Not long after I retired, I was packing away and throwing out education books I had collected over the 25 years. I came across a tattered paperback copy of Teaching as a Subversive Activity, and was struck by how deeply my teaching had been affected by this book: Early in my career, I had vigorously attempted to adhere to these principles. At my very best, I tried to teach students to question everything they were told – even the things I told them. The public education system is not friendly to this kind of teaching. And by the end of my career, I still had the attitude and tried to pass it on to my students. But today public education will beat the inquiry out of you.
According to Postman and Weingartner, students should be encouraged to ask questions meaningful to them, and ones that do not necessarily have easy answers; teachers should be encouraged to avoid giving answers whenever possible, and to avoid giving direct answers in favor of asking more questions.
The method of teaching students to ask questions is motivated by the authors’ understanding that learners need to center their attention on the process of inquiry itself, not merely on the end products, or facts. They list certain characteristics that they think are common to all good learners (Postman and Weingartner, 31–33), saying that all good learners have:
• Self-confidence in their learning ability
• Pleasure in problem solving
• A keen sense of relevance
• Reliance on their own judgment over other people's or society's
• No fear of being wrong
• No haste in answering
• Flexibility in point of view
• Respect for facts, and the ability to distinguish between fact and opinion
• No need for final answers to all questions, and comfort in not knowing an answer to difficult questions rather than settling for a simplistic answer
In attempting to imbue students with this approach to their education, a teacher who adheres to the inquiry method must act in ways that are startlingly opposed to traditional teaching styles.
Postman and Weingartner suggest that inquiry teachers have the following characteristics (pp. 34–37):
• They avoid telling students what they "ought to know".
• They talk to students mostly by questioning, and especially by asking questions that are divergent.
• They do not accept short, simple answers to questions.
• They encourage students to interact directly with one another, and avoid judging what is said in student interactions.
• They do not summarize students' discussion.
• They do not plan the exact direction of their lessons in advance, and allow it to develop in response to students' interests.
• Their lessons pose problems to students.
• They gauge their success by change in students' inquiry behaviors (with the above characteristics of "good learners" as a goal).
Good teaching can be subversive because, among other things, it challenges students to think, to question things as they are, to envision and consider possibilities. To be "subversive", we must encourage students to think outside the box. We need to teach students to desire to be life-long learners. We need to create a thirst for knowledge. The evidence that we have failed in this mission hits us in the face with every new government educational report. We have bright students, but what are we doing that causes the quality of education to continue to degrade? Why is America not at the top of the list of educated, developed nations?
I don’t know when I stopped using inquiry with conscious effort, but I know there were years I didn’t do it as well as Postman and Weingartner would have liked. I could blame my failure on burnout, or on No Child Left Behind, Madeline Hunter and five page lesson plans with stated objectives, checklists, state standards, and benchmarks. I cannot even explain how discouraging it was knowing that Central Office (my bosses) wanted every 8th grade History or Language Arts teacher to be on the same page, on the same day, teaching the exact same enumerated State Standard. I do know that NCLB was why I retired after the minimum 25 years.
The book's authors predicted that much in American education would be changing. In some respects, and it has; but not for the better. I was blessed with a good mind and an excellent public school education. The elementary and secondary teachers I remember best did encourage their students to ask questions. They also taught from the heart and with a love of the curriculum, not from a list of objectives provided by the state or central office. I can’t imagine exactly what some of them would have thought about the inane hoops I was required to jump through after the implementation of NCLB.
We have a wealth of educational technology today. The average 8th grader holding an iPhone has more information at his or her fingertips that all of the previous U.S. Presidents. But if they do not have the ability to sift through the information provided by this technology and recognize what is valid, it doesn’t do them any good. All the technology in the world will not produce an inquiring mind without someone modeling the process of inquiry.
The results of not having a questioning mind are evident in the attitudes and actions of a large majority of adults today. They hear something on TV and immediately take it to be a fact. Our society has become too accepting. We don’t ask why. We don’t ask how. We get in line and do as we are told. We give up our basic rights. We have become sheeple.
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