Psychology of Education 1 - Introduction

before we get started here is what is made available to you by the fact that this video is on youtube it's a high-tech prosthesis first if things move too slow or too fast you can pause go back or adjust the video speed some students watch at 0.75 times speed which would be absolute torture for plenty of other students including myself i tend to engage with youtube at double speed and the general guidance for those looking to get the most out of this video would likely be copied over from readin

g best practices namely watch first at a fast pace building your understanding for the framework and the overall design and ideas and then go back and more deliberately or carefully attend to the details the second time looking for apparent contradictions which tend to be misunderstandings and seeing where the analogies are incomplete or what was not said perhaps on purpose in addition to speed control youtube auto generates very good subtitles which occasionally make for good comedy but i would

say are more than 95 accurate it also makes transcripts for you which you can copy and paste and pretend that you made your own notes the comments section also tends to be a better place than the course's learning management software to comment on or start discussions about lecture content because you can comment as you watch and leave time stamps so people know what you're referring to one of my favorite features of youtube is the kind people who comment helpful time stamps for the benefit of

other watchers or for the benefit of me so i know what their comment is actually referring to over here is where you can make me feel good about spending time making watchable videos rather than teaching my kids things unreinforced behavior becomes extinct and when we don't participate in the social sphere the most pathological voices take over common sense is not dead it's just quiet so maybe murmur a bit if you don't have a youtube account please take the 180 seconds required to make one if on

ly so that you can participate in this minimal way three two one zero education is a change of mind not of grade level psychology studies the mind by seeing what explains predicts and controls human emotion behavior and thought so we have defined education in terms of psychology let's see how that fits with the more general definition education is the act or process of imparting or acquiring general knowledge while developing the powers of reasoning and judgment and generally of preparing onesel

f or others intellectually for mature life education this lecture is designed to present a broad view of education and present a range of perspectives on it to help you figure out where you stand philosophically but also show you the potential value and usefulness of some perspectives you might not have considered or heard of before a philosophy of education should be informed both by how one thinks education does work what processes of mind or society are the things that educate and how educati

on should work i.e what you want as an end goal and the best way to make the identified processes work to accomplish that there is value in each of these philosophical perspectives the ones that repulse you the most are probably the ones that can teach you the most since the repulsion suggests that you've avoided exposure to them here are the philosophies arranged on a continuum from topic or content focused to student or self-focused we'll start with perennialism and then hop the widest possibl

e philosophical chasm to discuss social reconstructionism a substantial part of which is critique of perennialism or its contents and then move back to hear perennialist responses to social reconstructionism followed by essentialism then existentialism and finally the gooey jelly middle of progressivism and i'll cycle through with my own personal opinion and commentary on each note that this continuum does not correspond to any political spectrum not left right not libertarian authoritarian mapp

ing this continuum onto politics would cause rather profound misunderstandings of the philosophies quoting harold bloom in his western canon to read in the service of any ideology is not in my judgment to read at all end quote and in the assessment of essentialist e.d hirsch you have to be conservative if you're in education if your aim is socially progressive that's because language and the taken for granted knowledge in communication changes very slowly no matter how loud you yell uh from your

soapbox it it's it's very slow to change uh literate culture is i mean you can't change what's written down in all those books in the libraries so the uh socially progressive movement was running up against this conservatism of literacy you might say literacy itself has a kind of conservative slow to change character first up perennialism if something is perennial then it does not die it may go away for a time but eventually returns perennial flowers return in the spring having never actually g

one away and the key problems of human cooperation and survival returned to consciousness having never actually gone away this makes learning from history and old works of genius relevant today tomorrow and as long as humans persist perennialism generally overlaps with what is called classical education which notes that the books and subjects we call classics are classics because they offer us useful profound and perhaps eternal insights thomas hobbes wrote in 1651 a book called leviathan one of

the two or three most influential works in the history of thinking about government and politics in western society he was writing from the midst of a raging civil war and he argued that unless we gave all the power unless we surrendered all ultimate control to a legitimate king that we would all rob and kill each other was he right about that is that the way things actually work and is the question relevant to us today when we no longer believe in kings my take on classical education however i

s that it could be done in any of the five philosophical paradigms we could be asking what is wrong with or what could be changed about these classic works even moses himself was a revisionist number one do not condemn people on the basis of their ethnicity or their color number two do not ever even think of using people as private property or as owned or as slave three despise those who use violence or the threat of it in sexual relations number four hide your face and weep if you dare to harm

a child in other words since studying the classical great works is not the same as believing that they hold the eternal truths or even inherent merit valuing engagement with the classics is not enough to make you a perennialist to be a perennialist you need to believe in the inherent value of or deep truth of the prior best attempts to capture core key important truths our exemplar for perennialism will be harold bloom and his case or elegy for the western canon the canon really means the works

that a particular tradition designates as being most essential for study by the young and why should the young experience specific canonical works because of the aesthetic experience of these great works of literature they let you know what's possible and having the memory of this profound aesthetic experience of great literature will make you hold things to high standards and yourself to high standards as well you'll have the memory of it memory is the major element in cognition in everything t

hat we call the humanities if you cannot remember then you can think and you can't imagine and you can't write and you can hardly read if you have shallow authors chosen only for political reasons you will not augment memory you will not cause the mind to grow you will put people into a state of another kind of poverty a poverty that the school of resentment does not seem to care about poverty as imaginative needs nobody is imaginative you sound politically frustrated bloom is that because your

perennialism is actually conservatism in disguise i refuse to say that the function of studying canonical works is to reinforce our moral suppositions then why choose what students can read at all why narrow the world for them if science came along and saw to it that we all lived 140 years on the average then at the moment there would be no canonical problem so you just want students to grow their aesthetic memory and standards in the limited time they have before they die is this to shape them

into being better people if anything bloom believes the opposite namely that reading the best of everything is going to make people want to conquer the world rather than get along well in it and be good citizens he says this multiple times in the roughly 500 pages of the western canon he's not selecting these books to shape good citizens he's selecting these books because they are the quote unquote best survival of the fittest seems to be the operating principle in the canon there are other cons

iderations like the fact that the work should be challenging for the reader and thus develop them cognitively but the overriding consideration is just the aesthetic value the experiential value of the text making it canonical crossing the chasm from classical to critical we will take as our exemplar of social reconstructionism paulo freire paulo freire who dedicated his life to empowering victims of brazilian colonization and slavery through literacy protest and political action and who contrast

