Teaching and Learning Formal education has a dual ideological importance. It is often claimed to be the process by which ideology is transmitted, but it is also something that people have ideologies of. It is the latter issue that will concern us, namely people's conceptions of the educational process itself: of what education is, of how people learn, of how they should be taught, and to what ends. Conceptions of education are particularly appropriate for a general discussion of ideology. Education (in this context, formal schooling) is an important part of the larger process of becoming an adult member of society, and so ideologies of education, necessarily include conceptions of human nature, of how we become what we are, of the relationship between individual and society, as well as prescriptions for the conduct of teaching and learning. Furthermore, education is organized on a societal scale, and may be expected therefore to carry with it societal values about those things. In this chapter we shah demonstrate that the process of education, quite apart from issues of what 'content) show be taught, is itself dilemnmatic and ideological. In Hard Times, Dickens provides us with a graphic parody of Victorian educational values: 'Bitzer,' said Thomas Gradgrind, 'Your definition of a horse.' 'Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely twenty-four grinders, four eye-teeth, and twelve incisive. Sheds coat in the spring; in marshy countries sheds hoofs too. Hoofs hard, but requiring to be shod with iron. Age known by marks in mouth.' Thus (sad much more) Bitzer. 'Now girl number twenty,' said Mr Gradgrind. 'You know what a horse is.' Thomas Gradgrind's conception of what education is all about can be inferred from even so short an extract. It is based on an ideology of authoritative knowledge, of discipline and order, of the acquisition of received wisdom. Pupils respond when spoken to, and speak only to the teacher. It is all about filling the empty vessels of children's minds with 'facts': the cold transmission of ready-made bits of knowledge. But Bitzer's definition of a horse, while (presumably) accurate enough, would probably astonish a modern teacher. Pupils today are not expected to achieve understandings through the rote memorization of factual information. Bitzer may well have had no idea what he was talking about, what his parrot-learned words actually meant, why anyone would wish to possess such information, or what to do with it once they did. The depersonalized 'girl number twenty' presumably had seen plenty of horses, knew they had four legs, and much else about them that Bitzer's list of characteristics would not mention - how they look and move and smell, and what people do with them. A modern teacher might well start with such everyday knowledge, and get pupils to cooperate in a project to find out more. This is not merely a different way of achieving the same ends. It is founded upon a different conception of education, of knowledge itself, of children and of what sorts of adult citizens the education system should be trying to foster: that is to say, a different ideology of education. At least, this is the general assumption, that we are dealing with different and contrasting ideologies. We shall argue that a single, dilemmatic ideology underlies them both. How many ideologies? Conventional treatments of educational ideology concern themselves with the issue of enumerating how many educational ideologies there are, and with listing their distinguishing characteristics. Each is defined as distinctly as possible from the others, with each possessing as much internal coherence as description allows. Indeed, as we have noted, theories of ideology are typically based on the assumptions that ideologies are internally consistent, that they are opposed to other consistent ideologies, and that all these opposeing ideologies are espoused by different people. So, in a discussion of the sociology of education, Meighan (1981) defines idology as 'a broad but interlinked set of ideas and beliefs about the world which are held by a group of people and which those people demonstrate both in behaviour and conversation to various audiences' (p. 19). An educational ideology is therefore 'a coherent pattern' (p. 22) such that 'alternative patterns of ideas…coexist and compete for existence' (p.155). There are always at least two contrasting ideologies, and indeed, in treatments of education, two is the usual number. A conventional dichotomy is drawn between 'traditional' and 'progressive' education; other, roughly quivalent terms are sometimes employed, such as 'transmission-oriented' versus 'inerpretational', 'authoritarian' versus 'child-centered' or 'democratic', and so on. In rough, graphic terms, transmissional teaching is the formal, lecturing sort: pupils sit in desks facing the teacher, who controlls all talk and activity. The pupils are required to listen attentively, to 'read, mark, learn and inwardly digest' what is given. In contrast, child-centred eucation would typically be represented by classrooms where pupils are engaged in individual work, or in small cooperative groups, the classroom a hubbub of noise and activity as the teacher moves from group to group, supervising and facilitating each pupils' learning. Sometimes three, four or more ideologies have been distinguished (for example Williams, 1961; Cosin, 1972), and even as many as a dozen, though by the time that we are down to the criteria that define many types of education, the term 'ideologies' has been replaced by 'teaching styles' (Bennett and Jordan, 1975). From the theoretical perspective that we have outlined in the earlier chapters, the various depictions of educational ideology possess several interesting features. First, despite their presentation as ideologies of education, they clearly appeal to a set of issues whose currency is much wider than that of merely how to teach and learn. They are concerned with fundamental and instantly recognizable social and political issues, such as those of individual freedom of action versus authoritative constraint, and the conservatism of sticking to traditional ways and wisdom versus the encouragement of change, variability and the potential for new understandings. Educational ideologies are variants of more general ones. Secondly, they are cast as opposites, alternatives, positions defined in contrast to other positions. This immediately suggests that they are not independly formulated ways of thinking about education, but rather the terms of a debate, positions extracted from a single dialogue. Each position is not formulated as an exercise in itself, as a self-contained schema or conception of the world, but rather defined point by point in contradiction to another position which must inevitably, therefore, belong ot the same universe of disciourse. It is important that we realize that it need not have been so. The argumentative, dilogical character of educational ideologies is not a necessary characteristic of the consistent schemata that, according to some theoretical perspectives, individuals carry around in their heads as they make sense of the world. Thirdly, the values of each position are not mutually exclusive. Supporters of traditional, transmission-oriented teaching are unlikely in all contexts to insist that pupils must remain passive recipients of the received widom, that education is always one-way traffic, an unchanging reproduction