401. Schooling in the modern world
There is debate on how to teach, in primary and secondary education, in the
modern world. Does the old idea of education as transfer of knowledge still
apply in a world where Internet provides easy access to all the knowledge there
is? How to cope with this flood of knowledge?
Younger teachers (such as my daughter Anouk) claim
that it no longer makes sense to transfer facts and figures, and to give
lengthy lectures, in one-directional transfer. They plead for a more dialogical
process, in discussion between teachers and pupils, and pupils among each
other. Instead of cramming facts into them, let them ask questions and then
look for answers and debate them.
Older people (like myself) ask what then happens to
the use of existing knowledge: does that not get neglected or even lost? And they
argue that one must have knowledge to know what questions to ask.
Also, isn’t the present calamity of the production and
credence of fake news due to lack of knowledge and critical thought, disregard
of the facts and how they connect?
Who is right? Both are, depending on what meaning of
knowledge you take.
Cognitive science offers the distinction between on
the one hand declarative knowledge, of facts of date, place, people, and
events, and on the other hand procedural knowledge about logics and processes
of structure, causal or logical connection, with arguments of implication or
other inference or association. They occupy different regions of the brain.
Facts are isolated, while procedures give their
connection. That makes it easier to remember, because of coherence where the
one thing rests upon the other, like a house of cards, and one can use the one
as a trigger to remember the other. It is beginning to happen to me that I
can’t remember the name of the author of a book, but I can tell you what he or
she tells.
The problem of the flood of information in the Internet
age may be solved by teaching the procedural knowledge needed to ask the right
questions and to connect the facts, offering cognitive and logical structures
in which one can fill in the facts taken from Internet.
Procedural knowledge can be learned by reading books
that supply arguments and analyses, but the book does not answer back to
questions that may arise. For that, one would have to check the references and
trace the trail of literature involved.
But for that knowledge the internet offers the ideal
vehicle, to search for sources and connections. And if reading is replaced, to
a greater or lesser extent, by dialogue and debate, does that not make the
process faster and more versatile, and the learning of how to ask questions and
evaluate answers more fruitful?
In other words: could one not make the learning of
procedural knowledge the cornerstone of teaching, and train how to develop that
and use it in tracing, filling in and evaluating the facts from internet?
This connects with my arguments, in earlier items in
this blog, that one needs the opposition from others, in debate, to have a
chance of being freed from ignorance and prejudice. For that one also needs
sufficient variety of cognition, at a cognitive distance large enough to yield
surprising insights but not too large to absorb and make use of it. That would
also train pupils not to hide in the comfort of filter bubbles that confirm
prejudice.
A complication may be the following. How do you grade
students when there are no standard tests of knowledge, in the more processual mode
of procedural learning? Or is the very concept of grading a bit of old thinking?
But then, does evaluation of students and their progress not become too
subjective, based on a teacher’s impressions, and is that not prejudicial, and
susceptible to negotiation between teacher and student? Might that not lead to inequality
and a decline of standards?
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