Philosophy and Educational Foundations

Allen Brent

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138692480
• eBook ISBN: 9781315532035
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

What models in the social sciences underlie existing or proposed patterns of educational practice? What theories of knowledge inform such models and thus arguably sanction such practice? In this book, first published in 1983, the author seeks some tentative answers.

Wittgenstein's understanding of 'family resemblance' and Chomsky's 'linguistic universals' are interpreted, contrary to Hamlyn, as reconcilable notions that can both illuminate and refine Hirst's understanding of 'categorical concepts'. In the light of such a reformulated theory, Brent suggest ways in which a unified model of the social sciences could yield a unified curriculum theory. This title will be of interest to students of the philosophy of education and curriculum studies.

Chapter 1

Behaviourist Foundations and Approaches to Pedagogy

This book is about theoretical models of pedagogy, the foundations of which are found in the social sciences. It is written in the conviction that basic conflict between contemporary theoretical foundations need not be final, and that such conflicts are reducible using the techniques of philosophical analysis. It is further written in the conviction that, because theory does affect practice whether consciously or subconsciously, there is great practical importance in at least attempting a synthesis of such models of pedagogy via some tentative moves towards a reconstruction and reconciliation between rival theoretical foundations. Our first principal theme will therefore be about the way in which theoretical models of pedagogy originate as explanations of and answers to certain particular classroom practices and problems and how, from such a base, they come to dominate answers to all such practices and problems. In the course of our discussion on this theme, we shall see how changes in the ‘taken-for-granted’ ‘common-sense’views of classroom practices are produced by changes in the theoretical models themselves. Our second principal theme will be an exploration through an analytic critique of the foundations of such theoretical models of how they might be reformulated in order to tell a more consistent story of how men are in their natural or social world, and how, as adolescents or as children, they are introduced to such a world.

In this chapter, we shall be presenting with a view to analysis the first of several, admittedly stereotyped examples of common-sense approaches to the classroom, together with examples of common-sense views of such approaches. We shall then show how several major and conflicting theoretical frameworks have grown out of the discussion of such common-sense views and have been used to license some common-sense practices in preference to others. Having thus shown how setting theory against theory also sets practice against practice, we shall be showing in later chapters how the reduction of theoretical conflict will license a new more coherent model of pedagogic practice. Before, however, we launch into a description and a discussion of our first theory, namely, behaviourism and its origins in certain exemplified classroom practices, let us justify by means of a general example our claim which some may find controversial that theoretical frameworks develop out of common-sense judgements in such a way as to pronounce some common-sense judgements valid and others invalid, thus modifying or even drastically revising general, taken-for-granted approaches to situations. We shall leave for the moment whether such developments are justifiable and whether such pronouncements about validity are in fact valid.

Let us take as our simple though inevitably controversial example that famous description of Isaac Newton throwing an apple into the air, watching it fall, and either inventing or discovering thereby the laws of gravity. That the apple would fall was a common-sense prediction made on the basis of common-sense observation by millions of mankind before Newton. However, it was a common-sense observation and prediction which Newton suddenly and perhaps insightfully grasped to be at variance with other kinds of common-sense observation and prediction on this momentous occasion. The common-sense view of physical objects was and, I suppose, still is that objects are normally at rest and only (abnormally) move, when, for example, someone or something pushes or propels them. If I look at the objects around me in my room as I write, they all appear to be at rest. When one of them moves, it appears to be because some force propels it. If I push a book, a glass or a pen at rest at one end of the table towards the other end, then it appears from common-sense to move because of a force which I have brought to bear upon it, and, when it ceases its move, it appears to be because the force has spent itself and the object has returned to its normal state of being at rest. This was the common-sense view of objects and their motion, refined by Aristotle’ (1932) physics, which regarded unmoving objects as no problem and held it to be only a movement of an object that required any explanation.

But let us go back to the good Sir Isaac throwing his apple into the air. ‘If this common-sense view of physical objects and the forces that moved them were correct,’he thought, ‘why doesn’ the apple just stay put in the air?’He had, after all, thrown the apple, and the force which he had brought to bear upon it was now spent. Yet the apple did not simply stick there but had fallen to the ground! Supposing then for one moment, reflected Newton, that we were to make the breath-taking assumption that all things were normally in motion and that only when things came to a rest was any explanation required. Now we would have to change totally our common-sense, Aristotelian world view. We would now assume that all objects throughout the universe were in motion and only pause to look for an explanation when we found one that was at rest. We should then look, not for what started things moving but for what stopped them, and such theories as explain these phenomena are to be found in the theory of gravity, friction and motion that Newton went on to propound.

