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Constructivism ExaminedRichard Fox

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Oxford Review of Education, Vol. 27, No. 1, 2001

Constructivism Examined

RICHARD FOX

ABSTRACT In this paper I examine constructivism as a view of learning which has cometo dominate educational debates about learning in the � eld of teacher education. Themajor claims of a variety of constructivist theories are considered and found to be largelywanting, in that they either differ little from common sense empiricist views, or else providemisleading and incomplete views of human learning, with consequently misleadingimplications for teaching in classrooms.

INTRODUCTION

Constructivism now appears to dominate the view of learning articulated in theeducational literature, at least of the Anglo-Saxon academic world, and especially in thedomain of teacher education. Yet it is perhaps as much a guiding myth as a testablepsychological theory, a general view rather than a single clearly stated set of claims.Existing in many versions, it has become a somewhat uncritically accepted textbookaccount of learning (Eggan & Kauchek, 1994; Fosnot, 1996; Woolfolk, 1996), oftenarticulated in opposition to simpli� ed and even distorted ‘straw man’ versions ofbehaviourism, nativism and information processing theory. In such contexts it is indanger of becoming a general term of approbation with but little content and anincoherent underlying epistemology. The aim of this paper is to review the principalclaims of a variety of constructivist accounts of learning, as they appear in a variety oftextbooks and papers in the � eld of teacher education, and to argue that, except whereconstructivism slips into making extreme and implausible epistemological claims, itturns out to have relatively little to say which is distinctive and not already implied bycommon sense, broadly empiricist, accounts of learning (Strike, 1987). What it doeshave to offer, as a positive contribution to debates on education is, however, alsoconsidered. It will also be argued that the popularity of constructivism, at least in itsmore unsophisticated versions, stems largely from its being a view that is articulatedand understood in opposition, or reaction, to naõ ve psychology and, or, naõ ve episte-mology. That is, students, realising the improbability of their initial unexamined andnaõ ve views of teaching and learning, take up constructivism as a better alternative, butthen tend to make characteristic mistakes of their own.

THE CENTRAL CLAIMS OF CONSTRUCTIVISM SUMMARISED

Constructivism is basically a metaphor for learning, likening the acquisition of knowl-edge to a process of building or construction. Like all such metaphors of the mind, ithas particular strengths and weaknesses. Claimed as both a ‘paradigm’ and a ‘theory’(Fosnot, 1996), constructivism has also been described as ‘akin to a secular religion’

ISSN 0305-4985 print; ISSN 1465-3915 online/01/010023-13 Ó 2001 Taylor & Francis LtdDOI: 10.1080/3054980020030583

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24 Oxford Review of Education

(Phillips, 1995). It is indeed a broad church, including variants of Piagetian construc-tivism (Piaget, 1969; Liben, 1987; Adey & Shayer, 1994) neo-Vygotskian construc-tivism (Wertsch, 1985; Brown & Reeve, 1987; Tharp & Gallimore, 1988), Feuerstein’smediated learning (Sharon, 1994), radical constructivism (von Glasersfeld, 1996) andsocial constructivism in various shades and hues (Rogoff, 1990; Mercer, 1995; Fosnot,1996). Its varieties have been reviewed and compared by Strike (1987), Ernest (1994),Prawat & Floden (1994), Phillips (1995) and Fox (1997), amongst others. Quite apartfrom its position as the most favoured current view of learning and teaching in theteacher education literature (Mayer, 1992; Sudzina, 1997), it has a long history as atheory of perception and of memory (Bartlett, 1932; Neisser, 1967, Gregory, 1981,Eysenck & Keane, 1995). As a theory of learning, its central claim is that (human)knowledge is acquired through a process of active construction. This vague idea, itselfmisleading and incomplete, can be developed in a number of ways that are not alwayscompatible with one another. Moreover, as the claims become more bold and distinc-tive, they risk collapsing either into implausible philosophical positions or becomingempirically too narrow, respecting some aspects and types of learning to the detrimentof others. My method will be to list a number of such claims and to comment criticallyon each in turn.

