tbsmllr

Neil Postman & Charles Weingartner, Teaching as a Subversive Activity

First thing to be said is that this book was written in 1969 — that’s 47 years ago — and it still seems radical and sure to shock some people. For example: I posted a list of the authors’ proposals for better schools and somebody tweeted “I agree with a couple of these, but they all just sound like they were written by someone with a bitter hatred of teachers.” I tweeted back, “or a love of students.”

Some notes, below.

Students should be “crap detectors”

Hemingway once said, “In order to be a great writer a person must have a built-in, shockproof crap detector.”

Postman and Weingartner propose that their version of education would “cultivate just such people—experts at ‘crap detecting.’” They underscore survival as the primary goal of education: that the world is changing more rapidly than ever, and our schools should produce a student with “an actively inquiring, flexible, creative, innovative, tolerant, liberal personality who can face uncertainty and ambiguity without disorientation, who can formulate viable new meanings to meet changes in the environment which threaten individual and mutual survival.”

This student would be like an anthropologist in her own culture:

We are talking about the schools’ cultivating in the young that most “subversive” intellectual instrument—the anthropological perspective. This perspective allows one to be part of his own culture and, at the same time, to be out of it. One views the activities of his own group as would an anthropologist, observing its tribal rituals, its fears, its conceits….

Who would rely on her own judgment and question authority:

“Good learners… recognize, especially as they get older, that an incredible number of people do not know what they are talking about most of the time. As a consequence, they are suspicious of ‘authorities,’ especially any authority who discourages others from relying on their own judgment.”

The primary objective for students is learning how to learn

Students should be engaged in a “questing-questioning, meaning-making process that can be called ‘learning how to learn.’”

Once you have learned how to ask questions—relevant and appropriate and substantial questions—you have learned how to learn and no one can keep you from learning whatever you want or need to know.

The authors note that most schools don’t teach students to ask questions, they teach them to come up with answers. The good teacher “is concerned with the processes of thought rather than the end results of thought.” They explain the difference:

When the older school environment has asked, “Who discovered America?” the inquiry method asks, “How do you discover who discovered America?” The older school environments stressed that learning is being told what happened. The inquiry environment stresses that learning is a happening in itself.

“Asking questions is behavior. If you don’t do it, you don’t learn it.”

Students learn what they want to learn

Unless…perceived as relevant by the learner, no significant learning will take place. No one will learn anything he doesn’t want to know.

It’s hard to do any real learning in school, because school is mostly a game of make-believe:

The game is called “Let’s Pretend,” and if its name were chiseled into the front of every school building in America, we would at least have an honest announcement of what takes place there. The game is based on a series of pretenses which include: Let’s pretend that you are not what you are and that this sort of work makes a difference to your lives; let’s pretend that what bores you is important, and that the more you are bored, the more important it is; let’s pretend that there are certain things everyone must know, and that both the questions and answers about them have been fixed for all time; let’s pretend that your intellectual competence can be judged on the basis of how well you can play Let’s Pretend.

Learning is a verb, not a noun. A process, not a product.

The authors emphasize that “the critical content of any learning experience is the method or process through which the learning occurs.”

Almost any sensible parent knows this, as does any effective top sergeant. It is not what you say to people that counts; it is what you have them do…. What students do in the classroom is what they learn (as Dewey would say), and what they learn to do is the classroom’s message (as McLuhan would say). Now, what is it that students do in the classroom? Well, mostly, they sit and listen to the teacher. Mostly, they are required to believe in authorities, or at least pretend to such belief when they take tests. Mostly, they are required to remember. They are almost never required to make observations, formulate definitions, or perform any intellectual operations that go beyond repeating what someone else says is true.

If you don’t change what students actually do in the classroom, you can’t change what they learn.

Part of the issue here is nouns and verbs. This is illustrated by a quote from Alan Watts’ The Way Of Zen:

“In English the difference between things and actions are clearly, if not always logically, distinguished but a great number of Chinese words do duty for both nouns and verbs—so that one who thinks in Chinese has little difficulty in seeing that objects are also events, that our world is a collection of processes rather than entities.”

The authors point out that we’re obsessed with describing these processes, these verbs, as nouns:

Why the mind? Why a noun? Why a “thing”? As John Dewey and Arthur Bentley observed, we would come much closer to actuality if we spoke of “minding” (as a process) rather than of “the mind” (as a thing).

Learning is non-linear

If the learning process were to be visualized, the authors say it would look something like a Jackson Pollock painting: “a delightful, fitful, episodic, explosive collage of simultaneous ‘happenings.’”

How unique and meaningful an individual’s education depends on not just about what is learned, but in what order it’s learned. “A syllabus not only prescribes what story lines you must learn…. It also prescribes the order in which your skills must be learned.”

Textbooks, tests, and technology won’t help

The good teacher “regards learning as a process, not a terminal event… he assumes that one is always in the process of acquiring skills, assimilating new information, formulating or refining generalizations.”

Tests, which see learning as a series of fixed points, also corrupt the learning environment:

As soon as [tests] are used as judgment-making instruments, the whole process of schooling shifts from education to training intended to produce passing grades on tests. About the only wholesome ground on which mass testing can be justified is that it provides the conditions for about the only creative intellectual activity available to students—cheating. It is quite probable that the most original “problem solving” activity students engage in in school is related to the invention of systems for beating the system. We’d be willing to accept testing if it were intended to produce this kind of creativity.

Textbooks are largely worthless, because they consist of information which has (often arbitrarily) been deemed important by a committee (probably somewhere in Texas) and is often painfully out-of-date.

Technology, on the other hand, is of no particular value if it is used only to further the old methods of stuffing students with information, or in the authors’ words, educational technology is mostly “fancy hardware being developed to jazz up the Trivia contest.”

At this point, I’ve read so many books about education in the past couple of months, that they’re starting to all blend in together. (There were several sections of this book that felt like they were ripped straight from John Holt’s How Children Fail.) I liked this one a lot, and look forward to reading more Postman in particular. (Check out my friend Matt’s “Neil Postman” tag.)