I would sign on to Jay's suggestions for expanding the list of
things we fight about in public. Unfortunately at the moment we're
stuck with this fight in our particular corner of the world -- the
schools, and I'm afraid the conflict is about to escalate, with the
weapons -- ideas, values, and maybe evidence -- provided by
academics. My May _Education Researcher_ arrived yesterday -
featuring an article by John Anderson, Lynne Reder, and Herb Simon
titled "Situated Learning and Education." It is a segment of a
larger, unpublished, piece "Applications and Misapplications of
Cognitive Psychology to Mathematics Education," available on the
Web at: http://www.psy.cmu.edu/~mm4b/misapplied.html That piece
takes on what it views as harmful exaggerations from
constructivism, as well as conceptions of situated learning. While
I'm sure some of us will resent the chiding tone, it is relatively
calm in its discussion and it leaves a lot of credit and room to
maneuver to the views it criticises. It is clearly a much more
important and serious piece than Stone's. So far, I think it is
well within the conventions and civilities of academic debate, and
it falls somewhere near Jay's "Since I believe that some
combination of 'phonics' and WL ... makes for a useful recipe
across various ..." but extends the substance to components and
wholes, explicit and implicit instruction, contextualized and
de-contextualized learning and assessment, and so on, in education
more generally -- with a push toward their own cognitive
science/information processing views of how to proceed, both in
research and in instruction (though they are short-term modest
about the latter).
It will be very easy for this to heat up the academic fight,
but I guarantee that if we start screaming at each other, it will
be immediately assimilated into the "perverse way of defining the
issues" that already dominates the public forum. There are real
issues here, and it will be an indefinitely long project to sort
them out. No one who goes into schools these days can be
completely comfortable with the ways constructivist ideas (for
example) get implemented by real schools and teachers. But no one
should be surprised, either, that it takes time to learn how to do
new and complicated things well, or that they will be done
varyingly well. The same will be true of whatever comes out of
information processing. I think we have a common interest in
making the case that the schools can do better than they do; that
in some cases it is very urgent that they do; that we have learned
quite a bit about how to do better; but that we also have a lot to
learn and need room to try. We could all agree that there is
enough uncertainty to make legislated mandates about instruction
inappropriate, but we will probably make that case more effectively
if we accept that there are legitimate concerns about what the
schools and students accomplish and if we accept responsibility for
paying attention to results and evidence and making a good faith
effort to act on them.
I guess it's helpful to remember that these bozos still have
to get elected, so however distorted the process, they're still
"our" bozos. We have some obligation to try to educate them too,
rather than just clowning around.
Fritz Mosher