schank response essay

"Nobody Learns in the Classroom" -- or Roger Schank's
Electronic End-Run around Academia
(a response to Roger Schank's keynote address given at the Online Learning 2000 conference on September 26,
2000, in Denver, CO)

by Frank H.W.Edler

Some "true believers" of online education are using this kind of hyperbole ("Nobody learns in the classroom") to support their claim that online learning is better than classroom learning. Since they can't prove that it's better, the next best thing to do, apparently, is to gut traditional education. This is the direction Roger C. Schank took in his keynote address at the Online Learning 2000 Conference (September 24-27) in Denver, Colorado. Schank, past Director of Northwestern University's Institute for the Learning Sciences and current CEO of Cognitive Arts, gave his address entitled "Education Online: Another Educational Outrage?" before some 7,600 conference participants mainly from corporations looking to increase their "human capital" by establishing or enhancing their own corporate "universities." The first educational outrage referred to in the title is the outrage of traditional education; the second outrage refers to online education insofar as it merely duplicates traditional education. The third outrage, not mentioned in the title, is my own. Schank's address really ticked me off, and I shall endeavor to say why below.

Since Deming and Drucker, knowledge management has exploded and is now recognized as one of the most important ways corporations maintain a competitive edge to increase profits. Increasing "human capital," that is, adding to and improving the skills and abilities of corporate employees to make the corporation more efficient, more creative, and thus more productive, is perhaps the most powerful driving force today behind the expansion of corporate-based education. Many corporations have developed their own "universities" such as Motorola University, Disney University, Apple University, Chevron Technical University, Dell University, General Motors University, Master Card University, Microsoft University...; the list goes on.

I attended the conference as a philosophy instructor from a Midwest community college and as a member of the college's curriculum committee interested in the development of online curricula. I must admit I felt a bit like a duck out of water at a corporate conference. Isn't it odd, I thought, and rather striking that corporations (of all things!) want to appropriate the term 'university' when corporations traditionally have regarded universities with disdain as ivory towers disconnected from the real world and professors with amusement as impractical eggheads (those who can't do, teach)? On the other hand, do graduates of Disney University wear Mickey Mouse mortarboards during graduation ceremonies? These were some of my stray thoughts during the conference. Jocularity aside, online education interests me greatly; it has immense potential.

Nevertheless, this change from on-site to online education is a dramatic change in context; better, it's a question of a change in the ontology of place: where does online education take place? Where does it happen? The online folks say it happens on demand any time, any place. The problem here is that the business of online education does not yet fully know its product. What's being marketed is the product's easy access and availability. But what's inside the bottle is still education. We seem to have forgotten a very simple but important point: Education is not something we buy on demand. We don't put our money down and get the product. This bears repeating: education is not a product we buy. But don't we put our money down? Yes, of course we do. But the money we put down guarantees only the opportunity of participating in the process of learning. Payment itself is no guarantee that we will pass the course or get the "product." Again, education is not something we buy any more than prayer, for example, is a token inserted into the cosmic Coke machine. True, the educational process occurs within the context of our capitalist economic system, but the educational process itself is not in essence a monetary transaction.

This is precisely where the danger lies. The economic and management conditions of education are becoming more and more entrenched as the primary context in which education should be defined. After all, in order to remain competitive, education must become more efficient, more productive, and more "consumer-oriented." Education, then, is being "leveraged" from one topos or place to another, from one definitional site to another. In that shift, the educational process may lose the very place that sustains it. I'm not talking about the shift from "bricks and mortar" to "silicon and fiber"; education can take place in either one. The topos or site without which education would no longer be education is the openness of questioning for truth within a community of learning. The traditional university tried to preserve this openness by making itself a place apart. Although the university may not always have served this function well, I think we must recognize the fact that there is no other institution whose main purpose is to preserve and encourage the openness of questioning as such. Journalism assumes it and publishes the results of practicing it, but the main purpose of journalism is not to encourage the openness of questioning.

Three very powerful trends have dove-tailed into what could amount to the greatest challenge that the openness of questioning has ever faced: the revolution of information technology, the advent of online education, and the explosion of knowledge management. With the new economic pressure for just-in-time learning and the high cost of traditional university education, online education certainly provides an alternative. Since students no longer have to go to the physical site of the university to take courses, the idea of a physical place apart collapses. Consequently, the traditional university experience is limited to the online interaction students have in their courses. And it is precisely here where the experience of place (or the lack of it) matters. To what extent will universities preserve and encourage an openness of questioning as they compete with each other for online corporate students? Corporations have no patience with the openness of questioning unless you can show that it's a way to increase profits. The appetite for the corporate appropriation of education is evident not only in the desire to partner with universities but also in the desire to give that partnership its own corporate university name. For example, if the University of Dallas' Graduate School of Management partnered with a corporation such as STMicroelectronics, the corporation would list it as an in-house learning opportunity under its own banner of STUniversity.

Throw in the current mania for outcomes testing and I do agree with Schank when he says that "Doing well on multiple choice tests is not an indicator of knowledge, or common sense, or the ability to come up with innovative ideas. It does indicate an ability to do well on multiple choice tests. But surely, a nation of great test-takers ought not to be our goal. No one remembers the facts that are on these tests within a few weeks of cramming for them. The innovation and creativity in this country that we are so proud of and so afraid of losing was not done by great test-takers, but by great thinkers." (iMP Magazine, July, 2000)

So, you may well ask, what's my beef with Schank? It has to do, of course, with his hyperbole that nobody learns in the classroom. Does he mean a Montessori classroom, a classroom where master learning is used, or perhaps a collaborative learning classroom? I'm not sure what he means by "the" classroom. There is nothing about a classsroom per se that prohibits learning.

