30 April 2004

TEACHING AS A SUBVERSIVE ACTIVITY (concluded)     But the educational revolution never happened & the equation calculated by Postman & Weingartner was denied its proof.  In Britain Margaret Thatcher happened; in the States Ronald Reagan happened; that great geyser of legitimised greed that burst in the late ‘70s & engulfed the Western world in the ‘80s happened.  And here we are now on the other side of it but with the ideological wreckage it left behind all around us still.  Within government, within politics in general, we have been freed from the ties, the constraints, the ethical guidelines that once provided some sort of philosophical baseline that might in turn articulate policy.  The natural corollary of such a willing abandonment of ideology in the pursuit of realpolitik is the kind of world upon which so recently Great Britain & the United States opened the door.   Depressed by the news once again & moved suddenly by a sense of what might have been, I took Teaching as a Subversive Activity down from the bookcase the other day.  Flicking through the pages & then sitting down & re-reading more thoroughly, I was struck by the freshness & continuing validity of what had inspired me nearly 35 years earlier.  Where Winston Smith in 1984 speculated that the only hope for a better world lay with the proles, Postman & Weingartner place their faith in the young & in Teaching as a Subversive Activity they ask of education that most fundamental of questions: What’s worth knowing?   From TEACHING AS A SUBVERSIVE ACTIVITY   Thank God there are no free schools or printing For learning has brought disobedience & heresy into the world, & printing has divulged them God keep us from both. SIR WILLIAM BERKELEY, Governor of Virginia, d. 1677   ..   The institution we call ‘school’ is what it is because we made it that way.  If it is irrelevant, as Marshall McLuhan says; if it shields children from reality, as Norbert Wiener says; if it educates for obsolescence, as John Gardner says; if it does not develop intelligence, as Jerome Bruner says; if it is based on fear, as John Holt says; if it avoids the promotion of significant learnings, as Carl Rogers says; if it induces alienation, as Paul Goodman says; if it punishes creativity & independence, as Edgar Friedenberg says; if, in short, it is not doing what needs to be done, it can be changed; it must be changed.   ..   In our society, as in others, we find that there are influential men at the head of important institutions who cannot afford to be found wrong, who find change inconvenient, perhaps intolerable, & who have financial or political interests they must conserve at any cost.  Such men are, therefore, threatened in many respects by the theory of the democratic process and the concept of an ever-renewing society.   .   The principles of educational process now   ·         Passive acceptance is a more desirable response to ideas than active criticism. ·         Discovering knowledge is beyond the power of students and is, in any case, none of their business. ·         Recall is the highest form of intellectual achievement, & the collection of unrelated ‘facts’ is the goal of education. ·         The voice of authority is to be trusted & valued more than independent judgement. ·         One’s own ideas & those of one’s classmates are inconsequential. ·         Feelings are irrelevant in education. ·         There is always a single, unambiguous Right Answer to a question. ·         English is not history & history is not science & science is not art & art is not music, & art & music are minor subjects & English, history & science are major subjects, & a subject is something you ‘take’ &, when you have taken it, you have ‘had’ it, & if you have ‘had’ it, you are immune & need not take it again. (The Vaccination Theory of education?)   .   ‘What’s Worth Knowing?’ Extracts from a relevant questionnaire # 1     ·         What do you worry about most? ·         What are the causes of your worries? ·         Can any of your worries be eliminated? ·         Which of them might you deal with first? How do you decide? ·         If you had an important idea that you wanted to let everyone (in the world) know about, how might you go about letting them know? ·         What bothers you most about adults? Why? ·         How do you want to be similar to or different from adults you know when you become an adult? ·         What, if anything, seems to you to be worth dying for? ·         How did you come to believe this? ·         What seems worth living for? ·         How did you come to believe this? ·         How can you tell ‘good guys’ from ‘bad guys’? ·         How can ‘good’ be distinguished from ‘evil’? ·         At the present moment, what would you most like to be doing? Five years from now? Ten years from now? Why?  What might you have to do to realize these hopes? What might you have to give up in order to do some or all of these things..?   .   