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Natural Learning and the Natural Curriculum:
teaching tomorrow and the next learning system
Roland Meighan March 2004
Introduction
Readers probably know more about learning systems than they think.
And there are more of them than you might first think. Here's
the start of a list of some familiar ones:
Playgroups, nursery, infants, junior, secondary school, further
education college, traditional university, early childhood 'natural
learning' at home, home-based education, Open Univesrity, Scouts
Guides, Woodcraft Folk, Duke of Edinburgh Award Scheme, the Public
Library, the Army, Suicide Bombers Camps, Terrorist Schools, learning
clubs for Judo, Table tennis, Tennis Athletics, Dance, Book Circles,
University of the Third Age, Learning Co-ops, Community Learning
Centres, City as School, Not SchoolNet, and Cyber Schools.
Schools vary in style from Eton to Summerhill to local day schools,
to Sudbury Valley-type schools USA, to Cyber Schools to Eftaskole,
Denmark
As a young teacher, I came across this learning league table from
National Training Laboratories, Bethel, Main USA. It was an attempt
to rank a number of learning systems components on how much the
learners remembered afterwards.
Average retention rate
Formal teaching 5%
Reading 10%
Audio-visual 20%
Demonstration 30%
Discussion 50%
Practice by doing 75%
Teaching others 90%
Immediate use of learning 90%
This helped set in motion my life-long interest in learning systems.
(see A Sociology of Educating, fourth edition 2003, which could
easily have been entitled The Study of Learning Systems instead)
Four key propositions emerge, for our consideration here.
1. There exists a variety of learning systems and each one produces
different results.
Bertrand Russell in On Education (p.28) states the consequence
like this:
"We must have some concept of the kind of person we wish
to produce before we can have any definite opinion as to the education
which we consider best."
So, first decide your intentions, then choose an appropriate learning
system.
Thus, if we accept the view that the world's most pressing need
is to produce people who will do no harm, to the environment,
to each other or to themselves, and maybe even do a little good,
learning based on co-operation has to replace that based on competition.
We can choose to say more than this - 'we need people who are
capable, confident researchers and democratically competent'.
To achieve such people, the present system of mass coercive schooling
would need to be scrapped.
The first learning system we encounter is the Natural Learning
system of the home
i. Parents soon find out that young children are natural learners.
They are like explorers or research scientists busily gathering
information and making meaning out of the world. Most of this learning
is not the result of teaching, but rather a constant and universal
learning activity as natural as breathing.
ii. Our brains are programmed to learn unless discouraged.
A healthy brain stimulates itself by interacting with what it finds
interesting or challenging in the world around it.
iii, It learns from any mistakes and operates a self-correcting
process.
iv. We parents achieve the amazing feats of helping our children
to talk, walk and make sense of the home and the environment in
which it is set, by responding to this natural learning process.
All this is achieved, with varying degrees of success, by us so-called
amateurs - the parent or parents, and other care-givers such as
grandparents. What we discover as parents is that, if supported
and encouraged, children will not only begin to make sense of their
world, but can also acquire the attitudes and skills necessary for
successful learning throughout their lives.
v. But, this process of natural learning can be hindered or
halted by insensitive adult interference. Sadly, the schools
available to us, whether state or private, are often based on an
impositional model which, sooner or later, causes children to lose
confidence in their natural learning and its self-correcting features,
and instead, learn to be dependent on others to 'school' their minds.
In the process, E. T. Hall wrote in 1977,
"Schools have transformed learning from one of the most
rewarding of all human activities into a painful, boring, dull,
fragmenting, mind-shrinking, soul-shrivelling experience."
A prize-winning New York teacher, John Taylor Gatto, describes
this kind of schooling as training children
"... to be obedient to a script written by remote strangers
... Education demands you write the script of your own life with
the help of people who love or care about you."
The Natural Curriculum
The 'natural' curriculum is the 'course of study' that humans develop
as fast as physical and other conditions permit. So, babies accumulate
knowledge through activities such as play, imitation, and interaction
with any adults around. Play is best seen as children's work: one
grandparent noted recently that her granddaughter, at the end of
a refreshment and chat break, suddenly said, "I must get
on with my play-work now." This granddaughter does not
see her activity as 'trivial pursuits' or 'filling in time'.
The content of this natural curriculum is a set of existential
questions. They include: Who am I? Who are you? Who are they?
Where do we belong? Who gets what? How do we find out? Where are
we going? How am I doing? Who decides what? What is fair, right
or just? It is a set of questions that stays with us permanently
with the answers being reviewed constantly throughout our lives,
as we assemble our tool-kit of knowledge. From time to time, we
may engage with those attempts at systematic bodies of knowledge
called subjects, to help provide some answers to some of these questions.
The question, 'Who am I?' will be redefined many times. As a person
passes through the roles of infant, child, adolescent, young adult,
single person, couple, married person, parent, older person, their
self-concept has to be revised.
When young children reach five, they are asking, on average, 30
questions an hour based on their natural curriculum. At this stage,
one provisional answer to the question of 'How do we find out?'
has been gained, by achieving competence in the mother tongue.
