Daily Archives: October 31, 2011
Socratic Backfire and Banking Method of Education
So this article about a Professor being denied tenure because students did not like the style of his pedagogy and seems to be related to an increase to route learning being preferred.
Maranville followed the Socratic teaching style and described his way of teaching as “engaged learning,” according to court documents. Those records describe teaching approaches designed to go beyond lectures. He would ask questions to stimulate discussion. He divided his students into teams and gave them assignments outside class.
The Socratic style of teaching that Maranville used is hardly novel. But experts say that while it remains popular in law schools, there are reasons many faculty members have never used it extensively with the current generation of students.
“When done well, you simply do not impose the teacher’s idea, and try to come up with a solution through dialogue,” said Michael Apple, a professor of curriculum and instruction at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. “In general, it is a guided dialogue.”
Supporters of the method see it as “a process by which you try to make the best logical argument and you focus on process as much as content,” Apple said. But he added that not that many faculty members use it these days. “The reason for its unpopularity sometimes is because we are in a test-based education system. Students can be increasingly impatient where the answer is not clear and when the professor is not giving it to them immediately.”
A lot also depends, Apple said, on who the students are. “It is controversial to some people, for example, students who are deeply concerned that they have to learn a certain amount of content and then take a test at the end,” he said. Students may also think that they are being treated as if they were not very smart.
Walter Parker, a professor of education at the University of Washington, said he teaches using the “Socratic seminar” method. He cautioned against stereotypes of the Socratic method, namely the depiction in the 1973 movie “The Paper Chase,” which shows a professor giving harsh evaluations to a student, leaving the students embarrassed.
“That is not the Socratic method,” he said.
“It is an interpretive discussion of a piece of text during which the professor says very little,” Parker said. “The professor chooses a rich piece of text and plans an interpretive question as he opens the discussion.”
This kind of teaching is more common in the humanities and social sciences, he said.
The advantage of this kind of teaching is that students learn how to think on their feet, said Patricia King, a professor of education at the University of Michigan.
“But it requires hard intellectual work,” she said.
In Maranville’s case, students did not see the value of his approach, the court records suggest. “Some students were quite vocal in their demands that he change his teaching style, which style had already been observed and approved by his peer faculty and administrative superiors,” according to the lawsuit. Students did not want to work in teams and did not want Maranville to ask questions. “They wanted him to lecture.” They also complained, according to the suit, that he did not know how to teach because he is blind.
The department chair – Scott Hammond, who is named in the lawsuit – apparently agreed with how Maranville taught his courses and called him a “master teacher,” according to court documents. Hammond visited his class, and so did an associate dean.
What I have to say here is entirely anecdotal, but I experienced this in Korea where standardized testing has been part of the culture since the advent of Confucianism in the Joseon dynasty. I started noticing the above when I was teaching college and that thinking was declining. To use Paulo Freire concepts for a minute, standardized tests can only test easily banked knowledge given to the pupil. It is a model based on knowledge/power viewed primarily as a commodity. This changes the demands on Professors but also leads to a decline in both knowledge acquisition and process-based thinking. Furthermore, when combined with a consumer service model of evaluating Professors, you have something positively corrosive to education.
So I’ll leave you with a relevant quote:
“Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.”
― Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed
For the all the talk of the accountability: accountability doesn’t seem to be do the student ultimately since the student does not know what is necessary for knowledge formation. Instead it is accountability to capital to which the student’s uniformed opinion merely serves as a function.
Adorno contra Positivism, or why methodological skepticism is necessary, but not sufficient.