ed this radical approach he called critical pedagogy with what he called the banking model of education i.e the idea that the teacher has something to deposit into the students and that they get this information and passively hold it like some sort of capital which is a no-no for this marxist scholar mastered critical foreign enlightenment is realizing that you are oppressed and teaching is moving students toward an awareness of this oppression there is emphasis on political action based on valu

es and these values are the values of the students which a critical pedagog helps bring to the surface by communicating to the students how valuable their own experience is note that while this is a belief that one can change one's social world it is not a belief that there is no spoon it is not an epistemology that thinks that if we get enough people to believe there's no spoon there won't be any spoons it's an acknowledgment that if we're not acknowledging or supporting or incorporating the st

udent's own perspective of things then we are oppressing them and the worse forcing them into the dominant false consciousness whatever that happens to be at the time and while this fits in quite well in political studies and social science and wherever your audience is open to the idea that the system wants to intentionally keep them down and suppress their natural growth it tends not to fit so well with other disciplines if you are asking the students to recreate or from their experience come

to knowledge of things but this is not reducible to the constructivist version of this idea whereby if you think it then you made it because you made that thought the piagetian sense of to understand is to invent no the social reconstructionist sense of this recreation is a recreation with destruction it's an even less objective idea of what truth or reality is you do not understand you over stand you destroy the thing that you're supposed to stand under and comprehend by creating something newe

r better more personal to you simply by coming to a conclusion you are supplanting or overthrowing what came before and if the world pushes back don't worry your present is the future this has likely been a quite effective method of cultivating self-fulfilling prophecies in the classroom and the broader social world it is probably and rather ironically the most effective method of indoctrination getting people to believe that your views are theirs or came from them to begin with which is what wo

uld tend to happen in a very unstructured classroom where people don't know what they're supposed to learn because they're supposed to express what they learn from their own insides so they look for subtle clues that what they're saying is what you want and you have gotten around counter will or the emotional need to rebel by waiting for students to do what you want organically and then rewarding them for it so in terms of results it's not difficult to see why this approach would be perpetuated

enjoyed and anecdotally thought to be extremely effective what is less clear since as i said this is not an epistemology is why one would bother with this approach in stem or any field with essentials to learn and an objective other than self-understanding moral training social change or political action would someone achieving math skills be as important as becoming literate but today i understand this perfectly well i have no doubt that any effort today should not be an exclusive effort of mat

hematics or of the math professor as i understand it it should rather be an effort of the man or woman mathematician biologist or physicist carpenter which is actually the effort to acknowledge ourselves as conscious mathematicized bodies i mean i have no doubt that our presence on earth implied and undeniably implies in the invention of the world the decisive step that makes us capable both men and women was precisely the step whereby the support where we stood became the world and the life we

lived began to become existent and in this passage or rather during this passage you would never encounter a geographical border but during this transition from the support to the world is when history begins to unfold when culture is born language the invention of language thought thought that not only penetrates within the object that's being pondered but which is also enriched by the possibility of communication and convenience i believe that at this moment we have also become mathematicians

in other words life becomes existence life is as i see it and i would like to get back to this point i believe a primary concern not only to mathematicians but to all of us educators who are somehow accountable for a certain amount of deciphering should be this proposing to young students that at the same time or even before they discover that four times four are sixteen they should also discover a mathematical way of being in the world my take on this is that critical theory is like a sledgeham

mer or a universal acid it's designed to eat away at something and destroy something and when we ask it to do something constructive it's not particularly helpful but that said it's really good at destruction if the french postmodernists had a theory of destroying meta-narratives and meta understandings the social reconstructionists have a technology of it and the underlying assumption is that if you can destruct things like authority social structures and capitalism that creates a vacuum into w

hich the individual will be placed and that individual will take the power of that place it is a creative destruction which allows for a reconstruction of the student's social situation by the students themselves and the only job of the critical pedagoge is to pose the social problems and allow for the destruction of the oppressive structures that were preventing the students from coming to these solutions thus society is reconstructed in the student's image so rather than perpetuating oppressio

n the critical pedagog reconstructs a non-oppressive society with their students but of course paulo freyr is a philosopher of education he's not an educational psychologist so let's get a little closer to our own wheelhouse still looking at social reconstructionism critical educational psychology is a social reconstructionist perspective that takes the oppression and liberation idea and applies it to educational psychology itself addressing three major themes first that educational psychology h

as existing assumptions that two cause harm and three we should find and resist these harm-causing assumptions psychology is ideological because it comes from a certain perspective but two presents itself as if this were not the case if we look at a case of adhd psychology's job is to shift blame away from a pathological institution and to pretend as though it found something in the world that explains what should be evidence of the pathology of this power-based institution that makes inappropri

ate demands of the child psychology can only understand people with reference to norms and others and therefore prevents individuals from understanding themselves on their own terms and we want people to understand themselves and see themselves in their own terms so that they can reconstruct their society in their own terms and teachers can't do this for them students must come to accept their own wisdom and find their own wisdom on their own the critical pedagogue can only show them how valuabl

e and possible this is it is their own practical wisdom or phronesis that will accomplish liberation from oppression or the becoming of a master oneself the reconstruction of one's social world also teaching critical thinking is problematic because it's not political enough and rather than assessing the truth of claims we should be assessing the power and intent of those claims note that the contrasts between perennialism and social reconstructionism are not one-dimensional the canonical approac

h of perennialism is actually the one that is not seeking to tell the student what to do whereas the liberating form of social reconstructionism is concerned with framing the student's understanding of their social environment for perennialists wrong answers lie in the content and for social reconstructionists wrong answers lie in wrong attitudes but this is painting with a very broad brush returning to perennialism to get a response from the perennialists regarding the social reconstructivist c

ritiques so what's the end result is that students have absolutely no historical sense whatever we're afflicted with what's called presentism okay that is this focus on the present is very helpful to young people to get a sense of human history okay right so that's another reason why young people get so upset by current politics okay is because they have no sense that you know you know what the history of the world has been empire is rising and empire's falling into nothing but ruins and this hu

