Teaching and Learning

Augustine’s Secret

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 3 Comments

James K. A. Smith on marketing, desire, and the erotic:

“In a culture whose civic religion prizes consumption as the height of human flourishing, marketing taps into our erotic religious nature and seeks to shape us in such a way that this passion and desire is directed to strange gods, alternative worship, and another kingdom.  And it does so by triggering and tapping into our erotic core — the heart.  Thus in marketing one finds the promise of a kind of transcendence that is linked to a certain bastardization of the erotic.  Certain modes of advertising appeal more directly to eros, to sexual desire and romantic love, and then in a  move of substitution, channel our desire into a product — or at least associate the product with that desire and promise a kind of fulfillment ….

… I think we should first recognize and admit that the marketing industry — which promises an erotically charged transcendence through media that connects to our heart and imagination — is operating with a better, more creational, more incarnational, more holistic anthropology than much of the (evangelical) church.  In other words, I think we must admit that the marketing industry is able to capture, form, and direct our desires precisely because it has rightly discerned that we are embodied, desiring creatures whose being-in-the-world is governed by the imagination.  Marketers have figured out the way to our heart because they ‘get it’:  they rightly understand that, at root, we are erotic creatures — creatures who are oriented primarily by love and passion and desire.  In sum, I think Victoria is in on Augustine’s secret.”    (Desiring the Kingdom, 76)

The Victoria in question is, of course, the purveyor of a certain line of woman’s attire.  Augustine’s secret, as Smith puts it, is the recognition that human beings are embodied, desiring animals before they are thinking, rational beings.  We aim at life with our heart, not with our mind — the heart here standing for all the emotional, affective, visceral and bodily dimensions of the human person.

Dread of the Unread

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 5 Comments

Several years ago I came across a well-known line from Erasmus: “When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes.”  Apparently this is a variant, the line from one of Erasmus’ letters dated 1500 runs thus:  “I have turned my entire attention to Greek.  The first thing I shall do, as soon as money arrives, is to buy some Greek authors; after that, I shall buy clothes.”  Although the variant is more pithy, the sentiment seems to me largely the same in either case. I clipped the quote and stuck it in my wallet.  It would serve as a gentle reminder of where the money went.  Book shops perpetually tempt, and used book stores in particular tempt beyond my power to resist.

All that is fine and well.  It may be a vice, but it is a splendid vice.  However, there is a dark side to the book shop; entering therein incites a certain anxiety and sadness.  A sign should hang over every book shop declaring, “Abandon all hope, all ye who enter in … you cannot read it all.”  The sentiment is ancient.  Ecclesiastes warned, “of making many books there is no end” … to say nothing of reading them.  I’ve thought in the past that I had overcome this anxiety, this psychological burden of the unread.  In “The Pleasures of Reading,” Joseph Epstein’s writes,

Gertrude Stein said that the happiest moment of her life was that moment in which she realized that she wouldn’t be able to read all the books in the world.  I suppose what made it happy for her was that it took off a fair amount of pressure.

And so I thought, upon reading that testimonial, that I too had now suddenly come to terms with the awful realization.  But no, it was a false dawn.  While the angst fades, it still abides and from time to time reasserts itself with a certain gleeful vengeance.  Epstein went on to say,

I have finally come to the realization that I shan’t be able to read even all the good books in the world, and, far from making me happy, it leaves me, a naturally acquisitive fellow, a little sad.

I rather sympathize.

With all of that in mind, consider Will Self’s column in the New Statesman that came to my attention via Alan Jacobs this morning.  Here’s a sampling:

Back then, I laboured under the healthy delusion that, although I could not be as well read as Coleridge (who was said to be the last man to have read everything), I might yet read all that truly mattered.

Now, just as the possibility of joyous congress among the stacks retreats on hushed puppies, so the idea of all those unread books has become a screaming torment. Even the most innocuous of local libraries feels to me like Borges’s library of Babel, with its infinite number of texts ….

If the consciousness of unread books was bad enough, what about the consciousness of unread web pages?

It all puts me in mind of the Cha’an meditation illness: an incontinent recall of Buddhist texts that is the symptom of a Zen pupil’s overstrained psyche, and which can only be rectified by his master hitting him on the head with a stick. Otherwise, the texts proliferate across his visual field, while the meaning of every word is instantly grasped by him. At first, there are just texts the pupil knows, but soon enough these are joined by others he has only heard of – yet these, too, are comprehended in their entirety.

