For Teacher Candidates: Defining Our Central Terms

What is a teacher?  Is it the same as an instructor or a trainer? I believe these terms are not synonymous.  An instructor or a trainer implies the transmission of techne, what we usually refer to as skills.  A teacher can certainly be involved in doing that, so a teacher can also serve their function by sometimes acting as an instructor or a trainer.  But it does not work the other way around.  An instructor or trainer is not necessarily a teacher.  If all you do is instruct/train skills, you are not a teacher. 

This is because teaching is necessarily involved with the wider and deeper project of education.  You may be tremendously well trained in a skill and yet be entirely uneducated in the domains around which you use that skill.  This is the difference between a laborer and an artisan or professional.  It is the difference between doing what you are told and understanding the dynamics surrounding the project you are engaged in. 

For instance, a mason can direct any assistant to carry the bags of mortar and mix them up in a certain ratio with water. The assistant has no need of knowing the code requirements for mortar binding on block or, more deeply, understanding the effects of humidity on the curing time and resulting compression strength of the mixture, how the pattern of blocks changes the dynamics of compression, what reinforcements are most beneficial in which circumstances, etc.  The knowledge of the mason is both intellectual and practical, accomplished with a combination of mind and sensation (sight, sound, and touch).  It renders abstractions from what is immediately before her, requires reasonable speculation about future situations in relation to the materials and conditions, and involves seeing the complexity of non-linear interactions. The assistant can be merely trained, but to do all the things the master mason must to do requires education. 

Notice that I used here an example of education that is almost never the subject of K-12 or college schooling.  You need to disassociate the term education from the term schooling, because they are not synonyms.  They may be related (theyshould be related), but they are definitely not the same thing, nor does one connect by necessity with the other. However, back to being a teacher:

So to be a teacher means that you are more than a trainer or instructor.  Instead of merely training or instructing in procedures, you must facilitate someone else’s education.  A teacher is an educator. 

This leads to the necessity of knowing the definition of education.  If you do not, then you don’t know what it means to be a teacher.  Like with teaching, education cannot mean the same thing as training or instruction in things.  It must be something more.

Defining education is an involved project. When we set out to define education, the first thing to do is discern it from the objective definitions we know of necessarily related terms.  Though we often use them synonymously, education is not the same as learning, thinking, or knowing (no matter the grammatical forms of the terms – learned, thought, known, knowledge, etc. – that’s not what’s at stake here).

Each of these three terms has a definite psychological and physiological meaning that is objectively true.  Let’s get those cleared up and understood, and thus use them as tools to help determine a valid meaning of education most usefully rather than confusing them with education:

1.     Start with purposeful action: Action by any living being to a purpose represents the existence of will. Will is applied to avoid danger to self and to meet needs.  Even one-celled organisms both flee from being eaten and chase things to eat.

2.     The other thing that any slightly more complex organism does is to change subsequent behaviors based upon prior experience.  If danger or harm once occurs under a certain place or condition, they will act to avoid that place or condition in the future.  If beneficial things happen in a place or condition, they will likewise alter their behaviors to get back to that place or condition in the future.  This is, at the most primitive level, what learning is: changing behaviors as a result of experience.  Note that this was the behaviorists’ definition of all learning, and in a neurochemical, mechanistic sense, there is truth in this. However, for complex living beings, such a definition is too reductive.

3.     The more complex the creature, the more mediated by selectivity in the creature’s cognition learning becomes.  The primitive version is always there, operating.  The more mediated versions also rely mechanistically upon the same neurochemical mechanisms.  But as the complexity of the creature increases, so does the nuance of the process.  This is what we call choice and free will.

4.     A powerful element for exceeding merely behavioral learning is language.  Languaging creatures have learning that is abstracted far from the behaviorist version.  Choice and intention become complex with language. Learning becomes far abstracted from simply avoiding punishment or gaining reward.  Pattern recognition, vicarious learning, self-discipline, imagining, aesthetic appreciation, creative thinking, problem solving, and critical thinking all emerge and complexify as language does.

5.     For human beings, language has made it so that we must expand the definition of learning away from observable behaviors.  Human learning has to be defined as: changes in knowledge as a result of experience. 

6.     Piaget clarified/elaborated that definition in a way which defines knowledge (and neuropsych has been validating that his theory is fairly accurate in terms of the physiology of learning): An experience is when we pay attention to an occurrence around us and thus attribute meaning to it. The attribution of meaning occurs by applying prior knowledge to it.  The two mechanisms of this are:

           i.     Assimilation, in which the meaning is a natural extension of meaning and interpretation of things we already have (i.e., we have met many dogs, but never a corgi. Then, when we first meet a Corgi, that it is a kind of dog makes assimilative sense, and we easily learn that a Corgi is a kind of dog). 

           ii.     Accommodation, in which the meaning of the new experience requires us to re-organize our prior knowledge to include it (i.e., we think we understand gravity as mass being drawn together in the Newton sense, and this feels right to us as we stand on the Earth.  Then we learn in physics class that this is only correct at a basic level, that a more precise definition is that it is a result of the ‘curving’ of space-time that each object of mass performs, such that masses are in a constant state of ‘falling’ towards one another (thanks, Einstein!).  This is much harder to picture in our minds and reconcile with our common experience, but we can use models (like curving and falling) to accommodate and improve our understanding of how it works if we try).

