Learner 4.0: Towards an Agnostic Approach to Learner as Pope, Believer, Monk, Worker, Cook, Diner, Patient, Prisoner & Waste
Under post-Fordist regime, the university is a factory with its quotas and performance appraisals.
But what is the ontology of the learner?
- A worker?
- A consumer?
- A waste?
It seems all the above, depending whose perspective one takes. From within the university, a student is a worker who also has quotas and performance appraisals. If one is ill or has misadventure, one must provide the same type and amount of paperwork so extensive and intrusive as one would need to do so in the workforce.
And yet they're also required to pay like desperate consumers of monopolistic cartel for knowledge production and validation.
And yet more and more, universities spend exorbitant resources to guarantee their product's authenticity at a time when authenticity is becoming more and more fakeable. This produces more and more policing apparatus to ensure learners are fulfilling their work quotas.
Conversely universities have less and less capacity to deliver care and attention to their product/ learner/ customer/ worker.
Such overlapping of contradictory role-plays can only go for so long when:
- the customer will question their value for money,
- the worker will question why their being treated like paying slaves,
- the product can not be guaranteed to employers as authentic, let alone good,
- and the learner is stuck learning something which has highly perishable shelf life.
Cannibalistic Producer and Consumer of Knowledge
Somewhere in the midst of these contradictions, sooner rather later, the university and other learning institutions will need to reinvent and/ or regenerate in order to avoid the same fate as every-thing/ one that can not accelerate indefinitely whilst cannibalising itself into oblivion.
The university started out as an extension of the church. But when the non-secular church became a secular church of ostensibly Human Liberalism, human beings displaced God as its subject of inquiry. It then evolved into a NeoLiberal notion of a factory (for production of knowledge) and a highly concealed kitchen (for consumption and disposal of knowledge).
Yet when the cooks and the diners are the same individuals, it is only a matter of time when workers and consumers engage in a strange cannibalistic activity of producing and consuming knowledge.
I would venture more boldly to ask whether if it's a veneer to disguise that knowledge is no longer produced for knowing, but for consuming for the sake of consuming (i.e., mindless gluttony to disguise waste collection of disused academics who are downgraded to "lecturers" in an age where no body cares about speech, let alone free or safe speech).
This becomes a more acute concern when essays or even research projects could be artificially generated along procedural lines, like more extensive forms of bots who already produce breaking real and fake news. These bots will multiply especially along the well-established the route of preserving the same experimental design whilst modifying a narrow parameter. There's no reason why artificial intelligence technologies cannot out do such form of knowledge production.
The homogenization of the learner as a commodity is nothing new. In the US, The Committee of Ten in 1896 created curricula that would include the various subjects and objectives that college admissions offices would find adequate to admit students. This led to the College Board. We have had industrial curricula to get students prepared for industrial jobs (Kliebard's Schooled To work" Kliebard again in his 'Struggle for the American Curriculum' explores the various 'theories' of the student that government and others have provided over the decades. Kridel, the US Ed. Commissioner in the sixties said, 'education is too important to be left to the educators'. The Bell Jar, the reports to Ronald Reagan in the eighties, no child left behind...All these have prepared the student in a box to be delivered to the university...but then what? The university was a strange place where the box was not always square. Now the efforts are to put that square high school peg into the square college whole.
Though this was a high school study and experiment, I suggest looking back to the Eight Year Study conducted by the NEA with funding from the Carnegie Corporation to see how schools with the help of great educators like Ralph Tyler and others got together to find out exactly what students needed in their classes at the moment. Every summer they would revisit the composition of next year's classes and design a program to fit their specific needs. Perhaps there was something to this idea. Alas it got very little press because the reports were delivered only months after Pearl Harbor in 1942.
Hi Christopher,
Can't believe ResearchGate lost my first response to you. So now I will need to retype it! Which probably means I will now give you a different response.
Regarding Ralph Tyler, I am all for recovering old voices which go lost for what ever reasons. It's good to be reminded that one needn't re-invent the wheel.
And going with just a wiki summary for others to remind themselves about Tyler's work:
Tyler Rationale:
- What educational purposes should the school seek to attain? (Defining appropriate learning objectives.)
- How can learning experiences be selected which are likely to be useful in attaining these objectives? (Introducing useful learning experiences.)
- How can learning experiences be organized for effective instruction? (Organizing experiences to maximize their effect.)
- How can the effectiveness of learning experiences be evaluated? (Evaluating the process and revising the areas that were not effective.)
- In this book, Tyler describes learning as taking place through the action of the student. "It is what he does that he learns, not what the teacher does" (Tyler p. 63).
