Re-Visioning Teaching and Learning
““Children and teachers are not disembodied intelligences, not instructing machines and learning machines, but whole human beings tied together in a complex maze of social interconnections.””
The sociologist of education Willard Waller (1932) pointed out almost a century ago that the practice of education is not an objective, technical endeavor. It is hard to see education and verify that it is really education is happening. This predicament has made it hard for scientists to research education, especially the practices of teaching and learning. How do you know if a teacher is actually teaching or just pretending to teach? Most people can’t tell the difference. And how do you know if a student is actually learning or just pretending to learn by playing school? Again, most people can’t tell the difference.
Education is a subjective, social practice that is tied to our complex nature as human beings. There is no easy or quick way to study education, as Waller (1932) pointed out in his groundbreaking book on teaching. He wrote, “Children and teachers are not disembodied intelligences, not instructing machines and learning machines, but whole human beings tied together in a complex maze of social interconnections” (p. 1). Over the past century, educational researchers like Waller have taken many steps to demystify the “complex maze” of education, and these scholars have made a lot of progress, which we will selectively review.
In order to understand education, we first need to understand some basic things about the complex topic of human nature. At the most fundamental level of biology, human beings are programed by DNA and genes, like a recipe determining the ingredients of your dinner. Our genes program how our bodies and brains develop, and they give shape to our personality and our abilities. But a chef needs to cook a recipe in a kitchen. Without the cook’s actions and decisions, the meal would never get made. Likewise, we as individuals make our own decisions and take our own actions in order to create our own destiny, guided by our DNA and genes, and enabled or constrained by our social and physical environments, (Pinker, 2002; Mitchell, 2018; Richerson & Boyd, 2005, p. 9).
While we can make our own decisions, we are never entirely free to think or do what we want. We are conditioned by our culture. We interact with other human beings and with various social norms and traditions, which influence how we think and act by giving us a predetermined set of choices (Richerson & Boyd, 2005; Tomasello, 1999; Tomasello, 2016, pp. 86, 97; Searle, 1995). As psychologist Jerome Bruner (1983) explained, when we think or act, we never “go it alone” (pp. 3-4). Instead we “commit ourselves to institutions and traditions” created by other people, often over centuries, which we then use as “tool kits” to achieve our own objectives as we live our lives (Bruner, 1983, pp. 3-4; see also Pinker, 2002).
These cultural tools have a double edge. They “both amplify our powers and lock us in our path,” according to Bruner (1983, pp. 3-4). When we choose to follow one custom or cultural tradition, we are also choosing to ignore other ways of living, and we begin to lock ourselves along a path of repetitive thought and behavior (Burke, 1945/1969; Burke, 1950/1969). We are creatures of habit, which is largely an energy saving technique so we don’t get overloaded with thousands of choices, trying to reinvent the wheel every day. Culture is like a well-worn road full of people. The road enables us to get where we are going, but it also determines where and how we travel by limiting our choices. We all have to follow the road, and we have to follow the customary “rules of the road,” which includes cooperating with all the other people going their own separate ways. Culture makes our lives a lot easier and more meaningful, but it also restricts our freedom because we have to coordinate with everyone else in our society.
While our genes and our culture largely program the default settings of who we are, we still have some freedom to act and think in new ways, which philosophers and social scientists call individual “agency” (Ortner, 2006). While we are supposed to follow the rules of the road, we can choose how we follow these rules, or we can choose to break the rules, or ditch the road entirely in order to make our own path. Or, to go back to the metaphor of cooking, while our biological recipe has been largely determined by our DNA and genes, the environment mediates how the meal will actually turn out in terms of the quality of the ingredients, the resources in the kitchen, and the decisions we have available as the cook. While we have some freedom to cook our meal as we see fit, we are rarely in control of the ingredients, the kitchen, and/or the recipe. While we have some degree of freedom, we are always constrained in our agency, both by our biology and by our physical and social environment, which includes the traditions and institutions of our culture, which are the existing ideas and practices that structure and predetermine our way of life (Burke, 1945/1969; Hobsbawm & Ranger, 1983; Tomasello, 1999; Richerson & Boyd, 2005).
