The End of Education (15 page)

There is no need for you to do this alone. You should consult with your classmates, perhaps even form a study group that can collectively review the things I have said. Nothing would please me more than for one or several of you to ask for class time in which to present a corrected or alternative version of one of my lectures.

I am banking on readers’ agreeing that these three ideas are neither humorous nor impractical. Neither do I see them as gimmicks. To try to renew a teacher’s sense of the difference between teaching and learning, to eliminate packaged truths from the classroom, and to focus student attention on error are part of an uncommon but, I believe, profound narrative capable of generating interest and inspiration in school. It is, in fact, a refutation of a story that infuses so much of schooling as we know it and have known it for so long. I am referring to the story that says the following in a hundred ways to students: You come to school to learn important facts and enduring truths. Your teacher knows many of these, your textbooks still others. It is not your business to know where they came from or how. It would, in any case, be a waste of valuable time to burden you with the mistakes of those who
thought
they had discovered important facts and enduring truths. School is not a place for documenting error, but for revealing the true state of affairs.

Do I exaggerate? I don’t think so. The sentences above, with some variations and a few addenda, express the attitude of most schools toward knowledge (especially, by the way,
most colleges) and explain why a course or two in “critical thinking” is quite irrelevant. They also explain the easy appeal of the previously mentioned “cultural literacy” project developed by E. D. Hirsch, Jr. The idea there is for students to become acquainted with a thousand facts without pausing to know whose facts they are, how we come to know them, why they are deemed important and by whom. This leads quite directly to the state of mind sometimes called “justificationism.” As used, for example, by Henry Perkinson in
The Possibilities of Error
, the word refers to the tendency of most people to engage in a rigorous and “natural” defense of their own beliefs, not so much to explain their beliefs as to justify them. Although we are all accustomed to such performances, is there not something strange about this—this idea of education in which everyone is encouraged to justify, fight for, and defend what they believe, as if we did not know that our beliefs are flawed, imperfect, badly in need of improvement? It would take a satirist of Swiftian talent to show, first, how unseemly it is and then how deeply it offends the way people learn. I risk contradicting John Dewey’s most famous aphorism by saying that though we may learn by doing, we learn far more by failing—by trial and error, by making mistakes, correcting them, making more mistakes, correcting them, and so on. We are all in need of remedial work, all the time. And this includes teachers, students, and textbooks. Can you imagine a school organized around this principle—that whatever ideas we have, we are in some sense wrong? We may have insufficient facts to support an idea; or some of the facts we have may be incorrect, perhaps generated by a festering emotion; or the conclusions we have drawn may not be entirely logical; or some definition we are employing may not be applicable; or we may be merely repeating an idea we have heard expressed by some authority and have not examined its
implications carefully. Can you imagine schools whose epistemological story does not aim at producing a flotilla of fanatics, but, rather, people who proceed to learn with full consciousness of their own fallibility, as well as the fallibility of others?

How could such schools be created? Any plan would, of necessity, have its origin in a new way of educating teachers, because it would require a refocusing of the purpose of teaching. As things stand now, teachers are apt to think of themselves as truth tellers who hope to extend the intelligence of students by revealing to them, or having them discover, incontrovertible truths and enduring ideas. I would suggest a different metaphor: teachers as error detectors who hope to extend the intelligence of students by helping them reduce the mistakes in their knowledge and skills. In this way, if I may put it crudely, teachers become less interested in making students smart, more interested in making students less dumb. This is not a question of semantics. Or, if it is, it is not “mere” semantics. It is, in fact, the point of view taken by those who practice medicine and law. Physicians do, of course, have a conception of what is good health, but their
expertise
resides in their ability to identify ill health and to provide remedies for it. That is why, upon being consulted, their first and most important question is, What’s wrong?

