Обсуждение:James Paul Gee

The Anti-Education ERA (James Paul Gee)

It is a question about what would constitute a proper education for a person who wants to be a producer and not just a consumer, a participant and not just a spectator, an agent and not a victim in a world full of ideology, risk, fear, and uncertainty. What sort of education could—what would it mean for an education to—make us humans smart enough to solve our problems and save ourselves from our own stupidity?

Because I am now convinced that we cannot improve our society by more talk about schools and school reform, but only by talk about what it means to be smart in the twenty-first century. I am convinced that we cannot improve our schools and colleges by more talk about practices and policies, but only by talk about what it means to be smart in the twenty-first century and what schools and colleges have to do with this question. While I will certainly demonstrate in the course of this book a good many ways in which we humans can be stupid, in the end I will argue that when we make people count and let them participate, they can be very smart indeed.

We have forgotten education as a force for equality in the sense of making everyone count and enabling everyone to fully participate in our society. We have forgotten education as a force for drawing out of each of us our best selves in the service of an intellectually and morally good life and good society.

The most important step taken in the evolution of higher intelligence was the development of the ability of an animal to think and plan both before and after taking an action. Before acting, such an animal can think about what might happen and devise an effective plan of action. After the action, the animal can reflect on what happened and think about whether the results of the action were good or bad. Then the animal can plan a more effective action if necessary.

We can reflect on the effects of one car hitting another going in a certain direction at a certain speed. A scientist can imagine that he or she is an electron and try to see the world from the electron’s perspective. We are at our best engaging in such imaginings when we are using them to prepare for actions in which something really matters to us.

We humans are very good actor/simulators. We have language, and language allows us to think about things in a more complex way than other animals do. It allows me, for instance, to simulate what will happen if I wait until the day after next to do something I should have done two weeks ago. No other animal can manipulate time in this symbolic way. So as actor/simulators we humans can be smart.

There is a third condition. It turns out that humans think and act well only when they care about what they are doing. Caring, here, means feeling that something is at stake for us—that something really matters to us—when we act. Thus, emotion is crucial to thinking and simulating because it helps us to manage attention, persist past failure, and assess outcomes in terms of what we care about.

So let’s restate the conditions for smart human action, adding mentorship. The conditions are: (1) initial mentorship to get us prepared to learn from experience in specific areas; (2) lots of prior experience; (3) clear goals; (4) something being “at stake” (mattering to us emotionally); and (5) the opportunity to act. I have also added the fifth condition, the opportunity to act. No matter how much experience you have had and no matter how well you can use it to build simulations, it does little good unless you are an actor and not just a spectator of other people’s actions.

The world that answers us back in response to our actions is a stern task-master. It does not care about us. It can bite back if we do not pay attention to its responses. The world resists human ideologies and desires. Fire burns you and certain uncooked plants kill you, regardless of your values, desires, politics, religion, or ideology.

We humans need to learn how to elicit useful responses from the world. Good mentors can help with this, as can the stored knowledge of the social groups to which we belong. Right now, though, the main point I want to make is that you cannot elicit useful responses from the world if the requisite parts of the world are not present or if you do not know how to elicit useful responses from the world. There is a lot more to say about the circuit of reflective action. It is what made and makes us smart. It is interesting that the conditions for reflective action are often not met in formal schooling.

Much of formal schooling is devoted to listening to and reading language, not to taking actions in the world that are relevant to that language (say in history, civics, or physics). Often students can see no clear and compelling goal for learning in formal classrooms beyond grades and graduation. They often do not care about the material in any deep way. Many students have had little or no prior experiences of actions in the world relevant to the often technical language they hear or read in school. Some students have had mentorship in the subject area prior to or outside of school, mentorship about what to pay attention to and how to act and assess action toward goals in the area. Others have not.

You can really understand this text if and only if you can simulate in your mind the “named” actors and actions and see the effects of the actions. It is all the better if you are simulating this in order to take an action to accomplish a goal yourself or if you have done so in past experiences. You need to be able to see in your mind’s eye how things like water and wind can abrade a rough surface and why this would matter to anyone, especially you.

