Re: Darwin, Evolution, the Animal Kingdom, and Man

From: David Longley (David_at_longley.demon.co.uk)
Date: 12/06/04 

Date: Mon, 6 Dec 2004 21:11:49 +0000

In article <LF_sd.16790$dC3.309412@news20.bellglobal.com>, Wolf
Kirchmeir <wwolfkir@sympatico.ca> writes
>Greg Alexander wrote:
>[...]
>>>"Wolf Kirchmeir" <wwolfkir@sympatico.ca> wrote:
>[...]
>>>>Have we humans figured out how to pass on our knowledge? Yes, but
>>>> not
>>>>very well. If we really knew how to do it, and if we also knew what
>>>>knowledge was worth passing on, human society would become pretty
>>>>well perfect within a generation or two.
>
>> I hadn't thought of it that way. Hmmm!
>> Is there a field focussed on how to pass on knowledge more
>> effectively. I mean, psychology has the application side, and the
>> research side is relatively distinct. But teaching is largely
>> application. Does sociology research learning?
>> I wonder how our learning systems could be improved.
>[...]
>> Just my thoughts :)
>> Greg
>
>Yes, our teaching-learning systems can be imnproved, but it's a hard
>slog. We know very little, and basically all we can do is wait for a
>child to exhibit some behaviour like the one desired, and then shape
>it. Sadly, curricula imposed on teachers and students assume that
>behaviours can be imposed or created rather than shaped, despite all
>the evidence to the contrary.
>
>IMO, the only attempt to understand learning that have had any success
>is EAB, in all its guises (many people who use EAB principles in their
>educational research either don't acknowledge that they are doing so,
>or explcitly deny it - there's some sort of political correctness at
>work here. Bah!).
>
>EAB shows that certain kinds of learning can be rather easily induced
>and controlled -- that is, any existing behaviour is more or less
>easily shaped. The kind of learning we expect children to do in schools
>works only with such behaviours. For example, it's quite easy to to
>teach young children to play games. Young children engage in
>game-playing without being prompted, so shaping this behaviour (eg,
>teaching chess, basketball, etc) is easy. For this reason, if some
>desired skills can be incorporated into games, game-playing is an
>effective teaching method, as all teachers know, and most teachers do
>(there are unfortunately some teachers and parents who believe that
>learning and fun are mutually exclusive.)
>
>Similar observations apply to, for example, "critical thinking skills."
>Humans exhibit such behaviour from about mid-puberty on. (It's one of
>the reasons for the difficulties between parents and teenage children.)
>Given critical thinking behaviour, it's relativley easy to shape it,
>eg, to develop "rules of clear thinking". The student must of course be
>willing to cooperate with the teacher, but in my experience, most
>student want to cooperate.
>
>As for "knowledge as such", observe that children from about 6 to 10
>years of age equate "being smart" with "knowing stuff." That IMO is a
>clue as to how to proceed. Children resist acquiring knowledge that's
>"boring," so the trick is to make it interesting enough that the child
>will go to the effort of learning "stuff" that you want him or her to
>learn. That merely involves finding a link between the stuff the child
>likes knowing, and what you want him to know - IOW, it involves
>observing the actual behaviour of the child, and shaping it, rather
>than imposing some paradigm on it. Again, that's what successful teachers do.
>
>BTW, all the above "teaching strategies" were explicitly taught in my
>pedagogical training. NB that whatever the current educational jargon,
>at bottom it's all about shaping behaviours.

Skinner was aghast at the state of US education. He fought to bring the
technology of teaching to bear on education practice (and the training
of teachers) just as one might expect any good empirical scientist with
a proven track record. He spent a good part of the latter part of his
professional life trying to get "educators" to adopt what comes down to
self-paced programmed learning, but wasn't given the support he needed
by folk like Connant. Half a century later we still see teachers
struggling to do a combination of crowd control and mixed ability
teaching four or five times a day, with such large classes that for most
it's well nigh impossible (which isn't helped by an estimated 1:20 being
ADHD). It often seems to come down to varying degrees of expertise in
the ability to herd cats. Is this the consequence of "political
correctness" or is it just human idiocy? People like Connant played a
significant role in engineering these problems in the first place. Is it
conspiracy or is it ***-up? Perhaps it depends on one's politics?

Despite the UK government's education policy publicly asserting that it
discourages intake selection (suspected infringement can lead to court
action), it happens nonetheless through natural (and socially
engineered) diversity in "cognitive ability" and social mobility. As a
consequence, and in conjunction with other policies designed to keep
delinquents out of custody (and in the community in the belief that most
boys grow out of it) our inner city schools (in particular) are
progressively finding themselves having to cope with more and more
(serious) delinquency. As a consequence, "behaviour management" is
becoming more and more important in our schools. We now have a new kind
of "care in the community". The figures bearing on this are quite
remarkable, and yet most folk aren't aware of them. To give a financial
perspective on this, a rough estimate at the combined cost of crime and
education in the UK is in the order of 120 billion pounds per annum.

Fourteen years ago, we began trying to redress some of this via a
positive system of behaviour management based on attainment which
explicitly drew on the EAB/AAB, and which was implemented under
naturally controlled conditions. Whilst the words from the above system
are now in wider circulation, I'm sure the practice is not. We have IT
everywhere, but we still don't have effective programmed
learning/behaviour management - at what cost?

In fact, I'm still not sure to what extent the basic principles were
ever really understood. People seem to have a peculiar scotoma where it
comes to grasping the nature of behaviour analysis [#1] - something
Skinner frequently remarked upon and which we have seen all too often in
c.a.p. In my own applied field, we gave new credence to the notion of
"programmes" but the initiative was soon blighted by the introduction of
"cognitive skills" courses (imported from Canada of all places!). The
rationale for this flew in the face of all the empirical evidence that I
was aware of at the time of their introduction, which is why I
vehemently argued against their introduction. Over a decade later, they
fly in the face of our government's independent research as well (which
basically just replicates the earlier contrary evidence).

The price of "political correctness" is more than the reinforcement of
idiocy. I get much the same feeling about all of this that I do about
much that I see in c.a.p in response to expositions of what behaviour
analysis comes down to. It's so absurd that one has to ask if there's
more to all this than meets the eye?

If so, the question remains, at what expense? At whose expense?

#1 I'm sure the books by folk such as Huxley and Orwell didn't help
matters - but people are more readily influenced by science fiction than
they are by science. This is a serious problem and one which is, sadly,
widely exploited to most peoples' detriment. 

-- 
David Longley
http://www.longley.demon.co.uk/Frag.htm