Educators nod sagely at the mention of ‘social
constructivism’ confirming the current orthodoxy in learning theory. To be
honest, I’m not even sure that social constructivism is an actual theory, in
the sense that it is verified, studied, understood and used as a deep,
theoretical platform for action. For most, I sense, it is a simple belief that
learning is, well, ‘social’ and ‘constructed’. As collaborative learning is a
la mode, the social bit is accepted without much reflection, despite its
obvious flaws. Constructivism is trickier but appeals to those with a
learner-centric disposition, who have a mental picture of ideas being built in
the mind.
Let me say that I am not, and never have been,
a social constructivist. My disbelief in social constructivism comes from an
examination of the theoretical roots of the social portion of the theory, in
Rousseau, Marx, and Marxists such as Gramsci and Althusser, as well as critiques
of learning theorists Piaget, Vygotsky and Bruner. More specifically, I believe
it is inefficient, socially inhibiting, harmful to some types of learners and
blocks better theory and practice. Finally, I’ve seen it result in some catastrophically
utopian failures, namely Sugata Mitra’s ‘hole-in-the-wall’ project and
Negroponte’s Ethiopian farrago.
With Rousseau, we had the rebalancing of learning theory
towards the learner, which was good but it may have led to an extreme reliance
on naturalism and intrinsic motivation that is hard to apply in the real world.
David Hume wrote, “He is plainly mad, after having long
been maddish”, and although Rousseau's legacy has been
profound, it is problematic. Having encouraged the idea of romantic naturalism
and the idea of the noble and good child, that merely needs to be nurtured in
the right way through discovery learning, he perhaps paints an over-romantic
picture of education as natural development. The Rousseau legacy is the idea
that all of our educational ills come from the domineering effect of society
and its institutional approach to educational development. If we are allowed to
develop naturally, he claims, all will be well. This may be an over-optimistic
view of human nature and development, and although not without truth, lacks
psychological depth. Emile, as Althusser claimed, now reads like a fictional
utopia.
Although Karl Marx wrote little on educational theory, his
influence on learning theory and practice has been profound. In The Communist
manifesto Marx states that education has a ‘social’ context, which is both
direct and indirect, ‘
And your education! Is not that also social, and
determined by the social conditions under which you educate, by the
intervention direct or indirect, of society’. It was this idea that
underpinned the entire communist world’s view of learning in the 20
th century,
especially through Marxist theorists such as Gramsci and Althusser. In Soviet
Russia and its satellite states education was remoulded around political aims
and when the Cultural Revolution in China between 1949 and 1966 was unleashed,
it had devastating consequences, the nadir coming with Pol Pot and the complete eradication of teachers and schools. Interestingly, when it came to re-education, Marxists states reverted to direct, didactic instruction. To this day Marxism, to a degree, persists
in educational and learning theory, most notably in Gramsci, Althusser and the
‘social’ constructivism of Piaget, Vygotsky and Bruner.
3. I
don’t buy Piaget (see Piaget)
Jean Piaget claimed that cognitive development proceeds in
four genetically determined stages, and that they always follow the same order.
This theory of child development, he called ‘genetic epistemology’, and it saw
the minds of children as very different from those of adults. Importantly, this
perception must be taken into account in teaching and learning. Big problem –
he got it mostly wrong. His famous four ‘ages and stages’ developmental model
has been fairly well demolished. How did he get it so wrong? Well, like Freud,
he was no scientist. First, he used his own three children (or others from
wealthy, professional families) and not objective or multiple observers to
eliminate observational bias. Second, he often repeated a statement if the
child’s answer did not conform to his experimental expectation. Third, the
data and analysis lacked rigour, making most of his supposed studies next to
useless. So, he led children towards the answers he wanted, didn’t isolate the
tested variables, used his own children, and was extremely vague on his
concepts. What's worrying is the fact that this Piagean view of child
development, based on 'ages and stages' is still widely believed, despite being
wrong. This leads to misguided teaching methods. Education and training is
still soaked in this dated theory. However, on the whole, his sensitivity to
age and cognitive development did lead to a more measured and appropriate use of
educational techniques that matched the true cognitive capabilities of
children.
