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From "Real Teaching and Real Learning vs Narrative Myths about Education," Arts and Humanities in Higher Education 6.1 (2007): 7-27.

It is virtually impossible for any media narrative to create visual images of the critical forms of cognition, intellectual inquiry and intellectual discourse that lie at the heart of getting a genuine education. Secondly, what is made to seem trivial and irrelevant in media images of education is, for real teachers, the heart of the educational enterprise: learning how to think critically and analytically; learning how to read difficult texts; learning how to conduct intellectual discourse with others; learning how to attend closely to the structure of complex objects; learning how to measure, compute, and speak with distinct precision and accuracy; learning cognitive and emotional patience; learning to be thoughtful rather than impulsive; learning how to take historical and ethical perspectives on social issues; and so on. What education narratives ever show compelling images of these kinds of cognitive and intellectual exercise? According to the conventions of education narratives, any student who shows an interest in real intellectual activity gets branded by one of the negative stereotypes: geek, nerd, egg head, brainiac, and so on. But even if movies and television shows wanted to show compelling images of students achieving cognitive and intellectual development, they could not successfully do so because the kinds of effort that go into real education are nearly impossible to represent by means of dramatic images. What does a picture of someone studying a sonnet or solving a mathematical proof or contemplating a scientific hypothesis look like? At the very least, one's appearance in such moments is not interesting to someone else. If you and I are the outside observers, we might not even know that the person solving a quadratic equation is thinking. To you and me, he might look to be sleeping rather than thinking; he might be in a coma; he might even be dead. what we see in recently popular education narratives such as Dead Poets' Society, Renaissance Man, Dangerous Minds - and this is equally true of earlier education narratives such as The Blackboard Jungle or To Sir, With Love - are narrative images about the importance of social context and personal relations in schools. What we do not see, however, is students learning how to study or think.

© 2007 Copyright Marshall Gregory