Giving Place to Unforeseeable Learning: The Inhospitality of Outcomes-Based Education

Abstract

OUTCOMES-BASED EDUCATION: THREE CRITIQUES In recent years, under the influence of measurement and accountability discourses in North America, as well as in the United Kingdom, Australia, and South Africa, the concept of "outcomes-based education" has become increasingly popular. The idea is that the quality of education can and should be assessed by the measurable results it produces in terms of students' knowledge and skills. Moreover, the processes of listening, reading, writing, thinking, playing, observing, and others that make up educational time should be designed for particular predetermined outcomes and are considered successful only when those outcomes have been achieved. In the design of specific curricula and pedagogies, the term "prescribed learning outcomes" is sometimes used to identify those predetermined outcomes whose achievement constitutes educational success-regardless of other, unforeseen outcomes of the educational processes. Several authors have critiqued the economically driven paradigm in which a focus on outcomes fits. In the Australian context, for example, where outcomes-based education has already been widely implemented, John Smyth and Alastair Dow argue that outcomes rhetoric serves to justify "the scientific management of teaching and learning in a way that establishes a correspondence between the processes of education and the demands of industry." 1 The technical-rational approach to teaching and the idea that education is "the 'answer' to the economic imperative" go hand in hand. 2 Also in Australia, Richard Berlach has critiqued outcomes-based education for its definitional vagueness, its reliance on corporate jargon, and its excessive requirements of assessment and documentation. 3 Berlach thus points out that the demand for measurable outputs is coupled with heavy surveillance in the service of economic utility and productivity. A second critique of outcomes-based education might take John Dewey's pragmatic perspective and argue that outcomes-based education is, by definition, miseducative. By focusing education on predetermined outcomes, the experiences that students are set up to have are restricted and become, in turn, a hindrance, rather than a conduit, for future experiences-the very definition of a miseducative experience. 4 Predetermining the valuable outcomes of an experience glosses over the fact that experience is, in Dewey's terms, an interaction, and that one part of that interaction is constituted by the internal factors brought by the student. Dewey advocates education that allows the student to get "out of his present experience all that there is in it for him at the time in which he has it." 5 In other words, an educative experience is one that makes the fullest use of all that there is to be had from the interaction between the internal factors of the student's previous experiences and the