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Chapter two Learning helically In the previous chapter, I have presented Whitehead’s ideas about the rhythm of learning as they are found in The Aims of Education. I have ranged far beyond his few examples in attempting to illustrate what his ideas mean, and my arguments on behalf of those ideas are obviously of my own invention, or where they are others’ arguments their relevance is of my own fashioning. All of what I’ve done is nonetheless carefully grounded in Whitehead’s two brief texts and offers, I think, an accurate re-presentation of his views for readers whose great grandparents might have heard or read their original presentation. With this new chapter, I now begin an exploration of some striking similarities between these ideas of Whitehead’s about education and his metaphysical ideas, his speculative theories about the general nature of things. Readers will discover, I hope, that these comparisons will for the most part confirm what has been learned from chapter 1. But I venture the further expectation that they will also widen and deepen that learning, and on occasion transform it. In discussing Whitehead’s three stages of education, our tendency is to focus on the inadequacy of pedagogies that emphasize precision at the expense of romance. We are rightly angered by those whose teaching is exclusively about facts and systems of facts, about things we can observe with a bare or instrument-assisted eye and theories that organize those experienced particulars into intelligible wholes. We attempt to correct this bias by extolling the importance of romance, encouraging students to explore aspects of their world that are not certified facts and that escape the confines of any particular system. We want students to immerse themselves in the unsystematized wonders of the concrete and to let their imaginations wander adventurously. Our argument is that students will gain from those romantic experiences the 35 36 Modes of Learning healthy motivation they need in order to undertake the rigors of precise analysis and systemic interpretation. Generalization, Whitehead’s third stage, is then taken to involve a return to the world initially explored in romance, but now coming to it equipped with the tools of precision. We claim that our students so prepared will be able to penetrate the worldly mysteries that had originally stimulated their curiosity, to solve the problems they had posed. Notice how this standard scenario, explicated in the previous chapter , is a linear progression. Romance is about our naive responses to a confusing cacophony of sights and sounds; it is a time of surprise and bewilderment. The point of precision is to carry us beyond such things, to set aside our childish ways for the sophistication provided by systemic understanding and control. Generalization is the capstone, the theorizing put to work in solving real-life problems. Our educational trajectory is upward and onward. From romance through precision to generalization; from primary education through secondary education to higher education ; from the general basics to a disciplinary specialization to the mastery of a career vocation. Whitehead is partly to blame for this linear view. He refers to the stages of education as “first apprehension,” “precise progress,” and “final success” (“Rhythm” 17–19), and associates them with, respectively, early education, middle schooling, and the university. However, he explicitly rejects interpreting the stages as a simple linear progression, arguing as I made clear in the “Introduction” that they have a cyclical rhythm, and that “education should consist in a continual repetition of such cycles” (19). Each cycle is composed of a linear triplet: romance, followed by precision, followed by generalization. But the cycle is then repeated, and therefore the new romance will not be a repetition of its predecessor but will be a different kind of romance, one rooted in the generalization that concluded the prior cycle, and the new precision and new generalization will similarly be different from the earlier precision and generalization. Romance is a stage of elementary school learning, but it is also a stage of secondary school and university learning. It is a important stage in mastering an academic discipline but also an important stage in the first course taken in that discipline and in the last course taken. The three stages apply to each individual classroom session, to how the teacher fashions his kindergarten lesson plan for Thursday or the university professor designs her weekly graduate seminar. The cycles are what are repeated, not their content. The stages of education are helical in the...

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