Sugata Mitra and the Last Teachers
Professor Sugata Mitra is one of the great spokespeople for the strange movement in education that is hostile to the very notion of teaching. Education is good. Learning is fantastic, especially when it involves individuals and small groups pursuing their own interests, preferably searching for information on the internet. Teaching, though, is something we need to be very, very wary of. Unless we are very, very careful to adopt a minimal, low-key, hands-off approach to this piping hot potato of pedagogy we will be guilty of indoctrination.
Sugata Mitra’s hole in the wall project provides an inspiring image for the anti-teacher teachers: a teacherless space in which children learn on their own (surfing the web). Of course there is still a need for teachers to set this space up and to supervise what takes place there, but this will be “minimally invasive teaching”. Mitra’s term is interesting. It implies that all teaching is “invasive” – a word full of negative connotations. Teaching is prima facie bad. The best that can be hoped for in teaching is to keep that badness to a minimum.
What is really bad according to this scheme of things is anything that smacks of an old-fashioned moral education. However, what sometimes seems to go unnoticed is that this movement spreads a moral message that is at least as powerful as the message once proclaimed by maximally invasive teachers. The message goes out to the students that as far as our notions of the Good are concerned, there really is nothing to get very worked up about. For instance, Mitra wants to make rational thinking one of the three planks of primary education (the others being reading comprehension and information search skills). Now one could get quite passionate about the Age of Reason and start to think of oneself as a descendent of Descartes, obliged to carry on the unfinished project of the Enlightenment, sweeping away once and for all the remnants of the Dark Ages (horoscopes, theism, genuflection before gurus, all forms of fetishism, all advertising that does not just stick to the facts, etc., etc.) and (after reading Henri de Saint-Simon) perhaps arguing that henceforth all shirts should have buttons up the back. But, no, that would be terrible. It would be far, far too invasive.
To keep things suitably minimal the teacher would have to appear neutral, letting the students find their own set of values. Some might turn to anarchism, others to scientology, and yet others to Buddhism. The minimally rationalist teacher will doubtless prompt the students to defend their chosen value systems, but will avoid creating the impression that more educated members of society believe that some value systems are better than others lest the minimally invasive outdoctrination slip back into nasty old indoctrination.
In this way, students receive a very specific and utterly unambiguous moral education. They get the message that there is nothing to get excited about. There is certainly nothing to fight for or die for. We have our personal beliefs, but we shouldn’t get too worked up about them because as far as society is concerned there is absolutely no way to prove that one ethical framework is any better than another. The overriding principles are: Relax, take it easy, live and let live.
Although the anti-teacher teachers present their approach as something of a revolution, the fundamental moral message that ends up being passed on to students fits in very nicely with the sort of moral inertia already established by the culture industry, especially by TV. The form of TV broadcasting (irrespective of any particular content) creates the perfect impression that nothing really matters. When every story shown on television can be interrupted to run an advert for toilet cleaner, everyone gets the message.
In fact, because of TV and other influences in the world beyond school, the attack on teaching has come a bit too late. As attacks go, it is all rather futile. If the attempt is to pull the teacher off her pedastal, that collapsed decades ago, at least in the West, when critics like Neil Postman were writing nice books with titles like “Entertaining Ourselves to Death.” By the time children get to secondary school and the teachers might feel that at last they can discuss the serious moral issues in all seriousness, it is too late, the unspoken lesson of the culture industry that nothing really matters has already sunk in to the very pit of their being, and any overly serious moralising from teachers surely fails to penetrate the wall of indifference.
The anti-teacher teachers, with all their aparent moral minimalism, say a very maximal “Yes” to that wall of indifference.
Nietzsche said: “Behold I show you the Last Men.” These are (to update the description slightly) basically happy people for whom there is nothing to strive for any longer, apart from perhaps more things that will make life more comfortable, more entertaining, more pleasant – people for whom history has effectively ended, for whom the all-important contentment is perceived to be within reach – people who no longer say: “It was mediocre,” but, “It was OK” – people who want to accept themselves as they are, to be at peace – people who would seek out a therapist if they felt they were starting to feel disgust for something – people for whom the desert is only attractive as something seen from a jeep or from the back of a camel led by a tour guide – people for whom the idea of going out into the desert alone for forty days and forty nights in the hope of catching a glimpse of something utterly higher and other than the chatter of the town ceases to be comprehensible. Why would anyone do such a thing?
The hideous type described by Nietzsche is now seen to be the dominant type in online pedagogy – a type that therefore could be called the Last Teacher.
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Picture info:
Caspar David Friedrich – Wanderer above the Mist
Duane Hanson – Couple with Shopping Bags
I’m starting to feel a bit sorry for Mitra. In three posts you’ve painted him convincingly as (a) a failed romantic, (b) a Thatcherite and (c) a post-Nietzschean relativist. I suspect that he doesn’t really say enough for any of these comparisons to run very far…but surely it’s not possible to be all three of these at once?
In my field of EFL teaching I’d place him somewhere in the tradition of Prabhu’s Task Based Learning. This would enable me to make the following corrections to his approach:
(a) tasks have to be chosen and sequenced carefully so that they’re not too easy or too hard
(b) there have to models of successful performance of the task available
(c) students need a chance to reflect afterwards and possibly practice or apply their new skills/knowledge
John, can Mitra be three things at once (or tap into three apparently separate lines of thought and practice)? Yes, he can.
