We now live in a world once dreamt of by Comenius. In 1657, Comenius's Didactica Magna (The Great Didactic, 1657) proposed universal education for all, boys and girls, rich and poor, with teaching in vernacular languages using textbooks. He was actively involved in organising school systems for European governments and he proposed the system of schools now found in the USA with kindergarten, elementary school, secondary school, college and university. Comenius’s vision of education built heavily on the potential of the printing press to produce school textbooks with pictures. He went further to explicitly link the new technology of schooling that he proposed to the technology of printing, commenting: "we might adapt the term 'typography' and call the new method 'didachography''' :
Instead of paper we have pupils whose minds have to be impressed with the symbols of knowledge. Instead of type we have the class books and the rest of the apparatus devised to facilitate the operation of teaching. The ink is replaced by the voice of the master, since this is what conveys information from the books to the mind of the listener; while the press is school discipline, which keeps the pupils up to their work and compels them to learn.
Comenius's vision included the need for feedback from students to show that they are now "possessors of knowledge" (p. 293) and also the need for end of year examinations ensuring that "subjects have been properly learned" (p. 293). Comenius's model of nationally-based phases of schooling was adopted by the whole of Europe and the USA during the 19th Century (Barsky and Glazek, 2014).
It is understandable that many celebrate the vision of Comenius and the achievement of having nearly universal literacy with lots of children everywhere spending many years of their lives, up to 18 years now for some in richer countries, just learning stuff and getting increasingly good grades on exams that show just how how much stuff they have learnt. But is there perhaps something that we might have lost in this push for universal literacy and universal knowledge?
The way of thinking found in oral cultures is different from literate ways of thinking. An example of this difference is the nature of the 'song lines' of Australian Aborigines. Song lines, or sung stories of journeys through the landscape around them, have been said to map the territory and encode knowledge essential to survival. These songs include information about animals, plants and water holes, for example, but all embedded in sung stories about the doings of mythical ancestors in the 'dreamtime' when the land was created. This knowledge is not a classification nor is it a representation. Song lines are experienced as a relationship with the ancestors who created the landscape. That is, cognition is experienced not as something that humans impose on the landscape but as coming from the landscape. The collective stories are called 'song lines' because the land sings its stories as an individual journeys across its lines.
One way to illustrate the shift from an education for relationship to an education for representation is to consider the way that the meaning of the word 'knowledge' has changed from when this concept was first recorded in pictographs to how it tends to be used in Europe today. In the Bible, including parts like Genesis first written about 1200 BCE, the word knowledge refers to an intimate relationship. Adam 'knew' Eve, it is written, and then she conceived a son. The English phrase 'knowledge in the biblical sense' is still often used as a euphemism for intimate relationships including sexual intercourse. This phrase draws attention to the contrast many readers find between the concept of knowledge in everyday use around them and the concept of knowledge that emerges when reading the Bible. Tracing the roots of the Hebrew word for knowledge found in the Bible, Da'at (דעת) from the verb Ya'da (ידע), to know, we find that the original pictographs behind the two letters used in these words, dalet and ayin, combine the image of a tent door flap (Dalet) with the image of an eye (Ayin). To know, for the ancient Hebrews, apparently involved moving a seeing eye through the tent door flap to enter inside a previously hidden space. Knowing, on this metaphorical imagery, involves the difference between an outside view and an inside view, not just, for example what someone looks like from the outside but also effectively ‘moving inside’ them to know what it feels like to be them.
| Da'let (tent door flap) Ayin (eye) | Ancient pictograph   | Modern Hebrew ד ע |
Knowing as the eye passing through a tent door flap to see inside the tent
 | In moving from an understanding and experience of knowledge as relationship to knowledge as representation there might be something important that has been forgotten, something to do with what gives meaning to knowledge in the first place. Plato attributed a powerful critique of writing on these lines to his mentor Socrates. Socrates was an oral thinker who lived and taught during a time when there was transition to a new communications technology, the technology of alphabetic writing which came to Greece through the Phoenicians in the form of pictograms related to those used by the Ancient Hebrews. |
This new technology was impacting on the nature of education in a way that troubled Socrates. Somewhat ironically, however, we only know this because Plato wrote down Socrates’ reflections. In a story told by Socrates to his friend Phaedrus, the technology of writing is said to have been offered to man by the god Thoth as a 'pharmakon', meaning a remedy for problems of humans having poor memories. Socrates then argues that far from being a 'pharmakon' as remedy, literacy is a 'pharmakon' as poison - the same word is used for both meanings. Socrates claims that literacy is a poison for humans for educational reasons. Being able to appear intelligent by reading from a scroll means that people will no longer need to become really intelligent which is something only learned in dialogue. Like many teachers complaining about modern technology, Socrates was concerned that this new education technology would get in the way of learning necessary oracy and communication skills. Real intelligence, Socrates says, is relational. The written word, he claims, is no more than an image or representation of the real thing. Instead 'real’ words are living oral words with meaning carried by the warm breath of people in dialogue. They are not representations of external things so much as aspects of a living relationship in which meaning is experienced. Socrates is reported as describing written words as like ‘orphans’, ‘ghosts’ and ‘dead seeds put out on flagstones in the heat of the sun’. This is because they are abstracted from any particular relationship. This is a version of the idea of knowledge evoked by the image of an eye passing through a tent door. To know something is to enter into it and to feel what it means from the inside.
Is it really such a good thing that the education system puts so much focus on knowledge as representation and so little on knowledge as relationship? We know that finding out about a job from books is no substitute for actually doing that job. Doing a job means becoming a different person and experiencing what it means to do that job from the inside. In a similar way perhaps knowing about the world around us from text books and writing down this knowledge in exams is no substitute for cultivating a living relationship with that world: the kind of relational knowledge you might get from, metaphorically, opening the tent door flap of the world and walking inside.
RSS Feed