Teaching

On Teaching and Teachers

By John Taylor; 2007 Apr 18

At last week's Philosopher's Cafe meeting in Wainfleet we talked about education and parent's role in education. We resolved next time to talk about one of the most promising questions that arose in this discussion: "Is the Internet a good thing?"

There were fewer people present than usual, and this gave me an unique chance to grill two experienced teachers, Stu, a retired primary teacher and Mark, a French teacher on the secondary level, on my favorite topic of late, the Socratic teaching method. They assured me that for at least thirty years this method has been inherent to the standard training of teachers. Alright, maybe not the entire Socratic method that we have been discussing on the Badi' Blog, but the method of the teacher's colleges is still recognizably Socratic. Instead of real questions, though, they mostly hand out rhetorical questions, or questions aimed at brief responses. There is not the full interaction and open-endedness of a true Socratic dialog. But as they pointed out, this is a big improvement on the quasi-military authoritarianism of the teachers of former generations.

My questions in our discussion came out of something that I had just read by Abdu'l-Baha. In it, the Master tells teachers not so much to use the Socratic Method themselves but to hand off the job to the students themselves. Get the older ones to come up with questions of their own and lead a little Socratic dialog with the younger students. That way, the lessons will be part of their own discussion, not something handed down to them on a platter. This, it seemed to me, is a revolutionary idea. I had never heard of a school that did that. No, no, the two teachers told me, that also is standard to the training of educators today. There are two approaches, the student centered project approach and the teacher centered one, usually a lecture; the former approach, Mark observed, takes about four times longer than the latter, at least in his experience. Because of the time restraints, he ends up using the quicker teacher-centered approach most often.

Applying the pure Socratic Method, not just the sprinkling of rhetorical questions that teachers normally use, is, as Rick Garlikov points out, extremely demanding of the teacher.

"... it forces the teacher to think about the logic of a topic, and how to make it most easily assimilated. In tandem with that, the teacher has to try to understand at what level the students are, and what prior knowledge they may have that will help them assimilate what the teacher wants them to learn. It emphasizes student understanding, rather than teacher presentation; student intake, interpretation, and `construction,' rather than teacher output."

Could young public school pupils ever master that technique? At first blush you would think that there is no way, not even the most gifted student in the class could ever do that. They do it at Oxford University, but never at your friendly neighborhood primary school. But then you think, these kids are in several ways at an advantage as teachers of their peers, compared to an adult. For one thing, they have just learned the information themselves and are intimately aware of the difficulties and pitfalls to taking it in. Also, they are young and know better than anybody the thought processes, knowledge base and previous experience of their peers. If they master the Socratic Method early on they might well become skilled practitioners at an early age. Remember, after Socrates died, Plato and Xenophon were not the only ones who wrote Socratic dialogs. Everybody and his brother wrote them, it was all the rage in Ancient Athens. It was a writing fad and literary convention that lasted for centuries afterward. Socrates demonstrated to all how effective a dialog is at demonstrating otherwise inaccessible abstractions.

Would these young ones, using the Socratic Method, ever be able to cover the material as quickly as a lecturer could? Teaching them how to do that, certainly, is the challenge for the next generation of teachers. The Master seems to have thought that they can do it and will, sometime soon in the future. He saw the learning process becoming more efficient by several orders of magnitude one day. Certainly the goal of being fully mature with a viable apprenticeship to a trade at age fifteen would require much quicker mastery of the basics of learning.

Stu and Mark doubted that this can be done. The information explosion is just too fast. I mentioned that I had read a similar opinion, from the 1840's, that medical doctors would ever be able to take in the massive amounts of medical data that even then was coming in. But the fact is, our heads do not explode. Even now medical schools are turning out doctors with heads intact. We all deal with increased information by using the Socratic Method, if not with others then at least with an internal dialog. This is how we sort out the irrelevant and get to what we need to know the most. The trick is to ask the right questions. Garlikov:

"For the Socratic Method to work as a teaching tool and not just as a magic trick to get kids to give right answers with no real understanding, it is crucial that the important questions in the sequence must be logically leading rather than psychologically leading. There is no magic formula for doing this, but one of the tests for determining whether you have likely done it is to try to see whether leaving out some key steps still allows people to give correct answers to things they are not likely to really understand."

As Garlikov is pointing out here, the big problems come when questions are divorced from learning. Questions coming from outside, as assessment rather than part of the lesson itself, obstruct the goals of educational. This system as it is externalizes test giving and obstructs rather than helps the progress of children. Examinations waste their time, subject them to stress, and push them away from the joys of exploring the truth.

The Master had big plans for education. An early Baha'i educator, Stanwood Cobb, wrote in Star of the West an article called "Baha'i Education." Here he recalls,

"`Abdu'l-Baha once mentioned a plan he had had for founding a model school at Haifa. `I have carried in my mind for some time an educational system, but so far there have been no means for its realization. If that system were once beaten into workable shape, in two years' time the children would have studied four languages. At the age of ten they would study sciences; and at the age of twelve they would be graduated. I wanted to establish such a trial school of eighty one pupils, all six years of age, the children to be brought from Persia and Ishqabad, the teachers to be engaged and transported from America. But a number of unforeseen difficulties have prevented me.'" (Star of the West, Vol. 14, p. 3)

I did not realize that the Master had such detailed plans for a Baha'i curriculum. I also did not realize that the Master had any plans at all that were frustrated. I imagined that I had the market cornered on shattered dreams. But no, I did not know it but in this way, at least, I was following directly in the footsteps of the Master. Cobb later in this article comments,

"... It is a pity that circumstances did not permit Abdu'l-Baha to demonstrate by means of a model school what true Baha'i education should be. But from his own words and from those of Baha'u'llah, Baha'i educators will construct a more ideal system of child training than that now prevalent." (Ib. p. 6)

Although the Master was not able to start this jump-start school, He did offer comments and encouragement to students and their educators too. For example, one diarist living in Haifa during the Great War wrote,

"The Master spoke this morning to Mirza Badi about his school for the children. He said: I know thou art exerting thyself in the instruction of the Children. The life of man must be productive of some results, otherwise his nonexistence is better than his existence. As I said before, this teaching of the children is a service to the Blessed Perfection. Whosoever serves the world of humanity in this or any other way is serving His holiness Baha'u'llah. Your heavenly reward is with him."

"The education of children is one of the most great services. All these children are mine. If they are educated and illumined, it is as though my own children were so characterized. They will become the servants and the maidservants of the Cause of God, the gardeners in the vineyard of the Kingdom, and the lights of the assemblage of mankind." (Star of the West, Vol. 13, p. 172)