of all tha thas gone before. Similarly, the advocates of child-centred, autonomous learning will not insist that children are taught nothing, that the acquisition of a largely ready- made culture of knowledge and understanding is not, in however child- centred a way it is achieved, an important goal of education. Similarly, on the larger scale, few would advocate the unconstrained liberty of individuals to please themselves, just as few would insist on the necessity for social ocnstraints in all aspects of personal conduct. We are dealing with values from a common culture, recognizable and usable by advocates on either side ofa debate. The discussion of educational ideology which follows will begin by outlining breifly the modern 'progressive' approach, and then will proceed to examine how some modern teachers come to terms with its contradictions, both in how they think about it, and also in what they do in the classroom. Prompted by some remarks by the influential educational theorist Jerome Bruner, and advocate of such liberal approaches, we seek an origin for our educational dilemma in Plato's presentation in the Meno of a dialogue between Socratoes and a slave boy. It is a passage rich in significance for our understanding of education, embodying all of the dilemmatic themes of child-centredness, of innate capacity, and of the exercise of authority that we shall first identify in modern teaching. Teachers and teaching Teachers do not have the luxury of being able to formulate and adhere to some theory or position on education, with only another theorist's arguments to question its validity. They have to accomplish the practical task of teaching, which requires getting the job done through whatever conceptions and methods work best, under practical constraints that include physical resources, numbers of pupils, nature of pupils, time constraints, set syllabuses and so on. But these practical considerations inevitably have ideological bases, which define what 'the job' actually is, how to do it, how to assess its outcomes, how to react to its successes and failures, how to talk and interact with pupils, how many can be taught or talked to at once. For example, in the traditional chalk-and-talk lecturing method, a large class size is not so great a practical or ideological problem as it is for a teacher who upholds the value of individual, childcentred learning. Teachers' ideological conceptions ten] not to be so neatly packaged and consistent as those posited by theorists of educational ideology; similarly, the practice of classroom teaching tends not to be a straightforward realization of some such coherent position. Rather, as we shall show, teachers may well hold views of teaching, of children, of the goals of educational practice and the explanations of educational failure, which theorists of ideology would locate in opposed camps. And so also will the practical activity of teaching reflect principles that are propounded by what are held to be opposed ideologies. Further, it is not unknown for teachers to be aware of such contradictions, to feel themselves involved in difficult choices and as having to make compromises. We shall concentrate our analysis on a recognizably modern and widespread style of teaching which is of the 'progressive' sort. That is to say, it involves small-group, activity-oriented teaching, based on the view that pupils learn best through their own experiences. This is the 'child-centred pedagogy' that is associated with the psychological theories and research of Jean Piaget, with the principle of 'learning by doing', and with the enormously influential Plowden Report (1967), which has done much to shape the nature of British primary education since the 1960s (Valerie Walkerdine, 1984 provides a useful discussion of this approach and its limitations). It is explicitly opposed to the Gradgrind sort of pedagogy. In Piaget's words: Each time one prematurely teaches a child something he could have learned for himself, the child is kept from inventing it and consequently from understanding it completely. (1970: 715) And, according to the Plowden Report: Piaget's explanations appear to most educationalists in this country to fit the observed facts of children's reaming more satisfactorily than any other. . .Verbal explanation, in advance of understanding based on experience, may be an obstacle to learning. (paras 522 and 535) Although the Report contained provisos and warnings against the misapplication of 'discovery learning', its general effect was to encourage teachers to take more of a back seat, to allow pupils to actively try things for themselves, to learn from their own experiences. In fact, despite the obvious influence of these ideas on British educational thought and practice, it has become clear that a fundamental shift from transmission-oriented education to child-centred discovery learning has generally not taken place. Its implementation has at best been superficial or severely compromised, if not altogether illusory. Meighan (1981: 333) refers to 'the myth of the non-authoritarian primary school', and suggests that 'alternative forms of authoritarian schooling. . tare taken for radical non-authoritarian alternatives, and this gives rise to a variety of myths about educational practice' (p. 334). Cites a variety of research studies which support this conclusion (for example Richards, 1979; Berlak et al., 1975). Indeed, theoretical and ideological opposition began in advance of any such research, from the moment the Plowden Report was published (for example Peters, 1969; Froome, 1970). It included some simple reassertions of principles that would have appealed to Mr Gradgrind: 'All knowledge consists of facts, and a step-by-step assimilation of those facts which are deemed desirable is the basis of learning' (Broome, 1970: 113). The invocation of knowledge which is 'deemed desirable' introduces an ideological dimension to the debate which was sometimes quite explicit. Marriott notes some instances: Kemball-Cook (1972), in an article critical of Plowden, argued that a relaxed approach to discipline is particularly unsuitable for boys; while girls in primary schools exhibit docility and eagerness to please, boys' toughness and aggression requires firmer handling. Similarly, the apparently ubiquitous abdication of teachers in primary schools was connected by such writers to impending or current economic difficulties; for example, Cox and Boyson (1975) argued that if the non-competitive ethos of progressive education was allowed to dominate our schools, the result would be a generation who would be unable to maintain current standards of living when opposed by overseas competitors. (1985: 34 S) We seem to be faced with a quandary. Neither kind of education seems entirely satisfactory. The shift towards 'progressive' education was motivated by a deeply felt dissatisfaction with the nature and consequences of traditional chalk-and-talk teaching. The traditional methods, supported by the outmoded assumptions of innate ability and IQ testing, had given rise to the wholesale educational failure of large numbers of children, especially those of the working class. They were being left behind, falling off the back of the train as the teacher's single-track locomotive of educated thought and talk pushed on regardless, arriving at the final destination with only a few first- class passengers still aboard. The few who remained on the train, who