Learning Goals and Oakeshott

The battleground for the soul of the classroom is encapsulated in the idea of Learning Goals. They are all the rage in education these days; you can’t hear a college bureaucrat speak for more than 10 minutes about academics without an appeal to them. Now if you are not a college professor, you may not think that a discussion of learning goals is all that bad. After all, isn’t it obvious that there should be a goal for learning?

Ah, but saying there is a goal is not enough. Listening to the apostles of learning goals, one would think that the job of a professor is to establish specific learning goals for each class, show how the individual class learning goals relate to the department’s learning goals, and then show how the department’s learning goals relate to the college’s learning goals. Then, the class learning goals should be clearly specified on a syllabus, preferably with cross-references to the department and college learning goals. Every topic and assignment in the class should be explicitly linked to one of the course learning goals. Assessments should be designed to see if the students are meeting each specific learning goal. If students are not meeting a learning goal, the problem is clearly that the professor has poorly specified the learning goal, not properly instructed the students in the methods to be used to achieve the learning goal, or has not adopted the proper educational tools to assess whether students have met the learning goal.

I have been a bit befuddled by this request to establish measurable learning goals. The frequency with which these requests are coming is increasing exponentially. Thus far, I keep insisting that the learning goal for all my classes is “To teach students how to read Shakespeare for pleasure.” (By the way, I am an economist.) I am serious with that answer, but the bureaucrats never think I am treating the matter with enough gravity. The underlying puzzle for me has been trying to figure out how we got to the place where “learning goals” became the measure of education. Before the advent of the Bureaucratic College, how did learning ever occur? How did Socrates or Augustine or Aquinas or Hume or Smith ever teach anyone anything without first setting out learning goals?

My puzzle was solved while reading Michael Oakeshott’s “Rationalism in Politics,” a 1947 essay about European politics. Oakeshott describes the rise of Rationalism, the belief that the only authority and guide to solving all problems is Reason. With proper application of Reason, everyone will agree on the proper course of action. Experience and history are poor guides. “With an almost poetic fancy, [the Rationalist] strives to live each day as if it were his first, and believes that to form a habit is to fail.” There are many obvious effects of this mindset on politics.

Rationalism also has an effect on education. Knowledge, Oakeshott explains, comes in two varieties, technical and practical. Technical knowledge comes from learning the rules, the technique. A perfect example is learning to cook; master the ingredients and techniques and you too can bake a cake. There are similarly techniques to be mastered to learn how to work in a laboratory, apply the proper theory to interpreting a text, or manipulate a set of data to find statistical regularities.

In contrast, Oakeshott’s practical knowledge can only be learned in use. There are no rules to be followed, techniques to be memorized. “[P]ractical knowledge can neither be taught nor learned, but only imparted and acquired. It exists only in practice, and the only way to acquire it is by apprenticeship to a master—not because the master can teach it (he cannot), but because it can be acquired only by continuous contact with one who is perpetually practicing it.”

Now both sorts of knowledge exist. Indeed, in the traditional liberal arts college, both were vital. One mastered the technique of how to use a microscope or the library or a statistical software package. But the ends to which one could and should put those techniques were what the professors provided; students absorbed habits of thought by frequent contact with those who had devoted their life to acquiring knowledge and wisdom. That conception of the liberal arts is exactly what is under threat in the modern age. Akin to Oakeshott’s concerns about what was occurring in European politics in the late 1940s, the bureaucracy of the colleges has been staffed by Rationalists. The consequences for education are deep.

Rationalism is the assertion that what I have called practical knowledge is not knowledge at all, the assertion that, properly speaking, there is no knowledge which is not technical knowledge. The Rationalist holds that the only element of knowledge involved in any human activity is technical knowledge, and that what I have called practical knowledge is really only a sort of nescience which would be negligible if it were not positively mischievous. The sovereignty of ‘reason’, for the Rationalist, means the sovereignty of technique.

That is when the light bulb went on. Learning goals are, by their very nature, statements about technical knowledge, statements about technique. To set up learning goals for a class is akin to writing a cookbook. Students memorize the list of ingredients and the steps for combining those ingredients. If they follow the steps correctly, they get an A. Then they can move to the next cookbook. A department is akin to a cuisine; take 8 courses in Mexican food and you have a major. A college is a collection of cuisines. But, upon graduating, can any of these masters of cookbooks actually make a decent meal? Do they actually understand the principles of cooking? Do they even enjoy cooking?

Oakeshott’s distinction makes perfect sense of the modern college. It has abandoned practical knowledge. It really has no love of artistry and beauty. It merely takes 18 year olds and processes them until they become 22 year olds and then hands them a certificate of completion. The same thing is happening in classrooms. An increasing number of teachers are turning their classrooms into pure exercises of learning technique. Set measurable goals for the students and give them endless opportunities to redo the work until they meet those goals. Then you can pat yourself on the back and say “Mission Accomplished.”

Therein lies the difference between those of us who still believe in the virtues of the traditional liberal arts college and the modern educational technocrats who staff the bureaucracies. I don’t care if students remember whether a cross-price elasticity of demand equal to negative 3 means the goods are substitutes or complements. Nobody ever remembers whether increasing money demand shifts the IS or the LM curve and in which direction (and what is on the axes, again?). None of those things matter in the least decades later in life. What I want students who have joined with me in a class to remember is that learning things is fun, that there is a joy in discovery, that learning how to take complicated things and make little models of these complicated things is a marvelous way to gain insight. If I do my job well, then 30 years after graduation my former students will indeed pick up a copy of Hamlet and read it purely for pleasure. To attain that end, I have to model the excitement of learning. A classroom devoted solely to mastering technique is inimical to the wonder and joy of learning I hope to impart.

To return to the present crisis, which type of education is more amenable to an on-line education? It is not a contest. Technique can be taught on-line. Indeed, if the only thing you want to learn is a list of things on which you will be tested, there really isn’t any advantage at all to a live instructor. There is a YouTube video already out there showing you how to take apart your vacuum cleaner or take the derivative of a function. A quick Google search will allow you to discover the backgrounds of all the characters in the Divine Comedy or whether mixing two specific chemicals will cause an explosion.

As professors everywhere are scrambling to adjust their classes for on-line education, technique triumphs. Oakeshotts’ practical education cannot easily be shared on-line. That fifteen minute impromptu tangent in class, the half hour conversation in the office, the excitement arising from a random conversation about a topic unrelated to the course, none of those things occur in an on-line class. On-line education is the College Bureaucrat’s Dream; professors everywhere are being forced by circumstances to retrofit their courses around technique.

What happens when the students return? How sticky are the changes being made in class after class? If the College Bureaucrats have their way, they will be very sticky indeed. Having reformatted classes to become disciplinary cookbooks, what percent of the faculty will abandon those things and return to the messier but much more important task of modeling the practice of learning? Learning goals are less a passing fad and more part of the very nature of the rationalist bureaucracy which sees value only in technique. I fear this will not go away.