The patterns we put together by assimilation and accommodation for anything and everything with meaning to us, Piaget called ‘schema.’So by extension, we can also define learning as any change in our schema.

Our schema, summatively, can also be called our knowledge.

Learning, the acquisition of knowledge, therefore always comes about as a result of our active conversion of occurrences into our own experiences (attributing meaning to what has happened).

There is no other way that it occurs.

All “different ways of learning” when you are involved in thinking about differentiation are various means by which individuals most readily reach assimilation or accommodation of concepts into schema. 

7.     The activity of this we call thinking.  Here is how the three terms are connected:Learning is all thinking that is successful, which means it has become knowledge within us.

8.     An important corollary for human learning comes back to language: Remember that all of the meaning we attribute beyond the most primitive level, by which we form and alter schema, is done with language (this insight was originally Vygotsky’s group’s conclusion).  We need language.  This makes all learning social and shared, as well as personal and unique (since each person’s collection of experiences is unique to them).  This, by the way, is why extent of active vocabulary is directly correlated to capacity to learn in every venue it has been measured.

That is what learning is and what thinking and knowing are.  This is, at this point in history, a consensus definition within psychology and education.

By connection of grammar, we therefore are also certain of the different grammatical forms.  We know what it is to be learned, what thought is, what knowledge is, what is known, what is unknown (and any of this in the personal or social sense of usage). 

This brings us back to education: Unless we assert that a person’s education is everything they ever have learned or known or thought about, we cannot claim that education means the same thing as any one of these terms.  However, it is obviously connected to what is thought about, learned, and known.  It must be some sub-set of these.  The question is, what sub-set?  How will you define education?

A concept that helps us to discern what in us counts as our education is another distinction made by Piaget.  In his developmental theory, he discerns concrete operations from formal operations.  The difference is in the ability to create and employ abstractions.  For instance, speculating productively, which is positing hypothetical situations that extend beyond whatever is immediately before us in order to solve a problem or understand something.  Another example is being able to see non-linear or indirect connections between concepts.  He initially believed that most people never reached formal operations.  His psychometrics used a very limited interpretation of abstracted thinking.

Vygotsky’s group read and was convinced by Piaget’s development theory except for that assertion about most people never reaching formal operations.  In their work to explore formal operations further, they came up with the insight about the connection between language and concept construction, inventing social constructivism.  More directly, though, they concluded that most people do acquire formal operations in their adult lives.  The reason that it is not immediately apparent with a single psychometric instrument is that people formally operate in the subject matters and domains in which they have extensive, involved experience.  Our mason from our prior example will likely fail to show formal operations on Piaget’s original instrument because that instrument seeks abstractions that a Swiss psychology professor would use, not ones that a master mason would use.  However, if we use an open-ended approach to see how our mason understands the world, nature, her work, etc., we will find that she is a sophisticated abstract thinker who can operate with symbolic representations, hypotheticals, complex systems – any facet of formal operations you wish to consider.  For that matter, she will usually view the rest of what she encounters in life using her formal operational understanding of her work world as the primary set of metaphors for understanding.  For instance, to a dentist, political parties may be like different kinds of teeth.  To the mason, they are more like different kinds of stone.  The metaphors will be rich and revealing to the person who comes up with them, but fairly opaque to people outside of that domain.

Another very useful concept for discerning education from the mass of things a person knows is Maslow’s concept of self-actualization, which is the highest end of meeting human needs for life and growth.  You do not need education to have most of what is on Maslow’s hierarchy.  Training and instruction will do.  But the kind of understanding that allows self-actualization requires formal operational thought of some kind so that we can find meaning to our lived experience in holistic and comprehensive ways.

While there is no consensus definition for education, I propose that education is the subset of what a person knows in a formal operational manner to approach self-actualization.  We don’t have to use the Piaget or Maslow language to express this:  Education is the sub-set of what a person knows with which they conduct the thoughtful part of their regular living.  It is the knowledge that they use to understand and work with everything else they encounter in their lives.

If this is a correct, or at least optimally useful, definition of education, it follows that a teacher’s work is to help people to cultivate their understanding, their deeply processed knowledge and application, in domains that are of value and interest to them. 

This can certainly include introduction of useful domains that the person may not already know or show interest for.  It can include skills, which involves the training or instruction aspect.  For instance, literacy and numeracy  are fundamental matters for us to focus upon when children are ready to obtain it, because they allow easier access to everything else.  But even the facts and processes which are instructed or trained must be aimed at something greater: the student’s growth into having the concepts in ways that are meaningful to them for their own lived experience in the world.

The institution of school as we currently have it in our society does not envision or pursue this higher purpose as a central aim.  No matter how frequently we use the two words as substitutes for one another or in close conjunction, schooling (at least the public, K-12 variety) is not about education.  It is about training, instruction, and indoctrination into the status quo.  It leaves the higher calling of education to individual teachers and students who have the will and insight to pursue it, and abandons everyone else to be merely trained in a mediocre way for concretely operating their way through their lives.  This is all that the status quo requires of most people, and in fact is preferable for maintaining an essentially oligarchical social order.  There is no incentive for the leaders in our society to change school into anything other than a minimalist training ground to move people into their requisite roles in the existing economic order, and to be compliant to the political order that serves it.  The self-actualization of the individual human being is therefore not the interest of the system.  However, if you are to truly be a teacher, then the self-actualization of your students is indeed your calling.  If you really are a teacher, then your goal with your students must exceed what school wants of them and of you.