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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.
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 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)
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
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)
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."
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:
On the other hand, the natural learning approach, (and I propose, the next learning system,), assumes that:
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)
© 2004 PLAYLINK.