Our book club read Avatars of the Word by James O’Donnell, a classicist/techie/vice-provost,
who teaches at the University of Pennsylvania.
Near the end of Avatars, O’Donnell made some points about the future of
higher education. Although I’ve found myself nodding in agreement through much
of the book, I took a little issue with some of his ideas about how we should
reform our teaching-learning practices. In particular, he mentions the need
for learning experiences in colleges to be relevant to or modeled on the kind
of experiences students will have as adults in the world: "the traditional
classroom is among other things a place for rehearsing behaviors of use in later
life" (185).
I do agree with this notion, but my encounter of it here has led me to a somewhat
tendentious quarrel with it, along these lines: Might we, through
such thinking, be overly fitting the purposes of college to the (superficial)
purposes of society? Might not one argue that, rather than provide
direct preparation, or “training,” for adult life, college should instead provide a
countering or corrective influence to adult life?
I’m thinking of an individual who has, in fact, made such an argument. That
person (no surprise here to those who know me) is Kenneth Burke, who in his
1955 essay, "Linguistic Approach to Problems in Education," describes
the purpose of education as a kind of "preparatory withdrawal" from
life in order to equip us for life. Burke’s notion stands as a kind
of counter-statement to O’Donnell’s view: Education should function, Burke implies,
as a thing unlike life (thus the withdrawal) that helps gird you for
the struggles of life (thus the "preparation"). We go to college to
experience something different than the kinds of things and ideas we
will experience as adults. In this view, college provides not only a "broader
context" to adult experiences but also functions as an antidote to them–a
"counter-statement" to the assertions, or pressures of life. College
might equip us for life by stimulating our imaginations to think in grooves
very different from those that are etched by the pragmatic purposes of career
and social involvement. This value of college, Burke suggests, might be connected
with experiences of mortification, humility, appreciation–I think he even calls
it the "fear of God," though in a very secular sense. So what of it?
What do we think of this notion of college as a place set aside to scare us,
make us tentative, slow us down in our assertiveness?
More than anything, Burke seems to be promoting a cult of "interfence,"
as a type of protection against the efficiency of easy certainties. This is
an ironic approach to education–education as a kind of systematic complication
of our knowledge rather than mere confirmation, expansion, or application of
it. There is another Burkean context that come to mind–his essay on Thomas
Mann and Andre Gide in Counter-Statement. There Burke is talking about
the writer’s "art," but the points apply readily to concepts of "education."
Burke’s celebration of the perverse conscientiousness of Mann’s heroes and
the decadent irony of Gide’s anti-heroes points to a curricular ideal in a would-be
school of "preparatory withdrawal." Gide’s approach to irony, for
instance, helps us to break the spell of the "adult world" and its
ready-made reality. Burke quotes Gide, whose autobiography speculates on the
creation of "a whole civilization gratuitously different from our own"
(103):
I thought of writing the imaginary history of a people,
a nation, with wars, revolutions, changes of administration, typical happenings….
I wanted to invent heroes, sovereigns, statesmen, artists, an artistic tradition,
an apocryphal literature, explaining and criticizing movements, recounting
the evolution of forms, quoting fragments of masterpieces…. And all to what
purpose? To prove that the history of man could have been different—our
habits, morals, customs, tastes, judgments, standards of beauty could have
all been different—and yet the humanity of mankind would remain the
same. (103)
From Mann’s conscientious attitude of "containment," we get a "sympathy
with the abyss," an orientation quite inefficient for "rehearsing
behaviors of use in later life." Or to put it more positively, what of
the notion of college as a type of a "magic mountain" experience?
One goes to the magic mountain to experience routines and purposes of a very
different pace, style, and quality than those afforded by the hustle-bustle,
work-a-day world.
College as a "magic mountain" may be a traditional idea, and one
might even cite conventional notions of higher education’s role to promote independent,
critical thinking. But Burke’s notions of "preparatory withdrawal,"
inefficiency, and irony imply a goal of discomfort for education more
than anything else. In summing up his analysis of Mann and Gide, Burke asks
a question that for me functions as a first principle for an educational program:
"Irony, novelty, experimentalism, vacillation, the cult of conflict—are
not these men trying to make us at home in indecision, are they not trying to
humanize the state of doubt?"
Anyway, what of this notion of college as a "magic mountain"–a place
to which we withdraw, so that we might gain the (often ironic) resources
to encounter (or simply counter) the shaping forces of the world? O’Donnell’s
statement (that I have pulled out of context for my own purposes) made me think
of all this–most of all, the quote below from the conclusion of the Thomas
Mann and Andre Gide chapter. Just change the word "art" with "education":
…society might well be benefited by the corrective
of a disintegrating art [EDUCATION], which converts each simplicity into a
complexity, which ruins the possibility of ready hierarchies, which concerns
itself with the problematical, the experimental, and thus by implication works
corrosively upon those expansionistic certainties preparing the way for our
social cataclysms. An art [EDUCATION] may be of value purely through preventing
a society from becoming too assertively, too hopelessly, itself. (105)