Human nature and self-directed learning, and their adversaries

Another take on the blank slate

Photo by Susanne Jutzeler from Pexels

Dear readers, my sincerest apologies for my delay in getting out a new article. I can’t believe it’s been over a month!

"Women: If you didn't pursue a career in math, you can blame a man for that. If you just think hard enough, you can pinpoint the exact moment when some man discouraged you from pursuing your interest in math." 

Although not her exact words, this claim was made by a professor in my graduate program. One student tried to introduce findings from biology literature to refute, or at least add nuance to, her claim, and I argued that even if a woman has an aptitude for math, she might prefer a career in a different field. The professor wasn't interested in these arguments and neither were many students in this class. The nearly-shared consensus was that how you were socialized determines your path in life. Full stop. I didn't choose to be an educator, I was socialized to be one.

This is blank slate thinking in action. Much of the faculty in schools of education, in my experience, seem to believe that children are born blank slates, at least to some extent. They believe, as Steven Pinker describes it, "social arrangements should be reasoned out from scratch and agreed upon by mutual consent, based on knowledge that any person could acquire." And "differences of opinion arise not because one mind is equipped to grasp the truth and another is defective, but because the two minds have had different histories." 

Even if educators have spent time with young children and recognized that they express unique personalities early in life, because of the nature of their work, educators must buy into the blank slate to some extent. Much of the education industry (institutionalized education, that is) is premised on the idea that children can be molded and that high academic achievement in any given subject is possible for all children. Sentiments such as this are common among educators: "everyone is, in fact, mathematically smart as a result of living in the world."

Educators hold on dearly to this belief because to think otherwise would be to admit that inequality in academic outcomes is not fixable. Unless you place the bar so low that any individual child chosen at random can reach it, not all children will achieve at the same level. I do not advocate lowering the bar to such a level. Frankly, I don't think that bar should exist. Certainly, kids should learn how to read and do math and other things, and that schools should be expected to adhere to some sort of accountability metrics, but the way our education system is currently structured is setting many kids up for failure.

Maria Montessori, in her book the Absorbent Mind, seemed to recognize that children are born with capacities to learn and that "[t]he consideration of personality, the development of human potentialities must become the centre of education." Montessori diminished the importance of content knowledge in educating the young—"It is not transmission of knowledge that is required, the consideration of the human personality alone can lead us to salvation"—which I disagree with, but her point is well-taken that human potentiality (i.e., human nature) should be considered in how one gets educated. 

Montessori, like Socrates, thought that each child had a teacher within them. Her primary, or at least initial, reason for this claim was her observation of how young children learn language. They seem to not only absorb their native language, but to understand how to use it: "Within a child there is a very scrupulous teacher. It is he who achieves these [language] results in every child, no matter in what region he is found." She translated these observations, and findings from emerging research, to design her educational model, known to many as the Montessori method. With her understanding of human nature, the Montessori method of education is structured around the child as a learner and teacher. In other words, her model is one of self-directed learning.

Self-directed learning is all the rage in many progressive education circles because it aligns with John Dewey's approach to education—Dewey's philosophy of education is ingrained in many schools of education. But schools of education seem to embrace educational philosophies espoused by Dewey, Montessori, and other proponents of self-directed learning only up to a certain point. 

In the same graduate course that I described above, the professor, teacher's assistant, and my fellow graduate students did not consider differentiated learning palatable as a pedagogical approach. Differentiated learning is not self-directed learning, but it does allow students to pursue school work based on their abilities. The teacher sets up different learning stations in the classroom to accommodate different ability levels. The stations allow students to work at their own pace, but towards the same learning objectives, and they allow the teacher to work with different groups of students on different learning goals. Frankly, as a former 1st grade teacher, I don't know how you teach those struggling with reading, while not boring those who have mastered reading at their level, without employing differentiated learning. 

But here lies the issue with this approach: it sets up a hierarchy. Ultimately, the problem, according to my graduate class, was that differentiated learning, and relatedly self-directed learning, do not abide by the goal of equality. The two methods allow kids to set their own pace, which results in some kids achieving at higher rates than others.

I presented the objection to differentiated learning to a colleague of mine who started a Montessori-style charter school, and her response was that if kids are immersed in what they are learning as individuals, which may be different from what the kid next to them is learning, they either have no idea they are at a different level in the learning process or they are inspired to do what the kid next to them is doing, which is a goal they can work toward. And I would add, if a hierarchy exists, the kids know about it and the teacher has very little control over it.

My assessment is that educators are thinking about human nature and equality all wrong. As Paige Harden, a geneticist and parent, stated: "Verbal ability is valued, but having strong verbal ability doesn’t make one of my children more valuable to me. The genetic differences between them are meaningful for their lives, but those differences do not create a hierarchy of intrinsic worth."