A few years ago I was asked to be an NSF panel reviewer of applications for
major funding in their Informal Science Education program. I mainly looked
at proposals from science museums, most were not terribly intellectually
interesting, though perhaps useful to their primary constituents, and there
was a lot of concern at NSF about evaluation of such programs' outcomes. So
I did some thinking.
About the same time I was also invited to talk at a conference on computers
and education in a session whose theme was that there just might be some
basic incompatibility of educational philosophy between schools and the
internet community, leading to some potential conflict about how to
integrate information technologies into traditional formal education. So I
did some thinking.
What I decided in both cases was that formal vs. informal is not the issue,
though it names the paradigm cases. Formal education simply means
traditional schools, and informal education means anything else. If we want
to get fancy, formal ought to mean that there are systematic curricula and
informal that learning sequences and selections are emergent from the
on-going learning process. But it is not even really systematicity that
makes the important differences, for example, the relevant differences to
evaluation issues. It is much more nearly fixed goals vs. emergent
organization for the learning process.
Fixed goals are rarely the goals of the learner, at least not at any
particular moment, nor often even over a range of different time-scales
(goal of the hour, goal of the day, goal of the month ...). They are the
goals of someone with an interest in controlling what and how the student
learns. Controlling WHAT because they have an interest in all the obvious
consequences; controlling HOW because this has implications for costs. The
lie of the curricular paradigm in education is that curricula are just
efficient pathways by which students can achieve their educational goals.
Perhaps for some students, for some very longterm timescales, for some very
vague and abstractly defined goals, this might occasionally be true. But at
the level of short-term specificity at which day-by-day or week-by-week
curricular goals are evaluable, it rarely or never is.
Traditional paradigms of evaluation, whether of students or of programs,
are based on ends-means rationality, and in particular on fixed and
definite goals which provide the basis for evaluative criteria. If the
outcomes of learning were relatively unpredictable in any given case, then
the traditional paradigms for evaluation would fail to be applicable. This
is just what happens when learning is not subject to constant and intrusive
coercion: our goals and interests of the moment (and of the hour, day,
week, etc.) constantly mutate in unpredictable ways, every pathway to
learning is unique, for individuals and for groups, UNLESS we are forcibly
constrained to do something at each moment OTHER THAN what would be, for us
and now, the next logical step in inquiry or exploration.
It is often said that examinations and evaluation procedures are the source
of coercion in education, but this is not as useful a view, I think, as to
say that they DEPEND upon prior coercion for the applicability of their logic.
That the heart of the matter is coercion and not systematicity becomes more
apparent if we look at the alternative "informal" paradigms. The internet
community, at least the older core community before the vast expansion of
the last few years of the commercial internet, was highly "libertarian" in
US political terminology ... the highest value was freedom to pursue,
usually unorthodox, directions of interest and work, free from the coercive
forces of a larger institutional system that was fundamentally conservative
and managed by people on the whole far less informed or intelligent than
the elite of the internet community ... or at least this was how it was
seen from their own viewpoint. The information technologies that became the
WWW were based on a logic of open inquiry: people would follow their
curiosity and problems wherever they felt was necessary, and all
(non-private) information should be freely available and easily accessible.
This model was itself just an exaggerated, idealized form of a much older
model ... the model of academic research as free inquiry. The scholar in
the library represents a very different model of learning than the student
in the classroom. In some ways the library and the school are rival
educational institutions, upholding radically alternative paradigms: access
to information selected by the user vs. curricula with fixed goals and
sequences NOT selected by, and usually not even responsive to, the learner.
Museums follow the library model, but recognize different units of scale in
the learning process. Many museum exhibits offer the user a sequential
introduction to some topic, but there is very little coercion ... it is
perfectly possible to visit the exhibit in non-canonical order, to create
one's own "tour" through the whole museum even independently of its
organization into halls and exhibits. Many forms of online information
technology also offer users "guided tours" of specific topics, but the
valued ones, in this paradigm, also make it possible, and even easy, to
branch off, to cross-link, to customize, to create one's own pathway (e.g.
through a hypertext).
How do YOU prefer to learn? by following your interests, curiosity, needs,
questions, and best judgment of what to look to next ... consulting with
those you respect about most efficient routes through sources and levels of
complexity in a topic ... or handing your entire learning sequence over to
a standardized and invariable programme that will not let you learn in any
other way or learn any other thing than what it prescribes?
Again there is a matter of scale. I am perfectly willing to take the guided
tour up to a point, on some time scale ... but I need to have some choice
of what that scale is, and points to opt out of it ... because I recognize
that ultimately my (changing) purposes cannot be anyone else's, cannot be
anticipated by, or catered for, by anyone else. I can appropriate others'
guided tours into my travels, but only insofar as they continue to take me
where I currently want to go. On some longer timescale, I will still go my
own way. And on some shorter timescale, I may still want to deviate a bit
before returning to the guiding path.
Non-coercive learning is highly unpredictable in sequence, changeable in
goals, and significantly unpredictable in detailed outcomes. It is not
however entirely unpredictable insofar as there may actually be fundamental
concepts or skills that are in fact prerequisite to many kinds of learning,
for these will have to be encountered and learned somewhere along the line,
at least over the longer timescales. If you can learn more and more without
them, then they really have no claim to being fundamental. If they are
deeply fundamental, you may have learned them without ever setting out to
do so, indeed without even realizing that you have done so.
One of the most basic things that traditional testing never asks is: How
much do you value what you've learned? Did you learn things that are
important/interesting to you? which are most ... least ...? What would you
like to study next? These questions apply on all timescales of learning,
and they may have very different answers on longer than on shorter scales.
Finally, it is important to sketch the continuum between an extreme
individualism of learning, perhaps part of the autonomist fantasies of
renegade scholars and hackers, and the total coercion of institutional
curricular uniformitarianism. We learn with and from others, whether
directly or indirectly, and so we are always in the process of negotiating
social compromises between individual goals-of-the-moment and emerging
group agendas. We are always a little bit coerced in our learning by the
need to engage with others, and we have evolved democratic political ideals
to regulate collective activity. But what happens in curricular coercion is
an example of heterochrony: a system on a very large scale (the state),
operating in terms of very slow longterm processes (curriculum
formulation), intrudes by means of a material semiotic artifact (the
syllabus, the textbook, the test) and its much shorter-scale processes
(classroom activities using it) into a domain (our learning together) from
which it is almost entirely insulated by the vast scale difference. It
influences us, but we cannot in turn influence it. There is no interaction
across this scale difference, no reciprocity, no democratic political
negotiation, indeed no communication at all. The result is that none of us
would continue to pay attention to these artifacts if we were not coerced
on our own local scale into doing so. It does not matter that these
artifacts embody useful information about our larger-scale society;
students are not being encouraged to use them as "data" about the processes
in which they were formed, and teachers are every bit as much coerced by
them against their frequently better judgment of what to do next as are
students.
Not all institutional formations are equally coercive in this respect. I
think it will be interesting to analyze coercivity, not just in relation to
interests served, but also in relation to the fundamental problems of scale
in social organization. Schools and curricula, I believe, represent an
extremely pathological form of social organization, essentially defeating
their announced function. This is much less true of libraries or museums,
which have comparable scale considerations, but not comparable functions.
It is much less true of an institution like the 5th Dimension -style
afterschool communities, which have a somewhat comparable function, but
very different scale considerations.
JAY.
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JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
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