matched the pace of the lesson, were evidence that the teaching was sufficient;; the train itself was not to blame. Failure was due to pupils' lack of ability to learn. In the 'progressive' ideology, such a notion was untenable. The train was obviously faulty. Rote learning is not the same thing as achieving understanding. Pupils learn best and most deeply when actively involved and motivated in what they are doing, when relating ideas to their own experiences So what has gone wrong? Do we need perhaps to formulate another theory or ideology of education? Or is it simply that neither the traditional nor the progressive approach has been properly implemented, so that what we need to do is to have a more thorough bash at putting one or the other of them into practice? Or perhaps the answer is a compromise, a combination of the best of both worlds? If all we were dealing with were a couple of technical alternatives - ways of organizing classrooms, or topics to include in the curriculum - such a compromise solution might be a simple matter. But, as we have argued, we are dealing with much more fundamental oppositions, ideological ones that are part of much larger social and ideological debates than can be resolved merely by tinkering with what happens in the classroom. It could be that the problem is solved already: that despite our difficulties in formulating an adequate theory of education, there is no dilemma wine, it comes to the practical business of teaching. Teachers simply get the Job done; the compromises work. But of course, we are begging th' question. By what criteria do we, the pupils or the teachers, the analyst' or the society at large, judge education to be 'done' and to 'work'? Let us look more closely at what some teachers and pupils think and do. The educational dilemma: what teachers say We are in no position to offer any definitive or comprehensive survey of the thoughts and activities of teachers and pupils. However, it is possible to get a feel for the ways in which the sorts of ideological and practical dilemmas we have discussed are felt and acted on, and have a practical reality and relevance for those teachers and pupils that we and others have studied. We shall draw mainly upon a study of classroom education in which successive series of lessons with several classes of nine-year-olds were video-recorded, and the teachers and pupils interviewed about what they were doing (see Edwards and Mercer, 1987 for a fuller account) The teachers in this study were all identifiable as essentially 'progressive'; as evidenced both in the way they taught in the classroom, and by comments in interview such as the following: Given sufficient time and resources I felt that the best learning experience is one where children work things out for themselves. I didn't want to de them down to a heavily structured procedure because it might kill the possibility of children making their own observations and conclusions. In the practical work, where the children are much more interested, they will obviously acquire and retain more knowledge. The very meaning of the term [education] is not to input; it means to bring out. In addition to these clear evocations of the Plowden ethos, the same teachers also expressed a variety of explanations-of the fact that some pupils obviously succeed better than others. All of them offered explanations that appealed to innate intelligence. For example, in the words of one teacher (the last quoted above): They do better because they are more intelligent. . .you can't do anything about their IQ. and on the importance of 'social conditions': Children from affluent families would. . .have books at home. They would be taken on educational trips. . .they achieve more at their level than children of a similar IQ with perhaps not such a good background. and on more personal factors: You have to know which children in the class are. . Depressed or in trouble or distressed. None of the teachers attributed educational failure to poor or inappropriate teaching. So, while children are thought to learn through exploratory activity anal experience, they fail not through the lack or inadequacy of it, but rather through being unintelligent, disadvantaged or beset by some personal or behavioural problem These are notions that derive not from some single, coherent ideological position, as conventionally defined, but from conflicting theories of educational failure that are familiar in the literature. Teachers themselves are educated, of course, and will at some point in their training and in their wider reading have acquired at least a: folk wisdom basis, and in many cases much more than this, in the social and behavioural sciences and in their orthodoxies, assumptions and established theory and findings with regard to education But from the viewpoint of educational ideologies, the doctrines of native intelligence and of experiential learning belong in opposed camps. And so also do the orthodoxies of psychology and of sociology. While Piagetian psychological approaches allow for pupil learning which is exploratory self-motivated, creative and constructive of whatever understandings are achieved, sociological approaches (those of Durkheim, Parsons and so on) have typically stressed the transmissional nature of education, seeing it primarily as the socialization of pupils into an established system of educated thought, language and practice. To the extent that both the sociological and the psychological positions have any validity at all, and presumably they do, this places our teachers in a dilemma. There is socialization to be achieved, not only of the behavioural sort (disciplined conduct, respect for authority and so on) but also in terms of the more official curriculum: a pre-established body of knowledge thought and skills to be taught. But these cannot be taught directly; the pupils have to learn it all for themselves. In fact, they cannot be 'taught' it at all, in the traditional sense. You cannot teach children what they cannot understand. In the words of one of our teachers, it cannot simply be 'input'; it has to be 'brought out'. But how can you 'bring out' of children what is not there? How do you get children to invent and discover for themselves precisely what the curriculum pre-ordains must be discovered? It is a dilemma felt by the teachers themselves. In a junior school English teacher (in one of our own interviews), we find a clear awareness of competition between different educational philosophies: I think there's a place for both of these [progressive and transmissional philosophies of education]. I mean there are things that you've got to actually sit down and teach but you know lots of things. . . Practically they do find out. . .I mean they do lots of creative work and writing stuff where they were using their own experience. . .but I think there's a place for both. . .I mean you know there's a limit to how much to keep plugging it and how much you just wait for them and then they know it. While this teacher hopes to resolve the dilemma by suggesting that there is a 'place for both', it would not appear to be a simple matter to define precisely what that place should be. Berlak et al. (1975) cite the following comments from a teacher caught in what is also an obviously felt dilemma (and they proceed to describe the compromises of constraint versus freedom of choice under which his pupils were allowed to work) I have yet to come to terms