In a recent interview for the TES, neuroscientist Uta Frith, suggests that, ‘…teaching is a human superpower. It’s really very difficult to find any examples in other social animals of deliberate teaching.” I have also described the ability to communicate complex ideas as a superpower and marveled at the perversity of choosing not to use it.
The fact we can communicate complex ideas means that the next generation can pick up from where the last one left off. By passing on, ‘The best that has been thought and known,’ to young people, they can make decisions about what to do with this knowledge. Sometimes, they reject it. Sometimes, they embrace it. But they don’t have to start from scratch in a forest with a piece of flint, wondering if they can turn it into an axe.
Given the obvious advantages that the communication of complex ideas between generations provides to each subsequent generation, it is strange that it is under constant attack.
Firstly, there are the revolutionaries who challenge the handing down of knowledge in year-zero type campaigns. We can easily see why this benefits the revolutionaries — it removes rival sources of legitimacy. If students know history, they may dispute the political claims of the new demagogue. If they know science, they may be aware of the impossibilities being asserted in the name of the revolution. This is why teachers often become targets of such campaigns.
It is a form of this process that is going on now when parts of the revolutionary left argue against teaching knowledge developed by dead, white men and claim that objective and universal fields of inquiry such as mathematics, somehow need to be decolonised. Most people who go along with these antics just think they are being good and just — or perhaps just want a quiet life — and have little idea of what lies beneath the surface.
The second attack is more difficult to fathom — the inquiry learning movement. Try as I might, I cannot see anyone benefiting from refusing to effectively teach knowledge to young people, at least not in a way that would benefit them more than characterising that knowledge as bad and oppressive. I have grown convinced that if the first attack on knowledge is something approaching a conspiracy, the inquiry learning movement is just a bad, elongated mistake enacted by people who mostly have the best intentions.
Whereas the first attack on knowledge transmission must inevitably be fought politically, the second may just be a misconception — one that we can fight with polite logic. One reason to suppose this may be the case is the large number of testimonials from teachers, myself included, who once bought in to the inquiry learning myth to some degree and now reject it.
For me, it was a process of revelation that reached its zenith in reading Kirschner, Sweller and Clark’s seminal 2006 paper, Why Minimal Guidance During Instruction Does Not Work. However, I am wondering whether it always has to be this circuitous.
Because teaching really is a superpower. It is something that in its fully developed form is unique to humans. We know of no other species that can do it. So, when you next hear someone suggesting they are going to withhold knowledge from students as part the teaching process, ask them why. Ask them why they have decided not to use their superpower.
Because if teaching is a superpower then teachers are superhumans. Go with it.
There's a Theravada Buddhist sutta where the Buddha literally calls teaching a superpower on par with psychic power and telepathy. Check it out:
"Kevatta, there are these three miracles that I have declared, having directly known and realized them for myself. Which three? The miracle of psychic power, the miracle of telepathy, and the miracle of instruction...
And what is the miracle of instruction? There is the case where a monk gives instruction in this way: 'Direct your thought in this way, don't direct it in that. Attend to things in this way, don't attend to them in that. Let go of this, enter and remain in that.' This, Kevatta, is called the miracle of instruction."
https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/dn/dn.11.0.than.html
I think you've missed a couple important points about where inquiry-based "instruction" comes from, perhaps to simplify things for a single blog post.
While there are revolutionary types trying to erase certain types of knowledge (I, staunch Hirschean that I am, prefer to think of it as culture that they are fighting against), I think inquiry-based instruction is more likely used because it feels anti-authoritarian.
Throughout history we see successful revolutionaries understanding that good instruction is a superpower, and some of them are, sadly, authoritarian.
There's another group that sees inquiry-based instruction more natural and thus more powerful or virtuous. "It's what babies do, and they're the best learners in the world!"—that sort of stuff.
I could say more, but really I just hope more people read Hirsch's latest book, "American Ethnicity". It's got a great explanation of where modern instruction comes from. Also, more people need to start using the term "Pelagian" to describe inquiry-based instruction or bad developmentalism arguments.