The Ethnocentric Origins of the Learning Style Idea

Cultural Difference

The idea that students differed from one another in ways that required some kind of individualized instruction originated during the progressive education movement (Cremin, 1961; Zilversmit, 1993). Scholars justified the idea of accommodating individual differences through child-centered rationales, which recommended hands-on learning catered to students’ interests, and intelligence testing, which outlined the alleged differences in student intellectual potential and ability. Both student-centered instruction and intelligence testing recognized that student difference was a major issue facing schools and that a rational, scientific approach to curriculum could meet that challenge (Kliebard, 1995; Zilversmit, 1993). However, in no way did progressive educators acknowledge that students may have different learning styles; the focus was solely on different levels of intelligence, ability, knowledge, or academic potential. The idea of different learning styles did not emerge until after World War II in response to changes in anthropological conceptions of cultural difference.

Prior to World War II, most White anthropologists employed a hierarchical approach to culture that viewed all societies, past and present, on a universal scale of sociological development leading from savagery to barbarianism to civilization (Stocking, 1968). All of the cultures that met the criteria for civilization were White, while all of the cultures that met the criteria for barbarian and savage were non-White. Thus, the ethnocentric hierarchical model served as justification for White supremacy in the United States and the world until the late 1930s. However, during the early 20th century, a group of American anthropologists led by Franz Boas, and his former students Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, questioned the efficacy of the hierarchical model of culture and sought to replace it with a contextualized, contingent, relativistic approach to culture based on cultural difference (Stocking, 1968). Drawing on their ethnographies of indigenous cultures, Boas, Mead, and Benedict described societies in terms of qualitative differences instead of approaching them in terms of quantitative and technological accomplishments. During this time, leading African American scholars such as W.E.B. Du Bois and Carter Woodson also employed a relativistic approach to culture by documenting the cultural achievements of Blacks in the past and present. However, White scholars mostly ignored the work of Du Bois and Woodson and continued to employ a hierarchical model toward communities of color through the 1930s. Innate/biological explanations of racial difference, especially among psychometricians, continued as well.

The Boasian view of culture slowly gained influence between the 1900s and 1920s, but it really did not take hold until the rise of Nazism in the late 1930s (Barkan, 1992). Anthropologists led the charge to attack the racial science that the Nazis were using to justify their genocidal policies against racial minorities. In response to the Nazis’ assault on minorities, the American Anthropological Association passed a resolution in 1938 stating: “Anthropology provides no scientific basis for discrimination against any people on the ground of racial superiority, religious affiliation, or linguistic heritage” because the “psychological and cultural connotations [of race], if they exist, have not been ascertained by science” (American Anthropological Association, 1939, pp. 29–30). Shortly thereafter, Benedict (1940) published Race: Science and Politics, and Montagu (1942) published Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race. Both books were bestsellers, and both drew on recent anthropological research to attack the scientific basis of racism. Benedict and Montagu insisted that there was no scientific basis for the biological origins for cultural traits and that culture—in the new, contextualized, relativistic version of the word—was the best way to describe differences among people of the world. As Mead (1940) asserted during World War II, “scientific research has documented the absence of any proof of reliable differences in intelligence and emotional make-up; differences, that is, which are impervious to the forces of cultural change” (p. 202).

The new relativistic definition of culture was a doubled-edged sword for communities of color in the United States. On the one hand, it removed the biological justification for racism and suggested that social inequalities between Whites and Blacks were the result of race prejudice, unjust social policies, and cultural difference instead of intelligence, innate potential, or immutable traits. The culturally relativistic approach opened the door for a more egalitarian view of racial difference. On the other hand, the new definition of culture inspired sociologists and anthropologists to replace theories of biological deficiency with newer theories of cultural deficiency that depicted communities of color as somehow pathological, damaged, or less developed than their White counterparts. As Frederickson (2002) explained, cultural racism “is a way of thinking about difference that reifies and essentializes culture rather than genetic endowment, or in other words makes culture do the work of race” (p. 141). Starting in the 1960s, social scientists drew on their ethnographic studies of low-income communities of color to construct new theories of cultural deficiency that while certainly less dismissive than the former biological theories of race, nevertheless approached communities of color through a deficiency lens, suggesting that they were somehow ontologically less developed than their middle-class White peers. That is, White scholars perceived people of color as having a culture to the same degree as middle-class Whites, but that culture was still deemed somehow pathological and/or deficient (Martinez & Rury, 2012; Scott, 1997; Valencia, 1997).