with myself about what a child should do in, for instance, mathematics. Certainly I feel that children should as far as possible follow their own interests and not be dictated to all the time, but then again . . . I feel pressure from. . .I don't really know how to explain it, but there's something inside you that you've developed over the years which says that children should do this. . .As yet I can't accept, for instance, that since I've been here I've been annoyed that some children in the fourth year haven't progressed as much as, say, some less able children in the second year in their maths, because they've obviously been encouraged to get on with their own interests. But I still feel that I've somehow got to press them on with their mathematics. (1975: 91-2) The dilemma felt by this mathematics teacher is, similarly, not simply a personal one, unique to his own perspectives and experience. He is pulled by the very values and criteria that we have located in the wider context of current educational ideology: the notion that some pupils are simply 'less able' than others, yet also learn from self-motivated activity and experience, but yet again have to achieve standards of 'progress' in the clearly predefined realm of 'mathematics' which, whatever the pupils might discover for themselves, the teacher knows already. The educational dilemma: what teachers do The most important arena in which this dilemma has to be worked out is not in what teachers say in interview, but in what they do in the classroom. Edwards and Mercer (1987) present a detailed study of the sorts of strategies that are adopted, through which teachers, apparently at least, manage to 'elicit' from pupils things that they did not already know. What frequently occurs is that teacher and pupils engage In an implicit collusion in which the solutions and answers appear to be elicited, while a close examination of what is happening reveals that the required information, suggestions, observations and conclusions are cued, selected or provided by the teacher. A simple illustration will suffice. In the following dialogue, the teacher is introducing to a group of mne-year-olds the concept of pendulums, concerning which they are about to embark upon some experimental investigations. She has begun by telling them a story of Galileo, and decides to elicit from the pupils the information that he used his pulse to time the swings of incense burners in church. (T is the teacher. Concurrent behaviour is recorded to the right. The diagonal slashes represent pauses; underlined words show vocal emphasis.) T: Now he didn't have a watch/ but he had on him something that was a very good timekeeper that he could use to hand straight away/ You've* got it. I've* got it. What is it?// What could we use to count beats? What have you got?// You can feel it here. Pupils: Pulse. T: A pulse. Everybody see if you can find it. T swinging her pendant. T snaps fingers on 'straightaway', and looks invitingly at pupils as if posing a question or inviting, a response. * T points. T beats hand on table slowly, looks around group of pupils, who smile and shrug T puts f¦nger on her wrist pulse. (In near unison) All imitate T. feeling for their wrist pulses. Through action gesture the teacher manages to coax from the pupils the word she wanted. We may call this process one of 'cued elicitation'. The procedure was a pervasive one and was not restricted to such simple and obvious cases. It extended to the main activities, discoveries and conclusions of the lesson, all of which had been planned in advance. Before beginning the lessons on pendulums, the teacher had planned various features of them, including that the pupils should test three hypotheses about how to effect changes in a pendulum's period (the time taken for a pendulum to complete one swing). She had also determined exactly what these hypotheses should be, knew in advance that only one of the three variables (length of the string) should have any effect, and that the pupils should average their timings across twenty swings of the pendulum. All of these features (and others) were ostensibly elicited from the pupils during the lessons, as if it was the pupils themselves who were inventing and deciding upon them. So let us examine a somewhat less obvious elicitation that of the decision to average twenty swings. (In the following transcript simultaneous speech is bracketed together.) T: Right/ now how many swings will she* have to do do you think// before she can work out for instance suppose she starts from here and she counts the swings and divides OK. Now we did five. Do you think that's a good number to do and divide by? Lucy and Karen: Yes. Jonathan: Yeh. David: Yeh. T: I don't know. [ Why David: Ten Miss/ ten. Antony: SW an even number six. T: An even number/ makes it/ you reckon you can divide by six better than you can divide by five./ Will it make any difference to the accuracy/ of what she's doing if she did a larger/ number of swings? For instance if she decided that if it was/ um/ five swings she was going to do/ right/ and then she divided by five/ but suppose she decided as you've just said on ten. Which one of those readings would be the more accurate? Antony: Five. Antony: [ Ten. David: Ten. T: Why? Antony: Because it cuts it down more. T: Good boy. It cuts down/ what we call the margin of error doesn't it. It makes the error that much smaller. I think we could cut it down even smaller than ten. Antony: Twenty. T: Make the error Antony: Hundred. David: [ Sixteen. T: [ Counting a hundred swings Antony we'd be here till the Christmas [ holidays. David: [ sixteen. Sharon: [Fifteen. T: [ Let's make it an easier number to [ work with. Antony: [ Twenty. Twenty. Various pupils: Yeh. T That would be all right wouldn't it? So if we all use twenty/ so we'll do twenty swings/ get the time/ divide by twenty and we can use the calculator/ then we should get the time pretty accurately/ possibly in hundredths of seconds. OK? * T referring to Sharon. T holding the pendulum bob out at an angle. Both nodding their heads. // (Pause, 3 seconds) David shouts, interrupts T. T looking at Antony. T laughs, then Sharon laughs. T speaking slowly and clearly, with small pauses as indicated. T writes '5' on sheet of paper on table. T writes '10' next to '5'. T prods her pen back and forth from 'S' to '10'. Pupils watch the pen. Antony points to the '5'. //(Pause, 3 seconds) T continuing. Antony smiles. T writes down '20'. T pick up and shows calculator to pupils. T looking round group, pupils' eyes downcast and averted. Lucy, Karen, Jonathan and David all appeared initially to be ready to accept five swings as a good number to use. Guided by a series of strategic pauses and prompts by the teacher, they eventually hit upon the required number - twenty. It is difficult to avoid the impression that the pupils were engaged in an exercise of trying to read all the cues, prompts and signals available from the teacher in an elaborate guessing game in which they had to work out, more by communicative astuteness than by the application of any scientific principle of measurement, what it was that the teacher was trying to get them to say. The advantages of this sort of teaching may well be considerable, for instance in terms of involving the pupils in an active pursuit of knowledge. But whatever the advantages, it is also clear that, despite the elicitation style of teaching, there is at least as much 'putting in' of knowledge going on here as 'bringing out'. The communicative devices used by the teachers, through which curriculum knowledge was surreptitiously offered to pupils while overtly elicited from them, included the following: 1 Gestural cues and demonstrations while asking questions. 