Most people like to follow the crowd and participate in social traditions because it is easier, safer, and often more fun than trying sometime new because you are participating with everyone else. Inventing something new is often a difficult and lonely path. In order to do something new, you would first need to know what others have done, and then think about what a novel idea or act might be possible. Then you have to take a big risk by actually doing something new and potentially failing to make it work. As members of a culture we are all taught to follow a similar script, which we call tradition, the “right way of doing things” around here (Tomasello, 2016, pp. 86). Traditions are past down from one generation to the next, as historian Gerda Lerner (1986) explained, as authoritative beliefs and practices that are assumed to be “universal, God-given, or natural, hence immutable. Thus, it need not be questioned. What has survived, survived because it was the best; it follows that it should stay that way” (p. 16). So, most of us, most of the time, stick to the traditional script.
And yet, humans are not the mindless robots that 19th century psychologists once theorized as the crowd. We are all unique individuals who come together in multiple ways in many different places and times, so when we participate in a cultural tradition, we reproduce it and recreate it in a slightly different way each time, and sometimes in dramatically different ways (Tomasello, 1999, p. 39; Ortner, 2006, p. 133). Traditions are changing all the time. Think about every time you make your favorite meal in the kitchen. It always turns out slightly different even though you are always following the same basic recipe. As psychologist Michael Tomasello (2014) pointed out, “there are thousands of human cultures, and each of them has conventionalized, normativized, and institutionalized a particular set of cultural and communicative practices” (p. 32). Each cultural tradition in every society on the planet is being reproduced every day, and therefore each is changing in countless ways, as each individual creatively engages in, and protests against, the way of life that they were born into (Sen, 2006, ch 2).
Social scientists explain human society as a set of structured “social practices” or “cultural practices” in which “individuals coordinate with the entire cultural group via collectively known cultural conventions, norms, and institutions” (Tomasello, 2014, p. 81; Tomasello, 2016, pp. 86). But culture is more than just coordination and conventions. The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre (1981) emphasized the importance of values in human culture, what he called “standards of excellence” (p. 175), which constitute our social norms and inspire our traditions (see also Beach, 2018, ch 16; Engelke, 2018, ch 3). MacIntyre defined a social practice as “any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended” (emphasis added, p. 175). We don’t just participate in our culture to survive. As one famous teacher once said, we want to live more abundantly by pursuing the good life and trying to achieve excellence. Culture enables our ideals, which make life worth living.
Philosopher David Bridges (2006) explained the three conditions that must be met in order to define a particular human activity as a social practice. First, the activity must be “socially established, cooperative, coherent, and complex” (p. 371). Second, there are values or “goods internal to that form of activity, which are realized through standards of excellence that are partially definitive of that activity” (p. 371). Third, the activity must involve and embody human standards of excellence, defined in terms of “human goodness or virtue,” which are realized through participating in the practice (p. 372). Thus, social practices not only serve useful purposes by helping us survive, they also imbue our lives with meaning and identity, which motivates us to live more fully.
Over time, social practices become institutions with rules and rituals, and these cultural institutions become an important part of our cultural identity: “This is the way ‘we’ have always done things; it is part of who ‘we’ are” (Tomasello, 2014, p. 83; see also Hobsbawm & Ranger, 1983; Tomasello, 1999). When we participate in an institution, like a school or a church, according to anthropologist Sherry B. Ortner (2006), we are playing a “serious game” with formal rules, which can include how to talk, how to act, how to dress, how to eat, and how to interact with other people (p. 129; see also Tomasello, 2014, p. 91; North, 1990, p. 3). Each culture has its own set of serious games that everyone has to play, and each game has its own set of rules. It’s not enough to pay a game, you must follow the rules – otherwise, there will be serious consequences, which can include corporal punishment or even death. While most people actively participate in traditional games, some people choose to break the rules or not to play, and some dare to invent their own new games. We often call these daring people revolutionaries or innovators because they break away from tradition to invent a new way of life, often at great cost to themselves and their followers.
Culture is complex social tapestry. It is a structured way of life. We are woven into the fabric of our culture from the time that we are born. We participate and resist. We follow the script and we innovate. Being human is a long process of enculturation, teaching and being taught, learning and sharing, knowing and doing.
