Academic Practice

Practice as a form of action based on the codified experience of a field combines with the work of disinterested reflection to delineate a pedagogical commonsense that will serve educators dependably under established conditions. Here educators develop ideas by which we orient and sustain educational effort, enabling those engaged in pedagogical work to cope with limiting circumstances. Here is the grounding where educators make our basic assumptions about human potential. Who should do what with whom in the process of education in order for self-sustaining human development to take place?

¶124

Throughout the era of scarce educative resources, the problem of practice has been to make these stretch as far as possible. The common practice has relied on the strategy of instruction, which requires large numbers of children to learn in unison. This strategy has been in force for centuries. As we noted, this strategy accounted for the design of schools, the way classroom practice worked, the organization of the day and year, the plan of the curriculum and the function of textbooks. Under a regime of cultural affluence, the effort to make a few cultural resources stretch as far as possible makes little sense. Other imperatives gain prominence. These are not entirely new imperatives, but their relative importance increases with the change in underlying economics as the information infrastructure shifts from print to digital networks.

¶125

Inquiry, study, problem solving can become the prime educational activities in a system making full use of digital resources. Under a regime of instruction, the crucial instrumentality in education is the teacher who imparts the properly packaged curriculum to the receptive learner. Under a regime of study and inquiry, the critical causal agent is the student who appropriates the content of his or her education, making distinctive choices and reaching out to peers and adults, especially to teachers, for encouragement, advice, and assistance. Educators have often commended study and inquiry as the best modes of learning. Despite numerous reform efforts, however, practice always seemed to revert to norms of traditional instruction. The reason is fairly simple – schools and teachers could not mobilize the diversity of cultural resources required in order to sustain the currents of substantive open-ended inquiry that many millions of children and youths would generate, with each sustaining his or her quest over twelve to twenty years of education. Under a regime of scarcity, locating the causal agency of education in the power of students to study and inquire would overwhelm the ability of teachers and the intellectual resources of the school to respond effectively to the avalanche of youthful questions. Consequently, given the constraints, with every departure toward student autonomy, educators have repeatedly relocated the causal agency with the teacher in a regime of instruction. When that regime works, a linear flow of knowledge and skill moves from the teacher to a class of students with drill, practice, testing, and recitation pumping the flow onward – it being, alas, all too viscous.

¶126

Constraints, we recognize, are changing. Digital resources represent a powerful investment in the power of the student to inquire and to learn. Given effective tools of access, analysis, simulation, and synthesis, students can accomplish many things with these resources that they could not do without them. As a result of empowering students more effectively, new media enable teachers to alter their characteristic practices as well. For many teachers and observers of education, these shifts require a difficult change in mind-set about the process of education. All educational practices have implicit in them controlling assumptions about human nature. The controlling assumptions implicit in existing practices are pessimistic. People do not like to admit that external conditions determine what they will. Constrained to act thus and so, people adopt principles that convert the necessity into the fruit of reasoned choice. [Note 90] Thus, it is not enough for many people to say that teachers must be causal agents of education because limiting constraints prevent the system from responding in effective, supportive ways to autonomous students. Since children are feckless, steady control by teachers becomes their adult duty, the fundamental responsibility of their chosen role. With the pessimistic view of the student that many hold, seeing the student as a dull, indocile, quiescent creature, they would find it quite imprudent to act on the presumption of the student’s self-directing autonomy were it possible to do so. In the face of this pessimism, educators must now assert a strong optimism in their assumptions about the nature of children in order to develop the educational possibilities of the new technologies. They must assert this optimism and they must prevail, with articulate stands, in conflicts over such assumptions. Through such struggles, educators advance the continuing work of enlightenment. .

