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Notes

Educated Person Exercise

Header image: KF photo – Alex Janvier’s Morning Star

Coulter, D., & Wiens, J. R. (2008). Prologue: Why do we educate? Renewing the Conversation. Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education, 107(1), 5–18. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1744-7984.2008.00126.x

  • David Coulter EDST Emeritus: Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of Teacher Education
    • His research interests focus on understanding and fostering educational judgment

The Educated Person Exercise

  • “makes us feel big and important”
  • “humble”
  • “only has a Grade 8 education, speaks very little English, and doesn’t go out much except to church”
  • “acts like everything I do is special.”
  • “When I’m with her I feel I have her total attention.”
  • “non-judgmental”
  • “he’ll share stories about things in her life, and I’ll figure out later that she was giving me advice in a kind, gentle way, but she doesn’t expect me to acknowledge that or thank her for it.”

{DFN} [People] who wonder about the world they inhabit [KF: Roy]. Many are voracious readers who devour books, magazines, and newspapers. For some the Internet is indeed a worldwide web connecting them with others; they use it to ask serious questions of themselves and others. They are deeply curious, continuously striving to learn about what they believe matters, and as a result they know and understand something about a great deal and a great deal about some things. They tell stories about people who have confronted tragedy with dignity and resolve, who insist on caring for others, often to their own detriment.

The educated people our audiences describe attempt to make a difference in the lives of others: they use their knowledge and understanding in their engagements with other citizens, listen respectfully and thoughtfully, and act with honesty and diplomacy. In other words, they exhibit certain traits of character.

  • “A word we frequently heard is “caring,” but other virtues regularly listed include courage, integrity, and passion”
  • “Indeed, one commonly mentioned characteristic, a sense of humor, puzzled us for a long time until we linked it to another trait: humility”
  • “do not hold on to certainties, including their own, too tightly (or seriously).”
  • “Finally, we are struck by a glaring omission: formal schooling.”
    • “Some educated people have a great deal of formal schooling; others do not”

Schools are, of course, institutions intended to further education, but conflating schooling and education risks confusing means and ends.

Our audiences consistently separate the two: not only were educated people not necessarily well-schooled, but well-schooled people were not always deemed to be educated.

{DFN} education as involving both the acquisition of knowledge and understanding and the formation of character in order to live a good life in concert with other human beings.

Parents generally want their children to grow up to be happy, fulfilled adults. Indeed, education’s Latin root, educare, that is, to lead out, captures the responsibility of piloting children from the private world of the family into the public adult world. Determining the character of that public world and figuring how, when, and whether to help children contribute to it is the very stuff of education.

“writing” KF: return to this

education as promoting eudaimonia, a concept that has no precise modern equivalent in English. Usually translated as happiness, other renditions include wellbeing and human flourishing.

Our own preference is to translate eudaimonia as a good and worthwhile life (we insert “worthwhile” to distinguish this translation from “the good life” as demonstrated by the acquisition of material goods). The Educated Person Exercise seems to tap into this understanding of education

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Dramatically oversimplified, Socrates and Plato emphasize the role of knowledge and understanding in guiding human action.

  • Aristotle worries that Plato’s reliance on knowledge privileges the general over the particular—theory over practice—in ways that ignore the richness and breadth of human
  • What Aristotle means by “good discrimination” signals a dramatic shift in how he understands education and is captured by his distinguishing two words for wisdom, sophia and phronesis, that Plato used interchangeably.
    • For Aristotle, people with sophia attempt to contemplate and understand the universal and sublime—they were, after all, philosophers or lovers (philos) of wisdom (sophia).

Such people know a great deal—are learned—but may be incapable of acting on their knowledge, that is, unable to cure patients. They lack a different kind of wisdom, phronesis, or practical wisdom, which involves a kind of discernment that requires both knowing the right thing to do in particular circumstances and acting accordingly.

