The truth is rarely pure and never simple - Oscar Wilde.
Facts exclude. They exclude falsity. The Earth is round - we exclude the possibility that the earth is triangular, rectangular, or shaped like the gingerbread man... until further evidence is supplied. But well... that ain't gonna change, is it? When we start talking about education, things get trickier.
Education is a complex business because it involves an interaction between the learner - the kids - what they bring to school every day, who they are, what barriers and challenges they face - and what we want them to learn - the knowledge & skills *we* (adults, society, school) have decided are important.
Cognitive science is making inroads into educational discourse, and with it, it's presenting facts about how children learn, how they acquire knowledge and skill. Cognitive science doesn't distinguish based on race or background, and rightly so. Science generalizes about how all people learn. Therefore, some will think it ignores the differences between individuals and their circumstances. If you ignore differences, you are anti-equity so it all gets very political, very quickly.
Yet when we unpack this, who is anti-equity here? If you are saying to me that a child's background, their suffering, their trauma, and their life experiences are not just barriers to learning, but actually mean they learn differently, then I say you are the one who is anti-equity. The difference for me is, barriers and circumstances can always be overcome --- to some degree. Yes, sometimes people need a leg up, they need you to hold the ladder for them, but everyone is capable of some level of academic achievement. Will everyone reach the same academic level? No, but who would want that? Boring. Nobody wants a society full of academics. But equally, nobody should decide that anyone's barriers make them incapable of accessing and acquiring the fruits of humanity's collective wisdom.
Personalization is the status quo - differentiation is the norm; we hear that each child is unique, and we should meet their individual needs. So I appreciate that hearing "we don't learn differently," will rock some people's foundations a little bit. Education is a complex phenomenon that admits of nuance and subtle shades of grey. However, that doesn't mean that some of the old ideas from university education departments aren't demonstrably wrong - the idea we all learn differently is one of those old and wrong ideas.
A lot of what happens in a Principal's office is mitigating and managing nuance. Here's what we know about how people learn, and here's how we can use this to help your child. This statement is only possible if we are able to generalise about things. The generalizations we make, the truths we are able to hold, the useful heuristics, these hold great emancipatory potential if applied correctly.
There is a very human tendency for people to want to be right, with the other (probably bad) guy being wrong. Many bullying cases follow this structure. There needs to be a victim and victimized—the guilty and the damned, good and evil, right and wrong. And yet, when you sit down and deal with these human problems, you realize that there are grains of am truth in almost anything people say, even when we have seemingly contradictory statements.
So...
We all learn in the same way
We are all different
And never the twain shall meet! But wait, let's look more closely. What we have is:
Our cognitive mechanisms, brains, bodies are virtually identical, so they encode and process information in ways that are not substantially different.
We have different values, different experiences, different inputs, and different environment(s). The ways these inputs interact with the mechanisms are relevant.
When you break it down, you see the differences fade away. There is no paradox, it's all about the angle at which you hold the camera.
Can we go further? Let's take kids who have experienced quite significant trauma and deprivation, or who are simply neurodiverse - even these people will process information in virtually identical ways. The differences are less important than the similarities. There is no "new type of brain" that functions according to an entirely different set of operational rules. If every mind were utterly unique, there would be no need for educational psychology at all.
There are parents who have sat down, normally with kids who find school tough for various reasons, and they say, "my son learns differently". I have to make the call on what to say next? Is individual difference enough to grant that statement? There is a pay-off in ethical terms. What are the costs and benefits of me accepting the statement? What are the costs to my student, if he believes “he learns differently”, and it turns out not to be true? What about the benefits of believing it?
If I want to improve equity issues, or if I want to support those who are neurodiverse, I need to know how they learn. To do that, I need to make generalizations. I need to have some rules of thumb or heuristics, so I can provide useful advice. Research helps provide these facts. The generalization "everyone learns differently" is not helpful, in my view. Even if it was true, it doesn't really give much useful information on how to proceed as an educator.
Scarce are the people who deliberately set out to deceive people. Let's assume these findings are in good faith and make the most of them to keep things more straightforward in the classroom.
There will be times when someone says something at point of time A, that turns out, in retrospect, to be false. One peeve of mine, is to accuse that person of lying. Being wrong is not the same a lying. Lies are about deliberate misdirection and obfuscation. Nobody was lying when they insisted that the Earth circled the sun. They were just wrong. Nobody thinks people who spoke about learning styles and multiple intelligences were lying, but they were wrong.