Until quite recently in human history, this natural curriculum
was sufficient to keep most of us going throughout life. But then,
about 150 years ago, an institution called the compulsory school
was introduced. And suddenly, the natural curriculum was displaced.
The natural questions became replaced by an imposed curriculum based
on THEIR questions, THEIR required answers, and THEIR required assessment.
The message is dramatically changed: "Your experience, your
concerns, your hopes, your fears, your desires, your interests,
they count for nothing. What counts is what we are interested
in, what we care about, and what we have decided you
are to learn." John Holt, in The Underachieving School,
p. 161)
2. How do you classify learning systems?
None of the attempts I looked at as a young teacher seemed to be
getting us very far.
The role designated for the learner seemed to me to be a good starting
point:
Learners can be defined as Resister
or Receptacle
or Raw Material
or Client
or Partner
or Autonomous explorer
or Democratic explorer
It is hard to have an effective exchange with someone who has the
idea that learners are resisters and so must be compelled to learn,
if you are viewing learners as autonomous explorers who mostly need
support, encouragement and dialogue to assist their growth.
Here is the approach I worked with which classified systems as
Authoritarian, Autonomous and Democratic, along with a fourth category
of Interactive:
The Authoritarian View of Education or "You will do
it our way - or else!"
In authoritarian education, in its various forms, one person,
or a small group of people, make and implement the decisions about
what to learn, when to learn, how to learn, how to assess learning,
and the learning environment. This often decided before the learners
are recruited as individuals or meet as a group. As an exclusive
method, it is favoured by totalitarian regimes because it aims to
produce the conformist, lockstep mentality.
In this system, teachers can easily become merely 'miserable
rule-followers , as one teacher put it.
The Autonomous View of Education or, "I did it my way"
In autonomous education, the decisions about learning are
made by the individual learners. Each one manages and takes responsibility
for his or her learning programmes. Individuals may seek advice
or look for ideas about what to learn and how to learn it by research
or by consulting others. They do not have to re-invent the culture,
but interact with it. As an exclusive method it is favoured by liberal
or libertarian regimes.
The Democratic View of Education, or "We did it our
way"
In democratic education, the learners as a group have the
power to make most, or even all, of the key decisions, since power
is shared and not appropriated in advance by a minority of one or
more. Democratic countries might be expected to favour this approach,
but such educational practices are rare and often meet with sustained,
hostile and irrational opposition.
The Interactive View of Education, or "We did it in
a variety of ways"
In the interactive approach to education, the authoritarian,
democratic and autonomous ideologies are used in a variety of patterns.
They may be alternated, or revolved or used in some order of ranking.
For a deeper analysis see A Sociology of Educating, 4th
Ed. December 2003
3. A key lesson from the study of learning systems is that HOW
you learn is as important, if not more important than WHAT you learn.
The manner of learning is as critical as the learning itself.
Thus it assumed that literacy is automatically good. But, learning
literacy in a bully institution makes you a literate bully.
The survivor of a concentration camp had this to say on the matter.
"Reading, writing and arithmetic are important only if
they serve to make our children more human."
As governments world-wide bang the drum for more education, Don
Glines of 'Educational Futures Projects', USA, introduces a sobering
thought:
"...the majority of the dilemmas facing society have been
perpetrated by the best traditional college graduates: environmental
pollution; political ethics; have/have not gap; under-employment
- (in fact) the sixty four micro-problems which equal our one micro-problem!"
So, if some of the high achievers, Oxbridge, Yale, Harvard and
the like, are responsible for the various major problems the world
faces, perhaps we need less 'education' and more 'wisdom'?
The US radical, Nat Needle writes in response to President Clinton's
call to US citizens to prepare themselves to compete in the most
ruthless century yet:
"... if the 21st century becomes the story of human beings
around the world pitted against each other in a struggle for well-being,
even survival, this will only be because we failed to imagine something
better and insist on it for ourselves and our children.
"I don't care to motivate my children by telling them that
they will have to be strong to survive the ruthless competition.
I'd rather tell them that the world needs their wisdom, their talents,
and their kindness, so much so that the possibilities for a life
of service are without limits of any kind. I'd like to share with
them the open secret that this is the path to receiving what one
needs in a lifetime, and to becoming strong." (AERO-Gramme,
No. 25, Fall 1998)
4. Choosing to operate a mass, coercive, standardised learning
system inevitably stifles variety in achievement and limits the
amount of high achievement.
Sir Christopher Ball puts it like this:
"Unfortunately the 20th-century ... been too ready to classify
people as bright or dim. All these have conspired to hide the truth
that anyone who can speak their mother tongue, drive a car, and
understand the offside rule in football is highly talented and capable
of great feats of learning. Human potential is not in short supply."
Christopher Ball, RSA Journal 4/4 1999.