ge cycle of things happening and so an election that happens in a temporary election it's not the end of the world it's not the apocalypse okay oh no on that there's nothing but the president nothing or or or more more species okay is like once there was a utopia in fact everywhere but here everyone here in america is a utopia okay and therefore there are there are problems with america okay oh hello okay the no the horrors of history have been totally hidden from from young people do you know t

hat the banality of public school education today absolute emptiness this picture of human life everyone nice niceness okay is the answer in the public schools treat everyone nice be actually open intolerant make never make any judgments et cetera but the actual hard facts of human history and world geography i might point out all right they know nothing we're becoming a nation of people who are propagandized from elementary school right on through to the graduate school in a certain vision of t

he world and only the ones who for one reason or another either experience or insight or whatever leads them to say wait a minute only those are the ones that we have to depend on in a conflict of visions you talk about two fundamentally differing visions and two these two fundamental divisions underlie an enormous amount of the western political tradition yes the constrained vision and the unconstrained vision under the constrained vision whom an example an exemplar would be adam smith human na

ture is flawed but it's fixed and the question is how do we erect institutions that contain our flaws and permit us to live in the best possible society given in effect the fallen nature of uh or the fallen character of human nature yes absolutely so human when you say constrained it's a vision of human nature itself human nature is fixed uh flawed and therefore we operate within constraints the constraints human nature itself provides unconstrained is human nature itself is malleable and you sa

y that rousseau man is born free but everywhere he is in chains that's the classic statement of the unconstrained would you explain that yes that that the the things that we we suffer uh according to those of the unconstrained visions uh it's because of the failure of other people to be as wise or as noble as themselves because there are no inherent reasons for us to be unhappy so one looks at pain and difficulty in the world and says well this is the way life is let's say we'll never eliminate

it let's be wise and prudent and direct institutions that make life as much better as possible that's constrained yes the unconstrained vision looks at pain and suffering and says we must remake the world there are institutions causing this pain and suffering oh absolutely okay now let me give you another quotation the two great revolutions in the 18th century in france and in america can be viewed as applications of these differing visions explain that one well in france the idea was that if yo

u simply put the right people in charge and created the right institutions then the all these problems would would go away in the united states it was assumed from the outset that there were very limited things you could do and what you needed to do above all was to minimize the damage done by the flaws of human nature and this is why the united states for example has this constitution so much lamented by some of those who believe in the french revolution in which this group is is offset by that

group and nobody can sort of run wild the separation of powers uh you have elections you have constitutions you have all kinds of things hemming you in a condorcet who was the great supporter of the french revolution uh could not understand why they were why there was a separation of powers and not even when at the end of the end of his life he was arbitrarily thrown into prison where he continued to write about why the americans have this separation of power and of course if they've been a sep

aration of prowess he wouldn't be writing in prison right right could i just you've got france is the unconstrained vision 18th century america is the constrained vision founding fathers of the constrained vision can i ask if it goes even farther back what comes to mind is karl popper's uh the open society and its enemies there's a famous chapter in there in which he contrasts plato whom he views as a radical uh the man who wants rule by the philosopher kings with aristotle whom he views as a ki

nd of piecemeal reformer what you get in plato is the impulse to start a new and what you get in aristotle is the impulse to accept the givenness of things and make one change see how it works another change see how it works is in other words i guess what i'm getting at is is there some sense in which these two visions can be traced all the way through the western tradition oh absolutely that's right that's a fair statement yeah that's how dad did it that's how america does it and it's worked ou

t pretty well so far moving away from the fringes somewhat let's head next door to perennialism and visit essentialism essentialism most often refers to the belief that certain subjects facts and skills are necessary to learn if one is to function or thrive in the world if you agree that people need some understanding of language history or math then you hold an essentialist belief now you may have picked up somewhere the idea that if something is essentialist it is bad this is what sociology te

xtbooks will tell you and any other scholars of the social level of analysis that want to suppress competition in the marketplace of ideas but essentialism is at least some of the time true when i was an undergraduate 10 whole years ago the accusation that someone's argument was essentialist was a pretty fatal blow to the ethos of it if jane says for example that men should not be teachers because they're not as empathic as women that is an essentialist argument specifically because the conclusi

on rests on the premise that there is an essential difference between men and women with regards to empathy the more jane appears to think that her argument is a strong one the more she separates herself out from the shared egalitarian values of most canadians so is essentialism in the philosophy of education that type of essentialism a little bit on the surface is the simple call to teach what is necessary and foundational slightly below that surface is the justification that students need thes

e subjects and lessons because of our nature as humans or children or working class people a highly integrative essentialist approach is that of jordan daddy peterson the books that have influenced the largest number of other books are the canonical books and the ultimate canonical book in the west is clearly the biblical corpus because it's influenced virtually everything and so you have to know it because it's implicit in everything else and so you start there and so you have that and it gives

you the foundation the metaphorical foundation the conceptual foundation the mythical foundation that you can use to then well then maybe you can now that now shakespeare opens up to some degree and now milton opens up to some degree and dante opens up to some degree and you think well why should those open up and the answer is well as the social constructionists claim you're at least in part a historical creature well then those books are about you they're the the patterns in those books are t

he patterns of your perceptions and your actions and without understanding them then you don't know who you are and you can't guide yourself properly through life and so you you you come into university and you encounter experts and they say look this is canonical why because it's had a disproportionate influence on everything else so you need there's something here that you need to know about because it's about you and and it isn't about the you that's here now in some sense it's about the you

that can unfold across time in the in the best possible way so each of those works is a call to adventure well the average essentialist doesn't dive that deep peterson illustrates pretty well the two dimensions or aspects of essentialism the claims about content and the often implicit claims about the students our exemplar for essentialism is e.d hirsch to understand his approach imagine if we examined a year's worth of the most widely read newspapers and made note of the historical people place

s stories fables words concepts and fictional characters mentioned in other words which cultural touchstones or references are common enough that you seem to need them in order to understand current discussions just like you can't summit mount everest without a sherpa and equipment you can't understand sentences like this without knowing what everest is what summiting it means what a sherpa is etc so imagine you noted all of those references and compiled lists of important knowledge that will he

lp someone understand the culture in which they will live this is hersh's essentialist approach initially he called it cultural literacy but this was misunderstood as being against multiculturalism so the largely left-wing educational establishment banished him until he rebranded as core knowledge and restated his original principles educating and engaging everyone to the standard that only middle class students seemed to be able to meet as equity and inclusion the content is the same it was the

