Minds Are Like Parachutes
Why not start with an effective instructional orientation and tweak it rather than doubling down on ineffective pedagogy?
One more set of quotes from Learning from Others:
Both credulity and skepticism are adaptive. Credulity is adaptive in that it allows children to learn new things. Children constantly face new technology (airplanes fly, despite what common sense tells us), new cultural belief systems (religious, historical), etc. Credulity can also be considered having an open mind. As the bumper sticker goes, "Minds are like parachutes: They only function when open." On the other hand, skepticism is adaptive, given the many ways in which adult input misleads, intentionally or not, by means of deception, fiction, metaphor, and just plain old mistakes. A capacity for skepticism shields children from misleading input.
It's worth noticing, I think, how guide-on-the-side thinking in education goes very much against this natural grain. What the above tells us is something all of us already intuit—that people are more or less hardwired to learn from knowledgeable others (credulity is adaptive). Yet the whole purpose behind a guide-on-the-side orientation is to minimize this input. Why?
One fundamental reason—going back to Freire and not said much out loud anymore (if it ever was)—is that knowledge transfer from knowledgeable adults is presumed to enforce uncritical, consensus thinking. But this ignores people's (also hardwired) capacity for skepticism mentioned above, and below:
Harris & Koenig (2006) emphasize the "constructive role" children play in "reworking and organizing the various pieces of testimony that they receive." In other words, children show healthy skepticism of expert input. By 4 years of age, children are skeptical of statements made by a speaker who previously said untrue things—an ability all the more remarkable when one considers how difficult it is for children and adults to monitor the source of a piece of information.
What's most interesting about the hard-to-justify Freirean complaint, though—that learning from knowledgeable others indefeasibly imposes those others' views on the learner—is that it basically admits to the superior effectiveness (and naturalness) of knowledge transfer from knowledgeable adults. That is, it's not that knowledge transfer doesn't work; it's that it works too well.
Although one might expect children to be deep-down empiricists, believing most powerfully in what they can see, this is not the case. Testimony at times effectively overrides children's own perceptions.
Why not then start with an effective instructional orientation and tweak it to minimize any damaging side effects, rather than doubling down on ineffective and unnatural pedagogy?
It is a truism that children learn from those around them. Yet what does this mean? On the one hand, children are not solitary learners, independently figuring out the world from first principles, reinventing the proverbial wheel with each new generation. But on the other hand, neither are children passive sponges, absorbing whatever they see and hear. Along with the importance of the words and testimony of others is the importance of an evaluative child, judging and assessing the nature and relevance of the information coming in.
