The Quality of Learning

An Essay Concerning the Education of Dull Children

Ronald Morris

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138587571
• eBook ISBN: 9780429995149
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

First published in 1951. This book examines the challenges and difficulties that schools may face when it comes to the teaching of children with special needs. The author explores the argument that any challenges can be eliminated by the expenditure of more money, or whether these challenges cannot be solved merely by increased expenditure and a well-directed administrative effort to provide teachers, classrooms and materials.

6

The Pattern-Book of Learning

WE proceed now to consider the relevance of our parable of the cats and the apes to what goes on in schools. In the present chapter we shall be concerned in making clear the applicability of our story to learning in general; in subsequent chapters we shall make use of these generalities and show their relevance in particular instances and in so doing we shall examine in some detail case-studies of dull children engaged in learning to read and to deal with number. For the moment, however, we are concerned simply with sketching in broad outline the general relevance of our parable; in doing this we shall be able to summarise much of what has been said in previous chapters and at the same time we shall be building up a convenient terminology which will help in making clear the remainder of our argument and its detailed application to school work.

When a child goes to school and, for example, sits down at his desk and works from his books, or listens to his teacher, or is directed in the performance of some task in the school-garden or in a craftroom, we may say of him that he is engaged in a learning-situation of a particular kind. Obviously, not all learning-situations are of the same kind and they may of course be classified in a variety of ways. For our own immediate purposes we propose to classify them by reference to the way in which repetition is used and to the way in which the arrangement of the learning-situation facilitates the emergence of insight.

As we proceed with this classification we shall put together a pattern-book giving examples of different kinds of learning-situations. We hope to be able to show that each kind of learning-situation can be assessed for the contribution which it can be expected to make to the general educational development of different classes of pupils. It may, for example, be possible to show that a particular type of learning-situation frequendy used with the dull is rich in educational value for the brighter child but quite barren as far as dull children are concerned. In assessing the educational values of learning-situations in this way we shall attempt to discover the ways in which the teacher’s arrangement of the learning-situation affects the learning-experience that occurs in the life of the pupil.

It is not, of course, suggested that all classroom work falls conveniently into one or other of the five pigeon-holes of our scheme of classification, and it would be ridiculous to assert that teachers themselves can be classified as individuals into one of five or any other number of types. No such attempt is intended here. We merely suggest that there are in fact certain important differences in the types of learning-situation in which learners find themselves placed, that each type of learning-situation tends to bring with it characteristic learning-experiences which are of general educational significance for the pupil, and that teachers, according to their own personality, training and maturity of experience, select freely from moment to moment the particular type of learning-situation which they consider most appropriate to the learner’s needs. But do we always select the situation that is capable of making the greatest contribution towards improving the quality of the learning-experiences of the duller child?

Pattern No. 1: Lost-in-the-Maze

Imagine a classroom where the pupils are expected to learn without taking any intelligent interest in what is going on. Problems are not realised, and solutions, if they occur, are pure matters of chance. The learning-situation is too complicated at this stage to permit the immediate emergence of any insight, directly or indirectly. The ensuing state of complete bewilderment discourages any mental organisation of the learning task and an initial chance success will be of no help in the next performance. Before long this kind of random behaviour leads to boredom and fatigue. Perhaps in the strictest sense of the word “learning” it is incorrect to call this behaviour a learning-situatiori at all, for nothing is learned. Trial is piled on trial and error is added to error but the result remains the negation of learning. However, as it is not unknown in the history of pedagogy for school time to be occupied in this kind of random behaviour, it seems not altogether inappropriate to give this mode of passing the time some brief mention in our pattern-book of learning-situations.