Now it is important for us to be clear from the outset from this example how theoretical models come to be constructed on the basis of a limited and highly selective range of common-sense experiences which somehow get the theory started. This will be particularly important for the argument which this book will be developing specifically about the nature and character of educational theory. Although rooted in one particular set of common-sense experiences, like apples falling, Newton’ theory takes us beyond common sense and a ‘taken-for-granted’view of the world. It sanctions some kinds of common-sense products against others, labelling some of our intuitions as real and others as mistaken. Furthermore, Newton’ theory united piecemeal and discrepant descriptions of apples falling, rivers flowing downhill, satellites revolving around planets and so forth into a unified and coherent explanation. What they had in common, however, common sense could not detect whereas Newton’ theory could. Theoretical frameworks therefore fulfil that general criterion of rationality described as ‘the transcendence of the particular’(Peters, 1972, p. 59).

The social-science foundations of pedagogic theory which we shall be meeting in this book fulfil these two criteria: namely, (a) they sanction some items of common-sense experience against others, and (b) they transcend the particular in that they enable us to see items of experience which were, at the level of common sense, unrelated as part of a comprehensive and coherent view of things. For the Marxist, frustration with school subjects, rebellion in a classroom, a strike against an incomes policy, a manager’ ulcers, though they appear unrelated at the level of common sense, form within his theory of the contradictions of the capitalist system and his conflict model of social change part of a clear pattern, the discernment of which leads to explanation and prediction. Furthermore, some kinds of common-sense within that theory will be sanctioned as real whereas other kinds of common sense will be dismissed as the illusion of falseconsciousness, as we shall see (Chapter 5). For Durkheim and the structural functionalists (Chapter 7), however, we shall find that other and contrary common-sense insights are sanctioned by the contrary, consensual theory of social change, with a different pattern, involving a theory of social pathology, uniting the aforesaid disparate items of common-sense experience. Our subject for this chapter is however behaviourism, and the traditional, common-sense attitudes to teaching and learning of which, I shall argue, it represents a theoretical extension of the same type as that which I have been generally describing. Let us devise a typical example embodying common-sense attitudes of a traditionalist kind.

1.1 A TYPICAL CHARACTERISATION OF A TRADITIONAL CLASSROOM

We begin, then, with the first of our ‘typical characterisations’ I would mention, however, from the outset that I am using such fictional constructs for the purpose of initial exposition, and would not like to be accused of trying to win my critical points too cheaply by reducing my opponents to gross caricatures. Once, however, I have secured my initial expositional objective, in a later section I will be listing and summarising actual curricular proposals that I will argue to have the theoretical presuppositions which I am analysing and criticising (in the case of this chapter, behaviourist presuppositions).

Let us imagine Julia, who is a student teacher, joining Mr Callaghan and his class, to which she has been assigned for her teaching practice. As the bell rings, the children pour through the door and Mr Callaghan begins to quieten the class, identifying potential sources of disorder. Jamie is blowing up a balloon and squirting air into Christopher’ face to Christopher’ annoyance but to the great delight of Vicki, Jaqui and Russell. Mr Callaghan demands the balloon, which Jamie with some appearance of resentment hands over. That’ right Jamie!’says Mr Callaghan. ‘You can play with that to your heart’ content at playtime. But within the walls of this class you are here to work!’So saying, he takes a sidelong glance at Julia, winks fatherly, with a wise and self-contented look on his face.

Mr Callaghan whispers into Julia’ ear: ‘You must put your foot down from the word go. Once individuals start to get away with it, then things will go to pot. Insist on good standards.’And ‘good’standards are precisely what Mr Callaghan proceeds to exhort, both by word and by deed as he takes his class through a first hour of arithmetic, a second hour of writing, a third of religion, and a fourth of reading, duly interspersed with usual breaks, planned diversions for momentary ‘light relief’and so on. Tables are learned by rote and poems by heart, and the child who succeeds in reciting the nine-times table or ‘London Bridge’successfully and before anyone else is held up as the hero to be praised by the teacher and admired by all. But Mr Callaghan is nevertheless an intelligent and perceptive man. In case praise combined with ‘stars’for individual good work encourages too much a selfish and individualistic attitude, he rewards a great deal of achievement by a system of house-points by which he tries to foster a desire to work for the common good as a result of working for red house against green, or blue, or yellow. Those who lag behind in competition, whether it be for praise, stars or house-points, are chided caustically and reminded that their being last is a function of their moral values, for they are choosing laziness to industry. Mr Callaghan is, however, basically a sensitive and humane man, and his chiding more often than not is more in sorrow than in anger, despite the fault being basically the pupils’who have not paid attention, been lazy and so forth.

