We are Living in a Techne World

Ageism is a thing.  The progressive ennui caters to the young.  Modern technological advances, and the rapid rate of innovation in machines that are used to “get it done” ensure that older folks feel bedazzled, befuddled, and stressed by the constant flow of “new tech.”  Education is not immune to this plight.  Older teachers struggle to keep up with the latest learning platforms.  Fueling this frustration is a tech industry that is never satisfied, but rolls out some new idea almost weekly.  But all this innovation of teaching tech is not actually resulting in better education.  We seem to have moved from focusing on the skills necessary to teach the soul well to a focus on new techniques or means for teaching that produces a better product.

This post is not a pushback against all the tech.  Really, it is not.  But it is a concern of mine that as money comes into the equation, we become less objective at evaluating the efficacy of the “new” ideas and objects being poured into our field of education.

Some defining of terms are in order because the terminology has changed over the years.  Technology comes from the Greek term, techné, meaning “the art or skill necessary to gain something of value.”  For a long time, when the West considered this idea of technique, we were talking about skills in a given art, including the art of teaching.  As industrialization convinced man he could save himself a lot of trouble and time by using machines, technique gave way to a newer use of the term, technology which now seems to be used in a wide variety of ways. At a minimum, we use this term today in education to refer to processes (especially automated ones) of teaching, objects (especially electronic ones) used to teach, and knowledge of these processes and objects.

As with any new technique or machine, there is a learning curve.  Given that most educational technology is modeled upon the cutting edge products of human productivity it is often true that older teachers feel like they are playing catch up, while the younger generation is more natural with the latest gadgets.  The analogy may be that of the carpenter and hammer.  The young carpenter grabs the newest, nicest hammer and starts swinging.  The older carpenter, after years of using that one specific hammer that is his, will only begin work when he has “his” hammer, the one that feels right and he knows so well.  Moving from my analogy back into the classroom, let me ask, “Which ‘carpenter’ do you want to hire?”  The younger one seems at ease with the newest, latest, flashiest educational tools, but his artistic ability is way behind the experienced veteran who may still be using “old school” stuff but knows how to use it really well.

Perhaps this is one of the first implications I would draw out of this distinction between skill and tools that I am making is that a tool is useless or even dangerous in the hands of a non-Artisan.  With education, we all have basic aptitude for teaching: it is a humane endeavor.  But just putting powerful tools of communication or education into someone’s hands does not mean he can use them well.  Just swinging a nice shiny hammer around could cause damage rather than building a nice birdhouse.  And the solution to this is not professional development classes on using the tech, but on those things fundamental to education that the tech can aid you in accomplishing.

I am suspicious that much of the tech issue I am addressing is just a part of the larger issue of how rich education is today, especially here in America.  Even as we spend enormous amounts of money on education, we sink further and further behind less-resourced nations in the actual accomplishments of our educational establishment. I hold to the controversial opinion that money is the big problem in education: too much of it, not its paucity.  Every attempt to reform seems to be an enterprise, rather than a grass-roots movement.  A new set of curriculum is rolled out (at a significant cost) followed by new ways to assess that curriculum (cha-ching) and then a whole cadre of consultants hit the circuit teaching schools how to implement the reform and game the tests (while charging exorbitant fees and getting kickbacks and incentives from the curriculum and testing companies.  The educational technology industry gets its cut by marketing things that will aid the haggard teachers in keeping up with the current reform directives.

Meanwhile, the student has become something for the tech to be used on, rather than being seen as a young and growing human soul.  I won’t develop all the thoughts I have about widgets, factory conveyor belts, and the mathematics of efficiency dominating modern education, but the tech seems to be one further layer placed between the human teacher and the human student.  It concerns me.

And at the heart of the technological educational factory is a problem of purpose.  Are we teaching so as to get students into a great job, or ensure we continue to get our funding by getting a high test rate?  Is teaching a matter of means or ends?  As is often the case with human activity, we get distracted by the means and forget the ends we are seeking.  If I have written it once, I have written too many times to remember: education is the cultivation of wisdom and virtue.  Those are the ends.  That is what all the artistry, action, knowledge, and technology of education should be aiming toward: good people.  

There seem to be a lot of questions about our penchant for educational technology.  Let me ask the ones on my mind.  Is there one or many categories for science?  Can we only know material things, or are there immaterial, metaphysical things to be known as well?  Recovery of the four sciences seems long overdue.  The large expenditures we are seeing on a failing system seem to mostly be going toward the window dressing, not the foundational interests of a good education.  I am not pushing back against tech in the classroom.  I have it, I use it, I am grateful for it.  But cannot distract from the real issues of recovering good education.  I wonder if we would benefit from becoming poorer: using our own curricula, assessing in local ways, and firing all these strangers driving by our schools to “consult” during that half-day off school.  Solutions to these issues are not out there somewhere, they are here, wherever here is for each of us.

Teaching Multiple Pupils

I was speaking with a mom yesterday who is attempting to homeschool three sons for the first time.  She has a ninth grader, third grader, and I think a first grader.  All boys, so there is that.  Her dilemma is common to all educators, just more pronounced: how do I effectively teach three different learners at three differing levels “all at once?”  Here are the thoughts I put together after I left the discussion (which is when I usually think of good things, rather than the drivel I come up with at the moment).