The claims, which together are held to de� ne constructivist views of learning, are � rstsummarised en masse:

(1) Learning is an active process.(2) Knowledge is constructed, rather than innate, or passively absorbed.(3) Knowledge is invented not discovered.(4a) All knowledge is personal and idiosyncratic.(4b) All knowledge is socially constructed.(5) Learning is essentially a process of making sense of the world.(6) Effective learning requires meaningful, open-ended, challenging problems for

the learner to solve.

THE CLAIMS CRITICISED

(1) Learning is an Active Process

This, the most central and insistent claim of constructivism, seems, as it stands, to beeither misleading or untrue. Human beings, and animals in general, certainly doacquire knowledge of their environments by acting upon the world about them (forexample by investigating habitats and by eating things); however, they are also actedupon. We do things and we have things done to us; we act and we react, and clearlywe can learn from both types of experience. Many simple forms of habituation andconditioning consist of adaptive reactions, rather than actions. Thus, from light adap-tation of the eye to changing levels of brightness, to conditioned (e.g. eye-blink)responses and to the pervasive phenomena of orientation and habituation, there is acontinuum of adaptive responses which include instinctive processes and variousreactive forms of learning. Subliminal learning, perceptual recognition and implicitlearning (Claxton, 1997; Reber, 1993) have all now been minutely investigated anddocumented and turn out to be extremely common and important to human adap-tation. Why, then, should constructivism emphasise only one pole of human experi-ence? I suggest that this follows from its own reactive origins, as a view of learning

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Constructivism Examined 25

which was set up in opposition to a once dominant behaviourism and to traditionalistviews of education.

Thus an ‘active’ view of learning is often contrasted with behaviourist stimulus-response accounts in which organisms learn by being ‘stimulated’ and by ‘responding’.This is often described as a ‘passive’ view of the learner, although, in fact, manyanimal-oriented behaviourists studied and wrote mainly about animals adapting ac-tively to their (severely controlled) surroundings, as in Thordike’s cats attempting toescape from puzzle boxes and Skinner’s rats and pigeons pressing levers and keys toobtain various reinforcing consequences (e.g. Brown & Herrstein, 1975, chapter 2). Inbehaviourist accounts, typically, clear logical distinctions are made between increasingor withholding pleasurable or painful consequences, following either a response or theinhibition of response. Piaget famously insisted on the fact that children, rather thanbeing merely recipients of stimulation, frequently and typically investigate and act upontheir world, whilst getting to know it. However, he was also well aware that they oftenreact, both to people and events. In the teacher education literature, however, there hasbeen a further rhetorical reason for emphasising the active pole of learning, in the formof a frequently expressed opposition to traditionalist views of teaching and learning, atleast as these have come to be described by their more progressive opponents.

Thus traditionalists are said to believe that teaching consists of telling, or instructing,and that the learner is treated as ‘an empty vessel’ to be (inertly) � lled with knowledge.Since few constructivists, presumably, would want to rule out either listening or readingfrom the domain of possible ways of learning, both these are described as ‘active’processes. In many ways this is reasonable; all cognition is active in the sense ofinvolving activity of the brain, but it is worth noting that in contrast to talking andwriting, listening and reading are relatively ‘passive’. But, does anyone actually hold theviews ascribed to the ‘traditionalist’? Few, surely, would seek to deny the importance ofsome form of dialogue, if only question and answer, to teaching. It is rather thattraditionalists place a greater value on knowledge and its objective status, and on theteacher as knowledgeable expert, as against learners and their existing knowledge andimmediate interests. Of course, such biases can be taken too far in either direction(Pring, 1976). Too great an emphasis on either teacher or taught can lead to prescrip-tions for teaching which either ignore the learner’s needs or ignore the teacher as avaluable, knowledgeable resource.

Na õ ve views of learning may well be lop-sided in just such a way. It seems that manylay people, if pressed to explain what they take learning to be about, resort to de� ningit as memorisation. Learning is remembering. This most simple of views may then beadded to, or adapted, to become a view of learning as the acquisition of practical skillsand, further, as consisting of understanding some topic (Saljo, 1979a in Gibbs, 1981).In so far as naõ ve views of classroom teaching and learning amount to no more thanlearning as remembering, or ‘� lling empty vessels’ with facts, then of course theconstructivist story of the active learner comes as a welcome relief. But it does so whilstsubtly implying that remembering is not important, and that understanding concepts isall there is to learning, neither of which is true.