Personality Type and Cultural Deficiency

By the early 1960s, several trends converged to underscore a new focus on the alleged cultural deficiency of students of color living in cities, leading eventually to the suggestion that Black students may have their own learning style. First was the rediscovery of poverty ushered in by Harrington’s (1962) book, The Other America. In addition to people of color, Harrington’s study also depicted poor Southern Whites in Appalachia as part of the nearly 25% of Americans living in poverty. Furthermore, based on his study of the poor in Mexico City, Lewis (1961) introduced the “culture of poverty” thesis, suggesting that generational poverty created a self-perpetuating set of pathologies that impoverished people transmitted across generations, making assimilation to middle-class life difficult for youth living in poverty. Controversial reports such as Moynihan’s (1965) The Negro Family and Coleman et al.’s (1966) Equality of Educational Opportunity garnered further evidence that the learned cultural traits of people of color may be the biggest impediment to their success in school and that their impoverished condition was in part the fault of their own cultural attributes. The Moynihan report notoriously named the poor Black experience as “a tangle of pathology” (p. 29), and the Coleman et al. report demonstrated that family background, not per pupil expenditure, was the biggest determinate of success in school.

Second, the Civil Rights movement brought attention to the plight of oppressed groups. As African American leaders won political and legal victories, they soon shifted their attention to issues of economic and social inequality. To combat these social and economic inequalities, President Johnson’s Great Society and War on Poverty initiatives funded compensatory educational services such as the Head Start preschool program. The Great Society drew federal funding and research dollars to previously neglected urban areas populated by people of color. The engagement of urban, African American youth became a central concern for educators looking to bring equitable outcomes to students of color. Policymakers designed the Head Start and other preferential and compensatory programs to address the perceived cultural deficiencies of poor students in an attempt to close the achievement gap between White and Black students. However, many of the volunteers, workers, and researchers applied middle-class biases to urban youth, which further perpetuated the view that African Americans were culturally deficient.

Third, cognitive psychologists began questioning the alleged passivity of the human mind, as conceptualized by behavioral psychologists, and reenvisioned the mind as open, interactive, and culturally contingent. Specifically, cognitive psychologists considered the ways that preexisting cognitive schema and cultural attributes affected the process of learning, thus blurring the line between individual and group consciousness. Piaget argued that the child’s mind developed through epistemic stages that shaped and distorted how new knowledge was processed (Piaget & Inhelder, 1969). Bruner (1960) suggested that learning was a form of enculturation to academic ways of thinking. As Bruner (1966) argued: “Knowing is a process, not a product” (p. 72). Both Piaget and Bruner questioned the immutability of intelligence and emphasized the importance of early childhood education on future learning. More significantly, during this time, scholars began to consider the impact of cognitive differences, or “personality” (Allport, 1955; Jung, 1923), on learning, and a few studies even suggested that there were different ways that the mind approached a problem.

