Ideology v real children

Earlier in the week, readers will have noticed that we were reaching broad agreement on a number of points concerning home education. Of course, this pleasant state of affairs  could hardly be expected to continue indefinitely and in the last day or two, we seem  once again to have descended into acrimony and name-calling. Most of this has come from one or two individuals, people whom we might perhaps not inaptly describe as hardline autonomous educators.

Now I believe that most home educators, whether structured or autonomous, use or used a mixture of educational styles; some direct teaching, some self-directed learning. This was certainly how I worked.  The proportions might vary, but there tends I think to be in general a pragmatic approach, with different techniques being used as and when they prove effective. For some parents though, their educational methods  are  dictated more by ideological than empirical considerations. These are people, often disciples of various writers or philosophers, who pursue one pedagogy remorselessly because that is what they believe must work uniquely, according to Karl Popper or Ayn Rand. I have an idea that if such individuals spent a little more time with real children and a little less reading about education and childhood, then they might change their views. I have never been very keen on reading what Piaget, for example, said about children and their development; preferring to work directly with children. The problem is that if you read too much about the subject, you start to expect the children to fit in with your ideology and when they don’t behave as they are supposed to, it becomes irritating. We have seen this over the last few days.

Let us examine a couple of statements made here in recent days about children and their learning. These statements shed light upon the thought processes of some of those whom I mentioned above; the ones who take their knowledge of children from books, rather than real life. Here is one such statement;



'Nobody can teach anything to anyone who is not intrinsically motivated to learn it'


Here is another statement, confidently made. I had talked of teaching children the value of Pi by getting them to chant the figures out loud. Somebody then said of this method of teaching;



‘Research indicates that children retain only about 5%-10% of what they learn when "taught" this way’


Observe the quotation marks around the word ‘taught’. This person believes, on purely ideological grounds, that children cannot be taught. They can only learn what they wish to learn. This point was emphasised by somebody when I talked light-heartedly about being compelled to learn under penalty of sanctions, the order of the royal houses of England. The assertion was made that it would have been impossible to teach me this sequence; I secretly wanted to know about the Plantagenet, Tudor and Hanoverian dynasties and the teaching at school was irrelevant. There's an unexpected insight into my early life and no mistake! I just hope that no other readers are entertaining the delusion that they were compelled at school to learn a lot of foolishness which would never be of any practical use to them. You fools! You only learned about the principle exports of Australia because you wanted to! The teachers and school had nothing to do with the case.

I wish to consider one of the first things that children in this country learn in the academic line; that is to say the sequence of letters in the English Alphabet. According to the people whom I quote above, it is all but impossible to teach children to recite the Alphabet. One person asserts that it is impossible to teach anything which a person is not intrinsically motivated to learn and the other thinks that typically only 5% to 10% of material taught by chanting in a rhythmic and sing-song fashion is retained. Looking  at the first of these objections to the idea of children being taught to say the Alphabet, we observe at once that there can be no possible intrinsic motivation for wanting to  know the sequence of letters in the Alphabet at the age of four or five. The only  reason anybody would wish to know the letter order would be so that an index might be consulted. It will be a little while before most four and five year olds will be using indices and so they have no conceivable intrinsic motivation for learning the Alphabet.

The other person to comment states that only 5% to 10% of material taught by means of rote learning and chanting will be retained. This is a less extreme position than the first writer, but still means that it will not be possible to teach the Alphabet to the average child. They will only be able to learn perhaps the first two or three letters of the Alphabet by systematic teaching; say as far as ‘B’ or ‘C’. Teaching children  the whole thing would mean expecting them to retain  not just 5% to 10% of the material, but 100%. This is clearly unrealistic. The conclusion is plain; at least according to the two people who made the claims which we examined above. Teaching the Alphabet to children is impossible.

Here we see the perfect example of where too much ideology may lead us when looking at children and their learning. The people who made the statements above must surely never have had any dealings with real children. Their ideas about how children’s minds work have been taken from books or research papers, rather than by looking at and interacting with the genuine article!

I might mention,  for the benefit of  those who really doubt that teaching the Alphabet is possible, that 80% of five year-olds  this country are able to recite the Alphabet. The rest learn it in the following year. The exceptions are usually those with sequencing problems, dyslexia and other learning difficulties. The child who is unable to learn the Alphabet beyond the letter ‘C’, is actually very rare.

Incidentally, I am not advocating the teaching of children to recite the Alphabet at three. I regard it as a pretty pointless exercise. But believing, as I do, that we should not do it is a quite different thing from asserting on purely ideological grounds that the thing cannot be done.

Popperian epistemology

I have several times been advised to consider Popperian epistemology when discussing autonomous education. This happened again a couple of days ago when somebody commented here;

' I would suggest that it might help if you understood the basics before attempting a critique; in which regard, I would highly recommend a little reading on the subject of Popperian epistemology as it makes huge sense and is where much of the thinking springs from.'


