The child as an empty vessel: a defence of emptiness in education
Looking at education-related tweets it would seem that the most vilified idea in education at the moment is the idea that the child is an empty vessel. If people who pride themselves on their progressive approach to education can agree on one thing, it is that the child is not an empty vessel. There is no place for such ideas of emptiness in 21st century pedagogy.
One tweet-length piece of evidence:
Education-as-usual assumes that kids are empty vessels who need to be sat down in a room and filled with curricular content. Dr. Mitra’s experiments prove that wrong.
Tweets leave no room for footnotes, and hardly anyone feels obliged to go back and look at who proposed the idea of the empty vessel and why on earth they might have thought that it made sense. Instead, the idea is ripped out of context, passed on in a game of digital Chinese whispers, and vilified in a manner that speaks not of radicalism but of thoughtlessness.
What we want to do here is not just set the record straight about the child as an empty vessel, but we also want to suggest that the time has come to take the truly radical step – the truly progressive step – the truly thoughtful step of embracing the idea of emptiness.
First the record. The idea of the human mind as originally an empty vessel or a blank slate has a long history dating back at least to Aristotle (see De Anima, bk. 3, chap. 4), who argued that the human intellect must be something like a blank writing tablet able to receive the imprint of the ideas that come to be written on it. The idea then disappeared for almost two millennia before surfacing again in the early modern period in the context of a debate about innate ideas. As Henry More in An Antidote Against Atheism put it in 1655, the question was “whether the soul of man is a tabula rasa – a book in which nothing is writ – or whether she have some innate notions and ideas.” The notion that the human mind is empty, i.e. has no innate ideas, was then defended at greatest length by John Locke in his Essay on Human Understanding.
Locke was an ardent anti-dogmatist, and the view that there were innate ideas was, as he saw it, pure dogmatism. No, the human mind is not something upon which indubitable ideas are writ by the Divine Hand. The human mind in its original condition is a tabula rasa or a blank sheet of paper – the blank tablet described by Aristotle. And the tabula rasa and the blank sheet of paper are the empty vessel (a term which neither Aristotle nor John Locke actually used).
Now, despite the online vilification of Locke’s idea the vast majority of teachers are, in their teaching practice at least, faithful acolytes of Locke. All teachers who employ textbooks (either paper or digital) in the classroom assume in practice that the students pouring into the classroom have a certain intellectual emptiness which needs to be filled in one way or another.
The alternative would be a Platonic classroom, devoid of textbooks, relying entirely on a discussion in which the children clarify the ideas that they find within themselves, with the teacher playing the role of the good Platonic midwife assisting in the process of cognitive birthing.
But perhaps the thing that provokes so much opposition is not the idea of emptiness itself but the passivity of the learner that is supposed to follow from it. But this is just sloppy thinking. Locke, without any contradiction, believed firmly both in the original emptiness of the child’s mind and in the value of active learning. His Thoughts Concerning Education stress again and again the importance of both parents and tutors cultivating the child’s curiosity and encouraging children in asking questions so that they gradually become the masters of their own learning and achieve the overriding goal of becoming adults who can think for themselves and take an active part in the political life of the new republic.
Locke was an Enlightenment champion of individual liberty, not a theorist of standardised mass schooling. Indeed he argued that the only acceptable class-size was one, and he was such a critic of contemporary schooling that he argued it would be better for the child to be educated at home. Crucial for him was the liberty of the child (speaking out against a myriad forms of unfreedom, including tight clothing for girls, for instance) and the great empiricist had an acute sense of the individuality of the child, insisting that the parents and the tutor of a child pay close attention to the inclinations and talents of the individual, matching the course of education carefully to them.
Clearly, the tweets that are supposed to be light years away from the terrible pedagogy of the 17th century are often little more than footnotes to Locke.
Having set the record straight, let’s get back to the issue of emptiness. Locke was right about that original emptiness. But we can’t entirely agree with Locke because there is something amiss in his treatment of emptiness. The problem here has nothing to do with the reasons for his online vilification. The argument that needs to be made concerns freedom, and it has more to do with our understanding of social life and less to do with the mind of the individual child. It is a difficult argument to make because our thinking about freedom has progresssed so little since the seventeenth century. To make the argument we need to think about human freedom and its connection with emptiness, the point being to argue that if we are friends of freedom, we must also be friends of emptiness, in a sense.
