What is Education in Schools?

There are many ways that people imagine schools work. Schools have been envisioned as gardens, factories, behaviour training, knowledge transferal, strategic games, competitions and trade in commodities. These can be seen in the structures of the school, the way that teachers plan their classes and the motivations of parents and students. However, these models are all flawed and I suggest that social constructivism is a better model to guide teachers in their planning of school activity and to guide students and parents in their meaningful participation in it.

Schools are institutions woven into the fabric of our society. Michael Apple describes how they are so entangled with the economic and cultural institutions in our society that we rarely question how else they could be or even whether they achieve what we think they achieve (Apple 1990).

We all “go to school” at one or more primary/secondary school sequences of some sort. It is a considerable government - and often personal - budget item, takes thirteen years of most people’s lives, and has a significant impact on life beyond those thirteen years. But what is it?

The factory model

One model that is commonly used is the factory. This description has been used to describe characteristics of schooling that spread widely following the transformation of schooling that occurred in the mid 1800s to manage the need for mass education in industrial society (and a desire to bring about common social standards). This model is descriptive on a number of levels. It is not just the school that can be seen as the factory, it is the whole education system, or even the classroom.

The factory model is characterised by the need for efficiency, uniformity (all students treated the same in the same year level regardless of individual differences), top down management (in particular a fixed curriculum), isolation (it occurs in a fixed location in a dedicated building aside from the rest of society), management (bells, rules, uniforms, deadlines, standard behaviours), all students moving through at the same rate, and the students are passive – education is done to them. Young children enter as raw material to be manufactured into the product that society requires in the next generation of the adult population. The factory model uses quality control (standardised grading at each year level and report cards based on performance compared with the cohort) to decide on the success of the students. This assessment is based on the students’ responses to standardised tests and assignments that allow for little imagination and creativity. A brilliant insight or outstanding output that does not meet the specifications of the job (the criteria), is not rewarded, as it is not what the factory intended to produce. The products (educated students) are put on the market for sale once leaving the factory (the job market, that is, with the best quality products attracting the best value).

It is easy to see some of the characteristics of school in this model. However, like all models, it is not a complete description of school. The factory model ignores the complexity of human beings, including different rates of learning, strengths, interests and imagination that make children rather different to the raw material used in factories. The model also treats children based on what is wanted from them rather than what they are or could be. It suggests that there is a blueprint for the product they are required to be at graduation, whereas the young adults who leave school will all be unique. Those who have the greatest success at school, particularly a school closely resembling the factory model, do not necessarily outdo the “faulty” products once on the job market or in society. Schools are places for learning and development and children do not necessarily learn and develop best in environments set up to produce inanimate consumer products. Another feature of the factory is that it works in one direction. It works on the material, in this case, the child. Surely schools learn too and develop as the students leave their impact on them.

The factory model of schooling does not take into account external influences on the child or the variability of the resources available to the “factories”.

This kind of factory model has been described as the “social efficiency” model or ideology (Schiro 2013), “quasi-scientific” (Apple 1990) or Taylorism. It is an engineering solution to the problem of schooling. The product is often not even seen as a human anymore, but a worker, score (called the ATAR in Australia), or a ranking on international assessments such as PISA, TIMMS and PIRLS. When someone describes schooling using the factory model, it is usually in a pejorative sense.

Alternative models

What are some alternatives? Rather than viewing children as a raw material like steel, we could consider them as plants growing in a garden. This is described by Vygotsky as the botanical model (Vygotskiĭ 1930, Vygotsky and Cole 1978). The factory model sees students as passive raw material: the botanical model emphasises growth. Put the children in the right conditions and they will grow like a seed developing into a tree. We see this model in the name kindergarten – children’s garden. Here we have school as a place for students to grow. They grow by being protected, fed and watered. It is simply a matter of providing the right conditions for growth and the natural capacities of the child evolve. In a garden, the seed is not hammered, moulded or cut into the shape of a tree, rather the capacity to become a tree was already present in the seed. The task of the school in this model is to find out what best enables children to grow and develop so as to provide this to the children. Success is measured by growth and health. In schools this is generally done informally as in “she has come a long way” or “he has grown into a fine young man”.

The botanical model has advantages over the factory model. We know that children who are deprived of basic needs do not develop as well (cognitively, physically and emotionally) as those in a fertile home/school environment. This is one of the great benefits of kindergartens and early learning centres as children in these formative stages receive care that they may or may not receive at home (Dhuey 2011). While in some ways this model is much more appealing than the factory model, it seems to have limited value in describing human development and education, so Vygotsky had no time for it. This model can also be just as harsh and dehumanising as the factory model. Do we weed students out who do not grow as desired? And it turns out, adult humans do not just grow out of a well-nourished seed.

