Kieran Egan
The academic ideal and asses loaded with books
The next really big development in human intellectual culture after the development of language was the invention of literacy. While literacy may be counted as one of the most productive of human inventions, transforming our conditions of life and the conditions of our minds like no other, for the poor educationalist it is the source of another huge set of problems. Clearly literacy has been in general a good news scenario, but it also carries for the educator some bad news, some worse news, and some really bad news.
The good news is easy to see. Literacy has allowed generations of people to record their knowledge and experience. Further generations can compare that recorded knowledge with what they can see or discover, and leave a more accurate record, and they can compare other's experience with their own, enlarging and enriching their experience in consequence. Today we have stored vast amounts of knowledge in written records and we have access to a vast array of varied human experience. These enable our minds to transcend our own time, place, and circumstances.
Eric Havelock argued that Plato's great achievement was to work out how to think once alphabetic literacy became common (Havelock,1963, 1982, 1986). The result is both described and, if you'll excuse the term, paradigmatically exemplified in Plato's dialogues. When the best-accumulated knowledge coded in writing is learned, Plato taught, it transforms the mind of the learners and enables them to understand the world more accurately and truly.
The bad news in this for today's educators is that they have to work out what, among the vast accumulation available, is the best knowledge for children to learn. Herbert Spencer was confident that his answer to the question, "What knowledge is of most worth?" was unassailable. But, of course, everyone assailed it. Is the best knowledge that of the "timeless classics," "the best that has been taught and said," as Matthew Arnold argued or of urgent knowledge about current social conditions, or of economically productive skills, or should children's own interests determine their curricula, or should our school curricula be a smorgasbord of all the above laid out by committees of "stakeholders," or should we have different curricula for different people, or a common or core curriculum for all, or what?
The bad news is not so much that we don't know the answer in any generally agreed way, but we don't seem able to agree on how we might go about reaching an agreed answer. Or, as Chomsky more neatly put it with regard to another problem, "we don't even have bad ideas" (in Horgan, 199?, p. 152); though that perhaps overstates it--we do have some bad ideas. But in the absence of any convincing theoretical grasp on the question, it is left to political power&emdash;to the committees of "stakeholders" laying out the smorgasbord. This might be a good solution if we think of education simply as socializing, but it is a lousy solution if we think education has something to do with that ideal Plato articulated for enabling us to understand the world and transcend the (socialized) conventions of our time and place.
The worse news is that, whatever the knowledge some group decides is worthiest for inclusion in our curricula, most students find literacy a sufficient barrier that they will be unable to access it anyway. It ought to be easy to teach children to read and write. The great cultural breakthrough made by the invention of the Greek alphabet &emdash; from which all modern alphabets are derived &emdash; democratized, one might say, reading and writing. One had to learn only twenty or so symbols which could be combined to approximate the sounds of language. But becoming literate has never been as easy as it seems it ought to be. Most people find reading a lot of text very difficult and when not compelled to do so, don't. When it comes to writing, most people find it almost impossible to compose a coherent piece of prose that can express what they think with economy, clarity, and elegance. A note or e-mail message in dull conventional terms is as much as the majority can manage.
A huge number of tablets have been excavated from the ancient port of Ugarit in Syria. They were written about 1400 B.C.E. About two thirds of them are made up of lists &emdash; of taxes, rations, supplies, pay, inventory, census records, personal and geographical names, etc. If we were to calculate the kinds of records stored in computers we would likely find a similar proportion was made up of lists. For most people, the earliest uses of writing remain its still predominant use &emdash; TV schedules, bus, train, and plane schedules, meeting agendas, with some small amounts of informational prose, as in newspapers. What of the pursuit of truth, the transformation of consciousness, the transcendence of our time and place on the literacy-powered wings of imagination? The worse news is that we don't know how to achieve these glories for the vast majority of children. Their achievement seems to require conditions that our schools are not very good at supplying.
For most children, school disrupts and significantly destroys the orality of their early years by insistently trying to teach literacy and the knowledge coded in literate forms. For most children, school fails to provide the glories of literacy and to provide access to literacy's transcendent culture. A complaint of aboriginal people on the west coast of Canada who had been compelled to send their children to schools has been that "they taught them to read and made them stupid." The schools disrupted and significantly destroyed the children's native oral culture, and in its place were able to put only a crude and debased literacy. This is analogous to what we do to most children in schools.
The really bad news is that there isn't any knowledge stored in our libraries and data-bases. What we can store are symbols that are a cue to knowledge. People can read the symbols and not understand the knowledge, or partially understand it, or have a vague sense of what it means. This happens in schools to such an extent that we expect it and grade children by the degree of understanding we think they have achieved.
