Teachability and Learnability

Can Thinking Be Taught?

Paul Fairfield

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138600287
• eBook ISBN: 9781317330431
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Deep disagreements exist regarding what thinking and critical thinking are and to what extent they are teachable. Thinking is learned in some measure by all, but not everything that is learnable is also teachable in an institutional setting. In questioning the relationship between teachability and learnability, Fairfield investigates the implications of thinking as inquiry, education as the cultivation of agency, and self-education. By challenging some of the standard conceptions of thinking, the author explores the limits of teachability and advances critiques of standardized tests, digital learning technologies, and managerialism in education.

1 Introduction

A curious optimism today animates many an institution of learning. On the story that we often hear, educational institutions may confidently be expected to deliver measurable outcomes, while any contingencies to this pertain far more to institutional conditions—funding levels, policies and procedures, and learning technology—than to anything the students themselves bring to the experience. Topping the list of such outcomes is what goes under the name of critical thinking and, beyond this, varieties of thought and knowledge that happily coincide with the demands of the marketplace. Thinking, from elementary levels to the highest and about much of anything, can be taught. More than this, it can be taught directly and in an institutional setting. Indeed, it is optimally, perhaps even exclusively, taught and learned in this setting. The mission of the university in particular being to create and impart knowledge and the forms of cognition for which it calls, the second part of this mission is to impart in the sense of delivering or transferring knowledge from those who possess it to those who do not. Doing so is a relatively straightforward matter, and so long as best practices are followed, it can be accomplished in any discipline and at any stage of the learning process.

This spirit of self-assurance is not unique to schools and universities but is observable in a great many institutions of our time, many of which claim a monopoly on the capacity to deliver some value or service on grounds of either utility or, more usually, knowledge. The word hubris, that great anathema for the Greeks, is not out of place here and reflects perhaps better than any other the sunny optimism of our educational institutions. A measure of idealism is an abiding feature of educators and the youthful minds that are continually drawn to institutions of (especially higher) learning, although this is distinct from the more specifically institutional phenomenon to which I am referring. Institutions in our time are increasingly ubiquitous, enormous in scale, dependency-inducing, “manipulative” in Ivan Illich’s sense, and often monopolistic.¹ Even when they fail to deliver on their promises, as rather often they do, we are inclined to place our faith in them for reasons that are not always apparent. Universities are a case in point, as a glance at any university newspaper, website, or marketing material quickly reveals. Institutions of higher learning promise not a little in terms of both the knowledge that students may gain there and the new knowledge that the professoriate is charged with creating. Not a little over-promising is involved, as is always the case with marketing material, but the matter of which I am speaking is a deeper and more pervasive phenomenon. Students are given to believe a host of things, some of which are explicitly stated while others are implicit: a university degree (perhaps two or three) ensures a more or less smooth entry into the workforce and the middle class, the acquisition of information that is in principle unlimited, advanced and transferrable cognitive skills, and an intellectual and cultural respectability that cannot be had by other means. Membership in the elite may be purchased by spending a few years in the company of professors and completing whatever degree program one likes so long as it is put in place by a reputable institution. Some emphasis, usually subtle, is placed upon virtues of adaptation, working within a system, following techniques, and completing tasks spelled out in advance. As centers of knowledge, universities hold a near monopoly on the same and are fully capable of delivering this to maturing minds for the mere cost of tuition. Alma Mater, bounteous mother: where would we be without our mother?

