This slogan implies that education is the opposite of ignorance. That's not true: the opposite of ignorance is knowledge. Education isn't the same as knowledge, although the bumper sticker implies that it is. Highly educated people can be stupid, blind, prejudiced--in a word, ignorant. Education may lead to knowledge--or it may not. One of the major shortcomings of our culture is that it has substituted verbal fluency, which is easy to teach and measure, for knowledge, which isn't. Since we refer to both as "education," our discussions of education tend to be muddled. Real educators understand this difference and strive to aim for knowledge, beyond mere verbal learning. It's not easy, because teaching for knowledge involves working with potentials within students that are not as easy to access as rote learning is. Such teaching may require experiences which are beyond the range of the usual classroom. They may require more individualized teaching than our educational systems usually provide. In fact,educators have to work within educational and cultural frameworks that generally don't recognize the difference between rote learning and knowledge, and neither support nor encourage those who do. By "knowledge," I don't mean things like knowing who wrote what play or what event happened in what year. Such bits of information vary from culture to culture and are rarely of more than local importance. "Knowing" them really means "having memorized them." Knowledge involves understanding : of the meaning of events, of the relationship between oneself and others, of how to behave and why. Activities, such as projects undertaken by a student, are essential to developing knowledge. Such projects may be done with others or alone, under close supervision or relatively independently, and are to be evaluated by expert careful observation of results. This is very far from education as usually practiced. Nothing of knowledge can be gained from verbal learning alone, from reading and lectures. Language can prepare us for future experiences, or help to clarify and illuminate past ones, but only if and when we understand what it means . This is one implication of the fact that the two "halves of the brain" (cerebral hemispheres) process information differently. We've been instructing the left "brain" and ignoring the right one, so it's not surprising that our society is characterized by inability to see things dynamically and wholistically, whether in personal relationships or the application of scientific technology. The discovery of the different functions of the brain hemispheres is still working its way through educational circles, where it is more often encountered as a vague abstraction than a practical working concept to be applied in teacher training and evaluation, and curriculum planning and development. (More about that later.) The right brain, generally ignored by education, is vulnerable to influence and conditioning by crude or manipulative social forces (more about that later, too). This is seen most clearly where highly educated people become members of a cult, but is by no means restricted to such cases. Another way to approach the question of knowledge in education is to say that it exists at different levels, as the British educational psychologist Lawrence Stenhouse did in An Introduction to Curriculum Research and Development (Heinemann, London, 1975). Stenhouse discussed knowledge at three levels: 1. Information : facts, who was born in what year, the periodic table, etc. 2. Skills: knowing how to do things, bake a cake, do a chemistry experiment. 3. Understanding: recognizing the meaning and deep structure of subjects, ability to respond effectively and unpredictably to challenges within subject areas So, in psychotherapy, for example, there is: 1. Information about psychotherapy: knowing what various people have said about it. 2. Skills of psychotherapy: ability to conduct a therapeutic interview, lead a group. 3. Understanding of psychotherapy: recognition of the role, power and limitations of psychotherapy as a method of emotional and personal healing through interpersonal relationship within a particular cultural context. Ability to be therapeutic, not just go through the motions. Saadi, the great Sufi, said it in the 13th century: "A donkey laden with books is neither an intellectual nor a wise man." The problem of confusing language acquisition with knowledge has long been with us (The Way of the Sufi, by Idries Shah, Octagon Press, London, 1989. Distributed in the U.S. by ISHK Book Service.) Maybe the best response to one slogan is another. How about: "If you think "education" is learning--try knowledge!" |