A typical non-human example of a Pattern No. I situation is to be found in the behaviour of Thorndike’s cats in the initial stages of the experiment before the emergence of indirect insight. Time and again these unfortunate cats hurl themselves frantically round their puzzle-cages, pulling and clawing at everything in their vain efforts to escape. Succeeding by chance in freeing themselves on one occasion they are still without insight into the situation and, if they free themselves a second time, it must be once again by the operation of chance. This stage of random behaviour persists until the cat begins to take an intelligent interest in the problem, to take stock of the situation, to observe the results of its action and, in short, to organise its experience by the cumulative growth of indirect insight; in the early stages, however, before the cat begins to get the situation organised, there is nothing but that undirected clue-less activity which we have called Pattern No. I in our pattern-book of learning-situations.

Looking beyond the confines of the psychologist’s menagerie to human learning it is not difficult to find parallel examples in which the predominant pattern of the learning-situation is random behaviour and not any effective form of learning. The reader will indeed have been fortunate in his own education if he can cast his mind back to his own schooldays and not be confronted with the memory of at least one stage of one subject when he was completely unable to act more intelligently than the poor cats in Thorndike’s boxes. Certainly the author can remember his own vain efforts over a period of six months clawing at declensions and struggling with conjugations in the Latin puzzle-box without being in the slightest degree aware of the significance of any of his activities and without gaining the slightest profit from his random behaviour.

To take a similar but more objective example, an investigator writing on the results of teaching grammar in Scottish schools* shows that the average student in Scottish schools, after four years study of the function of the five principal parts of speech is not able to reach a fifty-per-cent score in answering straightforward questions on the work. Yet even in the face of this evidence it is still difficult to convince many “educationists” that random behaviour is not real learning but a mockery of learning; if we look at things from the point of view of the quality of the learning-experience enjoyed by the pupil we should surely have little hesitation in proclaiming that learning-situations of this type are an accursed waste of time. The teacher who realises that his pupils do not understand while he is teaching them but who nevertheless hammers away in the hope that some day his hammering will show results nourishes a vain hope; the hammer, used in this way, is not an instrument of education. Without insight there can be no learning; where the child is faced with a situation too complicated for him to understand, repeated encounters with this situation will bring not the seeds of future enlightenment but the immediate fruits of irritation, fatigue and stupefaction.

Pattern No. 2: Follow-the-Leader

It often happens in a classroom that a teacher, sensing that his pupils are Lost-in-the-Maze and at the same time doubting the capacity of his class of dullards to think things out for themselves or show signs of any process that even remotely resembles what he calls mental activity, determines to look after these unfortunates as a kind shepherd looks after his sheep. He decides to do all the thinking-out of problems himself and to train his pupils to accept his ready-made answers to problems they have not even asked. Accordingly he gathers his little flock about him and says, “Do thus and thus. Yours not to reason why. Yours not to see the sense of things for yourselves. Yours merely to do thus and thus. And I hope that when you have done these things on countless occasions you will eventually remember what I have told you and come to move across the hillsides after the fashion of fully-trained sheep.”

If we ask him the secret of his success with dull children he will probably tell us that the great thing is to maintain the children’s interest while you gently lead them on to do the same old thing in the same old way until at last the habit sticks. The learning-situation is, in fact, not unlike a game of Follow-the-Leader: everybody is expected to enjoy himself trying over and over again to do exactly what the leader does.

But there are other teachers of a sterner breed who, while they adopt the same fundamental Follow-the-Leader philosophy, nevertheless see no reason for molly-coddling their pupils by performing all manner of amusing tricks to arouse and maintain interest. For these teachers work seems more important than play; they believe that it is better not to coax the children but to make them work; they prefer “teaching by drive” to “teaching through interest”. Nevertheless, despite this difference, they agree in the long run with their kind-shepherd colleagues that the secret of teaching dull children is to teach a trick not by trying to explain it but by causing the pupil to perform the trick under instruction often enough for the habit to stick.

