The Digital Counter-Revolution

The di gi t al revol ut i on & t he l earni ng revol ut i on - goi ng beyond t he hype

The teacher as midwife Socrates, Rousseau and 21st
century pedagogy
According to 21st century pedagogic sagacity,
there is one overriding imperative for teachers:
Dont be the sage on the stage; be instead the
guide at the side of your pupils. Instead of
towering over their students like Platonic
philosopher kings imposing a monarchical model
of education, teachers must step down and stand
alongside their students and humbly assist them
in finding their own way along the path of
learning. The chief apostle of the new pedagogy is
Sugata Mitra, whose guidelines for teachers
demand that they set the questions for their students but refuse to answer them,
leaving the students to decide for themselves what the best answer is.
Among the shallows of 21st century online pedagogy one or two people think they see
here the ancient Socratic idea of the teacher as midwife. Let us point out to them how
very different the new view is both from the original ideas of Socrates and from those
of his modern successor: Rousseau, who gave a very elaborate description of modern
pedagogic midwifery in his 480-page book, Emile, published in 1760.
To really bring out the difference, we need to recall an idea that was even more
important for Socrates than that of the midwife: the cave. For both Socrates and
Rousseau every child is born with the ability to learn the ability to enquire and know
but they are all born into a society dominated by ignorance. The cave is Socratess
metaphor for a society blighted by the darkness of ignorance, and the role of the
teacher-midwife is to help young people find their way out of that cave.
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The distinctive feature of the pedagogic midwifery of both Socrates and Rousseau is
their understanding of the truth that children leaving the cave of ignorance were to
appreciate. In both cases the truth concerned what Socrates called the good.
Socratess great contribution to philosophy was to insist that people spend less time
arguing about the structure of the universe, and more time arguing about the values
that they are to live by. Without turning his back on what we know as the sciences, it
was obvious to him that the curriculum of the academy had to give priority to the
debate about our highest values. Although Rousseau was a fierce critic of the academy
(and of schooling in general), his pedagogy also gave priority to values, and his Emile
refers again and again to a term that has now become almost obsolete: virtue. Despite
their differences, both Socrates and Rousseau said the overriding aim of the teacher-
midwife was to help young people appreciate the truth about the highest values in
human life.
What makes 21st century pedagogy so massively different from the Socratic model is
its denial that there can be a truth about those highest values. Of course, the new
pedagogy is not blankly dismissive of the truth. The idolaters of digital technology
show no skepticism towards the truth of science or towards the authority of the facts
that self-educating students can find on Wikipedia. Their skepticism concerns only the
truth of the values that we might live by.
This is not something peculiar to pedagogy; rather the pedagogues are simply
affirming the dominant scientific view of where truth lies: Truth lies in the theoretical
explanation of observable facts. The truth conceived in this way is impersonal and
discursive, and so is cut off decisively from any personal experience of value. 21st
century pedagogy simply takes this economy of the truth for granted and rests its case
on it, ignoring all the voices that, for centuries now, have been raised against it.
The consequence of this is that 21st century pedagogy turns the Socratic method on its
head. Instead of helping young people leave the cave of social ignorance it ensures that
they stay inside. Our cave (very different from Athenian one, but a cave nevertheless) is
one where the prevailing dogma insists that we cannot know the good. Ignorance is
now official policy. Each of us can enjoy ourselves pursuing our ideas of the good, but
none of us should presume that there is any knowledge here a truth that might
convince people that they would be right to challenge the rule of the 21st century
technocrats. If we look carefully at where the 21st century pedagogic midwives are
standing, we will see them guarding the exits of the cave. Anyone who thinks there is a
way out must be turned back; any children who get the idea into their young heads
that there might be a truth to live by is taught, with all the tenderness of the post-
modern midwife, to confess their ignorance.
The best example here is Sugata Mitras idea of outdoctrination. Education ought to
outdoctrinate, he says. To illustrate how that is supposed to work lets imagine the
following situation: A teenage boy is studying at a school in Salford in the UK with a
teacher who is assiduously following the guidelines Mitra laid down for his self-
organising learning environments. As the school year progresses the teacher notices
that the boy is spending less and less time in his allotted group and has drifted off on
his own where he has become immersed in something. In a quiet moment, the teacher
manages to get him to explain. The boy (who has read Platos Republic and has a
taste for metaphors) says that he has slowly come to see his class and the
neighbourhood in Salford and the dark cacophony broadcast on television as
disturbingly cave-like. He says he has been googling desperately to find a way out of
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this dark place, and he has come across the life and ideas of Yukio Mishima. He is
certain now that Mishima is showing him the way, the truth and the life. He has
started going regularly to the gym, and the once flabby Salford dreamer is becoming a
lean self-taught Samurai warrior.
