Education and Mind in the Knowledge Age

Carl Bereiter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781135644789
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In this book, Carl Bereiter--a distinguished and well-known cognitive, educational psychologist--presents what he calls "a new way of thinking about knowledge and the mind." He argues that in today's Knowledge Age, education's conceptual tools are inadequate to address the pressing educational challenges and opportunities of the times. Two things are required: first, to replace the mind-as-container metaphor with one that envisions a mind capable of sustaining knowledgeable, intelligent behavior without actually containing stored beliefs; second, to recognize a fundamental difference between knowledge building and learning--both of which are essential parts of education for the knowledge age. Connectionism in cognitive science addresses the first need; certain developments in post-positivist epistemology address the second. The author explores both the theoretical bases and the practical educational implications of this radical change in viewpoint. The book draws on current new ways of thinking about knowledge and mind, including information processing, cognitive psychology, situated cognition, constructivism, social constructivism, and connectionism, but does not adhere strictly to any "camp." Above all, the author is concerned with developing a way of thinking about the mind that can usher education into the knowledge age. This book is intended as a starting point.

Part I

Mind in a Knowledge-Based Society

1

Our Oldest Unchallenged Folk Theory at Last Faces Its Day of Reckoning

Something is going on in elementary schools across North America that might strike the detached observer as insane. Millions of dollars are being poured into high-tech equipment that is used mainly to produce the kinds of “projects” that in an earlier day were produced using scissors, old magazines, and library paste. At the same time, and in the same schools, a back-to-basics movement has teachers obsessively concerned with covering traditional content and preparing students for tests.

One very naive response to this situation discerns no inconsistency. The computerized cut-and-paste work is believed to be teaching students computer skills that will insure their futures in the 21st century. It is therefore just another kind of skill practice to take its place with the more traditional drill in arithmetic, reading, and spelling. Adults are predictably overimpressed when children can do something they cannot. For instance, the things that can be done with photo image processing software these days look like magic, and when adults who have never encountered it before walk into a classroom and find 11-year-olds morphing images, changing coloration, and taking a figure from one image and planting it in another, they are likely to echo the words of a superintendent who exclaimed, “I think I have just seen the 21st century!” What they have seen, impressive as it may be, is, however, something that can be learned in 2 or 3 hours.

More sophisticated educators recognize there is a conflict and try to resolve it. But conceptual limitations put creative solutions beyond reach, leaving grudging compromise as the only choice. Computer activities are categorized as “constructivist”. The other kind are labeled “traditional,” “transmission model,” “teacher centered,” or perhaps even “rote learning.” Such a categorization brings with it a baggage of false and stultifying beliefs that, however, remain hidden from view within the categorization and are therefore unlikely to be questioned. Constructivism is taken to mean independent hands-on activities, ignoring the outstanding examples of constructivist education that depend on teacher-led, highly focused inquiry (e.g., Hunt & Minstrell, 1994; Lampert, 1988). The possibility of finding a “constructivist” way of meeting back-to-basics demands for accountability is therefore virtually eliminated. Categorizing instruction of the “nonconstructivist” kind as if it were something old and familiar wrongly implies that teachers already know how to do it and that it is an effective way to meet the demands for mastery of basic skills. That is usually far from the truth. Teachers are likely to have little knowledge of how to improve reading comprehension or how to overcome errors students make with fractions and decimals, two of the key requirements for improving achievement test scores.

Many different things are happening in education, some demonstrably good, some demonstrably bad, and many others of uncertain value. Yet in very fundamental ways, education is stuck. It doesn’t know where to move and it doesn’t have tools to move with. The dialogue, both within and outside the education profession, does not advance. The same blunt statements (including this one) are made over and over. The tools education needs are, of course, conceptual tools. In this so-called Knowledge Age, that is the first requirement for any human enterprise to advance. The argument I develop throughout this book is that education’s conceptual tools are woefully inadequate. They are not even up to old tasks, such as the tasks of understanding a textbook or solving an algebra problem, let alone the new order of tasks that education must face in this era of global competition. Better tools are coming available, but it takes conceptual tools to understand and use them. The most basic of tools are our conceptions of knowledge and mind. That, I argue, is where change has to start if education is to become unstuck.

