The Elephant In The Room
As promised, the subject of this essay is the book Teaching As a Subversive Activity, by Neil Postman & Charles Weingartner. I would like to begin by saying that I will not be able to cover the entire book, chapter for chapter, in the space available; rather, I will touch upon what I believe to be the key points that the authors make on the state of our educational system, their diagnosis of the problems, and their prescription, if you will, for reforming education.
Let’s begin on a point I think we can all agree upon: our schools, as they are currently formulated and administered, are a disastrous failure. Ok, maybe this isn’t the best starting point, after all, because before we can say anything about the success or failure of an institution, we must clarify the purpose for which it was intended. In this case, there are a number of possible ends for which our schools might have been instituted. For instance, we might have built and staffed schools with the sole intention of providing publicly-funded daycare, or alternatively, the institution of the public schools might be imposed upon our impressionable children with the aim of indoctrinating them in the propaganda of the state, the conformist expectations of a consumerist society, and the docile subservience of good corporate wage-slaves. Without being paranoid, I would invite you to consider these options for a few moments. Honestly, though, there is no good reason for schools to exist aside from their publicly stated purpose: to educate our children, to give them the means to learn and to participate in the marketplace of ideas, so that they might more fully realize their potential as both citizens of our republican democracy, and as human beings in general. And, regardless of how well our schools might have achieved any of our other hypothetical ends, they have not succeeded in this legitimate purpose for many, many years now.
Mark Twain said that there are lies, damn lies, and then there are statistics. Books, reports and scholarly articles abound which could enlighten us as to the statistical failures of our schools, but I will not reprint them here. If we disagree at this early point, let me just say that only one who has been living with his head in a hole for the last quarter century could honestly declare that our educational system is living up to its name. The failure of our schools at their job of educating our youth is a given that, by now, should be beyond debate. In light of this state of affairs, we can now turn to our evaluation of Postman & Weingartner’s thesis.
Teaching the Process
Learning does not occur like filling a bathtub. Often, young people are thought of as empty vessels, into which a learned and sagacious teacher pours forth his wealth of knowledge, thus filling the student’s mind with facts and figures that will inevitably make him an educated person. Unfortunately, the metaphor is crucially flawed. One cannot teach in this way, for the underlying assumption is that the student, in his learning, is playing a passive role; the bathtub does nothing, while the water-bearer works hard to fill it. Such an arrangement ignores the vitality of the student, their interests and concerns, their aptitudes and abilities, as well as their character flaws and deficiencies. In short, the traditional metaphor neglects one of the most important facets of the learner: his humanity.
The truth is learning is an active process, a process of investigation and discovery, and the teacher is not an answer bank, he is a guide. Learning depends upon two basic skills: knowing how to ask the right questions, and being able to find the answers to them. And if schools are instituted among men to provide an education to the youth, then it is proficiency in these skills that they must impart to the students.
Of course, the logical prerequisite of asking questions is, naturally, interest. Engaging students’ natural curiosity in a subject is not such an easy thing to do, but without an interest in the question, a student will not willingly pursue the answer. Obviously, then, it is an exercise in futility to frame questions which fail to pique a student’s curiosity. The whole point is to teach them to pursue knowledge of their own volition, since the exuberance and fulfillment of the quest is as much a part of the lesson as is the process of finding out the answers. It is this thrill of the chase that will fuel their drive, their thirst for knowledge, once they have been cut loose as adults, and if there is no fulfillment in the task, they will loath to expend the effort. So the question arises, how does one engage a student’s curiosity?
The answer is that it is already engaged in something. Everyone is interested in something, whether it be astrophysics or astrology, mathematics or music, the silver screen or surfing, or anything else. Once again, the key is to recognize and account for the individual’s humanity, then to use that to break the ice. The truth is that every conceivable “subject” of study has some relation to everything else, so that even scuba diving can be used as the jumping off point for a discussion of fluid mechanics, marine biology, evolutionary and geological history, applied mathematics of a thousand varieties, and even poetry and literature. You just have to know what questions to ask to get the conversation started. The point is that students are not bathtubs, they are people, and like all people they have individual quirks and nuances which make them unlike any other person. If you want them to seek out knowledge, you have to meet them on their own turf, then you have to know how to lead them away from what’s familiar so that they will learn how to discover things they didn’t know before. Ironically, the hard part is figuring out what their home turf actually is.
One of the primary reasons for our schools’ monumental failure is that their design is a product of the industrial revolution, and though the prevailing philosophy of the time period in which they were conceived is now obsolete, the institution has failed to evolve. Specifically, our schools are guilty of treating students as shapeless masses of raw material, and mirroring the paradigms of the time of their inception, they were designed to take those raw masses and stamp out a series of homogeneous representations of the ideal “Educated Man.” Our schools are cast in the image of mass-production factories of such dehumanized products, and they have failed to produce educated people because they have failed to account for the very humanity of the ‘raw materials’ with which they are provided.
If meaningful education reform is to be achieved, then, we must begin with a complete reevaluation of the basic principles of the educational process. We must accept the organic nature of the student, with all that that entails, including the individual and unique characteristics that he brings to the classroom, his educational needs and desires as a growing, changing human being, his interests, concerns and aptitudes, and an understanding of the very human process of learning and discovering. Real learning takes place only when the student takes control of his own destiny, and if our schools cannot guide students through that process, if they cannot foster that interest and desire and provide the resources to satisfy the inquiring minds that develop, then what business have they got with our children?
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Discere Aude,
Hephaestus
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