Locke did a lot to establish the idea that education (understood in the broadest sense to include all aspects of child-rearing) ought to be an education for freedom. The child is to be brought up to be a member of a society that would be the realisation of freedom. Although Locke preferred the word liberty, arguably the Greek word autonomy is better since it highlights the way in which a free society gives the law (the nomos) to itself.
Every society is autonomous in this sense, but very few are organised around an understanding of that autonomy. All too often societies fall back on the idea that something beyond them is dictating the law (their highest values) to them. Locke himself was guilty of this shrinking away from autonomy. Despite his lengthy arguments against innate ideas in his theory of knowledge, when he turns to politics he bases his argument on the supposedly innate idea of Natural Rights – as if rights were not a social construct but were something written in the book of Nature. Rousseau – the great critic of Locke’s theory of education – was guilty of the same. In his Emile, at the point where the young man being educated is first able to look in an intelligent way at the confusing array of cultures, he is told a didactic story that ends thus: “I therefore closed all the books [written by man]. There is one open to all eyes: it is the book of nature. It is from this great and sublime book that I learn to serve and worship its divine Author. No one can be excused for not reading it, because it speaks to all men a language that is intelligible to all minds.” (p306-7) Emile – held up as a paragon of autonomy – is supposed to immediately warm to the idea that our highest values are not ones that we imagine but ones supposedly revealed in a book written by some transcendent hand.
In the passage of time since the 1760s when Emile was published, it has become harder to believe that there could be a single universal language intelligible to all minds to provide a common ground for a global society of perpetual peace. Whatever nature says, its message needs to be interpreted, and that will inevitably occur within the frameworks of a very particular, historically specific language that will not be intelligible to all minds. There is no way for the book of nature to imprint itself directly on our intellects. The work of interpretation is unavoidable. Rather than basing our culture on the book of nature, we find ourselves having to write the book ourselves in our own, very particular language.
Here we are confronted with our freedom – a freedom best understood as the feature of a form of social life that lives in a web of meaning that society must spin for itself. It is a freedom that is difficult to confront – leaving us feeling perhaps that we are cast adrift like vessels in an abysmal sea of emptiness. And perhaps because of that difficulty so many clutch in desperation at anything that seems to stand as a rock that they can tie the vessel to, gaining reassurance, but denying their freedom.
Human freedom is a complex phenomenon, and there is nothing we can do here but provide a hopelessly sketchy indication that somewhere in the understanding of human freedom there is going to be a confrontation with a disturbing form of emptiness – the abyss that is the absence of a transcendent ground for our way of life. But with that sketch in mind we want to argue that if we agree with Locke that our thinking about education should be guided by the value of freedom, then we need to include the phenomenon of freedom and the emptiness beneath it in the curriculum.
This is something overlooked by the 21st century pedagogues who champion things like curiosity, childhood genius and self-organising learning environments. These models of education assume that for education to liberate it is enough if it allows the original fullness of the child to express itself. As long as there is an absence of obstacles in school to the enquiring mind, then freedom has been realised. But this is not the case. Freedom itself needs to be thematised. Students left to themselves may well devote all their time to the study of things and never reflect back upon the human condition (and this is the worst failing of education at the moment). If there is anything that deserves to be at the core of the curriculum in the later years of education, surely this is it. People like Sugata Mitra and Ken Robinson ostensibly develop liberation pedagogies (a bit like Freire’s pedagogy of the oppressed, although the new title would have to be something like “Pedagogy of the liberated”), but they make the terrible omission of not requiring young people to reflect upon the phenomena of liberation, liberty and autonomy. What they forget is that our freedom and our understanding of ourselves as free go hand in hand, and we develop as free beings by developing our understanding of our freedom.
An educational system that really advances the cause of freedom must advance our understanding of this key feature of human social life. At the moment the system allows the prevailing thoughtless reduction of freedom to the freedom of choice to go unquestioned. It also leaves unquestioned the various ways we construe social life as a heteronomous phenomenon, depicting social life as something following a path dictated to it, instead of grasping how society in that abysmal emptiness forges its path for itself.
Surely a better education will be one that thematises our freedom and ensures that all students, when they are well on the path to maturity, are encouraged to question what our freedom consists in, and are pointed to the best works of thinkers and artists who have put human freedom at the centre of their concerns. They will be encouraged to begin a line of reflection that will arrive sooner or later at the question of the grounds for our way of life. At that point the abyss will make itself felt. The issue then will be how they react to it: whether they embrace the emptiness at the core of the human condition or whether they continue the fearful retreat from it.
P.s. For those not shrinking from the abyss: Arvo Part’s Tabula Rasa.
