Liberty and Education by Geoffrey Hinchliffe

Author:Geoffrey Hinchliffe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge

The nature of an educational experience

I now wish to further explore the nature of the kind of educational experience that Dewey’s reflections on aesthetic experience allow us to identify. There are many different types of educational experience, but rather than enumerate some kind of discipline-based taxonomy I will look to see what the three philosophers – Wittgenstein, Grice and Oakeshott – suggest.

As Andrea English has recently pointed out, a central feature of learning is, or ought to be, its transformative quality (English, 2009). But how does this work? One way of approaching this problem is through Wittgenstein’s discussion of ‘seeing-as’ in Philosphical Investigations. He supposes that: ‘I may contemplate a face, and then suddenly notice its likeness to another. I see that it has not changed; and yet I see it differently. I call this experience “noticing an aspect”’ (Wittgenstein, 1958: 212).

A little later he distinguishes ‘continuous seeing’ from the ‘dawning’ of an aspect (213). Wittgenstein’s point is that we are not given raw material that we then somehow interpret and derive a meaning: rather that the perceptual grasp is also interpretative too – hence the aptness of the example of the duckrabbit where what is seen does not change. It is also clear from his analysis that the duck-rabbit is for him a fairly primitive example for an aspect may dawn where states of affairs are more complex: ‘what I perceive in the dawning of an aspect is not a property of the object, but an internal relation between it and other objects’ (212).

I want to suggest that one of the ways in which learning transforms is just this: the dawning of an aspect. I have in mind times when pondering over an inchoate jumble of information starts to make sense as an ‘aspect’; or perhaps the same information was seen in terms of a, b and c but is now seen in terms of x, y and z. It might be objected that aspect dawning is a part of learning, but only a small part; in particular what Wittgenstein describes are situations where a person is simply looking and pondering. Yet when a teacher does step out of a teacher-driven pedagogy and lets learning happen maybe aspect dawning is exactly what needs to take place. But for aspects to dawn there are three preconditions: first, there needs to be enough time, with breaks for chatting if needs be. Second, the pace mustn’t be forced at the same tempo; intensive activity needs to be followed by slow reflection. And third, the subject under consideration must be self-contained – a poem, a problem, a short text – so that in the time available it becomes possible for the learning to make sense. Aspects don’t dawn by trying too hard or by trying to do too much.

Interestingly, Wittgenstein is aware that aspect dawning may require ‘someone capable of making certain applications … quite freely. The substratum of this experience is the mastery of a technique’ (208) and goes on to surmise that here we have a ‘different though related concept’ to that of visual aspect dawning.

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