*****WARNING: RANT IN PROGRESS, PROCEED AT OWN RISK**********
Oh no, not another one of these rubric chart dealies with everything BROKEN down into little parts according to some “expert’s” ideas of how to think about learning.
I was just mellowing out in the course…now it’s back to the task of fending off conventional minded and inadequate theories of reality and learning. To sum up my first reaction to Mr. Bloom and this chart…it’s mind poison. At least for me.
Back in the 50’s when Mr. Bloom published a book cited for this chart, the psychological world was aflame with Behaviorism. Just one of a long series of isms brought to us by the mediocre minds of psychology, who manage to get just enough right to be really dangerous with the parts they get wrong. Definitely “B” Ark material, to quote Douglas Adams.
“”"Has a value system that controls their behavior. The behavior is pervasive, consistent, predictable, and most importantly, characteristic of the learner”"”"”
It’s really hard to know where to get started.
3 types of learning…short a few types, perhaps?
Affective learning…that’s just another way of saying “attitude?” Where did that idea come from… prisons? Emotions are there to be “controlled”? That’s their function? Something to squash?
Then the 3rd kind of learning is an afterthought? Uh, welcome to the multimedia world of personal expression…
Any categorizing of this kind is tricky…we learn as a whole being, and any attempt to categorize conscious or so called unconscious processes is lame indeed, given the level of understanding we presently have of how the mind or the brain or the body work together.
But this has not stopped people from proposing such charts, and this one is hierarchical to boot! Wow!! Impressive sets of presumptions at work, and we are tasked with getting to the bottom of where these ideas came from, and what schools of thought etc they are based on. Gag me with a pitchfork, as it’s a lot of work digging through the intellectual trash bins of history, or the shelves of academia, to find the sources for this stuff.
In other words, in order to make such a chart-o-learning, one would need a very subtle and comprehensive understanding of how we not only “think”, or feel, or intuit, but also how we process sense perceptions, indeed how we “construct” consciousness”….so in a way this kind of exercise is pathetically inadequate in the face of what we don’t know about the human experience/condition/brain/mind/body….the self and the social construction of reality etc etc….
And then we get into inculcating “values” into the little ones….Internalizing values= brain washing
“”"Instructional objectives are concerned with the student’s general patterns of adjustment (personal, social, emotional)”"”
Okay, I’ll take my cool aid, and study this for whatever I can get out of it. Ya know sometimes paying attention to what one doesn’t agree with can help formulate what one does think, instead. And that could be a very good thing. As I am interested in learning. I just don’t want to be assuming I know best for everyone how their brain should be put together…
John the Rantor