label that apparently needed changing if you go to the inner city where we have core knowledge schools you find that these children are absorbing this material with enthusiasm and not just the ones at the top end of the ability scale everybody likes facts kids like facts it's only education experts who seem not to like facts they have to have the information before they can think critically and to give them the information is empowering the whole anti-fact tradition has no real scientific basis

to back it up language is dependent absolutely dependent upon culture the unspoken is necessary to understanding the spoken all kinds of shared background knowledge is critical to understanding what language says i understood that reference the romantic tradition in education assumed that it was taking the lead from the impulses of the child even as the child all the while has been urgently trying to take its lead from the powerful grown-ups whom it finds in its path the naturally unfolding vie

w of human development is a deeply wrong theory that has been the source of enormous inequity children from homes where the national cultural commons is already the home culture are already native to many things the schools must teach the children of outsiders can gain entry to that cultural commons only through a deliberate effort of acculturation by the school to ask such children to unfold naturally is an unwitting educational crime the ability to act and communicate effectively within the cu

ltural commons is a requisite to the success of any citizen with success defined minimally as as the ability to earn a good living participate in democratic self-government meet every other citizen as an equal mastery of the common code of communication is central to all of those abilities in a modern democracy acculturation into the cultural linguistic commons is the fundamental and inherent duty of the school language mastery is dependent on knowledge mastery the two parties to a language tran

saction the speaker and the listener the writer and the reader have to share common unspoken conventions and common unspoken information about the topic if the trans action the linguistic transaction is to succeed we've known this since the 70s those who lack that knowledge are prevented from fulfilling their economic and civic potentials it's the duty of the school in democracy to convey that enabling knowledge i can think of no higher praise for hersch's work than the fact that i use his mater

ials with my own kids he makes these books for every level of study this is the what your preschooler should notebook my two and a half year old has moved on to the what your kindergartner should know book and he loves the poems the songs the stories about abraham lincoln they're all cultural touchstones with familiar rhythms characters things that he should be able to reference with other kids when he's four or five and they will understand what he's talking about and when you look through thes

e volumes realize how much cultural content you have in your head that you take for granted all the stories poems and characters that you wouldn't think to introduce the kid to unless you had this in front of you it's full of culture that has stood the test of time and it's full of facts and kids like facts okay but do kids like school do kids like being forced to hang out with only people their own age being told what to do on a minute-by-minute basis being limited to one-hour periods for a stu

dy of any topic being evaluated by strangers with no familial investment in them being constantly compared to age-based ability standards despite the known vast variability in when humans tend to meet those standards being told that they're experiencing all of this because they and their caregivers are inadequate to the task of educating themselves being taught that things are done for the evaluation of others being told that this process is for your growth well it makes you more dependent being

placed in categories by people who only see you in this pathological situation being tethered to the problems of the classmates you happen to get incarcerated with being shaped to be passive predictable unoriginal and timid and being taught that this is somehow natural and that homeschoolers are the socially awkward ones yeah maybe but at least i won't be unoriginal do kids like this cannot keep me away fog cannot cloud my way i march to school every day my school is the best loudly i say rain

cannot keep me away fog cannot cloud my way i marched to school every day my school is the best loudly i say and have you thought about how life is meaningless in light of our inevitable death and nobody has to be born and we shouldn't impose upon the desires of students but rather free them to pursue their own interests their freedom and emotional experience not any goals of the instructor being the most important consideration if you answered that students do not like most of those things and

that their freedom and emotional experience is important you're at least a little bit an existentialist while psychology does have some good existentialists like rollo may carl rogers irving yalum and probably most relevant to psychology of education abraham maslow most of them are existential humanists and i don't really like the humanist conflation of personal development with positive development so my exemplar for existentialism will not be any of those it will be award-winning educator and

author john taylor gatto when you train fleas you've got to break their spirits if you put fleas in a container they'll instantly leap off and head off in all directions because they have flea agendas and even they don't hold off in the same direction they have individual agendas so he says you gotta you gotta break that autonomy in the flea first and the way you do that is you put them in a container small with a lid on and the fleas keep attempting to follow their own agenda and they strike th

emselves over and over again and if you come back in an hour or so they're all huddled in a mess together now when you take the lid off they don't even try to escape now you can impose your will on the fleet the minute the 11 year old kid said that to me i knew that i had been hired as the lid on the container to the extent that you use education and schooling as synonyms you've already anchored yourself it's like a horse that has 40 pounds of lead to carry as well as the rider there they're not

the same thing schooling tells you visually what it's about i mean the metaphors drawn from a school of fish a school of fish you've all seen them when one turns they all turn it's about inculcating that i'm including the finest schools in the country and they're all about inculcating the cues and the habits and the attitudes necessary to keep this dysfunctional economy lurching from decade to decade and the people that we get rid of are the people who show signs that uh that they're not going

to fit in we get rid of most of the people who score well on the test or haven't you figured that out yet you have to look out for yourself and then of course look out for the people you love look out for your friends get a little energy left over look out for your neighbors don't solve the problem systematically or we're playing another utopian game we can talk endlessly about it solving your personal problem is pathetically easy it's just ripping out the indwelling curiosity cut-offs that have

been planted in there it's ripping out the fear there's nothing to be worried about schooling is a form of adoption you give your kid away at his mouth or his or her most plastic ears to a group of strangers you accept a promise sometimes stated and more often implied that the state to its agents knows better how to raise your children and educate them than you your neighbors your grandparents your your local traditions do and that your kid will be better off so adopted by the time the child re

turns to the family or has the option of doing that very few want to their parents are some form of friendly stranger too and why not in the key hours of growing up strangers have reared the kids now let's look at the strangers of which you were one and i was one regardless of our good feeling towards you regardless of our individual talents or intelligence we have so little time each day with each of these kids we can't possibly know enough vital information about that particular kid to tailor

a set of exercises to that kid oh some of us you know will try more than others but there simply isn't any time to do it to a significant degree so what we do is accept and of course we don't accept this we're fired or harassed we accept a state's prescription that's written in manuals you do this first in this second and this third and here you have a little attitude to talk to the kid and the way the state checks on whether you've followed that diet is your standardized tests given at interval