Follow-the-Leader learning-situations of both of these types are common enough in school and the reader will doubdess have little difficulty in calling examples to mind. (Detailed descriptions are given later in this book.) Perhaps it may help our general description of this type of learning-situation if we make here a brief reference to an interesting but not very widely-known out-of-school example. Katona in his book Organizing and Memorizing* describes certain experiments which he made in teaching card tricks to groups of undergraduates : some groups were taught as “organizers”, that is, the students were given help in arriving at an understanding of the principle underlying the trick; other groups were taught as “memorizers” or, in the terminology of this book, as “drudges”, that is, the trick was first performed for them and then they were told “To do this trick, follow these instructions. Repeat them till you can remember them.”

We do not pursue here the results of Katona’s study in the use of these different types of learning-situation; the reader who is interested is referred to Katona’s own work which gives strong experimental evidence for believing that what is learned in a Follow-the-Leader type of learning-situation is less effective than learning done by students treated as “organizers”. Firstly, what is learned in Follow-the-Leader situations is retained for a shorter period of time by the learner; secondly, whereas organizer-learning has transfer value (i.e., the learner can apply what he has learned to new contexts), memorizer-learning has no such value and anything learned in one context is known only in that context and does not help the learner to apply that knowledge or skill in new circumstances in which it could in fact be profitably employed.*

How shall we evaluate this Follow-the-Leader type of learning-situation? Obviously the learning-situation here is more akin to that confronting the cats than the apes. Learning by immediate insight is not expected by a teacher who doubts his pupil’s capacity for thinking and tries to replace encouragement to active thought by habit-formation through the conditioning of responses. Thus the teacher may be said to teach as if he believes that learning is merely a matter of forming the right association-bonds by an adequate number of repetitions. However, it is the contention of this book that whether the teacher believes that his pupil has any powers of mental organisation or not, the pupil—if he learns at all—learns by the exercise of such powers of mental organisation as he possesses. It is not open to a teacher to take his choice in this matter and say either, “My pupils will learn by the association of ideas”, or ”My pupils will learn by perceiving relations”. In the last resort any learning that will be done will be done by the pupil, and the pupil, if he learns, will learn by gaining some insight into a situation.

Just as Kohler’s apes and Thorndike’s cats may be said to learn by what is fundamentally the same mechanism so all pupils, irrespective of the particular theory of learning at the back of the teacher’s mind, learn, according to our hypothesis, by gaining insight directly or indirectly, by mentally organising and re-organising the situations in which they find themselves, by discriminating between things that previously were confused and perceiving relations where none were seen before. On this view, all that it is within the power of the teacher to do is to help the emergence of insight by arranging the learning-situation in one way or hinder it by arranging it in another. He may make it possible, as Kohler did, for his pupils to learn by direct, immediate insight, or he may condemn his pupils, as Thorndike did, first to complete Lost-in-the-Maze bewilderment and then to a period of learning through a long-drawn-out series of intermittent flashes of insight separated by tedious stretches of vain groping for further clues.

In deciding to build the learning-situations for his pupils in accordance with the Follow-the-Leader formula, the teacher shows that he does not seek for his pupils the educational experience that comes from learning by direct insight; he is content to rely on persistent repetition of the learning-situation bringing with it a slow growth of indirect insight; but even where partial insight emerges eventually in some roundabout fashion he does not place any high value on its occurrence and in fact does a great deal by his arrangement of the learning-situation to prevent the pupil from being aware that he is gaining insight and seeing the sense of things for himself. The child who is brought up on Follow-the-Leader lines is, in fact, placed in a position which encourages the belief that learning is not getting to know something that makes sense in itself but is simply a process of carrying out certain mysterious commands in a given order. Thus insight, even partial insight, occurs but seldom and the rare feeling experienced when one thinks “I know what I’m doing” is apt to be overwhelmed by the thousand and one occasions when the pupil’s learning effort is dominated by the thought “I’m doing what I’m told “or” It’s all mixed up; I wish I could remember what I’ve been told to do next.”