“Cowed into wanting to be no more than a mere provisional abbreviation for the factual matter beneath it, thought loses not only its autonomy in the face of reality, but with it the power to penetrate reality. Only at a remove from life can the mental life exist, and truly engage the empirical. While thought relates to facts and moves by criticizing them, its movement depends no less on the maintenance of distance. It expresses exactly what is, precisely because what is is never quite as thought expresses it. Essential to it as an element of exaggeration, of over-shooting the object, of self-detachment from the weight of the factual, so that instead of merely reproducing being it can, at once rigorous and free, determine it. Thus every thought resembles play, with which Hegel no less than Nietzsche compared the work of the mind. The unbarbaric side of philosophy is its tacit awareness of the element of irresponsibility, of blitheness springing from the volatility of thought, which forever escapes what it judges. Such licence is resented by the positivistic spirit and put down to mental disorder. Divergence from the facts becomes mere wrongness, the moment of play a luxury in a world where the intellectual functions have to account for their every moment with a stop-watch. But as soon as thought repudiates its inviolable distance and tries with a thousand subtle arguments to prove its literal correctness, it founders…. Vis-á-vis positivism it is fitting neither to insist on being right nor to put on airs of distinction, but rather to prove, by criticism of knowledge, the impossibility of a coincidence between the idea and what fulfills it. The passion for equating the non-synonymous is not the ever-striving toil that at last attains redemption, but naive and inexperienced. Thought has known and forgotten the reproaches of positivism a thousand times, and only through such knowing and forgetting did it first become thought.” [s82] – Theodor Adorno, Minimia Moralia.
While I don’t want to downplay Adorno’s wit, this is my problem with the methodological skepticism of most of the “skeptic’s movement” and with naivete realism that confuses factual knowledge with the totality of truth. Positivism has more or less disappeared as a serious philosophical move: it’s abnegation of metaphysics, itself metaphysical. The methodological skepticism of someone like Michael Shermer is insufficient without some sort of critical orientation and remove from empirical facts in and of themselves ideological moves start to sneak into the purview of empirical facts. Notions of objectivity cloud values judgments and the necessary life of the mind which an enable an interpretation of facts and application of them is dormant.
Methodological skepticism is not a philosophy. It is, to use an term from Badiou, anti-philosophy is applied for its own sake.
Five postulates for dealing with abstractions
For an abstraction to have truth value, it much not merely model facts.
An abstraction must be understood in context and without context. A de-contextualized abstraction that can be applied consistently in variety of contexts and does not end in contradiction of definition or structure can be seem to have truth value in and of itself.
Semantics are vital to the understand abstraction and dismissing discussions of semantics as invalid removes the ability to talk about abstractions.
All discourse of structure function in abstract but manifest in context.
Totalizing abstractions cannot be avoided in speech.
"The Four Cs": Commodity, Currency (Money), Capital, Corporation — A popular lexicon regarding some commonly confused terms, along with some further scholarly notes
The Parisian Arcades
The “Four Cs”: Commodities, Currency (Money), Capital, and Corporations
POSITIVE DEFINITIONS
First we can state briefly what these objects concretely are, so that we can then spell out exactly what they are not.
Commodity — A commodity is any product that is produced for sale on the market, i.e. for the sake of exchange. Like any other product (non-commodities included), it has a certain…
OWS, Odds, Ends, and Bits of Ephemera
Eduardo Porter said some interesting things on the OWS:
It’s hard to believe today, but from the 1960s to about 1980 workers in finance made little more than those in the rest of the private sector, on average. Then, things changed: from the ’80s on, administrations from both parties embraced deregulation, undoing many of the rules put in place in the wake of the Great Depression to limit banks’ riskiest, and most lucrative, investments. Gone were the limits on interstate banking, down came the wall separating commercial and investment banks.
From 1979 to 2006, the financial industry’s share in the nation’s corporate profits grew from a fifth to almost a third. By 2006, bankers and insurers were making 70 percent more, on average, than workers in the rest of the private sector. Then they set off one of the worst financial crises in living memory, and taxpayers bailed them out.
The protesters’ grievances may be aimed at Wall Street as a metaphor for broader economic forces. But there is nothing metaphorical about who is taking home the wealth. The protesters might even aim a bit higher: the real income growth is happening in the top 0.1 percent. There are lots of bankers there, too.
