Gardeners or Carpenters - A New Culture of Learning

In Alison Gopnik’s study, reveals some of the deep flaws in modern parenting that reinforces that leaners do exactly what we instruct them to do and nothing more. This is a very limiting approach to learning and does not allow the learner to discover, "play," and fully understand what they are learning. The learners that were shown what to do could only recreate exactly what was shown to them. Furthermore, the learner relies on what has been shown them and loses the nature of experimentation or "play," which often leads to failure, but much of the time, we learn more from failure and how to problem-solve to correct the answer. In review of this study, Gopnick very eloquently sums up the study by asking the summary statement,

Gardener’s or Carpenter’s

The attraction of approaching learning as a product is that it provides us with something relatively clear to look for and measure. The danger is that it may not be obvious what we are measuring – and that the infatuation with discrete learning objectives pushes people down a path that takes people away from the purpose and processes of education. It turns educators into ‘woodworkers’ rather than ‘gardeners’ (Gopnik 2016).

As carpenters:

… essentially, your job is to shape that material into a final product that will fit the scheme you had in mind to begin with. And you can assess how good a job you’ve done by looking at the finished product. Are the doors true? Are the chairs steady? Messiness and variability are a carpenter’s enemies; precision and control are her allies. Measure twice, cut once….

When we garden, on the other hand, we create a protected and nurturing space for plants to flourish. It takes hard labor and the sweat of our brows, with a lot of exhausted digging and wallowing in manure. And as any gardener knows, our specific plans are always thwarted…. And yet the compensation is that our greatest horticultural triumphs and joys also come when the garden escapes our control. (Gopnik 2016: 22)

References

Gopnik, A. (2016). The Carpenter and the Gardener. What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us about the Relationship Between Parents and Children. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.