Crossing borders, breaking boundaries: research in the education of adults an international conference
Generic outcomes: a challenge to established educational boundaries
Paul Hager, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia
27th annual SCUTREA conference proceedings 1997page 1
Crossing borders, breaking boundariesResearch in the education of adults
O
ne reason that traditional educational boundaries have tended to marginalise adult education is the perception that while ‘real’ education centres on students learning content (the academic ‘subjects’ or ‘disciplines’), adult education has no such agreed content. However, traditional educational boundaries are being questioned currently by the emerging worldwide interest in generic outcomes for the various educational levels. Personal attributes concerning capacities to plan and organise, to relate effectively to others, plus various reasoning abilities, are prominent amongst these generic outcomes. Since adult education in its broadest sense has been characterised by a strong focus on personal generic capacities like self-direction, learning from experience and reflection, this trend potentially could reposition adult education within education as a whole.
This emerging interest in outcomes of the various types of educational provision is often inspired by economic rationalism. For many, this is enough reason to reject it. For others, a focus on generic outcomes signals the end of liberal education and, hence, a subversion of genuine education by economic considerations. However, these debates, in order to genuinely engage with the relevant educational issues, need to go beyond mere labelling of the enemy and to scrutinise closely the nature of educational outcomes, whatever their origins might be. After all, there is the genetic fallacy. This paper is not inquiring about the pedigree of proponents of outcomes-based education, but rather asking whether outcomes by their nature are in any way inconsistent with education as such.
To sharpen these issues I will evaluate the claim that a focus on outcomes is inevitably inimical to liberal education and to the development of the repertoire of cognitive abilities that traditionally has marked quality education. To do this, I briefly consider characterisations of liberal education by several notable writers and then successively outline and evaluate arguments that have been advanced for the alleged deleterious effects of outcomes-based education on liberal education. This latter discussion is illustrated by examples of desirable outcomes for higher education advanced by various writers.
Liberal education and outcomes
Anderson is a well known defender of liberal education as the only type of genuine education. According to Anderson, education is ‘the development of judgement or of criticism ... the development of an objective view of things’. (1980, 117). Socrates represents for him the detached, disinterested, objective inquiry that is the genuine educational outlook. Anderson finds in Socrates and his predecessors the highwater mark of this educational outlook. Hence he often links education and culture with what he calls ‘classicism’. For Anderson classical studies are crucial for education:
Their interest is not antiquarian; it is in standards of criticism that apply as much to the present as to any other time. What makes works and periods ‘classical’ is their objectivity, their demonstration of the ways of working of things themselves (of human and non-human nature) as against personal purposes and local requirements. It is not merely (though this is true, too) that with the passage of time special interests fall into the background and the achievements of disinterestedness more and more stand out; that would apply to the study of the past in general. But there have been conditions under which disinterestedness (culture) rose to extraordinary heights, and it is because classical Athens provides an outstanding example of this that it is especially worthy of study now or at any time. (Anderson 1980, 178)
The preceding points are summarised in Anderson’s contrast between classical and utilitarian views of education :
... the classical and the utilitarian views of education are distinguished as employing intrinsic and extrinsic criteria, the one considering education in its own character, as the development of thinking or criticism, the other considering it in its contribution to something else, subordinating it in this way to the non-educational and running the greatest risk of distorting its character. (Anderson 1962, 189)
At this stage we can note that Anderson’s view of education as ‘the development of judgement ... of criticism ... of an objective view of things’ sounds very much like an outcome.
Schipp (1985), writing in defence of the liberal education provision of the Workers’ Educational Association, echoes Anderson in his characterisation of liberal education as ‘objective, disinterested and critical’. For Schipp, liberal education is ‘... the serious, objective and critical study of nature and society in its various aspects, past and present; as well as of the history and appreciation of the arts (literature, music, architecture, painting, sculpture, etc.)’ (Schipp 1985, 3).
‘Objective, disinterested and critical’ study focuses more on the pursuit of knowledge and the processes which promote it; on the demands of the discipline itself; and it assumes the essential open-endedness of inquiry. (Schipp 1985, 5)
Schipp contrasts the liberal education approach with ‘partisanship’:
... partisanship is displayed in courses where the tutor pursues the objective of gaining acceptance from the students of assertions or theories ... or of the virtue of adopting certain attitudes or beliefs ... Such partisan objectives tend to the adoption of persuasive rather than rational discourse, to an inadequate presentation of opposing views ..., and to the at least implicit suppression of critical discussion. (Schipp 1985, 6)
Schipp and Anderson are agreed that the pedagogy of successful liberal education requires a firm focus on education for its own sake. Once again Schipp’s characterisations of the nature of liberal education look very much like a series of outcomes. One question that Schipp does not ask is whether the promotion of liberal education in the form that he favours is itself partisan. Schipp seems to be confident that his view of liberal education is the only rational, and hence, right, one.
