We covered a lot of intellectual terrain this week. Rather than dig into the particulars of Locke, Descartes or Rousseau in this post, instead I'm going to ask you to think about these three ways of thinking about human nature and humans as knowers broadly:
1. How do they relate to/differ from each other?
2. Do you see these ways of thinking operational today within the realm of education? You might also consider whether the differences that exist between these philosophies relate to any tensions you see evident today.
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ReplyDeleteJohn Locke was an Empiricist. He believed that the mind was a blank slate (“tabula rasa”) on which we write our ideas which are based upon our experiences. We are born without innate ideas and so, for Locke, knowledge is determined by experience which is gained through our senses, by following examples and by practice.
ReplyDeleteRene Descartes was a Rationalist. He believed that human reasoning is the essential component to knowing… “I think, therefore I am.” According to Descartes, if your senses have been deceived then you may have gained faulty knowledge via these flawed experiences. Knowledge for Descartes entailed “convictions;” knowledge based on perfect certainty and a complete absence of doubt. (Does that mean Descartes equates absolute certainty with truth or does it mean that he doesn’t believe in “truth”?)
Rousseau was a Romanticist who believed in humans’ basic goodness before they are corrupted by society. He believed that young learners should be active participants in their own learning and driven by their own interests, not receptacles for others’ beliefs and opinions. We see this in experiential, “play” based early childhood education programs and in “hands on,” experience oriented classrooms. Rousseau was a (the?) founder of developmental education and believed that children (to about age 12) are guided by their emotions and impulses and don’t begin to develop reason until ages 12 to 16. In some ways, this seems to be an integration of Locke's empiricism and Descartes' rationalism. I am less clear on Rousseau’s ideas about the development of knowledge in adulthood…Based on the reading, is he saying that inequality is the result of society’s corruption of human nature via the development of knowledge (p. 722)? Does he believe it is inevitable that “the savage man” ceases to exist as he develops social needs which make him weak and dependent? Is the experience of knowledge for adults necessarily “bad” in his opinion?
I feel like we explored this prompt pretty thoroughly during class last night, so I thought I would throw out some questions that came to my mind during our conversation.
ReplyDelete--What role does the body/the senses/Descartes' mind-body split play in learning? How has the understanding of this role and its effect on learning changed since Descartes and Locke's times?
--It seems to me like most of today's teaching is based on Locke's ideas of learning (blank late upon which the school/teacher writes) rather than Descartes' (personal experience leads to learning). Is my understanding correct?
--What does Kant have to say about learning and education in his synthesis of Locke and Descartes?
Ginger
(I also have some thought-experiment questions about animals and learning, but I'll keep them to myself because they're crazy.)
DeleteDoesn't sound crazy. Sounds interesting.
Delete1. From my understanding, both Locke and Descartes operated in quests for truth, Locke’s truth based on experience and Descartes’ truth based on reasoning. I’m unclear on Rousseau’s ideas about truth and knowledge seeking, but his ideas about education seem less the most dissimilar of the three. He focuses on the whole of human experience, rather than a pointed path, as a basis of education. Rousseau also seems the most skeptical of the three regarding the value of education (even of experience), but that may be because, of the three, he’s the only one that situated learning in a social context.
ReplyDelete2. With that understanding, Rousseau’s take on education is, in my experience, the farthest removed from how education is generally carried out today. I think his ideals are incorporated into more exploratory and experiential models of teaching and learning; Locke’s ideas, in particular, seem to have more influence on how learning is both carried out and how it is measured on a large scale.
Descartes’ approach to knowledge-seeking is also extremely prevalent. I’m reading Cosmopolis by Stephen Toulmin for this class, and Toulmin sums up pretty well how Descartes’ thinking influenced (and still does) both philosophy and education and educational research:
“Descartes persuaded his fellow philosophers to renounce fields of study like ethnography, history, or poetry, which are rich in context and content, and to concentrate exclusively on abstract, decontextualized fields like geometry, dynamics, and epistemology. From then on, the focus of my (Toulmin’s) research was the 17th-century move from a partly practical to a purely theoretical view of philosophy” (p. x).
So, from this we have generalizable knowledge and universal truths trumping content-rich descriptions of what happens in everyday life to everyday individuals. I see this in standardized education that fails to consider the differences in backgrounds and experiences of students and in the insistence on empirical research methods that show statistically viable, but often locally unreliable, results / truths about how people learn.