When Meno opened the dialogue that bears his name with the question, “Can you tell me, Socrates—is virtue something that can be taught? Or does it come by practice? Or is it neither teaching nor practice that gives it to a man but natural aptitude or something else?” Socrates’ reply flew in the face of both his time and our own. The prevalent view in his day, as he immediately pointed out, is that teachers of virtue—Socrates singled out the sophists, and Gorgias in particular—are everywhere. Virtue, on this view, is not only learnable but teachable, and indeed without much difficulty. For a modest fee, a young man could learn what it is to be virtuous and carry this into life with the assurance that is a natural consequence of having learned from, or having been taught by (these are two ways of saying the same thing), the master. Socrates’ assessment was skeptical: “The fact is that far from knowing whether it can be taught, I have no idea what virtue itself is.” The interlocutors are forced into taking a long detour through the apparent morass of what virtue is before returning to Meno’s question. Socrates himself knew neither what the thing itself is nor whether it is teachable, opining only that before broaching the latter question we must broach the former. Socrates ended the dialogue on the same note of skepticism, or humility, on which he began: “If all we have said in this discussion, and the questions we have asked, have been right, virtue will be acquired neither by nature nor by teaching. Whoever has it gets it by divine dispensation without taking thought, unless he be the kind of statesman who can create another like himself. Should there be such a man, he would be among the living practically what Homer said Tiresias was among the dead, when he described him as the only one in the underworld who kept his wits—‘the others are mere flitting shadows.’”²

The account that Socrates gave turned into a metaphysical story about souls, recollection, and divine dispensation, and if the line of argument in the following chapters does not go down this road, it does follow Plato’s thinking in a couple of important respects. First, the question of whether something is teachable presupposes some understanding of what the thing itself is—a point that might be thought obvious, however, judging from both a good deal of the contemporary literature and what we so often hear from educational institutions, it may not be. Universities in particular routinely promise to teach the art, perhaps the method, of thinking—or, more specifically, critical thinking—while working with concepts of thought and critical thought that are about as amorphous as the notion of virtue in Plato’s time. Whether thinking can be taught presupposes the prior question of what thinking is, and, as I shall argue, it is about as far from a straightforward question as the matter of what education itself is and what the whole enterprise is for. A second lesson we may take from Plato is to incline against the sunny optimism noted above. There are limits to what a human being can teach another, whether we are speaking of the formal teaching that happens in institutions or the informal teaching and learning that take place in the course of ordinary life. Everything that is known can be, indeed has been, learned; it does not follow that it can also be taught. The latter issue requires philosophical and phenomenological investigation.

A stubborn fact about education is that for all that falls on the input side of the equation—large (yet somehow always inadequate) budgets, psychological and pedagogical research, technology, and the unfailingly skillful planning of administrators—in the end everyone must find their own way to it, their own path to knowledge, to thinking, and indeed to their own way of thinking. In this pursuit the principal educators are neither institutions nor teachers in the usual sense but values over which no one holds a monopoly: experience, ordinary trial and error, loss, history, art, love, and life itself. It is these things from which we learn in an ultimate sense, through immersion in an environment that is the world of experience and ideas, and by cultivating habits and capacities of mind that make it possible to participate in the life of one’s culture. Those whose education can be counted a success are curiously non-identical to those who have attained high grades or advanced credentials. Input and output here balance about as precariously as between economic planning and prosperity, city planning and livable cities, health care budgets and health, and countless similar examples. Educational institutions promise much and deliver, in the usual course of things, far less. To see this, we may look to the form and level of engagement with a field of knowledge that graduates are both capable of and disposed toward rather than appeal to the crude instruments that are test scores or quantifiable outcomes (one cannot measure an ocean with a yardstick). The university graduate who possesses no inclination to continue learning is as commonplace a phenomenon in our time as the intellectually curious individual who has never attended such an institution.

If hubris is always unwise, its institutional varieties are even more so. For all the evidence-based pedagogy, administrative planning, and accountability in the world, no one and no institution can make education happen. Students accomplish this for themselves—not alone, but in constant conversation with professors, other students, and a subject matter that has some vital connection to their experience and existing interests. Institutional efforts to formalize, administer, calculate, and virtually (if never quite) cause learning to occur are birds of a feather to those ancient teachers of virtue of whom Socrates spoke. The accountability movement in education which, lest we forget, originated in political conservatism bears about the resemblance one would expect between offspring and parent, and has spurred many educators not only to resist the trend but to question anew the conceptual basis of this practice, particularly in the liberal arts where a philosophy of efficiency, outcomes, technology, and managerialism does violence to the forms of knowledge that are pursued there. The narrow instrumentalism that has swept over universities the world over, particularly at the level of administration, is in my view the largest threat these institutions currently face, and not only them. Where educational institutions go, their graduates follow, and where they are going is where the logic of the marketplace is leading them. Education today is a means to an end, and the end is measured in dollars and cents. The abiding imperative is adaptation, not thinking, while in a worldview in which matters readily become their opposites through the power of language, what is spoken of as knowledge, critical thinking, and thinking outside the box are in reality so many ways of following rules and doing what is expected in exchange for some utility.

