Book: Critical Essays on the Enclosure of the Cultural Commons: The Conceptual Foundations of Today’s Mis-Education by C. A. Bowers, 2007

We return to the above book with one more excerpt. Chet Bowers is most concerned with unconscious and invisible bias which may be encoded in theories but also in ‘how’ we use certain tools such as computers, and that make a non-alienated relationship with the environmental commons very difficult.

Here, he links computers, to the constructive learning theories with which computer-enabled learning is often associated.

Chet Bowers:

How the Idea that Individuals Construct Their Own Knowledge Contributes to Enclosing the Cultural and Environmental Commons

“The focus here will be on how computers contribute to the enclosure of the cultural and environmental commons.

The two most ubiquitous forms of enclosure include the silences that individuals unconsciously accept as part of their taken-for-granted daily experience. This results in the inability to recognize when different aspects of the cultural commons– such as civil liberties, the knowledge of how to farm without relying upon pesticides and other chemicals, the grass lands and marshes that disappear under the pressure of developers, mentors who are dying off without having passed their knowledge and skills on to the younger generation, etc.—are being enclosed. This form of enclosure results from how the media and most public school and university classes reinforce the knowledge and values supporting the expansion of the industrial, consumer dependent culture. What a few students learn about the various natural systems that are being degraded is overwhelmed by the larger number of classes that perpetuate the silences about the community centered alternatives to a consumer dependent lifestyle.

The other form of enclosure promoted mostly in public schools can be traced to various theories that promote the idea that students should be encouraged to construct their own knowledge—though, as mentioned earlier, a more ideologically based emphasis on students doing their own thinking is reinforced in universities. Proponents of computer-based learning often claim that computers make it possible for constructivist learning to occur in the classroom, which then leads to teachers playing the role of being a facilitator who does not impose their prejudices and limited knowledge on students. The so-called virtue of students constructing their own knowledge is now being further supported by another largely unquestioned assumption: namely, that the manner in which the expanding digital culture allows people to make their ideas available to others as part of the cybercommons fosters a more democratic society—and the flat earth that Thomas Friedman of The New York times celebrates as the latest expression of technological progress.

As I have written several books that are critical of various constructivist learning theorists, such as John Dewey, Paulo Freire, Jean Piaget, and less known theorists who argue for the more intelligent yet basically wrong idea of social constructivism, I shall summarize here the most salient criticisms. For those wanting a more in-depth critique, I suggest they read The False Promises of Constructivist Theories of Learning: A Global and Ecological Critique (2005); and the online book, Transforming Environmental Education: Making the Cultural and Environmental Commons the Focus of Educational Reform (2006). The chief misconception underlying the various constructivist theories of learning that proponents of computer-based learning rely upon is that, contrary to popular thinking, the individual is not the Cartesian individual who is free of the influence of culture’s taken-for-granted patterns of thinking, who stands apart from the external world as an objective observer, and who makes autonomous decisions about what constitutes knowledge, and the values that are to be lived by, and what is unworthy of attention.

What the Dewey, Freire, Piaget, and the ideologues that promote the high-status knowledge in university classrooms overlook is that the supposedly autonomous individual’s pattern of thinking, values, and behaviors are influenced from the first moments after birth by the intergenerational languaging patterns that sustain the culture’s symbolic systems. These initial encounters are learned as part of the taken-for-granted stock of knowledge that the infant, and at later stages of development, is unable to name except in the language largely made available by others. Sounds, tastes, what will be seen and not seen, the non-verbal patterns of communication and moral values constituted earlier in the culture’s history, all become, in varying degrees, part of the individual’s natural attitude toward the everyday world. This legacy of taken-for-granted culture may include the narratives that exclude and lead to the exploitation of others; it may also include the values of moral reciprocity, as well as an understanding of the patterns of interdependence with the non-human world. This legacy may also include the forms of knowledge that are valued by the culture—including an awareness of the importance of critical inquiry. The role of critical inquiry in some cultures is to assess which traditions are essential to retaining a degree of self-sufficiency and thus in need of being conserved. The goal of various models of critical thinking in the West is to overturn all traditions that limit the progress of supposedly autonomous individuals who are engaged in constructing their own knowledge. What the proponents of critical inquiry overlook is that the constant quest for new technologies and markets also relies upon critical inquiry, and that this quest also impacts the non-consumer oriented traditions of the community by turning them into new market opportunities. What is largely missing in the thinking of constructivist theorists, as well as in the thinking of proponents of computer-based learning, is the need to have a more balanced understanding of the role of critical inquiry in contributing to a more ecologically sustainable culture.

