Constructivism II: Maps & Plans

To traverse the world men must have maps of the world.  Their persistent difficulty is to secure maps on which their own need, or someone else’s need, has not sketched in the coast of Bohemia.

This quotation from a letter of Walter Lippmann’s, “The World Outside and the Pictures in Our Heads,” has always tickled me, and over the years I have used it as the text of a final essay exam and the subject of Paideia discussions. 

I precede the Paideia by projecting a map of Bohemia to provide the most obviously needed fact, but the two sentences typically take students 40-45 minutes to decipher, much less to “apply the statement to oneself.” 

The syntax, certainly, is more complex than my students are familiar with.  It’s another example of knowledge—of syntax as well as geography—being the prerequisite to critical thinking.

Lippmann’s warning, of course, is that if our maps don’t correspond to the landscape, our travels will go awry.  Those maps won’t correspond to the terrain if they have been influenced by our desires or someone else’s.  What those desires might be is an open question.  Maybe we are unconsciously ambivalent about going to Bohemia.  Maybe our parents or spouses or children or friends don’t want us traveling there.  Maybe someone we trust has issues we’re not aware of.  Maybe we’re the victim of a nefarious conspiracy.  Lippmann’s warning arises from the possibility that we may not know ourselves or our sources of information well enough to be aware of designs on our plans.

But Lippmann’s statement also implies that we have to know enough about the world in order to make sure our map of Bohemia doesn’t show a coastline.  If we are ignorant of geography, we may bring the wrong clothes.

David Weisman uses a slight variation on the theme as he explains the constructivist error in describing knowledge solely in terms of schema or, for Piaget, developmental structures, not acknowledging “representation” in their epistemology:  “…there are rules for making things, but no ideas of or about them.  This is a grave omission, for no one walks safely across the street in full sunlight or through a dark house at night without maps and plans representing both these terrains and the instrumental relations appropriate to them.  Granting Kant his constructive applications of thought, we insist that hypothesis be given its due:  making designs, music, and proofs, we also make and test representations” (66).

Constructivism has difficulty explaining our instrumental failures.  If the world is only accessible to us through our constructs, and it is impossible for us to represent the world “as it is,” then how are we to understand it when the world we create frustrates our desires, or, in Lipmann’s language, our needs? (Weissman 76).  

One of Weismann’s answers is that we are indeed capable of representing the world.  He writes that a statement is true if it can be “instantiated” (87).  G. E. Moore demonstrated the idea simply in “A Defence of Common Sense”:   

            There exists at present a living human body, which is my body.  This body was born at a certain time in the past, and has existed continuously ever since, though not without undergoing changes; it was, for instance, much smaller when it was born and for some time afterwards, than it is now.  Ever since it was born, it has been either in contact with or not far from the surface of the earth; and, at every moment since it was born, there have also existed many other things, having shape and size in three dimensions (in the same familiar sense in which it has), from which it has been at various distances (in the familiar sense in which it is not at a distance both from that mantelpiece and from that bookcase than it is from the mantelpiece); also there have (very often, at all events) existed some other things of this kind with which it was in contact (in the familiar sense in which it is now in contact with the pen I am holding in my right hand and with some of the clothes I am wearing… (107)

and so on.  Moore is simply reminding constructivists (~ philosophical idealists) that part of the burden of their position that there is no knowable world except through our conceptions of it, is that they must explain the common sense knowledge we all have—even constructivists!—of the world that does not depend on our interest or desire or even whether it works (von Glasersfeld 4). 


References

Glasersfeld, Ernst Von. "Problems of Constructivism." Radical Constructivism in Action: Building on the Pioneering Word of Ernst Von Glasersfeld. Ed. Leslie P. Steffe and Patrick W. Thompson. Vol. 15. New York': Routledge Falmer, 2000. EBSCO. Print. Studies in Mathematics Education. 3-9.

Lippmann, Walter. "The World Outside And The Pictures in Our Heads." American Studies at the University of Virginia. University of Virgina, 1 Sept. 2009. Web. 12 Dec. 2015. .

Moore, G. E. "A Defence of Common Sense." Selected Writings. Ed. Thomas Baldwin. London: Routledge, 1993. 106-33. Print. International Library of Philosophy.

Weissman, David. Truth's Debt to Value. New Haven: Yale UP, 1993. Print.

Constructivism I: Piaget and the Classroom

There is no one way that we learn.  Constructivists, however, dispute this, and promote inquiry as the only road to authentic learning (Cardellini 182).  This stems from Piaget’s insistence that development is the spontaneous “genesis” of cognitive structures.  Learning happens as the child acts upon her environment (Lawton & Hooper 171).  Knowledge is constructed and in turn constructs new knowledge (as in an axiomatic system like arithmetic).  Specific constructions, such as number or length conservation, are only possible once specific stages of cognitive development have been reached.  Because development is natural, it should not be interfered with, but any schooling needs to be consonant with natural developmental processes.  Charles Brainerd summarizes Piaget’s position on schooling:  “…learning only occurs when two conditions are met.  First, the training treatment incorporates laws of spontaneous development.  Second, the to-be-trained subjects already possess the to-be-learned concept to some measurable extent” (71).

If this sounds like a variation on John Dewey, you are correct.  The emphasis is on natural processes that adults should not interfere with, merely “facilitate.”  Not only may such interference be harmful, it is likely superfluous:  “As for teaching children concepts that they have not attained in their spontaneous development, it is completely useless” (qtd. in Brainerd 94).

