Quote of the Month Archive
April 2009
Personalized learning?
Those who can consume enjoy both the reality and the illusion of choice: subjectivity and identity are now shaped and defined in consumption where once they were shaped through the meanings of social roles and structures, and of those of participation in an economy of production. The analogue in education is the niche education of 'personalized' learning and curricula. At a more profound level the effect on learners is their taken-for-granted assumption that they have power, that they are agentive in their own learnin, that they choose that with which they wish to engage on the basis of their interest, and that in their actions they remake their world in their image. That presents a deep paradox for the school, which may wish to say 'yes' to the learner's agency, but 'no' to the personalized curriculum."
Kress, G. (2006), Learning and curriculum - Agency, ethics and aesthetics in an era of instability in
Moore, A. [ed.] Schooling, Society and Curriculum, London: Routledge (p. 162)
Blog entry to come soon for comments.
March 2009
Beware!
Therefore, in researching education we are engaged in two sorts of clarification - first, the general usage of the term (which is complex enough) and, second, the different ways in which the term is applied, especially in its evaluative sense, depending on different traditions of what is considered to be of value. (...) Beware those who, ignoring these conceptual points, speak with confidence about what their empirical investigations demonstrate. It all depends on what you mean."
Price, R. (2000), Philosophy of Educational Research, London: continuum (p. 12)
Blog entry to come soon for comments.
February 2009
No quote this month - sorry! I might cheat and edit this later.
January 2009
Thought before language?
"Natural logic says that talking is merely an incidental process concerned strictly with communication, not with formulation of ideas. Talking... is supposed only to 'express' what is essentially already formulated... Formulation is an independent process, called thought or thinking and is supposed to be largely indifferent to the nature of particular languages. Languages have grammars which are assumed to be merely norms of conventional and social correctness, but the use of language is supposed to be guided... by correct, rational or intelligent thinking.".
Cole and Scribner, quoted as 1940a, 207-208 [reference not found] in
Hasan, Ways of saying: ways of meaning, Cassell (London), 1996, p. 19
Comment on my blog.
(in case anyone wondered I disagree!)
December 2008
About extrinsic and intrinsic motivation
"There are different kinds of rewards. There is the reward which has no natural connection with the things you do to earn it and is quite foreign to the desires that ought to accompany those things. Money is not the natural reward of love; that is why we call a man mercenary if he marries a woman for the sake of her money. But marriage is the proper reward for a real lover, and he is not mercenary for desiring it. A general who fights well in order to get a peerage is mercenary; a general who fights for victory is not, victory being the proper reward of battle as marriage is the proper reward of love. Thye proper rewards are not simply tacked on to the activity for which they are given, but are the activity itself in consummation. There is also a third case, which is more complicated. An enjoyment of Greek poetry is certainly a proper, and not a mercenary, reward for learning; but only those who have reached the stage of enjoying Greek poetry can tell from their own experience that this is so. The schoolboy beginning Greek grammar cannot look forward to his adult enjoyment of Sophocles as a lover looks forward to marriage or a general to victory. He has to begin by working for marks, or to escape punishment, or to please his parents, or, at best, in the hope of a future good which he cannot at present imagine or desire. His position, therefore, bears a certain resemblance to that of a mercenary; the reward he is going to get wil, in actual fact, be a natural or proper reward, but he will not know that till he has got it. Of course, he gets it gradually; enjoyment creeps in upon the mere drudgery, and nobody could point to a day or hour when the one ceased and the other began. But it is just insofar as he approaches the reward that he becomes able to desire it for its own sake; indeed, the power of so desiring it is itself a preliminary reward".
C.S. Lewis, The Weight to Glory. Address made in Oxford University Church of St. Mary the Virgin, 8 June 1941.
Published in C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory, HarperSanFrancisco 2001
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