¶127

By and large, the traditional system assumes the worst of students. If it has eased up on the adage, "Spare the rod, spoil the child," it is fast replacing it with "Scrub the test, wreck the cohort." One of the great ironies is that infants learn to walk and talk largely through their self-directed effort. They are, furthermore, remarkably dependable in achieving these first goals through their self-directed efforts. How wonderful it would be were our schools to have such rates of success! Adults, however, learn little from the example of infants. As children grow, becoming able to walk and to talk, they suddenly appear to their elders to have become willful. The elders then become far more paternalistic and start to assume that children cannot exercise wise judgment about their own education. Adults usurp control, convinced that they can speed the process and keep priorities in order. Parents easily find their usurpation of pedagogical control to be entirely legitimate in view of the child’s recalcitrance in bringing the dread sphincter under voluntary discipline. The cost of this usurpation is a frequent estrangement of children and youth from their own education. The benefit is a speeding of the process, or so we think, as what might be learned, slowly but autonomously, by a zigzag path of trial and error, is learned instead by the straight and narrow as the student is channeled along pre-designed tasks to the formal curricular objective. Alas, the estrangement becomes habitual and adults, who had been accustomed to it in their turn, can see issues of education only from the perspective of teacher control. Too often adults can only see, as external observers, a wasteful trial and error in what subjectively to the young mind is a course of challenging inquiry and exploration, leading to a construction of understanding and meaning.

¶128

Long ago Rousseau argued eloquently throughout Emile for a careful cost-benefit trial of this trade-off between educational estrangement and didactic acceleration. [Note 91] To date, a significant trial at the level of organized practice has not yet taken place, largely because the strategy of acceleration has been the only organized practice within which results could be examined. The American progressive education movement tried to minimize educational estrangement by working with students as they set their own pace and direction, but we have noted before – this movement proved fundamentally impracticable under prevailing conditions. Now those conditions no longer prevail. As digital resources become the infrastructure for education, it becomes much more feasible to test whether or not paternalistic efforts to accelerate the pace of learning are in fact counter productive and whether both time and value can be gained by ceasing to understand the business of the student as learning what teachers teach and instead recognizing it to be what the student’s name suggests, studying those things that the student finds significant. [Note 92]

¶129

Perhaps the most deep-seated issue facing educators in the social construction of a new educational system involves their assumptions about human nature, particularly their assumptions about children and youth. It is an issue about which the Western tradition is deeply ambivalent, encompassing strategies of activation, which assume a natural goodness as the point of departure, and strategies of direction and control, which assume original sin as the starting point. [Note 93] By historical accident, these differences have had relatively muted effects in education practice over the past few centuries. During this time, the means available for following through on the more optimistic assumptions were severely limited, and those that were consistent with a more pessimistic view of human nature were historically both more widely accessible and more effective under the prevailing constraints. Now this accidental muting of the issue is fast disappearing. Already, a significant strand of opposition to twentieth-century progressive practices attacked them for allowing children to grow up undisciplined. Critics rejected progressivism as a reckless abandonment of children to their willfulness and perversity, a callow failure by adults to implant a sense of order on the childish soul. As observers of our extended present, we are seeing a similar, serious conflict arising with respect to the use of the Internet in education. The Web is almost a perfect litmus test, disclosing a person’s basic assumptions about human nature. Some predominantly celebrate its profusion as a wonderful opportunity enabling people to participate more fully in cultural activity of significance to them. Others dread that profusion as a terrible temptation that must be censored and controlled before the young can safely enter into it. At a time when the teaching of evolution can still come under challenge as an insult to strongly held beliefs about the origin and nature of human kind, one can easily envision strong objections to a pedagogy of student autonomy, gaining substantial public adherence.

¶130

Here is one of the points at which the new technologies may be associated with a significant historical change of phase, however. The parameters of past sensibilities may prove to have little to do with the realities of our emergent present. Significant realities widespread before the change, for instance, a pessimistic view of human nature, may simply be left behind in the transition from one phase to another. Past beliefs, therefore, do not necessarily predict emergent convictions. If we look, we can see that patterns of human trust and acceptance are changing substantially as the contexts of human experience change. Consider the hypothesis that modern conditions elicit a growing confidence that people are fundamentally good, and that the digital systems are extending that confidence in other people immensely. Complex systems of social action require that the people participating in them have internalized stringent standards of behavior and the conceptual assumptions that secure and reinforce those standards. When my action is tightly linked to similar actions by many others, with all of us acting according to internalized standards and codes, we develop very extensive spheres of trust and confidence, which encompass multitudinous strangers. In this way, people become natural Rousseauians, confidant that the love of self inherent in each person, leads each person to act in a way that protects both his or her own safety and that of others as well.

