Another Pandemic Altogether

It is hard, in the midst of a historic pandemic, to write about anything other than the coronavirus. About which, unfortunately, I have no expertise to offer. But there is another virus, more dangerous, to which I have recently been exposed.

The subject my student is studying in her grad program, “Critical Pedagogy,” is a Marxist take on “constructivism.” It is the dominant philosophy now in all branches of “education,” from kindergarten through the ed schools, up to doctoral level, and far enough afield from there to include the language schools.

The basic premise is that knowledge is “constructed,” as opposed to discovered. Learning is, in the words of the present paper, “a process of collaboratively constructed knowledge.”

It follows that the teacher cannot actually teach anything. The paper criticizes traditional education for seeing students as “empty agents who receive knowledge from teachers.” An image often used is of the learner as a passive empty glass that the teacher, in the bad, old way, is filling up with knowledge.

This sounds good. But that is not how traditional education worked at all. Genuinely traditional education means the Socratic method—that is, asking questions to provoke the student to think, rather than feeding him facts. And Bacon’s scientific method: don’t take anyone’s word for it, do the experiment. Nor is this true only of the West. Confucius said, “I show a student one corner of the problem. If he cannot discover the other three corners himself, I have no more I can do for him.” His collected sayings, which we call “The Analects,” model this method. Nothing is said plainly; they all require consideration and interpretation. They are hints.

Jesus did the same, of course, with parables. He might well be ranked as a third great teacher.
Traditional education used this method precisely because they did not see truth or reality as an arbitrary construct. Plato, our source for Socrates, understood all knowledge as innate; we are born with it, or we could not recognize it in the sensory world. Accordingly, all the teacher need really do is jar the memory.

But even without this “Platonic” view, which Confucius clearly shared, so long as objective reality exists in any form, the teacher’s job remains to teach the student how to reason, how to learn, how to discover things for himself.

Traditional education, accordingly, taught debate, logic, rhetoric, parliamentary procedure, mathematics, and the scientific method: ways to think, ways to arrive at knowledge.

Constructivism yanks this rug right out from under the enterprise. If, as it asserts, all truth is arbitrary, there is nothing at all to teach or to learn. One simply decides what one wants to be true. No role here for education at all. No role for anything but pouring things into empty vessels—indoctrination.
For of course, in a classroom, each individual student cannot be allowed to make their own reality; those realities will conflict. So what is one to do?

Here’s where the “collaborative” bit comes in. The stock constructivist response is that everyone in class must agree on the same reality.

This is at best a stopgap—the students will, sooner or later, need to leave the classroom, and their shared reality will not conform with the equally arbitrary shared reality of any given larger group.
But even within the class, on what basis, given that all realities are arbitrary, is one proposed reality to be preferred to another? On what basis does one come to a consensus?

Critical pedagogy, and constructivism generally, masks this with an implicit appeal to democracy: it is decided by majority vote. This is, in philosophical terms, the ad populum fallacy: majority opinion is no indication of truth. But even that is irrelevant; if truth itself is arbitrary, the only basis for preferring majority over minority truth in the first place is might makes right: the majority has the power to suppress the minority if it dissents.

It is significant that constructivism never gives any thought to parliamentary procedure or to how consensus is to be arrived at. For after all, if all realities are arbitrary, there is simply no room for debate. The biggest bully gets their way.

Of course, in a real constructivist classroom, it is the teacher who has ultimate power. It is the teacher’s chosen reality that will prevail, under the guise of “consensus.”

One begins to see why constructivism in various forms has become so popular among teachers. It gives them the most absolute power possible over the students in their class, and imposes no actual obligations on them to do anything they do not choose to do. It makes the classroom model a totalitarian dictatorship of Orwellian dimensions.

It is interesting, and alarming, that the essay my student was assigned was actually authored by two professors at the Islamic Azad University in Iran. That suggests how pervasive this ideology is: it dominates even in a supposedly Islamist university in a supposedly theocratic state.