Nothing Is More Powerful Than Assumptions

by Marion Brady   International Education Daily    December 26, 2000

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In human affairs, nothing is more powerful than assumptions. Thirty years ago, in an orange grove on what was then the south edge of Orlando, I was given a vivid example of this fact.

In the late 1960s, a vice-president and a couple of editors from a major publisher of textbooks came down to Florida to talk to me about writing a world cultures textbook and an American history textbook for adolescents. They wanted, they said, books that were "cutting edge," books they could market to the "the most knowledgeable and thoughtful ten percent of educators."

That meant that the books had to be pretty unconventional. Ordinarily, when students read textbooks, it's assumed that they'll use just one mental process-recall. These new books would have to require them to engage in all thought processes-to infer, generalize, classify, make value judgments, relate, synthesize, and so on.

Ordinarily, textbooks deal with matters seen by students as having little or nothing to do with their everyday lives. These new books would have to leave no doubt about the immediate usefulness and practicality of what was being learned.

Ordinarily, textbooks inundate students with thousands of "equal sized" facts, touching on each one briefly and then moving on. These new books would have to focus on a relatively few, very powerful ideas of permanent usefulness that organized and made sense of many seemingly random facts. And they'd have to hammer on those ideas from so many angles with so many different kinds of activities there could be no doubt they had become a natural part of the students' way of looking at the world.

I told the executives I'd need some help, and they agreed to put my younger brother on the contract.

The first task was to choose the "big" ideas that would organize the two books. Some of those that made the final cut were "patterns," "polarization," "motivation," "autonomy," "habitat," "social control," "system change," and "values."

It was pursuit of instructional materials for the big idea of "belief systems" that took us into a little farmhouse in the orange grove.

We had written to several dozen anthropologists in various parts of the world describing the kinds of materials we had in mind. One of those letters went to an anthropologist in Korea, a Jesuit priest who was teaching mathematics in a small rural school. He told us he thought he might be able to help, that it just happened that his parents lived near Orlando, and that he was coming home in a few weeks for the Christmas holidays. We could, he said, sit and talk directly.

We wrote back thanking him for his offer and telling him to set the place, day and time and we'd be there.

Out of a Christmas holiday evening came his detailed description of an elaborate, three-day funeral ceremony for a village elder in rural Korea. The description appeared pretty much verbatim in the world cultures textbook. Tacked on to the end of his account were two sentences: "If a child dies, no funeral is held. The father simply puts the body in a straw bag and, possibly accompanied by one or two male relatives or other men, buries it in some isolated place with no ceremony."

"How could this be?!" startled students would exclaim when they read the sentences. "These are terrible, insensitive people!"

With that, dialog among the students about differing belief systems would begin in earnest. Eventually, they'd see that underlying what to them was an unacceptable way of behaving was a deep-seated, unexamined assumption, an assumption that humanness isn't a given, but a learned and earned quality, that babies are born only with the potential to BECOME human. Since infants have barely started on the journey toward humanness, the sorrow accompanying their loss, in the traditional Korean view, was much less than it would later be.

In human affairs, nothing is more powerful than assumptions. In the drive to reform education, the most devastating assumption is that education's problems, problems with classroom discipline, student apathy, teacher burnout, soft public support, and high dropout rate, can be solved without major, fundamental changes in the curriculum.
 

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