A very interesting post! And I find myself agreeing with some bits, esp the last one: yes, education should certainly encourage students to reflect on a number of things and it should certainly point them to the best works of thinkers and artists.
Re the ‘tabula rasa’ notion, here are some things I believe:
According to many psychologists children may not be born with ideas, but they certainly have certain predispositions, preferences, ‘leanings’ – and they can learn some things a lot faster than others. Some examples:
– Children (even very little ones) seem to have built-in notions of beauty; they will look at a pretty face for much longer than an ugly one.
– Children seem to have some innate building blocks of morality; they will look longer at a ‘good’ doll (one which has helped another) rather than a ‘bad’ one (one which has hindered another and, given a choice, will prefer to play with the former.
– Children can learn to speak a language and can develop a fear of snakes much more easily than they can learn to write a language or develop a fear of cars.
A number of analogies have been suggested – I like the one by D. Kenrick: a child does not come into this world as a ‘tabula rasa’ but rather as a colouring book; culture can add the colours etc, but the broad outlines of the sketches are already there….
Nick, thanks for the feedback. I know you are keen to join forces wtih Stephen Pinker in attacking what he construes as the blank slate thesis. My post about the child as an empty vessel is a first attempt to defend the idea of the blank slate.
Pinker seems to think that the idea of the blank slate was an idea of a child (or of humanity generally) that is originally a complete void within which culture could construct anything at all without ever feeling the slightest resistance. Now, I can’t argue that no one ever had such a dumb idea, but I can argue that people worth reading – people like John Locke (the great exponent of the tabula rasa thesis in the early modern period) – never had any such idea. For Locke, the child is born with drives, instincts, inclinations, reflexes, etc., etc. The child is not a void on legs. And he insists that parents and tutors need to observe those natural inclinations carefully so that education can work with them rather than against them.
The blank slate for people like Locke and more radical theorists like Cornelius Castoriadis exists on the level of meaning. For me the issue is highlighted best by a comment that Nietzsche makes about the Darwinian theory of evolution. Nietzsche sees no reason to dismiss the theory, but he sees a massive question: When we become aware of the ape within ourselves, what are we to make of this? What horrifies him is not the theory of evolution itself, but the equanimity with which the Darwinists calmly announce that we are apes. For Nietzsche we ought to be ashamed of the fact that we have not put more distance between ourselves and our primitive ancestors.
What Nietzsche refers to is the question of how we are to make sense of things. People like Pinker ignore this, and content themselves with reminding us of the facts – facts that would come as no surprise to the best thinkers of the 17th century. We forget our humanity in an atrocious way when we stick with the facts and ignore (or dismiss) the question of meaning – the question of how we are to make sense of, for instance, our continuity with the apes.
I think you yourself have posted about the gap between facts and values. The blank slate exists in that gap. And that is the core of human freedom – the freedom of beings who can make sense of their situation in such a wide variety of ways simply through the language they use to describe it, to talk about it and to urge one another to respond to it in one way rather than another.
And here we find ourselves rubbing shoulders with Nietzsche again, accepting that we have a nature, but horrified to be surrounded by people who forget that there is also such a thing as meaning, and so we struggle, not to deny nature, but to remind humanity that it has the potential to transform itself and live its meaning.
I just learned of Sugata Mitra from your site. I’ll watch a youtube video or two of him to learn more. I kind of get the unfortunate feeling though that he will be a brown sahib, or a thoroughly westernized Indian and that is why, while having a few good ideas, he so far comes across as being confused and unfortunately cut off from his own Indian traditions, particularly the great guru-shisya or mentor-disciple tradition, through which Indians have classically passed down knowledge not only of their profound philosophical theories, but of a great many things.
Yes, you will be sorely disappointed. Rather than suggesting to people in the West that instead of fetishising the technological means of education, they need to think more deeply about the ends of education, he has established himself as the great defender of the indefensible idea that the truth is online and that as long as children have access to the internet, they will find it.
Well if his work is based in India then I can see why. There are a great many kids there (population is beyond 1 billion citizens currently) and some innovations must take place to see that all get an education. Building that many official “schools” simply is not an option at this point. He might be improvising some Indian jugaad (google it).
“The human mind in its original condition is a tabula rasa or a blank sheet of paper”
Can you offer any evidence for this claim?
As we try to argue: The tabula rasa thesis that makes sense is limited to the human intellect, and the thesis claims that there are no innate ideas (like the ideas of natural rights for instance, or the idea that there is a God and he is male and perfect and one, etc.). Really, the onus is one the defenders of innate ideas to prove that there are such things. Basically Locke argues that none of the arguments are persuasive, so it makes sense to assume that there are no innate ideas.
