21/06/2023
As there is, alive and well, an “unschooled” or “transmission” view of education. To wit: The child has an empty mind, the educator has (one hopes!) a well-stocked mind, and the goal of education is to transfer that stock as efficiently and actively as possible from the mind of the educator to the mind of the child. It’s ironic, but perhaps also fitting, that in a book with this title, stiff resistance to its central ideas itself reflects the smooth and powerful operation of the unschooled mind.
Three Characters in Search of a Framework.
First, there is the intuitive learner (sometimes known hereafter as the natural, naive, or universal learner), the young child who is superbly equipped to learn language and other symbolic systems and who evolves serviceable theories of the physical world and of the world of other people during the opening years of life.
Second, there is the traditional student (or scholastic learner), the youngster from age seven to age twenty, roughly, who seeks to master the literacies, concepts, and disciplinary forms of the school. It is these students who, whether or not they can produce standard performances, respond in ways similar to preschool or primary school youngsters, once they have been removed from the context of the classroom.
Third, there is the disciplinary expert (or skilled person), an individual of any age who has mastered the concepts and skills of a discipline or domain and can apply such knowledge appropriately in new situations. Included in the ranks of the disciplinary experts are those students who are able to use the knowledge of their class to illuminate a new phenomenon. Their knowledge is not limited to the usual text-and test setting, and they are eligible to enter the ranks of those who “really” understand.
Why, one may ask, should we care about erasing these gaps? And, in particular, why is it important that natural or scholastic understandings give way to disciplinary understandings? The answer is simple: The understandings of the disciplines represent the most important cognitive achievements of human beings. It is necessary to come to know these understandings if we are to be fully human, to live in our time, to be able to understand it to the best of our abilities, and to build upon it. The five-year-old knows many things, but he cannot know what disciplinary experts have discovered over the centuries. Perhaps our daily lives might not be that different if we continue to believe that the world is flat, but such a belief makes it impossible for us to appreciate in any rounded way the nature of time, travel, weather, or seasons; the behavior's of objects; and the personal and cultural options open to us. And it was because Christopher Columbus dared to entertain a contrasting belief that he embarked on a journey of fateful consequences.
Trivia by Mrs. Minakshi Balkrishna