Vygotsky noted that the botanical model was supplanted in psychological research by what he referred to as a zoological model (Vygotsky and Cole 1978). Zoological, because no longer was the template plant development, but the study of animal behaviour. Behaviour is seen as an interplay between an external stimulus and the response of the animal. Many experiments, including the famous dog conditioning experiments by Pavlov, demonstrated the power of this model. Animals could be taught to respond in particular ways to cues provided by a stimulus. This was viewed as learning in its simplest form and “higher intellectual processes” that develop in humans are simply a more “complicated and developed” continuation of this process. In this sense, school could be viewed as an advanced version of puppy training, a process of teaching children how to behave in various situations. Humans are able to be trained to do more complex tasks than dogs but in this model it is assumed that to attain the “higher intellectual processes” is just behavioural conditioning with more connections being made.

One of the questions that drove Vygotsky was: “what made humans different to other animals?” He did not find the botanical model or the zoological model satisfactory, but explorations into the behaviour of chimpanzees and children gave him greater insight into human learning and development. I will come to some of his conclusions on learning later.

With the rise of computer technology, we have another model that is popular – which I call the knowledge transfer model. We are familiar with computers having data and being able to transfer that data from place to place. We can carry data and information around on various devices and transfer it to another device. In this model, we have knowledge in the teacher (book, video, Google, etc) and the task is to transfer it into the student. This can be done via lectures, notes, slide presentations, videos and any other means of presenting the information to the student. This is the way that education is often discussed casually. In fact, the behavioural/zoological model mentioned above and the factory model both imply knowledge transfer. In the factory, the knowledge is transferred by imposing it on the raw material and in the behavioural model it is transferred by strengthening stimulus response connections. In the media we often read or hear about things being “on the curriculum” but it is often left unclear as to how that curriculum is “delivered”. Knowledge transfer is often implied.

The knowledge transfer model is very unsatisfactory. Even from its computing analogy, it does not measure up. We can transfer data from one computer to another but does that mean we really transfer knowledge? We can share our phone number with someone but that would hardly amount to education. With computers, what is transferred is identical in each device. With human learning, the teachers may have knowledge of what they want the students to be able to do. The teachers can guide and support in various ways, but what the students end up with is something new. Sometimes it is better than what the teacher had because the student brings prior knowledge, skills, imagination and creativity to the task.

Some parents and students view education in terms of competition, games and trades. The idea of competition in education is prevalent. Scores, grades and awards become in their minds the ends of education in themselves. A lot of emotional energy and sense of identity becomes tied up in receiving certain prizes, scores and awards, and the reaction to not receiving what they want is often despair. While competition can provide a level of motivation that might drive the student to achieve more than they otherwise would, a significant number of parents and teachers become very emotionally involved in the outcome, to their detriment. Their priorities and sense of perspective have been compromised as they have usually started out with ambitious educational goals and end up obsessing over a token. There are many other flawed ways that education could be measured – how many words are written, hours are spent, snacks are consumed. These, like prizes, grades and awards are incidentals, a part of the process, yes, but hardly the point behind this great enterprise.

Similarly, there are those who treat education as a strategic game, they just need to work out how to play it right – get the right teachers, in the right school, the right subjects, and that will lead to the result that they are seeking. If someone does better than them, it is because the game is “rigged”, or that person has gained some advantage in the way that they have played. Similar to the competition and game is the trade. It is about paying enough money and the result will be handed over in return.

These superficial models do little to describe what schools are all about but play a role in the minds of many and may need to be countered by schools themselves. While superficial, they may have non-trivial implications for what is actually learned by the students.

Constructing Knowledge Together

The final model I will discuss here is often called social constructivism. Constructivism has moved through three main phases that can be called Piagetian Constructivism, Radical Constructivism and Social Constructivism (Flenley 2016). Piagetian Constructivism came to prominence in the 1960s and 70s. It reacted to the behaviourist assumption that learning occurred by transmitting knowledge onto the blank slate of a child’s mind. Instead intellectual growth was a process of construction that the learner actively participated in. The limited success of this model resulted in its replacement by the new behaviourism of B F Skinner and R Gagné.

The next phase was the radical constructivism of the 1980s and 1990s. This had its base in the work of Ernst von Glasersfeld and the notion that there is no direct correspondence between knowledge and reality. According to this view it is impossible for us to know what is reality so our knowledge is idiosyncratic and always open to revision. Von Glasersfeld claimed that traditional testing tended to focus on recall of facts rather than demonstration of understanding (Von Glasersfeld 2001). Recall is easier to teach but his point was that understanding was not required for recall. When teachers believe in a realist interpretation of the world, in spite of thousands of years of philosophic thought to the contrary, recall may seem synonymous with understanding. The answer is right or wrong. However, understandings of the same information can vary from person to person. So, a word, image or explanation is not enough to establish what he refers to as conceptual understanding. He therefore, promotes teaching that involves exposing students to situations where their current understanding of concepts is insufficient for solving the problem at hand. This requires conscious reflection by the learner, avoiding right or wrong judgements that reinforce recall and discourage active reflection.

