Teaching’s Thermomix: Dumbing down society
Cook it quick
Here is an analogy I have been ‘cooking up’ (apologies for the dad joke). Teaching has started to be viewed as a thermomix. Now for those who don’t know, a thermomix is a tool that is the ‘state of the art’ cooking gadget. It chops, it dices, it stews, it cleans itself. In short, it’s just one big self-contained crock pot that claims to be cooked up by astrophysicists or something similar.
Now, rather like the common parlance of being a vegan, someone will tell you if they own an airfryer, as it costs around 5 thousand dollars, the sunk cost fallacy has importance here. It’s the air fryer from 10 years ago, all flash and impressive promises, but in short it's just kind of an oven.
Now the problem with learning the tricks of the trade of a thermomix is that they have zero applicability to any other field of, you know, normal cooking. So you can work out how to cook Gelato in a Thermomix, and never really know how to make one without it. It’s rather its own obtuse puzzle, removed from the broader world of cooking.
So…. what’s all this about cooking got to do with education?
Pedagogical discussions have become thermomix recipes:
Do this strategy and students will learn
Do this strategy and students will succeed on examinations
Do this strategy and students will be engaged
Use this app and the students will learn whilst having fun.
But teaching aint for students, its for society, and it’s not for learning, it’s for acculturation. So you can’t have the recipe without the why, the what without the: to whom.
It is, “The centrality of ‘moral purpose’, otherwise expressed as ‘stewardship’ (Sergiovanni,
1994, p. 102ff) and also embedded in European notions of educational
praxis (Ax & Ponte, 2007; Ronnerman, Furu, & Salo, 2008) to the teaching profession
is a popular concept amongst those who focus their work on the life-world of teachers. Day, for example, suggests that ‘moral purposes are at the heart of every teacher’s work.” (Mockler, 2011, p.523). Whilst, “Fullan, who has built a body of work in this area over more than a decade, invokes us to ‘scratch a good teacher and you will find a moral purpose’ (1993, p. 12).” (Quoted within Mockler, 2011, p.523)
Instead, “Schools as well as the cultural pedagogies of media and other social institutions too often perpetuate ignorance or, as Macedo puts if stupidification.” (Kincheloe, 2008, Pp.85). We aim for students to be content rich but experience poor. To be, in short, knowledgeable, but dumb. Clever, but dull. There is no discussion of the “Pedagogy of the Shine in the Eyes.” (Kincheloe, 2008, Pp.90) which all teachers know and chase every day as they stand in front of a class to perform their next masterpiece.
Yes we are capturing, “Pierre Bourdieu's notion of "cultural capital” (Kincheloe, 2008, Pp.110) but also lived experience and the sheer joy and pleasure of learning - and that doesn’t always occur within the confines of strict literacy and numeracy goals, learning intentions and success criteria. Quite the opposite. It cannot be found within textbooks, those recipe books for education, instead it’s not in “the unassailable knowledge of textbooks. Textbooks in a democratic education are always open to challenge and critical teachers must stand ready to take issue with them.” (Kincheloe, 2008, Pp.110). And take issue we must!
And this has ramifications for industrial concerns also, as “Nias, however, has rather provocatively posed the question ‘Would schools improve if teachers cared less?’ (1989), suggesting that teachers’ commitment to moral purpose and ‘care’ can sometimes get in the way of what she sees as schooling’s primary task, that of ‘equipping students for life in the twenty-first century’ (1989, p. 22).” (Quoted in Mockler, 2011, p.523).
We need to be less like those with a Thermomix, avoid disjointed pedagogies, apps and approaches that teachers have clearly never used, or pursued within their own classrooms, instead, look for those things that have been proven, practiced and polished within a teachers classroom who has a clear sense of what they want the world to be; and therefore their classrooms and schools to look like, and don’t chase those who lack vision, for they lead you nowhere but towards blind corners.
References
Kincheloe, J. L. (2008). Critical pedagogy primer (Vol. 1). Peter Lang.
Mockler, N. (2011). Beyond ‘what works’: Understanding teacher identity as a practical and political tool. Teachers and teaching, 17(5), 517-528.
Running Word Count (the second 100,000): 10,550