Hirst’s well known attempt to ground liberal education in forms of knowledge also explicitly employs outcomes. For Hirst, the main outcome of liberal education is ‘the development of mind’ (1965, 99). This development of mind can be conceptualised in terms of the ‘forms of knowledge’ which are ‘the complex ways of understanding experience’ (1965, 96) which humankind has achieved. Hirst (1965, 105) identifies seven distinct forms of knowledge: mathematics, physical sciences, human sciences, history, religion, literature and the fine arts, philosophy. He admits that there are various ways of providing a liberal education, for example, directly by studying the various branches of the disciplines that constitute the forms of knowledge or indirectly by studying a certain theoretical or practical field in such a way as to develop the learner’s mind across the range of forms of knowledge. However, Hirst sees dangers in the latter type of option as liberal education may be lost sight of in favour of the development of skills and techniques. As before, Hirst’s view of liberal education is presented in terms of desirable outcomes. The development of mind that is central to liberal education has as its ‘outcome’ the ‘achievement of a series of discrete ways of understanding experience’ plus an understanding of ‘the complex interrelationships’ between them (1965, 110).
Thought about the nature of liberal education has undergone significant changes as the work of Bailey (1984) shows. At first sight, Bailey’s characterisation of liberal education is familiar enough:
Liberal education ... achieves through the development of reason the liberation from the present and the particular; it focuses upon the fundamental and the generalisable; and it has concern for the intrinsically worthwhile rather than for the solely utilitarian. (Bailey 1984, 26)
However, Bailey (1984, 80ff.) is concerned that liberal education is too often portrayed (for example in the authors considered above) as narrowly focused on theoretical knowledge as ‘bodies of true propositions’. He emphasises that it also should include ‘... areas of human ‘goings-on’ which are the actions, makings, doings, dispositions, expressions and interactions which give meaning, point and significance’ to the true propositions. Bailey men-tions Wittgenstein’s language games as examples of human ‘goings-on’. Thus, for Bailey, liberal education includes important components of ‘knowing how’. He rejects the view that ‘knowing how’ is ‘... no more than being able to perform the appropriate action’ (1984, 59). Bailey suggests that we should say ‘is able to’ or ‘can’ ‘... when all we are speaking about is the performance ...’. Rather, ‘know how’ should be kept for all those cases where we are suggesting rather more than mere performance. He suggests that the ‘more’ might be something like:
(i) having some conception, presented to myself in some form, of what I am doing and how it is differentiated from other things that I might be doing;
(ii) having some understanding of what I am doing in the sense of knowing why I do certain things to achieve other things; and perhaps
(iii) providing evidence of (i) and (ii) in an account given to another person.
Another way of putting this is to say that we talk about knowing how to do something when the performance is, as it were, an intelligent performance executed with a background of evidential beliefs about it. We might thus define it: I know how to do something when I perform the action correctly (or have recently done so more than once) and have a background of at least some beliefs about the action that appropriately conclusive evidence entitles me to be sure about.
Overall, Bailey’s claim is that ‘... the objects of liberal education, in so far as they concern pupil performances, must be to get pupils to know how to do things and not merely to be able to do them.’ Once again, liberal education is being specified in terms of outcomes, though somewhat different ones from those specified by the authors considered earlier.
This recent concern within the liberal education tradition that theory not be elevated over practice is taken even further by Hirst. His latest work represents a notable repudiation of his earlier influential work of the 1960s. Hirst’s revised position, which once again centres on the outcomes of education, is as follows:
I now consider practical knowledge to be more fundamental than theoretical knowledge, the former being basic to any clear grasp of the proper significance of the latter. But my argument now is not merely for the priority of practical knowledge in education, but rather for the priority of personal development by initiation into a complex of specific, substantive social practices with all the knowledge, attitudes, feelings, virtues, skills, dispositions and relationships that that involves. It is those practices that can constitute a flourishing life that I now consider fundamental to education. (Hirst 1993, 197)
In summary, an examination of some basic writings on liberal education has suggested that the notion of outcomes as such is in no way inconsistent with liberal education. Hence, recent efforts to specify outcomes for WEA courses (Daines 1994, 1996) may not be as misguided as some have thought. Perhaps the recent worry about outcomes evident amongst some educators is more to do with the kinds of outcomes that have been proposed rather than with the notion of outcomes as such. Let us consider some possibilities along these lines.
Arguments against outcomes-based education
1. The ‘outcomes as extrinsic’ argument
Earlier, we found Anderson contrasting what he calls the ‘classical’ and the ‘utilitarian’ views of education by their employment of intrinsic and extrinsic criteria respectively. According to Anderson, the intrinsic features of education like disinterested inquiry and critical judgement are destroyed if brought into contact with extrinsic considerations whether vocational, economic, social, political or religious. Thus genuine education is ‘education for its own sake’. Perhaps the view that outcomes are inconsistent with genuine education derives from the current interest in outcomes largely arising from vocational, economic, social, political considerations. If so, attention has been drawn already to the genetic fallacy of mistaking something’s origins for its nature.