2 Generally controlling the flow of conversation - such as who is allowed to speak and when, and about what. 3 The use of silence to mark non-acceptance of a pupil's contribution (see pauses, and pupils' reactions to them, in the dialogue quoted above). 4 Ignoring or side-tracking unwelcome suggestions. 5 Taking up and encouraging welcome ones. 6 Introducing 'new' knowledge as if it were already known - and therefore not open to question. 7 Paraphrasing pupils' contributions so as to bring them closer to the teacher's intended meaning. 8 Over-interpreting observed events so as to make them seem to confirm what the teacher anticipated. 9 Summarizing what has been done or 'discovered', in a way that reconstructs and alters its meaning. These and other features of classroom talk and education are discussed in some detail in Edwards and Mercer (1987). The point which concerns us here is their implication for educational ideology. To the extent that such findings have any generality at all (and they are indeed consistent with other research, such as Becker, 1968; A.D. Edwards and Furlong, 1969; Berlak et al., 1975), we are forced to the conclusion that the distinction between traditional, transmissional education on the one hand, and progressive, child-centred education on the other, is not so clear in practice as it may appear to be in theory. Both approaches involve a subordination of pupil to teacher, of personal discovery to the curriculum. Indeed, rather than stemming from two distinct and opposed ideological bases, they may well be alternative expressions of a single, though dilemmatic, ideology. That is the argument that we shall pursue. Educational dilemmas and social values The practical dilemma which we have identified hinges on the problem of how to 'bring out' of children what is not there to begin with, how to ensure that they 'discover' what they are meant to. It is this dilemma that gives rise to the variety of strategies we have outlined, through which the teacher manages to impose knowledge and understandings while appearing to elicit them. But this is a dilemma that rests upon a conflict of values and perspectives that are relevant to much wider issues than that of education alone - the contrasts between freedom and constraint, individual and society, growth from within (psychological development) and Imposition from the outside (socialization). These are fundamental ideological oppositions, of the sort that are appealed to in general political debate and polemic. They may be invoked on either side of such a debate; 'freedom', and the contrasting necessity of 'social order', in one sense or another are claimed by both left and right. Not only are these oppositions essential to many political debates' they are also basic features according to which we can distinguish a variety of theoretical positions and approaches taken within the social sciences. Behaviourism is a psychology of control and constraint, of imposition and socialization, explicitly set against the notions of voluntary action, personal growth, sense-making and self-determination (Wann, 1964; Skinner, 1971). Similarly, Dawe (1970) has idendfied two opposed currents of sociology, which can be disdaguished in terms of their positions with regard to these issues of freedom and constraint, relations between individud1 and society, determination from within the individual or imposition from without: At every level, they are in conflict. They posit antithetical views of human nature, of society and the relationship between the social and the individual. The first asserts the paramount necessity, for society and individual well-being, of external constraint. . .The key notion of the second is that of autonomous man, able to realize his full potential and to create a truly human social order only when freed from external constraint. Society is thus the creation of its members. (1970: 214) It is clear that the 'two sociologies' are not merely alternative descriptions, but are ideologically opposed and prescriptive of human conduct' including notions of what is proper and necessary for our 'well-being'. For example, writers in the tradition which emphasizes the importance of social discipline and constraint can argue with reference to education that 'Society can survive only if there exists among its members a sufficient degree of homogeneity; education perpetuates and reinforces this homogeneity by fixing in the child, from the beginning, the essential similarities that collective life demands' (Durkheim, 1956). In education, as in many other spheres of social life, these oppositions of freedom and constraint, of individual and society, of determination from within or from without, have to be worked out in practice as well as in theory. The point about them is that they are oppositions intrinsic to how we think of ourselves, oppositions in which each one ofthe pair is necessary to the meaning of the other, in which neither can survive alone. They do not belong to separate systems of thought. Society cannot socialize dogs, rhubarb or furniture into the requirements of mature human conduct, any more than an isolated individual can bootstrap herself or himself into a culture. In becoming twentieth-century citizens of Britain we have not merely realized a potentiality within us. The same thinkers and theorists (including us all) move freely from one side of an opposition to the other, as practical constraints or the requirements of argument demand. The same teachers who espouse the virtues of child-centred education, of learning by discovery and of the realization of innate potential also know in advance what will be prepare their lessons according to set books and syllabuses, and prepare their students for the knowledge that is to come (The pendulums teacher even referred her nine-year-old pupils to aspects of the physics of pendulums that they would cover if, in perhaps eight years' time, they did the A-level syllabus upon which her own son was currently embarked.) Education and the Meno Educational theories and prescriptions which stress one side or the other of our opposite perspectives are likely to fall prey to the arguments and virtues of the other side. In an attempt to create an integrated account the influential psychologist and educationalist Jerome Bruner draws upon the work of the Soviet theorist Lev Vygotsky: His basic view…was that conceptual learning was a collaborative enterprise involving an adult who enters into dialogue with the child in a fashion that provides the child with hints and props that allow him to begin a new climb, guiding the child in next steps before the child is capable of appreciating their significance on his own .The model is Socrates guiding the slave boy through geometry in the Meno. (Bruner, 1986: 132) It is a modern, sophisticated view of education and of human development in general, one which gives an equal importance to the intrinsic activity of the child, and to the adult's role as carrier and representative of a ready-made culture in which the child is serving an apprenticeship. But it is not so modern that Bruner cannot trace it directly back to Plato. Indeed, the dialogue