There is worse to come, as flying from all angles wing still more texts that the pupil is compelled to include in his screaming wits – texts he has never heard of at all, texts he didn’t know could exist, texts written by alien civilisations, texts doodled on the Etch a Sketch of God by archangels peaking on acid! No stick is big enough to beat this pupil – Humanity. So the maddening and delusory library expands, while the real and useful one is shut down.


What are universities for?

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 2 Comments

Not too long ago I noted two essays that appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, one by Martha Nussbaum and the other by Keith Thomas, on the topic of the humanities and the university.  In his piece, “What are universities for?”, Thomas regretted the loss of the art of teaching within the context of an academic culture that put a premium on research and publishing.

In a recent interview, Wendell Berry expressed similar concerns:

I think [the University of Kentucky] has gone astray first with its long emphasis on research instead of teaching. If you promote research, which can be quantified, and make it the paramount issue with promotion and tenure and salary raises, then you diminish the standing and importance of teaching necessarily, which can’t be quantified. … Administrators have to find a way to reward professors for teaching.

Berry’s comments came in the wake of his decision to remove his papers from the University of Kentucky’s archives  in protest against the university’s recent emphasis on becoming a Top 20 “research university” and their acceptance of a sizable donation from a major coal company. Later in the interview Berry makes the following reasonable assumption:

And so the University of Kentucky has for some time had a program to become a top-20 research institution. Every sizable university in the country has that program, as if the present top 20 is going to stand back while the others pass them. I don’t think that’s going to happen for most of them. Well, let me not speculate.

In his essay, Keith Thomas observed that

Only a minority of academics can hope to achieve any real advance in their discipline, but all have the possibility of making an enduring “impact” on the minds of their pupils.

Combining Berry and Thomas yields the following formulation: only a minority of universities can hope to become Top 20 research institutions, but all have the “possibility of making an enduring ‘impact’ on the minds of their pupils.”  But this can happen only if they make teaching and “scholarship,” to borrow Thomas’ term, a priority.

You can read more about Berry’s decision at University Diaries and the Lexington Herald-Leader.

Grading Teachers

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 1 Comment

Two weeks ago, Stanley Fish wrote a column in the NY Times recalling his classical high school education.  Fish expressed his deep gratitude for the education he received explaining that,

although I have degrees from two Ivy league schools and have taught at U.C. Berkeley, Johns Hopkins, Columbia and Duke, Classical High School (in Providence, RI) is the best and most demanding educational institution I have ever been associated with.

That is remarkably high, and seemingly well-deserved, praise.  Fish’s column, which went on to review three recent books advocating a reconsideration of classical education and the humanities, apparently provoked a strong response from readers.  This Monday, Fish began his column by recounting the many responses he received which described an experience along these lines,

“I had a high school (or a college) experience like yours,” the poster typically said, “and I hated it and complained all the time about the homework, the demands and the discipline; but now I am so pleased that I stayed the course and acquired skills that have served me well throughout my entire life.”

I imagine this is not a terribly unusual situation.  We have all had the experience of coming to appreciate something in retrospect which for one reason or another, often immaturity, we were unable to appreciate at the time.  But, Fish goes on to reflect on the implications of this pattern for the near ubiquitous practice of student course surveys.

Now suppose those who wrote in to me had been asked when they were young if they were satisfied with the instruction they were receiving? Were they getting their money’s worth? Would they recommend the renewal of their teachers’ contracts? I suspect the answers would have been “no,” “no” and “no,” and if their answers had been taken seriously and the curriculum they felt oppressed by had been altered accordingly, they would not have had the rich intellectual lives they now happily report, or acquired some of the skills that have stood them in good stead all these years.

This is why Fish suggests that, “Deferred judgment” or “judgment in the fullness of time” seems to be appropriate to the evaluation of teaching.”  And this is also why Fish concludes,

… student evaluations (against which I have inveighed since I first saw them in the ’60s) are all wrong as a way of assessing teaching performance: they measure present satisfaction in relation to a set of expectations that may have little to do with the deep efficacy of learning. Students tend to like everything neatly laid out; they want to know exactly where they are; they don’t welcome the introduction of multiple perspectives, especially when no master perspective reconciles them; they want the answers.