Nobody is lying now when they said everyone learns differently, but they are wrong.
Here's where I get to the point of this blog. I can be fighting for equity and inclusion, but I am not doing it in the same way as you. It's not that I don't care about inclusion and equity; it's that I think education has been getting it wrong.
Too often, I see teachers jumping on other teachers' feeds with snidey comments about equity and inclusion, calling people racist or authoritarian or whatever moniker designates "morally odious" in that particular circumstance for differing even slightly from recieved wisdom. Such name-calling and assumptions of bad faith, are damaging the discourse. The ONLY way society and education can progress is if we listen to and learn from people who are dealing with the same problems, but taking a different perspective on them. We need new ideas. Something needs to change. Could you think just for half a second that maybe, just maybe, your attempts to help are doing more harm than good?
Now more than ever, people of different political persuasions need to come together and form a new consensus. One quite useful starting point would be to consider what D Willingham put in his tweet the other day: We are more similar than we are different!
Facts exclude. They exclude falsity. The Earth is round - we exclude the possibility that the earth is triangular, rectangular, or shaped like the gingerbread man... until further evidence is supplied. But well... that ain't gonna change, is it? When we start talking about education, things get trickier.
Education is a complex business because it involves an interaction between the learner - the kids - what they bring to school every day, who they are, what barriers and challenges they face - and what we want them to learn - the knowledge & skills *we* (adults, society, school) have decided are important.
Cognitive science is making inroads into educational discourse, and with it, it's presenting facts about how children learn, how they acquire knowledge and skill. Cognitive science doesn't distinguish based on race or background, and rightly so. Science generalizes about how all people learn. Therefore, some will think it ignores the differences between individuals and their circumstances. If you ignore differences, you are anti-equity so it all gets very political, very quickly.
Yet when we unpack this, who is anti-equity here? If you are saying to me that a child's background, their suffering, their trauma, and their life experiences are not just barriers to learning, but actually mean they learn differently, then I say you are the one who is anti-equity. The difference for me is, barriers and circumstances can always be overcome --- to some degree. Yes, sometimes people need a leg up, they need you to hold the ladder for them, but everyone is capable of some level of academic achievement. Will everyone reach the same academic level? No, but who would want that? Boring. Nobody wants a society full of academics. But equally, nobody should decide that anyone's barriers make them incapable of accessing and acquiring the fruits of humanity's collective wisdom.
Personalization is the status quo - differentiation is the norm; we hear that each child is unique, and we should meet their individual needs. So I appreciate that hearing "we don't learn differently," will rock some people's foundations a little bit. Education is a complex phenomenon that admits of nuance and subtle shades of grey. However, that doesn't mean that some of the old ideas from university education departments aren't demonstrably wrong - the idea we all learn differently is one of those old and wrong ideas.
A lot of what happens in a Principal's office is mitigating and managing nuance. Here's what we know about how people learn, and here's how we can use this to help your child. This statement is only possible if we are able to generalise about things. The generalizations we make, the truths we are able to hold, the useful heuristics, these hold great emancipatory potential if applied correctly.
There is a very human tendency for people to want to be right, with the other (probably bad) guy being wrong. Many bullying cases follow this structure. There needs to be a victim and victimized—the guilty and the damned, good and evil, right and wrong. And yet, when you sit down and deal with these human problems, you realize that there are grains of am truth in almost anything people say, even when we have seemingly contradictory statements.
So...
We all learn in the same way
We are all different
And never the twain shall meet! But wait, let's look more closely. What we have is:
Our cognitive mechanisms, brains, bodies are virtually identical, so they encode and process information in ways that are not substantially different.
We have different values, different experiences, different inputs, and different environment(s). The ways these inputs interact with the mechanisms are relevant.
When you break it down, you see the differences fade away. There is no paradox, it's all about the angle at which you hold the camera.
Can we go further? Let's take kids who have experienced quite significant trauma and deprivation, or who are simply neurodiverse - even these people will process information in virtually identical ways. The differences are less important than the similarities. There is no "new type of brain" that functions according to an entirely different set of operational rules. If every mind were utterly unique, there would be no need for educational psychology at all.
There are parents who have sat down, normally with kids who find school tough for various reasons, and they say, "my son learns differently". I have to make the call on what to say next? Is individual difference enough to grant that statement? There is a pay-off in ethical terms. What are the costs and benefits of me accepting the statement? What are the costs to my student, if he believes “he learns differently”, and it turns out not to be true? What about the benefits of believing it?