Here are some other examples of hyperbole in the address: Schank tells us that there are only two (!) kinds of learning. There's learning-by-telling and learning-by-doing. The first one is bad and the second good. (In logic, we call this a false dilemma.) I'm not sure, though, what "learning-by-telling" is, but I think he means something like lecturing. When I lecture in philosophy, I tell my students about Socrates and how he did philosophy. I tell them how a Socratic dialogue proceeds and we do it together. Does Schank think that doing philosophy in a lecture means simply telling about philosophy? If so, any good philosopher will tell him otherwise. Moreover, telling has many forms; it is a rich word. Telling should not be reduced simply to the stating of factual information as Schank tells us. Telling can be a wonderful experience as in telling a story; telling a good joke can change the mood of a class. Behavior in the classroom can be telling too. Perhaps we should tell Schank that telling is not a bad thing; however, if we don't tell him, he may not get it.

Schank goes on to say that learning-by-doing is where all real learning takes place. I'm not so sure about that, but the phrase "learning-by-doing" invites a reduction of thinking to doing. This is an area of concern to me. There are great advantages to situating learning in a purposeful, pragmatic context. We "see" problems with an immediacy and concreteness that is compelling. I am reminded of the wonderful educational materials developed by Maria Montessori, especially the mathematical materials, where you can literally "see" the abstract relationships in the hands-on models. In a pragmatic, purposeful context, we try solutions, fail, reassess, reconstruct, learn, and then try again. It is an effective learning environment.

The problem I have with learning-by-doing (and the "just-in-time learning" that for Schank goes along with it ) is that learning tends to remain bound to the specificity of the concrete problem, the deep studying connected with research is reduced to video clips where authorities present issues and positions in 5-minute sound-bytes, and thinking tends to be placed in the service of finding means to achieve an end. But as Stanley Milgram's experiment clearly shows, there are times when the whole notion of the purpose or end must be re-examined and replaced. In other words, thinking is not just a means to an end; thinking is also what determines the appropriateness of the end itself. It is the latter thinking that scares corporations. Corporations want to appropriate knowledge and control it in-house because this kind of thinking can be subversive. God forbid you should question the purpose of the corporation itself or the means it uses in achieving that purpose. I would agree with Peter Drucker that the practice of management is truly a liberal art. But would Drucker also agree that management as a liberal art needs at times to reassess the very definition and practice of capitalism under which management operates?

But it wasn't just Schank's use of hyperbole that ticked me off; it was his whole argument. This must be how we learn by doing. Let me summarize without exaggeration: first, we stereotype the "other position" (learning-by-telling) by showing a video clip of a drop-dead-boring teacher in front of stunned-to-silence students; next, we make the position into a "straw man" by stating that this is what constitutes all traditional learning; third, we construct a syllogism -- yes, a syllogism! -- to prove our point: 1) All traditional learning is learning-by-telling, 2) The only real learning is learning-by-doing, and 3) Therefore, all traditional learning isn't real learning. All of this, of course, is then used to show that online education, like the learning-by-doing courses Schank's developing in his new corporation Cognitive Arts, can improve education. I think the last straw was the syllogism. Here's a man telling (!) me that all traditional learning isn't real learning; then he turns around and uses the tradition of deductive logic to prove his point.

You may reply that Schank knew his audience was primarily a corporate audience and that he was simply using the rhetoric of exaggeration appropriate for such an audience. It's just the language of business bluffing, you may say. My point precisely. The use of language changes when we shift from the context of education to the context of business. Like it or not, business bluffs and lies to gain a competitive advantage. Is this what Schank was doing (!) when he told his audience of more than 7,000 people that nobody learns in the classsroom and that traditional learning is not real learning? Both are obviously false claims and yet many people in the audience apparently approved his argument: they were smiling and nodding their heads; some clapped and cheered. It took my breath away. Was Schank tapping into some subtle "groupthink" in the audience that wanted to affirm statements even when they were clearly false? He was certainly playing to a sense of anti-intellectualism when he chided that "we're training students to become professors." He even threw in the "f" word to show that he was down-to-earth and not one of "them."

I would like to believe Drucker when he says that " Management is thus what tradition used to call a liberal art -- 'liberal' because it deals with the fundamentals of knowledge, self-knowledge, wisdom, and leadership; 'art' because it is practice and application. ... For these reasons, management will increasingly be the discipline and practice through which the 'Humanities' will again acquire recognition, impact, and relevance."(The New Realities) I think he's on to something, but the realist in me says otherwise.

If in the long run the university will no longer be that place apart where the openness of questioning is protected, what will take its place? Who or what will protect it? Will an online community be strong enough to protect it? That remains to be seen. Will Roger Schank protect it? Fat chance. But he thinks he's protecting it by developing his own rich, online courses at Cognitive Arts. E-learning certainly needs a good dose of rich courses given much of the pap that passes now for online education. The irony, of course, is that he's denigrating the very richness of the tradition that he's actually trying to infuse into his courses. Part of the problem is that the humanities and liberal arts have not stepped up to claim and defend that richness. If the classroom is to move back to the agora, let's be ready for it.

I think it's high time for the humanities and liberal arts to stop retreating and take off the gloves. It seems to me that the arts and humanities in the 80s and 90s retreated to the ivory towers as a refuge from the onslaught of materialism, corporate greed and religious fundamentalism.Well, guess what? The traditional ivory towers are beginning to crumble. As the lines are increasingly blurred between universities and corporations, as university administrators come increasingly from the ranks of corporate management with at times little or no commitment to the deeper mission of higher education, as knowledge is increasingly viewed as nothing more than a means to an end or as a commodity to be bought and sold, and as teachers are increasingly defined as components of software, can we be surprised if a corporate will-to-power has crept into higher education?