Education

Armed with a provisional understanding of learning, it becomes possible to consider education and the role it plays.

The role of education now seems clear: it is to adapt the complex matrix of concerns that make up each learner to fit with the complex system of concerns that comprise a society (or an organisation). Yesterday I saw a child’s drawing entitled ‘What I want to be when I grow up’. They had drawn a vampire. Society does not need vampires, it needs accountants. Education makes accountants out of vampires.

And so we can ask about the role of the educator. Do we need them? Obviously not – there is nothing intrinsic about the process of altering a set of concerns that requires an educator, this is something that happens quite naturally as creatures adapt to their environment (which, as it happens, is largely what takes place during school). This is the essence of learning. And yet there is a vital role that can be – and occasionally is - played by educators.

The educator can act as a channel – even a tugboat – between one set of concerns and another. It is through the educator’s ability to connect the learner’s concern-matrix to the societal concern-matrix that they are able to facilitate the re-shaping of those concerns.

The first characteristic of a good educator is therefore concern for the learner. It is regrettable that this features in no way in the selection or training of educators, nor do we have any model or method for doing so. This is the failure of learning theory. Without a concern for the learner – without the ability to understand the learner’s concern-matrix and appropriately connect, the ability to move the learner will be limited at best. An educator may also be concerned with their subject-matter; and it may be that demonstrable passion and deep concern for a subject (art for example) may result in sympathetic concern-alignment in the learner. But clearly there is a problem here – at least from the perspective of society: an educator may succeed in reshaping the concerns of the learner, but not in a way which integrates seamlessly with the concerns of society. This risk is greatly increased by recruiting educators whose interests and background are often tangential to the mainstream. For this reason an educator’s secondary characteristic should be expertise (which means affective congruence) in a given societal context. They should be an expert at something.

So how should education function? I would like to suggest by ‘successive approximation’. Today education is characterised by dysfunctional systems and bright spots of intuitive success. As an example, the pervasive use of knowledge tests is dysfunctional: it works to realign concerns by creating a sense of artificial anxiety regarding performance on recall tasks – something which is not a feature of successful life in society at large and which creates an aversion to learning itself (which is a feature of modern-day success). On the other hand many educators do intuitively grasp the central role played by care for the learner, a passion for their subject, and achieve success despite the system. In some cases tasks set at school do begin to resemble a societal context, but there is no systematic matching or individualised transition process for each learner. There is often a disconnect between educational tasks and societal tasks. Learners describe education as boring because it does not have affective context. And it is quickly forgotten, therefore.

Briefly, though, the basic process should be one of gradually reshaping the concern-matrix of the individual by systematically adjusting their affective context. It begs the question why one would not simply introduce the learner to the societal context – in the way that, for example primitive societies introduce children to functional roles without the need for an educational system. In this light, the answer is fairly clear: it is too big a step to be made all at once. You cannot sit an illiterate child at a desk in an office and expect them to answer your emails. Even in primitive society there is a gradual escalation of responsibility. In a complex society it makes sense to work with successive approximations of contexts (such as ‘playing shops’) for example in order to achieve congruence more reliably. In this method the learner learns to master a simplified version of the affective context before moving on to tackle it in greater complexity.

But which contexts? Society provides a great diversity of contexts. Here we find one of the central shortcomings of the educational system: as with educators, there is no mapping of the learner’s concern-matrix at the point of entry into the system. Intuitively, some educators may be able to ‘pick up on’ the things that excite a learner and connect with those – but as with the selection of educators, we have no method or model for mapping these concerns. Certainly there are some things that will appeal to a wide range of learners – humour, surprise, enthusiasm to name some familiar ones. But this is a proto-scientific and haphazard method: it subjects the great diversity of learners and their concerns to the constraints of convenience. At its worst it means that everybody in the class must learn the same things in the same way. Naturally, learners in this situation form ‘special interest groups’ of their own accord – the ‘jocks’, ‘nerds’, ‘emos’ and so on – and increasing access to technology and social networks has proliferated such lines of escape, allowing learners to disappear from the crass homogeneity of the educational experience and align their concerns idiosyncratically. In such a world it becomes obvious to ask ‘why do we need education?’ But an online library would not be a solution: it does not approximate reality, and it overlooks the affective role played by good educators.

To summarise the above, an idealised educational model would begin with a detailed assessment of the learner’s current pattern of concerns – their internal affective context. In turn, this would suggest a number of provisional ‘fits’ and the learner would experience simplified versions of these affective contexts, guided by someone with a concern for each learner and deep expertise in the societal context (the ‘real job’). Though one-to-one guidance would be ideal, the next best solution would be to separate people by context, as they gradually refine their choices. Societal contexts should be accurately mapped in terms of their affective structure, so as to properly reproduce characteristic features at successive degrees of similitude. Such an approach would lend itself to similar 'tiered' layers of educators, whose focus shifts from the affective structure of the learner to the detailed affective structure of the societal context as learners progress.

In an important sense there is only ‘learning by doing here’ – even in bookish contexts, such as legal training, learning takes places in response to challenges posed by the performance context (even where these challenges are anticipated), with each successive context closer approximating the real thing – in fact the transition may be indistinguishable. This is not necessarily an illiberal approach; an affective description of a role is not the same as an operational description.

This leaves unresolved the question: what if everyone wants to be a historian? There is a societal context for a historian, just limited spaces. It may well be that the majority of learners must be encouraged to fit contexts which have very little appeal, and this process of adaptation will necessarily be arduous.

Whilst this model may seem strange, features of it might be recognised in apprenticeships which share some characteristics. In one sense the ‘successive approximation’ model differs only in that it offers choice, and an extension of the apprenticeship downwards.