¶131

For instance, we eat foods that countless hands have processed and prepared, we know not whose, foods from unknown sources, shipped in unknown ways, packaged and sold according to unknown routines, going to millions of mouths in billions of meals, in an incredible network of trust and confidence in other people, nameless and entirely unidentifiable. For instance, too, as we drive our cars, we routinely risk our lives and those of others in acting on the belief that the behavior of other drivers is sane and highly predictable – virtually everyone continuously assumes the natural goodness of other drivers as each speeds hither and yon. When the light turns red, people stop, and whether drivers hold a pessimistic or an optimistic view of human nature, they stake their lives repeatedly on this expectation. Most complex systems depend on the intricate structuring of behavior, achieved through a pervasive expectation of conformity by all participants to rigorous standards and requirements. The expectation that participants in the system internalize and develop its standards and requirements is built into the system, and people do so out of concern for their self-interest, both narrowly and broadly construed, which is helped by observance and harmed by violations of the enabling standards. At the margins – beware the radar trap. But maintenance of the system is not achieved through enforcement at the margin, but by nearly universal expectations that all can depend on each to act according to the norms in force. [Note 94]

¶132

How does such confidence in the other person spread through a population? One might observe that both optimists and pessimists about human nature are inclined to act, given the opportunity, on the basis of their view, and in both cases those actions embody self-confirming prophecies. Thus the pessimist creates authoritative systems of enforcement, the typical effect of which is to engender destructive, subversive opposition. The pessimist then takes this resistance as evidence that he or she was right all along. The optimist advances a self-fulfilling prophecy in creating internalized systems of self-control. If such a system is sufficiently attractive to people to elicit their participation, they indeed internalize the standards of self-control and the system flourishes, becoming evidence that the optimistic assumptions were sound. Circumstances have so far favored the pessimistic prophecy, at least within education. Now, however, it becomes possible to implement practice according to the optimistic prophecy. As we do that the evidence may build that indeed students deserve and merit trust. Digital technologies embody deeply optimistic assumptions about human nature and their efflorescence in our culture is a work, both sudden and vast, resulting as people internalize unenforced standards of operation and use them to advance their various purposes. Educators have the opportunity, finally, to open participation in the work of culture fully to all, and to grasp that opportunity educators need to advance a great, hopeful prophecy, that people who participate in the cultural work of humanity, thereby internalize the standards and discipline requisite for its effective operation.

¶133

In constructing a new educational system, centering initiative and control with the student is a fundamental principle of design and a measure of good practice. The role of teachers remains great: it is the role of fomenting questions, doubts, uncertainties; modeling strategies of inquiry; and criticizing the quality of results. In this context, curriculum design becomes the art of posing problems and facilitating work upon them. To so facilitate autonomous work by students requires great skill and sensibility, and teaching may become a more prized and more demanding profession. As educators adapt work to empower the student, they create settings in which

• Students work primarily in small collaborative groups on challenging projects that take a significant period of time to complete and cut across normal disciplinary boundaries.
• Students have access to digital representations of nearly unlimited sources and data – documents, images, recordings, videos, maps, statistics, artifacts, monuments, and so on.
• Students can make effective use of digital tools that enable them to conduct sophisticated analyses, syntheses, and simulations with the result that the work students can perform is much closer in scope and quality to that of advanced scholars.

The transformation of education taking place is not a function of increased access to information. It is a function of increased participation in intellectual work – in advancing knowledge, in applying skill, in exercising judgment. Participants create, adopt, and maintain their standards. They do not have their standards imposed by external authority. The faith in human nature, which educators should profess with pride and vigor, is the faith that participants in the creative work of culture open to all, all naturally adopt its empowering discipline and work through it to make a better future, further strengthening the progressive bond with posterity.