Transforming Education
Part 4: School as Organism

The entire article is available as a PDF document.

Quotes from the article

You don't "motivate" a seed or a baby chick to grow by creating standards for how they must grow or what they must become. You don't motivate them by measuring them every other week. You don't motivate them by offering a reward if they grow faster-or by threatening the gardener or farmer if they don't! You "motivate" living things by creating an environment that provides what they need to grow and develop into fully functional organisms. Only then can they contribute effectively to their environment.

Students, teachers, administrators, parents, support staff…everyone involved in the school enters the school environment already fully engaged in real life. Yet there's an unconscious sense that the purpose of schools is to PREPARE students for real life rather than being a potentially rich environment in which to EXPERIENCE aspects of real life in ways that other environments don't permit. It's as if, when they step through the schoolhouse door, students are supposed to suspend their personal needs and goals and turn themselves over to be shaped into "future members of society" by others.

Dr. Carl Bereiter from the Centre for Applied Cognitive Science and the Department of Applied Psychology at the University of Toronto has identified several of types of "inner knowing." In addition to "statable" knowledge (knowing that) and skills (knowing how), effective thinking requires:

  • Implicit Understanding—the development of "relationships" with ideas and concepts sufficient to prompt a person to say, "I understand." Bereiter points out that "Implicit understanding is more like perception than like having propositions in the head." True understanding (despite the simplistic use of the word in many curriculum guides) requires significant exposure and interaction—certainly more than "covering" a subject in a 20-minute lecture or reading a few paragraphs in a book.
  • Personal/Episodic Knowledge—what a person knows because of personal experience. In many cases, personal knowledge can have a tremendous influence on how students perceive and un-derstand new experiences and ideas. And it is different for each person!
  • Impressionistic Knowledge—the affective component. Several prominent neuroscientists have proposed that emotion is an essential characteristic of rational human thought. Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio has found that, in the absence of emotions, higher thought processes are impaired. Emotions may well impart a "feeling tone" to ideas that help it make decisions. The feeling is the knowledge! Yet in the rush of "covering" more and more bits of "statable" knowledge, engaging the emotions of students has little or no priority.
  • Regulative knowledge—the "self" as learner. What does this mean to me? How can I use it? Where does the usefulness end? What more do I need to know? This is reflection on the relationship between self and knowledge.

There's no way to "standardize" these types of knowledge. In fact, they are often beyond one's ability to express in words. Neither do they act in isolation. Breaking knowledge into separate "types" or thought into separate "thinking skills" for ease of assessment does not change the fact that these types of knowing work in parallel. They are inseparable parts of a system that encompasses the knower and the known. We may examine drops of water from a river, but they tell us little about how the river flows.