(2) Knowledge is Constructed, Rather than Innate, or Passively Absorbed

This is an elaborated form of claim (1). Once again it highlights one aspect of learning,namely the extent to which it is a matter of acquiring and elaborating concepts, inopposition to innate, or maturational, in� uences on learning, and in opposition to

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implicit learning. Yet in so far as human beings have a distinctive cognitive system,different from that of, say, seagulls or chimpanzees, it is virtually all inherited. Ourability to perceive, to learn, to speak and to reason are all based on the innate capacitiesof the evolved human nervous system. Piaget, of course, considered that maturationwas important, although dif� cult to study directly, and limited in its direct in� uence.He wrote, for example, that:

Because the maturation of the nervous system is not completed until about the� fteenth or sixteenth year, it therefore seems evident that it does play anecessary role in the formation of mental structures, even though very little isknown about that role … the maturation of the nervous system does no morethan open up possibilities, excluded until particular age levels are reached.(Piaget, 1969, quoted in Light et al., 1991, pp. 11–12)

Other researchers suggest that genetic factors play a crucial role in developing percep-tion and cognition, besides in language acquisition and developing motor skills (e.g.Carey & Spelke, 1994). Besides contrasting the active learner with nativist views (acontrast incidentally also made by all environmental empiricists) active learning iscontrasted by constructivists with ‘passive absorption’. But the passive absorption ofelements of our experience is exactly what does seem to occur in contextual andimplicit learning (Claxton, 1997), so again the claim is one-sided and misleading.

(3) Knowledge is Invented not Discovered

This claim is not always explicitly stated by constructivist writers, but it lies at the veryheart of their rejection of empiricist and ‘positivist’ conceptions of learning. It is arguedthat knowledge is not a copy or a true re� ection of some independent reality (Rorty,1979; von Glasersfeld in Fosnot, 1996) and that therefore we must adopt some moresubjective, idealist or at least conceptually relative view of human knowledge and of theworld we can know. Truth as objective correspondence to an independent realitysimply does not exist, on this view; we cannot have a ‘God’s eye’ view of the world, ora ‘view from nowhere’. We always perceive and know the world from some sociocul-tural, and historically situated, point of view. Hence, human knowledge is always to beseen as a ‘construct’, a product of the human mind. But one can accept this argumentof ‘conceptual relativism’ without being driven by it into some subjective or relativisticepistemology. We can accept that maps of the world, for example, are human construc-tions, which make different assumptions and simpli� cations in representing the globe.Different 2-D projections, for instance, notoriously produce different distortions ofland areas in different latitudes, and so forth. But we do not have to conclude from thisthat there is no globe, no planet Earth, which is the subject of these imperfect humanrepresentations. Similarly, our conceptual viewpoints are indeed limited but, beingviews, they are precisely views of something, namely the world or some part of it. Thatwe cannot know ‘things in themselves’ or ‘reality as it is’ does not mean that we haveto give up our deep assumption of the existence of things in themselves, or of anexternal world independent of human minds (Searle, 1995).

Indeed, the background assumption of external realism is crucial for our lives, ourlearning and our discourse. It is not exactly that we have to believe in external realism;it is simply that all actions, all communications, all investigations, presuppose its truth.The exact nature of this reality, independent of our minds, may forever be beyond ourrepresentations of it. But as a presupposition, external realism is virtually unavoidable.

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Constructivism Examined 27

In Searle’s words, it is the assumption that there is a way things are, which is quiteindependent of our theories about the way things are. Alternative anti-realist positionscan be invented, but it is not clear what difference they would make to our sense of thecontact between mind and world.

