An advocate of natural rights continues his/her presentation[1] …
Moving on with the commonplace of curriculum development – the learner –
the next concern of this blog is pedagogic student interests.[2] Gerald Gutek[3]
puts forward the argument of essentialists, i.e., that the pedagogic interests
of students are served if they are mastering the basic skills and acquiring
basic subject matter content. E. D. Hirsch
writes how skills and content are related.
All cognitive
skills depend on procedural and substantive schemata that are highly specific
to the task at hand.
Once the relevant knowledge has been
acquired, the skill follows. General
programs contrived to teach general skills are ineffective. [Artificial intelligence] research shows that
experts perform better than novices not because they have more powerful and
better oiled intellectual machinery but because they have more relevant and
quickly available information. What
distinguishes good readers from poor ones is simply the possession of a lot of
diverse, task-specific information.[4]
Or more directly,
Teacher-centered
philosophies [such as essentialism] are those that transfer knowledge from one
generation of teachers to the next. In teacher-centered philosophies, the
teacher’s role is to impart a respect for authority, determination, a strong
work ethic, compassion for others, and sensibility. Teachers and schools
succeed when students prove, typically through taking tests, that they have
mastered the objectives they learned.[5]
Hirsch continues in this
vein by further pointing out that his cited research has found that such skills
as critical thinking or inquiry skills are only taught successfully for
specific tasks and content and are not transferable as is claimed by the Rousseau-Dewey
tradition.[6] Even among researchers who generally support inquiry,
a level of concern can be detected.
For example, and looking
at this instructional approach from a more global perspective, the following
can be found:
It should be cautioned
that inquiry-based learning takes a lot of planning before implementation. It
is not something that can be put into place in the classroom quickly.
Measurements must be put in place for how students [sic] knowledge and
performance will be measured and how standards will be incorporated. The
teacher’s responsibility during inquiry exercises is to support and facilitate
student learning … A common mistake teachers make is lacking the vision to see
where students’ weaknesses lie. According to Bain, teachers cannot assume that
students will hold the same assumptions and thinking processes as a
professional within that discipline …
While some see
inquiry-based teaching as increasingly mainstream, it can be perceived as in
conflict with standardized testing common in standards-based assessment systems
which emphasise the measurement of student knowledge, and meeting of
pre-defined criteria, for example the shift towards “fact” in changes to the
National Assessment of Educational Progress as a result of the American No
Child Left Behind program.
Programs such as the
International Baccalaureate (IB) Primary Years Program can be criticized for
their claims to be an inquiry based learning program … While there are
different types of inquiry … the rigid structure of this style of inquiry based
learning program almost completely rules out any real inquiry based learning in
the lower grades. Each “unit of inquiry” is given to the students, structured
to guide them and does not allow students to choose the path or topic of their
inquiry. Each unit is carefully planned to connect to the topics the students
are required to be learning in school and does not leave room for open inquiry
in topics that the students pick. Some may feel that until the inquiry learning
process is open inquiry then it is not true inquiry based learning at all.
Instead of opportunities to learn through open and student-led inquiry, the IB
program is viewed by some to simply be an extra set of learning requirements
for the students to complete.[7]
This extended quote is included to point out that even in an inquiry-based
approach, educators need to give essentialist ideas and ideals due respect –
again, students need information before they can go off and inquire or do
whatever else education calls on them to do.
That tradition – the Rousseau-Dewey
tradition – emphasizes intensive study by classroom students in which critical
thinking skills, inquiry skills, or discovery skills (terms that are often used
interchangeably) are practiced and “taught” over limited material (teaching in
depth, not breadth). This antithesis
argument claims that students need many referents in order to make sense of the
realities of the world.
Expert thinking, as
studied by current cognitive psychologists, is evidenced by being able to
recall many facts which are contained within the contexts of schemata.[8] Schemata mentally arrange facts in meaningful
groupings or chunks of information. “As we
have seen, the most effective system of the mind, whether in chess or in
reading, is to keep most of its indexed schemata at a medium level of
generality.” [9]
What works in reading and
chess works for governmental studies.
The political systems approach, under the construct of the natural
rights perspective, provides such a medium level of generality. It is a viable vehicle by which to arrange
meaningful and relevant political facts.
Relevancy is determined by the goals of the natural rights perspective
to prepare students to be viable citizens in the competitive realities of the
American political system.
The next posting will
pick up on this theme as it continues this review of pedagogic student
interests.
[Reminder: Readers are reminded that they can have
access to the first 100 postings of this blog, under the title, Gravitas: The Blog Book, Volume I. To gain access, they can click the following
URL: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zh3nrZVGAhQDu1hB_q5Uvp8J_7rdN57-FQ6ki2zALpE/edit
OR
click onto the “gateway” posting that allows the
reader access to a set of supplemental postings to other published works by
this blogger by clicking the URL: http://gravitascivics.blogspot.com/ and then looking up the posting
for October 23, 2021, entitled “A Digression.”]
[1] This
presentation continues with this posting. The reader is informed
that the claims made in this posting do not necessarily reflect the beliefs or
knowledge of this blogger. Instead, the posting is a representation
of what an advocate of the natural rights view might present. This
is done to present a dialectic position of that construct. This series of postings begins with “Judging
Natural Rights View, I,” August 2, 2022.
[Note: This blog, in the postings entitled “Judging
the Natural Rights View, I-XVI, started with “An advocate of parochial
federalism continues his/her presentation …”
It should have read “An advocate of natural rights …” Please excuse the mistake. The archived record has been corrected.]
[2] The learner or student is one of Joseph Schwab’s
commonplaces. See William H. Schubert,
Curriculum: Perspective, Paradigm, and
Possibility (New York, NY: MacMillan
Publishing Company, 1986).
[3] Gerald L. Gutek, Basic Education: A Historical Perspective (Bloomington,
IN: Phi Delta Kappa Educational
Foundation, 1981).
[4] E. D. Hirsch, Jr., Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know (New
York, NY: Vintage, 1987), 61.
[5] Matthew Lynch, “Philosophies of Education: 2 Types of Teacher-Centered Philosophies,” The
Edvocate/Entelechy, August 5, 2016, accessed October 5, 2022, https://www.theedadvocate.org/philosophies-education-2-types-teacher-centered-philosophies/.
[6] Hirsch, Cultural Literacy.
[7] “Inquiry-based Learning,” Lumen/Foundation of
Education (n.d.), accessed October 5, 2022, https://courses.lumenlearning.com/olemiss-education/chapter/inquiry-based-learning/. British
spelling.
[8] Schemata, plural form of schema, are representations
of developed plans, theories, or models presented in the form of graphic models,
other graphic presentations, or outlines.
[9] Hirsch, Cultural Literacy, 64.