between Socrates and the slave boy is well known in the annals of educational history and philosophy, and is often cited as an early example of the modern, progressive sort of pedagogy. For example, Lawrence (1970: 26-30) cites it in an argument that Plato, rather than Rousseau, originated the notion that 'The function of the teacher is to help the learner to discover the truth for himself.' Similarly, Curtis and Boultwood (1965: 80) have it as a 'classic instance' of the doctrine, this time attributed to St Augustine, that we can only teach what is already implicitly known, that 'Teaching. . is the activity of causing pupils to learn.' The Meno will repay a close examination, not only because its presentation as a dialogue invites comparison with the teacher-pupil conversations we have examined, but also because it Is possible to discern within this famous and influential text the very issues and oppositions that have concerned us. Indeed, it becomes clear that it would not be difficult for a proponent of teacher-dominated pedagogy, or of the doctrine of the overriding importance of innate abilities, to present the same text as support. Gradgrind would have The Republic to draw upon too! In a passage in the Meno, Plato provides an account of a dialogue about geometry between Socrates and a slave boy. Socrates was trying to convince Meno, the boy's master, of the reality of innate ideas, that concepts such as that of 'virtue' (arete) were not empirical, but depended upon being already present in the mind in a latent form, awaiting realization through experience. It was Socrates's belief that such innate ideas were memories (anamnesis) derived from the immortal soul's previous lives. Through dialogue with the slave boy, Socrates attempts to demonstrate to Meno that, despite an apparent initial ignorance of Pythagoras's theorem concerning the calculation of the areas of triangles and squares, the boy in fact knew the theorem all along, and simply needed to be questioned in order that this innate knowledge might be drawn from him. (The implication for Meno's benefit is that the same may also be true of the notion of 'virtue'.) In fact, Socrates was at pains to demonstrate that he taught the boy nothing. The slave boy dialogue is a peculiarly powerful and influential passage, in which we find the very themes of human nature, of knowledge and education, that we have identified in modern educational ideology. Socrates asks Meno to 'Listen carefully then, and see whether it seems to you that he is learning from me or simply being reminded' (Plato, l956: 130; the sequences of dialogue quoted below are taken from the translation by W.K.C. Guthrie). Let us also take up Socrates's invitadon. In the following dialogue, he has drawn a square in the sand at his feet, and has established that the boy understands that it is a figure with four sides of equal length. Pointing to various parts of the diagram, Socrates establishes that the boy can calculate the square's area: Socrates: Now if this side is two feet long, and this side the same, how many feet will the whole be? Put it this way. If it were two feet In this direction and only one in that, must not the area be two feet taken once? Boy: Yes. Socrates But since it is two feet this way also, does it not become twice two feet? Boy: Yes. Socrates And how many feet is twice two? Work it out and tell me. Boy: Four. (1956: 131) Guthrie (1975), in a detailed account and discussion of this and other parts of Plato's philosophy, offers a distinctly progressive/Piagetian interpretation of the slave boy's achievements (of which more in a moment): Mathematical knowledge cannot be handed over by a teacher like the chemical formula for water or the name of the first President of the United States. Each must comprehend it for himself, and when he does so. . .the surprising fact emerges that he discovers precisely what everyone else must discover. The boy does not say 'yes' or 'no' to please Socrates, but because he sees that it is the obvious answer. What shows him his errors, and the right answers, is not so much the questions as the diagrams themselves, and were he mathematically inclined he might, given time, draw the diagrams and deduce the truth from them, without an instructor. (1975: 255) The 'surprising fact', that the boy comes to understand what everyone else does, is of course no surprise now to us. But let us examine this claim, that what the boy learns from experience is a realization of innate knowledge, and that Socrates does not teach but merely elicits. The boy's contributions to the dialogue are clearly minimal, the first two being simple affirmations of propositions to him by Socrates. If this were a transcript of natural dialogue that we are examining, we would probably assume that, preceding Socrates's 'Put it this way', the boy had paused, unable to answer the initial question. Indeed, several times in the dialogue Socrates has to rephrase and break down the problem into simple steps, as he does here. But in doing so, he asks recognizably 'leading questions', providing the answers within his own questions, with even the restricted choice between 'yes' and 'no' cued by the form of the question: 'must not the area be. . .', 'does it not become. . .'. Moreover, in breaking the problem down into a series of small steps, Socrates requires of the boy only that he performs small calculations; the boy's one substantive contribution is to work out what is twice two, a calculation he could easily have made without reference to geometry. If we conceive of the problem as constituted by the ordered series of steps rather than by its individual elements, it is difficult not to read the dialogue as essentially Socrates's thought rather than the boy's. In terms of the classroom discourse we have examined, what we have here is a piece of cued elicitation. Let us examine, then, how Socrates proceeds to elicit from the boy Pythagoras's theorem. First, he establishes that the boy falsely assumes that a square of twice the area, that is eight square feet, will also have sides twice as long, that is four feet in length. As the dialogue proceeds, Socrates builds in steps a geometrical diagram of squares and rectangles to illustrate each step of the argument. He succeeds in eliciting the boy's acquiescence to the suggestion that 'Doubling the side [of a square] has given us not double but a fourfold figure.' Again, the boy's role in the dialogue is merely to confirm the propositions put to him by Socrates: 'Won't it be four times as big?' The sole exception is a minimal and tautological one, in which the boy is called upon to deny that 'four times' is the same as 'twice'. Socrates's questions eventually reduce the boy to a state of confusion. He is brought to realize that a square with sides two feet long has an area of four square feet, and that a square of four feet long has an area of sixteen square feet. In pursuit of the sides of a figure of eight square feet, Socrates points out that they 'must be longer than two feet but shorter than four'; the boy appropriately suggests three feet, but is prompted to calculate that three squared gives nine. He despairs: 'It's no use, Socrates, I just don't know.' Socrates proceeds to enlighten the boy by drawing another diagram (shown here as Figure 1, constructed line by line in alphabetical order as the dialogue proceeds), in which ABCD represents the same area as [diagram goes here] Figure 1 Socrates's