DD9: Excellent article. I tout a correllary to his thesis. I involuntarily lunge backward whenever I here someone say they're going to "make learning fun". SDF: This sounds like teacher jargon. "Making learning fun," according to the canons of teacher jargon, begins with the common teacher assumption that "learning" normally takes place within encapsulated school classrooms. "Making learning fun" thus means "accomodating students to their existence within the parameters of required classroom attendance," as stipulated by truancy laws, school rules etc. Of course this assumption serves social functions, such as I've dealt with here. As Seymour Sarason says in The Predictable Failure of School Reform:
I became aware of the very unsettling fact that my thinking, like that of everybody else, rested on an axiom that wholly or in large part was invalid. The axiom was that education (schooling) best takes place in encapsulated classrooms in encapsulated schools. So... I began to examine seriously the implications of the axiom's invalidity, and then I wrote Schooling in America: Scapegoat and Salvation (1983). Very briefly, I argued as follows:
1. Schools generally are and have been uninteresting places for students and others. They are intellectually boring places.
2. In this century, developments in the mass media, and their ever-growing influence (especially through television), have created for young people a wide, unbridgeable, experienced gulf between two worlds: that of the classroom and school and the "real" world. In terms of interest and challenge, the former cannot hold a candle to the latter.
3. By virtue of their encapsulation, physical and otherwise, schools have two virtually impossible and related tasks: to simulate the conditions that engender interest, challenge, and curiosity, and to make the acquisition of knowledge and cognitive skills personally important and meaningful.
4. As long as we uncritically accept the axiom and think of reform only in terms of altering classrooms and schools -- what goes on in them -- educational reform is doomed. (Sarason p.111-112)
So it is within this context that learning must be made fun, because "learning" has been made boring beforehand.
DD9: Is there something wrong with learning that it needs to be "made fun"? I thought learning was a natural, spontaneous process.
It was for ME, at least until public school got ahold of me. After that, for 12 years I thought I hated learning. Then one day I realized that all I really hated was learning how to be a slave to state and corporate power.
SDF: I'm not sure learning is natural or spontaneous, because I think that the conditions for learning are socially conditioned -- for instance, your ability to read might be socially conditioned by the availability of books in your home and at your local library, the literacy level of your parents, siblings, friends etc. On the other hand, the growth of young brains can seem quite natural and spontaneous.
DD9: It's maddening that a newspaper columnist is an educational Einstein compared to our Education policy makers.
SDF: Maybe it's a matter of purpose and not intelligence. Politicians are conditioned to placate the public with photo-opportunities where they appear (in front of cameras) to be "doing something" about education, while they satisfy their campaign donors' desires to maintain existing inequities in wealth and power. Thus it's doubtful that any of them want more than a cheap fix for problems that arise as a result of the operation of the system as it is.
DD9: Its even more maddening to think that it may have nothing to do with intelligence but instead pivots on whose stuffing whose coffers with money and power. In that regard it seems we're forced to waste fine journalism on corporate propaganda abatement instead of in open public debate where it would otherwise serve much higher purposes.
: Damn the establishment!
SDF: Don't just damn it, organize politically against it.
None.
