Socrates "got it" when it came to
education
By Marion Brady
*August 3, 2003
One of the many books written by the late Oxford University professor C. S.
Lewis, defender of Christianity, was titled The Great Divorce. If I recall
correctly from my reading of it about 50 years ago, those who chose to go to
heaven and those who chose to reside in hell were so unlike each other their
differences were unbridgeable. Given day trips to heaven with the option of
staying, the citizens of hell find the place so alien they take the bus back to
where they feel more at home.
Reading the criticisms of my stands against standardized tests, I sometimes
wonder if the gap between the pro- and anti-test people is equally unbridgeable.
Because my e-mail address accompanies my columns, I get a great many reactions
that don't appear as letters to the editor. I get considerably more support than
criticism, but what the critics lack in numbers they often make up in
shrillness.
I suspect emotions play too large a role in this issue for agreement to be
reached. However, because the matter has implications for just about everything
related to education, an effort should be made. Ask almost any education-related
question---who should teach? how should they be trained? what kind of teaching
materials work best? what's the ideal class size? who's most to blame for poor
performance?---ask these and many other questions, and pro- and
anti-standardized test partisans will have very different answers.
In the interest of mutual understanding, I'd like to try to surface what I
believe to be the bedrock belief underlying each side's position.
In the late 1980s, Louis V. Gerstner, CEO of IBM, played a major role in kicking
off the current testing fad. Educating, he felt, wasn't very complicated. His
view---one he probably shares with most readers---is that knowledge is located
in places like teacher's heads, textbooks, libraries, and the Internet, and
educating is a matter of moving it from those places into empty space in kids'
heads.
That this idea has important implications for schooling is easily illustrated.
For example, if Gerstner is right, then class size isn't very important. It's
about as easy to distribute information by way of lecture or assigned readings
to 300 students as it is to distribute it to two or three.
There is, however, a radically different, minority view of what's involved in
educating, a view demonstrated by Socrates. For him, teaching wasn't a matter of
stuffing kids' heads with new information, but of pulling out and rearranging
information already in their heads.
Clearly, if Socrates was right, class size (and just about everything else in
the education mix) makes an enormous difference. Figuring out why a particular
student always makes the same kind of mistake in arithmetic calculation can take
real insight. Pack a room with students, no two thinking alike, and it should be
obvious why, from the Socratic perspective, teaching is so intellectually
challenging.
I have in my files a video production by the British Broadcasting Company, shot
at a Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduation ceremony. Several students
still in their caps and gowns are handed a short section of a tree limb and
asked, "What's this piece of wood mostly made of?"
The usual response of the graduates? Some version of, "It's made mostly from
stuff the tree sucked up out of the ground."
Well, of course, it's not. Wood mostly comes from an invisible gas in the air.
Sunlight, by way of photosynthesis, turns carbon dioxide into the solid material
of the tree.
The point of the video isn't to expose the ignorance of graduates from a
top-flight university, but to bring attention to the inadequacy of the belief
that educating is just a matter of dumping information into kids' empty heads.
Almost certainly, every single one of those MIT students had studied
photosynthesis in elementary school, middle school, high school and college.
And, to get into MIT, it's a safe bet that they aced the photosynthesis
questions on the standardized tests.
Why, then, did they give the interviewer a totally wrong theory about the origin
of wood?
Too much Gerstner, not enough Socrates. The explanation they dreamed up from
"common sense" never got matched up with and reorganized by books and teachers.
Gerstner asks the question most amateur educators ask: "Is this kid getting the
information?" To that question, standardized tests provide accurate, satisfying
answers.
Socrates asks a different question: "Is the kid understanding the information?"
That's a question which standardized, machine-graded tests can't answer.
Gerstner (via standardized tests) creates clones.
Socrates (via dialog) creates thinkers.
*Originally published in the Orlando Sentinel. Published here by
permission of the author.