Thus, in order to understand the concept of education, we must first understand that education is an activity, not an idea. As educational philosophers have pointed out for over a century, “human life begins in doing, not in thinking,” (Smeyers & Burbules, 2006, pp. 440-42). Education is tied to the biological foundations of being human. We are social and cultural animals. Thus, education is a social practice infused with standards of excellence. And in most cultures, education is also an institution. Education is usually a serious game, and as such, it must be played, not just known, and rules must be followed. Education necessarily involves the combination of knowledge and action, often in coordination with other people. Education is usually a team game, although not always.
Education is a structured way of life infused with specific standards of excellence that focus on teaching and learning for the purpose of creating and using knowledge as a cultural tool to make life better and more meaningful for all involved.
Now, let us contrast this definition with the conventional, common sense notion of education in schools. Most people think that education consists of students following the commands of a teacher in a school. Teachers talk and students memorize the abstract knowledge that comes out of a teacher’s mouth, or out of a textbook, in order to take standardized tests with formulaic questions that require predetermined answers. This activity takes place in a room called a classroom in building called a school. This school gives students official pieces of paper that determine the value of each student via standardized measurements called grades. After spending a specific amount of time in the school accumulating these grades, a student then earns a magic piece of paper called a diploma or degree, which allows the student to apply for a job so they can earn money.
The tradition described above is the definition of schooling, not education. While education can take place in a school, often it does not. Schooling does not require, nor reward, education. The social practice of schooling was invented by the ancient Chinese, as we discussed in the last chapter. Schooling is a political and economic institution that was created by and for elites. Schooling creates and preserves elite privilege, and it helps maintain political and economic inequality.
The social practice of education is something much, much older and more important than schooling. The practice of education is an inherent part of our biology and the evolutionary development of our species (Tomasello, 1999; Mercier & Sperber, 2017, p. 69). Education is one of the most important biological and social traits that makes us characteristically human, although we share some basic elements of teaching and learning with other species (Tomasello, 1999; de Wall, 2016).
When we practice education, we learn not just to know, but more importantly, we learn to act – to skillfully and meaningfully participate in our culture by playing serious games with others to achieve standards of excellence. We are created by our culture through the practice of education. Sometimes education entails learning to participate in and reproduce the established traditions that everyone has always followed. But while we are taught to be like others in our culture, we also have the ability to change and re-create our culture, and ourselves, through our novel thoughts and actions, which is a different form of education. We can learn through our novel exploration, experience, and creativity (Dewey, 1966/1916; Robinson, 2001). While education is often focused on the reproduction of traditional cultural practices (Richerson & Boyd, 2005), the philosophers Smeyers and Burbules (2006) argue that “interpretation and adaptation” are always possible (p. 447), even when we are following traditional rules. When we enact traditional social practices, we always have the possibility of changing them, either intentionally or accidently, or we can choose to simply break with tradition and try something new.
The philosopher John Dewey (1966/1916) helped pioneer the deeper understanding of education as a social practice, and he was one of the first scholars to appreciate the revolutionary political implications for this kind of education (Gutmann, 1987). Dewey explained that education should be understood as part of the natural biological and social development of all human beings, and as such, it is a process of discovery, personal growth, and social being, which should have "no end beyond itself" (p. 50), especially the forced ends of political power and economic inequality. If education is treated as a means to an end, especially if that end is dictated by powerful adults and has little relevance to the student, then personal development and deep learning will not happen, which is the ironic and tragic predicament of schooling as a political and economic tool. When students are forced to learn things that they do not want to learn in a place they do not want to be, especially if a once vibrant social practice is stripped down into abstract concepts in order to be regurgitated on a lifeless exam because a teacher forced you to do it, then the complex practice of education will be reduced to the narrow and meaningless ritual called schooling. Playing school is a meaningless, authoritarian social practice forced onto students for political and economic purposes, not educational ends. Dewey (1966/1916) explained that “education is not an affair of ‘telling’ and being told, but an active and constructive process” (p. 38). Education is the process of living a meaningful life through participating in authentic social practices in order to become a member of a culture. When we become educated, we “acquire a habit of learning” and a way of being (p. 45), a condition which needs no magic piece of paper to certify it.
Countless scholars in many disciplines have echoed Dewey’s philosophy of education as an “active and constructive process.” Business professor Peter Drucker (1969) distinguished information from knowledge, noting that only when information is applied through action “does it become knowledge. Knowledge, like electricity or money, is a form of energy that exists only when doing work” (p. 269). Psychologist Michael Tomasello (2014) once explained that “being smart counts for nothing if it does not lead to acting smart” (author’s emphasis, p. 7).
