A Word about Education
By Chrys Horn
March 2006
‘We need to educate people’ is a comment I often hear in the context of improving environmental outcomes. Most people I talk to about this appear to be using what Paulo Freire called a ‘banking’ model of education. This model suggests that education is the transfer of information from one person’s head into the heads of others. The more information transferred, the better the education.
The practices that emerge from a banking approach include the idea that we need to give talks and produce information sheets, web pages, resources for schools and put out as many media releases as possible. In short, we need to advertise. There are several assumptions inherent in the advertising or ‘banking model’ of education. A few that come to mind are:
- The more information we put out or the more ‘advertising’ we do, the more our intended audience will hear us.
- We know how best to present our information to make it relevant and easy to understand.
- When people out there know what we know, they will act in the way we desire.
- Knowledge and information are objective, unrelated to agendas and power structures, and there is one correct truth that we all need to know.
- It is both possible and ethical to educate people to do things that we have decided are good for them.
As it turns out, none of these are particularly robust assumptions. First, human beings are experts at filtering out information. A researcher I talked with recently gave the example of interviewing people who live within a few hundred yards of a billboard. Her work revealed that most of them had no idea what was on it – even though it had been there for some weeks.
People are constantly bombarded with information of various kinds from businesses, organisations or groups – trying to prevent the spread of aids, encourage people to buy their products, exercise, stop smoking, stop drinking, drive safely, clean up the local environment, or fight crime and poverty.
At best, advertising may raise someone’s awareness that something is out there. Ads simply make people aware that when they want something like X, Y or Z that this is an option. They do not generally make people go out and buy X, Y or Z. Buying usually happens only after the customer has found out more from family or friends who have used the product, or from the Internet, or from a salesman. In other words, the customer needs some kind of engagement with information that they trust. Successful marketers seldom use advertising by itself. They spend a lot of time talking with and trying to understand their target audiences and building relationships with them.
Second, we do know how to make information easy to read and understand and it is good to do this. People are more likely to read short articles than they are to read journal articles or books. Articles that bring together a range of findings from different studies are even better. However, different groups may need different approaches when it comes to making information relevant. The best way to produce something relevant to a group is to get some of them to help with writing articles or preparing talks.
Third, ‘educating’ does not necessarily change things the way we expect or hope. Attitudes are not strongly linked to behaviour. Despite what our intuition tells us, research indicates that intervening variables in the environment are much more likely to affect behaviour than any attitude a person has towards that behaviour. Education may actually result in the opposite of what we expect because people tend to use information to confirm their current position. Everyone carries around a different set of information and experiences to which new information is added. Different people make their judgements from very different perspectives. To have any hope of ‘persuading’ people of anything, much time is needed to learn from them about their perspectives on the issues and on the information in question. Another aspect to this is that the way people perceive a personal information source (in terms of questions like “are they from the same broad social group?” “Are they well respected?” and, “Are they trusted?”) will affect what they make of information they are given.
Fourth, in this respect, knowledge is not objective. Without careful reflection, people tend to collect information that confirms their position and gloss over information that disconfirms it. All of us construct knowledge according to our own interests, needs and experiences, so our experience of getting information can affect the way we treat the information. That is, the tone of the information can be more important than the content. How do you feel when someone speaks down to you, or tells you to do something even when you know they might be right?
The last few paragraphs indicate that it is not possible to educate people to do as we might wish. Furthermore, some care is needed when trying to change others, particularly where one might be perceived as having more power in a situation, or where you may inadvertently encourage people to act against their own interests.
Social systems are not like technical or ecological systems in that there are ethical issues associated with manipulating the system without the consent of the people in that system. As a social scientist my priority must be towards the people that I am ‘researching’ and it is not for me to decide what is of benefit to them. My work focuses on helping them learn so they can make those decisions for themselves.
Freire P 1972. Pedagogy of the oppressed. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Azjen Icek 1991. The theory of planned behaviour. Organizational Behaviour and Decision Processes 50: 179–211.
Ross L,Nisbett RE 1991. The person and the situation. Philadelphia, PA, Temple University Press.
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