KNOWLEDGE IS EVERYBODY’S BUSINESS

Knowledge used to be the sole province of philosophers; that is, philosophers were the only ones who studied and talked about knowledge as such. The rest of us might acquire, use, and perhaps even create knowledge, but we did not have to think about what any of that meant. In time, social scientists began studying knowledge from the standpoint of the people who create and use it. The real territorial shift began, however, with the advent of cognitive science and it became decisive once the business world discovered knowledge and acquired a fascination with intellectual property, or “IP” as it is familiarly called.¹ The barbarians are now within the gates. Perhaps philosophy’s final loss of proprietorship over knowledge will be dated from 1997, when the Xerox Distinguished Professorship in Knowledge was established at the University of California, Berkeley—in the school of management, with the first occupant being a sociologist who made his name studying what he called “knowledge-creating companies” (Nonaka, 1991).

In Western philosophy, knowledge has typically meant something like true or warranted belief, usually in the form of propositions. When cognitive scientists began constructing computer models of human intelligence, knowledge in the form of propositions and rules played a central role. That is what made the models cognitive as opposed to behaviorist. But whether the propositions were true or not was irrelevant as far as understanding cognition was concerned. No one would imagine that the mind functions differently depending on whether it is operating on true propositions or false ones. Knowledge, accordingly, became whatever functions as knowledge in mental processes. Knowledge came to include beliefs of any sort and to include rules that constitute know-how or skill (Anderson, 1983).

Cognitive science spawned practical applications in artificial intelligence and expert systems, and with the latter came a new occupation: knowledge engineering. In designing an artificial system to provide expert guidance in medical diagnosis, for instance, the best model will often be a human expert. But human experts, it was soon found, had limited ability to articulate the knowledge that seemed to be guiding their actions, and so it became the job of knowledge engineers to observe experts at work and, using a combination of detailed observation and probing questions, dig out the expert’s covert knowledge and formulate it as rules and propositions that a machine could process. For business managers eager to capitalize on the new information technologies, this development had a dual effect: It dramatized the importance and the vastness of knowledge that figures in expert performance. At the same time, it entrenched and gave an apparent scientific license for a simplistic conception of knowledge as items in individual minds.

Growing recognition of the economic importance of knowledge has brought all kinds of players into the knowledge arena who have no particular theoretical perspective on knowledge. Unhampered by philosophical or psychological strictures, they can shift indiscriminately between treating knowledge as stuff in people’s heads and treating knowledge as stuff out in the world, to be found in books, patent applications, and the like. They do not distinguish between companies that strive to become better at what they are doing and companies whose work is to produce knowledge. Both are called learning organizations. They do not distinguish between knowledge that inheres in competence and knowledge that becomes negotiable property. Both are called intellectual capital (Stewart, 1997). As a result, there is no incisive way to talk about what is the main challenge for many organizations: how to get progressively more competent at producing advances in knowledge.

Despite these conceptual weaknesses, modern businesses are far in advance of the schools in understanding and appreciating the importance of knowledge. The Knowledge Age has not yet come to the schoolhouse. To many school people, knowledge is old fashioned, the stuff of pedants and test makers. Knowledge is what reactionary parents keep trying to force schools to go back to. Ever since the publication of Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives in 1956, educators in North America have been wedded to a hierarchical view of learning outcomes, with knowledge occupying the bottom rung (more about this in chap. 4). The upper rungs are occupied by “higher order thinking skills” or other elevated mental traits such as creativity. Business pundits, unhampered by requirements of consistency, buy all of this “higher order” talk as well. But they also value knowledge in a way that is foreign to the school world. They recognize knowledge as stuff to be produced and worked with.