4. Above
all, I don’t buy Vygotsky
Lev Vygotsky, the Russian
psychologist, was as influential as any living educational psychologist. In 'Thought and Language' and 'Mind
in Society', along with several other texts, he presents a psychology rooted in Marxist social theory and
dialectical materialism. Development is a result two phenomena and their
interaction, the ‘natural’ and the ‘social’, a sort of early nature and nurture
theory.
Ultimately the strength of Vygotsky’s learning
theory stands or falls on his social constructivism, the idea that learning is
fundamentally a socially mediated and constructed activity. This is a detailed
recasting of Marxist theory of social consciousness applied to education.
Psychology becomes sociology as all psychological phenomena are seen as social
constructs. Mediation is the cardinal idea in his psychology of education, that
knowledge is constructed through mediation, yet it is not entirely clear what
mediation entails and what he means by the ‘tools’ that we use in mediation. In
many contexts, it simply seems like a synonym for discussion between teacher
and learner. However he does focus on being aware of the learner’s needs, so
that they can ‘construct’ their own learning experience and changes the focus
of teaching towards guidance and facilitation, as learners are not so much
‘educated’ by teachers as helped to construct their own learning.
In particular, it was his focus on the role of language, and
the way it shapes our learning and thought, that defined his social psychology
and learning theory. Behaviour is shaped by the context of a culture and
schools reflect that culture. He goes further driving social influence right
down to the level of interpersonal interactions. Then even further, as these
interpersonal interactions mediate the development of children’s higher mental
functions, such as thinking, reasoning, problem solving, memory, and language.
Here he took larger dialectical themes and applied them to interpersonal
communication and learning.
However, Vygotsky has a pre-Chomsky view of language, where
language is acquired entirely from others in a social context. We now know that
this is wrong, and that we are, to a degree, hard-wired for the acquisition of
language. Much of his observations on how language is acquired and shapes
thought is therefore out of date. The role, for example, of ‘inner speech’ in
language and thought development is of little real relevance in modern psycholinguistics.
He prescribes a
method of instruction that keeps the learner in the Zone of Proximal
Development (ZPD), an idea that was neither original to him nor even fully
developed in his work. The ZPD is the difference between what the learner knows
and what the learner is capable of knowing or doing with mediated assistance.
To progress, one must interact with peers who are ahead of the game through
social interaction, a dialectical process between learner and peer. Bruner
though the concept was contradictory in that you don’t know what don’t yet know. And if it simply means not pushing learners too far through
complexity or cognitive overload, then the observation, or concept, seems
rather obvious. One could even conclude that Vygotsky’s conclusion about
mediation through teaching is false. Teaching, or peer mediation, is not a
necessary condition for learning. A great deal is made of social performance
being ahead of individual performance in the ZPD but there is no real evidence
that this is the case. Bruner, as stated, was to point out the weakness of this
idea and replace it with the concept of ‘scaffolding’.
The oft-quoted, rarely read Vygotsky appeals to those who
see instruction, and teaching, as a necessary condition for learning and
sociologists who see social phenomena as the primary determinant factor in
learning. As a pre-Chomsky linguist, his theories of language are dated and
much of his thought is rooted in now discredited dialectical materialism. For
Vygotsky, psychology becomes sociology as all psychological phenomena are seen
as social constructs, so he is firmly in the Marxist tradition of learning
theory. One could conclude by saying that Vygostsky has become ‘fashionable’
but not as relevant as his reputation would suggest.
The resurrection of Vygotsky has led to strong beliefs and
practices around the role of the teachers and collaborative learning and the
belief that social context lies at the heart of educational problems. Here, it
is clear that Marxist ‘class consciousness’ is replaced by ‘social
consciousness’. We no longer have Marxist ideology shaping education, but we do
have the ideas dressed up in sociology and social psychology.
