Constructivist Education: Inventing Your Own Reality

One of the trendiest fads today is called constructivist education. If knowledge is a social construction, as Dewey said, then the goal of education should be to teach students how to construct their own knowledge. Read this description by a proponent of the method: Constructivism does not assume the presence of an outside objective reality that is revealed to the learner, but rather that learners actively construct their own reality.

That’s a pretty tall order: Before kids are big enough to cross the street, they’re supposed to learn how to “construct their own reality.” Teachers are not to tell students that their ideas are right or wrong, either, but merely to encourage them “to clarify and articulate their own understandings.” After all, there are many different possible ways to construct the world, and constructivism cannot rule out any viable theory that encapsulates personal experience.

As one prominent constructivist writes, “To the biologist, a living organism is viable as long as it manages to survive in its environment. To the constructivist, concepts, models, theories, and so on are viable if they prove adequate in the contexts in which they were created.” Notice that the passage speaks of ideas being viable, not true. Constructivism is based on the assumption that we are merely organisms adapting to the environment, so that the only test of an idea is whether it works.

  - Nancy R. Pearcey, Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity, 2004.

 

What Do We Teach Our Children

Are we moving toward something, or away from it? Are we teaching our children to march forward, the banner of their civilization in hand, or to back slowly away from it, watching the shining city on the hill receding into the distance? So, what do we teach our children? What must they know to become defenders of the only civilization worth fighting for?
 
1. Your Life Has Purpose. Life is not a bewildering, chaotic mess. It’s a struggle, but it’s a struggle guided by a higher meaning. You were designed to use your reason and your natural gifts—and to cultivate those assets toward fulfillment of a higher end. That end can be discovered by investigating the nature of the world, and by exploring the history of our civilization. That end includes defending the rights of the individual and the preciousness of individual lives; it includes acting with virtues including justice and mercy. It means restoring the foundations of your civilization, and building new and more beautiful structures atop those foundations.
 
2. You Can Do It. Forge forth and conquer. Build. Cultivate. You were given the ability to choose your path in life—and you were born into the freest civilization in the history of mankind. Make the most of it. You are not a victim. In a free society, you are responsible for your actions. Your successes are your accomplishments, but they are also the legacy of those who came before you and those who stand with you; your failures are purely your own. Look to your own house before blaming the society that bore you. And if society is acting to violate individual rights, it is your job to work to change it. You are a human being, made in the image of God, bound to the earth but with a soul that dreams of the eternal. There is no greater risk than that and no greater opportunity than that.
 
3. Your Civilization Is Unique. Recognize that what you have been given is unique in human history.  Most human beings have lived under the control of others, suffered tyranny and oppression. You have not. The freedom you enjoy, and morals in which you believe, are products of a unique civilization—the civilization of Dante and Shakespeare, the civilization of Bach and Beethoven, the civilization of the Bible and Aristotle. You did not create your freedoms or your definition of virtue, nor did they arise in a vacuum. Learn your history. Explore where the roots of your values lie: in Jerusalem and Athens. Be grateful for those roots. Then defend those roots, even as you grow to new heights.
 
4. We Are All Brothers and Sisters. We are not enemies if we share a common cause. And our common cause is a civilization replete with purpose, both communal and individual, a civilization that celebrates both individual and communal capacity. If we fight alongside one another rather than against one another, we are stronger. But we can only be stronger when we pull in the same direction, and when we share the same vision. We must share the same definition of liberty when it comes to politics, and, broadly speaking, the same definition of virtue when it comes to creating and maintaining social capital.
 

- Ben Shapiro, The Right Side of History, 2019.