I’ve nearly finished reading The Americans: The Democratic Experience by Daniel J. Boorstin. I didn’t have any particular plans to comment on the insights and delicately ironic prose of Professor Boorstin until I read these words:
For while Eliot, reformer though he was, still thought and talked about “subjects” of study, Hall, Dewey, and their followers thought and talked about the pupil. While Eliot aimed to emancipate the student from narrow, antiquated subject matters, giving him a freedom to “elect” the subjects of greatest interest, the others aimed to liberate the student from subject matter, to emancipate him to be himself.
I took some high school history courses (I think two) from a mildly eccentric but competent and learned man. Once, one of my fellow students started to pontificate on some matter and Mr. Bosquet stopped him short and said, “You have no right to an opinion until you know some facts about the matter.”
The problems caused by the American attitude toward the student are still deeper than we might think from Mr. Bosquet’s statement to a pupil-centric pupil, but it gives us an insightful and hardheaded start in understanding why my worldview, though far more humane than the views of the educrats, condemns this `pupil-centric’ education and strongly indicates a return to subject-centric education would be wise and might help us to become far better individuals and far better peoples. It might even help us to understand how to go about building a new, and far more glorious, phase of Western Civilization.
There’s no denying that Hall and Dewey and their followers won the war to control the American educational system and probably destroyed the American mind in the process. Certainly damaged that communal a lot along with a lot of individual minds. Certainly forced those desiring a healthy and active mind, a mind in contact with the intellect of the West, to avoid `learning’ too much in mainstream educational systems. (To be sure, some were lucky in being mentored by honorable and capable teachers, but that was purely a matter of luck. I wasn’t one of those lucky few.)
First, some wikipedia links to overview articles about the lives and works of the characters mentioned in this essay:
Both Boorstin’s book, which deals with Hall and Dewey in multiple places, and also the articles at Wikipedia tell us that their followers have been more guilty than the masters at some of the excesses of this `child-centered’ business.
Now, I move on to my critique. There is no creature with a mind, blank-slate or determined from conception, which presents itself at five to the kindergarten teacher. There is also no more than a hint of intellect, capitalized and communal mind, in the vast majority of 14 year-olds. Any competent teacher has to be responsive to the student’s needs and interests, strengths and weaknesses, to their progress or lack thereof, but teachers and students don’t come together to become buddies. They come together to each do the work appropriate to their role in their communities. And that job is mostly the development of the individual and intellectual (communal) aspects of the mind of that student. For various reasons, that job seems to be best done by courses which deal with sometimes artificially defined `subjects’.
Of course, the `subject’ isn’t the real point but rather the reality to which the subject points and the goal is to nurture a mind which gives its proper attention to that reality. A school subject be a natural science or human history or a human art or philosophy or theology or any of many other realms or aspects of reality. We develop human minds by a proper response to reality and that response can usually be at a high level only with the assistance of a sophisticated educational system. Even those with the talent to do creative work at some point can reach that point only by proper nurturing and guidance. A good school can help a mind acquire centuries worth of intellect in a few years — at least enough of that intellect so that the learning process can be self-sustaining, so that the student is ready to move on to being himself a true teacher or leader or thinker of a civilization.
Our brains are our own and the minds which arise upon a properly active brain are mostly our personal responses to reality, though those responses are — usually — best guided by expert teachers if those brains are to amount to much in the few years allotted to us in this mortal realm. The intellectual aspects of our minds are the communal responses to reality we accept into our own minds even though we might struggle against some things we see as errors or just unlovable in our traditions. We might even help to overthrow errors or to fill in some incomplete regions.
In any case, the student finds his real mind by giving his embryonic mind over to the subject, by losing his mind in that subject and allowing that immature mind to be reshaped so that it does not think about that line of mathematical reasoning but rather thinks that line of mathematical reasoning. The student should be preparing for those “Ah-ha!” moments which come after years of often frustrating study and leave the student in possession of Riemann’s insights into geometry and not just conversant about the textbook statements of Riemann’s accomplishments. The student should be helped not to stand over the founding of the United States, as if he were some sort of disembodied demon, but rather to find his mind actively carrying out lines of reasoning which flow along with the recorded reasoning of Jefferson and Adams and Sherman and Dickinson. He should acquire that informed and alert state where he is involved in those long-ago events but also detached and capable of a sympathetic and, perhaps, ironic understanding. He should feel some upset, one part of his mind for another, as the representatives of heavily-populated states debated the structure of the Federal government with representatives of lightly-populated states because he should be able to think the thoughts of each group even if he comes to align his views with only one side.
A pupil-centric education system won’t be oriented toward these higher states of the human mind. It will leave the student convinced he is inherently a person, a human animal with a difference. He comes in a five year-old human animal and leaves an 18 or 22 year-old human animal with misty memories of the stuff he learned for a bunch of tests. He will be in the dark about the nature of a civilization and the relationship between the human mind and civilization. He will be fundamentally ignorant of the ways in which a mind can be developed or a civilization built or nurtured and maintained. He will think he knows something when he knows no more than textbook and uninterested, not `disinterested’, summaries of something.
[In this essay, I’ve glossed over the power we have, especially in the modern world, to access external `memories’ of much in the Western intellect and even the intellects of other civilizations. We can also, for good and bad, quickly access the thoughts which can be considered those of individual minds over the globe. This is an interesting complication and possibly a game-changer. See my earlier essay Does the Body of Christ have non-human components? for a very preliminary discussion of these sorts of issues.]