s if your kids do badly it does not mean that they're bad readers or anything else it means that they haven't been obedient to the drills the state set down and they're marked for further treatment later on or marked to be excluded from responsible jobs by the time kids are released from the schooling experience they're so bent to habit patterns and attitudes that very few of them deviate for the rest of their lives i think as a school teacher teaching in a classroom for 30 years that that's a h

orrible thing because we alienate a great number of these kids from themselves and we absolutely guarantee that whatever their innate genius and talents are is very unlikely to be developed uh efficiently so rather than follow the state's prescription which gato said amounted to the seven lessons gato would try to have a unique curriculum for each student based on their interests what they find valuable and connections they can make in their community he had one student who was interested in swi

mming and he said well how about you go around new york and you find all the places that have swimming pools and you just record data about them how deep they are the hours that they're open you can compile that and make it available at the library and he had projects like this for nearly all of his students which was definitely against the rules gato was breaking new york state laws in order to help students get an education so he had to cover for his students and explain why they were absent h

e said at one point there were only nine students out of his class of 50 that were actually in the classroom and he was running out of ways to explain their absences the seven lesson school teacher was part of an acceptance speech for a teaching award that he won right before he quit teaching the next few minutes are gato sharing his research into what went wrong with education in the u.s it is likely not all relevant to canada and his analysis may be incorrect but i think his perspective is uni

que and valuable so i wanted to share it with you victor and prussia spinoza in holland and calvin where his theology spread but the father of this has to be plato these four major names spanning european history agree that the ordinary population is a very dangerous to the social order if it learns how to think and if its imagination remains intact and furthermore we have this corollary that there is no way to improve this but one of the wealthiest families on planet earth the family of charles

darwin and their former anglican minister trained son charles says that the evolutionarily retarded are fatally dangerous to the physical integrity of the human race the advance of civilization because of the few evolutionarily advanced cross breed god forbid with the irish or the spanish evolution will march backwards into the swirling myths of the dawnless past and nothing can change that now put yourself if you're watching this in the position of a responsible person who learns that that if

these ordinary people walking around in the american democracy if they happen if they happen to cross breed with your daughter evolution is going to march backwards you now have a justification beginning in 1871 second to none you can argue with calvin you can argue with spinoza you can argue with plato you can argue with victor this is science and mathematics and managed to obtain a book called principles of secondary education that he had written in 1917 in it ingalls highly praised by the pre

sident of harvard lists six precise functions of the new american schooling new in his day at least so try these on for size according to ingles the first function of schooling is the adjustive function the establishment of fixed habits of reaction to authority nothing in here about reading writing and arithmetic the establishment of fixed habits of reaction to authority in which i learned that stupid orders test this much better than sensible orders people who follow sensible orders are just se

nsible the people who follow stupid orders those are the people you can trust this prepares the young to accept whatever managers dictate when they are grown second according to ingles is the diagnostic function school determines each student's proper social role i'll bet you thought that it was determined some other way and schools log it mathematically and anecdotally on cumulative records to justify the third function of schooling the sorting function school sorts children by training individ

uals only so far as their likely destination in the social machine not one step beyond the fourth function is the conformity function as much as possible kids are to be made alike not from any passion for egalitarianism but that so their future behavior will be predictable in service to market research and political research i mean that's quite brilliant next is the hygienic function which is nothing at all to do with health or rather it has a lot to do with the health of the race as ingalls and

conant and the school crowd the architects thought of the health of the race this is a polite way of saying that school is expected to accelerate the darwinian natural selection principle by unnaturally tagging the unfit so clearly that they will drop out of the reproduction sweepstakes interesting huh and last is the pro-pideutic function that's a fancy word meaning that obviously a very small fraction of kids will have to be trained to take over the management of this system and perpetuate it

guardians of a population deliberately dumbed down and rendered childlike in order that government and economic life can be managed with a minimum of hassle and in conclusion each well-schooled generation you get a break after this each well-schooled generation remembers less and less of the founding vision of america it remembers not at all that political life here was deliberately arranged to make management difficult remember in third grade or fourth grade when hopefully you study the the uh

separation of powers the idea is to make management very very difficult which is this is not a nation that's about consensus what we gave the world and still what we have to give the world is argument premature consensus is for jerks for serfs we need to recall for our children and ourselves that america was given to the world as a place of argument not as a laboratory of managed consensus the new american dream of the great corporations and of our great imperial government is that we shall all

remain childish and emotionally needy forever because that makes the task of management more efficient and what i say to you in conclusion is that we should be done with this stunted and dishonest dream because it drives our children mad they are human beings not consumers they are not human resources i hope at least one person in this audience will break the nose the next person who uses the term human resources in front of you our children are not human resources they are not a workforce just

kick someone in the shins who says workforce they are not a breeding experiment to advance the efficiency of evolution they are not lab rats and they are certainly not subjects of an empire to be quit of the deepening nightmare requires that we first recognize the paradox of a democratic republic attempting to be an empire the contradictions between what we say we believe and what we do are not resolvable the project of extending childhood was concocted thousands of years ago by male philosophe

rs and reinvented by male philosophers in every age of history only to be ignored surely the mothers of the world who ended up saddled with its destructive responsibility never asked for it only in modern times did the idea come to be supported by powerful interests which came to see value and childishness for social and economic projects from plato onwards a few thinkers have always recognized that to bring about a closely managed society ways have to be found to keep the general population uni

nformed it's uncanny how steadily that theme echoes through history it's just that nobody quite knew how to do it or had really had the command over the society to pull it off and except for specialized functions in the overall system management is massively aided by making people incompetent so they're dependent on experts to keep their lives in balance in particular rhetorical fluency which allows unauthorized voices to reach out to others had to be rationed if a stable social order was the go

al even citizenship the concept of active personal responsibility for the community could not be allowed to spread very far since only a population numb to the interests of others will accept much management time to obey the curriculum and change topics most of what existentialists end up actually doing when it comes time to teach or to study would fall under progressivism which is also called pragmatism or experientialism progressivism asserts that student interests can determine what content i

n the essential topics or subjects should be covered it caters to individual students needs and it holds that students learn by doing things or at the very least holds that something that hasn't been related to any actions has not been made real for the student progressivism de-emphasizes notions of truth in favor of skills and methods what's useful to know or required to believe will change as society progresses so more important than facts are good ways of finding out what you need to know so

