“You’re just trying to win the debate!”
I’ve been reading Teachers Without Goals: Students Without Purposes by Henry J. Perkinson. I cannot recommend this book enough.
The book totally embraces Karl Popper’s ideas as far as learning, and moreover, also embraces the concept of evolutionary epistemology.
I wanted to share a short passage from the book. It’s very typical when people debate to have this idea that there are winners and losers in any particular debate. People often ask themselves, how can I win the debate. As Perkins astutely observes, for a person practicing critical rationalism there can’t be any expectations as far as who will win and who will lose, because that’s not the goal of the debate – at least not so long as winning equates having one’s ideas triumph.
Instead of trying to socialize the young to accept and give thanks for the existing social, political, and economic arrangements, critical teachers will encourage them to criticize those arrangements, as well as to criticize all proposed alternatives to the existing arrangements. These criticism will be met by countercriticism from the teacher, or from other students in the class, creating a critical dialogue. A critical dialogue, as I understand it, is an engagement in which the participants try to uncover the weaknesses, inadequacies, errors, in their own ideas and theories. A critical dialogue is not a debate where one tries to prove that one’s ideas are correct. Nor is it a fight where one tries to demonstrate that the ideas of one’s opponents are wrong. No, a critical dialogue is a procedure of trial-and-error elimination, an engagement wherein one tries out one’s own theories and ideas in order to uncover their inadequacies. When the agenda or focus of a critical dialogue is about the (existing or proposed alternative) political, or economic, or social arrangements, then the outcome is an improvement of the participants understandings of the arrangements, an improved understanding of their strengths and weaknesses. Above all, participation in a critical dialogue produces in people an openness to continued dialogue about those arrangements.
Again, I can’t recommend this book enough, especially to those who are involved in education in one manner or another. Even to those not involved in the educational world, the book provides a rigorous application of the Popperian approach, and as such, helps those who are seeking to understand it. It’s actually a remarkably short book, which is also a bonus.
