To start, we need to acknowledge that Bloom’s taxonomy has always been on shaky intellectual ground. It was developed as an ad hoc way of trying to compare courses in mid-century America. It certainly was not designed to become the governing pedagogy theory of higher education.

Mainly because it was never and is not a pedagogical theory of any kind.

If it was a pedagogical theory, it would include some idea of how learning happens and probably a theory of cognition or mind or something along those lines. But it doesn’t.

Bloom’s taxonomy became operative in higher education as part of its neoliberalization in the 80s and 90s. It reflects unexamined, hegemonic notions about the rational, possessed individual who owns property. In such an ideology, one of the properties an individual could “own” is an education (or knowledge or expertise). This was all integral to the cultural shift in America where education went from being a public good to a private investment: that is, an investment in the private individual’s “human capital.” From that we get the public divestment in education, the conception of education as an investment in future earnings, and so on. And Bloom’s taxonomy is the institutional tool by which universities legitimize the privatization of education.

Bloom’s taxonomy asserts that learning is divisible into a series of generalizable chunks. For example, analysis. You can analyze the water system of a wetland or the taxation policies in early industrial rural England. Same difference. You can demonstrate analysis as a property you possess by producing analysis (usually in some written form). Perhaps you are taking a class on the history of early industrial England and one of the “learning outcomes” is that you will demonstrate the ability to “analyze social policies and their effects on communities” or something like that. In theory, that outcome might apply to either assignment, especially if the wetland analysis was in “environmental studies” rather than biology.

Anyway, somehow without saying how, Bloom’s taxonomy as it is institutionally employed suggests that these activities are both progressive and cumulative. So that when you collect enough you get a degree and that means something more than that you’ve filled your course cart. It’s also important along the way, so that we can say to students (and other stakeholders) that if you pass/purchase a certain class then you become the proud and permanent owner of a set of learning outcomes.

So why say the ethical collapse is now?

Obviously this has to do with gen AI. Without question, generative AI can produce documents that demonstrate all the features of a document that provides evidence of meeting university learning goals. You can call that cheating if you want. But my question is why does that work?

Gen AI output can demonstrate meeting learning goals because a document isn’t evidence of thought and certainly isn’t evidence of specific thoughts. And even if a document could be evidence of specific thoughts, there’s no way it could assure that those thoughts are somehow the durable property of an individual. The ethical collapse comes because the notion that my reading of a text could be evidence of someone else’s durable knowledge, even durable for a hour, is losing its hegemonic consistency.

If you’ve taken a class in your life ever, this is probably evident in your own experience. If you have an undergraduate degree, I’m willing to wager that you couldn’t even name half of the learning outcomes in the classes you took. How could they be your property if you can’t even name them? That language class you took and then you never spoke again, where’s that knowledge? Who could still pass a Calc 1 final? if I put you back in your college major, you’d get easy A’s because you already have that knowledge inside you, right?

Right?

If this is the wrong approach, then how can we determine if students are learning? I suppose we would start with a theory of mind/cognition, and there are a number of them. But they aren’t really structured to validate handing individuals grades after a semester. Because that’s just some arbitrary way we divide up our lives socially. Why would we think learning would line up neatly with that? Learning is also collective. More often than not in my experience, once a student leaves college, with or without a degree, their experiences atrophy and fade unless they are maintained elsewhere in their lives. In short, for most people, aside from things that become applied in workplace practices, whatever cognitive capacities students may have had in college go away.

From a faculty perspective, learning outcomes should be viewed as institutional widgets. Like the endless froth of university acronyms, missions, and polices, learning outcomes are part of a self-referencing system of codes with no significance beyond the bureaucratic structure they purport to legitimize.

At the same time, we have all experienced learning, so I do not mean to suggest we do not learn in some fashion, obviously (I hope). I am also not suggesting that there isn’t an activity that we might call teaching, which can be done well or poorly like most things. What doesn’t really work is how we try to describe these things institutionally.