These are all VALUABLE questions that any assessor should ask. One might even say that the "spirit" of Ralph Tyler is still pertinent to today and even tomorrow's (21st Century) concerns. I could not agree with old school Liberalism more. I do think the learner's autonomy needs to be respected.
The problem is, as often the case, in the administration and implementation side.
Firstly, there is the problem of learner autonomy in relation to ANY notion of assessment. One could go down the inherently anarchic ethos of a true Hayek, namely why even assess?
Just to name a few questions. No doubt there are more.
With regards to state-sponsored education rationales and rhetoric, there's also a great discrepancy. Take the No Child Left Behind,... how did it end up being Child Below Top 1000, 100, 10, 1... Left Behind?
How did we end up with a situation where it was about ensuring numeracy and literacy is available for the underprivileged to something that got so distorted to the point excluding even the more privileged?
These questions obviously have broader political, economic and sociological contexts and implications.
Another thing that Tyler didn't have to contend with is digital technology and its capacity to mutate or disguise its true ontological status.
One could build some AI on top or under these assessments and reconfigure outcomes from what started as a truly Liberal project to something even opposite from its initial ideological position is what we are barely able to grasp.
That AI could change the nature of governance and governmentality at speed of light is another issue that are challenging enough for the professionals, let alone the public.
I am so glad this second response is much better...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_W._Tyler
Tieu-Tieu,
I only used Tyler as an example because people are quite familiar with his Tyler rationale. What I am most interested in as I surmise you are as well is how do we tailor the curriculum to the individual student. This is what the eight year study tried to do. There are a number of volumes that the study produced, but the first one cited below can give you an idea of what they were trying to do. The progressives of the time were quite Deweyan, as you can surmise from this quote:
- Holding this view, the participating schools believed that the school should become a place in which young people work together at tasks which are clearly related to their purposes. No longer should teachers, students, or parents think of school simply as a place to do what was laid out to be done. Nor should schooling be just a matter of passing courses, piling up credits, and, finally, getting a diploma. The school should be a living social organism of which each student is a vital part. (p. 17)
Regardless of technology, AI, or other advances in tools, the process of curriculum discovering I think still requires thinking about the needs of the person being educated. This includes the context in which the education occurs. Who are we educating? The study concluded this:
- Out of their searching study the Thirty Schools came to realize that the primary purpose of education is to lead our young people to understand, to appreciate, and live the kind of life-for which we as a people have been striving throughout our history. (p. 18)
- Because of their concern for the individual as well as for the whole group, the schools realized that they must know guide him wisely. They said they should know each one as a person, not just as a student of English or mathematics or as halfback on the football team. Some teacher should know him in these and all other phases of his life, including his home. (P. 21)
What we need then is a viable process of curriculum discovering that helps students, administrators, teachers and other stakeholders for discovering the curriculum. As the eight year study participants realized, and which you are now also pointing out, this is discovering and not discovered, because with change we are constantly considering what is important for the students coming into our class. The study found this to be an important ideal:
- The Thirty Schools entered the Study to make honest attempts to find better ways of serving their students. Thoughtful investigation and planning preceded each innovation, and careful measurement of results followed. If results were not satisfactory, further change was made in the light of fuller knowledge. In this sense the Thirty Schools were and are "experimental" and they believe that every school in a democracy should be, also. No aspect of any school's work should be so firmly fixed in practice or tradition as to be immune from honest inquiry and possible improvement. It is only in this way that life and vigor are maintained and progress achieved. (P. 19)
They also looked holistically at what they were doing:
- They believed that no change in any part of the curriculum should be made without consideration of its effect upon the whole program of studies. They realized that this would require time, organization, and leadership. (P. 20)
These are just a few reasons why I think this study should be revisited. They not only laid out their approach, as has just been noted, but also implemented these ideals and ideas in practice and figured out why they worked in some places and not others.
Aikin, W. (1942). The story of the eight-year study, with conclusions and recommendations. New York: Harper & Brothers.
Hi Christopher
Thanks for your kind and generous response. I don't think we are disagreeing much on these details. So in that sense, maybe the Educational Ideals haven't changed too much.
But I do think there's been a lot not so good changes on the ground. For example, the issue of Civic Education. Who talks and acts in accordance with being a responsible citizen?
Indeed who even talks? In person?
Take classroom sizes in university. They're just too large for any Socratic engagement.
The staff, lots of adjuncts who are truly exploited, are under so much pressure from so many directions.
And there's a nasty kind of competitiveness in the air. This is not how I remember my undergraduate days going back to the early 90s.
We might even agree on lots of Liberal ideals, like Liberty.
My own suspicion is for the rhetorics coming from supposedly (Neo)Liberal camps, is that in practise, they're not even Liberals. I'd probably say the same about the Democrats. The alignments are totally criss-crossing, so it's almost meaningless to talk about Left Right.