The class is not treated to a boring monologue, and for this Julia notes a pleasing contrast between Mr Callaghan and some of her lecturers in the University’ Education Department who are always lecturing for fifty minutes or more on how bad lectures are as a means of communication. When he sees interest flagging and attention roaming, he raises his hands with a gesture like that of an orchestral conductor and chants, ‘Once four is four!’to be joined by a loud chorus of response from children thus stimulated to proceed to chant the four-times table. Sometimes, however, he varies his approach and chants instead, ‘Many hands…’to which the children respond, ‘… make light work but too many cooks spoil the broth’ thus completing the maxim as they do with many other such maxims. Mr Callaghan is clearly aware that he is not simply responsible for his children’ arithmetical education but for their moral education too.

As they write their essays (perhaps in the form of ‘news’items), aided by his first selecting likely boys and girls ‘to get things going’with oral contributions, individual boys and girls are called on to bring out their work for him and Julia to read and to mark. Work neatly written, grammatically well formed and interestingly (perhaps even imaginatively) written he rewards with a gold star, and work achieving some degree of approximation to one or all of these three criteria is accordingly given yellow stars, red stars, blue stars or green stars. Jamie produces an ink-stained and grubby offering at which Mr Callaghan scowls and sticks a large red label with ‘Keep-It-Clean’written over it. As Jamie returns to his desk, there is a rustling of feet as many heads reach over to look at his book in order to witness the full horror of what the notorious Jamie has perpetrated!

Julia and Mr Callaghan, despite an initial antipathy, get on well together. Julia talks to him about the schemes of work that her tutors are keen for her to do and, after a period of initial vociferously expressed scepticism, he finally shows interest, having reflected how battle-scarred and out of touch with an oversized class he probably is. He becomes enthusiastic, and so, with the head’ permission, an approach is made to the Educational Technology section of the Education Department to come and see whether they have any suggestions to make to help to improve an already excellent situation. And so the bearded, besweatered group of jargon-spouting lecturers arrive. They talk about ‘aims and objectives’ ‘learning packages’ ‘programmed texts’and ‘positive reinforcement’in particular and actual curriculum areas that I shall specify in greater detail later (Chapter 4). Where Mr Callaghan is wrong, they insist, is in trying to teach a group of forty children all together at the same speed and at the same time. Learning packages of various kinds are produced which will enable children individually or in small groups to proceed at their own pace. Mr Callaghan’ principle of reinforcement of successful learning with stars and house-points were a good idea but too haphazard and disorganised in their application. Only a few children received stars or house-points, and the consistency with which they were given was very rough indeed, with the result that those who received neither were likely to become apathetic and unmotivated. With learning packages, the learning units would be so spaced and organised that, at each successful accomplishment of a unit, reinforcement could be given regularly and consistently. Success in one unit would thus motivate progress to the next and a clearly thought out ‘schedule of reinforcement’would secure the success of a clearly ‘paced’schedule of learning. The ‘keep-it-clean’labels could be safely thrown into the dust-bin. They were examples of ‘negative reinforcement’which was proved to be a less economic aid to learning than ‘positive reinforcement’by rat experiments (Skinner, 1953). In such experiments, rats would continue going through doors in mazes far longer when rewarded with food pellets than they would if encouraged to choose the door because all the others in the maze had given them electric shocks. ‘Praise’rather than ‘blame’ therefore, was shown to be a far more successful method of achieving learning objectives. Now that each individual was regularly rewarded with praise, stars, lollipops and other incentives for having completed a unit of his own package (irrespective of what the rest had or had not done), there was no need of aversion stimuli. The absence of reward rather than positive punishment would be motivation enough, and positive punishment was precisely what blaming, scorning, shaming of children into action represented.

‘Yes!’remarked Mr Callaghan to Julia. ‘They are quite right. If you set up a “schedule” (as they say) of punishments, kids in my experience will simply do the minimum necessary to avoid punishment. If you tell them that anyone with less than four out of ten will have to stay in and write an essay, then there is a solid group of them that will just make sure that they get four out of ten and no more. But perhaps if I start reinforcing positively instead of negatively, then less numbers will rest content with only four and try to achieve more.’

