. It is mandated by
938
Teachers C,ollege Record
law to assist citizens' psychological adjustment to later middle age. Success
in the program is measured by the degree to which people return satisfied
to their old routines of life.
I-lang on. How can an institution designed to help you find the real you
measure success by convincing you that the old you is the real you? Shouldn't
you be encouraged to head out yonder to the pearl seas or the South
Pacific or at least take up kayaking or building a japanese garden? Socializing strives to homogenize; individual development strives to bring out the
uniqueness of each person. Hard to aim for both in the same institution
and expect success. They constantly pull in opposite directions-the more
you do one, the harder it is to do the other. And we expect our schools to
do both successfully.
Consider a third scenario: It is 20 years in the future and the government's educational authorities have become convinced that the route to
the fullest development of each individual's potential is to design different
kinds of schools to support the main styies of learning and kinds of intelligence people deploy. There are eleven kinds of schools, each designed for
one of the eleven distinct intelligences now identified by Dr. Gardner at
ground zero. Enormously sophisticated testing apparatus and procedures
are applied to children to determine which school would most fully develop
their particular strengths. Iluge amounts of money have been spent on
designing the schools, outside and in, to respond to and stimulate the
needs of the kinds of students they house. The curriculum in each kind of
school is, however, identical. The children follow a rigorous academic program designed to carry their minds from the ignorance and confusion of
their originally unschooled condition towards a disciplined understanding
of their cultural heritage. Ther-e are no electives, until university specialization, because the authorities have also been convinced that the only
proper aim of education is to empower children's minds with the best
material human beings have created; and that is precisely what the disciplined forms of understanding provide.
Now such a system would surely be self-contradictory. The academic
commitment to shaping the mind by teaching disciplined forms of understanding isn't compatible with the belief that the minds of different people
can be optimally developed by knowledge chosen to suit their particular
style of learning, kind of intelligence, needs, and interests. One cannot
have two masters, especially when both mandate different things. We can't
construct a coherent educational institution using radically different criteria.
But, of course, that's precisely what we require of our schools today. We
require that they acknowledge, and accommodate as far as possible, different styles of learning and different ends of the process for different people.
"Education" for one child may have a quite different character from that
attained by another; quite different "potentials" might be developed and
......
Wh7:Y
TWdaizior
Is So Difclidt awl Co,ritentionts 939
eac'h be ani example of successful educatiotn. We require also that the
academiiic idleal be acknow.ledged, which recognizes education only in the
degree to which minds are shlaped hv progress in understanding the range
of disciplines. The result, of course, is Elot a coherent curricullum but one
that tries to accommodate both co nflictinig principles. The result, also, is
perpetual strife bv adherents of the conflicting principles fighting about
which shotuld have greater intfluence over children's education.
C(ONCLUSION
Wee have inhEierited three foundational ideas about education. Each one of
them has flawvs, at least one flaw in each being fatal to its ambition to
represent an ediucational ideal we mighIt reasonablv sign on to. And the
worse newts is that each of the ideas is incompatible with the other two.
These warring ideas hovered arotund thie cradle of the state schools, profferinig their gifts. The schools eagerlv took them all, ancd so education
remains difficult ancd contentious.
Well, having thought aboout the ideas we usually think with, where are
we? A plaLlsible ansver is, in something of a mess. The commonest response
to inspectinig the foundations of our ideas andc finding them inadequate is
to tuirn and carry on wvith everything mtuch as before. I mean, think of the
trotible we would have to go to if we were to conclutde that indeed our
conception of edtucation is flawed in the wvav this article has argued and
that, we should do something about it. Ini general, most people seem to be
sustained by institutions not ideas. That the institutions are as they are
because of particular ideas seems not to be a matter that concerns most
people in the education business. Practical folk just get on with doing the
best thev can within the institutionis tthat exist. And, of course, without this
pragmatic commonsense approach we would be in a bigger mess.
But what woould we have to do if we take ideas seriously, understand how
thev shape institutions, and conclude that the above argument is right?
First off we need a better idea of education than the fractiotus conftusion we
currently stuimble along with. And where will we find such things? Well, we
just have to make them up. If vou want an example of a new conception of
education that avoids the problemus of our ctirrenit tripartite incompatibilities. may I recommend 7he Educat:ed Mlind (Egan, 1997)? In that book, I
show hows we can. drawing somewhat on X'vgotsky's 1987) ideas, reconceive
education as a process of stimtlatinig and developinig a set of kinds of
understanding. From such foundationis we cani then derive new forms of
curricuila, teaching practices, and appreciation of varied forms of stutdent
learning. The result is tnot so strange that it will seem entirelv alien to our
cut-rent traditions, becatuse it grows out of them.
........... ........ -
940
Teachers College Record
I mention this book because it provides an example of what we need to
be engaging in much more. It follows Dewey's (1963) advice: "It is the
business of an intelligert theory of education to ascertain the causes for the
conflicts that exist and then, instead of taking one side or the other, to
indicate a plan of operation proceeding from a level deeper and more
inclusive than is represented by the practices and ideas of the contending
parties" (p. 5). I really can't see any likely good return from the continuing
battles between progressivists and traditionalists-as though there is to be
some possible winner or some refined balance between these positions that
has evaded everyone for the past centurv and a half. Nor can we look to any
benefits from battles about whether the schools are there to produce "jobready skills" (as a local school adver-tised its main product recently) as
distinct from the fulfillment of each child's unique potentials. Of course,
all schools, school districts, and state and federal educational institutions'
"mission statements" invariably, in my fairlv exhaustive surveys, promise all
three of our incompatible goods. When we reach the plausible conclusion
that these promises cannot be fulfilled and that they constitute a form of
nonsense, then we have to get back to the hard business of thinking about
what we uisually think with.
When we see students unable to read or write very well or see our
country's educational failures compared with some other country's relative
successes, despite the money we spend, it is easy to look for a scapegoat in
some particular group. It is less easy to accept that our fundamental problem in education is theoretical and that improved andc more effective work
by all the groups in education will not solve ourl problem if we have a
confusion at the root of the system; rtuning faster with improved style will
not help us if we are goinig in the wrong directioln. We behave as we do,
design schools of the kinds we have, as a result of the ideas we hold. If we
want to improve our schools, it is with the abstract and awkward realm of
ideas that we must first deal.
Charles A. Beard (1932) observed that "The world is largely ruled by ideas,
true and false" (p. ix). IIe went on to quote a "British wit" to the effect that
"the power which a concept wields over human life is nicely proportioned
to the degree of error in it" (p. ix). We needn't give in to such cynicism, of
course, but the witty point pricks because it sometimes seems only too true.
iuring the writing of this article, I have been the grateful beneficiary of a grant from the
.Spencer Ffoundation. Though aided in 'm research by the Spencer Joundation, I take full
responsibility for the arguments in this article.
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KIERAN EGAN is a professor of eduication at Simnon Fraser University,
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COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
TITLE: Why education is so difficult and contentious
SOURCE: Teachers College Record 103 no6 D 2001
WN: 0133500447001
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