Philosophical Underlabouring around Educational Internalisation
Philosophical ‘underlabouring’ is a term created by John Locke that means clearing up the conceptual clutter and laying the foundation for future work and theorising. That’s what I want to do around the terms I spoke about in the last article: internalisation and externalisation.
I think I was able to get at something pretty deep with them. And I want to follow that thread with this article.
So, if you recall, internalisation is what we do when we freeze parts of context into discrete concepts and teach them in isolation. It is a pressing down into the student, requiring them to learn the specifics of a concept/skill/curriculum. Externalisation is the opposite; it gets students to externalise their knowledge, so that they can make more connections. It gets them to understand.
Let’s do some underlabouring around internalisation and start by asking ourselves what it assumes. For it is the dominant mode of education today, in high schools and in Universities. I’m not making any truth claims here, just laying out what I think the assumptions of this mode of education are:
Students don’t know anything important - they need to learn it
Explicit knowledge is more extensive/significant than implicit knowledge
If a student can’t replicate a perfect textbook answer then they don’t know the information being taught/learned, because implicit knowledge is a factor that is either not very important or non-existent altogether
That cutting knowledge out of context makes it less overwhelming and easier to learn
That learning the specific information will transfer to real life
That there aren’t any long term negative consequences (low self-esteem, less creativity, less critical thinking, disembodied knowledge, increased compliance and agreeableness to the status quo and convention, etc) to requiring students to internalise specific content knowledge and replicate it by rote
That if students don’t internalise anything in education, then they will leave stupid and dumb and won’t contribute to the economy, and the education system will have failed
That the education system needs to produce a measurable and explicit effect in order to be successful
That teaching needs to happen through internalisation
That knowledge is simple, stable and set
That ‘secular’ knowledge free of ideology is possible
Students don’t need to understand why they are learning something, beyond trite reassurances that it is practical (that never really resolve into a higher resolution)
That curriculum knowledge is important for all students to learn
That students’ individuality is peripheral
That a student gains value to the extent they internalise the knowledge, rather than the knowledge gaining value to the extent it is internalised by students
That the professors who have developed the curriculum documents are unbiased generalisers of disciplinary knowledge
That disciplinary knowledge is accurate and truthful and does not need to be examined
I’m sure we could come up with more. This is what I mean by underlabouring - getting clear on the assumptions we haven’t really been able to name so that we can clear out some territory for us to proceed more appropriately going forward.
Because all of this - our entire education system - proceeds from this faulty axiom that knowledge needs to be cut out of context and impressed on the student. We need to be able to trace all of this back to the causal error from which it compounds; that, too, is a part of underlabouring, so that we can see the engine of the modern educational worldview.
But we can also do some underlabouring around what externalisation offers instead. A completely different education and worldview. Here is what it assumes:
That implicit knowledge is more extensive and significant than explicit knowledge
That students need help connecting what they know explicitly and implicitly to other contextual factors and bits of knowledge
That this externalisation leads to understanding, when one ‘joins the dots’ and understands the bigger picture
That understanding is a more immediate and important thing than rote internalisation
That students have a lot to offer as they are
That students have selves that are important, and the knowledge we give them is important only in relation to them and whether it connects to them
That we should only freeze information and take it out of context when we are doing so to help them connect to it again; but that we need to do this as a part of the same process; that internalisation with the payoff delayed is harmful, and that it should only occur when we are doing it to connect them to context, in other words, as a part of the process of externalisation
That knowledge is fluid and biased, and that context is incredibly complex
That professors don’t get their discipline right all the time
That the discipline doesn’t get it right all the time
That education is about linking students up to their context, and successful education is one in which students’ selfhood and capacities have flourished
That this flourishing is hard to measure, but that it has something to do with maturity
That we recognise and ‘measure’ maturity to the extent that we ourselves have matured
That this is deep and mysterious, because human beings and context and the relationship between them are more complex than can be explicitly formulated, but this doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist or isn’t important, on the contrary, it is all the more important because of this
That education is supposed to be messy; that mess doesn’t equal unproductive - the opposite: too much tidiness means we’re doing internalisation divorced from externalisation
And so on.
Education is the relating of consciousness to its wider context. Context is fluid, changing, complex, tacit. We freeze parts of it that our students might need help metabolising - like a stream that is blocked by a stone - and then we keep going with the flow. This freezing and internalising is a part of it, but if we focus on irrelevant discrete bits of information (we know we’re doing this when our students ask, ‘Why are we doing this?’) and don’t worry about linking it back to anything, then we’re shooting ourselves - not to mention our students - in the foot. We’re not being effective.
Internalisation and externalisation.
Two simple terms that get to the heart of the shift we need to make as educators, policy-makers and administrators. Moving into the latter will help us to ensoul education.
It will also literally, as we make learning more relevant for our students, make our jobs as teachers more relevant to society. And so will kickstart a virtuous cycle (the opposite of the vicious one we’re in now), leading to greater respect and pay for teachers, which will send more passion the way of students, and so on.
The main issue as I see it is the fact that teaching through internalisation seems easier: you just need to memorise a script, a certain way of teaching the concept (which is the same as what students need to do). So a lot of teachers and administrators, caught up in the assumptions of this mode, might want to defend it. It’s a really heavily entrenched perspective. There’s an anxiety about loosening the standards, and a shift towards a more externalising mode is likely to be seen as that. If we don’t force our students to learn this very specific set of knowledge and practices, then we will be failing as institutions. Yes, true - but externalisation doesn’t invert internalisation; it places it front and centre, but connects it to the wider context. Internalisation puts this connection off into the vague future, and so fails. Externalisation succeeds because it sees how context is essential to the purpose of education, that an education without it is itself, for all its anxiety to succeed, a failure.
Good teachers already do this. But we can get these ideas out there and practice them with more courage and pedagogical deliberateness. And start to normalise the conversational, messy, flowing process of externalisation. For that is what builds a real bridge between our students and the context, and brings them both to life.