It happens that a number of experiments have been done to test how rigid Piagetian developmental stages are in children who have no understanding of concepts like number conservation and class inclusion. Studies examined the efficacy of teaching those concepts Piagetian theory suggests they would be incapable of learning. 

Self-discovery training had very little effect with subjects who had no prior knowledge of the concepts at issue.  “Moreover, unlike self-discovery procedures, tutorial procedures have produced large learning effects in subjects with no prior grasp of the to-be-trained concept” (Brainerd 91).  For teachers used to providing scaffolding before introducing new material, this is hardly surprising. 

Brainerd’s summary of studies on number conservation are also enlightening:

Since number is the first area in which conservation appears, it should be especially difficult to train [because of the newness of the structure—RM].  Subjects who fail number conservation pretests across the board should show little or no evidence of learning.  There is considerable evidence to the contrary…Many of these subjects (e.g., more than 75% in Murray’s experiment) performed perfectly on the posttests.  Thus, the available data on training number conservation does not suggest that this concept is either impossible or even especially difficult for children to learn (99).

As I have argued in earlier posts, in principle learning is learning, whether writing an essay, solving a problem, reading a book, or listening to a lecture. Physically passive students are not necessarily mentally passive.  Physically active students aren’t necessarily intellectually engaged, be it with a project or the group or research or even writing a paper.  The indifferent work I’ve received is evidence enough of that.  This should not be controversial, but it contradicts the Romanticism of Dewey’s and Piaget’s orientation.

Inquiry lessons, which typically call for group projects and discussion and presentations and movement are fun, and even educational when goals are clear and responsibility is evenly—actively—shared among the group’s members.  But I know from personal experience that I learn a lot from the books I read, and I had some terrific lecturers when I was an undergrad. 

Because Piaget generally studied children in isolation, critics accuse him of discounting the power of conversation: 

Piaget conceives of development as the result of progressive decentrations, whereby the child comes to understand that his point of view is not that of others…Piaget’s reference is the individual child’s point of view and how it changes under the force of contradictions resulting from encounters with the environment, this environment including other children and adults.  The child does not change his point of view as a result of sharing his experiences with other people, for his experiences are exclusively his own (Brainerd 301).

The privacy of experience is a common theme with constructivists, but privacy is not absolute.  Otherwise, people wouldn’t bother to talk or write or sing or paint or compose in order to communicate their experiences and argue for or wonder about their significance.  To write, as Piaget does, as though children, even small ones, don’t speak to one another, argue, and discuss, as though those activities have no bearing on learning or development seems silly.  It is a consequence of ignoring experiences your theory doesn’t account for.  In the case of Piaget’s orderly developmental scheme, conversation is perhaps too open-ended and chaotic and social.

Conversation is the source of feedback from peers and mentors that confirms or challenges our understanding and our arguments, and has been critical in my own development (cf. Montaigne).  It is one of the reasons I allocate 25% of my class time to Paideia seminars every week (Paideia.org).  For nearly four years I hosted a Socrates Café (http://www.philosopher.org/Socrates_Cafe.html).  When I was a junior in high school in the late 1960s, I persuaded my principal, eventually, to allow an ad hoc group of us to organize monthly Forums that would bring people from the community of Westerville, Ohio, together with students and teachers to talk about what was dividing us in that very divisive time.  A good conversation, much more so than a Mastercard, is priceless.

Conversation between parents and even very young children is credited with building larger vocabularies (Lareau 107) and reading readiness (Hirsch 24), seemingly obvious aids in personality and cognitive development that Piaget largely ignores.  Language for him seems to be mainly of value as a representational system serving logical structures (GE 45).

If the research, at best, is mixed on the efficacy of “active learning,” as Boyle and Brainerd have asserted, then we need to re-evaluate the push in college and K-12 schooling to use it exclusively.  As I have argued, as one tool in the toolbox, I see nothing wrong with the methods, and have and will continue to use them when appropriate.  But the theory is flawed, and cannot justify its ideological pretensions.

References

Boyle, Derek.  “Piaget and Education:  A Negative Evaluation.”  Jean Piaget:  Consensus and Controversy. Ed. Sohan Modgil and Celia Modgil.  New York:  Praeger, 1982.  Print.  292-308.

Brainerd, Charles J. “Learning Research and Piagetian Theory.”  Alternatives to Piaget:  Critical Essays on the Theory.  Ed. Linda S. Siegel and Charles J. Brainerd.  New York:  Academic Press, 1978.  Print. 69-109.

Cardellini, Liberato. “The Foundations of Radical Constructivism:  An Interview with Ernst von Glasersfeld.”  Foundations of Chemistry.  Vol. 8, 2006. Springer.  Print. 177-187.

Hirsch, E. D. The Knowledge Deficit : Closing the Shocking Education Gap for American Children. Boston:  Houghton Mifflin, 2006.  Print.

Lareau, Annette.  Unequal Childhoods:  Class, Race, and Family Life. 2^nd Ed. Berkeley: University of California, 2011. Print.

Lawton, Joseph T., Frank H. Hooper.  “Piagetian Theory and Early Childhood Education:  A Critical Analysis.”  Alternatives to Piaget:  Critical Essays on the Theory.  Ed. Linda S. Siegel and Charles J. Brainerd.  New York:  Academic Press, 1978.  Print. 169-200.

Montaigne, Michel de.  “The Art of Conversation.” Essays.  Tran. J.M. Cohen.  New York:  Penguin. Print. 285-311.

Piaget, Jean.  Genetic Epistemology. New York:  Columbia UP, 1970.