But sometimes (although not always) effective teaching involves the deliberate inducing of confusion, the withholding of clarity, the refusal to provide answers; sometimes a class or an entire semester is spent being taken down various garden paths leading to dead ends that require inquiry to begin all over again, with the same discombobulating result; sometimes your expectations have been systematically disappointed. And sometimes that disappointment, while extremely annoying at the moment, is the sign that you’ve just been the beneficiary of a great course, although you may not realize it for decades.

Needless to say, that kind of teaching is unlikely to receive high marks on a questionnaire that rewards the linear delivery of information and penalizes a pedagogy that probes, discomforts and fails to provide closure.

In the interest of full disclosure, I am a teacher and I have been the subject of course surveys of the sort Fish describes, or better, decries.  For the record, I have done quite well on such surveys, so this is not a rant born of bitterness.  However, I find it hard to argue with the logic of Fish’s argument.  The rest of his column goes on to target a proposed education reform plan being advanced in Texas which relies on the student-as-customer model which is closely connected with the ethos of the student evaluation form.

Education in this country, at the secondary and post-secondary level, is unfortunately in a state of disrepair.  Countless books and articles have been written on the subject and some form revitalization is needed.  This much is true.  It is also true that often the problems stem from teachers and professors who are more interested in career advancement and security than they are in advancing the knowledge of their students.  Something needs to be done about this.  However, we should be careful to avoid a cure that is worse than the disease, and the further mechanization, commercialization,  and bureaucratization of education seems to be just such a deadly cure.

In his excellent piece, “The Computerized Academy,” from the Summer 2005 issue of The New Atlantis, Matthew Crawford offered these apropos reflections,

Ideally, a teacher’s judgment about what is good for you is not colored by what is immediately pleasant for you. But increasingly, what is good for the teacher (professionally) is determined by what is immediately pleasant for the student. The career incentives for professors can be managed to some extent by judicious deans and department chairs, for example, by norming a professor’s teaching evaluations against his or her grade distribution and the demands of the course, so that tough grading and a choice of difficult material, even if penalized by students in their evaluations, will not be allowed to threaten a professor’s tenure prospects. Absent such a contrarian, clear-eyed defense of excellence by those in charge, all the pressures on a professor tend toward dumbing things down: giving fewer assignments (less work for him), grading generously (less whining and pleading from students), and choosing subjects that are not too remote from the students’ experience (a sure path to popularity). Since that prior experience is constituted to a large degree by mass forces, there is a certain uniformity of perspective and taste that begins to assert itself in the curriculum.

Accountability that will not endanger the pursuit of excellence and reward conformity is the goal.  Figuring out the mechanism that will get us there is the task at hand. The indiscriminate expansion of choice and the introduction of market pressures into the classroom does not seem to be the right mechanism for the task.  At the very least, it is fraught with serious and troubling side effects.

Book v. Computer

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 1 Comment

The results are in (at least tentatively).

From the Freakonomics folks at the NY Times:

More evidence that technology doesn’t always equal higher test scores: a new working paper by Jacob L. Vigdor and Helen F. Ladd examines the effects of home computer and internet access on test scores.  Consistent with the research of Ofer Malamud and Christian Pop-Eleches, Vigdor and Ladd found that “the introduction of home computer technology is associated with modest but statistically significant and persistent negative impacts on student math and reading test scores.”

Meanwhile from a study reported on by The Chronicle of Higher Education:

What’s surprising … is just how strong the correlation is between a child’s academic achievement and the number of books his or her parents own. It’s even more important than whether the parents went to college or hold white-collar jobs. Books matter. A lot.  The study was conducted over 20 years, in 27 countries, and surveyed more than 70,000 people. Researchers found that children who grew up in a home with more than 500 books spent 3 years longer in school than children whose parents had only a few books. Also, a child whose parents have lots of books is nearly 20-percent more likely to finish college. For comparison purposes, the children of educated parents (defined as people with at least 15 years of schooling) were 16-percent more likely than the children of less-educated parents to get their college degrees. Formal education matters, but not as much as books.

This may of course assume that one doesn’t necessarily believe that quantity trumps quality.  For more on both studies visit Rough Type.