The irony of this situation should now be evident. The teacher has doubted his pupil’s capacity for learning by insight and has been deluded into setting up learning-situations to reach his ends in other ways; meanwhile the pupils, who must learn by exercising their powers of mental organisation if they are to learn at all, are devoting such powers of mental organisation as they possess to the task not of increasing their intelligent understanding of some of the real problems with which the world of human experience abounds but of trying to make some sense for themselves of their teacher’s arbitrary series of instructions. It must be remembered that however seemingh simple and well-arranged the teacher’s drill sequence may appear to be to the teacher, as far as the pupil is concerned the neatly arranged sequence remains undifferentiated meaningless chaos until it has been organised by the pupil himself into some sort of mental pattern. Thus the dull child, treated as a drudge, wastes his limited powers of organisation in learning to Follow-the-Leader and in so doing is denied the opportunity of using these powers for ends of greater educational worth. In fine, the teacher with his carefully designed Follow-the-Leader learning-situations has not succeeded in saving his pupils the trouble of thinking; he has merely directed their thinking into less profitable channels.

When we try to assess the educational value of learning in Follow-the-Leader situations, we must not lose sight of the fact that for the teacher the task of teaching has become largely a matter of either “driving” or “maintaining interest” while the child stumbles along the chosen path, a path which the child himself would find too unattractive to follow unaided, but along which he may be persuaded to venture in the company of a teacher who appears in the rôle of either driver or friendly guide. Thus learning becomes for the child either a hateful but inescapable routine or at best a humdrum uneventful affair, without beginning and without end, enlivened, if at all, only by the personality of the teacher. Essentially the teacher’s role is active and the child’s passive, and the quality of learning suffers accordingly. Whatever else the child may learn from this type of training it is certain that nothing is done to give the child any confidence in his mental powers. The teacher is regarded always as the great sustaining power. Without his presence, the child feels helpless and, feeling helpless, naturally is as helpless as he feels.

It may be suggested that nothing else can be expected of dull children. But to argue in this way is to ignore the whole parable of the Cats and the Apes. Kohler suggested that insightful behaviour—perhaps even conscious insightful behaviour—is possible at very low levels of intelligence. The apes demonstrated acts of achievement by direct insight even though their I.Q. was very much lower than that of children who are often encouraged to pass through the whole of their school career without manifesting any conscious exercise of their own intelligence.

But, if a child is never to be given an opportunity of realising his intelligence the effect of this on character formation is obvious enough. Treated as a drudge the dull child never realises the possibility of being anything else. He needs to be shown everything and is afraid of everything until he has been coaxed or driven into acquiring familiarity with it. Without help, everything appears impossible. He may be taught to read and write in school but in after life he will be chary of employing these accomplishments. In extreme cases, he will ignore printed instructions and will do nothing until he finds a companion who will read them for him and tell him what is said. With the same attitude of mind, he may learn one job but will rather be unemployed than try to learn another for himself. He may, of course, be driven or persuaded by external pressure to adapt himself, but he always depends on the help and pressure of others because he has no faith in his powers to help himself. Exhortations to self-reliance are wasted, for he can have no real understanding of what is required. Spoonfed through the formative years of childhood, he finds it impossible to achieve independence in even the smallest things.

What, then, does it profit a child to acquire this or that item of knowledge or to become adept at this or that type of behaviour if the acquisition of the knowledge or skill brings with it added emphasis on the child’s own impotence and insufficiency? Better surely for the child to learn one thing in a way that will give him confidence in his powers than to learn a hundred things in ways that render impossible the growth of this confidence. In education what matters most is not how much we learn but how we learn it. The quality of learning is always more important that the quantity. Learning-situations based on the Follow-the-Leader pattern treat the dull child as a drudge...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• I. Organisers and Drudges
• II. Psychologist’s Menagerie
• III. Ape Explains Cat
• IV. The Clever Fool
• V. Dint of Practice
• VI. The Pattern-Book of Learning
• VII. Back to The Classroom: Relevance for Reading
• VIII. Back to The Classroom: Relevance for Number
• IX. Summing Up