1. He is the most popular online evangelist of discovery learning. The first big proponent of discovery learning (if my information is correct) was Rousseau. Rousseau was a Romantic. The Romantics were anti-industrial. Mitra is actually pro-industry, but has chosen, for some reason, to make anti-industry noises (limited only to a critique of what goes on inside schools). His model can appear to make the child everything, just as for Rousseau everything had to centre on Emile. So, yes, definitely there is a line that joins Mitra’s model with that of Rousseau, and in that sense it is not completely ridiculous to connect the two and ask if the new version of discovery learning is more sophisticated than that of Rousseau or less.
2. Mitra, insofar as he has a connection with the Romantic tradition, is a failed Romantic. For instance, it isn’t really the child that is at the centre, but the tablet. And his anti-industry noises shy away from any meaningful critique of the Big Industry in which we live. The ways in which his approach fails as a form of Romanticism enable it to provide a perfect training for the latest approach to industry: neoliberalism. Mitra can spin things on stage so that he sounds like a rebellious Romantic critic of the establishment and so tap into an undercurrent in his audience that would like to flirt with something that sounds anarchic, but that just masks the way his model actually satisfies the needs of the New World Order – an order which promotes an ideology of the free individual but really promotes the interests of Big Industry (and Mitra promotes the same ideology to the same end).
3. A Nietzschean relativist? You skimmed that post too fast. We weren’t arguing that Mitra was a Nietzschean. Mitra is a scientist – a rationalist – but one of those little rationalists in the pragmatic tradition. An empiricist more than a rationalist in the great tradition of big rationalism. His approach to outdoctrination implies that the only reasonable approach to be taken to all doctrines is to keep a skeptical distance, remaining true to the data, to the empirical – and, of course, one can never draw any big conclusions from the oh so small data. This is most definitely NOT the view of Nietzsche. God is dead for both Mitra and Nietzsche, but whereas Nietzsche sees the great danger, and tries desperately to find a way of saving big values after the death of the assumed source of their authority, Mitra sees no danger whatsoever and simply slides along with the decline believing – presumably – that everything will be alright as long as we do the research sufficiently meticulously.
In “Thus Spake Zarathustra” Nietzsche gives a lovely cameo of the Last Man – the man who no longer sees any big values worth fighting for – the man who is content with the trappings of bourgeois life. Mitra’s outdoctrination, if he ever managed to implement it (and I don’t see it included in the SOLE toolkit) would provide a very nice preparation for just such a life.
And of course it would have tickled Milton Friedman to think that a new form of non-schooling would pull the stuffing out of all adolescent idealism and ensure that all the kids grow up to be content with the trappings of bourgeois life.
Conclusion: Mitra provides a lovely case study in how a once-revolutionary philosophy can be thinned down and made so shallow that it loses all its revolutionary content and becomes something that prepares children very nicely for the very thing the revolution was to overturn.
Of course, in making these arguments we are putting undue emphasis on Mitra’s spin and less on his research. As we have said, Mitra would probably prefer to rest on his research and just stick to the figures like the good scientist he would like to be, but he seems to have realised early on that that is not where the money is. The research needs to be spun – it needs to be made to seem that, for instance, here is a way to make poverty history, or here is a way to end the regimentation and oppression of the lives of the young, or here is a way of opening the door to a society that will be free, free at last.
You seem to be more inclined to focus on the data. We are more interested in criticising the spin because that is what has caught people’s imagination, leading people to see revolution where we see only reaction.
Torn, the spin is definitely an entertaining thing to discuss and read about. Unfortunately, I think the way spin succeeds is by getting people to focus on it – instead of laying out their own alternatives.
Would you be able to work with the SOLE set-up if we just made one simple change to the instructions – “switch off the computers and use your imagination instead?”
John, yes, the spin is entertaining, but it is more than that. It is a force in itself. Spin is what we used to call ideology – one of the forces that helps keep this particular show on this particular road. If we want to change course, it won’t be enough to change the system of carrots and sticks; we also need to challenge its ideologies and get people to see through them.
About working with the SOLE: We are great believers in Rousseau-type discovery learning, so insofar as some modified SOLE-setup (freed from the crazy insistence that everything must be done online) allows for some sort of discovery learning, yes, we could work with it. But we wouldn’t get excited about it because built into the SOLE idea is the assumption that all education needs is something like a new app that we can plug and play – a minimal approach that turns its back on the old edifice of education and leaves the children plugged into the wider industrialised world. (Prensky wrote a lovely – i.e. horrible – article about turning on the lights, describing almost poetically this aspect of the edtech myth.) We would get excited when we see people insisting that education must be understood much more broadly as the shaping of character by the thousands of influences across the full breadth of society. Mitra is right about the terrible effect of industrialisation, but the primary industrialising forces are not those found in old-fashioned schools. When we hear someone say loud and clear that we live in a society that is fundamentally anti-pedagogic we will rise to our feet as one and applaud them until our palms start to bleed.