The same may be said of lawyers, whose expertise resides in their ability to identify injustice and to pursue methods to eliminate it. In fact, to be realistic about the matter, for most physicians, good health is defined as the absence of illness; for most lawyers, justice is defined as the absence of injustice. Physicians and lawyers, we might say, function as painkillers. The good ones know how to relieve us of illness and injustice. I am suggesting the role of painkiller for teachers whose purpose would be to relieve students of the burdens of error—in
their facts, their inferences, their opinions, their skills, their prejudices.

It would not be easy to educate teachers to approach matters in this way. Unlike the study of sickness and injustice, the study of error has rarely been pursued in a systematic way. But this does not mean that the subject has no history. There are many honorable books that take human error as a theme. The early dialogues of Plato are little else but meditations on error. Acknowledging that he did not know what truth is, Socrates spent his time exposing the false beliefs of those who thought they did. Erasmus’s
In Praise of Folly
also comes to mind, as does Jonathan Swift’s
Gulliver’s Travels
. In a more modern vein, one thinks of Jacques Ellul’s
A Critique of the New Commonplaces
, Stephen Jay Gould’s
The Mismeasure of Man
, I. A. Richards’s
Practical Criticism
, Mina Shaughnessy’s
Errors and Expectations
, and S. I. Hayakawa’s
Language in Thought and Action
.

Such books are not normally included as part of the education of teachers. Were they to be used, teachers would be likely to come to three powerful conclusions. The first is that everyone makes errors, including those who write about error. None of us is ever free of it, and we are most seriously endangered when we think we are. That there is an almost infinite supply of error, including our own, should provide teachers with a sense of humility and, incidentally, assurance that they will never become obsolete.

The second conclusion is that error is reducible. At present, teachers consume valuable time in pointless debates over whether or not intelligence is fixed, whether it is mostly genetic or environmental, what kinds of intelligences exist, and even how much intelligence one or another different race has. Such debates about error are entirely unnecessary. Error is a form of behavior. It is not something we
have;
it is something
we
do
. Unlike intelligence, it is neither a metaphor nor a hypothetical construct whose presence is inferred by a score on a test. We can see error, read it, hear it. And it is possible to reduce its presence.

The third conclusion is that error is mostly committed with the larynx, tongue, lips, and teeth—which is to say, error is chiefly embodied in talk. It is true enough that our ways of talking are controlled by the ways we manage our minds, and no one is quite sure what “mind” is. But we
are
sure that the main expression of mind is sentences. When we are thinking, we are mostly arranging sentences in our heads. When we are making errors, we are arranging erroneous sentences. Even when we make a nonverbal error, we have preceded the action by talking to ourselves in such a way as to make us think the act is correct. The word, in a word, brings forth the act. This fact provides teachers with a specific subject matter in which they may become “experts”: Their expertise would reside in their knowledge of those ways of talking that lead to unnecessary mischief, failure, misunderstanding, and even pain.

I believe Bertrand Russell had something like this in mind when he said that the purpose of education is to help students defend themselves against “the seductions of eloquence,” their own “eloquence” as well as that of others. As I have previously mentioned, the ancient Greeks—that is, the Sophists—believed that the study of grammar, logic, and rhetoric would provide an adequate defense. These arts of language were assumed to be what may be called “meta-subjects,” subjects about subjects. Their rules, guidelines, principles, and insights were thought to be useful in thinking about
anything
.

In poking fun at those who saw no purpose in learning about language, Erasmus (in his
In Praise of Folly
) wrote with
sharp irony: “… what use of grammar, where every man spoke the same language and had no further design than to understand one another? What use of logic, where there was no bickering about the double-meaning words? What need of rhetoric, where there were no lawsuits?”