Jung (1923) first introduced the personality traits of individuals and how they differed in degrees of introversion, extroversion, sensitivity, intuition, thinking, feeling, judging, and perceiving. Myers-Brigg (1962) turned Jung’s personality types into the popular Myers-Brigg personality type inventory. Furthermore, in Psychological Differentiation, Witkin, Dyk, Fattuson, Goodenough, and Karp (1962) suggested that some learners were “field-dependent” while others were “field-independent” in their ability to solve problems; the former required social support while the latter did not. In The Silent Language (1959) and the Hidden Dimension (1966), Hall studied the unspoken language of gestures and nonverbal cues. He concluded that some cultures communicate in sophisticated ways through nonverbal cues and spatial recognitions that are missed and/or ignored by middle-class, White culture, which tended to be highly verbal. “People from different cultures not only speak different languages,” Hall (1966) explained, “but, what is possibly more important, they inhabit different sensory worlds” (p. 2). Hall included examples of how urban dwellers draw on different spatial cues than those living in suburban and rural areas, suggesting that urban youth had different cognitive-cultural approaches to their lives.

Collectively, this new scholarship reenvisioned the mind as context-bound, interactive, socially mediated, and culturally influenced. This new approach drew attention to the conditions and environments in which students were raised by suggesting that urban students experienced the world differently than suburban and rural ones. More importantly, this work underscored the idea that personalities, cultures, and environments intervened in the way students responded to stimuli. Instead of envisioning the mind as a blank slate that behaved in accordance with universal laws, as behaviorists suggested, cognitive psychologists and cultural anthropologists forged a new interactive and culturally informed approach to mind that opened the door for the idea that students (and/or groups of students) potentially learned differently. Under this new conception, the development of individual personality and acculturation of the individual to social/ethnic groups worked conterminously. As a result, the line between the individual and his or her culture was blurred and conflated.

Drawing on these developments in cultural anthropology, social policy, and cognitive psychology, Riessman (1962) authored The Culturally Deprived Child. Riessman suggested for the first time that differences in student achievement might be due to differences in “styles of learning” (p. 64). Riessman identified poor Appalachian Whites, Puerto Ricans, Mexican Americans, and Native Americans as culturally deprived, yet the examples in the book focused almost exclusively on urban and particularly male African American youth. In his book, Riessman used the terms “cognitive style,” “type of thinking,” “style of learning,” and “style of thinking” interchangeably (pp. 64, 115), yet subsequent learning styles theorists would later distinguish these concepts from one another (see Curry, 1983). Under the heading, “Another Style of Thinking,” Riessman asserted, “Deprived children are capable of developing abstract, symbolic thinking. They appear to develop this type of thinking in slower, more direct fashion; that is they require more examples before ‘seeing the point’” (p. 115). Riessman pointed to the untapped potential of urban youth and advocated for addressing their particular style of learning, writing:

The underprivileged child has a cognitive style or way of learning that includes a number of features that have unique creative potential: his skill in non-verbal communication (his is not word bound). His proclivity for persisting along one line (one track creativity), his induction emphasis on many concrete examples, and his colorful free association feeling for metaphor in language, perhaps best seen in his use of slang. These potentialities, indigenous to his cultural heritage, must be fully explored in any program concerned with developing talent among underprivileged groups. (p. 115)

Although Riessman stated repeatedly that he was trying to transcend the deficit approach to culture by “emphasizing the positive aspects of their culture, which, hitherto, have been largely ignored” (p. xiii), it was difficult to read his characteristics of culturally deprived children and their learning style as preferable to the learning style of mainstream, middle-class, White students. In other words, despite his best intentions, Riessman could not completely transcend the hierarchical view of culture because he judged the culture of students of color against the standard of White mainstream culture. Elsewhere in the book, Riessman decried the “anti-intellectualism and narrow practicality of the deprived,” again demonstrating that he was working, at least partially, through a deficit lens (p. 129).