drawing before, i.e. four square feet. Socrates again exhorts Meno to 'Notice what, starting from this state of perplexity, he will discover by seeking the truth in company with me, though I simply ask him questions without teaching him.' Once more, 'in company with me' hardly does justice to Socrates's role in the discovery. Socrates [drawing in the diagonals]: Now does this line going from corner to corner cut each of these squares in half? Boy: Yes. Socrates And these are four equal lines enclosing this area [BEHD]? Boy: They are. Socrates Now think. How big is this area? Boy: I don't understand. Socrates: Here are four squares. Has not each line cut off the inner half of each of them? Boy: Yes. Socrates And how many such halves are there in this figure [BEHD]? Boy: Four. Socrates And how many in this one [ABCD]? Boy: Two. Socrates And what is the relation of four to two? Boy: Double. Socrates How big is this figure then? Boy: Eight feet. Socrates On what base? Boy This one Socrates. The line which goes from corner to corner of the square of four feet? Boy: Yes. Socrates The technical name for it is 'diagonal'; so if we use that name, it is your personal opinion that the square on the diagonal of the original square is double its area. Boy: That is so, Socrates. Socrates goes on to condude that, having been elicited by questions rather than through direct tuition, 'These opinions were somewhere in him…This knowledge will not come from teaching but from questioning. He will recover it for himself' (Plato, 1956: 138). The dialogue of the Meno is in many ways unlike naturally recorded conversation, it is altogether too neatly ordered, and there are moments of implausibility in the boy's responses. It is, of course, whatever its historical origins, a quasi-dialogue written by Plato. Nevertheless, the role of Socrates bears comparison with that of the teachers in the sorts of 'discovery learning' we have been examining. He remains in control of the talk, governing the taking of turns at speaking, closing the boy's options even to an extent that we have not witnessed in schools, by merely inviting affirmations of ready-made propositions - the familiar 'leading questions' of the courtroom. The assumption implicit in Socrates's account of the process, that he will 'simply ask him questions without teaching him' is that questions do not carry information, that they may not inform and persuade, command and convince. Of course, this is a demonstrably false assumption, one unlikely to be made even by the pre-Socratic Sophists, the experts m rhetoric (Billig, 1987), let alone by modern scholars of language and communication. As one of the latter remarks, 'Questions will generally share the presuppositions of their assertive counterparts' (Levinson, 1983: 184). Most strikingly, we find in the Meno an example, at least as clear as any we may find in school, of a contrast between the teachers' overtly expressed insistence that their pupils learn from experience, realizing an innate potential and learning for themselves rather than being 'taught', and the surreptitious way (via gesture or presupposition, for example) that the teacher implants knowledge and assumption, defines what is relevant and true, structures experience and assigns significance to it. The boy's conclusions were, like the principles of pendulums, established by Socrates and the teachers in advance of the 'lesson'. Their pre-existence was real enough, as Socrates claimed, but they existed not in the minds of the pupils but rather in those of the teachers - Socrates included. The very term 'education' is a symbol combining contradictory themes. Its etymological derivation is a direct reflection of Socrates's conception of the process. It comes from the Latin e-ducare, which means, as many modern teachers are aware, to 'lead out'; this implies a process in which the teacher's role is rather like that of Socrates in the dialogue, drawing out of pupils that which is already latent and awaiting realization. But our discussion of educational ideology forces us to re-examine the word and its implications. The notion of 'leading out' is just that; the 'due' of 'education' is the same as that of 'duke' and of 'II Duce' (the title adopted by Mussolini), denoting leadership in the sense of power and command. It is no mere coincidence that Socrates's dialogue was with a slave boy. | Our examination of much less domineering sorts of 'elicitation' forces us to note that what is apparently elicited is often surreptitiously introduced, by gesture, assumption or implication, by the teacher. The knowledge attributed by Socrates to the slave boy was in fact constructed for him in the discourse itself, the boy serving merely as a compliant participant in an exposition dominated by Socrates. If the boy was 'educated' in the process, then it was at least as much a process from the outside in (induction) as from the inside out (e-ducation). What Socrates and Plato offer us is not so much a demonstration of the reality of innate ideas, as a somewhat unreal piece of surreptitious tuition. In fact, the slave boy section of the Meno, despite the special significance that educators have attached to it, is a rather untypical example of a Socratic dialogue. The usual form of the Socratic dialogues is different in both respects that we have emphasized; they are typically dialogues between social equals, and they are also typically dialogues about contentious issues (such as the nature of virtue or of justice) rather than about problems for which there is a unique and demonstrably correct answer. In the Protagoras, for example, Socrates and Protagoras deliberately swap roles of questioner and answerer. The interchange with the slave boy is very different. Like Gradgrind's 'girl number twenty', the boy has no name, and must do as he is bidden. He also must answer the questions put to him, and does so briefly, and does not question or answer back. But if we take the Meno as a whole, rather than just the slave dialogue section of it, we can see that it is not really so exceptional. The true dialogue was not with the slave at all, but with Meno, his master. The boy was not invited to participate with Meno and Socrates in the discussion of 'virtue'. The slave dialogue is merely an interlude in that discussion, a demonstration performed on the boy by Socrates to convince Meno of the validity of an argument concerning innate ideas. The real issue was not geometry but the innate idea of virtue - a genuinely contentious issue. The dialogue with Meno continues before and after that with the boy, and even during it, as in the quotation above when Socrates pauses to make sure that Meno appreciates the significance of the demonstration. The slave boy is called in like a medical exhibit in a lecture on psychiatry or anatomy. It is a peculiar fact, then, that it is the untypical slave boy dialogue rather than those between Socrates and Meno or Protagoras (or any of the others) that has appealed to liberal educators as embodying principles of pedagogy. Perhaps this is merely because the slave was a child, and education is generally conceived to be a process oriented to children. But surely the other features of that untypical case are also important: power and the pre-existence of knowledge. The teacher is in control, the child cooperatively subjugated, the agenda closed and determined by the teacher, the learning process defined as one in which the pupil attains