He meant to say that as humans we will always have difficulty understanding one another, will always bicker about the meaning of words, always claim we have been injured by another. There is nothing that happens among humans that is not instigated, negotiated, clarified, or mystified by language, including our attempts to acquire knowledge. The Greeks, and, indeed, the medieval Schoolmen, understood well something we seem to have forgotten—namely, that all subjects are forms of discourse and that therefore almost all education is a form of language education. Knowledge of a subject mostly means knowledge of the language of that subject. Biology, after all, is not plants and animals; it is a special language employed to speak about plants and animals. History is not events that once occurred; it is language describing and interpreting events, according to rules established by historians. Astronomy is not planets and stars but a special way of talking about planets and stars, quite different from the language poets use to talk about them.

And so a student must know the language of a subject, but that is only the beginning. For it is not sufficient to know the definition of a noun, or a gene, or a molecule. One must also know what a definition is. It is not sufficient to know the right answers. One must also know the questions that produced them. Indeed, one must also know what a question is, for not every sentence that ends with a rising intonation or begins with an interrogative is necessarily a question. There are sentences that look like questions but cannot generate any meaningful answers, and, as Francis Bacon said, if they linger in
our minds, they become obstructions to clear thinking. One must also know what a metaphor is, and what is the relationship between words and the things they describe. In short, one must have some knowledge of a metalanguage—a language about language—to recognize error, to defend oneself against the seductions of eloquence.

In a later chapter, I will offer a more detailed description of what such a metalanguage might consist of for modern students. Here, I should like to suggest some other means of educating students to be error detectors—for example, that all subjects be taught from an historical perspective. I can think of no better way to demonstrate that knowledge is not a fixed thing but a continuous struggle to overcome prejudice, authoritarianism, and even “common sense.” Every subject, of course, has a history, including physics, mathematics, biology, and history itself. I have previously quoted William James to the effect that any subject becomes “humanistic” when taught historically. His point almost certainly was that there is nothing more human than the stories of our errors and how we have managed to overcome them, and then fallen into error again, and continued our efforts to make corrections—stories without end. Robert Maynard Hutchins referred to these stories as the Great Conversation, a dynamic and accurate metaphor, since it suggests not only that knowledge is passed down from one thinker to another but modified, refined, and corrected as the “conversation” goes on.

To teach about the atom without including Democritus in the conversation, electricity without Faraday, political science without Aristotle or Machiavelli, astronomy without Ptolemy, is to deny our students access to the Great Conversation. “To remain ignorant of things that happened before you were born is to remain a child,” Cicero said. He then added, “What is a human life worth unless it is incorporated into the lives of
one’s ancestors and set in an historical context?” When we incorporate the lives of our ancestors in our education, we discover that some of them were great error-makers, some great error-correctors, some both. And in discovering this, we accomplish three things. First, we help students to see that knowledge is a stage in human development, with a past and a future. Second (this would surely please Professor E. D. Hirsch, Jr.), we acquaint students with the people and ideas that comprise “cultural literacy”—that is to say, give them some understanding of where their ideas come from and how we came by them. And third, we show them that error is no disgrace, that it is the agency through which we increase understanding.

Of course, to ensure that the last of these lessons be believed, we would have to make changes in what is called “the classroom environment.” At present, there is very little tolerance for error in the classroom. That is one of the reasons students cheat. It is one of the reasons students are nervous. It is one of the reasons many students are reluctant to speak. It is certainly the reason why students (and the rest of us) fight so hard to justify what they think they know. In varying degrees, being wrong is a disgrace; one pays a heavy price for it. But suppose students found themselves in a place where this was not the case? In his book
Mindstorms
, Seymour Papert contends that one of the best reasons for using computers in the classroom is that computers
force
the environment to be more tolerant of error. Students move toward the right answer (at least in mathematics) by making mistakes and then correcting them. The computer does not humiliate students for being wrong, and it encourages them to try again. If Papert is right, then we do, indeed, have a good reason for having students use computers. Of course, if he is right, it is also an insult to teachers. Is it only through the introduction of a machine that
the classroom can become a place where trial and error is an acceptable mode of learning, where being wrong is not a punishable offense?