Riessman’s book received criticism from both those who rejected his cultural relativism as well as those who thought he had overemphasized the cultural deficiency of urban Black students. As Cynthia P. Deutsch (1965) argued,

Riessman’s argument on cultural relativism does not take into consideration the increasing industrialization of our society and the consequent greater dependence on verbal communication which lead to a greater need for facility in verbal skills such as reading and writing. (p. 143)

Drawing on the research of Martin Deutsch, she insisted that language acquisition was critical to learning and that the urban Black youth had verbal deficits that needed to be corrected, not catered to. On the other end of the spectrum, African American author Ralph Ellison (1963/1986) insisted that there “is no such thing as a culturally deprived kid” (p. 65). Suggesting that Black students were culturally different, not deprived, Ellison argued that poor African American kids could draw on a rich “social fabric” based on “basic ingenuity” that had been overlooked by White educators. He implored educators “to find out what [Black children] have” and asked, “What do they have that is a strength?” (p. 65). He insisted that instead of language deficits, Black children had “great virtuosity with the music, the poetry of words” (p. 67). Citing Ellison, Castro (1971) likewise questioned Riessman’s assertion that students of color had verbal deficits and demonstrated the consistencies in the language patterns of African American youth, which she had studied in her research by using drama and games to access their rich linguistic knowledge.

In an article for the Journal of Negro Education, Riessman (1964) attempted to respond to both critiques of his approach—that he was too dismissive and not dismissive enough of urban Black youth. Carefully replacing the term culturally deprived with economically disadvantaged and/or educationally deprived, Riessman again outlined “the content-centered not form-centered mental approach” of urban youth and their “physical and visual style in learning” (p. 230). He also listed additional deficits of the educationally deprived such as “poor auditory attention poor time perspective, inefficient test-taking skills, and limited reading ability” of “disadvantaged youth” (p. 230).

Others took Riessman’s learning style idea even further. Dismissing Riessman’s relativistic approach to culture as too empathetic and irrational, Johnson (1970) likewise identified a learning style of the culturally disadvantaged. However, Johnson was more overt in his deficit language. “[T]he learning style of the culturally disadvantaged is not efficient,” Johnson explained, “it is slow, physical, nonverbal, problem-centered, and concrete-oriented—like the learning style of a young child” (p. 33). Johnson listed further deficits of culturally disadvantaged youth, such as “negative attitude towards intellectual tasks,” “inability to recognize adults as information sources,” “ineffectiveness to verbal stimuli,” “present-oriented,” “slowness with intellectual tasks,” and “inability to deal with multiple problems” (pp. 36–39). Johnson’s assertion that the learning style of the culturally disadvantaged was “like the very young child of any culture or social class” linked his assessment to the largely debunked ethnocentric theory of recapitulation—the idea that the development of the individual retraced the sociological/psychological history of the human race and that non-White cultures/minds represented earlier childlike stages of White cultures/minds. Pre-Boasian anthropologists in the early 20th century used the theory of recapitulation to justify domination over non-White and premodern cultures that were characterized as childlike, undeveloped, inchoate, and savage (Fallace, 2015). By adopting the “child” metaphor, Johnson unwittingly linked his approach to the hierarchical theory of culture he was trying to challenge. “The term culturally disadvantaged . . . is a relative term,” Johnson explained. “The disadvantaged materializes when the child leaves his primary cultural group to function in the dominant culture” (p. 3). Thus, according to Johnson, the deficits of the culturally disadvantaged were contingent, not absolute. Nevertheless, Johnson approached students of color as ontologically less formed than their White counterparts and espoused cultural assimilation in lieu of cultural preservation.

By the mid-1960s, the learning style idea had first entered the discourse via Riessman, and it did so in the context of teaching “culturally deprived” children. Riesmann’s book was not specifically about learning styles, yet it did represent the first time the term had been used in an educational context as a way to improve educational outcomes. However, not all scholars using the cultural deprivation paradigm adopted or discussed the idea of learning style. Conversely, not all scholars who employed the idea of learning styles linked the idea to cultural differences and deficits. Even those who applied the learning style idea to urban youth, such as Strom (1965), used it in inconsistent ways. As Strom pointed out in his book, Teaching in the Slum School: “Not only is instruction influenced by different types of learning but recent studies suggest that children differ in their preference of learning styles” (p. 78). However, instead of outlining the divergences between the middle class and culturally deprived learning style, Strom pointed to an “authoritarian method of learning” versus a “spontaneous style of learning in which trial and error, experimentation, and idea modification are utilized” (p. 78). Thus, Strom suggested that the “authoritarian” and “spontaneous” learning styles cut across class and racial types, thus paving the way for the race-blind learning style inventories of the 1970s.