When constructivism starts down the road of conceptual relativism, it rejects naõ veempiricism or common sense realism, but it then reaches a fork in the track and hasdif� culty avoiding either solipsism, or a kind of blinkered social consensualism. Thesolipsist position is defended, it seems, by no-one. If I can be con� dent of the existenceonly of my own mental states, then I am reduced to believing that my mind constitutesthe whole world. This, at the very least, makes it dif� cult to see how I can justify a beliefin the existence of you, or your mind, or the natural world, or discourse about theworld. I am left in absurd isolation, without a world of any kind to investigate ordiscuss. No-one seems to wish to occupy this ridiculous philosophical position, but inescaping from it, constructivists tend either to re-admit an independently existingobject world, or else pursue a kind of social solipsism, in which other minds, and socialconstructions, are all that exist.

Thus von Glasersfeld, the defender of radical constructivism, takes the � rst of thesepossible routes, arguing as follows:

The key idea that sets constructivism apart from other theories of cognitionwas launched 60 years ago by Jean Piaget. It was the idea that what we callknowledge does not and cannot have the purpose of producing representa-tions of an independent reality, but instead has an adaptive function. (vonGlasersfeld, 1996, p. 3)

In adopting this Piagetian view of the function of knowledge, he seems to believe that hehas provided himself with an alternative epistemology. But to provide an explanation ofthe function of knowledge is not to say what knowledge consists of, nor how it arises. Itvery soon emerges that for von Glasersfeld, although knowledge results from our sensoryworld, and thus: ‘is the result of our own perceptual activities and therefore speci� c toour ways of perceiving and conceiving’ (1996, p. 4), it allows organisms to survive,‘given the constraints of the world in which they happen to be living’ (1996, p. 4). Butthis entails not only that there is a contingent real world, in which we are living, but alsothat we somehow obtain feedback from that world. The ‘� t’ of adaptation is a � t to anobjectively existing environment. I think von Glasersfeld would object that this ‘� t’ isonly to a subjective world of experience, not to an independent objective world, but thenthe reply is simply that death may well bring about its end, without bringing about theend of the world. Most species which have existed are extinct. Survival is an admirablyobjective criterion of successful adaptation. Thus perception, and concepts, are re-con-nected to the world, in spite of being human constructions. To put it another way, vonGlasersfeld holds that all knowledge is relative to our human conceptual viewpoints(conceptual relativism) but allows that we can know a world, including its constraints,well enough to survive within it. But any reasonable empiricist, or positivist, can acceptthis easily. It is to say only that our knowledge is fallible and derives from our humanpoint of view. It still remains a testable view of something, namely an independentreality. To use Phillips’ (1995) terminology, nature is still to a degree our instructor,although we are the creators of our (imperfect) knowledge. The world hits back, as itwere, when we try to act upon it, and gives us feedback when we investigate it.

Ernest (1994) takes the alternative route at the conceptual relativist fork, and arguesthat:

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Social constructivism regards individual subjects and the realm of the social asindissolubly interconnected. Human subjects are formed through their inter-actions with each other (as well as by their individual processes) … Mind isseen as part of a broader context, the ‘social construction of meaning’ … Thehumanly constructed reality is all the time being modi� ed and interacting to� t ontological reality, although it can never give a ‘true picture’ of it. (Ernest,1994, p. 8)

This move is important in differentiating social constructivism from radical, individual-istic, constructivism. We shall need to examine it again in connection with claim 4b,below. For now, however, suf� ce it to say that by allowing an ‘ontological reality’Ernest also re-admits a real world from which we can obtain suf� ciently accuratefeedback in order to survive and to improve the ‘� t’ of our knowledge. Fit involves onething � tting another, in this case knowledge � tting (or failing to � t) the actual(ontologically existing) world. This is just as well, since the alternative would seem tobe a form of social solipsism (only minds exist). However, Ernest also has to accountfor how this � t is obtained. The dif� culty is that, for a completely relativistic epistemol-ogy, which both von Glasersfeld and Ernest think they have achieved, it seems there canbe no objective assessment of � t whatever. A relativistic epistemology implies that ourknowledge is completely relative to our particular human conceptual framework andhence that no particular framework has any priority or preference over any other, exceptin social terms. Any conceivable framework, be it individual or cultural, would do aswell as any other. The only criteria of ‘� t’ become socially negotiated criteria, as weconstruct our human meanings via conversations. But if these criteria are con� ned todifferent social processes, of power and persuasion, then the � t achieved is limited tovarious types of social compliance or consensus, rather than to features of the naturalworld. The part played in this process by perception and experiment, or more generallyfeedback from the non-social world, remains fuzzy.