On Languaging   It turns out that language is far from being neutral in the process of perceiving, as well as in the process of evaluating perceptions.  We have been accustomed to thinking that language’ expresses’ thought & that it ‘reflects  ‘ what we see. We now know that this belief is naïve & simplistic, that our languaging process is fully implicated in any & all of our attempts to assess reality.     Proposals for action in the classroom   1.       Declare a 5-year moratorium on the use of all textbooks.  (If it is impossible to function without textbooks, provide every student with a notebook filled with blank pages & have (them) compose (their) own text) Have English teachers teach maths, maths teachers English, social studies teachers science, science teachers art, & so on. transfer all the elementary school teachers to high school & vice versa. Require every teacher who thinks he knows his subject well to write a book on it. (In this way he will be relieved of the necessity of inflicting his knowledge on other people, particularly his students). Dissolve all subjects, courses, & especially course requirements. (This proposal, all by itself, would wreck every existing educational bureaucracy. The result would be to deprive teachers of the excuses presently given for their failures & to free them to concentrate on their learners). Limit each teacher to three declarative sentences per class, & fifteen interrogatives. (Every sentence above the limit would be subject to a fine. The students can do the counting & collecting). Prohibit teachers from asking any questions they already know the answers to. (This proposal would not only force teachers to perceive learning from the learner’s perspective, it would help them to learn how to ask questions that produce knowledge). Declare a moratorium on all tests & grades. (This would remove from the hands of teachers their major weapons of coercion & would eliminate two of the major obstacles to their students’ learning anything significant). Require all teachers to undergo some for of psychotherapy as part of their in-service training. ( Its purpose: to give teachers an opportunity to gain insight into themselves, particularly into the reasons they became teachers). Classify all teachers according to their ability & make the lists public. Require all teachers to take a test prepared by students on what the students know. (Only if a teacher passes this test should he be permitted to teach). Make every class an elective & withhold a teacher’s monthly cheque if his students do not show any interest in going to next month’s classes.  (This test would simply put teachers on a par with other professionals, e.g. doctors, dentists, lawyers etc .) Require every teacher to take a one-year leave of absence every fourth year to work in some field other than education. (Such an experience can be taken as evidence, albeit shaky, that the teacher has been in contact with reality at some point in his life ) Require each teacher to provide some sort of evidence that he or she has had a loving relationship with at least one other human being. (If the teacher can get someone to say, ‘I love her (or him)’, she should be retained. If she can get two people to say it, she should get a raise ) Require that all the graffiti accumulated in the school toilets be reproduced on large paper & be hung in the school halls.  (Graffiti that concern teachers & administrators should be chiselled into the stone at the front entrance of the school) There should be a general prohibition against the use of the following words & phrases: teach, syllabus, covering ground, IQ, make-up, test, disadvantaged, gifted, accelerated, enhancement, course, grade, score, human nature, dumb, college material, & administrative necessity)       ‘What’s Worth Knowing?’ Extracts from a relevant questionnaire # 2   What do you hear if you are in a car & it is raining outside? Describe the odor of gasoline. What sounds do you hear if you are walking with heavy boots in deep snow?  (Don’t use the word ‘crunch’) What does hair feel like? Describe the texture of skin.  Feel it. How would you describe fear?  Describe the odor of freshly cut grass. Describe the sensation of placing an ice cube against your lips. Is there a particular odor  in the air before a rainfall?  Describe it. Is there a particular odor in the air after a rainfall?  Describe it. If your hand slides across a piece of silk, what sensation do you feel? If you were to walk barefoot along a beach of pebbles, what would you feel? What does your hand feel like? What does someone else’s hand feel like? Describe the taste of salt. Describe the flight of a seagull.     Well, if you got this far, you’re a teacher, a student or someone who shares my conviction that if there exists a forum wherein the revolution might be fomented, it’s the school.    I shall now climb down from my hobbyhorse & resume my customary diet of piss-takes, polemic & poems + pics           11:20:59 PM    Mmm? []

© Copyright 2004 Dick Jones. Last update: 01/05/2004; 23:09:58.