What does the 21st century follower of Sugata Mitra do when she sees the local boy
from Salford turning Japanese? She might not be sure of the means to employ, but the
objective prescribed by 21st century pedagogy is clear: She must get the boy to see that
although Mishima had some interesting ideas, they were just interesting ideas things
to be entertained by, not reasons to turn Japanese. And she might hope the boy comes
to see those ideas as the ideas of a rather unpleasant and problematic character a
man who could not come to terms with the modern world a man we ought to
criticise rather than follow. And so the boy who had been looking for the light beyond
the Salford cave is brought back to the group huddled in the half-light around its
tablet of silicon.
There is a strange dialectic of openness here (the one described by Allan Bloom back in
the 1980s). If the discourse were able to use the word virtue, it would call openness
the highest virtue, and the completely outdoctrinated person is supposed to be a
paragon of openness. But openness at its best like the openness of the boy in Salford
is an openness to the truth an openness in which things experienced as being true
can have a profound, life-changing effect. Without at least the hope that there might
be a truth out there, openness degenerates into a new kind of closure the closure of
the person who is content with his cave, believing that there can be nothing of any
great significance beyond it. It is immensely entertaining to watch the flickering
images of the outside projected onto the walls of the cave, but none of them can
possibly be taken seriously.
What sounds radical initially turns out to be utterly conservative something that
Herbert Marcuse would have called a one-dimensional pedagogy. Socrates, by
contrast, was a genuinely radical figure, and he paid for his radicalism with his life.
Rousseau, too, was a vehement critic of the anti-pedagogic Parisian culture (the
culture of a city he said France would have been better off without), and he insisted
that the only place to give Emile the education he deserves was somewhere far from
the influences of the modern city.
Neither Sugata Mitra nor Ken Robinson need to worry about being forced to drink
hemlock. Behind the rousing talk of a learner revolution is a resounding affirmation of
the dominant trends in society (trends that rest on an epistemic dogmatism), and all
their critical ire is expended on things like brick and mortar schools that arent
keeping up with the times. Socrates was condemned for allegedly corrupting the youth
for leading them to question the prevailing untruth in the name of a new
understanding of the truth. How very different things are now. Sugata Mitra wants to
see the children studying genetics, keeping them connected to the internet (the 21st
century equivalent of Rousseaus Paris) feverishly teaching themselves about
recombinant DNA. And Ken Robinson wants young people to slip effortlessly and
uncomplainingly into the economy, finding something to do there that combines
talent and passion (and here it is assumed that even the lucky ones need not be
troubled by the rightness or goodness of the life they are leading and the system they
are lending their support to).
The problem here is not that the pedagogy of people like Sugata Mitra and Ken
Robinson is not radical enough (as if radicalism itself were an indicator of truth); nor
is the problem that it is insufficiently Socratic (as if the Platonic texts were sacred
measures of what is right and wrong); no, the problem, quite simply, is that it is bad
midwifery.
The essence of a good educational midwife is a sensitivity to the most profound needs
of the students a sensitivity to something inchoate within them that needs some
teacherly guidance to help raise it to consciousness and become articulate. Allan
Bloom puts it this way: Attention to the young, knowing what their hungers are and
what they can digest, is the essence of the craft. One must spy out and elicit those
hungers. For there is no real education that does not respond to felt need; anything
else acquired is trifling display.
Are there not intelligent hungers among the young that 21st century pedagogy
dogmatically dismisses? Among those who have not yet been sucked into a thoughtless
and overly commercialised culture are there not signs of a need for something that can
be experienced as true? If so, how can a 21st century educational midwife justify
ignoring such hungers as these? We hate to say it, but there is a risk here of midwives
becoming abortionists.
A single example of the need being dismissed: At the time of writing over 33 million
people have watched one version of the Lilly Allen song Fear on YouTube. Its a song
which, for all its disposable and inarticulate poppiness, dances around the moral void
of the modern epistemic landscape. As the chorus puts it:
I dont know whats right and whats real anymore
And I dont know how Im meant to feel anymore
And when do you think it will all become clear?