It is as if we imagined human beings all locked into a hermetically sealed, dark room(Plato’s cave, without any way for light to enter?) in which they converse about whatthe world outside might be like. Amongst its oddities, this image of life fails to explainhow the physical sounds or letters of language would be perceived by the sociallyconstructed individuals taking part in the conversation, unless, that is, we make thecommon sense assumption that the social world is built out of natural, materialelements, in a natural physical world. But then we are dealing with the natural worldjust as empiricists, such as John Locke, always thought we were. It appears that socialconstructivists thus fail to account for the fact that a socially constructed realitypresupposes a reality independent of all social constructions, for there has to besomething for the social constructions to be constructed out of (Searle, 1995). Evenlanguage, the material out of which most constructivists seem to want to buildknowledge, is a socially constructed system of representation which is itself built out ofbrute physical sounds or visual marks, or similar alternatives.

When constructivists argue that we ‘construct the world’ or that the ‘the world is aproduct of minds’ we need to resist the temptation to infer that our constructions needonly be products of the will, or that the world beyond and independent of mind, iswhatever we desire it to be. Indeed, much of our learning consists in coming to termswith the constraints of our own physical and biological make-up as well as the physicaland biological constraints of the wider environment. To sum up, conceptual relativismis a breakthrough; it allows us, for example, to realise that the same reality can be

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Constructivism Examined 29

represented in many ways. But it need not force us into an implausible subjective orrelativistic epistemology. We need to accept that our knowledge is fallible, rather thancertain, but who these days denies this? We also need to maintain some form offeedback from the non-human world, in order to avoid falling into an individual orsocial form of solipsism (and, incidentally, in order to survive).

(4a) All Knowledge is Idiosyncratic and Personal

(4b) All Knowledge is Socially Constructed

These two claims are best considered together because they appear to contradict oneanother. 4a, the individualistic version, is important for teachers because it implies thatthe same lesson, or ‘experience’ or activity may result in different learning by eachpupil. Unique subjective meanings are derived by each learner from ostensibly the sameteaching, or the same text. Social constructivists, on the other hand, generally followingVygotsky, insist on the sociocultural nature of learning. Individual knowing subjects arethemselves considered to be constructed out of social interaction and social discourseand the individual is thus him- or herself, a social product. Since all meanings aresocial, and since Wittgenstein has plausibly argued that the notion of a private languageis basically incoherent, it is thought to follow that all teaching and learning is a matterof sharing and negotiating socially constituted knowledge. This, too, has importantimplications for teachers, since the ‘shared construction of knowledge’ becomes thecentral image of teaching. Each of these positions tends towards an implausible extremewhich can be discerned more easily by keeping both of them in view together.

4a tends towards solipsism once again, for by insisting on the subjectivity of theindividual learner’s experiences, it tends towards a denial of the possibility of sharingand communicating knowledge between people. It is only one step beyond this to theassertion that personal subjective experience is all the experience, and hence all theworld, that there is. If it is admitted that knowledge can in fact be communicated, andshared, and compared, and evaluated, then the distinctive point about this claim (4a)largely disappears and we are back with common sense. If it is not admitted, thenamongst other things we are left wondering what there is for teachers to do. The mostthat 4a offers, as an insight into learning, is that each individual learner has a distinctivepoint of view, based on existing knowledge and values, which the teacher ignores at herperil.

