Monday, 26 April 2010 by Marcus Aquinas.

Brian Leiter’s blog (Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog) linked to an interesting review by Troy Jollimore at TruthDig of Martha Nusbaum’s book, “Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities”. Perhaps I am just more aware of the issue than I had been in the past, but the review raised a number of very interesting points as to the value of the Humanities in a well-rounded education. A similar point was made by Robert Paul Wolff (see my earlier post for the link) in slightly different terms.I confess to having a somewhat personal axe to grind on the issue since it pertains to my own education. Most of my readings in the traditional Liberal Arts have been at my own instigation. On the one hand, I have enjoyed the freedom to explore, question and ponder pretty much as my curiosity has directed me. On the other hand, this has happened in an environment with few people who were capable of telling me when I was full of it or not; their educations being even more lacking in this area than mine. But on one point, coming from an admittedly limited and informal foundation, I have to agree: the Liberal Arts help the student develop a particular sympathy for others’ viewpoints. To sacrifice that for economic gain is to do a great disservice not only here, but to the future.

If of thy mortal goods thou art bereft,

And from thy slender store two loaves alone to thee are left,

Sell one, and with the dole

Buy hyacinths to feed thy soul.

–Moslih Eddin Saadi, Gulistan

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Wednesday, 14 April 2010 by Marcus Aquinas.

While working with a student after school, I witnessed an incident that set me to thinking about knowledge, how we acquire it, and the acceptable parameters under which it is acquired.

The student was checking email while we were chatting on a variety of topics. To paraphrase part of an old Tom Lehrer song, when correctly viewed, everything is Social Studies. So my after-hours conversation with students tend to ramble a lot and checking email during such a conversation was a non-issue from my perspective. After reading the email, the student told me “(a person who shall remain nameless, but who really should know better than to have done this) said the answer to #2 is ‘False’.” To which I gave my standard response, “I don’t know… is it?” Personally, I think the student was trying to wheedle answers out of me as a way to avoid doing the reading and/or assignment on their own, but still wanted a good grade on the assignment (kids will do that). But since I wasn’t in the mood to let the wheedling succeed so easily, I set the student to comparing what they already knew against what the other student had told them and had them reach their own conclusion. For the record, the other student was correct, but it’s the principle that set me to wondering.

To put it all into context, the question (a modified true-false) was intended to show a rudimentary understanding of how the abundance of cotton, combined with the availability of reliable transportation (railroads) led to the establishment of several textile mills in Texas in the late 1900s.

The question that bothers me is how that understanding is acquired. The student who sent the answer read the assigned material, took that information and applied it to a given situation (fellow educators will recognize this as sitting at about the mid-point of Bloom’s taxonomy), while the second student had not. Both students know that Texas produced a lot of cotton in the late 1800s and both students know that textile mills process cotton, turning it into thread or cloth. The first student knows that this became possible because the railroads allowed easy transport of the raw materials to the mills and the finished product from the mills. I’m fairly sure that the second student knows this because I led them down the garden path to get to that conclusion. But let’s imagine that there were other addressees on the email. I’m not sure that they know this last piece of information. They may know the first two things, but the only thing of which I can be certain is that they have good reason to believe that statement #2 is false.

All of which, with a couple of brewskis on top, leads me to the issue. What, if anything, has been communicated through this whole exchange? From my point of view, both students have adequately met some of the objectives for the lesson, at least by the measure of my assessment instrument. But it should be painfully obvious that only the first student (the one who did the assignment) has the potential of being able to extrapolate from the knowledge set to some piece of new knowledge. The second student might or might not. For any other student, I’d bet on “not”; for this particular student it’s close to 50/50 (teenagers are like that, but I have hope for the future).

By almost anyone’s criteria, the first student has acquired the requisite knowledge. Absent my intervention, the second student would not have, but did in the end. The question, I suppose, is whether the method of acquiring that knowledge is of greater, equal or lesser importance than the knowledge itself. To my mind, they seem of about equal importance. I often wonder whether our public education system shares the same view.

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