Education for phronesis involves a kind of knowing of particulars that is only possible by being in the world with others (that is, experience) and the requisite virtues consistent with right character, partly acquired by being around people who model those dispositions. [KF: Roderick]

  • People with phronesis do the right thing the right way for the right reasons at the right time. Joe, Susan, and Ella are people attempting to be phronemos, or “practically wise” people [KF: phronemo@nym]
  • Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle all hoped to foster people who led good and worthwhile lives, understood what was true and right, and acted on that understanding,”
    • differed about how such a life could be fostered, that is, they disagreed about what counted as education
    • contemporary educational discourse emphasizes the acquisition of abstract knowledge to cultivate theoretical wisdom, usually to the neglect of the type of wisdom that involves acting in the world
      • KF: TE devalued as a result
    • In the West, Plato seems to have trumped Aristotle publicly, while Aristotle’s ideas remain alive if only in private

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In North America, for example, an [I]ndigenous Anishinabe interpretation of education would integrate bimaadziwin (the good life) with particular concerns for the traditional knowledge and spirituality of First Nations people;

An Islamic education might focus on tawhid or oneness “where all aspects of life whether spiritual or temporal are consolidated into a harmonious whole”

A Confucian education would aim to contribute to the formation of the exemplary person or junzi “who has shaped his or her basic character or disposition through the practice of appropriate conduct and ritual propriety.”

Egan, for example, shows how prevailing Western conceptions of education are based on contradictory ideas.

  • We simultaneously seek to socialize people into various existing communities, develop their unique talents, and teach them to challenge the status quo.
    • In other words, we want people to fit in, be different, and think critically. Education, so understood, is necessarily difficult and contentious.

Conflict is endemic to education and can only be avoided when everyone agrees about what constitutes a good and worthwhile life for everyone at all times in all circumstances— and then how to foster such a life…not likely.

KF: “War is the continuation of policy with other means“ : Education is the enacting and propagation of such policy

Much educational discourse…presumes that we have agreed about what counts as education and focuses on its attainment. The most pervasive example is the emergence of “learning” as a synonym for education over the last two decades.

  • Glossed over in these examples is any specification, let alone justification, of the nature of the learning at stake.

Deciding what counts as education is a political problem in that such a decision depends on determining how people live with one another both now and in the future.

Important educational questions include:

  • What are the forms of a good and worthwhile life that a society wishes to promote collectively?
  • What scope do people have to determine the direction of their own lives?
  • Which aspects are best left to individuals, families, groups, communities, and governments (however construed)?”

“Some decisions that must be regularly confronted include:

  • Do people decide directly or elect representatives who decide? (KF: CH v CAN)
  • Who is eligible to participate and who is not?
  • What limitations are placed on subject matters to be decided?
  • What happens when people cannot agree? What constitutes “agreement?”
  • If majority rule is the deciding principle, what safeguards are available for minority views?”

    The means by which a majority becomes a majority… [involves] antecedent debates, modification of views to meet the opinions of minorities…. The essential need, in other words, is the improvement of the methods and conditions of debate, discussion, and persuasion (Dewey)

    . . . time will change and even reverse many of your present opinions. Refrain, therefore, awhile from setting yourself up as a judge of the highest matters

    Plato

    • KF: Alas, this essential need is given increasingly less attention. Instead, we have keyboards, pitchforks, and petrol bombs.

    In democratic societies, education and democracy are symbiotic concepts:

    • deciding what might count as educational is a democratic problem;
    • preparing people to resolve important concerns [how] is an educational problem.

    The central educational responsibility becomes preparing people to engage with their equals in deciding how they will live together…no easy task.

    Robert Redfield described education more than fifty years ago: “If I should choose a few words to describe the endless act of creation that is education, I should choose these: Education is conversation about the meaning of life, as each sees some part of it, on behalf of everyone.”

    Nemo vir est qui mundum non reddat meliorem
    Quis homo est homo qui mundum non meliorem facit?

    KF: I’m doing this not for the love of knowledge (but I do love knowledge) but for the love of wisdom; I am in the world and my purpose is to use my abilities to try to improve it [it gives me position and direction].

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    KF: Lesson ideas

    Paired with: STW;

    Preceded by: Adjective Order Lesson (TYDKYK v TYKTJAS)

    Bridge in: Magic Show story; Intro different types of audience members

    • Debunkers
    • Demanders
    • Too cool
    • An example of an exercise where it is better if you don’t ask questions.
    • The design of the exercise intentionally leaves you with discretion.
    • Asking for clarification or following another’s example destroys the intention of the design.

    LOs / AOs

    • Hidden
    • Actual: Explore difference between education and schooling
      • All the better to interrogate “What is education?”

    Instructions

    • Review
      • What mention of formal qualifications?
      • How might being TE TCs impact your choice?
        • Might other TCs have shown a different overall response?
        • What might that indicate?
      • What of sophia/phronesis re physics/TechEd?
    • Choose a quote from the paper

    Follow-up:

    • Assign Reading: Deciding Education section?
    • Direct v representative democracy: Canada: Federal Referenda – 1898; 1942; 1992 (CH: 600 since 1848)