As several respondents have pointed out, the "developmentalism" article
makes substantial use of the argumentative strategies of polarization and
dichotomization. However, as in most fields of human activity, what is
purportedly being described is much more complex and diverse than the
dichotomies allow. Certainly schools and classrooms are not all of a type,
nor are most teachers' attempts to do their best for their students
consistently based on one "ism" to the exclusion of others. Similarly,
from my experience, teacher education does not purvey a single, simple
view of teaching, developmentalist or otherwise.
Faced with the inadequacy of such dichotomous rhetoric as a means of
collectively working our way towards greater understanding, why - I
wonder - do we all tend to use it so frequently. To a considerable
degree, the answer seems to be that our language (at least English, and
probably other languages too) disposes us to do so. Most lexical items
name discrete, typological categories (it's either a cat or it isn't) and
a similar dichotomizing tendency is found in the "either/or" pattern at
phrasal and clausal levels. To hold a number of possibilities in tension
within a single spoken utterance is difficult for both speaker and hearer;
and, even in writing, it is difficult to formulate a multidimensional
characterization of a situation without losing one's reader "along the
way". Although the "tool of tools", language doesn't seem to be ideally
suited to the expression of simultaneously grasped perspectives. Yet
this seems to be what we urgently need.
On a different note, I should like to draw attention to a contrast that
appears at the end of the article: medicine v. education.
> The restrictions on effective practice posed by
> developmentalism have largely precluded many otherwise
> credible attempts to improve education through applications
> of science. The contrast between the degree of scientifically
> founded progress in medicine versus that found in education
> attests this conclusion. To a large extent, medical science has
> benefitted man by employing scientifically informed means of
> intervening in nature. The artificial creation of immunities
> through the use of "unnatural" and invasive vaccination is an
> historic example. In contrast, educational improvements on
> "natural" patterns and processes of learning have been severely
> restricted by a doctrine of developmentalism. Instead of using
> experimentally validated teaching methods, teachers have been
> encouraged to emulate nature and thereby preserve the perfection
> assumed to exist in natural developmental processes.
Generally speaking, I believe, the assimilation of education to the
medical model is quite inappropriate. My impression is that the
"success" achieved in medicine is largely based on the working
assumption that the human body is comparable to an intricate "machine" -
an assumption that ignores the interdependence of body, mind and culture,
and leads to treatments, in some cases, that are not in the interests of
the patient as a whole person-in-his/her-cultural-context. In appealing
to the medical model, and in the paper more generally, Stone seems to be
working from a similarly impoverished view of students as, for all intents
and purposes, identical, disembodied minds - mental mechanisms to be
manipulated and fine-tuned on scientific principles to absorb and store
the information that someone in authority considers important.
Gordon Wells, gwells who-is-at oise.on.ca
OISE, Toronto.