from essentialism progressivism keeps the use of key subjects and the position of teacher as at least a guide and from existentialism progressivism keeps the idea that students have a say in their curriculum and contribute to the making or finding of facts for progressivists and pragmatists nothing teaches like real world feedback how the world responds to your actions is how you learn what is true and even how you learn that there is truth well the main figure in pragmatism is john dewey as you

can see i'm scrolling through some of his quotes because he's very quotable in fact i have a quote from him as the sign off on my emails which says that if we teach today the way we taught yesterday we give away tomorrow a very progressivist idea but while he is the founder of a whole bunch of schools that did a whole lot of good and he is one of the most quotable authors and from anecdotal reports of people who've been in the classroom with him he was an excellent teacher his work is just a li

ttle bit dated as evidenced by this quote so i will take as our exemplar for progressivism someone who went to a john dewey inspired school and who is far more familiar to us gnome chomsky there are contrasting conceptions of who whom education is for and what it is for so let's take a look at whom it is for there are two views two fundamental views one view is that education is higher education is for basically for the elites uh for the privileged the rest of the population should be dumbed dow

n uh maybe allowed entry into vocational schools unlearned trades uh there's a more general conception that lies in the background and which strikingly holds across the mainstream political spectrum the leading public intellectual of the 20th century walter lipman his view was that that we have to distinguish between the intelligent minority called the responsible men and what he called the ignorant and meddlesome outsiders that's the general population who have to be spectators but not particip

ants in action and the responsible men incidentally anyone who ever discusses this is always part of the intelligent minority by definition so the intelligent minority the responsible men who are in charge of decision making they have to be protected in his words from the roar and the trampling of the bewildered herd he developed the concept of manufacture of consent is it a new art of democracy which has to be used to keep the ignorant and meddlesome outsiders from interfering he was actually r

elying on his own experience this was these were writings in the 1920s internally they're called progressive essays on democracy he was relying on his experience in the first and in many ways only official u.s propaganda agency the committee on public information term that orwell would have liked it was the creel commission established during the first world war to try to drive a pacifist population into raving war mongers and it worked pretty successfully uh it was led by the responsible men th

e intelligent minority who were more or less unaware that they themselves were the targets of an earlier propaganda agency the british ministry of information another orwellian phrase which was essentially designed to control the thought of american elites so they would therefore participate in the great task of bringing america into the first world war on england's side another member of the creel commission who was also very impressed by it was edward bernays he's the one of the main founders

of the modern public relations industry and his views were about the same there has to be an intelligent minority in control and we have to have a technique he called an engineering of consent to make sure that the rebel stays in their place as spectators not participants long before this ralph waldo emerson was considering the question of why political leaders uh are interested in having public education mass public education was just beginning and he said that the ground on which eminent publi

c servants urged the claims of popular education is fear uh in their words he says this country is filling up with thousands and millions of voters and you must educate them to keep them from our throats meaning educate them the right way keep their perspectives and their understanding and narrow and restricted discourage free and independent thought and frighten them into obedience something that's done over and over in the schools as well we've all experienced it if you go back still farther t

o the framing of the constitution it was based essentially on the same principles we have to make sure that the public is marginalized because otherwise they'll be trouble the majority of the population would use their voting power to take away the property of the rich to carry out what these days we would call land reform and obviously that would be unjust so therefore we've got to guard against democracy actually it's kind of interesting that whether consciously or not madison was reformulatin

g aristotle's book politics aristotle reviewed the many forms of government there could be and didn't like any of them but decided that democracy would be the least bad he's of course mostly thinking of athens and but he raised the same dilemma he said this same problem madison did one of the big problems of democracy is that the majority of the poor would use their voting power to take away and divide up the property of the rich which is unjust so madison and aristotle face the same problem but

they picked opposite they drew opposite conclusions aristotle's conclusion was we should eliminate inequality make everyone middle class more or less and he proposed actual measures for this what we would call today welfare state measures and that would overcome the problem so reduce inequality the madison solution was the opposite reduced democracy so design a system in which the public will not be able to exercise the kind of free vote that would threaten one of the main goals of government w

hich he said is to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority so therefore the same problem but opposite conclusions reduce democracy and if you look at the framing of the constitution that's the way it's designed so again in madison's words the constitutional framework has to ensure that power is in the hands of what he called the wealth of the nation the responsible men the men who have respect for property and its rights and therefore will ensure that the opposite minority is pr

otected from the majority let's go back a little bit further and go back to say david hume one of the first great modern political philosophers he wrote a book called first principles of government and in this he i'll quote him he wondered at the easiness with which the many are governed by the few and the implicit submission with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers when we inquire by what means this wonder is brought about we shall find that as force is a

lways on the side of the governed the governors have nothing to support them for but opinion it is therefore on opinion only that government is founded and this maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments as well as to the most free and most popular and in fact the more free and more popular where force is less available you get the most sophisticated development of the notions of manufacture of consent engineering of consent public relations industry and so on and the educa

tional system has to be enlisted in this enterprise it's a very conscious policy i'll return to the way it works in the modern period well that's one point of view about whom education is for another alternative point of view including high culture is that it's for everyone and there's interesting work on this uh one book i'd strongly recommend is if you have good eyesight a very tiny print unfortunately is a book by a scholarly book by jonathan rose it's called the intellectual life of the brit

ish working classes it's a monumental study of the reading habits of 19th century british workers and it's pretty remarkable to see what they were reading rose contrasts i'll quote him contrasts the passionate pursuit of knowledge by proletarian autodidact with the pervasive philistinism of the british aristocracy and he has good evidence for it and pretty much the same was true in the united states so in boston let's say in the 19th century if a blacksmith had enough could afford it that he wou

ld typically hire a young boy to read to him while he's working and reading meant reading classics or contemporary literature that we now consider uh in the fact in the factories that were the mills that were just beginning to be built in the early days of the industrial revolution a lot of the workers were young women from the farms called factory girls but there was pretty lively labor press at the time and very interesting to read the factory girls had plenty of condemnations of the industria

l system into which they were being forced i'll come back to a little bit but one of them was that it was taking away their high culture they were used to reading contemporary literature classics and so on when they were driven into the mills uh that was taken away from them from them and this this continued i mean i'm old enough to remember the 1930s at that time there was lively programs of workers education well those are two views of whom education is for to contrast new ones then comes the