Education, for most part, is part of the Welfare component of the Welfare/ Liberal Democratic state. And it is all hallowed/ hollowed out.
We might have a much smaller government, at least in that the Welfare part is truly hallowed/ hollowed out to the point just being a state.
And in passing, I would even agree with the concerns raised by Hayek.
The point is that big governments exist alright, just not in physical space, but in cyberspace. This is not just a concern regarding surveillance which puts me as a Libertine, but also all sorts of goods and services, and increasingly even experiences such as education.
This is where I think I might then depart from your above position.
This is where I am most concerned, namely that we have little access, and if so, understanding of how the very Educational Ideals that you and I may agree with, are truly being challenged to the point of non-existence.
The sort of vigilance and caution, to the point of even self censoring, that I am sensing from university research and teaching staff, this has the same whiff of fear and precaution that I know as a child of a supposedly Totalitarian state...
Tieu-Tieu, well said. Where do we go from here? Where do we begin? I wonder if we shouldn't turn the pyramid upside down and shake out the students and put them at the front of the line. So, how do we do this and reconstruct the idea of the university from the standpoint of the student? Michael Porter said of strategy--it's why people buy from you rather than someone else. Simple enough. So, do we go to our students and ask them--why are you here and construct a strategy from that? Or do we take the Jobs' approach and ask what is it that people really want and aren't getting and then we can build the school from that perspective? I believe both have merit because they attack both the what is and could be better, and the 'riskier' what could be. If we can devise a methodology for both processes, I do think that some enlightened academic leaders will listen. They are all scrambling for legitimacy in the face of mounting pressures from all stakeholders.
All excellent questions Christopher. Times when ResearchGate pays off... I am glad you're asking those questions. We all should. That's the point. We all should. Unfortunately, look around, who are asking these questions? Who even cares?
My main position is that we should have a choice. A REAL CHOICE. There's increasingly the issue of what it means to be educated, let alone publicly or privately. It may actually get to an ironic point that we won't have a choice the other way... that is the death knell of public education, possibly the only place that makes sense having any civic education.
Otherwise, what's the use of civic education in the absence of a civil society? Why even have society, if it's just the market that exists?
So we're back to the Ancient Greeks... they had some answers to such conundrum... but who is reading them these days? Never mind about Ralph, who's Plato?
- And your point about risks, what is "riskier" - again great question(s). And who is answering these questions for us?
- Like what are the risks of being headhunted for a job versus being targeted by a private or public entity?
- And why these risks are necessary, non-negotiable and interchangeable?
- Whether being headhunted, for example, is even a risk given its certainty/ requirement? If so, then are we not in fact dealing with vulnerabilities, as opposed to risks?
- As for questions of legitimacy, that's also another excellent concern. But who is willing to back and VALUE, i.e. pay for such priorities?
I seem to remember that legitimacy is something one has within a polity, namely this is, first and foremost, a political issue. And even to speak about political deliberations, these are classic questions of the original Greek Republic. These are not issues pertaining to the market, especially if we want to speak of democracy.
I do want to note that university exists for all stakeholders, not just students but of course teaching and research staff as well as administration.
Teaching is still an art and science. We've also forgotten the art of it. I have certainly benefited from many idiosyncratic teachers, some of whom were also my friends and classmates. So they could come from unexpected places. We just shouldn't be writing an obituary for teaching...
The more I think, there's reflex to reach for a dichotomy between public and private which probably doesn't exist either. Public schools having to find alternative fund-raising. Private schools having state subsidies. It's the ambiguous nature/ ontology of things that are making decisions and choices, should there be such, difficult to make and prioritise.
Perhaps we need to understand the historical origins of the university and colleges. In the middle ages, scholarship was conducted by monks or by scientists who had very wealthy patrons. Later, the need for secular education became more important and the patron model evolved into the university where the professor could continue to do research but had to sacrifice some research time to educate students who replaced (outside of wealthy donors) at least part of the cost of funding the research professional’s work. This has evolved into the tripartite model we see in many schools today of: research, pedagogy, and community service. As graduate programs increased, graduate students were given teaching responsibilities, especially in the introductory classes. This has evolved to include more and more adjuncts who have replaced both professors and graduate students. Unfortunately, the adjunct model does not provide pedagogical training or any real supervision. There is at least some supervision of graduate students. The clinical professor model emphasizes teaching over research, but adjuncts are a cheaper alternative.
We must return again to the discourse of the aims of education which has somewhat been lost in the persistent effort of government and special interests to brand a particular political agenda for the teaching of children. Nel Noddings was right, the aims of education and aims talk in general can be used to critique society and that is where we might want to begin.