So in giving me the text in the absence of prior experience, mentorship, clear goals, actions to be taken, and caring (having something at stake) you have ensured that I cannot use the circuit of reflective action to learn and succeed. You have taken away what I, as a human being, am potentially good at. In turn, you have made me stupid. Good teaching does not do this, of course. It places words like those above inside mentorship, experiences, goals and actions, and caring.

Humans memory

We strongly believe that our memories are “real” and “true.” They just feel that way. We would “swear to it” and sometimes do in court. We think of memory as a stable store, like things written down on paper and only in need of being read out loud for us to recover the truth of what happened. Nonetheless, recalling experiences is not like passive reading. It is active and continual interpretation, editing, and rewriting. The memory keeps changing based on when and where we recall it, what we experience later, and how we make use of the memory in storytelling or other sorts of accounts and activities.

So why does human memory work this way? Why is it something flexible, changeable, and full of associations? The reason is that human memory was not built (by evolution) to be accurate, fair, objective, or fixed. It was designed to help us make sense of the world, see connections, and find patterns, all in the service of accomplishing goals, surviving and flourishing in the world, and fulfilling our needs and desires. Being true can sometimes be a very important property of making memories and their recall effective for action and the accomplishment of goals. But truth is not the sole—and sometimes not even a—purpose of human memory. Human memory is, like the circuit of reflective action, “practical.” It is not a disinterested search for truth, but a search for effective action in the world.

It is really too bad that we use the same word for both human memory and computer memory. Humans can use memory very effectively to interpret the world, make sense of things, fulfill needs, and get on with the work of surviving and, hopefully, flourishing. They cannot use it very effectively to store and recall.

Story StoryTelling

At any rate, human memory is what it is. It is poor on meaningless or disconnected details, strong on meaningful stories and accounts. It is poor for things we do not care about and strong for what we do care about. Humans prefer stories to hard facts. We find comfort in stories that evade facts in favor of fantasies. Such comfort often leads to the sorts of stupidity that makes life worse for all us.

There are a number of reasons why humans are good at telling stories. Before I get to these, though, let me make a distinction between “narrative” and “story.” A narrative is any use of language in which specific events are said to have happened one after the other. Thus: “The king died. Then the queen died” is a narrative. The human mind has an interesting and important tendency to understand narrative (that is, events happening one after the other in time) as meaning that one event caused the other. Though this little narrative does not literally say so, we humans tend to interpret “The king died. Then the queen died” to mean that the queen died because the king died. Our minds have the urge to turn the little narrative into a story.

A story is a narrative with a “plot.” To interpret sequence in time as causation (X happened, then Y happened, or X caused Y to happen) is already to begin to give a plot to a narrative (a sequence of events). A plot is a framework imposed on a narrative that gives the narrative a beginning, a middle, and an end. A story gives meaning or significance to events. It tells us not just what happened, but why it happened or what these happenings meant to or for us or others.

The world is a demanding taskmaster. It does not care about us and often gives us answers we humans do not like. Suffering and death, as well as coincidences, inexplicable events, and unintended consequences, are some of the answers from the world. The human mind cannot accept this. It needs to find pattern, purpose, and hope in the world. It will supply these in story form if they are not forthcoming directly from the world. What is it about us human beings that makes us want to find meaning and purpose in the world even when they seem not to be there?

Stories of an afterlife are a good example. This world (especially for the vast majority of humans who are now, and have been through history, poor) seems imperfect, harsh, and unfair. Thus, we tell a story that there is another world, a perfect one, where we will live later. This world will make up for the imperfections of the current world and give these imperfections meaning and purpose. Religion, in its origins, is composed of stories and rituals that connect humans and the imperfect world they live in to another, better world or one that helps explain why our world is as it is.

There are, of course, many types of stories we humans tell, ranging from dinner-time conversation to books and movies. The human mind’s capacity to make up and believe stories that supply our need for control, meaning, and purpose, whether they be claims that “everything happens for a purpose,” the myths of a long-ago culture, or today’s religions of the book, gives rise to what I will call “mental comfort stories.”