Kevin Carson, whose solutions I disagree with, points this about the OWS:
Among the expedients for “creating jobs” is a massive project to “rebuild infrastructure” — an approach well-loved by the Michael Moore “progressive” wing of the Democratic Party, but fundamentally antagonistic to the portion of the movement with a more or less anarchistic vision of a post-corporate alternative economy.
The “Jobs for All” agenda is essentially a return to a greenwashed version of the centralized corporate-state Consensus Capitalism of the mid-20th century. That model relied on massive waste and capital investment boondoggles by the state to guarantee full utilization of capacity and full employment — the very pathologies of corporate capitalism that the folks at Monthly Review have been pointing to for years. Just leave the centralized, capital-intensive, bureaucratic structure of Galbraithian capitalism intact, and then let the state build a new (but greenwashed!) Interstate Highway System every ten years to keep it running at capacity. Then everybody can work forty hours a week at a “job” doing things at least half of which are the moral equivalent of digging holes and filling them back in again, in an economy organized by Rube Goldberg. It’s the world depicted in the movie “Brazil.”
In other words, we’ve got a bunch of “Leftists” who are nostalgic for retro capitalism.
(Side note: There are days when I can’t tell if Doug Henwood is a socialist or a new dealer, and his proposal do sound like retro capitalism).
The charges that OWS is anti-sematic come up again. It is a front group again. :
Second, as I described in a recent post, there is indeed a structural similarity between some of the Occupy movement’s concerns and historical antisemitism. Occupy is, indeed, protesting against the malefactors of great wealth and their international cabals of political-financial interest. Add the word “Jewish” in there, and you’ve got world-zionist-conspiracy antisemitism, circa 1880-1945. So in a way, the couple of bigots at Zuccotti Park are just connecting the dots between Occupy’s agenda and their own.
The main difference, of course, is that Occupy’s target is real, whereas the antisemite’s is a fantasy. Which is a pretty big difference.
All this would be insignificant were it not for the significant financial backing of ECI, and its association with respectable conservatives like Fox News commentator William Kristol. It’s possible that cracks may be appearing in the edifice. Recently, it’s come to light that one of ECI’s board members, Rachel Abrams posted inflammatory, borderline-insane rants about Palestinians being “devil spawn” on her blog. Unsurprisingly, the center-left Jewish organization J Street has called on the saner folk at ECI to cut dies, disavow, etc, and if they don’t, for other Jewish organizations like AIPAC and the ADL to distance themselves from ECI.
This last step should have been taken long ago. ECI, as critics point out, is no more a friend of Israel than it is a foe of Occupy Wall Street. Rather, it uses Israel (and now Occupy) as a pawn to score electoral points for Republicans. The whole organization is a ruse. It’s the Swift-Boat Veterans of American Jewry.
Of course, the Wall Street firms are spying on the #Occupy:
While we’re at it, despite some libertarians claim to the contrary, corporate capitalism is largely DEPENDENT on debt to function.
As we can see, profits actually come from some fairly unusual sources. Government spending up to the point of full employment actually increases profits, while workers’ savings diminishes them. This ties into the MMT argument that government should offset workers’ desired savings. As we can clearly see from the contemporary situation, this happens in an almost automatic manner; as the private sector saves and pays down debt in the current uncertain environment, the government goes into deficit in order to float profitability.
We should also note that capitalist economies are not perpetual motion machines. Many people seem to have a vague inclination that capitalist economies are somehow ‘self-generating’ and, for example, that government spending or private debt-financing are exogenous or external factors. This is clearly not the case. Money enters the economy through either government spending or private sector indebtedness. These then wash through the economy and eventually turn up as profits. These facts need to be front and centre when public policy is considered.
Now that we understand the basic dynamics of profit in a capitalist economy we can explore a number of different issues; including: monopoly profits and financial profits and the role of profits in a financial crisis. With our basic understanding we will be able to investigate these in more detail in later pieces.