question what it is for and here too there are contrasting views the contrast is actually discussed during the enlightenment and there's an imagery associated with it one image is that education is like pouring water into an empty vessel and in fact it's a pretty leaky vessel as you all know from your experience so you pour water into a vessel and of course all of us have been through this and you remember nothing the other possibility the other alternative is uh that education teaching should b

e like laying out a string along which the student can explore and progress in his own way that image comes from wilhelm von humboldt who was the founder of the modern university system also one of the founders of classical liberalism i get to uh john dewey america's greatest social philosophers mentioned later he wrote that it is illiberal and immoral to train children to work not freely and intelligently but for the sake of the work earned in which case their activity is not free because not f

reely participated in and as he also pointed out it'll be a leaky vessel those choices contrasting choices are very sharply drawn today i'm sure again that most of you have seen in your own experience i certainly have myself it has very definite policy implications right now in fact actually some very recent and very pointed discussion of this which i'll quote the american association for the advancement of science the main scientific organization has a regular journal of journal science and in

the last couple of issues the editor biochemist bruce albert sets forth alternatives these alternatives very clearly he's discussing science education in the schools but it generalizes so one approach he discusses is in fact the enlightenment view the teaching is laying out a string along which the student progresses in their own way through discovery and exploration and his version of it is that our goal is to make it much easier for teachers everywhere to provide their students with laboratory

experiences that mirror the open-ended explorations of scientists instead of the traditional cookbook labs where students follow instructions to a predetermined result and he contrasts that with actual practice which is of course pretty much the opposite a concepts taught with an overly strict attention to rules procedures and root memorizations then he goes on to quote his own testimony to the california standards commission his testimony opposing such ideas as teaching the periodic table of t

he elements in fifth grade which is totally meaningless to the students incidentally he points out he was unsuccessful in this it's taught that way and what he says is when we teach children about aspects of science that they cannot yet grasp then we have wasted valuable educational resources produce nothing of lasting value and much worse we take all the enjoyment out of science when we do so and he discusses dna his own field he says unfortunately most students today are taught about dna at su

ch an early age that they are forced to merely memorize the fact that there's a quote from a textbook dna is the material from which genes are made to chore that brings no enjoyment or understanding whatsoever and much later he says when they do have the background to understand both the structure of the dna molecule and its explanatory power i fear that the joy of discovery has been eliminated by the early memorization of boring dna facts we spoil the beautiful story for them by teaching it at

the wrong time and it goes on to the college level he says for example in an introductory biology class students are often required to learn the names of the 10 enzymes that oxidize sugars but an obsession with such details can obscure any real understanding of the central issue leaves students with the impression that science is impossibly dull of course many of them causes many of them to drop it tragically we have managed to simultaneously trivialize and complicate science education as a resu

lt far too many for far too many science seems a game of recalling boring incomprehensible facts so much so that it may make little difference whether the factoids about science that come from the periodic table or a movie script and give some examples again i'm sure you've had your own experience about that just to interpret i certainly have i remember when i was a 16 year old freshman at the university of pennsylvania i had to take a general chemistry course with about this many students in th

e audience it was insufferably boring and first furthermore it was completely obvious what was going to happen so if you read the textbook you knew exactly what was going to happen so i never went to class but they you know i got an it was okay i actually had a friend who took notes but the but the worst part was that they had a lab and i knew perfectly well that if i went to the lab and carried out the experiments none of them would work that's kind of reflects automatic so i didn't go to the l

ab there's a there was a manual where you had to fill in the answers to the results of the experiments and again entirely obvious what they were going to be so i filled it in you know got an a and so on but then i had a but then i had a very unpleasant experience i had to register for the next semester and when i tried to register they insisted on my paying a fee for breakage in the laboratory i'd never been to the laboratory i didn't know where it was but i obviously couldn't say that you know

so so i had to pay 17 which was a lot of money in those days the for the breakage in the lab that i never attended and of course i don't remember thinking of course i'm sure many of you can duplicate this experience serious education is radically different it's what alberts was recommending and that's the way science is actually taught at the advanced levels so take my own university mit it's a research university there's a famous world famous physicist late victor weiskopf who like a lot of sen

ior faculty taught freshman courses and he used to say that when he came to the first session of his freshman course and students would ask what are we going to cover this semester and his routine answer was it doesn't matter what we cover it matters what you discover and maybe you'll discover that what i'm teaching is wrong that would be great that's the kind of thing we want to do this goes on right through the graduate level that's in a serious university that's all there is it's the whole cu

rriculum and that's actually possible all the way down to kindergarten there are examples so in fact albert's in this series of articles it gives a good example he talks about a kindergarten class which won some award in the sciences as five-year-old kids their task the task that was given them each kids in the class was given a dish that contained seeds uh pebbles and shells and their task was to figure out which ones were the seeds so kids got together and what they call the scientific confere

nce and they each had ideas about how you might do it they exchanged the ideas suggested some ways of testing it then finally carried out the tests they finally got somewhere a little feature guidance but basically figuring it out for themselves it ended up at a point at the point where they were they figured out what were the seeds and they were dissecting the seeds they were given magnifying glasses and could look into it and locate the embryo which is the source of the that's learning real le

arning that's enlightenment style learning so it looks like chomsky accepts a similarly dismal and conspiratorial view of the origins and function or functions of formal schooling as gato does yet chomsky retains a rather positive view that teachers from k2 university can enlighten their students this provides a more radical set of intellectuals who otherwise adore chomsky for his anarchist political views with an axe to grind against him one of my favorite exchanges is between him and denaldo m

akedo here is makito at mcmaster well first of all i think that linguistics as any other field first and foremost should be engaged in ethical work and i i have been denouncing over many years the fact that we are not encouraged to study ethics educators should be first and foremost ethical uh individuals you know a teacher who is a racist uh uh should not be in the classroom a teacher who is who discriminates should not uh be in the classroom she should be weed out or he should be without so wh

en because i was trained in linguistics mostly to to be a technician in the analysis of linguistic structures uh from theory to practice you know i was never really even asked to think about language as my philosophy of language so for me then uh uh not knowing you know the philosophy of the very field of study you know that you have invest so many years that you've given begin you have been given degrees and so on and so forth you're going to be a professional in that field and so on and so for