The insistence of 4b on the intrinsically social nature of all knowledge, and hence alllearning, also tends towards an implausible extreme, in this case the idea that socialfactors, or in� uences, alone determine all learning and all conscious thought. Thiswould deny the individual any role or in� uence whatever in learning. But sincememories are crucial to learning, and memories, not to mention perceptual systems, arepackaged in individual biological brains, this seems to go too far. Psychology may oftenhave over-estimated the power of individualistic explanations, but even those whofollow Marx in arguing that man’s consciousness is a product of the social world wouldgenerally admit that individuals, such as Marx, have often had a crucial role to play inchanging peoples’ beliefs, in changing knowledge and hence in changing cultures.Science may be a social tradition, largely based on social institutions, but this doesn’tmean that individual scientists have never made discoveries, or changed the path ofscienti� c knowledge through their individual efforts.

Another variant of this extreme socialisation theory is to argue that all knowledge is

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based on language and on linguistic representations, or perhaps on semiotic systemsmore generally. Human minds are said to be ‘shaped’ by language, although it is notclear why this one form of experience is held to exclude others (viz perceptualexperience, practical trial and error and non-verbal emotion). If held literally, this viewdenies any knowledge to infants in their pre-linguistic phase (all of Piaget’s sensori-motor intelligence) and tends to imply that animals cannot know anything. It alsoignores all the implicit knowledge we have of the world which we have never put intowords. To focus on teaching as the shared construction of knowledge also risks ignoringthe extent to which learning depends on independent practice and problem-solving. Ittends to highlight learning as conceptualisation and to ignore learning as the formation,or revision, of skills. But as well as sharing knowledge, we have to make knowledge ourown. Outside of these implausible extremes, claim 4b leaves us with the insight thatschooling, as a context for learning, is crucially dependent on linguistic representationsof knowledge.

It seems more reasonable altogether to bring 4a and 4b together and to argue (a) thatalthough individuals have their own personal history of learning, nevertheless they canshare in common knowledge, and (b) that although education is a social process,powerfully in� uenced by cultural factors, nevertheless cultures are made up of sub-cultures, even to the point of being composed of sub-cultures of one. Cultures and theirknowledge-base are constantly in a process of change and the knowledge stored byindividuals is not a rigid copy of some socially constructed template. In learning aculture, each child changes that culture. To see more clearly why 4a and 4b havedeveloped their distinctive, if � awed, views of learning, it is helpful to bring out theirdifferent underlying conceptions of what knowledge is. On the one hand (4a) knowl-edge may be seen as ‘essentially’ de� ned in terms of the subjective mental states of eachknower. On the other hand (4b) knowledge may be de� ned in terms of the publiclycommunicated and constructed bodies of knowledge that make up academic disciplines,data-bases, books, theories, works of art and other cultural products (Popper, 1979).Popper distinguished these two senses as subjective and objective conceptions ofknowledge. Only by denying that social groups are formed of individual minds, or bydenying that individual minds can communicate, are these two senses rendered incom-patible. The individual and the social are mutually constructed and co-existing levels ofanalysis and indeed of life. In passing, it is worth remembering that even behaviourismrecognised that individuals have unique histories of learning, whilst traditional empiri-cist social psychologists have always studied social in� uences on learning. Construc-tivism is not offering a new vision in either of these respects.

(5) Learning is Essentially a Process of Making Sense

This, although it has a seductive ring to it, is once again ultimately misleading. Makingsense (or making meaning) is a notion which has its home in the area of language, andin activities such as reading, or more generally perceiving patterns. As we puzzle overa text, or perhaps an image or a set of numerical symbols, we make sense as weassimilate the new experience to our existing knowledge. Here, constructivism empha-sises the aspect of learning which is about understanding and, in doing so, takes usbeyond any naõ ve conception of learning as rote learning or as an unproblematic‘drinking in’ of new information. Since Psychology, particularly in its view of intelli-gence, tended for a long period largely to ignore the structure of the learner’s knowl-edge, this was certainly a great step forward in developing a more realistic conception

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Constructivism Examined 31

FIG. 1.

of human learning. But, if taken too literally or one-sidedly, it can suggest (a) thatunderstanding is all there is to learning, and (b) that motivation is not a problem forteachers. In an extreme form it may also suggest that we are at the mercy of our existingknowledge.

