Teaching and Learning
The following section, "Teaching and learning," is intended to serve as material for our second meeting.
In addition you should read chapters 3 and 4 of Kleinig's text.
The question to ponder is "who is to blame if you do not understand what is going on in this course?"
What is the problem?
I tried to motivate the previous examination of education's conceptual position by suggesting that we used the word in a variety of ways and that it was not at all clear how these ways linked together or what we were getting at. Given the way concern for education was transformed into concern for its various aims, I hope you were convinced that some reflective review was useful. But in the case of teaching, what's the problem? We talk about teaching in a variety of contexts, but that in itself is no problem: we talk about eating and walking and many other activities in a variety of contexts too, but I haven't seen anyone puzzling about the conceptual connections of those terms.
Some of the philosophical literature on teaching borders on the infantile. You may never have explicitly noted it before but teaching involves saying things, demonstrating things, monitoring the learner's success or lack of it, planning a sequence of what are hopefully called "learning experiences", and so on; just like gardening involves digging the ground and weeding and watering young plants and so on. If you want you can now say that both teaching and gardening are polymorphous activities: big deal!
I think that the philosophical interest in teaching arises from three sources:
Unfortunately, a lot of the written material focusses on (a), perhaps in the mistaken belief that getting that right would automatically answer the deeper questions raised in (b) and (c).
A logical skeleton
Kleinig's chapter 3 is tough going, since he takes up a lot of the issues people have raised in attempting to get (a) right. That is a difficult business, and as you will see when you read it, it gets mixed up with subtle questions about how different tenses work in English. I shall hope we can get by without these subtleties.
Let's look at a few more obvious points. The standard teaching claim is something like this: John teaches Greek to Mary, or to put it in philosophical quasi-algebra: X teaches A to Y. What goes in the X and Y slots will usually be words for people; what goes in the A slot will refer to what we can call the "subject" or the "content" that is taught.
The first simple point is that all talk about teaching has to be interpretable in the standard, triadic (three slots) way. You can grammatically leave a slot unspecified, but then you are speaking elliptically, to use the term we met in Argument Analysis. So slogans about teaching subjects not children, or children not subjects, are literally nonsense. You always have to do both. (Of course, people who use the slogans are not saying what they mean; but perhaps it would be better for everyone if they tried a little harder to be precise.)
The fact that we can use the word, "teach," elliptically may also give some support to the exceedingly dubious view that there is something called "teaching" that some people can do, for anyone and with respect to any subject. Such a belief may serve the interests of principals suddenly lacking a specialist biology teacher and finding a music teacher sitting in the staffroom; but it is false for all that.
A point of stunning simplicity is that when we start doing conceptual analysis we are likely to fill this slot with the name of a single person, as I have just done above. We might say that the basic case of teaching is where one person teaches another something. Your mother probably taught you how to cook. Maybe a driving instructor taught you how to drive. Reading Plato's Meno might have taught you that the way to double a square is to construct one on the diagonal of the original square. And so on. Certainly such things happen; but for people troubled by questions of responsibility within school systems, concentration on such examples overlooks a crucial fact. Teaching in those situations is not a one-to-one affair, but a one-many relation.1
Some relations can be indifferently one-one and one-many. I can fire a sub-machine gun at one of you or at a whole crowd of you, and as far as achieving my goal is concerned, it won't make much difference. You, one or many, will die. But what might work well in teaching Mary Greek might not work at all on Fred. The success of teaching depends in part upon the learner, and when we find the Y slot filled with more than one learner we will find that they vary in significant ways among themselves (significant as far as the success of the teaching goes). Of course, institutional instruction systems have various devices for reducing the variation: age cohorts; streaming or setting; prerequisites for entry to a course, and so on. But these merely reduce, they do not eliminate the amount of variation in significant features. (Many of them are under attack by self-styled "progressive" educators, so one might expect variation to increase in the future.)
The traditional response to the situation I have sketched was to teach to some supposed average of the group, or to a norm for the group. Learners who didn't fit the average or norm were left to rough it. A more modern response has been to get back closer to a one-one relation by giving learners lots of self-paced work-cards or small group projects, so that instead of 50 minutes addressed to the average of the class each member can hope for a couple of minutes one-to-one. There is, understandably, a good deal of controversy about whether the more modern system provides any advantages over the older one.
I think the main point is that in neither of them can one expect much serious learning of anything worthwhile, or at least, little learning that can be attributed to the teaching offered.
The preceding discussion has already in effect trespassed on this topic. What are we getting at when we say that somebody is teaching something to somebody else?2
It is widely thought that the answer involves the idea of the occupant of the Y slot learning the something in question.3 Most of the argument is about how precisely the learning gets into the picture.
