understanding
THE EDUCATION MESS WE'RE IN
by
DAVID SOLWAY
______________________________
David
Solway is a Canadian poet and essayist (Random Walks)
and author of The Big Lie: On Terror, Antisemitism, and
Identity and Hear,
O Israel! (Mantua Books). His editorials appear
regularly in FRONTPAGEMAG.COM and
PJ Media. His monograph, Global Warning:
The Trials of an Unsettled Science (Freedom Press Canada)
will be launched at the National Archives in Ottawa on September
10, 2012. His latest book of poetry, Habibi:
The Diwam of Alim Maghrebi
(Guernica Editions), is now available. Also a singer and
songwriter, David's CD is scheduled to be released later in
the year.
In
Plato’s dialogue the Phaedrus, the sine qua
non of the educational transaction is identified as “an
acquired conviction which causes us to aim at excellence.”
This conviction, and the double purpose of such excellence —
knowledge of the subject to be learned and knowledge of the
soul that digests the subject (thus relating the academic subject
to the psychological subject) — has today been almost
entirely forgotten or deliberately abandoned. The culture’s
memory bank has been junked and students enter on their careers
— such as may still be found in our diminished world —
with only a small float in their cerebral registers, living
on a reduced intellectual budget. Their connection with the
legitimate culture, that is, with the memorial scope and vista
of our history as a civilization, has been rudely and peremptorily
aborted, and replaced by an instrumental modality of instruction
that is grievously lacking in substance.
The
attitude of our so-called educators toward their profession
is perhaps best described in the paradoxical phrase coined by
the Hellenistic philosopher Philo of Alexandria, the nefalios
methi, or “abstemious intoxication”: “abstemious”
because it eschews the plenitude of genuine teaching and knowledge-based
scholarship, and “intoxication” because it is besotted
by the reductive paradigm of instruction it has enthusiastically
adopted.
This
paradigm is instantly recognizable by the contents and procedures
that dominate our public school classrooms: films galore, computer
simulations, audio-visual devices, testable competencies, PowerPoint
presentations, concept maps, information transfer, virtual whiteboards,
expurgated texts, true-or-false exams demanding little in the
way of written formulation of ideas, and so on. Teachers are
trained to emphasize method, to prepare instructional designs,
to focus on “techniques” of transmission, to valorize
process instead of matter, to generate “lesson plans”
rather than lessons — “That’s the reason they’re
called lessons,” remarked the Gryphon in Alice in
Wonderland, “because they lessen from day to day.”
Meanwhile, since they are expected to be communicators rather
than preceptors, teachers are regularly shunted around the curriculum
and required to teach outside their disciplines — which,
be it said, they have often failed to master owing to the institutional
stress placed on tactics and delivery rather than on grist and
corpus. Thus the poor geography teacher becomes a worse gym
instructor.
Doubtlessly,
the penchant for instrumental modes of teaching has been with
us since time immemorial, but in the current climate it has
been exalted into a hypothetically remedial ideology and institutionalized
as a pervasive method of committee-backed instruction. It is
high time we became aware, then, that despite all the media
hype and the inundation of formulaic pamphlets, primers, and
manuals which experts, specialists, and many public school teachers
have unfathomably welcomed, and the misguided policy to hire
100,000 more ill-equipped teachers, the techniques that have
become so popular these days do not work. As I wrote in Education
Lost: Reflections on Contemporary Pedagogical Practice,
“the fundamental premise at the bottom of modern educational
theory, namely that teaching is a science whose operative concepts
are those of storage, dissemination and skill-replication .
. . is faltering badly, especially in those disciplines which
are not data-based.”
To
avoid or at least mitigate the disaster we have brought upon
ourselves, we would do well to recognize our pedagogical arrogance
and to revive the sane and prudent, low-tech high-intelligence
mode of operating associated with certain earlier institutions
such as, for example, the Merchant Taylors’ School in
mid-sixteenth century London. The founders of the school, which
turned out an elite corps of graduates including the poet Edmund
Spenser, confined their speculations (in the words of Elizabeth
Watson in her little book on Spenser) “to the ensuring
as exactly as possible that the condition of their school and
its running shall be conducive to study and learning, without
attempting to implement any particular syllabus, or even to
insist on any theory or method of education.” They offered
their students a true, down-to-earth education rather than the
cold cultivars of merely fashionable theory.
Everything
considered, and allowances made for cultural and historical
differences, the Merchant Taylors’ School, in the early
to middle period of English pedagogy, was a far superior secondary
school to anything our contemporary ideologues and planners,
whose ignorance of educational history is impressively catholic,
have managed to install today. We no longer teach the classics,
those documents — in the words of Melville scholar and
Norton anthologist Hershel Parker — that “afford
the most rich, complex, aesthetic experiences . . . most likely
to work transforming enlightenment . . . in all earnest young
students.” On the contrary, our current methodology, pursued
in a cognitive vacancy, constitutes nothing more than another
pedagogical talisman which testifies only to the bankruptcy,
or the magical thinking, that has overtaken the culture of education
to which we unthinkingly contribute. We have long passed the
time, laments Welsh poet Gillian Clarke in her new book Ice,
“when the map of the earth was something we knew by/heart.”
It is as if we have simply forgotten the central axiom of human
development: if you know very little, you cannot do very much.
'Method can never be a surrogate for substance.' You must work
to have something there if there is ever to be something there
to work with.
We
are speaking of education here, but education is not only and
exclusively education; it is also an expression and a symptom
of the culture in general. And thus, it is not only students
who are at risk, but all of us in whatever field, niche, or
social category we may find ourselves. This is precisely the
argument that the late president of the Czech Republic Vaclav
Havel makes in his Summer Meditations, in which he
stresses that the only way to fulfill the purpose and historic
mandate of the schools is to eschew the production of “idiot-specialists”
and “to send out into life thoughtful people capable of
thinking about the wider social, historical, and philosophical
implications of their specialties.” And not only of their
specialties, of course, but of the social, cultural and political
world in which they will be constrained to live and for which
they will be held accountable.
In
1695, the Puritan divine Timothy Cruso, after whom Defoe may
have titled his famous novel, wrote: “The days wherein
we live are extremely evil, but we have yet a sad and doleful
prospect of the next age becoming worse . . . We see such crowds
and swarms of young ones continually posting down to hell, and
bringing up so much of hell in the midst of us . . . we cannot
but use some Christian endeavors to open the eyes of these mad
prodigals, and to fetch them home.”
Christian
endeavors aside, such fears and imprecations are fashionable
in every age and testify as much to the inevitable incompatibility
of the generations as to the progressive regression of history.
Nevertheless, I sometimes wonder if a time will not eventually
come in which the apocalyptic platitude manifests as ineluctable
fact, in which the fears of conservative parents are ultimately
and unexpectedly realized in their refractory offspring, victims
of a feckless and corrupt Academy. I suspect we may be there
now.
Perhaps
we can start by re-reading the Phaedrus, that is, by
recognizing that the past has much to teach us and that we are
not free-floating, ahistorical particles who owe nothing to
the archive of our civilization. For we, too, like our progeny,
will be held accountable.
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