Consciousness and literacy: does it matter?
Or:
Maybe I think too much?
Let us take a speculative and rather wary ramble up towards the last frontiers of psychology and philosophy. The bracken is high in this part of the intellectual world, as a few quotes will confirm.
‘The nature of consciousness has proved … elusive, ambiguous and questionable …’ (Smith & Jokic 2003 p.1) ‘Science’s failure to get to grips with consciousness gradually became an embarrassment.’ (McCrone 1999 p.6) ‘Consciousness is what makes the mind-body problem really intractable... Without consciousness the mind-body problem would be much less interesting. With consciousness it seems hopeless.’ (Nagel, in Block et al 1997 p. 519) and ‘Consciousness is a fascinating but elusive phenomenon: it is impossible to specify what it is, what it does or why it evolved. Nothing worth reading has been written about it.’ (Sutherland 1995 in Block et al 1997 p. 8) Oh well...
It has only relatively recently become respectable to debate this issue at all. It has been regarded as absolutely out of psychological bounds, and as thoroughly dubious philosophically. The debate is getting into its stride now, though, and is subject to intense philosophical and psychological rumination and considerable neurological research. I have found nothing much in ‘the literature’ about the possible influence of consciousness and unconsciousness on the theory and practice of teaching and learning, although it seems to me that this influence may soon be regarded as quite considerable. Here, I present a taste of the exhilarating, if intermittently bewildering, arguments to come. That I am writing about this subject is assuredly not to be taken as suggesting any special expertise in it. I am no more expert than you are. I merely raise some perplexing issues which it seems to me are of educational interest. Nobody else is doing this, so far as I know.
These notes will ponder three and a half questions: How sovereign is our consciousness, how useful is it (and for what) and what effect might it have on learning? I seek to undermine your faith in your conscious but to bolster your belief in your unconscious; to outline a theoretical framework which may support our intuition that, sometimes, we do indeed think too much – that at least some learning is not helped by intellectualising it. Some learning is disadvantaged, perhaps, by applying the conscious mind to it.
Why does the question grumble? The idea that my conscious played (very) second fiddle to my unconscious and that in certain circumstances it might be unimportant, perhaps sometimes even actually unhelpful, particularly to learning and particularly to certain kinds of learning, came into my head years ago. It still grumbles about in there. Why did I have this idea in the first place? I found I hated certain teaching or learning methods quite unreasonably (for example using spelling ‘rules’ as a teaching method, but also the overt learning of Danish grammar which was forced upon me when I learned that language as an adult). These methods felt unnatural and toxic; they felt as if they literally rubbed my mind the wrong way; they grated and chafed. Their common denominator seemed to be that they all involved the deliberate application of my consciousness to learning detail or considering items I suspected were meaningless or unreal. They made me think consciously about stuff I felt was peripheral and counterproductive, in ways I felt were aberrant and did not suit the apparatus in my head. I came to fear the ‘explanation’, the giving of ‘reasons’ and, most of all, the elaboration of complex and only intermittently true ‘rules’. The kind of thinking these methods induced made simple stuff complicated and natural stuff unnatural – or so I felt. Teaching me overt, explicit grammar, for example, was to insist that I think consciously about the rules of the language I was being expected to learn – in the old cliché, to learn about the language rather than to learn the language. It seemed to be precisely this requirement to intellectualise which seemed to complicate learning and which made it so scary. Thinking too much, or perhaps it was thinking inappropriately or about the wrong things in the situation, seemed to get in the way of learning. It seemed to interfere with fluent performance. It intimidated and demoralised as a result. I felt then that something was peculiarly wrong, and I still do now.