Becky C on starting at the top

...teachers assign a ten-year-old to write a summary paragraph on The Lousiana Purchase. The ten-year-old is to pull the right amount of important details about that happy event from a two-page single spaced essay given out in class.

To a ten-year-old, every sentence of that essay seems as compelling and important as every other sentence BECAUSE TEN-YEAR-OLDS HAVE NO LIFE EXPERIENCE LET ALONE KNOWLEDGE OF WORLD HISTORY TO JUDGE what they can leave out of their summary and WHAT MUST NOT BE LEFT OUT.

It's this weird inversion of developmental expectations.

It's like they envision my child comfortably attired in a wool cardigan, sitting at home in a shabby leather wingback chair, thick black reading glasses perched low on his nose and hair thinning slightly on top of his head, and he puffs away thoughtfully on his pipe while he writes down the right amount of important details from the essay on a yellow legal pad with his leaking fountain pen.

Teachers think that if you CALL a child a writer, if adults SEE him as a writer, if we CELEBRATE and PUBLISH his writing, that good writing will follow like cargo planes landing on a South Pacific island.

But, NO IT DOESN'T.

copying sunflowers

I have been reading up on Vincent Van Gogh to prepare to give a short Art Literacy lesson at my children's school. I will read from a script, but I do a better job if I have read more than the script, beforehand.

The constructivist ethos of our Art Literacy program is to give children as much freedom as possible in achieving the production goal that follows each lesson. In this case, the goal for each child will be to paint a sunflower and show its texture by using specially thickened paint and a palette knife. Vincent used a lot of paint on his canvases.

In art, as in learning to read words or to add numbers, constructivists do not want children copying someone else’s good idea, whether it's how to paint a sunflower or how to sound out a word or how to add two numbers by counting-on. The child who copies is the child of a lesser god. He has fallen short of the goal of constructing original aesthetic or literary or mathematical meanings.

So I will read the Van Gogh lesson script and assign the painting, but I'm not supposed to finish what I've started by leading the children step by step through one method of creating one copy of one of Vincent's sunflowers. I show them one sunflower, and then let them learn the rest by doing it themselves as best they can. Once. Because they won't get a second chance because there isn't time.

They must copy one of Vincent's sunflowers, but I can't teach them how to use the tools they are given to achieve an aesthetic meaning that would be mine and not their own. I would be putting words in their mouths, so to speak, if I led them.

I was amused to read letters that Vincent wrote to his brother Theo and find that Vincent was often quite skeptical of his fellow artists and their methods. Among other observations, here is one excerpt from a letter he wrote from St. Remy on the subject of copying another artist’s work:

It is a kind of study that I need, for I want to learn. Although copying may be the old system, that makes absolutely no difference to me. [I have copied the Pieta and] I am going to copy the Good Samaritan by Delacroix too. What I am seeking in it and why it seems good to me to copy them I will tell you - they are always asking we painters to compose ourselves and be nothing but composers. So be it - but it isn't like that in music - and if some person plays Beethoven, he adds his personal interpretation - in music and more especially in singing - the interpretation of a composer is something, and it is not a hard and fast rule that only the composer should play his own composition. Very good - and I, mostly because I am ill at present, I am trying to do something to console myself for my own pleasure. I put the black and white [Pieta] by Delacroix… in front of me as a subject - and then I improvise colour on it, not, you understand, altogether by myself, but searching for memories of their pictures - but the memory, the vague consonance of colours which are at least right in feeling - that is my own interpretation.

Many people do not copy, many others do - I started on it accidentally, and I find that it teaches me, and above all it sometimes consoles me.

I am sorry he was not consoled more, sooner.

During the Art Literacy lesson we are to tackle the subject of Vincent’s mental illness right out of the box because even the littlest kids already know that he cut off his ear, and we need to manage their interpretation of the event.

We can also say that Theo sent Vincent money to keep him alive and painting, and we can say everybody is sad that Vincent never knew how famous his paintings would become.

But we don't tell the children that he made copies. Or that he took art lessons in Paris and he read books on technique that Theo bought for him. We don’t explain that Vincent made preparatory sketches and studies before he painted. We skip right over his many careful revisions, as he frequently returned to favorite subjects in favorite colors like sunflowers. We don't tell the children that, in his correspondence with Theo (who was working for an art dealer in Paris) the two of them were always desperately trying to figure out how to sell more of Vincent's paintings.

punished by rewards

In light of the desire of educators to rethink our schools, this bit that Catherine posted from Cheri Yecke caught my eye,

I became alarmed as I read article after article in which middle school activists expressed their arrogant assumption that America’s public schools were their personal vehicles for social engineering. I came to see how radical middle school activists were driving many of the policies and practices that have been so damaging to the public education system in America at all grade levels, and how such policies and practices were responsible for damaging the trust between many parents and the public schools.

One person’s damage is another person’s progress. Reading the Bowles and Gintis paper cross-linked by Vlorbik, I learned that schools "prepare [children] for adult work rules... by what we call the correspondence principle, namely, by structuring social interactions and individual rewards to replicate the environment of the workplace." Bowles and Gintis are quite optimistic that schools can bring about social change by socializing children to not "function well, and without complaint, in the hierarchical structure of the modern corporation."

First, schools influence which cultural models children are exposed to. Second, schools immerse children in a structure of rewards and sanctions.

