The Mantra Persists — Discovery In It’s Many Masquerades !

“ . . . children in rows bad, teachers who talk bad, today’s kids will have 17 jobs in 5 industries, content and knowledge bad,  schools kill creativity, project-based learning is the future, kids need 21st C competencies and be ‘engaged’ —  or so the mantra goes.  We have it here in Canada as well, right now!  Australia, NZ, UK, USA, etc.

This reminds me of the 1980 quote from the Aquarian Conspiracy:  “Discoveries about the nature of the mind, unfortunately, have been like the slow-spreading news of armistice. Many die needlessly on the battlefield, long after the war is over.”

Just how many of our children are the casualties of today’s continuing education wars.  A dozen years ago Richard E Mayer said, “The debate about discovery has been replayed many times.”  After discovery came experiential learning, then problem-based learning, then inquiry learning, then constructivist instruction. Other terms also populate this thrust — and they should be collected and brought forward for the needed work ahead.

Mayer, in his paper “Should There Be a Three-Strikes Rule Against Pure Discovery Learning? The Case for Guided Methods of Instruction” says:

“An important role for psychologists is to show how educational practice can be guided by evidence and research-based theory rather than ever-shifting philosophical ideology.”

The division, the disagreement, the actual “war” lies in a quarrel between practical people who want the education job done and political people who see schools as training for changing the world (or something like that, you know, “social justice”, etc.). 

To differ slightly with Mayer, I, as a grandparent, don’t think psychologists alone can tackle this job.  Many parents are getting impatient, and so too are a lot of teachers.  Thankfully, cognitive psychologists ARE leading the way in delineating effective methods in pedagogy.  But the matter has come to the point of knowing that withholding critical information is doing untold harm in this world.  No medical breakthrough would ever be left dormant as long as this unrevealed education knowledge has been left to fester.

I am a gardener and am constantly uprooting invasive weeds.  That is the imagery that inspires me to want to help in this task of getting the proper pedagogy out there.  I came across an incredible article that increases my fears even more, and that is a 25 year chronicle of the very revered “scientific method” itself being attacked by “constructivists” .  Academics out there should be able to get this paper easily and I got it months ago when it was still free — 25 Years of Journal Editorship, Michael R Matthews. 

The comforting part in Matthews’ article is that he has found at least one constructivist cheerleader who has “abandoned the constructivist paradigm as a useful theory for articulating and explaining knowledgeability and changes in observable behaviors . . . because it turned out to be plagued with considerable contradictions.”  Ominously, however, Matthews points out that there is now a journal devoted to cultural studies in science as a mutation of the constructivist direction.

I am wondering if this embrace by Willingham of the social and cultural is aligned?