Whitehead, in The Aims of Education, posits that the main problem with education is that students receive far too many inert ideas during the course of their schooling. Inert ideas are pieces of information that are given to students without any context, and they remain disconnected from other ideas because they are not used or tested. Because this is the dominant pedagogy, students become “a disheartened crowd of young folk, inoculated against any outbreak of intellectual zeal.”
Whitehead is writing mostly about education that takes place after age 16, what we would think of a secondary and higher education. He believes that training, which takes place until age 12, is mainly done in the home, by mothers. In order for education to actually mean something, that is, for students to learn more than inert ideas, there is a process of learning that must take place for each idea or subject matter. In addition to that process, people must realize that teaching itself is a craft that can’t be done by anyone, and can’t be measured in the objective manner that many propose. A teacher has to be skilled to guide students through the educational process, and the way student learning is evaluated can’t be governed by sweeping generalizations about what students should be exposed to. I think the paragraph on page 264 that begins with “The best procedure…” resonates today, as the dominant thinking about education today is that students’ progress can be measured objectively, as if their minds are “dead matter.”
The process, or rhythm of education, should, in Whitehead’s view, begin with the romance stage. In this stage, the student’s interest is sparked in a subject or idea. The teacher must be careful at this stage not to enforce too much discipline around learning facts about the subject because that can “kill” the curiosity that the student has. At the same time, however, the teacher has to be a skillful guide so that the student comes to the realization that there is so much more to learn about their interest. The next stage is the precision stage, in which the student receives concrete knowledge about the subject, and the skills necessary to apply their knowledge in the final stage. The generalization stage is the one in which a student can apply the skill they learned in the precision stage to the larger world. These stages together make knowledge useful and applicable in the world, which is something that Whitehead sees little of. When experienced fully, the stages also allow the student to retain the sense of wonder they have about the world and their intellectual growth isn’t stunted.
Whitehead notes that it is possible for the student to move through all stages in one subject but not in others, meaning that meaningful knowledge can be developed in one subject, but be stunted in another. I could see that happening a lot with students at the high school and college level, because they have so many different teachers and professors, and depending on how the teacher approaches the subject, and how they handle discipline, that romance stage could either be encouraged or stifled. From what I understand, a student has to be intrigued by a subject, and that initial intrigue is what can set the process in motion. But I’m wondering must the student discover the subject themselves, or can it be something that is introduced by the teacher as long as that teacher lets the curiosity develop and lead to questions which move into the precision stage?
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