I should make it clear from the beginning that I am to be counted among the barbarians. My interest in knowledge is practical, concerned especially with the improvement of education. But I have seen enough of the world outside education to be convinced that the muddles educators get into about knowledge are only a more acute form of the muddles people in the society at large are getting into. They all have their source in conceptions of mind and knowledge that we acquire as children and never think to examine—because they seem to be given directly by experience and because no alternatives have been presented.

To put my present effort in perspective, it is at one remove from books on how to reform education or to reinvent businesses for the Knowledge Age. Instead, it develops a way to think about knowledge and mind when going about these innovative efforts. I do not believe managers and educators can get along indefinitely with a theory of knowledge acquired at their mother’s knee. It is not that the theory is wrong. Better to say it is obsolete. It is obsolete in much the same way as a 5-year-old personal computer. It is still serviceable and for many ordinary uses it is perfectly adequate. It may even offer advantages over later models in simplicity and freedom from glitches. But there are new tasks—in multimedia and in communication, for instance—that the old machine either cannot handle or can handle only with considerable effort and ingenuity on the part of the user.

FOLK PSYCHOLOGY AND EPISTEMOLOGY

There is a commonsense psychology that we all develop in early childhood and that we use in making our way in a world whose most significant objects (for us) are other human beings. The central tenet of this psychology, as it develops among children in the Western world, is that people’s behavior is determined by their beliefs and desires. It is well understood by 6-year-olds, although not by 3-year-olds, that other people’s beliefs may differ from their own, but they also understand they can, albeit imperfectly, infer other people’s beliefs from their words and actions and from the facts of a situation (Astington, 1993).

Along with commonsense psychology comes a commonsense epistemology. Commonsense psychology posits a mind, which contains immaterial objects such as ideas, memories, facts, plans, goals, and principles. Commonsense epistemology posits a relationship between these things in the mind and an external world of observable things and actions. When this relationship is correct, the mental objects constitute knowledge. When the relationship is incorrect, the mental objects constitute false beliefs.

Together, the commonsense psychology and the commonsense epistemology make up what contemporary scholars refer to as “folk theory of mind.” There is some dispute about calling it a theory, and I do so only because it is a common and handy usage. But regardless of what scholars may decide to call it, it seems clear that to ordinary people what I described in the preceding two paragraphs is not a theory—not, that is, a set of propositions vulnerable to counterevidence. It is just the way things are.

Folk theories, however, generally have this aura of certainty rooted in direct experience. That the sun rises in the east and moves across the sky once seemed to be given directly by experience, to involve no conjecture or interpretation whatever, whereas what happens to the sun between the time it disappears in the west and reappears in the east is conjectural (and folk theories accordingly differ widely in what they say about it). To the modern mind, however, it is evident that the daytime cycle is also a matter of interpretation, even if not in quite the same way as what happens to the sun at night, and that interpreting it the way folk astronomy does gets one off on a wrong path for understanding the cosmos. Similarly, folk mechanics is based on the unquestioned observation that objects set in motion gradually lose their initial impetus and come to rest. From the standpoint of Newtonian mechanics, we can now recognize that loss of impetus, far from being an uncontaminated observation, is an inference that must be questioned for physics to progress.

The mind is popularly regarded as mysterious. There are all kinds of questions for which folk theory of mind provides no answers: why we remember some things and forget others, how ideas come about, what the nature of dreaming is, and so on. What seems to be given directly by experience is the existence of the mind itself and its contents: beliefs, desires, memories, ideas, dreams—the whole carload of mental luggage. This is what, to the folk way of thinking, seems to be beyond question, the solid rock on which conjectures and theories must rest. There is this about folk theory of mind, however, that sets it apart from other folk theories and may explain why it has survived while other folk theories have fallen before the march of science: Although it may be difficult, we can begin to conjure up doubts about almost anything we perceive in the external world. In fact, playing with the idea that there is no world out there, that it is all a dream, is a favorite amusement of young people just awakening to the possibilities of philosophy. But to doubt our experience of the mind seems self-contradictory; for isn’t the doubt itself an experience of the very kind we are supposing might be denied? That is the line of reasoning Descartes pursued, in trying to find a foothold of certainty, something on which a sure understanding of the world could be based. But might it not be that what we think we experience so directly as mental events is already heavily interpreted in ways we fail to imagine?

