I want to add one-cent comments to Chuck's thoughtful discussion. He wrote,
> So, to repeat, perhaps rather than wondering about how much we
>dislike coercion or whether lectures were good or bad for the mind or
>whether some people should be guiding others, we might wonder about what
>gets students involved and engaged and mentally growing, and more
>particularly how do we get them involved in the rich and useful domains
>developed by many people previously who founds those domains rich and
>rewarding.
Two points:
1) Really like to think about educational philosophies as a cohesive dynamic
unity that guides person's participation in a sociocultural activity exactly
because lecture can be a long dialogic turn in meaningful discourse or a
coercive tool.
2) People who coerce other people to learn something often can not find
themselves "intrinsic" reason why the coerced content should be learned. By
saying that, I do not mean to blame teachers for coercion (they are least
guilty in my view!), I just want to stress the institutional ideology of
"transmission of knowledge."
Eugene Matusov
UC Santa Cruz
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Eugene Matusov
UC Santa Cruz