What Does It Mean to Spurn Educational Constructivism? How Traditionalistic Proclivities Generate Unnecessary Error

1. Introduction

It is firstly conjectured that Constructivism is a wholly reactionary point—reactionary and contrary to the poverty of educational theory in the late nineteenth century. Dewey (1916) is confronted with such as even being discordant with American socio-political foundations; further, the student is actively disenfranchised by the apathy-inducing repetition of previously introduced intellectual subject matters. Today, such a point as expressed is attributed to the teacher’s relative inability to observe whole characteristics of students or further the misplacement of resources (Ferguson, 2011) to students who are unwilling to engage in educational subject matter.

In later studies, Piaget (1962) takes it upon himself to propose the idea of the “open-classroom”—to assume the role of the teacher to then be the “facilitator” of the child’s stage-based cognitive development; the student’s development of faculty uses intellectual material as a means of learning that is then attached to the cultural/intellectual sphere. However, to facilitate the student is to make a concession: with available information, the student cannot conceptualise and therefore adapt to the human cultural/intellectual frame; further, the student who already has already acceded to the human cultural frame (in High School, as one may assume) remains subject to the same organisation as does the primary student—even more, perhaps, given the pretension to reducing significant social disorder among the students and stricter guidelines for a student’s learning (where guidelines are the length of classes and the educational outcomes that a student must attain to).

However, the true social product of education is not truly discussed in any significant detail. Dewey (1910) asserts that the school is almost exclusively a social body, yet the consequences (or even necessity) of this ideal is not explicated beyond the basis of acquiring skills that the students’ previous generation had honed and developed. However, it is extraordinarily important to also understand that Dewey attributes learning to the student’s conscious understanding of content material.

Dewey then defines that conscious learning to be exactly extraneous of any mechanical reproduction of material. Therefore, it requires the student to engage in an act of self-determination and a self-formation of knowledge; a construction of one’s own mode of intelligence, isolated from conflicting influence, that then necessitates an effort on the part of the student to achieve a configuration of the cultural/intellectual frame that we treat as intelligence.

1.1. Motivation

Far too often, progressivism in education has been associated with the modern “creative” movement for education. Such is constructed primarily on wastefulness and centred on a variable pedagogy for the student’s controlled application. This confers an experiential education that by the relative complexity of combining means of experience and means of learning, is supportive for the adult class that attaches nostalgia to their education: for instance, a Science class about diffusion would be supplemented by remembrance of a teacher’s or student’s actions rather than the material specifically. The creative education is supplementary to Liberal Education because it supports the standardisation of Liberal Education without inducing change and subjecting

1.2. What Is the Teacher?

In an ideal classroom—quite simply, as this article asserts—the teacher should be allowed unimpeded to assert their dictation for the student body (discipline must not be used) and the aptitude of the student body is uniform.

In such an event, we can exclude the faculty of the teacher’s specified “support” for students and disciplinary measures—both of which we assume to be extraneous to proper teaching, such that we are left with an ideal classroom and an ideal performance for the trained teacher.

Firstly, relative to the information that can be garnered from books or other media about intellectual subject matter, what does the teacher offer? One answer may be the structured approach to the subject matter—the student’s lack of knowledge about the educational form, and the teacher’s knowledge allows for the subject matter to be interpreted in such a manner that it describes a more productive picture for the student. However, even in a uniform and homogeneous classroom (to assume that the “productive picture” is equivalently efficacious for each student), to limit the trial and error of a student’s development is to reduce intellectual effort and discovery. In discussing a topic (subject matter) with multiple fields of belief, such as the sociological division (of two different schools for the sake of simplicity) between pluralism and elitism (Bachrach and Baratz, 1962) where there cannot be a “middle ground”, then the teaching will occupy a reliance on one teaching in order to promote rules about the topic—simultaneously, to introduce one topic under two rules is entirely confusing and does not promote education under the preconceived notion to ease the learning process in the productive picture.

The teacher is therefore assumed, in practice, to produce a “vocal form”, the combination of a subjectivised academic argument and the will to educate upon a subject matter that the students bear little to no familiarity about. The idea of the “vocal form” is furthered by necessary assumptions about the reality of the classroom: the teacher must interpret discipline among specific students and with a specific approach, not all students will find the “productive picture” so productive for themselves, and some students may require different degrees of attention from the teacher. Granted that “organization is the mobilisation of bias” (Bachrach and Baratz, 1962), we can understand a significant disjunction between the status of the teacher and that of the student.

1.3. The Cultural/Intellectual Frame

Granted that we cannot achieve a whole intelligence surrounding the capacity of a single person to solve every problem and to know everything, then it is unreasonable to posit education in such a direction. Instead, the student is intended to achieve a cultural/intellectual frame that is formative to their humanity. We achieve such an education primarily on the basis of content for a gradual, “organic” learning—that one accedes to a common thread that humanity “coalesces” around.

However, such an identity is merely a transposition of an already constructed cultural/intellectual frame that, similarly, the student may become accustomed to in the practical world—yet, as we understand, this is not the case because children without any such education become troglodytes. Because school does not provide that construction, yet does eventually succeed in forming a cultural/intellectual frame, we must assume that it occupies an awkward middle-ground between that real accession and that simple transposition of knowledge.