One story (Kleinig mentions Hirst's version) is that it is a matter of X's intention. If and only if what X does, he does with the intention that Y learn A, then he is teaching A to Y. Notice that on this view it can be true that I am teaching you though you learn nothing. What matters is that I intend that you learn. Equally, though perhaps this case is less likely, you may learn a lot as a result of what I do but it may not be true that I taught you because I lacked that intention.
Another story (Kleinig's own preference) is that it is a matter of actual outcome. If Y learnt, then X taught; if Y did not learn, then X did not teach. What did X do while he sincerely intended to bring about learning? Kleinig says he tried to teach.
A typical academic response to such a contrast of views is to have it both ways. In this context, philosophers have often said that there are two senses to the word, "teach": a task sense, and an achievement sense. One can, of course, be working away for years at a task without ever achieving one's goal. Kleinig goes into this supposed contrast of sense at great length, though perhaps with little profit.
Another response to this sort of argument is to appeal to one's dictionary. The dictionary I have to hand (one of Webster's) tells me that to teach is to cause to know (a subject or how to do something or the disagreeable consequences of doing something). I shall come back to the idea of knowledge; let's look at causing. I was pleased to find that the same dictionary glosses "remind" as "cause to remember." I can remind you of the alphabet or of the capital of Nicaragua, as I did in the previous chapter, by mentioning salient facts ("H" comes after "G"; Managua is the capital of Nicaragua). I can remind you of an appointment by telling you that you've made it. And I can tell you that without in fact your remembering; I'm still reminding you, even though I'm not causing you to remember. Why? Because I am doing the sorts of thing that standardly do cause you to remember. Causing things to happen in people is always fraught with uncertainty. We do the best we can. I show you the entry in the diary; I tell you the bit of gossip that was conveyed at the time; and still you don't actually recall any of it. Too bad; I reminded you. When you don't show up for the appointment you certainly can't say that I didn't remind you! Nor would you get away with saying that I did at least try very hard to remind you.
I hope you can see where this is leading. Teaching and learning is like reminding and recalling. I teach you if I do the sorts of thing that standardly cause you to learn. We don't need to know anything about my intentions, though in many cases of course I will have intentions that relate to your learning. We don't need to know anything about your actual learning (except, perhaps, if you are very weird, so weird that the standard sorts of things that cause people to learn A don't work at all in your case and so I should have done something completely different). That seems how we use this bit of language. You can walk round a school and pick out the people who are teaching from the ones who are not (and from the ones who are trying to teach but not succeeding because the Principal keeps interrupting their class) and you can do all this without, it would seem, any profound investigations into intentions or any testing of the learners.
I have stressed that teaching is a relation between two (groups of) persons, the X and Y slots in our formula. There are a whole range of relations between people — I can hit you; I can love you; I can sell something to you; I can teach you;.... Logically they work in different ways; but for the present the important difference I want to focus on is the extent to which the person(s) in the Y slot have to do anything. I can hit you while you are asleep; you just have to be in the right place. I can love you without you even knowing about it (without you even existing in fact). But I can't sell you something unless you agree to buy; I can't talk to you unless you listen, though I can speak to you.
Where the point of X's doing something crucially involves Y's response, I shall say we have a transaction. Evidently, the point of my teaching you is that you learn; so teaching is a transaction in this sense. It is also evident that where we have a putative transaction, things can go wrong in various ways, in particular if Y, for whatever reason, fails to do his bit.
When we have a transaction, the language we use is, I think, always a bit slippery when it comes to these cases of Y's failure to respond. We could sometimes insist that it can't be true that X Fs unless Y also Gs appropriately — "sell" might behave like this. In other cases we allow that X does F, though we can see the witty point in denying it (cf. Martial's remark non scribit, cuius carmina nemo legit — he doesn't write, whose poems no one reads). The slipperiness is increased by the fact that often we have institutionalized the activities in question, or at least have what I called "standard" ways of doing them. Then to F it may simply be enough to be doing the standard things, with however little success. (Even Kleinig concedes such a use of the word, "teach,"4 though if my claims in the previous section are correct we may not really need it here.)
Perhaps more important than determining how English currently operates is to note the distinguishable "moments" in the transaction. The teacher has to present A; the learner has to grasp it; and then the learner has to decide what to do with it (e.g. compartmentalize it in the way we looked at earlier, or accept it and make it his own). If you want to concentrate on the various things that go on in teaching, what the teacher does is the presentation, the packaging of A for the particular learners in question. You then get a kind of account of teaching (such as Gowin's) which sidesteps the debates we looked at earlier about how learning fits in.
