Abstract
This book is built around three enlightened attempts to rephrase learning and instruction in ways more sensitive to the social organization of learning situations. This paper extends the effort by pointing at a growing scandal. Institutions of learning have been corrupted by the market. Learning has been measured, credentialed, bought, and sold to the point that educational reformers have to worry about the use and misuse of their most important product. They have to worry about the connections learning makes to persistent structural inequalities. Learning has been commodified, and efforts to reform learning instruction must be sensitive not just to the gentle facts of how it is best done by people working together, but to the more disturbing facts of how it can be isolated, tested, administered, fetishized, and put up for sale in the reproduction of career and income lines. Serious advances in learning theory must be protected from the possibility that they can be used to make things worse.
Learning … is fond, and proud, of what has cost it much pains; is a great lover of rules, and boaster of famed examples … learning inveighs against natural unstudied graces, and small harmless inaccuracies, and sets rigid bounds to the liberty …
Edward Young, Conjectures on Original Composition (1759)
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Bateson, G. (1972). Steps toward an ecology of mind. New York: Ballantine.
Beckett, S., Brion, M., Budgen, F., Gilbert, S., Jalas, E., & Llona, V., et al. (1929/1962). Our exagmination round his factification for incamination of a work in progress. New York: New Directions Press.
Bredo, E. (2006). Philosophies of educational research. In J. Green, G. Camilli, & P. Elmore (Eds.), Handbook of complementary methods in education research (3rd ed., pp. 3–31). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Cole, M., & The Distributed Literacy Consortium. (2006). The Fifth-Dimension. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
Dewey, J. (1927). The public and its problems. New York: Henry Holt.
Dewey, J. (1937). What is learning? In J.A. Boydston (Ed.), John Dewey: The later works, (Vol. 11. pp. 1935–1937). Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991.
Dewey, J. (1940). The vanishing subject in James’s psychology. Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Method, 37, 589–599.
Dewey, J., & Bentley, A. (1949/1960). Knowing and the known. New York: Beacon.
Elman, B. (2000). A cultural history of civil examinations in Late Imperial China. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Emerson, R.W. (1894). Natural history of intellect and other papers. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin.
Fortes, M. (1938). Social and psychological aspects of education in Taleland. London: Oxford University Press (also published as Africa 11, supplement to No. 4).
Garfinkel, H. (1967). Studies in ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Goodwin, C. (1994). Professional vision. American Anthropologist, 96, 606–633.
Greeno, J. G. (1980). Psychology of learning 1960–1980. American Psychologist, 35, 713–728.
Greeno, J. G. (1995). Understanding concepts in activity. In C. Weaver, S. Mannes, & C. Fletcher (Eds.), Discourse comprehension (pp. 65–93). Hillsdale, IN: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Greeno, J. G., McDermott, R., Cole, K., Engel, R., Goldman, S., Knudsen, J., & Linde, C. (1999). Research, reform, and the aims of education. In E. Lagemann & L. Shulman (Eds.), Issues in education research (pp. 299–335). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Hardwick, E. (2000). Herman Melville. New York: Viking/Penguin.
Hedegaard, M., & Chaiklin, S. (2005). Radical-local teaching and learning. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press.
Hood, L., McDermott, R., & Cole, M. (1980). Let’s try to make it a good day. Discourse Processes, 3, 155–168.
James, W. (1899/1962). Talks to teachers on psychology. New York: Dover.
James, W. (1911/1976). Essays in radical empiricism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Klemp, N., McDermott, R., Raley, J., Thibeault, M., Powell, K., & Levitin, D. (2008). Plans, takes, mistakes. Critical Social Studies 10(1), 4–21.
Lave, J., & Wenger, É. (1992). Situated learning. London: Cambridge University Press.
McDermott, J. J. (1976). Introduction. In W. James (Ed.), Essays in radical empiricism (pp. xi–xlvii). Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
McDermott, R., & McDermott, M. (2010). “One aneither”: A Joycean critique of educational research. Journal of Educational Controversy, 5(1), http://www.wce.wwu.edu/Resources/CEP/eJournal/v005n001/
Sacks, H. (1974). An analysis of the course of a joke’s telling. In R. Bauman & J. Sherzer (Eds.), Explorations in the ethnography of speaking (pp. 337–353). London: Cambridge University Press.
Schegloff, E. (1988). Goffman and conversation analysis. In P. Drew & J. Wooton (Eds.), Erving Goffman: Exploring the interaction order (pp. 89–135). Boston: Northeastern University Press.
Vygotsky, L. (1934/1987). Thinking and speech. In R. Rieber & A. Carton (Eds.), L. Vygotsky, The collected works of L.S. Vygotsky (Vol. 1, pp. 39–285). New York: Plenum Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2011 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
McDermott, R. (2011). Can We Afford Theories of Learning?. In: Koschmann, T. (eds) Theories of Learning and Studies of Instructional Practice. Explorations in the Learning Sciences, Instructional Systems and Performance Technologies, vol 1. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-7582-9_24
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-7582-9_24
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY
Print ISBN: 978-1-4419-7581-2
Online ISBN: 978-1-4419-7582-9
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and LawEducation (R0)