In Defense of Learning


Michael Pollen's In Defense of Food, among other things, makes a case against the positivism of nutritional science. If production means economy and food wasn't a product in the same way now as 50 years ago, nutritional science has been key to the rhetoric that has gotten Americans to buy, eat, and get fat from things that aren't food at all.

Today I spent some time reworking a proposal for a very wonderful sounding digital learning lab. It's an excellent idea that I really think will give several dozen nerds types the opportunity to hang out with their friends and dick around with technology they sort of know how to use.

In my research I watched a commercial/motivational video on thinking outside the box in education. I'm not one to be squeamish about progressive thinking - certainly not in areas that I care deeply about, like literacy and education.

Maybe the video had a point I missed but it left me feeling a little bullied.

Notes

  • Our educational system is totes broken
  • Team USA will lose to unless we change
  • Change means hyper customization that focuses on learning styles and environment
  • Teachers and students are the guides and must have autonomy to make their own educational plans

Honestly, I don't mind any of these ideas. I'm also not an educator. What bothered me was the "box" sentiment that to me values change before content and adjustment and metrics over having a well grounded idea in the first place.

In early days of nutritional science, very well meaning scientists made attempts to replace breast milk with a synthetic human substance. They failed more than they succeeded and since then the art has developed itself quite the track record of telling humans that manufactured food was better than whole food.

“The entire history of baby formula has been the history of one overlooked nutrient after another…and still to this day babies fed on the most “nutritionally complete” formula fail to do as well as babies fed human milk.  Even more than margarine, formula stands as the ultimate test product of nutritionism and a fair index of its hubris.” In Defense of Food

You and I do not share the same backstory but I would venture to say you have heard something about the trend to slow, locally sourced food, food that comes from plants and animals not machinery in plants.

Engineering Education
"Yet the beauty of a processed food like margarine is that is can be endlessly reengineered to overcome even the most embarrassing about-face in nutritional thinking—including the real wincer that its main ingredients might cause heart attacks and cancer." In Defense of Food

Has education wandered down the sickly slope away from whole education and into pixelated hyper measurement? Is the science of learning a dangerous idea? I have long held that the reduction of human experience to data is grave disservice to our souls. Positivism and its built in hubris of mathematics as truth has done a lot of good and a lot of damage to our culture. I'm concerned about educational systems that want to tinker with a generation. As we are wary of the health claims of any product, the learning benefit of any system (especially one that comes with an all-inclusive price tag connected to a for-profit industry) is should be related to its benefits in the long term, the lives of the children it educates, not the short term benefit of better metrics.

In Defense of Education

Is the a "real learning" response to engineered learning? What can we learn from experiences based on a shared culture? My personal answer to the food question has been to explore the foods of ethnicity and invest in habits that consistently use simple, recognizable ingredients to make real food.  Is there an analogy in education? I don't know, do you?