Where traditional schooling goes wrong

On reform, intellectual selectionism, and Piaget’s error

It is with great pleasure that we present a four-post series on embodiment science, written by Guy Claxton. What Guy covers in this series (based on his and Emily Poel’s upcoming book Bodies of Learning: How Embodiment Science Transforms Education) should, we think, help educators in Aotearoa to think critically about ‘the’ science of learning.

What is clear is the argument Guy presents shows there is no ‘the’. What also becomes clear as the series progresses is what our education system loses when engagement with Te Tiriti and mātauranga Māori are made optional.

Here is the third post in the series.

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The Weakness of Reform

One of the reasons why ‘progressive education’ continually tends to be sporadic and marginal is that different ‘progressives’ are touching different parts of the elephant without realising that they all parts of the same beast. There’s forest schools, small schools, Montessori, Steiner; learning that is inquiry-based, problem-based, project-based, story-based, social-and-emotional, active, hand-on, experiential, expeditionary, self-organised, creative, child-centred, and so on. What do they all have in common? The body.

The body is the elephant (and often, if you like, the elephant in the room). All these different kinds of ‘progressive education’ are striving to include forms of bodily learning that have been excluded by selective intellectualism (see below). They recognise the intelligence involved in making, moving, manipulating, sensing, interocepting, imagining, intuiting, relating to and resonating with others, learning from nature, learning from other cultures – all the things that are very often treated as non-intelligent and non-essential by the traditional model of schooling.

Embodiment science provides a platform of understanding, a rigorous rationale, that underpins and unifies all these overlapping approaches. Embodiment science tells us how and why all these different ways of knowing and learning are valid, important and necessary.

In case we didn’t already know.

Intellectual Selectionism

As well as conflating intelligence with intellect, Trad Ed also thinks of intelligence as a unitary capacity that is largely inherited, largely fixed, and unequally distributed across the population. This package of beliefs leads to a fundamental design feature of schools called ‘intellectual selectionism’. Basically, the job of school is to gradually increase the difficulty of intellectual material to be mastered so that those with limited amounts of intelligence (or perseverance) progressively drop out, leaving a small distillate of ‘winners’ whose prize is a place at a high-status university.

It’s like an athletics competition such as the high-jump. Exams are designed not to show what young people can do but to identify a necessarily large bunch of also-rans who weren’t ‘bright’ enough or didn’t study hard enough. A third of all youngsters, give or take, are led to believe that it was their fault they lost; they were just too dim or too lazy.

This injustice has persisted because the view of the mind on which it rests has been presumed to be true: ostensibly sanctioned by evidence and reason. Embodiment science pulls the rug out from under this iniquity. It points to an alternative form of education that is non-competitive; an all-round enhancement of real-world learning capacity at which everyone can succeed, and of which everyone can see the value.

Piaget’s Error

Portuguese-American neurologist Antonio Damasio’s 1994 book Descartes’ Error was a landmark in the founding of embodiment science. The error was to assume a strong separation between brainy mind and menial body. The new science now reveals a second major misconception: Piaget’s Error.

Swiss psychologist/philosopher Jean Piaget’s great insight was to show how different ways of knowing, learning and thinking emerge – given the right conditions – during a child’s development. Sensorimotor (i.e. bodily) learning gives birth to the imagination. Add language to imagination and the ability to reason logically begins to emerge. So far so good. But Piaget’s big error was to allow educators to think that each newly emergent way of knowing was inherently superior to the earlier ones, and to promote the idea that education should encourage the progression from the bodily to the abstract, at each stage, as it were, kicking away the ladders between ‘lower’ and ‘higher’ behind them. Teachers were led to believe that their job was to hasten this development from ‘childish’ to ‘adult’ ways of thinking; to encourage children to grow out of these earlier, more ‘primitive’ forms of cognition as fast as they could.

We now know that this is quite wrong. We adults need our sensory acuity, our self-regulation, our physical tinkering and our imaginations just as much as children do. Our abstract thinking should retain its grounding in concrete experience and continue throughout life to benefit from it.

Piaget’s Error has led schools to select, cultivate and reward the development of academic mindsets that often lack insight, imagination, common sense or moral compass. Schools should develop the full cognitive deck of cards – all the ‘suits’ of the bodymind - and not focus exclusively on the ‘diamonds’ of formal rationality.