relative worth of the meanings that human beings make or the desires that drive them to do so”
because each meaning is equally an outgrowth of the same basic element: power.^18
This idea may be motivated by a sincere desire for advancing equality and by a genuine concern
for society’s unfairly marginalized groups, yet it has the unintended consequence of making
rational debate and compromise meaningless. If students are convinced they are merely“repre-
sentatives”of a marginalized group, and opinions–including the instructor’s–are merely covert
assertions of power, then there is little reason for students to be moderate when advancing their own
opinions or the interests of whichevergroup or sub-group with which they identify. Students will no
longer come to class as individuals thirsty for new and foreign insights into the meaning of life, they
will come as delegates.
The more a classroom resembles a gathering of delegates speaking on behalf of the groups they
represent, the less congenial a place it becomes in which to explore questions of a personally
meaningful kind including, above all, the question of what ultimately matters in life and why.
In such classrooms, students encounter each other not as individuals but as spokespersons
instead.^19Kronman’s analysis may help explain why students on some North American campuses have
become increasingly less tolerant of academic freedom and free speech, more willing to shout down
rather than listen respectfully to invited speakers with whom they disagree, and why a proportion of
them are becominglessfit for life in a democratic republic or parliamentary democracy.^20
In addition, there is evidence that the new strategies modeled on twenty-first-century education
theory are less effective than are traditional strategies when it comes to developing deep learning.
Psychologists Kirschner, Sweller, and Clark’s analysis of discovery-learning concludes that,
although unguided or minimally guided instructional approaches are very popular and
intuitively appealing, the point is made that these approaches ignore both our cognitive
architecture and evidence from empirical studies over the past half-century that consistently
indicate that minimally guided instruction is less effective and less efficient than instructional
approaches that place a strong emphasis on guidance of the student learning process.^21Minimal guidance learning overloads the student’s short-term cognitive functions and frustrates the
development of conceptual skills and deep learning.“Everything we see, hear, and think about is
critically dependent on and influenced by our long-term memory.”^22 It does the learner little good if
the information they need to build upon is stored on Google servers rather than in their own
memory. They cannot merely“look”up the facts that form the schema into which the new facts they
are learning must be fitted.“Minimally guided instruction,”these authors conclude,“appears to
proceed with no reference to the characteristics of working memory, long-term memory, or the
intricate relations between them.”^23
And work done over the last thirty years by E.D. Hirsch and the Core Knowledge initiative
supports these findings:
The central insight of Core Knowledge is the scientific finding that language comprehension
requires a mountain of unseen shared knowledge that is not spoken–a kind of dark energy that
governs verbal comprehension. The schools’neglect of this hidden knowledge has depressed
language competence and perpetuated inequality.^24A sizable portion of the knowledge a student requires in order to develop deep learning must
already be available in the form of stored information–facts and dates, for example–in long-term
memory rather than information that is stored in an external source, like an internet database.
84 David W. Livingstone