My point here is not that we humans cannot reason when we have evidence. We can. My point is that we can also reason when we do not have evidence. In the absence of evidence, especially when we feel a loss of control, meaning, or status, we can spin elaborate stories or arguments that comfort us, right our sense of failure and loss, and render the world lucid, even if unjust.

Another way to put this point is to say that humans are experts at post hoc reasoning. After something happens, no matter how complex all the interacting causes were that gave rise to it, we can always find a good story for why it happened just as it did. The problem is that if something different had happened, we would have constructed an equally good story about what happened and why it was “inevitable.”

Humans engage in storying not to tell the truth or even to attempt to discover it, but for comfort. This human skill is often very good for us. But it can be—and has historically been—dangerous. When people, especially groups of people (tribes, ethnic groups, cultures, and nations) tell comfort stories, these stories lose a lot of their force for comfort if others do not believe them or if they have opposing stories. Humans have a tendency to enforce their stories if they can and to demonize people who hold opposing stories. In part, this is because telling stories for mental comfort is often a form of self-deception, and self-deception does not work well when others

All humans have one or more “natural” (human) languages that they speak, barring severe problems. But humans have also invented a number of special languages or language-like symbolic systems for special purposes. They have invented the language of classical logic, the languages of many branches of mathematics and science, and the language of law, for instance. No one learns these languages as their first language at home, even though some of them use words from our everyday languages like English, sometimes with their everyday meanings and sometimes not. So I want to use the term “language” broadly for things like everyday English, the language of algebra, and the technical languages of lawyers and engineers (which mix everyday words and phrases with technical ones).

Content

Because a common way to make people look stupid is to present them with something that is claimed to be general, clear, and explicit in and of itself, without any appeal to context or past experience, and then tell them they are stupid if they do not understand it.

To understand what “Hornworm growth displays a significant amount of variation” really means, you need to know about the contexts in which biologists use statistical measures of “significance,” why they use them, how they use them, and what sorts of meanings they give to claims of significance in the different contexts in which biology operates. If you attempt to learn this just by reading but have no experience of what biologists do in contexts of problem solving, you will just run into more and more words and phrases tied to the practices of biologists and statisticians, practices you have not experienced and don’t really understand.

For example, I was stupid enough not to realize that when a girl asked you, day after day, what time it was when she was wearing a functioning watch, she was trying to pick you up, as a surfer dude later told me. I did not even know girls “picked up” men. I thought it only went the other way round.

Pooling experience across diverse people with diverse experiences can be a powerful force for correcting errors and discovering new and better associations and patterns. It is, in fact, the basis of a phenomenon called “the wisdom of the crowd.” On the other hand, groups of people without sufficient diversity of experience can often just entrench their errors and prejudices by pooling information based on their own limited shared prior experiences, associations, and pattern recognition.

So why can’t we humans stop doing stupid things like eating too much sugar? If our “old mind” tells us to eat and eat more, why doesn’t culture (or the “good sense” it is supposed to impart to us) tell us not to? The answer to this question is usually that humans have a hard time with delayed gratification. They know getting fat will be bad, but they are faced here and now with a luscious piece of cake that they really want. Yet it isn’t true that humans always have trouble with delayed gratification. Exercise clubs are often full, and many teens even delay a short-term pleasure to get into an elite college.

Thus, we can behave in different ways in different contexts, depending on how we orient toward status or solidarity. Sometimes we feel conflicted. Should I order beer to show solidarity with my buddies or wine to show my appreciation for the “high life”? Should I date women I like or women who make me look important? Should I listen to country music in deference to my roots or classical music in deference to my education and refinement (at least in front of “refined” people)?

For us humans, there is no asocial starting point, no asocial ending point. The English word “idiot” is derived from the Greek word idiōtēs meaning “individual,” itself derived from idios (private, one’s own). It’s interesting that our English word for stupid comes from the Greek word for a person viewed just as an individual apart from the social body. It is the push and pull of status and solidarity that make people “public,” visible, and what they “are.”

In many cases, people are just lying. But not in all or perhaps even most cases. They are often, sometimes quite appropriately, advocating or simplifying for the sake of accomplishing their goals. They are being, in this sense, “practical,” focused not on truth, but on “work,” on getting things done, on remaking the world in their image. Naming things is, however, just the tip of the

Language, like painting or musical notation, is, in actuality, a tool for making “art.” It is not primarily for telling some literal truth and/or giving each other unvarnished information. Why do I use the term “art” here? I use this term because art is supposed to move people emotionally by getting them to imagine certain things in their minds.