What is becoming of the freedom to think, where this means not the capacity to follow procedures or adapt to what is but something altogether more inventive, responsive, reflective, inquisitive, and personal? Are institutions presently teaching this, and indeed can it be taught? The usual answer is affirmative on both counts, yet the issue warrants closer scrutiny. Academic freedom is the first principle of education and of the university in particular, yet forcing everything that happens there into a straightjacket of managerial efficiency, evidence-based practices, structured learning, quantifiable outcomes, and in general everything that goes under the name of accountability produces an ethos that is profoundly antithetical to the cultivation of free inquiry and free minds. Students of the arts and humanities who might expect the university departments that house these disciplines to be natural homes of free thinking quickly find themselves in the structured plan that is a degree program constituted by three or four years of courses—some required, others optional—assigned tasks, required readings, and continual testing, all of which is designed to instill and quantify some value in the student’s mind, an outcome that is the educational counterpart to annual earnings. The successful graduate is henceforth able to think, and not only in terms that are unique to a discipline but in a larger sense. Their intellectual aptitude, some sheer power of mind, has been strengthened, rather like muscles that have been trained to lift increasingly heavy weights through regular exercise in a weight room. This is how the classroom is often conceived: on the model of a weight or perhaps boardroom in which training for future problem solving and utility optimizing can happen. The model is corporate and the methodology scientific and technological, quite apart from the discipline in which such training is thought to occur.

The argument of the following chapters places an accent on limits. There is much that can be taught directly and much that cannot. Into the former category falls primarily the information of which a sizeable proportion of all education consists as well as the more methodological and technical forms of knowledge, while into the latter falls the greater part of what may be called thinking in a more expansive sense of the word. What cannot be taught directly are the more advanced—the less informational and methodological and more creative—forms of thought and knowledge of the kind that are often thought the crowning achievement of education. The reasons for this are several and include factors of intellectual agency, responsive uptake, habits and virtues of mind, and the important matter of self-education. Our inquiry strives to articulate a more measured, at times more skeptical, answer to the question that is the subtitle of this book than we typically hear from institutions themselves, which, as I shall argue, exhibit a pronounced tendency to over-promise what they can deliver. A few years spent in the proximity of professors does not an educated mind make, any more than does an habitual experience of completing assigned tasks and running through whatever mazes that an institution, however venerable, devises. Something more is required, and this something more, whatever it is, is decisive to the ongoing growth of the mind. The question of what this is is about as elusive as the questions of what thinking and the practice that endeavors to cultivate it themselves are, yet in order to get a handle on the matter of what may be taught to whom and under what conditions, we must have some understanding of these prior questions.

Etymologically, to educate (from the Latin root, educere) is to “draw out” or “lead forth” the mind from where it is to where it might be, however to say this raises the question of agency. What manner of leading is this, who is leading whom, and do the answers not depend on what stage of the learning process we are speaking of and on what is being taught and learned? To lead forth is not to cause, and any positive description of what it is will have to be complex. John Dewey’s notion of growth is about as suitable as Michael Oakeshott’s conception of education as an initiation into “the conversation of mankind.”³ Neither institutions nor educators grow the mind in any sense that is remotely causal but at best provide the conditions that make growth possible. Intellectual growth is a springing forth of the mind and is effected by the same. There is a rising up to agency and freedom that is involved, and too much structure (also too little) kills it. Conversational initiation is an equally apt metaphor, where here again teachers are inviting students into a field of inquiry and helping them gain an orientation without programming their utterances. The student is not a patient but an agent in the making who, as the learning process unfolds, gradually becomes responsible both for driving the process and for whatever results the process attains. Students at the outset of their schooling years are not autonomous agents in any robust sense, yet by the time they enter the university they are not patients in any sense. Understanding the logic of this transformation will be our goal in what follows.

