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Research Articles:
Teaching and Learning
So far as values are
concerned, the progressive approach tends to see attempts to
teach or improve these directly as less effective than
creating schools which exemplify values of greatest
relevance to the young. Hence the importance placed on the
way individuals, adults and learners alike, are encouraged
to behave towards each other. A disciplined environment,
rather than being externally imposed, is a direct
consequence of that process. Social values, cooperation
rather than competition and equal value given to the efforts
of the least as well as the most able, are emphasized.
Finally, as a point of principle, it is assumed all can
succeed at some level in some aspects of learning. As one
19th-century educator insisted: “All can walk part of the
way with genius.” Sharply differentiated forms of education,
with children attending schools or classes confined to those
with particular levels of aptitude, however assessed, are
thought to conflict with this principle. By inducing a sense
of failure in children allocated to what are seen, by others
and themselves, as schools or classes with lower standards
than others, general levels of achievement are thought to be
depressed and an unmotivated and under-achieving group of
children unnecessarily created.
The opposed concepts
implicit in “traditional” and “progressive” attitudes to
teaching and learning reflect approaches regarded by those
holding one or other of them as self-evident: that it must
be right to start from what needs to be taught or,
conversely, that it must be right to start from the learner
whose success in learning it is the purpose of teaching to
ensure.
The virtual impossibility
of reconciling these two diverse approaches, at least in
their extreme forms, has led to each being caricatured,
often in metaphorical terms. Traditional education’s
perception of children, in an extreme form, was described by
Charles Dickens in Hard Times as seeing them as: “little
vessels arranged in order, ready to have imperial gallons of
facts poured into them until they were full to the brim.” In
short, like a kettle that has to be filled from a tap, the
traditional learner is taken to be a passive recipient of
whatever is being taught. Further, because the traditional
approach to education requires a degree of memorization, the
ability to recall with precision what has been taught in the
terms in which it has to be reproduced by the learner, this
feature is disparagingly described as “learning by rote.”
The implication is that the learner’s mind has not been
required to be engaged in the process. Finally, the
assumption that, to the traditionalist, knowledge is
something that already exists, causes this approach to be
seen as backward-looking at a time when new knowledge is
being created and reshaped at a bewildering rate.
Criticisms of progressive
education, particularly in its extreme forms, have
concentrated on the folly, as this is perceived, of allowing
children to decide when and how they are to learn anything.
Lack of externally imposed discipline has led to some
schools where, as one inspector of schools described it, “it
is like a wet play-time all day.” The emphasis on growth and
development, with analogies to the way plants move naturally
through their lives without constantly being told what to
become, has been particularly criticized. The simple notion
of growth carries with it no implication as to the direction
that growth is taking. Growth, progressives are thought to
ignore, may as easily be in an unwholesome direction as a
healthy one. This leads to values being seen to be relative,
with no one set of values inherently to be preferred to any
others. Yet what ought to be, values of any kind, cannot be
derived from what is; and it is a naturalistic fallacy to
suppose otherwise. Finally, because the teacher is not seen
as at the center of the educational process, he or she is
reduced to becoming a “facilitator” of children’s learning;
in extreme cases unprepared even to answer simple questions
or directly to teach anything at all, on the assumption that
the only things a learner really learns are those things
which he or she has “discovered for himself.”
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