Julia was to observe Mr Callaghan taking this lesson very much to heart. In fact he stopped his habitual tirades against unruly behaviour the morning after such somewhat trying experiences as games afternoons. He also stopped stem warnings about ‘crime does not pay’and ‘getting the police in’when money, scarves, pumps or other items went missing. Whenever games afternoons went well, he became fulsome in his praises, not only of the class in general but of the virtues of as many of the individual boys and girls as he could possibly enumerate. ‘Blue and Red teams could have simply lounged around or been fighting one another while Yellow and Green were competing, but,’added Mr Callaghan with pride, ‘they did not. They watched attentively, and cheered and encouraged their pals on!’The morning after an afternoon of near riot following two heats having to be run several times over again produced in Mr Callaghan complete silence. Likewise, when Jamie found a five-pence piece and handed it in to him, Mr Callaghan waxed eloquent with praise. ‘Now pay attention!’he called to the class. ‘I have something important to tell you. Young Jamie here has handed in this five-pence piece that Christopher lost. Now he could have put this in his pocket and spent in on an ice-cream for himself. But rather than do this, he handed it in.’Mr Callaghan had indeed been converted from ‘blame’to ‘praise’ and though before he had been a ‘good’teacher by getting things right by intuition, he was now becoming an even better teacher by articulating and generalising, on the basis of particular and individual judgements, formal rules and principles with which to guide himself. He was simply by such a process enabled to be more consistent to what in his heart of hearts he was really committed and to what for him was ‘common sense’

1.2 THE BEHAVIOURIST PERSPECTIVE: GENERAL PRINCIPLES

We saw in the opening paragraphs of this chapter that what a scientific perspective has done is to take certain common-sense insights, perhaps handed on through a community originally in the form of folklore, and to develop these particular insights into a formal and general system of considerable sophistication. In the light of this system, other common-sense insights have been declared to be misconceived and invalid, in fact to be just folklore. We saw that this was the case with Isaac Newton and the common-sense experience of an apple falling when thrown into the air. The insight gained from formulating this piece of common-sense knowledge had systematically led him to overthrow the validity of another piece of common-sense experience, namely, that objects are ‘naturally’at rest and that it is their movement which requires explanation. For the moment, we are content to record such a procedure as a fact of history, although later we shall show the limitations of such a view of theory. Likewise, too, Mr Callaghan in our teaching example has begun to see that his folklore practices were based on inconsistencies in what he counted as common-sense knowledge. He has begun, with the help of an educational technology based upon behaviourist learning theory, to develop systematically some parts of his common-sense knowledge to a point where he had formed a general perspective in the light of which he rejected other parts of his common-sense knowledge. ‘It’ only common sense to tear kids off a strip whenever one of them steals or runs riot,’is a piece of ‘common-sense’pedagogy rejected in favour of praising if they do well repeatedly and consistently, but simply remaining silent when they do not. The latter is nevertheless supported by another item of common sense, namely: ‘If you repeatedly nag, they will take no notice of you.’Furthermore, Mr Callaghan’ common-sense practice of encouraging with stars is developed into a full-scale theory involving schedules of positive reinforcement, whereas his other common-sense practice of using ‘keep-it-clean’labels is rejected. Curricular subjects, moreover, are either given a clear structure (or their implicit structure is spelled out) by which clear learning steps can be mastered, thus eliminating haphazard guesswork.

It is interesting at this juncture to note, however, that, for all the innovatory and revolutionary appearance of the educational technologists in contrast to Mr Callaghan, both they and he share a common perspective derivable from the same set of common-sense experiences. Both see teaching and learning in terms of behaviour modification and control, stimulus and response, rewards and punishments, schedules of reinforcement and so on. In fact, this is why Mr Callaghan gets on so well with Julia and her college tutors in our example, since they share common presuppositions about the teaching situation. The educational technologists, for their part, would readily agree with my contention. This is why, they would be quick to argue, they deserve all the economic resources that they claim. They are trying to answer the ‘real’problems of ‘real’teachers based upon ‘common sense’ Only, alas, as it will be argued further in this book, their ‘common-...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• 1 Behaviourist Foundations and Approaches to Pedagogy
• 2 Behaviourism and the Philosophy of Language
• 3 Skinner’s Conflicting Paradigms of Science
• 4 Behaviourism: Curricular Deductions
• 5 Marxist Alternatives
• 6 Classical and Phenomenological Marxist Pedagogy
• 7 Bernstein, Hirst and Rule-Following Models
• 8 Forms of Knowledge, Categorial Concepts and Linguistic Universals
• 9 Categorial and Substantive Concepts, Morphemes and Family-Resemblance
• 10 Conclusions: Multicultural Education and the Place of Religion
• Bibliographical References
• Index