Notes

1See Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society (New York: Marion Boyars, 2009), a text to which I shall return in Chapter 7.

2Plato, “Meno” trans. W. K. C. Guthrie, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 70a1, 71a4, 354.

3See Michael Oakeshott, “The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind” in Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1991), 488–542. For an analysis of Oakeshott’s metaphor and some of its educational implications, see Education and Conversation: Exploring Oakeshott’s Legacy, ed. David Bakhurst and Paul Fairfield (London: Bloomsbury, 2016).

2 Teachability, Learnability, and Agency

No sooner did governments learn that competitiveness in a global knowledge economy is contingent in some ways upon what is happening in schools and universities than the discourse of education became dominated by notions of accountability, efficiency, technique, outcomes, and by a general mind-set of managerialism in which normative and philosophical questions appear to have been superseded. The trend toward “lifelong learning” soon came to the fore, where the idea is that workers must prepare themselves for periodic retraining in order to adapt to the kind of economy that has emerged throughout the world and that failure to do so will have dire economic consequences for individuals and nations alike. Economic imperatives, flanked invariably by science and technology, reign supreme, while questions regarding the ends of education that have their roots in ancient Greek thought and extend to present-day philosophy of education are put to one side. It is not educational ends that matter, according to the story we increasingly hear, so much as means. Empirical discourse being unequipped to answer normative questions, the issue of education’s larger meaning or purpose exits the front door only to return through the back in altered form: how can particular learning outcomes be achieved in ways that are efficient and quantifiable? What measurable competencies can schools and universities instill to prepare students for the workforce and by what means? Gert Biesta has coined the term “learnification” to refer to “the tendency,” widespread in our times, “to replace a language of education,” particularly one that deals directly with normative questions, “with a language that only talks about education in terms of learning,” and specifically the “how to” rather than the “what for” of learning. As he notes, “Given that the question of good education is a normative question that requires value judgments, it can never be answered by the outcomes of measurement, by research evidence or through managerial forms of accountability—even though … such developments have contributed and are continuing to contribute to the displacement of the question of good education and try to present themselves as being able to set the direction for education.”¹ Quantifiable learning outcomes become the sole ends of education, with no apparent justification but for an economic utility that is usually implied rather than stated.

The question must be stated directly: what larger purpose(s) does education serve, and at the various stages of the learning process? Why should anyone attend a university or, for that matter, graduate from high school? What is such an education ultimately for? In this form, these are not empirical but philosophical questions and no evidence-based research is going to answer them. The response we most commonly hear today, not only from governments but increasingly from universities themselves, is broadly utilitarian and specifically economic: the general aim of learning, including the lifelong variety, is to train the workforce of tomorrow and to meet the demands of competitiveness; the world is changing in a great variety of ways, and education must prepare the young for the world they will face. John Field has observed that in addition to “large scale and somewhat abstract economic and technological changes, we also face a whole series of intimate and often small scale demands for change and adaptability, rooted as much in our daily lives as in the global ebb and flow of government, economy and science. Yet public policy tends to be driven, globally, by largely economic concerns: competitiveness, rather than citizenship, is the primary focus for policy.”² A quite different answer is that the general aim of education is to cultivate what is...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Teachability, Learnability, and Agency
• 3 What Is Education?
• 4 The Promise and Limits of Educational Technology
• 5 Thinking as Inquiry
• 6 From Reflective to Meditative and Critical Thinking
• 7 The Educated Mind
• 8 Self-Education
• 9 Conclusion
• Index