5.
Massively inefficient
Critics of social constructivism are rarely heard but the
most damning criticism, evidenced by Merill (1997) and many others since,
criticise social negotiation as a form of learning, as it quite simply wastes
huge amounts of time to achieve collaborative and consensual understanding of
what is taken by many to be right in the first place. This leads to massive
inefficiencies in learning. Many, if not most, subjects have a body of agreed
knowledge and practice that needs to be taught without the inefficiencies of
social negotiation. This is not incompatible with an epistemology that sees all
knowledge as corrigible, just a recognition, that in education, you need to
know things in order to critically appraise them or move towards higher orders
of learning and understanding. In addition, social constructivism largely
ignores objective measures, such as genetically determined facets of
personality, it is often destructive for introverts, as they don’t relish the
social pressure. Similarly, for extroverts, who perhaps relish the social
contact too much, social learning can disrupt progress for not only for
themselves but others.
6.
Damages the less privileged
Constructivist theory, even if correct, accelerates learning
in the privileged and decelerates learning in the less privileged. Those with
good digital literacy, literacy, numeracy and other skills will have the social
support, especially at home, to progress in more self-organised environments.
Those with less sophisticated social contexts will not have that social support
and be abandoned to their fate. This, I believe, is not uncommon in schools.
The truth is that much learning, especially in young people, needs to be
directed and supported. Deliberate practice, for example, is something well
researched but rarely put into practice in our schools and Universities. In
fact it is studiously ignored.
7.
Ignores power of solitary learning
Much of what we learn in life we learn on our own. At
school, I enjoyed homework more than lessons, as I could write essays and study
on my own terms. At University I learned almost everything in the quiet of my
own room and the library. In corporate life, I relished the opportunity to
learn on trains and planes, havens of forced isolation, peace and quiet. To
this day I blog a lot and enjoy periods of intense research, reading and
writing. It is not that I’ve learned everything in these contexts, only that they
go against the idea that all learning needs to be social.
8. Blocks
evidence-based practice
Social constructivism, is what Popper would call a
‘universal theory’, in that no matter what criticisms you may throw at it, the
response will be that even these criticisms and everything we say and do is a
social construct. This is a serious philosophical position and can be defended
but only at great cost, the rejection of many other well-established scientific
and evidence-based theories. You literally throw the baby, bath water and the
bath out, all at the same time. Out goes a great deal of useful linguistic,
psychological and learning theory. Out goes any sense of what may be sound
knowledge and quick straightforward results. Direct instruction, drill and practice,
reinforcement, deliberate practice, memory theory and many other theories and
practices are all diminished in stature, even reviled.
9.
Utopian constructivism
Sugata Mitra and Nicholas Negroponte have taken social
constuctivism to such extremes that they simply parachute shiny objects into
foreign cultures and rely on self-organised social behaviour to result in
learning. It doesn’t. The hole-in-the-wall experiments
did
not work and
Negroponte’s claims on his Ethiopian experiment are
quite simply untruthful. The
problem here is the slide from social constructivist beliefs to hopelessly
utopian solutions. As Mark Warschauer reports “
no studies have reported any
measurable increase in student performance outcomes in reading, writing,
language, science or math through participation in an OLPC program”.
10. Groupthink
I often ask what people who mention social contsructivism, what it emans to them, and almost universally get vague answers. I then ask for names, and often Vygotsky is mentioned. I then ask what Vygotsky texts they have read. At this point there's often a blank stare - they can rarely mention a title. My point is that social constructivism is itself a social construct, often just a phrase, certainly often a piece of groupthink, rarely thought through. It gets perpetuated in teacher training and many other contentxs as a universal truth - which it is not. It is a theory that on first hearing, flatters teachers as the primary 'mediators' in learning. In other words, it is a function of confirmation bias.
Conclusion
Why am I NOT a social constructivist – ALL OF THE ABOVE.
