On The Media: Transcript of “The Power of Myth” (November 24, 2006)
ANA MARIE COX: Well, I think that Joe is a provocative thinker and a great reporter. He was really early out of the gate trying to put a narrative around this election. There was a very unusual mid-term. There were races that came out of no one’s playbook. I think people are still kind of struggling with how to make it all make sense. And the best that we can do here at Time Magazine or Time.com is tell you what doesn’t make sense.
Making sense of things seems to be very important at all level of human cognition from recognition to social. There are also affective aspects to making sense.
How does this making sense of things work? Narratives (of different levels of schematicity) seem to be one of the primary devices (if not really the only device - meaning that everything can be seen as a narrative of some sort). Journalism presents a particular kind of narrative which is often self-reflective but also has a strong propositional element. Other kinds would be re-enactive - such as drama - where the propositional elements are limited or purely (mostly) propositional narratives (or pseudo-narratives) such as science.
November 17, 2006, Hour Two: The Family that Couldn’t Sleep / The Artist and the Mathematician
Starting in the 1930s, Nicolas Bourbaki published dozens of papers, becoming a famous mathematician. There was just one problem: he didn’t exist. Join Ira in this hour on Science Friday for a conversation with Amir Aczel about the genius mathematician who never existed.
The really interesting thing about this Science Friday podcast is not the subject matter itself (although it’s no boring either) but a little throwaway line by Aczel when he says that the reason French mathematics of the 1920s and 30s wasn’t very good (meaning there weren’t many world-class mathematicians) was the fact that the main introductory textbook was boring and hard to read. There is also a comment on p. 14 of the book: “in addition to the fact that the teaching at these small schools in wartime France was not good, the textbooks were inadequate.” - thanks to Amazon.
This brings up the image of a number of stories of confused students who then decide not to (or do not decide to) pursue mathematics further. This is a very typical image employed in much of educational policy to justify particular action in service of global change. But there really is no good reason to claim that this is an apt image to apply (although it may be the most natural one - or the one most readily integrated with the mental spaces). First, for it to be useful, the opposite would also have to be true - i.e. that engaging and easy-to-understand texts would leave to more mathematicians. This clearly isn’t the case - because there are many who use the opposite scenario. Students who study easy math are never challenged enough to become good. (A friend of mine who is a mathematician in the US in a department full of non-Americans blames many of the failures of US domestic mathematics on the ‘permissive’ nature of the American approach to education.)
The problem for policy is that plausible stories can be told with either of these rich-image scenarios. But neither of them has a great explanatory let alone predictive value. I suspect that a good anthropology of education might provide a good explanation and the complexity of the situation will preclude any effective predictive explanation. But anthropology and ethnography have in general proved to be very difficult to translate into policy.
Malaysian National News Agency :: BERNAMA
PEKAN, Nov 4 Bernama — Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak has called for the countrys memory-based education system to be replaced with one that promotes mind development so that the students become more creative and critical.
The Deputy Prime Minister said the education system was currently directed towards memorisation which became the basis in assessing the students performance especially during examinations.
This little new story goes to the heart of the whole problem of education. Is it about knowledge of facts or skills? Well, in fact it is about neither of these things. The primary purpose of education is socialization. This is often concealed because only a small proportion of it is ‘primary socialization’ in the sense of socializing into one’s immediate ethnic group. Education provides multiple socializations: into all the various groups of specialists, into a group of people in education with a view of a membership in a group of people who have received an education. In fact, it is possible for somebody with only a minimal grasp of fact or limited skill to be socialized into a particular group if they can engage productively with that groups code (or discursive practices). Very often the prerequisite for that is a certain amount of knowledge and skill but the performances that membership in a group calls for are mostly symbolic. It reminds of ‘Trading Places’ by David Lodge in which an professor of English has never read Oliver Twist.
So what is the implication for the educational system? Its stated and apparent purposes seem to be fairly divergent but that is a necessity. What would the curriculum look like in a system that was explicitly focused on socialization? Interestingly enough, some of the recent debate on faith schools in the UK has had that focus but even there with a few exceptions (teaching of evolution, religious education) the examples were extracurricular (dress, environment, background of teachers, etc.).
Therefore, we are forced into an instrumental view of education which is where ultimately the skill argument seems to win over. This is because the argument for memorization ends up being mostly reminiscent of the argument for socialization. However, the problem is that skill-based (competency-based) curricula often do not deliver the desired results, i.e they do not ‘produce’ people who appear to have been well-educated in the sense of not being able to engage with particular discursive communities. Bringing back memorization then seems to be the solution favored as a countermeasure. But since memorization is then treated instrumentally rather than as a means of secondary socialization(s), it is also doomed to failure, particularly since the skill-based approach has changed the frames of expectation.
I would therefore predict great conceptual as well as practical problems for Malaysia (and any other country) as it tries this particular reform. Is there a solution? Not really! Perhaps a hint of one might be: use the skills-based approach when viewing education instrumentally and the memory-based approach when thinking of it socially. And make sure that both perspectives are present in equal measure in the underpinnings of the system of schooling.
