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Re: Work, Play and Alfie Kohn
Thank you so very much, Brian...I'm so glad to hear your voice here and
see you rear up against this power monger, Casey, and so deftly, too!
I had to refer these several excellent sites, below, to EVALTALK, where
evaluation powerhouses, Western Michigan Uni & their ilk, and other
such research brokers are hankering to get their data-mining hardware
and ethically challenged teeth into all this disaggragated data that the
ilk of Herr Doktor Leo has helped dish up and offer out of our classrooms.
Glad, indeed to see you, again...hie to EVALTALK, if you might, again,
Brian. We need a little heavy lifting there theze daze, as well... ;-}
rap.
REFs:
Paulo Freire Institute at UCLA
http://www.paulofreireinstitute.org/paulo_freire.html
DESCHOOLING SOCIETY
by Ivan Illich This document is available online courtesy of Paul Knatz
< http://knatz.com> and PK Imaging < http://www.pkimaging.com>.
http://reactor-core.org/deschooling.html
and GettaLoadA THISone, at th' same time, Brian (talkin' 'Bout Socially
Constructivist Curriculae!):
Reactor Core: Alternative Food · Alternative Health · Alternative Thought
http://reactor-core.org/
An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has
come. — Victor Hugo
<>Free Speech · Clear Thinking · Hard Truths ~~ You are blind; most of
what you know just isn't so.
<>In the country of the blind, the one eyed man is called insane. ~~
Join me; open your eyes.
Brian LeCloux wrote:
I'm reading this book right now and this dualism you've constructed to
explain away Kohn's powerful critique of the homework myth just isn't
there. For example, the kind of learning environments Kohn advocates
that teachers create are quite challenging and intellectually
stimulating, not play. The constructivist classroom is far more
difficult to facilitate and far more challenging to the learner than
the transmission model most classrooms have suffered. On that basis
alone, your framework fails.
What is there is plenty of evidence against the practice you seem to
deftly avoid talking about. Actually the taking the bus metaphor
perfectly fits the homework practice, not Kohn's critique. There
are many practices and habits about the public school that just get
repeated year after year, being done as they've always been done
except when there's reform and its more of the same only harder.
Well, it's 2006. Let's start applying all of the research laying
around---some of it for decades now---that calls into question
traditional practices.
Folks, read the book. In fact all of his books are very well documented.
Brian LeCloux
Sun Prairie, WI
----- Original Message -----
From: leoecasey@optonline.net <mailto:leoecasey@optonline.net>
To: arn-l@interversity.org <mailto:arn-l@interversity.org>
Sent: Tuesday, October 17, 2006 7:50 AM
Subject: [arn-l] Work, Play and Alfie Kohn
http://edwize.org/work-play-and-alfie-kohn
Reading anti-homework evangelist Alfie Kohn is a very predictable
experience, not all that different from taking the same bus, on
the same route, over and over again. No matter the specific
destination, no matter the particular educational topic, it is not
very difficult to predict in considerable detail what Kohn will
have to say on it, before you have read his first sentence. This
is so because there is a simple formula which underlies all of his
writing on education.
For Kohn, there are two modes of human activity around which one
could organize education – work and play. In Kohn’s hands, work
and play are a polarized dualism: play embodies the spontaneous,
creative and liberating side of human activity, voluntarily
undertaken, while work is alienated and oppressive drudgery, done
in the service of the ‘other.’ We play because it gives us
pleasure; we work because we are forced to do so, usually to
provide the essentials of life. Real learning takes place, Kohn
believes, when we are engaged in creative, self-directed play, and
not stuck in alienated work.
Kohn is the latest incarnation of an ultra-libertarian,
anarchistic tradition of educational thought, perhaps best
represented by A. S. Neill’s Summerhill. Every educational issue
he has addressed has been seen through the same prism of the
anarchic celebration of play and derogation of work. Take
assessments. Virtually every test and every form of assessment –
not just excessive and misused standardized testing – is a form of
oppressive work to Kohn. Even a rubric for a performance based
assessment is something to be avoided, because it imposes external
standards on the creative act of writing or speaking.
The distinction between standards and standardization – so central
to most educators – is a distinction without a difference to Kohn;
for him, standards lead invariably to standardization and the
stifling of creative play. And Kohn’s latest obsession, homework,
is understood literally, as work at home. It has to be boring and
unimaginative toil.
Kohn’s educational philosophy is problematic in a number of
important respects. There is a role for play in schooling, but it
is a developmentally appropriate role, not a universal one. Play
is a central component of early childhood education, when students
are transitioning into schooling. Among other functions, it is
fundamental in socializing young children into their roles as
students. One of the negative effects in the current NCLB induced
climate has been the diminishment of play time, as academic
subjects are more and more pushed down into early childhood grades
– the ‘kinder’ is increasingly being taken out of ‘kindergarten.’
But as students develop, socially and academically, their
activities should assume more and more the form of intellectual
labor, and the role of play should diminish.
The transition to academic work can, of course, involve sheer
drudgery, the robotic memorization of disconnected facts and the
mindless completion of meaningless exercises. What, after all, is
the infamous work sheet, if not just the latter? But there is no
law that says academic work must be so, that it can not be
meaningful and purposeful intellectual labor. This would seem a
rather obvious, almost commonplace observation, but it is still
lost on Kohn. When he discusses homework, for example, he provides
only examples of poorly conceived and thoughtless ‘busy work’
assignments, as if this was something intrinsic in this category
of work, and nothing else was possible. Yet would this be a fair
characterization of a Social Studies homework assignment that had
students read selections from oral histories of life under
American slavery, and then write a poem or a rap song about the
experiences of enslaved African-Americans? Or another Social
Studies assignment that had student
s read about the First World War and the conditions on ‘the
front,’ and then write a letter home from a young soldier to his
family? Don’t these assignments, which could be multiplied
endlessly with similar examples, require imaginative, thoughtful
intellectual work on the part of students, and involve real learning?
In fact, Kohn’s polarized dualism of creative, imaginative,
self-directed play, on the one side, and alienated, oppressive and
thoughtless work, on the other side, excludes the middle term
which is the actual ground of education – meaningful, purposeful
intellectual labor. The most profound of educational thinkers,
from Socrates to Dewey, have always understood it in such terms.
What American students need is not freedom from homework in a
world of perpetual play, but homework thoughtfully crafted to
engage their minds and their imagination.
-------------------------------------------------------
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