Home education need not be schooling.  You don’t have to have all the bells and schedules and discrete subject distinctions of school.  Part of schooling is having  several teachers share the load, thus all the subject periods and fragmentation of knowledge that goes with it.  You can teach music and math together, or literature and history.  There is only one teacher, so combining things is much more natural at home than in school.  Less really is more.  That is your freedom with home education.  That said, no one wants to go through a 9-10 hour day that has all your attention devoted to one child while the other two “do other things” (i.e. burn down the house).  So there has to be ways to overlap the time of teaching.

Themes help.  Even with disparate skill levels, such as the ages mentioned above, you can blend the instruction together around themes.  These might come from history, or literature, or seasons, or any number of things, but if you are all studying the same idea together, you buy back time.  Studying the same time period as several levels is much more easily done than trying to keep three differing historical time periods rolling at the same time.  Even building off the same piece of literature at three levels is better than not.

It’s always the arts over the sciences.  I harken back to the old sense of these terms, not the modern, so let me be clear.  Developing your students to be able to learn on their own, acquiring the arts (or skills) of a learner, is much more durable and long lasting than simply providing them with the knowledge of a subject (read my use of “science” here).  And in this emphasis is a key to sanity in the home version of education.  As you teach the young ones, they become their own teacher, relieving you more and more of constant teaching and rather becoming more of a mentor.  In other words, the older the properly taught student, the less they need your time as teacher.

I don’t believe for a moment that any type of teaching is easy, and home education is daunting, so please don’t read these comments as belittling the cause.  It is a great cause, and thus great and difficult work.  I think the less we try to force home education into the path taken by schooling, especially that done in our overcrowded and confused government schools, the better, happier, and more enjoyable it will be.

Nota Bene: My podcast partner Jason and I discussed this issue shortly after I wrote this article. You can listen to that here.

What Does a Grade Mean?

After establishing what a grade or assessment is, we move on to the issue of what it indicates or means.

If a grade indicates the teacher’s assessment of learning, then we have to distinguish between the “kinds” of learning occurring.  The first distinction I would make is between Arts and Sciences.  In short, we teach students either to do or to know.  A full discussion of this can be found here, but you can’t teach, or assess, these two things the same.  An art (the ability to do something) is not taught or tested in the same way as a science (something we learn intellectually or that which we know).

As I see it, the following are at the very least the ways in which these things must be assessed differently.  In the arts we seek to judge how well the art is able to be done.  This further breaks down into those who have obtained enough of the ability that they can be said to be able to do “x.”  These assessments of basic ability, when done correctly, indicate that Johnny can dribble a basketball and Susie cannot, etc. But most times, the instruction is more than just distinguishing between those who can or cannot, but how well one can do the thing being taught compared either to other artists or to some standard for that art.  Here the task of assessment is to demonstrate a growing ability with the art.  “You started at this level and have progressed further to this current level.”  This is demonstrated well by such things as various karate belt colors.  You progress from white, to yellow, to gold, orange, green, blue, purple, brown, red and eventually finally to black (which then even has degrees within its highest distinction).  The color around your waist is an instantaneous indicator to all who care with what level of proficiency you have progressed through your karate training.  And that leads to the final act of assessment in the arts.  Though no art is ever perfected in a human, there are masters of the art, and at some point one must be judged such, usually demonstrating their readiness to leave formal training in that art and become a teacher of the art themselves.

The sciences are taught and assessed quite a bit differently.  I must reiterate from other discussions on this that Arts and Sciences work together.  Confusing the two is problematic to be sure, but sealing them off hermetically from each is equally harmful.  At least three things are assessed in a student’s growing knowledge of a subject: the level of knowledge, the student’s competency of that knowledge, and his ability to integrate his knowledge of the subject with the rest of his life.  The first is often what most people default to in educational assessment:  “How much do you know about the subject.”  But most teachers want students to know the material in such a way as to be able to connect the content together into something like understanding.  Given that these things (the knowledge) are so, how does fact A connect to and affect facts B, C, and D?  And this simply leads right into the third aspect of this mode of assessment:  how does subject A integrate or fit into the other subjects or “sciences” of life.  See my discussion here of the four sciences and how they are used to better educate the whole student.

So a grade or assessment shows a great number of things, depending on what is being assessed.  The last question for this blog is just as fundamental:  Who wants to know?  As an assessment is a judgment being made, it seems the main purpose of the grade is to communicate the judgment among all involved parties.  I think the teacher, student, and depending on the age, the parent behind the student, want to know the judgment contained in an assessment.  The teacher can use assessment to better his teaching, determine the progress of his students, and be clear with student and parent where he thinks the learning process currently resides.  A student is able to adjust his learning experience based on this feedback from his teacher.  And the parent, who is often funding and responsible ultimately for the learning going on, but not in the classroom, is able to know how things are progressing.

Some of the following questions flow out of these thoughts:

1. How individual or collective can assessment be? Can the same assessment judge all students, or should there be individual tests for all?  The whole standardized testing thing comes into the discussion here.
2. How objective or subjective is a grade? What can affect the objectivity/subjectivity of assessment? [I wander over into this sticky mud hole in my next blog].
3. Should teachers seek premade test banks or make all their own assessments?
4. If the arts and sciences are assessed differently but their grades appear side by side on a “report card” what is to be done to avoid the common confusion of these things?

A Deepening Contemplation

I have been spending a lot of time lately trying to think with others about how the seven liberal arts, the four sciences, a Christian idea of epistemology, and the modes of knowledge of all work together.  It is deep, demanding, and greatly rewarding.  If you have not seen it, here is a chart from James Taylor that has fed much of my thought.

It is from page 44 of his work, Poetic Knowledge, which I highly value and highly recommend.