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