an understanding already attained by the teacher. Absent are the qualities of open argument and debate, of true negotiation of issues and understandings that we find in Socrates's real dialogues. The notions of innate knowledge, and of education as drawing out (or 'bringing out') from pupils the capacities and cleverness which they possess already within them, are clearly reflected in modern educational theories Indeed, they are a cultural heritage, an ideology of education that we have inherited from Plato. In the Thaetetus he calls it 'mental midwifery', and in keeping with the metaphor the modern word 'concept' has the same root as 'conceive', in the sense of 'become pregnant with'. It derives from the Socratic dialogical method of drawing out meanings - the 'maieutic' (midwifery) method, with Socrates the midwife, and the pupil giving birth to ideas that were latent within. More recent variants of the nativist doctrine include the arguments by the linguists Chomsky and Fodor for the necessity of postulating an innate knowledge of language. (How, Fodor asks in an argument reminiscent of the Meno, can one learn a new concept unless one can already hypothesize it?) But the dual, oppositional character of the educational process was present even in Plato's treatment. R.S. Peters puts it nicely: When Socrates described himself as a midwife in the service of truth he used a brilliant image to illustrate this dual aspect of a teacher's concern. He must care both about the principles of his discipline and about his pupil's viewpoint on the world which he is being led to explore. Both forms of concern are obligatory. Respect for persons must not be pursued with a cavalier disregard for standards. (1966: 59) The twin pillars of educational philosophy most clearly espoused by the teachers in our study were variants on the theme: an assumption of innate intelligence as the prime factor in pupils' learning problems and abilities; and the principle of 'e-ducare', of leading or drawing out, helping pupils to learn for themselves, to realize their intellectual potential through their own activity and experience. The slave boy's knowledge of geometry was elicited, on Plato's and Socrates's accounts, merely through 'questioning' and by confronting the boy with the properties of squares and triangles We find articulated and embodied in the Meno the foundations of both poles of our ideological oppositions: discovery learning versus transmissional teaching, the realization of personal potential versus the exercise of social power and determination. We even have the denial by Socrates that any such control is being exercised. It is a set of oppositions and presences that recur not only in modern education, but in many other contexts of our social and political life. The hidden dimension of the slave boy dialogue - indoctrination, as opposed to elicitation - is in fact quite explicit elsewhere in Plato's writing Indeed, his major treatments of education are to be found not in the Meno (in which Socrates ostensibly teaches nothing), but rather in the Republic and the Laws. Here the major recommendations concern the ends, rather than the means, of education. And the ends are clearly predetermined and heavily imbued with ideological values - the rearing of children so that they become good citizens, virtuous and dutiful, each to their allotted place in the creation of the ideal state. It is no open-ended creative process; the midwife has a clear, socially defined conception of the required , offspring's character: 'Education is the process of drawing and guiding children towards that principle which is pronounced right by the law and confirmed as truly right by the experience of the oldest and the most just' (The Laws, book 2, para. 659). Indeed, steps should be taken to prevent any possibility of unpredicted or open-ended outcomes. While toddlers would be encouraged to play, this must be carefully constrained in middle childhood, for fear of rearing innovators: 'Children who make innovations in their games, when they grow up to be men, will be different from the last generation of children and, being different, will desire a different sort of life, and under the influence of this desire will invent other institutions and laws' (The Laws, book 7, para. 797). Marvellous, we might now think, just what we want children to be. But from Plato this was a dire warning, consistent with his recommendations for editing, restricting and bowdlerizing children's literature. Indeed, it was the very rationale for starting the educational process in early childhood, that it is then that our nature is at its most malleable: 'For it is then that it is best moulded and takes the impression that one wishes to stamp upon it' (The Republic, book 2, pare. 377). So, the very process of child-centred elicitation, of conceptual midwifery so keenly espoused by the liberal educadonists, contains also the predetermined curriculum, the character training, social values and constraints of the opposed camp. They originate in Plato's philosophy as parts of a single ideology. They come together in the pursuit of clear social goals, the creation of a highly structured, determined and just society, the realization of the natural virtue and goodness that are founded upon the careful midwifery of reason and understanding. As with all such ideological positions, what is socially arbitrary is offered as something natural. The notion that education is as much a process of in-duction as of e-ducation brings us back to Jerome Bruner, whose invocation of the Meno prompted our examination of it. According to Bruner, education is best conceived as an induction of pupils into culture, with culture itself conceived as a 'forum' within which shared meanings are defined and negotiated. It is a revised version of the 'progressive' ideology of education, contrasted with the 'transmissional' of pedagogy, but with the introduction of a communicative induction into culture in place of the all-discovering, self-fulfilling child: It follows from this view of culture as a forum that induction into the culture through education, it is to prepare the young for life as lived, should also partake of the spirit of a forum, of negotiation, of the re- creating of meaning. But this conclusion runs counter to traditions of pedagogy that of meaning. from another time, another interpretation of culture, another conception of authority - one that looked at the process of education as a transmission of knowledge and values. (Bruner, 1986: 123) Bruner's vision is an attractive and perhaps even an achievable one, but it is not much like what happens in schools; indeed, it is not much like what happens in the Meno, at least not in the slave boy section of it. If anything, it has more in common with Socrates's dialogues with the Sophists. What Bruner refers to as the older conception of 'authority' is not so easily dispensed with. It merely reappears in disguised form, as it did for Socrates. The same ideological oppositions are revisited; the contrasting values of creation and reduplication, of individual selfdetermination, and the reproduction of the established order. And in the absence of fundamental social changes in the nature of our culture and politics, in the underlying origins of our ideology, it is unlikely that the theorists and the practitioners of education will be able to avoid merely, at the ideological level, shifting from one foot to the other.