Since Locke we have become much more aware of the traditions we depend on. We get the ideas from the traditions we come in contact with, and the perception of their veracity depends on our experience (many ways of construing things just don’t “fit” with our experience of the way things are).
Furthermore, we are arguing that we should embrace that intellectual blankness because it is essential to human freedom. Ideas matter, and we are free to construe them differently, which might give us grounds for hoping that a different (better) world might just be possible.
With genetics and neuroscience both in their infancy stages, we may in the future see that ideas have their origins in genes, hormones or any of a wide variety of biological phenomena.
I just read this article and was wondering how tabula rasa squares with genetic pre-determination. It seems that science is proving we are are not blank slates or empty vessels.
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/01/life-as-a-nonviolent-psychopath/282271/
What do you think?
The scientists are talking about things like a genetic predisposition for things like aggression. The blog post tries to re-emphasise the distinction that goes back to Aristotle between things like that and the way we understand ourselves. As an example, let’s think about masculinity. Perhaps there are three different things to be distinguished:
1. By nature the boy feels that he is a man (with tendencies to be aggressive, possessive, jealous, etc., etc.). Here the scientists have lots to say.
2. The growing boy faces the question: What does it mean to be a man? He needs to understand the role that men are supposed to play in his particular society, with all its norms and ethical imperatives. Now it would be crazy for society to completely ignore nature, but isn’t there a gap here between what nature says and what society says about nature (about the bits we should give free rein to and the bits that should be repressed or sublimated)? Doesn’t that gap represent the limit of any simple scientific determination of the most important aspects of human life?
3. But the form of emptiness that the blog post wants to emphasise at the end is different. As well as society defining roles for men and women, it also develops an understanding of what we might call the metaphysics of those roles, i.e. it develops ideas about the reasons why they are imperative for us (e.g. because they are ordained by God, or because they are ordained by Nature, or because they are the work of a selfish gene whose mechanisms are beyond question). Every civilisation maintains some understanding of the Absolute (God, Nature, genes, etc.), and this becomes an organising principle for society as a whole. It makes a big difference if society tries to base itself on theology rather than science, for instance. Lots of things change. Now is there a genetic basis for Protestantism or Hinduism or scientism? What the post ends up maintaining is that here we find ourselves not only without God, but also without genes.
“Now is there a genetic basis for Protestantism or Hinduism or scientism?”
– Well….”The God gene hypothesis proposes that a specific gene (VMAT2) predisposes humans towards spiritual or mystic experiences. The idea has been postulated by geneticist Dean Hamer, the director of the Gene Structure and Regulation Unit at the U.S. National Cancer Institute, and author of the 2005 book The God Gene: How Faith is Hardwired into our Genes.
The God gene hypothesis is based on a combination of behavioral genetic, neurobiological and psychological studies. The major arguments of the hypothesis are: (1) spirituality can be quantified by psychometric measurements; (2) the underlying tendency to spirituality is partially heritable; (3) part of this heritability can be attributed to the gene VMAT2;[1] (4) this gene acts by altering monoamine levels; and (5) spiritual individuals are favored by natural selection because they are provided with an innate sense of optimism, the latter producing positive effects at either a physical or psychological level.”
Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_gene
“The tabula rasa thesis that makes sense is limited to the human intellect, and the thesis claims that there are no innate ideas ”
– Again, how can we know for certain that there are no innate ideas? Those ideas could be wrong, but they still may be innate.
Why this concern to find a genetic basis for faith? Are geneticists here filling the void left by the miracles that we can no longer believe in? Let’s assume that there is some predisposition to believe in something. Surely that provides no support whatsoever for the kind of spirituality that you are interested in. You have a whole series of ideas about the relationship between the human and the divine, between transcendence and immanence, between virtue and passion, between the still and the tempestuous – all of which go way, way, way beyond the utterly vague predisposition to believe. To all intents and purposes the tabula rasa remains. The geneticists may say: There is a slate called religion made by VMAT2 and blackened by monoamine molecules, but it is blank. And clearly, as people like Richard Dawkins demonstrate, this is a slate that people remain free to smash.
When was the metaphor “empty vessel” first used in history? Did Aristotle use this term? Or someone else in Greece?
“social excellence…realize their meaning…achieve their full potential…” Reflective teachers need to reflect a little more about the vacuities they parrot.