Cause Im being taken over by the fear.
(The complete lyrics are here.)
Lilly sings about the fake usurping the real in a world where image is everything a
world in which it is impossible to know whats right and whats real anymore. When
will it all become clear? For sensitive midwives in the tradition of Rousseau and
Socrates, these are the big issues (bigger than anything going on in genetics), and Lilly
is giving voice to an intelligent need that is ignored not only by current schooling but
also by the unschooling being proposed by 21st century pedagogy.
There is a need here for a better kind of educational midwifery. To the young people
who are searching for whats right and whats real, the most tweeted pedagogues
say: There is nothing to search for. Look at Gillian Lyne, for instance, she wasnt
looking for the truth, she was just developing her talent and becoming rich and
famous in the process. Do the same, and everything will be fine. But a better
midwifery than this is possible one that takes the deepest concerns of the young
about the way we are living and helps them become as thoughtful and reflective as
possible, connecting them to the works and ideas of people from the past who have
been moved by precisely these concerns. In all probability the result will not be the
clarity that Lilly Allen imagines, but rather a better understanding of the lack of
clarity an understanding that has no blueprint for the future, but that nevertheless
understands the importance of finding a better way of life.
There is no question here of teachers copying either Socrates or Rousseau. There can
be no going back even if it were desirable. The landscape has changed. In Rousseaus
day, for instance, things seemed to be easier. You just had to ensure that the child was
far from the cultural clutches of Paris, and nature could more or less be left to take its
course. Now the city limits of Paris encompass the entire globe. There is no escape.
And in such a situation educational midwifery will inevitably be different and harder
to accomplish. Rather than following Rousseaus Emile, we need to completely rewrite
it, but we need to do it in the spirit of Rousseau, which was the spirit of a dedicated,
undogmatic educational midwife who is sensitive to the deepest intelligent needs of
the young.
Although we dont yet have a new Emile (and there are huge obstacles to instituting a
form of education that questions the prevailing epistemic dogma), one feature of the
new education would seem to be clear: it will be more Delphic. The whole process of
raising the young persons most profound intelligent needs to consciousness
reconnects with the ancient Delphic imperative to know ourselves. Here, the new
educational midwives will be correcting the error described so well by Camille Paglia,
who saw young people leaving school technically skilled but drifting helplessly in a sea
of unknowing, cut off from a living tradition of self-enquiry and self-knowledge.
The need for an education like this is not just personal, in the depths of the individual
student, but also historical. Looking back at history, we see we have been living in a
series of caves. Our own society, where truth and meaning have parted company, is no
exception. There is no hope of leaving this cave if there is not a shared enquiry about
who or what we are, about where we have come from, and where we are going. At the
moment that enquiry is thwarted by its fragmentation into a science dogmatically cut
off from experience and an art whose claim to truth is being denied. A new, more
thoughtful culture of enquiry is needed to overcome that fragmentation. And if the
new midwifery ever comes to pass it is to be hoped that it will prepare the ground for
that more thoughtful shared enquiry about those ultimate questions.
written by Torn Halves on December 23, 2013 in education and Ken Robinson and pedagogy and
Sugata Mitra and Uncategorized with one Comment
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One Response to The teacher as midwife Socrates, Rousseau
and 21st century pedagogy
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In both cases the truth concerned what Socrates called the good. Socratess great
contribution to philosophy was to insist that people spend less time arguing about the
structure of the universe, and more time arguing about the values that they are to live by.
That was contributed long before Socrates by the Vedantists. Sankhya on the other hand
dealt with structure of the universe. The two schools combined form the basis of the Yoga
philosophy.
January 13, 2014 at 12:47 am
Krishna Conscious

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WHY SO COUNTER REVOLUTION?
If this were a genuine revolution that
might put an end once and for all to
man's inhumanity to man, we would sign
up immediately, take up arms and join
the fight. But, as we see it, it raises no
such hopes. Instead, the talk of
revolution sounds more like hype that
conceals the offline growth of
corporations, the money economy, and a
technological colossus that puts pseudo
forms individuality in place of a deeper
and more meaningful reconciliation
between the overly stressed ego and the
world from which it has been estranged.
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