Constructivist Setback

The weak constrcutivist position argues that everyone constructs knowledge for themselves. The strong constructivist position goes further and argues that because of this, teaching should be child centered, especially finding what a child's prefered method of learning is (seeing, hearing, touching, moving) and tailoring the lesson to the child. However, via a link at Number 2 Pencil, there is another installment of Ask The Cognative Scientist at the AFT website. Its very interesting, and worth a look-see. The thesis is a blow to the strong constructivist:

"What cognitive science has taught us is that children do differ in their abilities with different modalities, but teaching the child in his best modality doesn’t affect his educational achievement. What does matter is whether the child is taught in the content’s best modality. All students learn more when content drives the choice of modality. "

We might call this the Structuralist theory of knowledge. Content has its own best structure independently of the mind that understands the content. This was the dominant approach to knowledge, which often viewed knowledge as a tree, dividing subjects into specialities based one how they are related. Sciences would be grouped together, because they have common mental tools, for instance. Structuralists, I have have termed them, would argue that it is best to thing about science in a scientific way, rather than in what ever way is most pleasing to the student. The class, the unit, the lesson should all reflect the structure of the subject.

Aristotle proposed that knowledge is a series of catagories, some broad, some specific. This is based on logic. All blue-jays are birds, and inherit the qualities of "bird". So I can imagine a catagory "bird", and "blue-jay" and "that blue jay who nests in my yard" as ever more specific catagories. This is the basis of deduction. It is said that the Syrian philosopher Porphyry famously employed a tree as a metaphore for this process, and it has been used by taxonimists ever since.

Stong constructivism generally makes two kinds of attacks on this kind of approach. Either they deny the metaphysics of it, arguing that the world lacks the order being presented, and that the only order that exists is in the mind; or they they deny the epistomology of it, arguing that we cannot truly know anything and we just construct our own knowledge of things. These ideas stand in strong opposition to realism (Aristotealian philosophy) and empiricism (Lockean epistomology).