The assumptions shared by various interpretations of how students construct their own knowledge, including the way computers supposedly further empower students to achieve even more autonomy as thinkers, represent what can be called an “ecology of cultural misconceptions” that will contribute to yet another example of cultural collapse as we exceed the sustaining capacity of the natural systems. Common sense should lead to the awareness that socializing students, and adults who are increasingly at home in the cybercommons, to the idea that they are constructing their own knowledge of reality, and that is as valid as the realities constructed by others, creates a deep prejudice against learning the many ways they have been influenced by their cultural traditions. This prejudice is the source of a double bind whereby they continue to reenact the taken-for-granted patterns of thinking of their culture, including the culture’s silences, while at the same time maintaining the illusion that they are autonomous individuals—and thus free of the need to consider which taken-for-granted traditions need to be intergenerationally renewed and which need to be overturned.

An example of how the “I am in charge of my own destiny” generation (or what can be called the iPod-cell phone- computer gaming generation) continues to reinforce the consumer lifestyle while ignoring the traditions of the cultural commons that most intelligent people would want to conserve is the enclosure of different traditions that have long been associated with our civil liberties. What is being lost as this generation is electronically connected includes the right to privacy, habeas corpus, and the presumption of innocence until proven guilty. The federal government now monitors most of the individual’s activities, and can even have her/him declared an “enemy combatant” and turned over to the CIA for various forms of interrogation that exceed what the Geneva Convention allows. The irony is that many of the current and previous generations who have been educated in our public schools and universities continue to be not just indifferent, but to actively support this loss of our civil rights. This many sound like an over-generalization, but we need to remind ourselves that the majority of Congress that represents (indeed, reflects) the will of the majority of Americans passed the Military Commissions Act as well as Public Law 109-364; both of which gives the President sweeping powers, including taking federal control of the National Guard to put down domestic unrest, to arrest citizens as “potential terrorists” and “enemy combatants,” and to hold them in detention centers now being built by a subsidiary of Halliburton. Not only does the iPod-cell phone-gaming generation ignore the loss of traditions essential to a cultural commons governed by the rule of law and the presumption of innocence, but also the loss of the environmental commons as the industrial consumer dependent culture demands more resources.

It is impossible to digitize the inner world of the individual—emotions, thoughts, and insights, embodied sensations when participating in various face-to-face activities ranging from participating in a ceremony, engaged in being mentored and in mentoring others, and walking along a trail in the woods—without reducing them to an abstract text or documentary that is supposedly free of the individual’s perspective and powers of interpretation, The taken-for-granted world of the individual, which the educational process should help students to recognize and assess in terms of whether they contribute to a sustainable future, is beyond the technological capacity of computers. How the past influences the present, as well as how the changes in distant ecosystems make us less secure than we can understand in terms of our individualized perspective, are critically important to our collective future. Unfortunately, computer mediated learning, along with the constructivist theories of learning now being used to promote greater reliance upon the use of computers in the classroom, contribute to the silences and sense of indifference about these aspects of human experience. Constructivist theories of learning, which are now an orthodoxy in many parts of the world where computers are considered as essential to preparing students for the global economy, perpetuate the illusion that teachers no longer have responsibility for helping students to recognize the importance of what they don’t know.”