What is the purpose of education in challenging times? Part 1

Developing the capacity to think and ask questions is the heart of the scientific method.

Source: Elizaveta Dushechkina Unsplash

Teachers are busy people. We rarely have the time to stop and consider the purpose of our work within the grand scheme of things, and how the work we do everyday contributes to the bigger picture realities, including for the future of our society.

But asking the question, ‘What is the purpose of education?’ is a critical one that we must keep on asking ourselves, even while still tending to the ‘how’ of learning. Being clear about what we aim to achieve in education is critical because it informs our practice, and how we spend our time and resources.

The question of the purpose of education is ultimately a sustaining question. By contrast, the ‘how to’ debates end up in places that can be undignified and dispiriting. The need to be right becomes a myopic goal that ignores the larger purpose of education. Being clear about the purpose of education gives us a clear-eyed way to evaluate those ‘how-to’ debates.

To broach the question of purpose is not so straight forward, though. To do it well, we need to understand how the theories and evidence that inform us have come to be, and how these are shaped in public debates. We also need to understand the strengths and weaknesses of our education and university systems.

On the limitations of specialised evidence in education

One weakness of modern universities is their tendency to reward specialisation. Legitimate, but fundamentally different approaches to evidence, can be pitted against one another as though they are at odds. Instead, they are just two ways of understanding different dimensions to a real-world problem.

One branch of evidence wins the day and that becomes the new truth.

Rather than advancing knowledge, this leads to a flip-flopping between old arguments and educational fads that potentially harm people’s faith in universities and in our education systems as a whole. The system goes back and forth because both approaches have blind spots and the methodologies on which they are founded, are fundamentally different ways of understanding a question.

Rather than acknowledging their inherent strengths or weaknesses, and working to coordinate together, they continue to fight one another. Universities could be doing more to mitigate this issue.

A siloed or specialisation approach in universities is a relatively new phenomenon and one that mathematician and philosopher of science, Alfred North Whitehead saw as problematic. To Whitehead, the rise of the modern expert gave way to a limited kind of thinker. One who did not have the tools to see how various kinds of knowledge are connected. Whitehead saw what was being lost within new approaches to education. While many scientific breakthroughs have been enabled through specialisation, universities, in recognition of its limitations, have tried to recapture an interdisciplinary spirit in the last few decades, with varying success.

Even in the hard sciences, where clear findings may point to particular outcomes, knowledge is still being constantly updated and challenged. In universities where funding and media attention are contingent on new evidence, the debunking of previous evidence becomes a blood sport tactic. Inevitably, the slow work that defines deep scholarship and the cohesion of disciplines needed to understand and address complex problems, is undermined. In the meantime, the public become disenchanted with evidence-based solutions that are found lacking in real-world contexts in the long run.

It is not necessarily an issue with any of the particular evidence itself, but in how various kinds of evidence are pitted against one another in competition. Media, political and commercial interests benefit from these battles.

Cognitive science provides a disciplinary perspective that helps us to answer some questions in education, but it cannot, on its own, provide answers to all questions. Learning involves mind, body, social and cultural dimensions. Educational research requires a range of disciplinary approaches to answer these questions, and for researchers to adequately synthesise these various kinds of evidence.

Using only one tool or research perspective to understand learning may lead us to particular conclusions about the aims and purpose of education that are only half the story.

“If nothing has gone into the long-term memory nothing has been learned, and pretty much nothing happens. The aim of education is to have information go into the long-term memory”

Emeritus Professor John Sweller

Chalk and Talk Podcast, Episode 67

The questions we need to be asking

While it is true that committing information to long term memory helps us to carry out tasks and solve problems, reducing cognitive load, if we only talk about learning in these terms, we leave out some important questions. Critical questions.

These include questions about the quality of those things we choose to commit to memory. Not everything is good, valuable or worthy of being remembered. Learning to discern the quality of information is just as important as memory. Just as teaching children to decipher healthy foods from unhealthy ones, without also teaching discernment and critical questioning, we make education a work of mere spoon-feeding.

Learning to discern right from wrong, good from bad, how to stay safe when crossing a road or how to practice safe online behaviours cannot be left to chance. Nor to the latter years of schooling.

Questions such as: ‘Is it true?’ ‘Can I trust the source of this information?’ and ‘Where can I go to find trusted information?’ are vital.

Thinking and questioning skills are not easy to teach but are essential to anything we might call a quality education. However, if our education systems have decided that teaching young people to ask important questions, to evaluate information and to locate truth is no longer needed, something important is lost. It would also seem to be a dereliction of our duty as educators.

Traditional tales and folktales used in many cultures once supported this kind of work. Children, confronted with adult-like dilemmas, used these tales to rehearse scenarios in the safe spaces of their imaginations and as a prompt for conversations with their elders. The wolf, often used as a cipher for human predators, taught children about danger. The wolf dressed as grandma - or dressed in sheep’s clothing - as a way to teach that things are not always as they seem. Shaped well, through quality teacher questioning, stories are immensely powerful starting points for inquiry learning, to teach the skill of intelligent discernment.

What will our democracies look like in the future ? Look no further than the classroom

Removing dialogic and inquiry approaches to education that teach children the tools for sharp and discerning thinking, in favour of rote memorisation, would be a mistake.

Quality learning in inquiring environments makes purposeful use of questioning. To discern fact from fiction or to find age-old wisdom and truths in cultural artefacts such as celebrated literature, in our cultural histories and in stories. Similarly, learning to weed out lies that masquerade as ‘information’ or ‘fact’, especially in the online texts and platforms that proliferate, is vital.

Young children are already engaging in these digital worlds. While championing the possibilities of AI, STEM and digital technologies in the classroom, we have a duty to also promote thinking models that strengthen children’s capacity to recognise what is of value and therefore worth remembering. If education systems abandon the work of teaching the tools for thinking, we effectively leave our children and young people defenceless in a world of complex AI systems and online platforms that require the humans using them to be particularly astute.

The system response in education sectors these days will inevitably answer that, of course they agree that knowledge-building and truth are important. This is precisely why the system also conveniently offers a set of mandated lessons crafted by the elites and experts. They’ll give you the teaching scripts you can trust.

But what is being lost within these systems of mandated knowledge?

As we consider the big picture of the purpose of education, we need to push back against those who would have us close down thinking. The claim that inquiry learning is a waste of time because we should be teaching knowledge-building instead (i.e., presenting one form of truth), sounds distinctly like dogma. Perhaps even a proverbial wolf in grandma’s clothing.

I am sceptical, even wary, about what purpose for education these people are trying to achieve in the name of a particular science [see part 2 of this series of posts for more on this].

Rather, it is a spirit of scientific inquiry that may help us recapture the purpose of education. It is a genuine mindset of questioning, inquiring and testing theories - and most especially of discernment - that is critical and needed in challenging times.

References

Whitehead, A. N. (1917). Process and Reality.

Whitehead, A. N. (1933). Adventures of Ideas. Free Press.