Linearity of Time and Education

Lo thy dread empire, Chaos is restored;

Light dies before thy uncreating word:

Thy hand, great Anarch lets the curtain fall

And universal darkness buries all.

(as cited in Doll, 1993, p. 86)

Introduction

   As an international student pursuing a doctorate in a foreign country, my friends constantly asked me whether they should go for a doctoral degree after they receive their master’s. Their concern is that the time spent on getting a Ph.D. degree will not be worth the investment. It is as if an educational process is a linear timeline, which you start from your bachelor’s degree and end in the culmination of Ph.D. Their thinking always baffles me but the above quote from Pope helped me put their thinking in perspective. In essence, as Slattery (1995) has argued, the philosophy of modernity has resulted in a rejection of chaos by emphasizing the manipulation of time through expert time management and quantifying the achievements through finishing “assigned tasks” (e.g., finishing your Ph.D. degree in three years with a number of good publications). This concern for racing through your life courses has resulted in popular metaphors such as time flies and carpe diem, as if time is an entity that can be controlled. Or alternatively as Huebner (1975) opined that the belief in the linearity of time exerted pressure on educators to establish clear and verifiable goals. In this paper I attempt to first describe a linear perspective on time and what postmodern perspective on education can offer an alternative understanding of time.

Modernist Perspective on Time

   According to Slattery (2013), the modern mechanistic view of time has its origins from the Seventeenth century and the Newtonian vision of the universe as a giantclock system with time marching forward like a stream in a trajectory that is irreversible. Thus because time is conceptualized as never-ending and irrevocable, there is also an incessant motivation for a goal-oriented constraints because you simply cannot waste your time. Slattery (1995) opined the solution to this constant constraint on time for educators is to develop technology and organizational structures that will allow for more efficient allocation of time. However, these technological innovations did not fundamentally solve the problem of the thinking that human progress can be conceptualized as linear sets of events which can be broken down, segmented, isolated and then evaluated. This perspective as culminated in the policy of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), which stipulated observable students’ progress through standardized tests.

   However, as Dewey (1938) wrote, we are always living in a historical present and it is the present moment that is the focus of our experience. The Buddha also cautions in Diamond Sutra that you cannot own hearts of past, present and future because they are all illusions and has nothing to do with your Buddha nature. Happily, postmodernism has offered us a way out of this impasse by integrating the fusion of the past and the future into the existential present. In other words, the past and future are combined when we are living at the present. The following section elaborates on how a postmodern perspective on time can offer us a way out of current deadlock.

Postmodernist Perspective on Time

   Slattery (1995) has explained that a rejection of the assumption of concrete, historical time in favor of a process-oriented view of education, or in Deweyean sense, experience. As Hueber (1975) emphasized so convincingly “The very notion of time arises out of man’s existence, which is an emergent. The future is man facing himself in anticipation of his own potentiality for being” (p. 244).

   The implication for post-modernist perspective on time is Doll’s (1993) vision of curriculum as a process and learning and understanding results from dialogue and reflection. Alternatively, Pinar (2013) conceptualized curriculum as consisting of four stages, the regressive moment, the progressive moment, the analytic moment and the analytic moment. Or as Slattery (2013) argued, “Reconceptualized curriculum theory understands time and history as proleptic- that is as the confluence of past, present and future in the synthetical moment” (p. 68). The implication for educators is a focus on learners’ autobiographical experience and the interconnectedness of all experiences. It rejects the strict adherence on quantifiable results and linear progression of time with an eclectic celebration of chaos. As Doll (1993) has explained, chaos is not purposeless and destructive but quite complex and orderly. It is a complexity best exemplified by the butterfly effect, which M.I.T. climate scientist Edward Lorenz discovered in his simulation of weather patterns. As Slattery (2013) argued, this dynamic pattern exists in the classroom and every teacher recognizes this reality. Therefore we have to lament that we are trying to use an unfit model to a reality that only exists in our imagination.

Conclusion

   So what is the response that I gave to my friends worrying about whether a doctoral education is worthy of investment? I used my personal experience as a reference point. Being a career A-minus student, I am not so brilliant that I entered the doctorate program straight out of college. I have applied and been rejected by graduate programs of linguistics, in which my passion lies. It took some twists and turns and some fortune on my part to finally land a spot working on linguistics in an education department. However, the time lapses actually did not affect my study. In fact, I not only gained more experience with linguistics by reading papers by myself but also gained practical work experience when I spent two years working as a English teacher in Taiwan. Therefore my advice to them is think long and hard before you make a decision, and if you decide to pursue your doctorate, dedicates yourself to your study. If you work hard enough, the time lapses actually would not harm you!

翼鵬

德州農工大學

乙未年仲夏書於潛龍齋