We have now, not before time, arrived at what seems to me the main question we ought to address in reflecting on teaching and learning. Given that teaching is a transaction, that it requires the active participation of both X and Y, who should we hold responsible for its successes and failures?
The assignment of responsibilities here may depend in an important way on the context of the teaching in question. The learning that is correlative with teaching is typically effortful — people don't teach their friends their telephone numbers, they simply tell them, though they might teach them a mnemonic trick to recall them. If I ask you to teach me to prepare roti then you can assume I recognise the need to put in a bit of effort: to remember procedures and relative quantities of ingredients, to watch carefully what you do, and so on. If I paid no attention and then complained that you hadn't taught me properly, you would not be amused. In this sort of case (between consenting adults), you can reasonably expect things of the learner. But equally you do have certain responsibilities to me too. If you used a technical cookery term and I asked for an explanation, you should give me one. You shouldn't just tell me to follow the instructions on the pack of instant roti mix. Both sides have a job: you to present the task intelligibly to me; I to attend and remember.
In this simple sort of case, teachers can assume that learners recognise the effort they must put in, and can assume usually that learners want to learn. If I've no desire ever to cook a roti, why ever would I be asking you to show me how it is done?
But the teaching we are usually concerned with is not between consenting adults. When learners are children, the gap between what the teacher knows and what they know can be much greater, and so their grasp of the requisite effort less clear. Still, if both sides consent to the relation, this may just mean that the teacher's task is that much harder. The more important difference is the absence of active consent. In general children are sent to school; they do not go because they prefer that to their other options. In general too, people doing philosophy of education have been told to take the course as part of getting something they want; they have not chosen it out of intrinsic interest.
The other side of this coin is that the teachers are not ordinary people who find a request to teach something arising in the course of social life, but people who have chosen to work in an institution that engages in various forms of imposed instruction.
What, I suggest, these conditions imply is yet another extension of the teacher's responsibility, an extension which is normally revealed in the pre-occupation of teacher training with questions of "motivating" people to learn. In the simple, roti case, motivation can be taken for granted. But when it cannot, and when you are being paid to teach,5 then perhaps you do have a duty so to package the goods that people get over their unwillingness to expend the effort required for mastery. Another thought here is that the "system" has a duty to require something decent, if it is going to require any learning at all. I have already suggested that making people into walking telephone directories is a degrading process; to the extent that Aristotle was right that people are innately inquisitive (and even that the highest satisfactions come from intellectual understanding) a system that insists on their learning should make that learning of the highest quality it can find.
There is another aspect of the total situation where it seems less controversial that the "system" should be held responsible, much more so than it typically is: in providing the necessary material conditions for teachers to do their job adequately. No doubt it is logically possible for a hungry child to learn something in an overcrowded hot classroom with a teacher with no equipment but her voice, but again we have "standard" ways of doing things, and we know that the conditions in too many of our schools are a deplorably long way from meeting those standards. We are in danger of moving off again into sociological reflections on the actual place of schooling in our kind of society; but the basic point is simple enough -- if you are really insisting on learning then make it at least standardly possible. In these days of increasing privatization, we should also remember that malnutrition does not become the standard of healthy nutrition merely because people have suffered from it for decades.
To close let us return to another slot in our logical skeleton, the one for the content taught or learnt. Perhaps the only thing that can be said in general about this slot is that almost anything can fit. We teach and learn a vast variety of things. I think we often make trouble for ourselves by being too careless here to specify exactly what teaching/learning we are interested in. It is easy to say we want to teach someone algebra or about the granting of independence to various Caribbean territories without specifying whether we will be content if he can get a problem right or produce some correct dates or whether we want a lot more evidence of a grasp of the related theory or context, of a more than minimal degree of understanding. (This may sound like a plea for objectives, and if that is what such people want, so be it. The worry some of us have is that what such people want is a restriction to the most superficial and most easily tested level.)
Using some distinctions explained in a later footnote (note 7), it might also be worth noting that when we want to learn a skill we are often subjected to a diet of arid knowledge vaguely about the skill. (You want to become better teachers, and what happens? Here you are doing philosophy of education.) We may think that acquaintance with certain masterpieces is valuable, but end up studying the place of the theatre in Jacobean England instead of getting to grips with Macbeth and the rest.
It is widely assumed that some things are better "caught than taught." Perhaps in some cases that is true. What I want to take this opportunity to note is something endemic to school teaching, at least at the secondary level, and very unfortunate (not least for philosophers in search of a job). Take some big A, one of the main subjects at secondary school, say history or chemistry or mathematics. If you look at the aims set out for curricula in A, you will find a lot of talk about A's way of doing things — historical understanding and methods; "the scientific method"; critical evaluation of persuasive arguments; problem-solving;.... But when you get down to the nitty-gritty, the lesson contents that are meant to achieve these aims, what do you find? Usually an unholy scramble through centuries of wars and revolutions, or a portfolio of experiments and equations, or algebra and trigonometry and differentiation and integration and transformation geometry and ....