Perhaps then it is time to look at Karl Popper and his philosophy and see what it can tell us about knowledge, with particular reference to home educators. Before I go any further I should make it clear that I am not proposing a refutation or even a critique of Sir Karl Popper's work. Even my hubris has some limits!

One of the first things one notices when home educators are talking about Popper is that they do not very often quote things like;

'Vs(a)=CTv(a)-CTf(a), where Vs(a) is the verisimilitude of a, CTv(a) is a measure of the content of truth of a, and CTf(a) is a measure of the content of the falsity of a.'

They far prefer snappy sound-bites from his autobiography, things like;

'“...we were wasting our time shockingly, even though our teachers were well-educated and tried hard to make the schools the best in the world.'

At most, they will waffle on a bit about the idea of intrinsic as opposed to extrinsic motivation in learning. Now almost forty years ago I actually ploughed my way through Conjectures and Refutations; a book which makes Kant's Critique of Pure Reason seems as light and frothy as an airport novel. Any home educating parent able to struggle through this while looking after and educating small children has my wholehearted admiration! I think though that Popper's popularity with autonomous educators is less because they have all read works such as Die Zukunft ist offen and agree ardently with the theses expressed in them and more because Popper has been touted by Jan Fortune-Wood, who coined the very expression 'autonomous education', as being the boy to listen to as far as education goes.

Jan Fortune-Wood is of course a priest and one can quite see why a Cartesian dualist like Popper would appeal to her. He did after all believe in an incorporeal and immaterial mind or soul. The only problem is that you would be hard pressed to find any scientist these days who believes that the mind is an entirely separate entity from the brain. Come to that, not all that many theologians believe it either. My daughter and I went to a lecture at St. Paul's Cathedral last year and when Sir John Polkinghorne and Keith Ward were asked about the existence of immaterial souls, they both smiled indulgently! This means that those who follow Popper's ideas about learning have to adhere to a belief which hardly any educated person holds today. It's all a bit embarrassing.

Popper's Three Worlds notion is what we need to understand if we want to know how he thought that humans intereact with and acquire knowledge. Anybody wanting to know more about this should try reading the book he wrote with Sir John Eccles - The Self and its Brain. The book that Eccles wrote without Popper's assistance, The Wonder of Being Human, also explains Popper's ideas about this very lucidly. Anybody familiar with Plato's metaphor of the prisoners in the cave should be able to get it at once; the idea of knowledge and ideas having a separate existence in a realm of their own with which we can interact only via the immaterial mind. The problems with this idea have been obvious for many centuries; namely how an immaterial entity can possibly affect the material world. Since the brain is itself made of matter, then the mind must be linked to it in some very strange and unknown way. I do not say that no neurologist or brain expert in the world subscribes to this theory, but I would be interested if any readers can name me one since Eccles died. Most people today think that 'mind' is simply an aspect of 'brain' and not a thing in itself.

This then is why I have not before examined Karl Popper's ideas as they relate to education and the acquisition of knowledge. Like all stupendously intelligent men and women, Popper thought and wrote about a huge range of subjects. Many of his ideas are still held in just as high a regard as they were fifty years ago. His ideas though about the interactions between brain and mind have mostly been dropped. For autonomous educators to cling on to them is absolutely fine, it's nothing to do with me, but they do need to ask themselves if they are really claiming that Cartesian dualism is true and that the interactions of the World 1 brain with the World 3 realm of ideas via World 2 can be the basis for a modern educational theory. Learning after all has a good deal to do with remembering things. Most scientists today, probably all scientists except one or two mavericks, believe that memories are stored in the brain as physical traces. Eccles and Popper thought that at least some memories are stored in World 2, the mysterious zone which the mind or soul inhabits. Straight away, we can see that if we are following the educational theories of a man who thought that memories are not all to be found in the brain but also floating round in some kind of limbo where souls are also to be found, then this puts us in opposition with practically everything known about the brain.

Why do autonomous educators like to talk about 'Popperian epistemology'? Partly I suppose because it sounds so grand. The English are always impressed by some foreign-born boffin and it tends to baffle one's debating opponents to throw in names like Karl Popper. I do this myself of course by scattering references to Wittgenstein and Nietzsche in my writing. The only difference is that I do it tongue in cheek. I have a horrible suspicion that those claiming to be disciples of Popper, on the other hand, are deadly serious.

One curious circumstance is that Carlotta from the Dare to Know blog, she who urged me to consider Popperian epistemology in the comment quoted at the beginning of this article, lists atheism, humanism and rationalism as among her interests on her profile. I would have thought her the last person to believe in ghostly and immaterial spirits or the existence of souls! It just goes to show that you should never put people in neat pigeon-holes.