Is There a Black Learning Style?

By the end of the 1960s, controversial research by Jensen (1969) reasserted innate explanations of racial disparities in intelligence. In this context, the learning style idea took on new relevance as an alternative to biological/innate explanations for disparities in school achievement among racial groups. The learning style thesis suggested that the low achievement of African American students was due more to a mismatch between the instruction of White middle-class teachers and the learning style of urban Black students than it was due to innate deficiencies in intelligence and/or cognitive potential (Cohen, 1969; Slaughter, 1969). In this sense, Riessman’s thesis was more liberal and humane than Jensen’s argument for the innate inferiority of students of color. Nevertheless, race-based learning style idea continued to be attacked by those who rejected his culturally relativism and those who thought he had not gone far enough in recognizing the positive attributes of Black students.

One empirical study by Smith (1966) employed different learning styles with Jobs Corps participants of different races and ethnicities. Reasserting the behaviorist approach to learning, Smith concluded that race made no difference in how individuals learned. “As has been long maintained by behaviorists,” Smith concluded, “the burden of learning lies with the teacher and the institution of learning, not with the learner” (p. 3). Although Smith found that ethnicities could not be aligned with specific learning styles, he argued that race, “particularly Negroes,” did make a difference in regards to behavior (p. 3). Smith found that when Blacks made up over 40% of the class, their achievement and behavior degenerated, but when they made up less than 40% of the class, their achievement and behavior improved. This finding reinforced the cultural deficit approach to African American youth because it implied that the cultural traits of Black students impeded their own learning, but only when the relative number of Black students was great enough to exert their cultural influence on the rest of the class. Yet paradoxically, Smith’s study directly challenged the idea that there was a Black learning style.

Despite evidence and argument to the contrary, the idea persisted that Blacks learned differently than Whites. Articles published in the 1970s (Cureton, 1978; Gantt, 1972; Johnson, 1970) cited Riessman as justification for the idea that a Black or culturally disadvantaged learning style could be identified and addressed. “Is there a black learning style, a learning style especially suited to innercity [sic] students?,” Cureton (1978, p. 755) bluntly and provocatively asked. “I believe there is,” he answered (p. 755). Even those who were critical of the research on learning styles were still hesitant to rule out the possibility that learning styles could somehow be aligned with race. As Costello and Payton (1973) argued, “It seems necessary to separate . . . those cultural differences which preserve diversity in our culture, and those differences in learning style that limit individual development and may have nothing at all to do with preserving cultural diversity or ethnic identity” (p. 100). In summary, there were several learning style typologies in circulation by the 1970s. Some scholars identified Black/White and/or assimilated/culturally deprived learning styles, while others used introverted/extroverted or authoritarian/spontaneous typologies. Some recognized issues of race, ethnicity, and/or class and made it central to their rationale for why addressing learning styles was so important. However, by the time a few innovative scholars decided to design learning style inventories for mass distribution in schools, issues of race/ethnicity were ignored.

