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Newsgroups: bit.listserv.edpolyan
Date:         Mon, 11 Jan 1993 16:35:23 -0600
              <EDPOLYAN@ASUACAD.BITNET>
From:         stan kulikowski ii <STANKULI@UWF.BITNET>
Subject:      classic education, not in books

  classic education is exacting what is missing in the books.

  when i wrote my initial response to the 'Great books' request, a couple
of you asked for some clarification in my 'dim view of this profession'.
the dimness is one of our culture, rather than of my eyesight.


>>
>>  From:         JFCOVALE@SUVM.BITNET
>>
>>  By way of clarification, Stan, by "no principles that constrain practice"
>>  do you mean no algorithms of practice or no standards by which to make
>>  judgements about practice?
>>

  there are certainly low-level algorithms of practice, but there are no
means by which to compare them and no grounds upon which to discard poor
ones nor advance successful ones.  they do not build into high-level
algorithms which subordinate the basic levels.   i guess you would say
this means no standards by which to make judgements.  most educators
attempt to substitute statistical results in the absense of explanatory
structure.  we lack a coherent model for the structure of knowledge in
curriculum, hence our best efforts are guided by the raw prevalence of
testing items.  our worst efforts are guided by nothing at all.

  i do not believe it was always so.

  from the times of the roman republic (c. 300 bce) a person was judged
literate if once could read and write latin (their native tongue) and a
person was considered educated if one could read and write greek (the
language of scholarship).  after the fall of the roman empire, literacy
was determined by reading/writing in whatever national language you were
born to, but an educated person was literate in latin.  very educated
people included literacy in greek, and the most extreme scholars included
hebrew.  the grammar of these languages established a fundamental
structure to pedagogy.  general educators were not so much worried about the
content of curriculum beyond the ability of students to read classical
texts in their original form.  an uneducated person was typically
stigmatized as 'but he has no latin' and nothing further need be said
about native literacy or useful knowledge which such a person might have.
'no latin' simply meant uneducated, no access to the sources of wisdom.
this paradigm of education was accepted for a little more than 2000 years.

  a similar pattern is seen in the far east.  japanese and korean children
are taught their native writing systems, but literacy in chinese characters
determines their level of education.

  what has happened in education is that we have lost our functional
professional paradigm when science replaced the humanities in curriculum
during the 19th century.  today we have no operational definition what it
means to be educated.  i would invite you to read the archives of newedu-l
@ USCVM.bitnet for the early few months.  they struggled with the question
of what we mean by 'educated' and mostly failed to reach any consensus.
the best attempt was probably 'educated = well read' meaning familiarity
with famous works of literature determined by the defunct humanities.
many people will recognize the hollowness of 'well read' especially in
the explosion of information accompanying cyberspace.

  mathematics is the common language of the sciences, and it has failed to
capture the role of common organizing principle in curriculum.  we do not
recognize an uneducated person as someone who 'has no calculus'. i think
that most people probably feel that regular literacy in their native
language is equivalent to having an education.  the attempts to define
'computer literacy' or 'scientific literacy' are just trumped up
metaphors, recognizing the lack of an educational paradigm.  we have no
common ground beyond the third or fourth grade (literacy) and thereafter
we are engaged in mainly training (in specialties) and childcare
(baby-sitting).  this last may be the primary function for schools, since
both parents must be employed to maintain a life style comparable to late
19th century purchasing power of a family unit.  i recently read somewhere
that an assistant professor in american universities has about the same
buying power as a coal miner in the 1920s (sure feels about right).


>>
>>  From:         Aimee Howley <ESS016@MARSHALL.MU.WVNET.EDU>
>>
>>  a more productive sense of teachers might include consideration of
>>  the many experiences--"common sense," local knowledge, intellectual
>>  influences--that inform practice.  Why should teaching practice be
>>  constrained?
>>

  by 'constrained' i mean that from the set of all possible practices, we
commonly recognize a subset of them which are measureably effective and
anyone of professional standing uses these.  if we are constrained by
commonsense, this means that anyone can be a teacher (indeed, most people
do teach something to someone during their life), but it also means that
every effort to improve practice beyond commonsense is always starting at
ground zero.

  other professions are not so organized.  there are principles which are
not manifestly obvious and these principles constrain practicioners to
methods that are not common knowledge.     for example, biologists are
commonly constrained by the 18th century phylogenetic system of linnaeus
which determines the method of naming plants and animals by their
morphology and genetic descendancy.  every biologist does not start their
papers by describing what they mean by 'a fly', but rather they just refer
us to the linnean species names and go on from there.  every chemist
agrees upon the structure of the periodic table of elements.  every
mechanical engineer knows the standard tensile strength of materials used
in construction.  doctors recognize a common pharmacopiae.

  what does every teacher agree to?  well, probably literacy, and there is
a historically cyclic debate on the whole-word and phonic methods.   but
beyond that?  i routinely assign student teachers to write why they want
to be teachers-- the elementary majors invariably give responses like 'be
a role model' or 'learning should be fun' which i take to be the primary
concerns of childcare.

  what does every educator agree to?  at one time it would have been the
grammar of latin, and we would have debated the best forms of pedagogy to
instruct this.  is every teacher an educator by definition?  i meet
faculty in our universities who i doubt are educated even though they
possess ph.d and successful grants.  if you can name some fundamental
principles of education, i should be able to recognize them, as i have
been a teacher for a long time and am reasonably educated...
                                                            stan

          .         i have come
         ===        to chew bubble gum              stankuli@UWF.bitnet
                  and to kick ass
         ---        and i am all out of bubble gum.
                                   -- they live
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