To some extent, the regime I often found in home-based education
has characteristics reminiscent of those found by the Smithsonian
research into the learning regimes of the 'genius'. H.G.McCurdy
of the University of North Carolina identified three key factors:
1. a high degree of individual attention given by parents and other
adults and expressed in a variety of educational activities, accompanied
by abundant affection ,
2. only limited contact with other children outside the family
but plently of contact with supportive adults,
3. an environment rich in, and supportive of, imagination and fantasy.
McCurdy concluded that the mass education system of the USA based
on formal methods, coercion and inflexible organisation, constituted
a vast experiment in reducing all these three factors to the minimum.
The result was the suppression of high achievement. Home-based education
seemed to be busily reinstating these factors.
Edmond Holmes, Chief Inspector of Schools in the early 1900's,
finally denounced the first National Curriculum approach, which
looks similar to the second, but without computers tacked on. He
proclaimed that learning and teaching became debased:
" In nine schools out of ten, on nine days out of ten,
in nine lessons out of ten, the teacher is engaged in laying thin
films of information on the surface of the child's mind and then
after a brief interval he is skimming these off in order to satisfy
himself that they have been duly laid."
Some of the consequences were that:
"... with the best of intentions, the leading actors in
it, the parents and teachers of each successive generation, so bear
themselves as to entail never-ending calamities on the whole human
race - not the sensational calamities which dramatists love to depict,
but inward calamities which are the deadlier for their very unobtrusiveness,
for our being so familiar with them that we accept them at last
as our appointed lot - such calamities as perverted ideals, debased
standards, contracted horizons, externalised aims, self-centred
activities, weakened will-power, lowered vitality, restricted and
distorted growth, and (crowning and summarising the rest) a profound
misconception of the meaning of life."
Conclusion: The next learning system will need to offer 'alternatives
for everybody, all the time' (just as most home-based educators
do already)
In The Next Learning System, the ten or so time switches
of change that will move learning systems into more fluid patterns
are given. Five have been noted as of major significance:
a. We now have an information-rich society with direct access
through information communications technology
When mass schooling was established, people lived in an information-poor
environment. Since then, radio, television, the explosion of specialist
magazines, computers, videos and the like, have all provided the
means of making most of the products of the knowledge explosion
readily available to anyone who wants it. This is just one of the
reasons why home-based education is so successful.
b. We now know much more about how the brain actually works
The new technologies allow us to watch a living brain at work.
As a result, most of the assumptions of behavioural and cognitive
psychology are in question. The brain, amongst other things, is
better at pattern-making than pattern-receiving.
c. We now know of thirty different learning styles in humans
It follows that any uniform approach is intellectual death to some,
and often most, of the learners, and is therefore suspect.
d. We now know of at least seven types of intelligence
Howard Gardner in his book The Unschooled Mind (1994) reports
his work on multiple intelligences. Seven types of intelligence
(analytical, pattern, musical, physical, practical, intra-personal,
and inter-personal) are identifiable. Only the first is given serious
attention in most schools. Yet, we now know that so-called 'ordinary'
people are capable of feats of intellectual or creative activity
in rich, challenging, non-threatening, co-operative learning environments
and the narrow competitive tests currently in use to achieve 'the
raising of standards', just prevent this from happening.
e. Home-based education has proved to be remarkably successful
There are a clutch of reasons why this is so, but a significant
one is the use of purposive conversation as a learning method,
in substitution for most formal teaching. Self-managed learning
is another to replace teacher-directed instruction. A learner-friendly
setting, efficient use of time, toleration of different learning
styles, multiple intelligences, are amongst others.
The current mass coercive schooling system in UK and elsewhere,
assumes that:
- Learning is preparation for life so at some point learning stops
and living starts
- Learning occurs mostly in school
- Specialists are needed to impart knowledge
- Education takes place in a school and requires a prescribed
curriculum
- People do not and cannot learn on their own.
- People with a large quantity of memorised information are better
people
- Schools are needed to socialise and civilise
On the other hand, the natural learning approach, (and I propose,
the next learning system,), assumes that:
- Learning is life, for humans are learning animals, so while
we are alive, we are learning
- Learning occurs everywhere and anywhere
- People can direct their own learning
- Education is a lifelong activity needing to be personalised
using a catalogue curriculum
- People can learn to make decisions on what and how to learn
- Everyone is important regardless of how much they have memorised
- People are socialised and get civilised in their communities
Key features of the next learning system based on natural learning
principles
Elsewhere, I have listed some of the key features of the next learning
system. They include:
1.Learner-managed learning with very little 'uninvited' teaching
2. A network of learning sites
3. The natural catalogue curriculum
4. Personal learning plans devised by learners often in consultation
with others
5. Direct access to our information-rich society6. Teachers as learning
travel agents and learning coaches
7. Assessment on request, with celebration more important than testing
8. Monitoring mostly for good quality feedback to learners
Its spirit is summed in the dictum:
anybody, any age; any time any place; any pathway, any place
...
(for further material on this and related themes. See the best-selling
Natural Learning and the Natural Curriculum from Educational
Heretics Press, £10-00, mail order from 113 Arundel Drive, Bramcote,
Nottingham NG9 3FQ)
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