Teachers Without Goals Students Without Purpose
Teachers Without Goals Students Without Purpose, by Perkinson (1993) addresses the crisis in education and proposes an alternative construction of education with a renewal of the concepts regarding roles of the teacher and student. The author's educational approach is contrasted with what he labels as modern, postmodern, and post-postmodern approaches.
Perkinson proposes alternatives to teachers viewing their jobs as the promotion of learning. Modernism is seen as reflecting the notion that teachers can transmit knowledge to students by presenting the real world, to be grasped through their senses. Focus is on the packaging of knowledge in a digestible manner, for students. Next it became apparent that levels of development of children needed to be recognized, so that a child's ability to receive knowledge would be acknowledged. The theory of evolution furthered the learning concept to include the notion that learning is a matter of solving problems in the pursuit of goals; therefore students discover rather than receive knowledge. Teachers now needed to provide problems related to developmental levels, for the student to discover the knowledge the teacher wanted him to learn. An alternative to these notions is that knowledge comes from within rather than without. Perkinson suggests that education be considered as the growth or evolution of knowledge.
The concept that you cannot make someone learn who doesn't want to learn, is viewed as supporting the growth of knowledge theory; if people were merely receptors of knowledge, why do they not always learn? The author proposes that human beings create their knowledge by making sense of whatever they encounter; the world provides feedback that reveals when one has come up with an understanding that does not fit, thus supporting the notion that knowledge is a process of adaptation.
Since human knowledge grows through a ...