In fact, most of the proposed outcomes for higher education seem to be ones that are clearly intrinsic to the educational enterprise itself. For example, Jackson (1995) has proposed the following under-graduate competencies:
- Access to existing knowledge
- Command of existing knowledge
- Criticism of existing knowledge
- Exploration of issues with existing knowledge
- Creation of new knowledge
- Identification of ethical dimensions of a problem or issue
- Teamwork
With the possible exception of the last one, these competencies are very compatible with the various outcomes of liberal education noted above. Certainly they are intrinsic to education in the sense employed by Anderson and others.
Similar remarks apply to many of the components of the ‘Profile of the lifelong learner’ proposed recently by Candy, Crebert and O’Leary (1994, 43-4):
- An inquiring mind
a love of learning;
a sense of curiosity and question asking;
a critical spirit;
comprehension monitoring and self-evaluation;
- Helicopter vision
a sense of the interconnectedness of fields
an awareness of how knowledge is created in at least one field of study, and an understanding of the methodological and substantive limitations of that field;
breadth of vision;
- Information literacy
knowledge of major current sources available in at least one field of study;
ability to frame researchable questions in at least one field of study;
ability to locate, evaluate, manage, and use information in a range of contexts;
ability to retrieve information using a variety of media;
ability to decode information in a variety of forms: written, statistical, graphs, charts, diagrams and tables;
critical evaluation of information;
- A sense of personal agency
a positive concept of oneself as capable and autonomous;
self-organisation skills (time management, goal-setting, etc.);
- A repertoire of learning skills
knowledge of one’s own strengths, weaknesses and preferred learning style;
range of strategies for learning in whatever context one finds oneself; and
an understanding of the differences between surface and deep level learning.
By being more detailed and specific, this profile goes well beyond the various outcomes of liberal education noted above. However, it does, I think, incorporate most of those outcomes. Where it goes well beyond the various outcomes of liberal education, for example ‘ability to retrieve information using a variety of media’, such capacities are evidently not in conflict with ‘genuine’ educational outcomes. As long as the focus is not exclusively on the various outcomes that are not so central to liberal education, there is no threat to ‘genuine’ education. Once again, rather than well thought-out outcomes being inimical to the educational process in that they are extrinsic to it, they are, rather, a rich description of what learners immersed in that process should look like.
2. The ‘outcomes as practical’ argument
Another possible source of the view that outcomes are inconsistent with genuine education is the perception that outcomes are practical. Certainly there is a strand within liberal education thought, and within educational thought generally, that ‘education for its own sake’ means intellectual development with no object beyond itself. As already noted, Bailey, from within the liberal education tradition, has been critical of this trend. Nevertheless this attachment to the purity of the theoretical is very strong. According to Anderson, there is an unbridgeable gulf between the theoretical and the practical. For Anderson any encroachment of practical matters into education distracts it from the development of reasoning and critical thinking. On various occasions he recommended an entirely theoretical university ‘in which all training would be training in theory, all subjects ‘discussion subjects’, all courses exercises in criticism’ with all practical training carried out later in separate professional schools. (1980, 185, 157) Likewise, since Anderson uses the terms ‘liberal’ and ‘classical’ interchangeably in his theory of education (for example, 1962, 189; 1980, 102–103), it is clear that liberal education and vocational education are in opposition. The same obviously applies to education and work. When the two are mixed, the practical end
... of taking one’s place in the community, of securing more or less useful and remunerative occupation, overshadows critical thinking ... what ... is industry’s gain is quite commonly education’s loss. (Anderson 1960 in 1962, 191)
However I seriously question the relevance of the theory/practice, thinking/doing and education/ work dichotomies (Hager 1990, 1994). A contrast is set up in which pure thought for its own sake is elevated over the performance of mindless practical tasks to earn a living. Competency-based training in its narrowest versions approximates the latter. However such dichotomies caricature both education and work. The skilled employment of reasoning is not restricted to the domain of pure theory. Nor is there any reason other than prejudice to think that reasoning as employed in the workplace is thereby second-rate. Many of Anderson’s highly educated students ended up in very senior positions, so we can infer that their theoretical education prepared them well for work. However may not their reasoning capacities have been further developed as a direct result of being deployed in the workplace? Hence we can see that outcomes are typically cognitive as much as they are practical. For vocational courses, the vocation provides a set of contexts in which the generic competencies of the kind specified by Jackson are given substance. Since outcomes are typically cognitive as much as they are practical, they at least overlap with the domain of education even when it is viewed in a very traditional narrow sense.
A further version of the ‘Outcomes as Practical’ argument is the ‘Outcomes as Useful’ argument. Whitehead’s response to this argument was:
Pedants sneer at an education which is useful. But if education is not useful, what is it? (Whitehead 1950, 3)
Whitehead’s point is entirely appropriate. As Blanshard stressed:
... liberal studies ... are enormously useful in three ways. First, they are useful directly because they satisfy some of the deepest wants in our nature. Secondly, they are useful indirectly through enabling us to borrow the best insights and standards of others. Thirdly, if taken seriously, they may permeate with their influence all our thought and feeling and action. (Blanshard 1974, 31)