One of the most simple and powerful ways to grasp the message of constructivism isto contemplate one of the many visual illusions or ambiguous images studied in thepsychology of visual perception. An example is provided in Fig. 1. In Kanizsa’s design,we ‘see’ (or construct) a series of white star points which are ‘not there’. The effect isa powerful one, in that our visual system delivers to us not only the white star shape buteven a sense of contours, or edges of white against the white background and of abrighter white (star) � gure against a dimmer white background. This is impressiveevidence of the way in which we ‘construct’ our view of the world, using storedknowledge, but we should also bear in mind: (i) that virtually all humans report seeingthis phenomenon (contra claim 4a), (ii) that our visual system delivers this visualexperience up to us without any conscious effort, or deliberation on our part (contraclaim 1) and (iii) that we are also capable of examining the image and of noticing thatthe enhanced brightness and the contours are in a sense illusory and can be resisted(contra extreme forms of claim 5). (These are features which are general to suchexamples taken from perceptual research.) Thus, as well as being impressive examplesof the ‘constructed’ nature of our perceptions, such � gures can also be read as examplesof the objectivity of human perception, of its deep innate roots and of the way in whichwe can, up to a point, resist various features of our own initial view. But, on the otherhand, we cannot make anything of such � gures. If someone claimed to see here a set ofnested circles, or a giraffe, we would think they had somehow got it wrong.

Returning to the classroom, it is surely important for teachers to realise how learnersare always trying to make sense of lessons in terms of what they already know. If thecontext is too removed from their horizon of expectations, they may well abandon thesearch for meaning, feeling either bored or confused, or both (Smith, 1975). But the‘making sense’ aspect of learning, important though it is, needs to be placed alongsidetwo other aspects, which might be called ‘making learning easy’ and ‘making learningsatisfying’. Learning, in its deliberate forms, is a struggle to get beyond existingknowledge but, although we clearly rely on existing knowledge in this process, the roleof prior knowledge cannot itself explain the paradox of how we transcend it. Anotherimportant part of learning is made up of practising (or tuning, or polishing, or

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rehearsing) our use of concepts, skills and strategies and thus making performance easy.Practice is vital in two ways: � rstly because it is the chief way in which we eliminateerrors from habitual routines and secondly because it somehow (once more because ofevolved instinctive processes) allows us to transfer our limited powers of consciousattention away from routine competences. Thus the practicing musician does notexactly repeat each scale or musical piece, but strives to change the performance, ateach trial, so as to make it more � uent, error-free and easy to accomplish. Indeed, tothe extent that a trial is an exact repetition of a previous trial, nothing has been learnt.The point of practice, in this sense, is to eliminate errors.

But beyond this, as we repeat and hone our skilled and habitual routines, eitherdeliberately, as in the example of the practising musician, or unconsciously, as weautomate everyday skills such as dressing, washing, eating and driving, we graduallytransfer their control to non-conscious brain processes. ‘Consciousness’, as WilliamJames observed, ‘goes away from where it is not needed’. This automation of skills andhabits is extremely important in virtually every area of learning because it allows us touse our very limited span of conscious, purposeful thought, for strategically higherlevels of planning, execution and evaluation. Only if we have the elementary facts, orskills, ‘at our � nger-tips’ can we solve our problems strategically, with reference tohigher level, longer-term values, purposes or hypotheses. A mathematician who alwayshad to re-calculate simple number bonds, a chemist who always had to look up theelementary properties of acids, an historian who never remembered any facts wouldalways be trapped in low-level aspects of their problems. To some extent, gettingdeeper into any subject depends on developing a rich data-base of relevant information,on knowing one’s way around a topic, of having ready knowledge and skill availablewhen it is required. Only by making the early stages easy can we spend cognitiveresources on the new and the dif� cult. To memorise without understanding is indeedmostly pointless and to realise this is to move beyond the naõ ve. It is a move constantlyre-iterated by constructivists, and one that all teachers and learners need to make. Butto understand without ever remembering is also equally useless, for it condemns us torepeat each episode of learning over and over again, ad in� nitum.