Language, whether spoken or written, is always designed by the speaker or writer to help (or encourage) the hearer or reader to interpret it in certain ways and not others. It is always designed to attempt to get the hearer or listener to respond in certain ways and not others. Of course, we do not always successfully manage our recipients’ responses. But we try. As an example, consider how we talk about teachers, pupils, and schools. Some people choose to call students “consumers” or “clients” and talk about “auditing,” “inputs,” “outputs,” “performance indicators,” and “efficiency gains” in schools. This is the language of business. Applied to schools, it asks us to view schools as being like factories or stores that make and sell things. In other work, I myself have talked about teachers as “resources” for students’ active and collaborative problem-solving experiences and compared teachers to video-game designers. The traditional language of teachers as “instructors” and students as recipients of

Human minds/brains/bodies do not work well when they are sick. Perhaps the deepest human sickness is a lack of agency, a lack of the feeling that one counts and matters. Such a sickness is now an epidemic in our society and it makes both us and our society stupid.

The lower your status, the less you feel that you and your actions count and contribute. Feeling that you matter is good for your health. Feeling that you don’t (or don’t much, or not as much as others) is bad for your health. People have a need for agency, for mattering as actors. In highly hierarchically stratified societies (like the United States and many other countries to different degrees) and in a winner-take-all world, many people do not feel a sense of agency, or, at least, not a very robust one.

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Have you ever played a game, like a board game, with someone who does not care about the game or feels they cannot possibly win? They do not take the actions seriously or think much about them. They look stupid or silly. When people don’t believe their actions will make a difference or when they don’t know how to act, they appear stupid. They do not make good team members. When games are set up so that there is only one winner or a very few out of a great many players—and when winning begins to feel like a long-shot lottery—lots of the players give up or don’t put in much effort or they never get in the game.

Currently, school creates a situation in which many people feel a loss of agency, and thus school performance may not be a very good indicator of their potential for agency in other realms. To be agents, people need both opportunities to be an agent and models of effective action. They need to see that taking action can really matter, and they need to see what successful action looks like. For this, they need two additional things. First, they need to trust that the system is not rigged or unfair. They need to believe that their effective actions can have successful outcomes and that the outcomes of the game are not already predetermined by the actions of a select few. Second, they need to be members of a community or social group that models for them what counts as an effective action and that demonstrates to them that the actions of the community or group can be effective and will not be undermined by others with special privileges or access.

Another example: facing a new high-tech economic environment that more and more demands collaborative project-based teams for success, a company reorganizes its work force into so-called cross-functional teams, but leaves in place its old winner-take-all merit system that pits workers against each other, thereby contradicting the value of cooperation and collaboration.

The type of pathological story that I want to discuss here is different. People who tell these pathological stories attempt to recruit “facts” (evidence) to support them. But these facts are simply fictions dressed as facts inside nice-sounding, but blatantly stupid arguments. I will call these sorts of stories Pseudo Empirical Stories.

It is pseudo history, genetics, and linguistics. But that is its point: It is meant to sound good to people who know nothing and do not care to find out. It is meant for people who want to believe that their religious, ideological, and sometimes racist beliefs are “literally” and factually true, not just metaphorical or spiritual claims.

The human mind is made in such a way that it is heavily prone to thinking in terms of binary distinctions or dichotomies. People tend to define who is “like us” in opposition to those people who are not. They readily engage in “us” versus “them” thinking. Since they partially define their own humanity or sense of human worth in terms of the groups that are “us,” they can easily slide into viewing those who are “them” as less human or, at least, less worthy. .

Modern technologies allow the human urge to optimize and lower the level of challenge full rein and near endless application. In modern times, the human urge to optimize takes the form of customization. Modern technologies increasingly allow each of us, if we wish, to customize many things to fit with our skills, styles, desires, and beliefs in such a way as to leave us less challenged and feeling more “successful.” This process goes ever forward with each new technological advance.