Modes of Learning , livre ebook

Modes of Learning
Whitehead's Metaphysics and the Stages of Education
George Allan

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2012 State University of New York
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Allan, George, 1935–
Modes of learning : Whitehead's metaphysics and the stages of education / George Allan.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-4187-0 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Whitehead, Alfred North, 1861–1947. 2. Education—Philosophy. I. Title.
LB775.W4642A45 2012
370.1—dc23
2011021200
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Disinterested scientific curiosity is a passion for an ordered intellectual vision of the connection of events. But the goal of such curiosity is the marriage of action to thought…. Education should turn out the pupil with something he knows well and something he can do well. This intimate union of practice and theory aids both. The intellect does not work best in a vacuum.
—Alfred North Whitehead, The Aims of Education
Whatever is found in ‘practice’ must lie within the scope of the metaphysical description. When the description fails to include the ‘practice,’ the metaphysics is inadequate and requires revision. There can be no appeal to practice to supplement metaphysics, so long as we remain contented with our metaphysical doctrines. Metaphysics is nothing but the description of the generalities which apply to all the details of practice…. No metaphysical system can hope entirely to satisfy these pragmatic tests. At the best such a system will remain only an approximation to the general truths which are sought.
—Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality
Introduction
There is nothing more important than a good education—the kind of education needed in order to become a good person and a good citizen, a responsible adult member of political, cultural, and natural communities. In this book I will explore, by means of the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, these interrelated notions and their metaphysical conditions.
Although the specifics have changed over the centuries, a key claim about a good education has been that it has two stages. First, students should be taught the basic skills necessary for learning about anything, no matter what it is. Then, second, they should be taught a specialized field of inquiry. In the medieval European universities, students first learned the trivium—the general subjects of grammar, logic, and rhetoric—and then the quadrivium—the basic sciences of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. This two-stage sequence is echoed today, although only faintly, in the distinction between elementary and secondary education, or at the university level between general education courses and those that constitute a major field of concentration.
Process philosophers of education, following Whitehead's suggestions in two short chapters from The Aims of Education , re-express this traditional sequence as a cyclic rhythm of three learning stages rather than as a two-stage linear development. These chapters, a 1922 essay on “The Rhythm of Education” and an essay the next year on “The Rhythmic Claims of Freedom and Discipline,” run to a total of only twenty-six pages. Yet they develop what is probably the most frequently mentioned of all Whitehead's ideas: that education has a rhythmic structure to which teachers should be sensitive.
In his first essay, Whitehead cites the “truism” that “different subjects and modes of study should be undertaken by pupils at fitting times when they have reached the proper stages of mental development” (“Rhythm” 15), then parses the “fitting times” as having to do with “rhythmic” stages of a pupil's “mental growth.” He organizes these stages into a “threefold cycle,” which he likens, tongue in cheek, to Hegel's dialectic of thesis-antithesis-synthesis, labeling them as the stages of Romance, Precision, and Generalization (17).
Education, Whitehead argues, “should consist in a continual repetition of such cycles” (19). He then applies these three cyclical stages to infant and adolescent learning, and makes some comments about university education. He concludes with a warning that the stages are not linear but concurrent: each stage marks merely “a distinction of emphasis, of pervasive quality”—an “alternation of dominance”—in a process where all three are “present throughout” (28).
In his second essay, Whitehead elaborates these same points with a few minor differences. He characterizes the three stages as marked respectively by “freedom, discipline, and freedom” (“Rhythmic Claims” 31). Then he emphasizes that the cycle of stages recurs in differing ways in different educational situations, as “minor eddies” in ever wider contexts, “running its course in each day, in each week, and in each term” (38), as well as composing the way by which a formal educational curriculum should be organized and, indeed, by which a person's whole life should be structured. “Education,” Whitehead concludes, “is the guidance of the individual towards a comprehension of the art of life” (39).
Romance, precision, and generalization. These Whiteheadian notions have taken on a significance all out of proportion to the few oracular pages in which they are presented. Indeed, most people know of Whitehead only through secondhand versions of these notions, along with a treasure trove of phrases he used in explicating them, phrases that are cryptic enough to make wonderful epigrams for books or papers on educational practices, or as titles for conferences on current issues in education. I suspect this interest is a function of their vagueness, their utility as a way to suggest a wide variety of ideas about the dynamics of learning, enough to generate an interesting exchange of differing views. This suggestiveness is especially attractive for those who reject the excessively modular ways in which contemporary education is imagined and implemented, and who are looking desperately for a few countervailing quotes with which to indicate their distress.
These opportunistic uses and misuses of Whitehead's ideas about education raise a serious question. Are his ideas merely so much rhetorical bling, a convenient way to add a bit of glitter to one's substantive discussion of important educational issues? Or do they get us to the heart of such issues, cutting through the dross of tired ideas and the cant of the standard educational jargon they spawn? Is Whitehead's philosophy a new way of saying the same old things about teaching and learning, or does it offer a transformative fresh insight into the nature and function of education?
For those who know Whitehead's philosophy well, the quotability status that the rhythm of education has among educators raises this same serious question in a different manner. The antidote to the ineffectiveness of schools and universities that is proposed by educators influenced by Whitehead's thought is the admonition to think holistically; to embrace relational theories about facts, ideas, and persons, and about how intellectual understanding and mature selfhood develop. It is not quite clear, however, how these relational approaches are connected to Whitehead's philosophy of education, except for the minimalist observation that the iterated rhythm of romance-precision-generalization is indeed relational. What is the relation of Whitehead's educational notions to his metaphysics? Are the two little talks in The Aims of Education marginalia of no concern to the serious work of attempting to understand Whitehead's metaphysics? Or are his metaphysics and his philosophy of education intimately connected, each an implication of the other?
The aim of this book is to provide plausible, and I think interesting, answers to both these kinds of questions. I will argue that a careful examination of Whitehead's metaphysics reveals aspects of his views about the stages of learning that we are not otherwise likely to notice. And conversely, I will suggest ways in which Whitehead's stages of learning reveal aspects of his metaphysics often misconstrued or ignored by Whiteheadian scholars. I hope to show that Whitehead's ideas about the modes of learning can and should be educationally transformative because they reflect a transformative metaphysical understanding of the world and how it functions.
Chapter 1 presents the standard understanding of romance, precision, and generalization developed in Whitehead's two chapters in The Aims of Education . The conversation between this standard view and Whitehead's metaphysical writings begins in chapter 2 , with a comparison of the stages of learning and the notions of Beauty, Truth, and Art developed in Adventures of Ideas . This inquiry suggests a further comparison, explored in chapter 3 , between his three stages and the theory of knowledge explicated in Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect . From there we turn to the dynamics of world history, exploring in chapter 4 how the tension between romance and precision that generalization resolves is like the tension between speculative and practical reason that in The Function of Reason is resolved by what Whitehead calls the “Greek Discovery.” We then embrace the whole of our cosmic epoch in chapter 5 by relating the stages of education to implications of the interplay between the ultimate notions of matter-of-fact a