Please enable JavaScript.

Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.

The Importance of Structure: Bruner (The Importance of Structure…

- - - - • “The mean of docility is subjective in this sense. The definition of docility as the right amount of respect for the authority of teachers (or books) is by itself insufficient to determine action. It is a truth too remote from the exigencies of practice to direct us in the particular decisions we have to make. In this particular case—with this teacher or book, in view of my temperamental weaknesses, my tendencies to be indolent or impatient, and in connection with this point of doctrine about which I have strong feelings—what is the right amount of respect due those who are trying to instruct me? There is the practical question.” (Adler 26)
  - - - So long as the so-called educational directors of our leading networks continue to operate on their present false principles, we can expect nothing.
      - “In any case, it is clear that, if the great books contradict one another on many points, it must follow that many errors as well as some truths are to be found there. That is why the great books are such useful instruments in the pursuit of truth. For every truth, understanding all the errors it refutes is indispensable” (Alder p.5).
        
        "Learning" is what they did in college, and they know that that had very little to do with pain and work.” (Alder p. 34)
        
        “If we apply these principles to all the fundamental theoretic subject matters, we will find that, just as in the objective order, theology precedes metaphysics, and metaphysics, the philosophy of nature, and the philosophy of man, which is one of its parts, and the whole of philosophy, as dealing with essences, the whole of science, as dealing with phenomenal accidents; so in the subjective order, the members of this series are perfectly reversed: science should be studied before philosophy, and the philosophy of man before the philosophy of nature, and these before metaphysics and theology.” (Alder p. 21)
  - - - The need for docility arises from the supposition that a student lacks knowledge or the skill to get it and that a teacher, having what the student lacks, can help him. Although the student must never accept what the teacher says simply because he says it, neither can he reject it on that ground (Adler, 1989, 25).
      - Now the attitude of the various agencies of adult education is even more soft minded—not just softhearted— about the large public they face, a public which has had all sorts and amounts of schooling. The trouble is not simply that this large public has been spoiled by whatever schooling it has had—spoiled in the double sense that it is unprepared to carry on its own self-education in adult life and that it is disinclined to suffer pains for the sake of learning (Adler, 1989, 34).
        
        It would be a mistake for those of us who are teachers to suppose that the problem of achieving docility is a problem only for our students. To the extent that we, too, are students, the moral problem exists for us as well. It exists for anyone and everyone who is actively engaged in the life of learning (Adler, 1989, 26).
        
        Anyone who has done any thinking, even a little bit, knows that it is painful. It is hard work—in fact the very hardest that human beings are ever called upon to do. It is fatiguing, not refreshing. If allowed to follow the path of least resistance, no one would ever think (Adler, 1989, 35).
        
        We are frequently told that historical scholarship is the way. We are told that the proper study of philosophy, and even science, is impossible without thorough historical orientation. Both modernism and its equally bad opposite, "modern scholasticism," spring from corrupt history, or the lack of historical insight (Adler, 1989, 26).
        
        So long as they confuse education and entertainment, so long as they suppose that learning can be accomplished without pain, so long as they persist in bringing everything and everybody down to the lowest level on which the largest audience can be reached, the educational programs offered on the air will remain what they are today—shams and delusions (Adler, 1989, 36).
        
        At one extreme are those who claim that history is irrelevant to the study of philosophy. Curiously enough, these are usually the same people who try to teach philosophy systematically, out of textbooks or manuals. Philosophical knowledge consists of a set of doctrines which are timelessly true and which, therefore, can be expounded without any regard for the historical accidents of cultural time and place (Adler, 1989, 31).
- - - - “The banking concept does not admit to such partnership—and necessarily so. To resolve the teacher-student contradiction, to ex change the role of depositor, prescriber, domesticator, for the role of student among students would be to undermine the power of oppression and serve the cause of liberation.”(Freire 75).
- - - - “The teacher talks about reality as if it were motionless, static, compartmentalized, and predictable.” (Freire, 2005, P.71)
        
        “His task is to "fill" the students with the contents of his narration— contents which are detached from reality, disconnected from the totality that engendered them and could give them significance.” (Freire, 2005, P.71)