On Reality and Education

I heard from my friend Cathy who assured me that it was okay that I was slacking off in writing this blog; she was slacking off in reading it. What she suggested was writing things that are not necessarily true. Who would know? she asked. So beware that I may slip into sensationalism for the sake of keeping my audience. I won't announce it, however, so it will be your job to consider carefully what may be true and what is not.

In keeping in the mode of audience attention, I thought it was interesting to read reports from early U.S. educational reports. My colleagues and I labor over what can keep students' attention, worry that a decline in attention reflects on us or that students are changing. In an 1828 Report by the faculty at Yale, the observation is made that lectures are a needed part of the educational process so as to "give that light and spirit to the subject, which awaken the interest and ardor of the student." So are these early Yale-ites eager to learn? The warning is given that lectures alone are problematic because "they do not always bring upon the student a pressing and definite responsibility. He may repose upon his seat, and yield a passive hearing to the lecturer, without ever calling into exercise the active powers of his own mind" (I think we've seen those same students reposing.) Students were asking questions such as each should "waste his time upon studies which have no immediate connection with his future profession" and why all students should be required to take all the same classes since a student may have "no taste or capacity" for that subject (have we heard "I'm just not a Math/English/Science person?"). A liberal arts education was, by the way, nonetheless roundly supported.

And in case we think students were given tougher and better education back then--how many of us have heard that we should force students to memorize and recite--students remembered learning as boring: "No attempt was made to interest us in our studies" says one student of this time. "As only a few of the class recited well enough for us to learn anything from what they said, those hours were not only wasted, but put us in a condition of mental torpor." (Well, at least this former student knew what "torpor" meant.) Not much, apparently, was contextualized, and much "discussion" was actually recitation. On the other hand, recitation was also given as punishment--"two South Carolina College students who were discovered shooting their guns in town were punished by being forced to recite fifty lines of the Aeneid to the faculty." That-a-way to ennoble the text.

Some lessons can be learned for what faculty should teach, dare I say especially composition faculty? The Yale Report recommended faculty plus tutors (a bit like our grad students or recently graduated undergrads): "The professor . . . may be greatly aided . . . by those who are not as deeply versed as himself in all the intricacies of [the subject]. Indeed we doubt whether the elementary principles are always taught to the best advantage by those whose researches have carried them so far beyond those simpler truths, that they come back to them with reluctance and distaste. Would Sir Isaac Newton have excelled all others of his day, in teaching the common rules of arithmetic?" Okay, I'm not saying we're all Newtons, but it does say something about having grad teaching assistants.

And to my female colleagues, a few words of warning. Advanced public discourse for women was discouraged, "lest women appear 'threateningly insane and requiring restraint.'" (Yep, been there, done that.) One student at a college for women describes one of her teachers: "Miss Gilbert is rather singular. She is about 40 years of age. She has been quite a belle of New York in her younger years, but being reduced in affluence as well as age, she does not attract so many admirers as in former years, when about 18 perhaps; this consideration renders her rather petulant." Really, I haven't been petulant in at least a week.

I think it was Socrates that was reported to have said something about the youth of the day being lazy and unmotivated and not like youth used to be. I think Plato got it all wrong--there are no perfect forms out there: no perfect students, no perfect teachers, no perfect anything. It is what it is. That's reality. We take it, we deal with it, we act as if things can get better, but we shouldn't spend too much time and energy lamenting that it may not get better. We can celebrate when things work well, when the light bulb goes off over a student's head, when we refrain from going insane. All this is true. Or not.

p.s. in honor of anti-plagiarism rants and raves I provide in my classroom, all above quotes were either from the Reports of the Course of Instruction of Yale College (1828) or Caroline Winterer's The Culture of Classicism (2002).