The Philosophy of Open Education (International Library of the Philosophy of Education Volume 15)

David A. Nyberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781135170608
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

'Open', 'informal', and 'humanistic' are words used to describe new styles of education which depart from ordinary or traditional education. Too often, however, these adjectives are used in a strongly polemical or self-justifying rather than analytical way. Often too, the grounds for accepting or rejecting open education are political or moral, instead of being based on a consideration of the nature of open education and its strength and weaknesses. This collection of essays is central to the debate on open education, analyzing the important concepts in the field. The contributions, all written by authorities on the philosophy of education, deal with problems of definition, knowledge, socialization, freedom, cultural perspective, and unique meanings and metaphors.

part I
Problems of definition

1
What’s ‘open’ about open education?

Brian V.Hill

It is less helpful to ask of a slogan ‘What does it mean?’ than ‘Who said it, and what do they hope to gain?’ That is, when one is examining a slogan, an enquiry into political motivation is likely to be more productive than an attempt to gain conceptual precision on the basis merely of the face value of the words used. This is the situation in which we are placed by the phrase ‘open education’ which, anticipating later comments, I will here brand a powerful and non-specific slogan. The situation is complicated by two further factors. The first is that users of this slogan range very widely with respect to their normative commitments. Thus, some who have a high respect for the received cultural heritage see open education as a strategy more conducive to internalization of what are judged to be the best values than other strategies available. Others, speaking from within, say, a counter-cultural perspective, look to open education to subvert the dominant cultural values. The second factor partly accounts for the first: both words in the slogan can be put to a variety of uses which, depending on context, need not have close family resemblances. We must first, therefore, recall some salient features of the behaviour of slogans, before probing the various normative stances which lie hidden behind this particular slogan.

1

As any ad man knows, the best slogans are those which, irrespective of whether they actually denote anything about the product and the uses for which it is designed, do the most effective job of evoking useful mental associations and feelings of approval. Words that can be used in many different ways are more likely to pick up extraneous emotional overtones which will advance their effect as slogans. This has been well described as the ‘boo-hurrah’ effect that words often have, which more modern idiom, as my children have taught me, might well render ‘yuk-yum’.

An excellent candidate for sloganizing is the word ‘open’. Immediately one uses it, the options polarize. To be open (depend ing on context) is to be not closed, restricted, prejudiced or clogged; but free, candid, generous, above board, mentally flexible, future-oriented, etc. The opposite [sic] does not bear thinking about, and there can be no third alternative. ‘Open’ is yum.

The word has done wonders for ‘education’. For no sooner had R.S.Peters almost convinced us that the modern usage of the term ‘education’ necessarily implies that it is yum, than a new wave of educational critics lodged trenchant criticisms of the modern commitment to education, and one writer at least has asked disdainfully: ‘Must we educate?’¹

2

It will be remembered that Peters, responding without rancour to sharp criticisms of his earlier analysis of the concept of education, refined his account to accommodate two concepts, one older and undifferentiated from notions of rearing and training, which I shall refer to as Education I; the other tighter and more recent, implying development of the whole person through increased understanding.² I shall refer to this as Education II. The crucial difference between the two was the knowledge condition built into the second. For our present purpose I accept this analysis. Peters has erected on this analytic foundation a normative theory of education which calls for the initiation of the learner into the most valued public modes of knowing.

Peters’s normative views have their American counterpart in the writings, generally earlier, of such people as Phenix, Broudy, Burnett and Smith.³ The assumption they all have in common is that man has the capacity to interact with his environment in a variety of modes which, over centuries, have become highly developed and extended. The new-born human, possessing capacity to enter these new worlds of experience, deserves opportunity; and he is disadvantaged in the business of social living if he fails to enter in. Since he cannot know, before entering, what he is missing, and since he cannot exercise an intelligent option respecting his own future participation in these modes until he has been grounded in them at some depth, a benign compulsion is unavoidable in any society which takes seriously the responsibility of guiding the development of its younger members. From such premises as these flow arguments for a substantial period of universal compulsory education, the professionalization of teaching, and the maintenance of formal educational agencies, to mention but a few.

While institutionalized education has thus been legitimized at a high level by some theorists, it has also been vigorously promoted on grounds that are more utilitarian, which include the conviction that basic literacy and professional-vocational preparation are indispensable to a society’s economic productivity. Many of the current attacks on formal schooling focus on the capitulation of the schools, and of the teaching profession as a whole, to the demands and objectives of a consumer society manipulated by big business.⁴ To the extent that the experience of schooling has been an indoctrinative gradgrind, oriented to economic values and rewards, they are surely right. But this has been ‘education’ only in Peters’ first, undifferentiated sense, and the educational theorists I have just mentioned are making common cause with recent radical critics of the school in deploring such a capitulation.