I turn back to some groundbreaking work at the turn of the twentieth century (1918) called the Cardinal Principles. While these were developed for primary education because few matriculated into college, they provide a wholly different consideration of the aims and purposes of education. The seven Cardinal Principles are: Health, Command of Fundamental Processes, Worthy Home-membership, Vocation, Citizenship, Worthy use of leisure time, Ethical character.
This is education of the whole child. As k-12 has evolved, schools have been tasked to take over more and more of the responsibilities of child rearing without any real cohesive direction. Thus, we have disconnected programs that are not centrally coordinated through such ideas as the seven Cardinal Principles. This produces unevenness which we see in the colleges and universities of today. In fact, because the k-12 schools have been so politicized and damned as failed institutions there is at least some hope that the idea of the Cardinal Principles can be used by colleges to produce whole adults who can be comfortable in doing the things that the Cardinal Principles calls for.
Now, I call for an additional dimension which, in part, involves both Nel Noddings and Martin Heidegger’s notion of care as being both emblematic of the being of Dasein (Heidegger) and also an aim of education (Noddings). In this concept as care as the primordial aim of education, a process of curriculum discovering includes these six elements.
1. Create an environment where the student can have concernful engagement in and with the world.
2. Engage the concern of the student by focusing on the world of the student.
3. Engage the student in practical activities within the interconnected world of the student’s work
4. Reveal world through disturbance but provide an environment where the student can consider how to reconstruct the world of the work after circumspection so that the work once again can become practical.
5. Facilitate the student’s mode of being of projection in order for the student to begin to understand the possibilities for what the student is capable of becoming.
6. Consider the anticipatory resoluteness of the student when conceptualizing the curriculum in a manner that is optimized as parsimoniously as possible and occurs at the right moment when possibilities and time are the most opportune.
I see these as both complementing the Cardinal Principles as well as providing structure and framework for the education of children and young adults. I have fleshed these six requirements out in a study of Roald Dahl’s Matilda in my blog if you are interested. https://philosophicalmusingssite.wordpress.com/
I recognize that this effort only seeks ways of improving one aspect of the fundamental tripartite objectives of universities and that is pedagogy. I must admit, I do not have strong recommendations for the research or community service aspects of the triplex. However, if we can begin to reconceptualize the pedagogy of the university, we can begin to use aims to critique the current pedagogical environment and seek to improve it.
Hi Christopher. Thanks for your extensive insights. This is to tell you, I am still thinking about your comments.
Though right now, I am inclined to let go along with Feyerabend's comment about leaving things imprecise for a while. I am reading Feyerabend and Weizenbaum right now. Also John Berger. These guys were born a century ago. They retained a deep understanding of war and ethics in their works.
I so wish especially Feyerabend and Berger to comment about rationality, human perception and AI. Alas they haven't. I imagined if I were to ask them, they would surely not let me off so easily. That is to say, I would be forced to draw my own conclusions and judgement.
I am also thinking through Melanie Klein's work. This all may seem far fetched from what we are discussing here.
As always, I guess the challenge is to find a way to bridge between our discussion and the ideas (according to Berger and by implications Weizenbaum, are always accompanied by feelings) espoused by these interwar writers.
It seems to me they remember things often forgotten today. Crucially, they retain a cautious optimism/ care about shiny and new ideas/ things. This is not the same as some unreflected Conservatism. It's as if they're in touch with Walter Benjamin's cautionary tale, that human civilisation coexist with human barbarianism. That there's always a double edged sword... in war and in peace.
Gulag is an interesting term. In Russia, the Gulag was the agency in control of the camps. However, camps were often so remote they defied control. They served the same purpose, to punish 'enemies' of the state. Many graduated from the gulags to return to society. Others did not graduate. The system produced a sameness of administration, though likely there were more cruel administrators than others. It literally was cold justice in Siberia but most of the gulags were in Central Russia around Moscow and other major cities in the original Russia. What about the prisoners who worked hard for the state but received nothing in return? In the US Educational Gulag there are those who work for years and accumulate so much debt they will likely carry it until retirement. For some who attended the for-profit camps, employers reject their degrees; but the bearers of these worthless documents must still pay their debts. If one does not enter the gulag of education one is relegated to poverty and minimum wage. Therefore the gulag and those who are left behind are ultimately related because they are both subject to the conditions of power that subscribe to keep them economically and politically subaltern while the oppressors continue to increase wealth and power at their expense. It is the rise of the gulag state, both as those who stayed behind to work and those who put themselves into indentured servitude to the government loan programs that have listened to the most recent rhetoric about getting jobs and a better existence if only you will vote for me. Yet we know that as Gramsci said, in the hegemony the subaltern sings the song of the oppressor and begins to like the tune.
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