Concerning the first, we note that a huge body of evidence attests to the fact that a society’s values are passed from generation to generation through a process of transmission which may be vertical (from parents) or oblique (from others in the prior generation) and involves a psychological internalization of values. The school system is an unusual form of oblique transmission whereby a particular group of people that is often quite unrepresentative of the population of parents (teachers) occupy privileged positions as behavioral models for children (Marx 1963/1852):125).

Children initially acquire cultural traits by vertical transmission from their parents (assume the parents have identical traits). They are subsequently paired with a cultural model (a teacher, that is) who may have the same or a different array of cultural traits.

Confining attention to a single trait, suppose the teacher has the same trait as the parents. Then the youth is assumed to retain the trait. But if the parents and the teacher have different traits, the youth considers which one to adopt, surveying the experiences of those he knows (his classmates) for guidance in making the switch. Among the experiences the youth may find salient are the rewards and punishments associated with the particular structure of schooling. The reward structure … includes the close association… between the personality and behavioral traits associated with getting good grades in school and the traits associated with garnering high supervisor rankings at work.

In this view, culture thus evolves by some individuals (those paired with an unlike model) shifting from what they take to be lower-payoff to higher-payoff cultural forms…. In this model, it is possible for a school system or any other system of socialization to promote the spread of a cultural trait that would otherwise not proliferate, suggesting that schools do more than simply reproduce the reward structure of the rest of the society. Schooling thus may promote prosocial traits even if these are not individually advantageous.

I highly doubt that "prosocial traits" like the willingness to conform quietly to group norms in school group work, leading to group-think as well as free-riding and table-pounding, are not seen as "individually advantageous” by the individual children who exhibit these traits.

[S]chooling can also promote traits which are advantageous to one group (the group determining the structure of schooling) even if they are not generally advantageous.

In the following paragraph, I set Bowles and Gintis’ variables “A” and “B” to specific extreme values. You can choose your own values according to your own tastes for social change, or not.

Schooling can affect the direction of cultural evolution in two ways. First, if most teachers are [socialists] then the children of [socialist] parents will rarely switch, while [capitalist] children will virtually all have the occasion (a mismatch) to consider a switch. Second, if the reward structure of the school favors those with [socialist] traits (even if the [capitalists] might do better in adult life) then a significant number of [capitalist] children will become [socialists]....

Depending on the specific assumptions of the model and the specific value of parameters, there can either be two stable “homogeneous” cultural equilibria involving very high frequencies of either the advantaged or disadvantaged trait, or a single stable “heterogeneous” equilibrium involving a moderate frequency of both cultural forms.

These propositions show the importance of such oblique cultural institutions as schools, which are necessary to stabilize cultural forms, such as the legitimacy of being subservient in the workplace, that benefit one group, in this case employers, at the expense of another, the employees.

Let the destabilization begin.

My take on the cooperative, socialistic ideals promulgated in the public schools is that they don’t stop administrators and teachers and parents and children from being competitive. Humans want to compete. Neither school reformers nor teacher unions eliminate competition; they drive it underground and it pops up again in weird new ways that are less transparent and less fair to everyone. At least Bowles and Gintis are refreshingly honest about teachers using rewards to punish capitalists.

CONSTRUCTING GOOD, TELLING BAD.

THE SEVEN COMMANDMENTS

1. Whoever tells their truths to small children is the enemy.
2. Whoever lets small children construct their own truths is a friend.
3. No teacher shall use a red pen.
4. No teacher shall write on a blackboard.
5. No teacher shall give out gold stars.
6. No teacher shall deconstruct the narrative of any other teacher.
7. All teachers are equal.

revised 3/05/07

"Constructivism attacks the immune system that saves us from silliness."

Becoming a parent bolsters the immune system.

I have moved from more self-indulgent beliefs about the free development of children in general, to a certain knowledge of my personal responsibility for the future well-being of one child in particular: my child.

This past week I took a short tour of constructivism led by D.C. Phillips. Who is quite sympathetic to constructivism. But it was a great tour. It had everything, epistemologically speaking: the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Then I took a short tour of the not-so-subtle difference between finding out and making sense led by Michael R. Matthews. I found out that I prefer the discovery of truth to its invention (or construction).

I am now a true believer in discovery learning; it's just that I want it to happen very fast. Which means directly telling my child what I want him to know, what I want him to do to know, and when he should do it to know it. Life is short, in other words, and truth is external to my child.

I can now tell the difference between a radical constructivist,

Ernst Von Glasersfeld

"every man for himself"

a social constructivist,

Paul Ernest

"every culture for itself"

and a realist.

Michael Devitt

"we are all in the same boat"

I think I am a realist.

The post title is a quote from Devitt, who writes elsewhere,

Here is a summary of my argument for Realism. I start by observing that Realism about the ordinary observable physical world is a compelling doctrine. It is almost universally held outside intellectual circles. From an early age we come to believe that such objects as stones, cats, and trees exist. Furthermore, we believe that these objects exist even when we are not perceiving them, and that they do not depend for their existence on our opinions nor on anything mental. This Realism about ordinary objects is confirmed day by day in our experience. It is central to our whole way of viewing the world, the very core of common sense. Given this strong case for Realism, we should give it up only in the face of powerful arguments against it and for an alternative. There are no such arguments. That concludes the case for Realism.

Stones, cats, and trees. And my child. I am satisfied.