But not all radical critics stop there. For some, the grounds of objection extend to the very idea of a common curriculum, even though it may be based on the maximum possible degree of critical cognition and enquiry. Thus Bereiter, recognizing that the refined concept of education implies transforming the cognition of the learner so that his whole development as a person is affected, objects that this is an intrinsically authoritarian aim, which encroaches on the child’s entitlement to free choice.⁵ Bereiter, that is, regards Education II as yuk, and he is not alone in this.⁶

It is at this point that the concept of education has, in the minds of many, been given new life by the grafting on of the adjective ‘open’. By association, this word restores lost yum-power. One can dissociate one’s own engagement in teaching from criticisms of education, both conceptual and substantive, by saying, ‘Ah yes, but I’m involved in open education.’ It is doubtful if many who speak thus have grappled with the prima facie contradiction between ‘open’, understood as unrestricted option (including the right to opt out) which is one of its senses, and the implication that ‘education’, even when regarded as something superior to rearing or training, involves leading human learners towards certain goals. But the use of slogans is such as to discourage enquiries of this sort. In any case, our enquiry may be expedited by asking the political question: Who, in instance x, is advocating open education, and what does it appear they hope to gain by doing so? In short, what in fact are they advocating?

3

Much of the topical literature on open education, of course, springs from the American discovery, in the late 1960s, of the English primary school in some of its more informal expressions. When one investigates this model, one finds that the referents for ‘open’ are variously, spatial, temporal and procedural. That is, the classroom may be termed ‘open’ because children move in, around and out of the classroom at will, or because there is little use of bells to prescribe lesson segments, or because age and sex segregation have been abolished, or because traditional school subjects have given way to integrated learning activities, or any combination of these.

In anticipation of points to be made later, it is important to note some of the respects in which such schools are not obviously ‘open’. Thus, attendance is not voluntary, except in a limited, on-the-premises sense. Also the curriculum, though flexible in practice, is ultimately prescribed by the teacher’s view of what constitutes cultural consensus. Her view also determines the kinds of suasion she feels at liberty to exercise, and the ‘subtle structuring’⁷ by which she determines the choice and availability of activities in and beyond the classroom.

In effect, the meanings attached to ‘open’ in this context do not challenge the concept of Education II to which they are allied. Proponents of more formal procedures of class and/or subject organization⁸ are not ipso facto at variance with advocates of this kind of open school regarding general curriculum goals and the desirability of acquainting children with the best their culture has to offer. In the words of one American observer of the English example we are discussing, the teacher in an informal school typically creates ‘a rich environment of possible activities…to lead the child into activities that call for the same skills that the formal school seeks’.⁹ Silberman, in the book that did much to acquaint a wider American public with these schools, is equally accepting of the need for an agreed vision of ‘the educated man’.¹⁰ I shall therefore say that this segment of the literature on open education is only committed to PROCEDURAL OPENNESS.

Proponents of a more radical kind of openness are prone to allege that such a stance ultimately reverts to a force-fed ‘transmission of cultural values’, despite the fact that the best writing on both sides of the debate on procedural openness emphasizes the enrichment of the student’s capacity for autonomous personal choices.¹¹ I impute just such an unworthy jibe to the authors of Teaching as a Subversive Activity,¹² who seem to want to believe that only they have caught the vision of personal autonomy. Oddly enough, though they claim that the open procedure of ‘inquiry method^’ is the primary truth about good teaching, this seems to be qualified by the responsibility they place on the teacher to develop ‘in youth the attitudes and skills of social, political and cultural criticism’,¹³ and their recognition that ‘the inquiry environment…is a series of human encounters, the nature of which is largely determined by the “teacher”’.¹⁴ Viewed in the light of other writing reviewed in this section, their objections to curriculum pre-selection are more apparent than real.

4

A second characteristic emphasis in the literature on open education is what I shall call NORMATIVE OPENNESS. Into this category fall those viewpoints which advocate that the choice of learning tasks and activities shall be entirely the prerogative of the students. Normative openness logically implies procedural openness, whereas the reverse does not necessarily follow.

Hopkins maintains that there is a distinction between ‘free schools’ and ‘open schools’, in that the former are ‘based on a philosophy of freedom in education, which holds that each individual has the right to determine what he learns and does not learn’,¹⁵ whereas the latter only allow freedom at what I have termed in the previous section the procedural level. The distinction is worth making, but it is misleading to claim that the contrasting ways in which the words ‘free’ and ‘open’ are actually used establishes it. John Holt, for example, believes that these terms are practically synonymous,¹⁶ Silberman documents a loose interchange of these and other terms,¹⁷ and bibliographies on open education range eclectically across and beyond all the writings referred to in the present essay. To complicate matters further, references are often made to ‘openness’ in higher education, by which are meant not only freer and more individualized procedures of instruction, but radical freedom for students to choose what they will study and how their learning will be assessed. In short, the words ‘open’, ‘free’ and ‘informal’ are used in ways that frequently overlap, and any one of these words may be pressed into the service of normative, as distinct from merely procedural, openness.

Normative openness challenges the right of the teacher to be anything more than a facilitator, responsive to the expressed desires of the learner. Whether one enriches the environment in the school (A.S.Neill) or counsels deschooling the environment (Illich, Reimer), the intention is to leave the individual free to develop in any direction he chooses. This stance assumes that there is no universal nature, or agreed model, of man; and it regards as presumptuous any attempt to prescribe another person’s direction of growth. Illich categorizes schools, along with prisons, hospitals and supermarts, as manipulative social institutions,¹⁸ and he would totally remove ...

Table of contents

• Contents
• General editor’s note
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• part I Problems of definition
• part II Problems of knowledge
• part III Problems of socialization
• part IV Problems of freedom
• Index