An aspect of constructivism that is implicit in von Glasersfeld’s work but overlooked is the role of the more knowledgeable other in learning. Social constructivism presents a sociocultural view of learning based on the work of Lev Vygotsky. For Vygotsky, learning and development results from social interaction and the use of tools, including cognitive tools like language. One of Vygotsky’s ideas is that humans are the only creatures who are able to create their own stimuli, while keeping other stimuli in mind, to help them solve problems. This created stimulus is a symbol in their mind which is a form of tool use. Humans use tools, including symbols to mediate between what is known and new knowledge. Children learn to use tools and symbols in this way through social interaction. Social constructivism began to take hold in the 1990s and remains influential today. Social constructivism encourages teachers to have students work in groups, to allow students to express their opinions, questions and understandings to the class, so that they will be engaged in their own and other’s building of understanding.

 All three forms of constructivism require the students to be active in their learning. Students are not raw materials hammered into shape in a factory, or memory devices waiting for knowledge to be transferred. With social constructivism, the students are not plants growing independently of other plants or animals making associations between external stimuli and responses. They are not involved in a game they could win or lose, nor can they trade knowledge. When school is envisaged as any of these things, it falls short of its potential to bring about learning and cognitive development.

With Vygotsky, for learning to occur, the focus of the learning needs to be within the zone of proximal development (ZPD). He divides cognitive experiences into three zones. There is that store of knowledge that the student is already competent with and could demonstrate without any external scaffolding or support. Working with this knowledge does not generate learning. Then there are those things that the student can do with some support, by imitating the teacher or a peer, by following a text or cues given by another person (a More Knowledgeable Other – MKO). This domain of cognitive work is the ZPD. Work by a student with support of an MKO within the ZPD stretches the student a little beyond what they can already do without help. Beyond the ZPD, the student is outside their capabilities. They cannot follow what is going on even with scaffolding. A more knowledgeable other is required to help construct new knowledge, hence the term social constructivism.

This Vygotskian social constructivist model of learning responds to the student as a human being in a cultural and social context. The purpose is student learning and development. The curriculum and pedagogy must be adapted to the individual students’ zones of proximal development. The students cannot “fail” because they are not trying to meet some externally set standard or norm. But they must learn and through learning they develop cognitively.

Conclusion

I would like to say that a social constructivist model of schooling represents what happens in schools. However, while it certainly has a significant impact, at least in the school where I work, what happens in schools is a blend of all of the models described in this paper. The factory model is well represented by various structures in school, from periods to uniforms and in particular, standardised curriculum and testing. The botanical or growth model is present in improving aesthetics, environments and an atmosphere of fun. The zoological or behavioural model manifests in rewards for predetermined desirable behaviour, while the competition/game models are present in the rankings of scores and schools for NAPLAN and the ATAR, not to mention many other prizes and awards that schools present students based on their performance relative to their peers. Education as a commodity exists as we have schools with particular advantages where only those who can afford the considerable fees, or who can afford to live in the expensive suburb where the school is situated are able to access them. However, attempts to differentiate and appropriately scaffold learning activities, adopt collaborative learning techniques, promote active learning, growth mindset, peer mentoring, develop the whole child through wellbeing and co-curricular programs dominate the practice of teaching today and this builds a picture that none of the other models begin to describe.

So how does school based education work? Social constructivism must be considered as a key component, whether the teachers are deliberate about it or not. But it brings up other issues. If social interaction is so important for learning and development, then the nature of the interactions that a learner has at school is significant. This is understood by parents who take into account the other students when they choose a school for their children or when they attempt to intervene if they are not happy with the class that their child has been placed in. The word social here includes friendships, social skills and staying out of trouble, but it goes beyond this, according to Vygotsky, to impact on curriculum based learning and intellectual development as well. For some parents who are able, this is important in their decision to spend considerable sums of money and to have their children commute past many other schools to enter an independent school with high fees. On the level of society, this leads to a filtering, increasing the disadvantage in some schools and some areas, making the challenge to achieve their potential in education even harder. It is also understood by teachers who recognise that student engagement is essential in a functioning classroom and therefore do not simply speak or show information to students in their lessons.

There are many ways to approach the concept of school. The conception of school held by the parents, teachers and students impacts on how the school operates, the schools that parents choose for their children and the development and learning of the students that attend. This makes the conception of school a critical element of education and indeed society. However, it seems that this is given little attention in the public and political discourse on schooling in this country.

A Ross Phillips

References

Apple, M. W. (1990) Ideology and Curriculum (2nd), New York: Routledge.

Dhuey, E. (2011) Who Benefits From Kindergarten? Evidence From the Introduction of State Subsidization. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 33(1), pp. 3-22.

Flenley, R. (2016) The constructivist learner: towards a genealogy.

Schiro, M. (2013) Curriculum theory : conflicting visions and enduring concerns, 2nd ed., Thousand Oaks, Calif.: SAGE Publications.

Von Glasersfeld, E. (2001) Radical constructivism and teaching. Prospects, 31(2), pp. 161-173.

Vygotskiĭ, L. S. a. L., A. (1930) Tool and Symbol in Child Development.

Vygotsky, L. S. and Cole, M. (1978) Mind in society : the development of higher psychological processes, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.