The Problem of Education

While it is the aim of this book to avoid controversy, and to give instead as simple and straightforward an account of mind and its education as the limited state of our knowledge will permit, it is impossible to overlook those teachings, already referred to, which find in habit-formation both the method and the end of education. But instead of opposing those views at once with a contrary theory of creative achievement, let us first try to state the problem of education, and then proceed to check all inferences which can be derived from such a statement by whatever facts careful observation of the behavior of children has revealed.

What then is Education?
Education is a social process of change in the behavior of living organisms. This answer, simple as it is, contains several important terms, each of which stands in need of definition. First, education is social, for it involves the participation of different individuals. Secondly, it is a process of change— which suggests something more than a mere change in time or place—for the word process signifies progression in a series of events which are bound to gether, and which pass from a beginning to an end, or perhaps in a circuit which fulfills its destiny by turning full circle upon itself.

The educative process is no arbitrary change, but a systematic and ordered sequence of events. We do not attribute education to a stone which falls from a precipice into a gorge, even though in so doing it should dash itself to pieces on the rocks below; neither do we think of a stream of water as educating the soil over and through which it passes in its turbulent course, even though it does shape and mold its bed by its flow.

Furthermore, the changes wrought by education are changes of behavior. But what do we mean by behavior? A social process is here implied, for the term suggests the manner of conducting oneself, and the treatment one accords to others. Even when used for things instead of persons, as when we speak of the behavior of a machine or of a chemical, it is action directed from within rather than from without which warrants our use of the term.

Thus we seem to feel a human or a personal touch in the behavior of the thing—something like a personal quality, such as demeanor, deportment, or conduct. This brings us to the last term of our definition: living organisms. Personality belongs to living organisms, and it is with these that we are concerned in education. Furthermore, we are concerned with organisms, not merely as they live and grow, but as they behave and conduct themselves in accordance with the conditions of living and growing.

Thus the “process of change” which is a proper subject for physics and mathematics, is, in the specific instance of education, a change of behavior made in a living organism which not only lives but feels, and perhaps reflects. It thus appears that our simple definition is not simple after all; for it leads us into four great fields of science— Physics, Biology, Psychology, and Sociology—and into Philosophy. Many of our data and much of our method must be borrowed from these sources.

But it will be best to state our problem concretely, and borrow as our needs are felt, rather than try to survey the relevant sciences and present a philosophy of life at the outset of our inquiry. Everyone knows that physics deals with mass and motion; and that a child or an adult man has both. Everyone knows, too, that the subject of education is a living creature having biological, psychological, and sociological aspects. With this knowledge we can let the creature tell its own story by its concrete behavior, without trying to trace each aspect of this behavior back to its scientific or philosophical source. .

Beginning, then, with the quaintly inadequate little creature who comes into the world untaught and uninformed, what can we make of a baby’s first days of life? Aimless as his movements appear to be, and dependent as he is upon the guiding care of mother and nurse, a closer scrutiny reveals certain ways that are original to himself. His eyes will blink; and though they sometimes wander in different directions, they will converge and “fixate” a bright point of light shown in a darkened room. More over, when his hands come in contact with a seizable object, his fingers will grip it so rigidly that he can thereby be raised from the ground and suspended in the air for some time.
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Individuals as the problem: cultures, subcultures and learning styles

Hybridization in online classrooms thus evades extant frameworks of cultural analysis: moreover, the individual learner likewise escapes such frameworks – first, as we have seen, as the individual is more than simply a token for a presumptively monolithic national culture. In addition, individuals represent a constantly shifting intersection of multiple cultures and subcultures, which in turn alter over time at varying rates, that is, from national/linguistic cultures that change relatively slowly, to youth cultures, which change very quickly (e.g. as we have seen, with regard to such fundamental notions as privacy and the nature of the self).

A given individual may further reflect some number of ethnic and/or other subcultures, including those shaped by economic and social class. Insofar as each individual may be thought of as a distinctive construction and inflection of each of these diverse levels of ‘culture’, she or he may inhabit a near-infinite continuum of possibilities that are only poorly and incompletely captured by the five cultural dimensions articulated by Hall and Hofstede.

More radically, as we have seen, the cross-cultural online learning environment facilitates such individuals’ creation of distinctive new syntheses and amalgams of diverse cultural elements that again escape overly simple frameworks of cultural analyses. Hewling (2005), for example, documents forcefully how students in one of her intercultural online classrooms repeatedly exhibited communicative behaviours and values that (a) either could not have been predicted by using Hofstede or, worse yet (b), directly contradicted whatever predictions one might have made on the basis of those schema. So Hewling finds that among her students – Canadians, a North American, and a Sudanese – concerns about authority are expressed primarily by the (North) Americans. But according to Hofstede’s framework, (North) Americans, as members of a low-power distant country, should be least concerned about issues of authority.

Rather, as members of an individualist country, according to Hofstede, these students should be most likely to express their opinions directly and without hesitation. Hewling (2005), however, shows that this was not the case. For her part, Hewling proposes a content analysis methodology that she argues is more appropriate for analyzing the intercultural communication that takes place in online classrooms (2005) – a methodology that we can understand to incorporate both Koch’s second approach (‘culture as text’) and third approach (‘culture as community and practice’) to cultural analysis (Koch 2006: 221ff.).

Additional frameworks for cultural analysis have also been proposed. One of the most notable has been developed by Cantoni and his colleagues. Their frameworks take up Baumgartner’s much more complex matrix of cultural dimensions, one that adds to Hall and Hofstede an additional seventeen cultural factors developed in part from the theoretical work of Gould (2005). The resulting framework is then applied to a project involving ICTs for teacher-training in Brazil (Cantoni et al. 2006).

But again, this sophisticated enhancement of Hall and Hofstede as a framework for cultural analysis of intercultural online learning reiterates the point already made regarding intercultural communication online: while Hall and Hofstede (among others) may be used in initial ways, these frameworks provide only limited, and sometimes profoundly misleading, approaches to the realities of intercultural communication online.

While new, more comprehensive frameworks and approaches are being developed (e.g. by Cantoni et al.) that promise to offer us better understanding of online intercultural communication – and thus, of how we can shape both our technologies and their uses to foster the most effective intercultural communication and e-learning. We have only just begun.
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