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Another important realization I have made is the tendency for particular embodiments of ideas to be mistaken for the ideas themselves. (I may have called this ``co-option'' elsewhere.) I think the best way to explain this is in the context of a series of examples, starting with the general case and moving on to more specific instances.
I may be able to help another person grow; the way I interact with that person is determined by our context, and by an idea (for instance, respecting the learner). Suppose it is successful (the idea/action achieves the desired result). Now, suppose I am in another situation that seems similar, and I act in a similar way, expecting the same results, but it doesn't work. If I continue to try to apply this same method, I am confusing the embodiment of the idea of learning with the learning itself. I am ignoring that for some reason it is not applicable to this new context - in this case, the technique of ``respecting the learner'' successful in the first case doesn't work in the second case.
Many times, a gifted educator discovers the importance of respecting the learner. This educator sees that exceptional skills of integrated thought and action, as well as inner motivation and self-trust, only come about when the learner is allowed and encouraged to discover and follow their curiosity and values. Then, together with their students, the teacher develops learning activities and structures that arise directly from the students' curiosity and values. Then, later, this same educator (or another educator attempting to use these ideas himself) tries to duplicate the experience by using the same learning experiences, rather than starting anew with the new group of learners.
For instance, Eliot Wigginton (who in the 70s started Foxfire, an empowering, experiential public school program) wrote a book in which he described his approach. One thing he described was the darkroom his class had built, after they had become interested in photography. Later, he heard from a teacher who had tried to copy his method by building a dark room with her class. Her class was not interested in the darkroom for some reason or other, and Wigginton's success was not duplicated. Of course the unsuccessful teacher did not have bad intentions, and did not know that she was doing something different from Wigginton. But she was doing something different. Rather than beginning the learning experience with the interests of the students, she began with the idea of a darkroom - which for her particular class wasn't interesting. This is what I mean. It is not people attempting to derail a worthwhile movement, but rather a person believing in a movement so strongly (though not completely understanding it) they must enforce it on the students rather than engage in it with the students. They are not powerful co-opters of the movement; rather, the institutional thought tradition they have been socialized into is co-opting their passion.
I think this same thing had happened throughout the history of education (as well as in other fields of human experience, such as the overly literal interpretations of religious metaphors). In his book Black Mountain, Martin Duberman explains that the ``indisputable leader'' of Black Mountain College, John Andrew Rice, understood this trend in education:
...The trouble with ``progressive'' educators, Rice felt, was that they were doctrinaire: ``They've got the thing laid out. This is the way to do it. And by God if you don't do it that way you're not it.'' After a visit to the Lincoln School in 1934, one of the bastions of progressive education, Rice decided the place was all but lifeless, ``running on something that happened a while back;'' and ``one of the appalling disclosures'' of his visit was that ``progressive education, when it is stupid, is much more stupid than the other kind.'' The certainty of the current crop of progressive educators perverted, in Rice's view, the whole spirit of their alleged master, John Dewey - a man Rice knew personally and admired enormously.[5]
In this case, the Lincoln School was operating on the basis of what might have at one time really come from the curiosity and values of the student, but which no longer met those parts of the students.
Why might a teacher choose to do something without really understanding the basis of it? There are two things that make these new techniques especially tempting for teachers. First, non-traditional methods relieve teachers from the restimulated pain they feel from the straight-row lecturing they experienced in school. The alternative gives the instructor relief and might even be exactly what these instructors needed when they were in school. Sometimes the new techniques (papers or discussions as opposed to tests and lectures) do happen to respond to the curiosity and values of some students, and insofar as they do, they are very effective.
In alternative education, this confusion of particular methods with the broader response to the student happens in the form of educators who believe that darkrooms, field trips, projects, discussions, divisions, or other methods are necessarily valuable means. These alternatives, though they may engage a different reality from the traditional 3 Rs, may or may not arise from the curiosity and values of the students (even if these means might have once been unilaterally successful).
Contracts embody this conflict when their purpose is no longer to make education respond to a student's curiosity and values, but instead to record ``what'' the student is doing.
Interestingly, many movements identify themselves with their particular embodiments of their ideas - from save the whales mistaken for environmental consciousness or contracts and discussions mistaken for an education arising from the curiosity and values of the students. The only way to avoid it is to continuously re-engage in every new moment, with the context and the ideas once again. The only way is to reinvent the wheel every time. Sometimes the wheel will be the same, sometimes slightly different, sometimes altogether different. But the process of reinventing the wheel is essential, with each new person and situation. Ideally, we reinvent the wheel every instant (we get better at it so this doesn't take as long as the first time.) Of course, there has to be a compromise of reinventing the wheel and actually making some wheels; my point isn't to avoid the compromise, but to build a conscious awareness that we are always negotiating this question.