Declaring itself the “first comprehensive approach to the assessment of an individual’s learning style in grades 3 through 9,” Dunn et al. (1975) published the first comprehensive Learning Style Inventory in 1975 (p. 5). Admitting that the “questions in the instrument” were “highly subjective and relative,” Dunn et al. admitted that their inventory merely assessed how “students prefer to learn, not the skills they use” (p. 6). Dunn el al.’s inventory was complex and involved 22 areas in the domains of environment, emotionality, sociological, and physical needs. The next year, Kolb (1976) published a simpler Learning Style Inventory that identified only four learning styles: convergent, divergent, assimilationist, and/or accommodationist. Kolb cited the work of Bruner (1960), Jung (1923), and Myers-Brigg (1962) as justification for his learning style inventory. In contrast, Dunn et al. did not cite any of the cognitive or anthropological research justifying the existence of learning styles, but they did cite several empirical studies demonstrating that students learned better when instruction was aligned with their learning style. Despite Riessman’s prominence in the literature, neither Dunn et al. nor Kolb cited him as the originator of the learning style idea. Generally, those who did cite Riessman in connection with learning styles tended to align certain learning styles with particular racial, ethnic, cultural groups or classes, while those who did not cite him tended to approach learning styles in more individualistic terms.

By the time Dunn et al. (1975) and Kolb (1976) published their learning style inventories, psychologists had completely purged the deficit language from the history of the learning style idea. Neither Dunn et al. nor Kolb addressed the issue of whether certain racial or socioeconomic groups learned differently. It is possible that scholars deliberately avoided the issue of race in an attempt to avoid the controversy that had embroiled the work of Riessman. Or more likely, they were unaware of the work of race-specific learning style theories altogether and believed that race, ethnicity, and culture were completely irrelevant to the way that individuals learn. Either way, Dunn et al. and Kolb had redirected the discourse on the learning style idea away from racial stereotypes and deficit language despite the fact that scholars had been discussing the learning style ideas and its link to race/ethnicity for over a decade before the learning style inventories had been constructed and the fact that some African American authors continued to pursue the idea that Black students may have a learning style that was incompatible with White schools (Hale, 1982; Shade, 1982). Once the race-neutral learning style inventories become popular for use with White students, the discourse shifted to the discussion of emerging issues, such as the consolidation of multiple learning style frameworks, judging the efficacy of the theories, and assessing its role in improving student learning (Curry, 1983; Dunn et al., 1981). However, the learning style idea was still conceptually messy and controversial. Curry’s (1983) review of the literature on learning styles ignored the issue of race/ethnicity and class, identified over a dozen learning theory frameworks, and concluded that there was “bewildering confusion of definitions surrounding learning style conceptualization” (p. 3). The same year Curry presented her findings, Gardner (1983) published his influential Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences that, although not technically a learning theory, nevertheless provided further evidence and momentum for the idea that individual students possessed divergent learning strengths, preferences, and styles.

Conclusion

Whether the learning style idea is valid and/or worth pursing today is beyond the scope of this article, which focuses solely on the ethnocentric origins of the idea. Nevertheless, advocates should be aware of its problematic early history. During the 1960s and 1970s, the learning style idea was plagued by two recurring issues. First, the existence of learning styles was assumed before it had been fully clarified and empirically established. Throughout its early history, scholars expressed skepticism of both the existence of learning styles and the assigning of learning styles to particular racial/ethnic groups (Costello & Payton, 1973; Smith, 1966), yet scholars continued to explore and apply the idea nevertheless. Second, many scholars conflated the culture of social groups with the psychology of individual students (Cureton, 1978; Gant, 1972; Hale, 1982; Riessman, 1962; Shade, 1982). As a result, they failed to distinguish clearly where individual psychology ended and enculturation to social groups began, especially when approaching students of color. This created a paradoxical construct wherein ethnicity/race explained everything when it came to the alleged learning style of low-income students of color (e.g., Cureton, 1978; Hale, 1982; Riessman, 1962), yet race/ethnicity explained nothing when it came to the alleged learning styles of middle-class White students because White students’ race was regarded as irrelevant (Dunn et al., 1975; Kolb, 1976; Myers-Brigg, 1962). As a result, scholars paradoxically perceived students of color to have a particular collective learning style tied to their culture while they perceived White students to have individual learning styles completely independent of culture. Both views reflected a conceptual inconsistency that reflected the ethnocentrism of the period.