Learners Are People Too
PJM columnist Brad Rourke is fed up with the fancy language bureaucrats use to hide their real obligations. He argues that it's time to get rid of the ten-dollar-words and face up to the fact that our actions affect real people.
On an airplane last week, I found myself seated behind the president of a large municipal school board along with a staffer. I know this because I am only human and could not help but peruse the board member’s briefing book over the owner’s shoulder.
They were on their way to give testimony in a Congressional hearing and, it appeared, go on a series of meetings. There were pages of talking points. I’m not sure I would have been able to keep it all straight, there were so many. My eye kept coming back to a word, repeated throughout the papers: “learner.”
I have kids in school, so I have had this word used on me before. I hate it. My child is not a “learner.” He is — well, he’s a person. A child.
“Learner” always seems to me to be one of those terms of art that bureaucrats trot out so they don’t have to actually face the fact that their actions affect real people. It also conveys a little bit of “mission” along with it (as in having a “mission to foster lifelong learners.”)
But most egregiously to my mind, it drains education of its moral content. Public education, just as much as it does to convey knowledge to children, exists in order to develop good citizens. By calling children “learners,” the education intelligentsia makes the implicit point that, no, they’re not in that business. They are just there to get those three R’s across.
This bureaucratic obfuscation of reality is not just limited to the education establishment. Everywhere you look, “people” are turned by well-meaning organizations into “voters,” “users,” “customers,” “applicants.”
Or, worse yet, into “individuals.”
I had the unlikely yet immense pleasure of being introduced to moral philosophy in Berkeley, California. Of course, the professor who hit me with it was not in the philosophy department but in law. I cling to this day to a handful of ideas he conveyed to this eager learner.
A Belgian, he had a thick accent and a dramatic habit of jumping up and down, stomping his feet to make a point. “Individual” made him stomp. “An ‘individual’ is an island,” he would yell, “with no moral responsibilities.” He insisted, when discussing human beings, that we call them people and not individuals.
A “person,” as opposed to an “individual,” is obligated to act morally, and has a legitimate claim for others to return the favor. Ditto “citizen” vs. a “voter.” A voter is just someone stating a preference. A citizen has moral duties as well as privileges.
And, while a “learner” is little more than a customer in a shop, a “child” is someone whose character we have a moral duty to develop.
Too often, in the language of public discourse, we use ten-dollar words that hide our real obligations and cover up what we’re really up to. They have no moral content. The next time you read a report or press release from a think tank or nonprofit organization, look closely at how they talk about people. Are they really people, or are they just data?
In public life, we aren’t comfortable addressing morality. Yet that is precisely the subject that must come before us. Because, when you strip away the fancy talk, the political and policy decisions that face us are really moral choices.
We’ve got to be able to talk about them without mumbling.
Brad Rourke writes a column on public life called Public Comments, produces a videolog called Taxonomies, is a founder of the Maryland neighborhood blog, Rockville Central, and is in a band called The West End.
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5 Comments
1. mishu:Whatever happened to calling them students or pupils? Why do they have to make up some lame buzz word?
Oct 5, 2007 - 5:11 am 2. goy:All true. And more. Much more.
There’s another, deeper aspect to this “learner” newspeak, and it’s grounded in the constructivist philosophy that has essentially destroyed our educational system. That system has not only abdicated its responsibility to develop what Americans once considered good citizens, it has abdicated its responsibility for getting across the Three R’s as well.
The kids you (and I) have in school are not “children” or “learners”. In that environment, they are Students.
To answer mishu’s question: there’s a problem with this term in our new “progressive”, politically correct world. The title of Student naturally implies that there is someone on the scene acting as a Teacher. And our culture, of course, has come to assign specific, vital responsibilities to people who take on this title.
Constructivist theory specifically eschews this teaching responsibility, and has successfully transformed most classrooms using a new paradigm. The “outdated”, classical mode, where Teachers are responsible for lecturing, encouraging, stimulating, assessing and grading – teaching – Students, is now largely abandoned. A more “progressive” mode – typically a chaotic morass of activity, where “learners” collectively flail through loosely structured group activities to “construct their own knowledge” – has replaced the classical mode, while the former Teacher now acts as a “guide on the side”, and is more a referee than a resource.
All manner of psychobabble regarding “individual learning styles,” “metacognition,” and other nebulous factors have been used to justify this shift in classroom structure and teaching methodology. But the most critical result of the process has been the abdication on the part of Faculty and Administration of its responsibility to actually teach.
The most tangible benefit for constructivist “educators” in this new mode is that there is no accountability whatsoever for the faculty or the administration. If a “learner” fails to learn, there is no Teacher/Student relationship, i.e., no implicit contract involved that might be used to show a lack on the part of the Teacher. There IS no Teacher, per se. The result of this lack of accountability is clearly demonstrated in the continuing decline of quality education, despite the ever-increasing allocation of tax dollars and ever-growing tuitions supposedly allocated to its improvement.
There’s a lot more to this phenomenon than first meets the eye. The implications of enforced collectivist, group activity (and group assessment), emphasis on “diversity”, radical feminism, “social justice”, and multiculturalism, implementation of campus “speech codes”, abused tenure and many the other elements have conspired within this new education paradigm to replace classical education with something that is transforming our culture as we watch. It’s not a pretty picture.
Oct 5, 2007 - 6:43 am 3. Garrett DeOrio:An equally deep problem here is the way people in so many professions, especially legal, legislative, and “business” (in the narrow sense), have started using language not to elucidate or communicate, but to obfuscate.
If you don’t know how to fix the problems with which you’re faced, you can always use “ten dollar words,” call students “learners,” talk about things like “maximizing potentialities,” and just talk around the problem.
Oct 5, 2007 - 9:37 am 4. David:“And, while a “learner” is little more than a customer in a shop, a “child” is someone whose character we have a moral duty to develop.”
Insteadd, public schools today seem to think their duty is to develop political activists.
Oct 5, 2007 - 12:07 pm 5. tanstaafl:There are several explanations for the increase in the use of the type of language you describe, “individual”, “learner” et al. and etc. ad infinitum ad nauseam
One is that it is distancing, an avoidance of personalization.
Another is the desire for a position, a viewpoint, someone’s 8 pages of “talking points” to have some kind of credibility, some scientific underpinning.
It’s a function of insecurity to not use real words, to rely, instead, on fake “scientism”.
We are, indeed, getting dumber and dumber.
Oct 9, 2007 - 9:55 am