If I want to improve equity issues, or if I want to support those who are neurodiverse, I need to know how they learn. To do that, I need to make generalizations. I need to have some rules of thumb or heuristics, so I can provide useful advice. Research helps provide these facts. The generalization "everyone learns differently" is not helpful, in my view. Even if it was true, it doesn't really give much useful information on how to proceed as an educator.
Scarce are the people who deliberately set out to deceive people. Let's assume these findings are in good faith and make the most of them to keep things more straightforward in the classroom.
There will be times when someone says something at point of time A, that turns out, in retrospect, to be false. One peeve of mine, is to accuse that person of lying. Being wrong is not the same a lying. Lies are about deliberate misdirection and obfuscation. Nobody was lying when they insisted that the Earth circled the sun. They were just wrong. Nobody thinks people who spoke about learning styles and multiple intelligences were lying, but they were wrong.
Nobody is lying now when they said everyone learns differently, but they are wrong.
Here's where I get to the point of this blog. I can be fighting for equity and inclusion, but I am not doing it in the same way as you. It's not that I don't care about inclusion and equity; it's that I think education has been getting it wrong.
Too often, I see teachers jumping on other teachers' feeds with snidey comments about equity and inclusion, calling people racist or authoritarian or whatever moniker designates "morally odious" in that particular circumstance for differing even slightly from recieved wisdom. Such name-calling and assumptions of bad faith, are damaging the discourse. The ONLY way society and education can progress is if we listen to and learn from people who are dealing with the same problems, but taking a different perspective on them. We need new ideas. Something needs to change. Could you think just for half a second that maybe, just maybe, your attempts to help are doing more harm than good?
Now more than ever, people of different political persuasions need to come together and form a new consensus. One quite useful starting point would be to consider what D Willingham put in his tweet the other day: We are more similar than we are different!
I’d extend it and say that similarity applies not only to how we learn, but how we live our lives. Most people care about equity, have compassion for the least privileged, and want outstanding opportunities for everyone. They might disagree on the means, but the ends are the same. We want everyone to flourish, be well educated, have decent chances, and be successful. Trust each other, belief in each other, we aren't so far apart. People who act out of hate, destruction and pathology are ill. They are not the norm, and even they need understanding and guidance.
It does mean an end to... "oh you have a hard time learning to read, let me show you why learning to read isn't necessary," type thinking. "Oh, you have a hard time with Math? Let me teach you all about mathematical mindsets, so really, you don't have to learn math". No, language and math are our cognitive tools, they don't belong to anyone one group -- different speeds, different levels, sure. But people don't learn or even think in very distinct ways.
“Everyone learns differently,” thinking is well-intentioned but mistaken; it's beautiful until it's not beautiful anymore. It's fine until the kid has to write an email to his boss or calculate his mortgage repayments, and finds that he doesn't know how to do it. This inability to access culture provokes rage, it provokes a sense of distance and difference.
It does mean an end to... "oh you have a hard time learning to read, let me show you why learning to read isn't necessary," type thinking. "Oh, you have a hard time with Math? Let me teach you all about mathematical mindsets, so really, you don't have to learn math". No, language and math are our cognitive tools, they don't belong to anyone one group -- different speeds, different levels, sure. But people don't learn or even think in very distinct ways.
“Everyone learns differently,” thinking is well-intentioned but mistaken; it's beautiful until it's not beautiful anymore. It's fine until the kid has to write an email to his boss or calculate his mortgage repayments, and finds that he doesn't know how to do it. This inability to access culture provokes rage, it provokes a sense of distance and difference.
Yet it could be prevented in so many cases by paying more attention to what we know about how people learn.
Perhaps someone assumed that angry kid learned differently, or *could not* do the same academics as everyone else; perhaps he was a genius. Nobody has the right to take the decision to say someone learns differently on behalf of a child.
So when someone says they think direct instruction works, or that it's a good idea for schools to have rules and follow through on them, or that kids need some basic shared knowledge to understand the world around them, don't immediately attack the moral basis of this view. Could we try NOT assuming people espousing this view are anti-equity or racist, and agree they just have different ideas about how REAL equality might be achieved? And then learn from each other?
So when someone says they think direct instruction works, or that it's a good idea for schools to have rules and follow through on them, or that kids need some basic shared knowledge to understand the world around them, don't immediately attack the moral basis of this view. Could we try NOT assuming people espousing this view are anti-equity or racist, and agree they just have different ideas about how REAL equality might be achieved? And then learn from each other?
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