As psychologist Anders Ericsson explains, “Learning isn’t a way of reaching one’s potential but rather a way of developing it” (Ericsson & Pool, 2016, p. xx). Learning produces knowledge and skill, which are byproducts of our physical and mental participation in the activity we are trying to learn. The more we do, the more we learn and the more we know, and the more we know, the more we can do and the more we can learn. It’s a virtuous circle. There is no biologically or culturally predetermined upper limit to what we can accomplish. Ericsson (2016) argues, “There is no point at which performance maxes out and additional practice does not lead to further improvement” (p. 113).
When we engage in the process of education and truly learn, we discover and internalize a set of social practices through doing the same activities over and over again, usually over many years, making the practice part of our identity and behavioral repertoire. Learning is an emerging and continuous activity. It is not a means to an end. When it comes to authentic learning, there are no rules or set boundaries on where we can learn, the process of learning, or how much we can learn (Ericsson & Pool, 2016). In many ways, our abilities as humans are limitless, in the sense that we are not born with prescribed biological or social limits to how much we can learn or do.
Human leaning is not an isolated, individual phenomenon, as some cognitive psychologists like to think, and it definitely cannot be reduced to the memorization of abstract information for standardized test (Brown, et. al., 2014). Instead, learning is a socially constituted way of living and growing through interacting with other people, our environment, and our self (Tomasello, 1999; Gopnik, 2016; Mercier & Sperber, 2017; Wenger, 1998). We learn how to think and act through participating in particular communities, which make our life meaningful by giving us an identity and a purpose (Wenger, 1998, pp. 141, 226). Students start with simple, fundamental cultural practices in K-12 schooling. Then students move on to higher education, which focuses on specialized knowledge and skills produced and practiced by academic disciplines and professions. In higher education, student learn how to participate in formal learning institutions focused on specific methods for researching, thinking, constructing knowledge, and skillfully acting to solve real-world problems.
When we are engaged in authentic learning, we learn new information about the world we live in, especially through the books and lectures of experienced experts who have specific skills that they practice. But more importantly, we also learn more about who we are, or who we want to become, by identifying with the thoughts, actions, and personas of other people who have studied what we are studying – other people who have done what we want to do. We all learn to do a social activity by fist watching others who have mastered the activity through a process called “observational learning” or “imitation” (Tomasello, 1999; Richerson & Boyd, 2005, pp. 108-112). This form of learning is coded deep in our biological nature. While all primates can “emulate” a teacher, most primates don’t understand the details or purposes of the activity they are emulating, even our closet relative, the chimpanzee, with whom we share 97% of our DNA (Diamond, 1992; Richerson & Boyd, 2005, p. 110). Only humans can truly “imitate” a teacher by learning how to do an activity with skillful detail and purpose, which leads to the uniquely human ability to creatively repurpose and adapt imitative knowledge for a new end (Richerson & Boyd, 2005, p. 110).
After we have watched and imitated an experienced expert, we then practice that activity on our own or with a group, often with the guidance of a teacher or coach. Why do we need a teacher to watch us practice? A teacher helps push us so that we can find the limits of our own ability and eventually exceed those limits in order to grow (Ericsson & Pool, 2016). A teacher also gives us feedback so we can see and understand our mistakes, and thereby, learn to perform the task better. A teacher can also demonstrate the proper practice of a skill so we can contrast their actions against our own as we learn to accomplish the same skill.
But no matter what a teacher does, or what the class does, each student has to do their own learning and understanding all on their own (Cuban, 2013, p. 51). Thus, students need to be able to “make sense” of cultural practices as they learn to do them, not just memorize abstract facts (Fitzgerald & Palincsar, 2019, p. 227). Sense making involves asking questions, making connections between knowledge or skills, being able to solve problems, and building skills through increasing levels of difficulty (pp. 236-370). As we become educated, we learn how to become ourselves by knowing who we are and what we are capable of, which in large part entails learning how to become a contributing part of our culture through the practice of our newly acquired knowledge and skills (Tomasello, 1999). And as we develop our personal and cultural identity, which includes learning how to contribute to our society, we bring meaning and purpose to our lives – we learn to live a good life.