Should we then understand that this middle-ground is the proper education? Which is therefore unique to the human condition because we cannot assume it to be the most efficient, most strenuous or the most productive means of education, but that it is uniquely attached to human necessity and social foundation. To do so is to (1) disregard already existing institutional failures (assuming that there does not exist any means by which education can be sufficiently improved) and to (2) be subject to the persistent institutional nostalgia that fails to enact significant change in educational policy. The middle-ground is a false position that intrinsically confers social harm, as is explored in 2.1.

2. Social Education

Dewey asserts that the school is a social body, and that therefore policy surrounding education cannot serve to disenfranchise the social construction of friendships and authority.

However, the accession of this authority is that which is effectively undecided: the child that may choose to spurn all authority can be said to be void of authority (in essence, no knowledge of it), while a child that follows authority does have knowledge of it. To the rational observer, granted that both children have a pretext of higher powers (in the form of religion, higher intellects, or the relative physical power of older children), then that impetus for authority is already observed. Further, that the child who is understood to disregard authority has (therefore) engaged with authority repeatedly demonstrates a precondition towards authority. The idea of friendship requires little elaboration.

As such, our perception of school is as a cultural mechanism. The construction of—for lack of a more general term—human beings, is a simple causality of the human condition. For the human being to speak a certain language, to dress in a certain manner, to establish tastes, is significantly a cultural construction. Of these, many may assume such traits to be properly in the control of the being themselves—whereby the school is only a setting, among others, for a simultaneous social development with the human condition.

In the classroom, the authority of the teacher is something that we would consider to be provisional for the student—to remove the teacher is to manifest a void in the education of the child. This is true on the basis of a teacher-centralised education for any lesson without such should devolve into chaos, yet, even on such a basis, the teacher provides a derisive effect on the real education of the student. Dewey’s identification that the student’s real learning is in their conscious faculty therefore means that the idea of the teacher is disjoint to the transference of that knowledge—which we note by the variance of the productive picture.

This subsection concludes with the understanding that the teacher is assumed as an “awkward necessity” within the bounds of a teacher-centric education.

2.1. Means of Addressing Information

Granted that the teacher has been excluded from the real means of education, the true means in which the provision of education is made must be in its non-transcribed source: academic articles, books, et cetera.

However, authorial bias is just as present in works of literature as should be assumed by the teacher’s dictation in the classroom—a significant point, yet for the work to be public it can no longer be under the exclusive intention of a single author; if it becomes more significant, then a greater degree of interpretations affect change to the work and remove any original bias via a whole, public intrusion into the literature. The schoolchild’s modern illiteracy (owed not to a change in the syllabus, but in the individual habit of the student) further shows the failure of the classroom to function more than a means of politicised organisation.

2.3. Social Inadequacies with Respect to Education

Owing to the advancements that education has made for common individual intelligence, to make the assumption that the students perform in accordance with biologically/divinely ordained means is fallacious. All students possess equal means and therefore equal faculties, however where control is executed to inhibit such faculties, then

With a universal, physical means to education: that each child has access to school, materials for exercises, then we—in our Liberal Education—expect significant differences in students’ performances with respect to conceptually simple identities. As has been discussed previously, it is the teacher’s role to fulfill for the student an accession to the Cultural/Intellectual sphere that otherwise the student cannot manifest for themselves. Further, without the “support” that the teacher provides to the elementary student, the student would reach a fulfillment of these basic skills on account of the faculty that they have already developed in one Cultural/Intellectual faculty and therefore develops a progressive understanding because of their own involvement.

3. Conclusions and Significance

The only object of our now traditional Liberal Education is to subdue even habitual learning. Where educational material (in the form of exercises, books, et cetera) is conceivably extraneous to the classroom, it remains entirely productive and original for curiosity in its own form as it remains the objects of professors and even younger children who have not yet been made temperamental by educational proclivities.

Yet the classroom-based education is definitive for habitualization, so what does it achieve? Granted that it is simply a failure for a significant proportion of students, what has the means to education (of which is the faculty of the teacher and the capital of the school) been able to achieve? The answer is standardised organisation; a politicised basis—“organisation is the mobilisation of bias”—that operates without human idealism intervening in social settings, particularly in the case of the professor and intelligent student’s grappling with propositional theories, of experiential uniformity is successful for a culture in its retention.

What makes our most immediately modern phenomenon of misinformation so palpable has been a lack of learning in the schools—quite right, however, for such a paradigmatic shift to be so pronounced in societal adherence is a construction that relies on a divergent idea of order: likewise the influence that—although bias must always be avoided—Fox News pundits hold over their audiences is attached to the teacher, despite Fox’s messaging against conforming to ideology (students are taught to analyse propaganda from infamous regimes as part of the historical curriculum).

Contrary to how we may observe professors and students in higher areas of academics spurred by works of academic origin—a trend that we observe in the reception for Darwin’s Origin of Species and Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams; opposition was pronounced for both works yet interest survived on account of the intellectual material that the works conferred.

As such, to abandon educational progressivism as Constructivism is to engage in an artificial and systematic stratification of educational outcomes against the nature of the intellect. The predatory nature of many pundits in the American media offer a presentation of the relative evils that are conductive on account of poor educational policy and an inhibition towards developmental attitudes.