THE PROB LEMS OF EDUCATION ARE NOT GE NE TIC 325birds out of the air to teach them to fl y. In h is Autobiography (1876),
Charles Darwin notes that mathe matics was repugnant to him from
being devoid of meaning. School students have much the same prob lems
today with so many areas of the curriculum.
Th e prob lem is that the curriculum— what is taught, and the teaching-
learning process—is set up as a “test” of children’s general learning poten-
tial when it is really a test of social background. Researchers have noted
this immediately from the way that knowledge is specially prepared, with
special features, to be learned in certain ways, for con ve nience of testing
and then largely forgotten. Designed both to be of some obscure future
use, and as a way of sorting out children on the basis of their basic learn-
ing potential, it boils down to a test, above all else, of their motivation,
perseverance, and belief in their own ability.
One clue to this is the way that so much school knowledge is shorn of
meaningful reference to the environments, economics, and social struc-
tures of children’s actual communities, in forms that might help their de-
velopment as responsible citizens. It is abstracted, refi ned, and packaged in
a way that seems to minimize its immediate social and historical interest.
Learning theory in education— how children are thought to learn—is
haphazardly laced with a few child- centered concepts from developmental
psychologists. But it is utterly dominated, however thinly disguised, by
the traditional learning model in which individual minds are required to
memorize knowledge “chunks” to be regurgitated in tests and exams.
School learning involves what educational theorist Jerome Bruner
called “artifi cial made-up subjects.” Th ese come in specially packaged
forms, in carefully controlled time slots, modules, and formats, and in
fi xed chunks and sequences that can be reproduced in multiple- choice
or short- answer tests.
Th is form of learning is a very unusual, quite remote from knowledge
as learned and used in the social and practical world. School knowledge
is not “knowledge” as we know it in the everyday sense—as the knowl-
edge we use in work and social intercourse all the time. Nor is it knowl-
edge as we know it in the academic or scholarly sense. As a specially
packaged variety, its learning occurs as disjointed fragments and is
motivated, on the part of pupils, by long- term status goals, rather than
current intrinsic interest.
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