Turning to the matter of making learning satisfying, constructivists often seem toimply that since making sense is a natural cognitive state of affairs, for children as foradults, pupils will naturally try to make sense of the school curriculum. The problemof attitude, of motivating the learner to become deeply engaged in relevant activities, isthus either magically dissolved or else tacked on to the constructivist view as a furtherclaim. In Smith’s work, the problem is dissolved, as when he writes:

Learning is not dif� cult. It does not even require deliberate motivation. Mostof the time we learn without knowing that we are learning. (Smith, 1992, p.38)

But this account fails to distinguish the ‘easy’ episodic, perceptual and incidentallearning, which is indeed largely an unconscious by-product of experience, from themore ‘dif� cult’ deliberate learning of concepts, skills or strategies, which requires aconscious effort of attention and a striving to make sense of new ideas or procedures.This is the problematic type of learning which we routinely demand of pupils inschools. In Fosnot’s introduction, this aspect of learning gives rise to a further claim:

Challenging, open-ended investigations in realistic, meaningful contexts needto be offered, thus allowing learners to explore and generate many possibili-ties, both af� rming and contradictory. (Fosnot, 1996, p. 29)

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Putting this into general terms, we get the further claim:

(6) Effective Learning Requires Meaningful, Open-ended, Challenging Problems for theLearner to Solve

One may well agree with this as a general prescription for the curriculum, thoughnoting that some rather less challenging kinds of instruction and practice may also behelpful, but it is dif� cult to see why it should follow from any of the earlier claims ofconstructivism, any more than from any other view of learning. It recognises, as Smithdoes not, that motivating learners to engage with the topic requires more than simplyfacing them with new learning to do. It accepts, implicitly, that our existing model ofthe world includes powerful values and dispositions, which set up expectations aboutwhich experiences we are likely to � nd interesting or satisfying. This gives rise to oneof the most dif� cult and persistent problems for teachers, namely that of devisinglessons and activities which succeed in persuading pupils to try, whole-heartedly, tolearn something which is not, immediately, or obviously, interesting to them. But thisdoes not follow from the claims that learning is constructive, or relative to ourconceptual schemes, or subjective, or socially mediated. Perhaps it is thought to followfrom the claimed insight that learning is ‘active’, but, if so, we need to remember thatthis notion of ‘activity’ has to include such things as reading a book, or listening to aninteresting talk, both of which can prove extremely satisfying. Nor are all ‘active’ lessons(viz investigating how many different ways we can make the number 6, or whichsubstances dissolve in water) necessarily interesting to all learners. In other words, thegenerally progressive tone of such supposed implications of constructivism has to bejusti� ed by reference to additional premises, or arguments, about what pupils � ndinteresting or engaging; ‘activity’ alone will not suf� ce.

CONCLUSION

Constructivist accounts are often ‘hopeful’ in that they seem to promise that if we, asteachers, are prepared to recognise our pupils’ natural learning capacities, are aware ofthe ways in which knowledge is mediated via representations, and of the many ways inwhich past knowledge affects present learning, then classroom learning will not be aproblem, for teacher or taught. A further over-simpli� ed claim may be that allindividual differences in learning come down to the consequences of each learner’shistory of learning; no upsetting differences in innate ability or talent have to beconfronted. Constructivism seems to offer learning without tears. There is a tendencyhere, it seems to me, to brush all manner of obvious problems and dif� culties to oneside. But if this is indeed so, disillusionment awaits the unwary constructivist teacher.The greatest insight of constructivism is perhaps the realisation of the difference madeby a learner’s existing knowledge and values to what is learned next, both in facilitatingand inhibiting it (e.g. Claxton, 1990). But this is a neutral insight, in that it points toboth possibilities and problems. Learners do need to interact, to have dialogues, tosolve problems and to make sense of new ideas; but they also often � nd it dif� cult tosee why they should make the effort, fail to pay attention, misconstrue new concepts,forget what they learned ten minutes ago and fail to apply fragile new knowledgeeffectively to new contexts. They can be helped by the expertise of teachers and theyneed instruction, demonstration and practice, as well as challenging problems and

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investigations, to make progress. In all this constructivism moves us beyond naõ vete,but perhaps not very far.

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