The thought seems to be that if you do lots of experiments (this one illustrating this point; the next one checking out that; ...) you will somehow pick up how to do experiments in a new context, the rationale and logic of experimentation. Fortunately a few people do. But many others don't. And it's not very surprising, because typically the teacher never draws explicit attention to these aspects of experimentation. (You can change "experimentation" to its historical or mathematical analogues.) Nor is that very surprising, because typically the teachers have never explicitly studied them either.
You may by now have some better idea of what I'm getting at because you have been required to read through Argument Analysis and its attempt to get you to understand explicitly some of the elementary issues that arise when we critically evaluate an argument. English teachers, maybe all teachers, expect their students to pick out "good" and "bad" arguments; but they are as mystified by the contents of Argument Analysis as anyone else, and I don't honestly think it is all the fault of my exposition; it is the novelty of actually focussing your mind on things we normally take for granted and so don't teach, even though we say they are among our main aims in teaching.
The same experience should also convince you of why my making a fuss about this is not entirely self-serving: people often don't do very well at A's ways of doing things. They can learn to do better. But, I submit, they can learn to do better much more easily by explicitly teaching these things than by longer unreflective immersion in A's activities.6
The word "unreflective" is important in the last sentence. The kinds of aims I am looking at here are typically "second order" matters, structural features of experiments or of how historians deal with documents or whatever. What gets stressed in the implementation of the curriculum is the various "first order" experiments, their outcomes, etc. But unless one is directed to attend to matters of logical structure there is no particular reason to notice it. I could, to use a somewhat different example, show you "X" and then "T". You might remember both of them, and even the sequence in which they were presented; but you might never think that they are both constructed from two straight lines.
There are other possible curricular aims which might not create this sort of problem. If you want students to be acquainted with the variety of dogs you might bring in a spaniel one week, a chihuahua the next, a German shepherd, and so on. By presenting lots of instances, you might well achieve an aim that consists in acquaintance with a general kind: dogs, Shakespearean plays, ... But the first order/second order relation is logically very different; the former won't automatically give you the latter.
We saw earlier that the non-philosophers responsible for my dictionary said that teaching was a matter of causing to know. I have changed that to causing to learn. But Kleinig, for one, seems to think that learning implies knowing and so implies the truth (or more generally the "correctness") of what is learnt, of the A slot. Given the falsehoods taught all over the world everyday, I cannot see why Kleinig thinks so; unfortunately the "powerful" argument by Dietl is locally unavailable and Kleinig's claim that "when I say 'I learned ____A' [i.e. that 2+2=5, or how to square the circle, or to say my rosary] I do not imply any likelihood that I might be wrong" does not amount to his further and false claim that "in avowing that one has learned something, one is staking one's reputation, putting one's credibility on the line" (p. 36, with a trivial change of lettering). Not implying I may be wrong is not the same as implying I must be right.
It must be admitted that very often there is some reference to doing things the right way (or at least a socially acceptable way) when one speaks of learning, and to that extent Kleinig's point holds. But that doesn't seem so strong as he supposes. (It is in fact a very general phenomenon. I am inclined to think it should be attributed to the verb itself — swim, sing, walk, etc — rather than to the context of knowing how to, or learning how to. If so, it reflects the tremendous permeation of social norms into almost everything we do.)
Since it has been suggested that one should analyse "know" as a matter of having learned and not forgotten, my view above that talk of learning does not imply knowledge is certainly odd. I would appreciate decisive objections to it.
It is worth noting a little about the logic of talk of knowledge. Here it is usually agreed that any claim to propositional knowledge (I know that p; he knows that p;...)7 implies the truth of the item known. It is often claimed that one thing talk of knowledge adds to talk of belief is this extra endorsement of what is believed. But while it seems that "John knows that p" does imply "p," I have claimed above that "John has learned that p" does not. The impression Kleinig has that it does is probably due in part to the fact that the first person case is likely to carry with it a "conversational implication"8 that p is the case since it amounts to something like "I have come to believe p" which does not sit happily with going on to claim "but not p." But this is in part a matter of the tense: "I came to believe p" is quite compatible with going on to say "but I later rejected it."
8. See Argument Analysis, Appendix 1, p. 100.
Return to Steps
URL http://www.uwichill.edu.bb/bnccde/epb/stepstl.html
© Ed Brandon, 1992, 2001. HTML prepared using 1st Page 2000, last revised June 19th, 2001.