WHEN FOLK THEORIES GIVE WAY TO SCIENCE

The term “folk theory” is used in several ways. According to one usage, folk theories are what people believe in the absence of scientific theories. In ancient times folk theories were all there were. Then along came science, and by now most educated people have adopted scientific theories. According to this usage, folk theories are to be found mainly among primitive peoples and among children who have not yet been instructed in science.

According to the usage I adopt here, however, folk theories are whatever theories or conceptual frameworks people pick up from popular culture and use in their daily efforts to make sense of events and plan their actions. We all acquire folk theories and are apt to go on using them until we get far enough into some endeavor that we need specialized knowledge. Folk theories, thus conceived, are not necessarily rigid things, insensitive to evidence and closed to novelty. They change as new facts and ideas are absorbed into popular culture. The kind of folk theory of disease that children grow up with in modern nations is radically different from the folk theory of a few hundred years ago. Germs now play a central role. Although folk theory offers little explanation of how germs cause disease, the notion of evil, fast-breeding little creatures invisibly pervading the environment provides a basis for hygienic practices that would have been meaningless to people of an earlier age.

Shouldn’t we say, then, that modern people hold a scientific theory of disease—even if it is a limited and distorted one—rather than a folk theory? This is a definitional issue that could be decided either way, but I think we will get farther in our inquiry into the educational implications of theories of mind if we follow the definitional course I have proposed: Ordinary people in the modern world hold and generally function according to folk theories of disease, but these are theories that have been significantly influenced by medical science. One reason for treating the matter this way is that it allows us to consider reverse influences: how medical science might be influenced by folk theory—not the folk theories of remote times and places but the folk theories today’s doctors acquired as children, growing up in middle-class suburbs, watching the Saturday morning television cartoons, being lectured to by their parents about what they should and shouldn’t put into their mouths. Folk notions, being largely unarticulated and unexamined, can influence the way people interpret and apply scientific information. Although these influences might be subtle in the case of medicine, the influence of folk theory of mind on scientific psychology and philosophy turns out, as will become evident later, to be obvious and profound.

Although higher learning may turn some of us into behaviorists who reject the notion of mind, idealists who deny there is a reality to which beliefs correspond, or antifoundationalists who deny there is a basis for comparing one belief with another, in our daily lives we function according to the psychology and epistemology we acquired in early childhood. There seems to be no practical alternative. That is probably true, as far as everyday life is concerned. Folk theory of mind is so intricately woven into the social fabric that there is no telling what would be left if we tried to remove it. Consider such socially important concepts as lying, pretending, promising, knowing, and joking. Everything from a criminal court decision to the fate of a friendship can turn on whether one of these concepts is thought to apply. But each of these concepts distinguishes a relation between something overt and something in a person’s mind. Joking is saying something untrue but without the intent that others will believe it; lying is the same thing but with the intent to be believed. The capacity to hold a theory of mind seems to be an evolved capacity, with evidences of it in other primates (Premack & Premack, 1996). As humans evolved talents for cheating, lying, pretending, promising, making truth claims, and joking, the ability to detect and distinguish among these became important survival skills (Barkow, Cosmides, & Tooby, 1992). A complementary notion, however, is that only having a theory of mind enables us to do such things. Chimpanzees, according to this reasoning, are not by nature less deceitful than we are, they are simply not as good at imagining themselves into one another’s minds.

That folk theory of mind serves us well in daily life does not mean, however, that it also serves well in all the more specialized activities of a modern society. There are other bodies of commonsense knowledge that serve us well in ordinary circumstances but that fail more severe challenges. I have already referred to commonsense astronomy, according to which the sun rises ea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Part I. Mind in a Knowledge-Based Society
• Part II. Education and Knowledge Work
• Appendix—Conceptual Artifacts: Theoretical Issues
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index