kulturbrille:amanuensis

These were the little ones.

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realized that the elementary mathematics taught in schools reflected the conceptions of the subject that were centuries out of date.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.

Parts of a disagreeable, hastily-written essay of mine:

Theories of curriculum and of teaching and learning cannot, alone, tell us what and how to teach, because questions of what and how to teach arise in concrete situations loaded with concrete particulars of time, place, person and circumstance. Theory, on the other hand, contains little of such concrete particulars. Theory achieves its theoretical character, its order, system, economy, and, above all, its very generality only by abstraction from such particulars, by omitting much of them.

- Joseph J. Schwab

Perhaps as a way to summarily conclude, I shall suggest a way out of this paradox. There is no need to demolish the current system or indoctrinate vast numbers of teachers so that they might become reflective; it is, by its nature, impossible! All of us, as Macdonald says, are critical realists in our sanest moments. The first step is to recognise the teachers as individuals and allow them to freely interpret the curriculum. This, to me, is the most glaring omission in the system. Each of us grapples with reality and knowledge in a way so as to extract meaning and comprehension, and this is our greatest resource as educators. I find that, in my most difficult moments as a teacher, I always return to personal narratives to illustrate my point. I return to the roots of my logical, rational conclusions, and construct an elaborate perspective from scratch that my students are able to understand, and usually after I demolish it all so that they might see that there is more than one way of understanding even the most basic of scientific propositions. I give them context, because, just as in a literary text, even in science, context is everything, and show them that context is not just the anatomy of a heart, but also the history of its discovery, the social implications of this knowledge, and much, much more.

The system demands that we trivialise our personal journeys and deliver curriculum using chosen tools and techniques. We should select teachers not for what they know but how they know it; their ability to apply knowledge critically and expound on their chosen field. It still perplexes me how, for all subjects, we regularly invite professionals and experts to come in and speak to students, and we place them on pedestals. The teacher is relegated to being a conduit because of his or her lack of knowledge. The reality is, I think, that it is acceptable to have a teacher who is bad at speaking in public, but not to have one who does not have his facts right. Teachers should be given the confidence and critical awareness of their own learning and thinking, and to use their own narratives to teach, in their own fields. They should be able to combine universal narratives with their own histories and insights to deliver curriculum.

The difficulty then lies in recruitment and human resource management, not in impossibly abstract theories to be forced down the throats of hapless educators as paradigms or initiatives. This, I think, is possible, and we would then have a nation of hermeutically-emancipated, liberated, people.

Barely two years ago, I was free to say and write what I wished. I was a student of pedagogy and education, and it was imperative that I constructed my own approach and philosophy of teaching, before I was unleashed (or booted out) into the real world. After a frantically insipid year, alas, it was not to be. I have learnt far more in the last few months as I study curriculum theory, and one of my first lessons was that my opinions now matter more than ever before, but I am unable to speak them.

Opinions count for much more than we are willing to admit. So much is unsaid in this country that we suffer from a stifling, pregnant silence everywhere we go, and as we become entrenched in our thinking and roles, we find ourselves unable to speak. Acquaintances becomes friends, colleagues, new individuals, students become graduates, family structures evolve. Each new role that we take on is another albatross around one’s neck, delineating in a single label all that we can and cannot say, and consequently, what we can and cannot do.

Such a deadening miasma cannot be healthy; I write here anonymously, but you know who I am, so why can one not sign off with a flourish after every incomplete thought? Are we so naive to take everything we hear or read at face value? Should I be so cruel as to give an answer? So much time is spent decoding oblique statements and references, reading subtle gestures and discovering context that our very mundane lives become artifically difficult narratives, painful to bear and hardly worth the effort. In the movie ‘Liar Liar’, Jim Carrey’s character can do nothing but speak the truth. However, it is impossible to imagine what it would be like if we had to tell the truth for a day, for in the first place, most would have very little to say. And then entire lives would crumble and falter as we come to terms with all the newfound colour that would spill out of our atrophied minds; there would be love, hate, admiration, liberation, realisation, fear, the entire gamut of human experience that we are constantly suppressing and pretending to experience. It would then not be our thoughts and narratives that would be found lacking, but our very own unequal natures, this in itself an unbearable idea.

And so on. There is nothing wrong with oppression, as the thought goes, as long as you are not the oppressed, nothing wrong with silence, as long as you have nothing to say. Several weeks ago, my lecturer exhorted us to speak our minds and ask all the frivolous, unanswered questions on our minds as she spoke. It was impossible, of course; in that class, as in many others, many are quietly answering their questions, or judging them, even as they emerge from the gloom of their thoughts. Their constructed paradigms endure for as long as their intellect and stamina can support them, before they silently crumble and fade away. I must slave within the system, and then be old, decrepit, of no consequence, before I can speak my mind.

‘All teachers should be critical!’, goes the new rallying cry in class, and at the back of our minds we are thinking, well, everyone should be critical about everything, but it would be fatuous to say that out loud. We squirm when someone quotes Socrates about the unexamined life, not because we disagree, but because it strikes a (quickly ignored) chord, because most are unable to begin. Or even speak.