Author: Ophelia Benson

So, we’re agreed then. Comfort and safety and enjoyment are not what’s needed, not unless one is ill or injured or a refugee from a war zone. We need our gadflies and lecturers and correctors and reformers, our troublers of the peace. We need our evangelists.

The Guardian has a review of Richard Dawkins’ new book, A Devil’s Chaplain, today. The reviewer (who, a correspondent tells me, used to be the bishop of Edinburgh) makes an interesting distinction between Darwin’s ‘classically Anglican’ atheism and the classically Evangelical variety Dawkins goes in for.

A friend of mine once remarked that he liked Anglicanism, because it didn’t interfere with your religion or politics, whereas Evangelicalism couldn’t leave anyone alone and meddled endlessly in people’s lives. If Darwin was a non-interventionist atheist, Dawkins is a great believer in the pre-emptive strike.

Well what else are teachers for? That’s their job, isn’t it, that’s what they do and what they’re supposed to do. Isn’t it? Not leaving people alone and meddling endlessly in the contents of their heads? Surely if one actually cares about politics and religion, ‘interfering with them’, i.e. arguing that there are better versions, is the logical thing to do. But then I’m an Evangelistic type myself, so I would think that.

The article by Harvey Mansfield we linked to in today’s News section examines a number of ways students are coddled or spoiled or pampered at Mansfield’s Harvard, coddled rather than being challenged and stretched as he thinks they ought to be and as, surely, is the whole point of education. If we are all perfectly all right just as we are, what do we need education for at all? Decoration? A status symbol, a positional good, bragging rights? A pretext for playing football or getting drunk? An expensive way to postpone getting a job?

The article is accompanied by a colloquy which offers some hair-raising personal testimony on the subject.

A questionnaire I gave students in every class to test their general knowledge led to one minority student claiming that it made him “feel stupid.” I suggested that perhaps the student was reacting in an overly sensitive manner and was informed by the department chairman that there is no such thing as hypersensitivity. (I’m sure this will come as news to paranoid schizophrenics.)

A repeated theme is the idea of education as a consumer item. This is also the subject of an article in Harper’s from 1997 which points out the way student evaluations tend to make teachers want to please and entertain their students more than provoke or push them. The classroom becomes just one more stand-up routine, and students have a good time but are left as they are.

Most of all I dislike the attitude of calm consumer expertise that pervades the responses. I’m disturbed by the serene belief that my function — and, more important, Freud’s, or Shakespeare’s, or Blake’s — is to divert, entertain, and interest…I don’t teach to amuse, to divert, or even, for that matter, to be merely interesting. When someone says that she “enjoyed” the course — and that word crops up again and again in my evaluations — somewhere at the edge of my immediate complacency I feel encroaching self-dislike. That is not at all what I had in mind.

Just so. Enjoyment, pleasure, amusement, and especially ease, comfort, and self-satisfaction are all very well in their way, but they are not enough, and they are not what people need at age eighteen. Discomfort, agitation, fear, excitement, hunger, are what’s needed. Not soft pillows and fluffy blankets and a spot before the fire and a basin of Mr. Woodhouse’s nice thin gruel.

Education. It keeps coming back to that, doesn’t it. Especially education in the broadest sense, which emphatically includes self-education and education as an intrinsic good, along with institutional and instrumental education. Education, especially the institutional variety, can be where one gets infected with fashionable nonsense, but education, especially the intrinsic good variety, is also the way to inoculate against it, and the way to cure it once infected.

We posted a link a couple of weeks ago to a story about Michael Dini, a Texas biology professor who is being investigated by the US Justice Department for refusing to write recommendation letters for students who cannot affirm a scientific answer to the question of how the human species originated. Now we get to write a blog about a blog about a blog on the subject. (I wonder how many levels blogs can go. Infinite? Or only six billion or so.) The writer is Chris Mooney, who as he mentions here, wrote a piece for The American Prospect on the inadequacy of ‘Intelligent Design’ theory (a piece which, ever-alert, we linked to in early December). The core of this article is Mooney’s ‘I think higher education should challenge deeply held beliefs’ and Dini’s expansion on the same thought.

Nor is one guaranteed that his/her most cherished beliefs will go unchallenged. Indeed, many students find it difficult to communicate with friends and family after completing a college education because they no longer share the same beliefs and values. College has introduced them to new knowledge and new ways of thinking. For many, especially those raised by parents who were not college-educated, college is a time of “de-acculturation,” wherein one gives up the culture in which one was raised, and subsequent “re-acculturation” wherein one takes on a new culture. My hope for all of my students is that they will become acculturated in “the life of the mind.”

Of course, this is not what most people think college education is for. College education is vocational training, after which one will be able to get a job that pays better than flipping hamburgers, so that one can buy a Sport Utility Vehicle and intimidate everyone who is still stupid and poor enough to drive a smaller car or even walk. That’s what education is for. There are still some poor idealistic wretches who think otherwise, but a good lawsuit usually shuts them up. Mooney cites this discouraging article we just did a Note and Comment on yesterday, written by a classmate of his.

So which is it going to be? Education for the sake of critical thinking, and some understanding of why one believes what one does and whether one ought to go on believing it? Or education for the sake of Loadsa Money and an undisturbed set of evidence-free beliefs. Perhaps litigation will decide the question in the US.

This is a bottomlessly depressing story, which resonates with several other stories we’ve linked to over the past few months. This one about students who made death threats against a teacher being temporarily re-admitted to the school, for example, and this one from only three days ago, which reports that the Welsh teachers’ union is calling for new legislation after a student who actually did shoot a teacher, albeit with a ‘toy’ gun, was also readmitted. In the Welsh case, as the Guardian reported, ‘Headteacher Dr Michael Norton permanently excluded the pupil after the incident and was quickly backed up by his board of governors. But the boy’s parents appealed to an independent panel, which overturned the school’s decision and forced it to take him back.’ Hands up, prospective teachers who would like to go teach in that school! Or any school subject to that kind of second-guessing.

It was not one of Jesse Jackson’s finer moments, when he attempted to do the same thing – force the re-admission of students who had been suspended from school for fighting – in the autumn of 1999. Many people were bewildered at his sympathy for the fighters and lack of sympathy for students and teachers who would like to learn and teach in a violence-free zone. It was a simple fist fight, he said blithely. And the nonsense is not even confined to the Anglophone world: I saw a story on a French tv channel in November about teachers on strike in a provincial French town over exactly such an incident: student violence, expulsion, reinstatement. ‘These boys will now be heroes to the other students,’ a male teacher said passionately to the camera, ‘what sort of atmosphere is that going to create in our classrooms?’

But I doubt the French can match the level of muddle-headedness the Kaplowitz story reveals. I hope they still hang on to enough Gallic cynicism and irony and je ne sais quoi to insulate them from the bizarre priorities Kaplowitz encountered during his training.

But the training program skimped on actual teaching and classroom-management techniques, instead overwhelming us with sensitivity training.

Alas, his story makes horribly clear that sensitivity was the last thing he needed. Stony indifference is probably the only quality that might have got him through his first year of ‘teaching’ unscathed.

Exiling my four worst students had produced a vast improvement in the conduct of the remainder of my class. But Ms. Savoy was adamant, insisting that the school district required me to teach all my children, all the time, in the “least restrictive” environment.

Oh yes. Least restrictive to whom? one wonders. Least restrictive to the students who want to wander around, assault other students, and make noise, which of course translates to very restrictive indeed to the students (the majority) who want to learn something. This is a large subject, and one we’ll be returning to on Butterflies and Wheels.