The problem here is that knowledge exists only in living human minds as a aprt of living human tissue, and the literacy codes we use for storage are cues that need to go through a complex transformation before they can be brought to life again in another mind.
Many educationalists, and even more non-educationalists, confuse the codes with knowledge. They assume that if the students internalize the codes they will have the knowledge. Alas, not so. We can relatively easily compel or persuade or seduce people into internalizing literate codes&emdash;so they can pass exams and seem knowledgeable. This kind of learning has been the bane of insightful educators down the centuries. What it produces is not knowledgeable people, but, as Michel de Montaigne put it, asses loaded with books.
This well-schooled, exam-passing, information-loaded person has always exasperated the major educational thinkers. That bookish man who described how his own early reading set his mind afire&emdash;J.-J. Rousseau&emdash;in a characteristic outburst famously wrote: "I hate books: they only teach one to talk about what one does not know" (1979, p. 184).
Howard Gardner describes a modern rediscovery of this phenomenon in what were the most successful science students at leading universities. When given problems based on principles they had learned but in contexts different from those in which they had learned the principles, they typically responded incorrectly in much the same way as a typical unschooled five-year-old (1991, Ch. 1). The students drew on the intuitive folk-physics they picked up in those early years of effortless learning. Their dozen years of physics in school and university was an insecure accumulation compared with the foundational knowledge of their pre-school years. The trouble is that the intuitive folk-physics is wholly inadequate to a scientific understanding of the physical world. (Sweaters keep us warm because they are themselves warm, is a typical folk-physics error.)
We all recognize the difference between genuine knowledge and accumulated codes&emdash;we talk of education as against training, wisdom as against "book learning," insight as against literal thinking and so on. But our schools are not good either at recognizing the difference or, consequently, promoting the genuine article rather than the counterfeit. And, as usual, Gresham's law applies &emdash; debased coin drives out good. T.S. Eliot's "Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?" cannot be answered if one doesn't recognize a difference.
The problem Gardner writes about is just the same as Montaigne complained of. In Montaigne's day, the richness and abundance of understanding that should have come to all students from literacy through an education in the classics, had too often descended into dry pedantry. The nineteenth-century reformers saw the dry pedantry and assumed it was the classical curriculum that caused it. ("Anyone who has passed through the regular gradations of a classical education, and is not made a fool by it, may consider himself as having had a very narrow escape" [Hazlitt, 1951, p. 147]). So in its place they created a more "relevant" curriculum, and their progressive successors through the twentieth century have remained puzzled that it has produced similar, and even worse, results&emdash;not so much pedantry but ignorance so extensive that there has been nothing much to be pedantic about.
The really bad news, then, is that some kind of magic (or technique we don't understand) is required to bring back to new life in a new mind the desiccated written codes in which knowledge was stored by some other, perhaps long-dead, human mind. But even if we can manage the magic, I'm afraid there is even worse news than the really bad news. That is, even at its best, Plato's academic ideal can't deliver on its promises.
Plato describes an educational program that will carry the mind from the confusions and illusions of the folk-physics, folk-psychology, folk-sociology learned effortlessly in our early years, through a curriculum of disciplined knowledge, to an understanding of the true nature of things. It is a program that requires the sacrifice of easy pleasures, and the deployment of our laborious general learning capacity to reconstruct all our early false knowledge, converting our minds always towards rationality and truth and away from the seductions of beliefs, myths, superstitions. We are to climb beyond personal interest in looking at the world and see it objectively.
But it is not clear that Plato's, or anyone's, curriculum can deliver these benefits. It is not clear that the products of high literacy include justice, objectivity, or truth. Plato believed these were the fruits of his educational program and justified the austere discipline necessary to gather them. It is probably a better educational idea than anyone before or since has had, but it is not adequate. The worst news, then, is that the academic ideal of education is designed to achieve a kind of understanding it simply can't deliver&emdash;its justification is an ideal that is unrealizable.
Herbert Spencer was a product of such an education at the hands of his intellectual father and uncle, and he was fairly described by Beatrice Webb as suffering "the mental deformity which results from the extraordinary development of the intellectual faculties joined with the very imperfect development of the sympathetic and emotional qualities" (1926/1971, p. 54). Mr. Potter complained that Spencer, when he launched into his disquisitions, from which he couldn't be stopped, "bored him past endurance" (p. 48). Being a kind man, after complaining of Spencer's lack of "instinct" and excess of "intellect," Potter would say, "I must invite the poor fellow for a day of fishing."