th you don't know and you may engage unknowingly in unethical behavior the academic language is a language that in many ways not lies you know because you know it it it often you know encourage the use of euphemism rather than a a language that really names reality for example as an example that i gave you know we you know in the middle class you know reality academic discourse in the so-called mainstream american schools we avoid you know the use of the term oppressed then we come up with you k

now dozens of euphemisms you know we go to great lengths to not name you know the oppressed and then we use disenfranchised marginalized you know economically marginal at risk you know uh minority and so on and so forth my question is why do we avoid using in oppressed and the reason that we avoid using a press because we remain uncomfortable in unpacking the reality where you have oppressors having read the first chapter of orwell's 1984 i think that makoto is on the wrong track both in terms o

f what he's technically doing and in terms of ethics in general but returning to his exchange with chomsky the exchange is in this book which is filled with great observations like the fact that most people think they are middle class when that's not the case chomsky clarifies his perspective that education as it is done in our institutions is indoctrination in service of those with wealth that education should be both democratizing and enlightening and his belief that dewey's progressivism is w

hat moves us in those directions also here is chomsky's pragmatic observation that the more you are demonstrating through your actions the values of democracy the less you have to advertise or praise those democratic values to get students to believe in them and the observation that the more freedom people have in a society the more individuals interested in directing that society tend to ratchet up the propaganda the distraction and the less interest in literacy any ruling elite or individuals

tasked with directing these individuals who are free would want for their citizenry this is where we see one of the sharp distinctions between mako and chomsky as makito is attempting to argue for a devaluing of individualism the idea being that it serves the interest of capitalists or elitists and chomsky's pushback saying no no this is what we're trying to defend chomsky tells makoto to keep his postmodern anti-objectivity away from the hard sciences he makes the case for telling the truth as

you see it sharing that truth honestly with your students and he gives another statement of his belief the student as vessel metaphor is wrong both in terms of how students actually learn and in terms of how students should be taught so here's our cast of characters and philosophies recall that this is not equivalent to any political spectrum sure the social reconstructionists are a self-described marxist and what you might call a practicing post-modernist but neither of the perennialists are ri

ght-wing camille paglia being self-described as a pornographer and libertarian despite the social reconstructionists making the most noise on campuses and despite hersch's observation that pretty much everyone should take a conservative approach if they want to have any kind of foothold in the culture the philosophy most ascribed to explicitly and implicitly through actions would have to be progressivism pragmatism is a powerful force in education hopefully this lecture has presented you with en

ough that you can imagine how conversations between these characters and their philosophies might go if you have 20 minutes you could play your own game of rock paper scissors lizard spock with them mine looks like this taking our initial point of comparison perennialism humbles social reconstructionism which redefines essentialism which anticipates existentialism which questions perennialism which incorporates essentialism which explains progressivism which appeases social reconstructionism whi

ch radicalizes existentialism which personalizes progressivism which tests perennialism and since we're back at perennialism we could continue the cycle again if we wanted and you could take any one of the triads and see how they circle around to each other since this is generally the point where students ask in terms of my personal philosophy the fact that it changes quite often makes me a pragmatist and a falliblist my heart is existentialist my head is essentialist my cosmic soul is perennial

ist but all i do is progress a bit since my first year in undergraduate studies true believers have tried to convince me that social reconstructionism has value but what i see in their books and have heard in their seminars is a conflation of moral import with correctness or authority note that this comes from real conversations with visiting scholars from brazil and portugal and close readings of freire's books and those of Henry Giroux i have receipts in the form of four notebooks worth of not

es i took on them in undergrad i trained myself to read while walking so i could justify with multitasking all the time i spent reading freire and giroud i really tried but the line must be drawn here this far no further the social reconstructionist approach is selectively postmodern in its philosophy a sort of post-modernism for me but not for thee where ideology is bad but critical ideology is just the capital t Truth or whatever critical consciousness raising anti-oppression value is currentl

y standing in for Truth post-modern distrust of meta-narratives stops for critical theory at their own axioms in part because there's little separation between critical theory and a critical theorizer so something that puts anti-oppression ideas or actions in a bad light is by definition not just oppressive in the abstract but also oppressing the critical theorizer in the present note that this makes someone who cares enough about your cause to voice dissent or correctives an oppressor they put

themselves on a different moral plane and so people like me are regarded as being not merely an error but in sin for arguments against critical theorists to be met with any other response than this that argument would have to be sufficiently identified as more anti-oppressive more rooted in critical theory than the one being argued against so there is a corrective falliblist falsificationist aspect to critical theory it's just not a correction toward truth but toward its axiomatic goals of anti-

oppression it's an example of a flaw so obvious that it can be taken down with a simple story four different farmers: a religionist a historian an empiricist and a reconstructionist were each worried about their crops not growing that year the religionist tried prayer and when that didn't work he decided it was not god's will but that god's will could change the historian farmer consulted texts and elders and decided she was doing all she could to help the crops grow but new approaches might be

invented that could help enter the empiricist farmer who portioned off a section of crops to try something new and only if that works would she apply the idea more generally the reconstructionist farmer noted that current methods were not working and sought to dismantle those aspects of farming that were not directly contributing to the growth of this crop she noted that criticism of this approach could not possibly be in service of growing the crops unless that criticism found something else th

at was not helping with the crop growth and as with everything else if the criticism was not contributing she blocked herself off from it now the philosophically charitable thing to do here is to take the social reconstructionist perspective and say well it may be the case that the oppressive narratives or the power that i unconsciously serve are preventing me from constructing in the world a food solution better than farming in my parable maybe but the empirical farmer does have that contingenc

y covered with the potential help of the historian farmer what social reconstructionism adds is not necessary but what social reconstructionism takes away probably is but this is just me sharing my personal philosophy i doubt that these criticisms would apply to every version of social reconstructionism i'm not a critical pedagogue in the same way that i'm not a Catholic there is value in the "-ism" and it can do good in the world and it has but i have no desire to sign up or subordinate myself

to all of it because there are parts of it that are entirely against my nature i can't say that about the other four philosophies but i can say that about social reconstructionism drop any other questions you have below and i'll do them justice and comment replies and the topics that get good discussion will get more lecture time especially the course's final lecture which is on what you want to talk about i'll leave you with some miscellaneous from the cutting room floor we'll see you next time

i can go anywhere i can be anything you