The following quote from page 394 is interesting in several ways. “… anyone who is good at math should be able to succeed…” I don’t know what that success would look and feel like. This quote reminds me of a somewhat similar quote by George Bernard Shaw. One of his many contentious quotes that rings loud and clear even today is “those who can do, those who can’t teach.” An apparent insult, whether intended or not, to the whole profession of teaching. Although, I don’t know the context under which he would have said this. I think that quotes like these make good cannon fodder, raising further tension between conservative and progressive views in regards to mathematics education in public schools. I am not sure if we should dismiss Shaw’s thought on teaching outright. Would it be worth having a meaningful conversation around this quote? I think that we ought to have a conversation around this, partly because many of us would have found success under a system that we are trying to move away from.
Another interesting quote in the paragraph, bleeding from page 395 to page 396, is also interesting. “Inquiry could be messy, uncertain, and unsettling compared to the certainty of accepting pre-made facts based on obedience to the teacher’s authority.” It is not clear why inquiry-based learning would be messy, uncertain, or unsettling. Who are the stakeholders that would feel this way? Would it be unsettling for the students or the practitioners? I think that I would argue that it would be unsettling to the practitioners, partly because inquiry-based learning may be associated with many practical difficulties. I think that some of the difficulties involved in inquiry-based teaching and learning are time constraints, variable learners’ abilities, classroom structure, beliefs and attitudes, resources for professional development, and sometimes insufficient knowledge of the practitioners.
Within the same paragraph on page 396, Dewey calls for the “development of high quality mental processes and a scientific attitude” for developing scientific and democratic thinkers. I find several issues with this. First, who was going to develop tools and techniques for these high quality mental processes? I assume that Dewey was calling on educational researchers to take on the job of developing these resources. With this approach, I find that it would quickly be perceived as a top-down approach to addressing educational issues. In one of his articles, Eisner says that in the classrooms, “teachers are the kings and queens” and not the researchers. So top-down approaches may not be fruitful in addressing education issues. Second, I am not sure what Dewey means by “high quality mental processes.” Was Dewey referring to the higher echelons of Bloom’s Taxonomy? Finally, why does Dewey focus on developing scientific thinkers? Why not artists, philosophers, or, for that matter, teachers? Is that because the real currency of good thinkers possess scientific attitude and knowledge? Can we also think of this as, yet, another attempt to promote the null curriculum as invalid?
I will stop my blabbering now.