Have you ever had that feeling in class when you know the right answer—well, you think you know—you’re almost positive, but you don’t want to share out of fear? What if you’re wrong? What if you get judged? What if it’s a “stupid” question? So you don’t share, the thought sits in your head, no one hears it. The room stays quiet, as everyone else is going through the exact same thing. This phenomenon is the simplest example to introduce us to a serious issue present in Western individualist society—we’ve become afraid of sharing in educational spaces, and it’s worsening our ability to learn collectively.
When we think about education, the first thing that pops into our head is likely the standard primary schooling process of lectures, textbooks, homework assignments, etc. Something worth noticing is that this is a pretty individual learning process that becomes less and less social as we get older, as the classroom begins to serve as little more than a place where information is offered for students to go home and process themselves. In early education, there are more attempts for teachers to create a social learning environment with their students, but that often gets lost in high school and college. Educational practices here tend to be done in lecture form—an individual sharing information that other individuals take home with them; discussion has become less prominent.
Whether or not we realize it, learning is significantly improved when done socially. Anyone who’s been in a book study knows that as soon as they sit down with another person and start reading together, having a second perspective to help break down a difficult concept becomes much easier. Even at an early age, people tend to have an intuitive understanding that it’s often easier to learn socially, studying together with friends, getting guidance from a parent, using a tutor, etc. These helpers don’t need to be experts on the subject in order to be useful; oftentimes just bouncing ideas off them can open us up to a new way of thinking about a concept.
But beyond just being helpful for understanding concepts, collective learning is a necessity for a fuller understanding of the world and how it functions. An individual has an inherently limited perspective—they live in one part of the world, interact with an unfathomable small circle of people compared to the general population, and therefore only have one specific anecdotal experience which cannot tell us about the world in general unless corroborated with other experiences. Collective learning is the offering of our incomplete perspectives for the purpose of us using those perspectives to come to a better understanding together, and a collective pedagogy is a philosophy of education based around collective learning and communal education in general.
Effective collective discussion requires not only the offering of a space for us to discuss, but for the participants to engage in healthy practices that allow our conversation to be productive. We must be willing to share incomplete ideas that may be relevant to the conversation, as well as ceasing judgement of other individuals for their incomplete ideas. The fastest way to shut down a healthy space for discussion is to introduce the idea of the “stupid question,” and shame someone for being curious. This will cause them to shut down and retreat into their own mind.
Although we’ve mostly discussed this from the context of traditional educational spaces, social learning doesn’t only happen in the classroom—some of the most profound insights I’ve ever had came out of random conversations I’ve had with a friend or parent or coworkers. I strongly encourage us as a society to have more conversations about potentially controversial topics with our social circles, as there’s a lot we can learn from these spaces, and we can also use them to get more comfortable with discussion in general.
Unfortunately, the society we live in is deeply individualist—rather than using our perspectives to come together and try and gain a better understanding of the world, we tend to keep them to ourselves or only share to those who may already share our conclusions. The result of this is our ideas go unchallenged, and that lack of challenge then leads us only to have a surface level understanding of concepts, and society ends up divided between lines we don’t actually understand. The ramifications of individualist education extend far beyond the classroom—they are a major reason why we have such a difficult time with constructive political conversation. Our lack of practice in the classroom and at home has led to our instinctive approach to a difficult conversation to either be the strategic employment of talking points for the purpose of “winning” an argument, or the exiting of the conversation altogether, neither of which help us learn anything.
What we have created is, in the words of Fanon, “a society of individuals where each person shuts himself up in his own subjectivity.” (Fanon, 47) This problem cannot be solved solely by addressing our educational spaces, as the tendency towards individualism begins at home and permeates all aspects of social life. One major way this happens is through children becoming conditioned to only speak when they have the correct answer, and are taught that there are “stupid questions” they shouldn’t ask. They then reproduce this behavior in school, shaming classmates for giving wrong answers, creating a social space where incorrectness is met with judgement, until people are eventually conditioned to only speak when they’re fully sure.
In this reality, processing ends up happening all in our own heads—we aren’t talking out loud about the thoughts we’re going through, only sharing them once we’ve reached a conclusion. As an alternative, what if we thought aloud together, putting aside our egos for the purpose of coming to a better collective understanding? What if we encouraged people to be curious, to share their thoughts, and rather than judging them for it, took those thoughts and worked through them together?
In order to move towards a culture of collective learning, we must get more comfortable having conversations about difficult topics with our social circles. We must offer educational spaces where the purpose is to discuss controversial topics and engage each other even through disagreements—not to win an argument, but for everyone in the room to leave with a more developed understanding of ideas. We must know that disagreement is a necessary component of collective learning, as the interrogation of an idea usually leads to a more detailed understanding of it. “Agreeing to disagree” may be necessary to deescalate a hostile situation, but if we haven’t reached that point, all it does is shut down a potential conversation. We must be vulnerable enough to admit when we do not know, and be willing to offer our incomplete thoughts and work towards a collective understanding with those around us. We must move towards a collective pedagogy, or our individualist culture of education will leave us even more uneducated than we already are.
Fanon, F. (1963). The Wretched of the Earth. Grove Press.