I liked two quotes from the passage about Rousseau: “We begin to learn when we begin to live” “We must, therefore, take a wide view and consider our pupil as a man, not as some particular kind of man.”
In my field of second language acquisition, this understanding is key. Without an understanding of pupils who can’t speak the teacher’s language as whole beings, they can easily be perceived as vacuums into which no culturally valuable knowledge can be put, because the knowledge these students already have they are unable to communicate to those who are tasked with teaching them. Toughy.
Sometimes I wish my mind WAS a tabula rasa right now… because one of the blessings, although it sometimes feels like a burden, of being in a doc program is the volume of new information that I’m continually taking in. I often don’t feel like I do any of it justice as I read, process, take notes and move on. Oh to be holed up in a room with a woodstove to process my thoughts as Descartes did…
ReplyDeleteIn terms of how these philosophers differ or are similar, I agree with Kate that Descartes and Locke are both in search of truth. It also seems as though they both begin at a place of skepticism and doubt. Descartes essentially introduced a process of skepticism. Locke believed that rational people should inquire about what can be known with certainty.
Of course the difference is the conclusions they each arrive at from their skepticism and doubt: Descartes basing his truth on reasoning and Locke, the empiricist, basing his truth on knowledge derived from experience.
These tensions continue to play out today. They exist between the hard and social sciences, within the education community between education psychologists and education philosophers, between constructivists and behaviorists, and tensions between approaches applied by the varying disciplines, for example science versus language arts. I’ll sound like a broken record here, but I’m sure Locke would be proud of today’s standardization education reform movement.
My take on Rousseau, at least in his work Emile, is that he is seeking the best way to educate the ideal citizen including providing the individual with the skills to survive a corrupt society. I appreciated his goal of teaching the person to live, and to teach more about how to survive any situation, poverty or riches, as opposed to preparing a person for a specific role or job in society. Sounds to me like the seeds of progressive education.
I agree with Tami that both Descartes and Locke begin at a place of doubt. Locke believed that "truth is hard to ascertain and that a rational man will hold his opinions with some measure of doubt." Descartes stated, "Everything I have accepted up to now as being absolutely true and assured, I have learned from or through the senses. But I have sometimes found that these senses played me false, and it is prudent never to trust entirely those who have once deceived us." I felt that the sentiments in these two statements were quite similar.
ReplyDeleteDuring class Monday we raised our hands to indicate whose theory we would "lean closer to." I was the only person who leaned toward Locke's tabula rasa. In all honesty I don't see the theories in black or white, there's quite a bit of gray. Maybe my 21st century lenses are clouding my view. I can appreciate Descartes' declaration that truth comes from reason, but I also believe that much of our knowledge comes from our experiences. I'm bringing in another class here, but aren't being exposed to new experiences and then reasoning about those experiences the basis of constructivism? I'm probably way out in left field, but I'm trying to see how bits and pieces from all of the early theorists fit in with our more recent theories.
At times I thought Rousseau sounded a bit radical in his views that society is corrupt, "the social order runs counter to human nature in every respect, and "the social condition is that of ongoing civil war." After reading up on his life, I understood why he felt so strongly.
They certainly can't be considered absolute truth but Rousseau had several "truisms" about life throughout Emile-
"He that is best able to bear its goods and ills is, I hold, the most truly educated; true education lies less in knowing than doing."
"He has not had most life who has lived most years, but he who has felt life the most."
"Every narrower society, if it be truly coherent, is thereby alienated from the wider society, which is mankind." (This quote made me think of all the discord in the world in the name of religion.)
I agree with Teri-- Rousseau is radical, but maybe that's why I like him. "It takes a village" to raise a child, and I am fascinated about how people consider the role of society in education (and vice-versa). While I wouldn't go as far to say that society is "corrupt," it's certainly not utopian, and we need to learn how to navigate in the society as we have it.
ReplyDeleteI also agree with Teri that neither Locke's nor Descartes' (nor anyone else's!) philosophies are black and white. There is a lot of gray — and while people generally try to take the aspects that they "like" (or that apply to them) to create their own views, I think we could (and should?) do that as well with philosophies of learning.
These philosophies certainly apply to today. Granted, most likely in a gray and combined form. While I'd like to say that Locke is more applicable, saying that we learn through experience (the most I remember about kindergarten is the centers, where we got to explore on our own), reason is more how curriculum is derived today. But when can we really expect children to start using reason as the basis of learning?
(Also, I'm with Ginger... I'd like to explore Kant a little.)