The Self-Organizing Revolution

The graphic on the cover of this project will make more sense in the light of the perspective brought by Ron Miller’s latest book The Self-Organizing Revolution (Miller, 2008). Miller presents a number of key attributes on a wide array of educational philosophies and does so in such a way that many of their common methods, philosophies and aims are highlighted. Ron Miller has been a scholar activist in the field of education for nearly 25 years. He began his teaching career as a Montessori teacher and soon realized that he felt confined by their specific and precise methods of instruction. While in pursuit of his Doctorate in education he founded the journal, Holistic Education Review realizing that the term Holistic Education, “Capture*d the essence of the common philosophical core of the diverse alternative movements.” (Miller, 2008, p. 7).

I chose to plot the educational alternatives he describes so eloquently on an x-y graph, to describe the relationship between student involvement in the learning process, the type of aims in the educational context and the degree to which the teacher is directing the process. As you can see, “Transmission Schooling” is located in the bottom left corner of the scale. Transmission schooling is essentially transmitting knowledge from one generation to the next. There is little to no choice exercised by the student and knowledge is considered established fact, to be incorporated by the student. Miller describes the relative use of Transmissive Education in the following quote:
In many educational situations, some degree of transmission is appropriate and even necessary. Professional and technical training requires novices to learn established bodies of knowledge if they are to master their trades. Closely knit cultural or religious groups do need to transmit their heritage if they are to maintain their tradition. Even in the most alternative educational approaches, there is some transmission of more or less objective knowledge about the world. (Miller, 2008, p. 28)

There are three large yellow bars with the words, “Autocratic, Democratic and Libertarian.” These bars are used to indicate a political philosophy in which this form of education seems to match the best. Within an autocracy, rule by one, there are defined leaders whose word is gold and taken as truth. In traditional or tribal cultures with established elders or chiefs it is very important that cultural heritage be transmitted from the past on into the future. Miller points out in the above quote that there are deliberate times when transmitting relatively objective information is necessary, however he cautions, “One key question that all educators and parents need to address is just how much, and in what specific ways, their students’ learning experience should be determined by external factors. (Miller, 2008, p. 29)

As we progress up the scale the teacher’s role begins to change from from a transmitter of information to a facilitator of group process. In the middle of the scale we find, “Social Constructivist Education.” Social Constructivism asserts that, again to quote Miller, “learning is essentially a social endeavor, requiring meaningful interaction between and among persons within an environment that deliberately encourages collaboration, inquiry, and creative problem solving.”* (Miller, 2008, p. 35)

The roots of Social Constructivism are described in the following section:
This understanding embraces ideas that John Dewey and his followers, and developmental psychologists such as Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky, expressed early in the twentieth century. Constructivism has since been developed further by numerous theorists and educators, for example those who practice approaches such as “cooperative learning” and “whole language instruction, who set up multiage classrooms and interdisciplinary or project based curricula, and who make deliberate efforts to teach nonviolent conflict resolution and other community-building skills.” Not sure where this quote ends (Miller, 2008, p. 36)

In the center of The Education Continuum graph the vertical bar reads, “Democratic” because the social constructivist pedagogy matches the political mindset of a socially constructed order, a rule by the people and for the people -- where power is only exercised via the consent of the governed. Miller states, “the education revolution follows from the view of Thomas Jefferson that “the earth belongs always to the living generation” -- that societies overly bound by tradition and authority are unable to respond creatively to the specific needs of their time and place.” (Miller, 2008, p. 24)

The mis-match that I see between a democratic society and a fairly transmissive educational style ever present in public schools is an interesting point of investigation but on that I cannot explore fully in this paper. S suffice it to say that there is a strong mis-match between e*ducation that is primarily transmissive and the nature of a pluralistic democratic society.

As we continue to travel along the continuum we encounter Democratic Education. Democratic schools seem to be the mid-ground between “Social Constructivism” and “Freedom Based” pedagogy. In Democratic schools students engage in a process where by they decide democratically the aim and goals of the learning that takes place.

Progressing to the top-right corner of the graph we find, “Freedom Based / Student driven learning.” This pedagogy stems from the belief that:
The young will learn because it is in their nature to do so. We do not need to worry, as we now do obsessively, that they will suffer from lack of information. We should be much more concerned about their being able to sift through this information with insight, wisdom, and a sense of responsibility toward human society and the planet at large. (Miller, 2008, p. 25)

An additional feature of the graph I have created is located at the top, where a box contains, “Task Focus”, “Process / Group Focused” and “Individual focus.*” This layer is present in, The Backcountry Classroom (Bonney et. al, 2005, p. 353). I have added the last aspect of “Individual focus” because I see it as a natural progression toward a Libertarian mindset where in the development and free expression of the individual is paramount.

This layer is important to me when attempting to make a decision about what pedagogical style should be used in which situation. If, for example, I were doing a unit on emergency medicine it is important that students understand that there are critically important “right” answers. However if, for example, I were doing a unit on social change, a wide array of work would be encouraged, almost to the extent that the work could be primarily student driven.

Ron Miller’s point, I believe, is captured in the following quotes, “The weakest system is a monoculture, an artificial selection of one variety at the expense of everything else. Modern agriculture aims to maintain monocultures with aggressive assaults on natural ecology such as powerful and toxic chemicals and genetic engineering.” (Miller, 2008, p. 4) He goes on to state later:
Despite the forceful push for standardization in public educational policy, growing numbers of parents and educators are starting to recognize that the one-size-fits-all system, devised for the industrializing economy of the nineteenth century, is obsolete, and that the current obsession with standards, testing and authoritarian control is a desperate last gasp of a system in decline.” (Miller, 2008, p. 29)

In my experience in schools I have witnessed that failure is not in making the wrong pedagogical choice, though I believe that match is important, but rather in holding to the pedagogical choice as one would to a religion that has fallen out of context with society. Ron Miller asserts that Integral or Holistic education is not a separate category of educational alternative but an integrative one. A choice whereby Holistic education “seeks to expand the richness of meaning of all that we experience, by placing all knowledge within larger contexts. (Not a sentence)

Ultimately Holistic education aims to encourage personal and cultural transformation - the generation of new meaning and a more embracing consciousness.” (Miller, 2008, p. 43) He (who?) quotes a Canadian scholar John Miller in saying, “holistic education [is] the cultivation of relationships between the learner and the world - meaningful connection between self and society, humanity and nature, intellect and emotion, adult and child, history and the present, and so on.” (Miller, 2008, p. 42)
Holistic education seems to beg the contextual questions, “What pedagogy? For what aim? In what context?” These are exactly the questions I will ask in the following catalogue of educational experience. As a foreign language teacher, a wilderness trip leader, and a primary classroom teacher I ask via reflection, what Alfie Kohn states in the PACE University’s Distinguished Lecture Series, as a primarily important question for parents and educators, “What is the effect on the attitude of the student towards learning?”