I start with the obvious starting-point: the gap between teaching and scholarship. For the most part, the conceptions of the arts and sciences which are presented to children in school are not those that contemporary scholars regard as being, in fact, the elementary principles of those subjects as now conceived. I think it was the mathematicians who first realized that the elementary mathematics taught in schools reflected the conceptions of the subject that were centuries out of date. They have begun to do something about this, and to try to develop a curriculum for mathematics which will present, in a logical sequence, a contemporary view of what mathematics is. Other subjects, including English, remain unco-ordinated, based on what are at best ad hoc principles.
[…] It has been said that this is an age of criticism: it is certainly an age of great self-consciousness about critical methods. A good many new schools’ of criticism have developed in recent years, seeming to have little in common beyond the ability to disagree with each other, to provoke positive and negative responses which seem equally confused. I think myself that we shall see much more unity in contemporary criticism when we realize that most of these new schools are also new teaching methods, each of them finding its own center of gravity at some stage of teaching.
[…] The only thing that is practical now is to gain a new theoretical conception of literature. The source of this new theoretical conception is contemporary criticism; the application of it to an articulated English programme still awaits us. Most of our difficulties in teaching English result from an immature scholarship that has not properly worked out its own elementary teaching principles: most of the difficulties in our scholarship result, even more obviously, from deficiencies in the teaching programme.
[…] The first thing that university teachers want to know is: what is important in the pre-university study of literature? Most of us, when we complain about our freshmen, base our complaints on the theme of information or memorized knowledge: our students don’t know enough; they haven’t read enough; the chronology of literature is a vague haze in their minds; some of them could hardly distinguish Chaucer from Tennyson except by the spelling, and so on. But if students don’t have enough information, it is a simple enough matter to supply it or to provide the sources of supply. The trouble is that what they learn within a mental structure of habits and assumptions, and university comes much too late in a students’ life to alter that structure.
[…] The primary function of education is to make one maladjusted to ordinary society; and literary education makes it more difficult to come to terms with the barbarizing of speech, or what Finnegans Wake calls the jinglish janglage.
– Elementary Teaching and Elementary Scholarship, Northrop Fyre
Frye argues that poetry is the basis for a literary education, where links to the imagination, myths, narratives, even a sense of the aesthetic, should be present at every level of an education. (He quotes, in passing, The Pirates of Penzance, which bounces in my head until I am trembling.)
I am no teacher, of course, not in any traditional sense; when my students (and colleagues) saw me mouthing nonsense in a video, they thought it par for the course. Instead, I have reached a sort of intellectual utopia (dystopia, more like, recalling the slate gray, moss green tint of London in the The Children of Men) where I have arrived by means of the discipline of education. Far too many choose, as Fyre decries, consciously their choice of major in university, for ‘conscious choice is for the uncommitted’, and that which moves us deeply spring from within, relying on the breadth and depth of our thoughts and mind to shape our existence.
At almost the end of another year of teaching, there is no doubt in my mind that I have found my calling; I am to continue down this rocky road to my Waterloo (wait, Utopia, I was going to say, but I might as well – it is a blog, after all, the leavings of my mind…) and there I shall find myself choosing between academia and – well, something else. Teach, I say, to those who are deeply rooted in the social, cultural couscous of this marvelously complex world; I am but a stilted, abstract entity too far removed from any real awareness of how things work at a level that allows me to sit quietly among the daffodils (such a disconnect and imbalance must be the product of an incomplete education). For I find no satisfaction in accomplishment or the gradual piecing together of a legacy, or the triumphant completion of an event or job, but the very act of thought – the hum of a mind, the clarity that it brings, the synthesis that it makes possible – that I wish.
It is hard to explain why this would be of any adaptive purpose; there is, after all, great value in working towards universal norms and ideals that everyone understands, even if after some cosmic struggle. It is noumenal; it is how I have come to understand myself, even if I cannot be sure how I came to be. And now, of course, one comes to a statement of purpose, a declaration of intent, that I should continue to seek out days like this, insulated from the mechanics of a real life, full of connections, considerations, things-to-be-done, where I stand on the shoulders of men and redeem myself from this life, to go beyond, and not to merely conquer or master, more than just the measures of a life as we know it.
I have found a way back from the wilderness; it is one that understands. For in years past when I was aimlessly exploring, experiencing, sliding from idea to idea, thought to thought, there was little to live for, but now there is. Not as a solution, but as a missing piece, found and unlike anything I imagined it would be.