The End of Education (21 page)

The problem may be stated in the following way: Because of the nature of the communications industry, our students have continuous access to the popular arts of their own time—its music, rhetoric, design, literature, architecture. As a consequence, their receptivity to popular forms is well developed and appropriate. But their capacity to respond with educated imaginations to traditional or classical forms of art is severely limited.

What is to be done? In the interests of cultivating resourcefulness and diversity in levels of sensibility, I would say there is no excuse for schools to sponsor rock concerts when students have not heard the music of Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, or Chopin, or for students to have graduated from high school without having read, for example, Shakespeare, Milton, Keats, Dickens, Whitman, Twain, Melville, or Poe, or for students not to have seen at least a photograph of paintings by Goya, El Greco, David. It is not to
the point that many of these composers, writers, and painters were in their own times popular artists. What is to the point is that they spoke, when they did, in a language and from a point of view different from our own. It is also to the point that the popular arts tend to mute the voices of these artists and render their standards of excellence invisible.

I am—to reiterate—not speaking against popular art forms. I am speaking against our allowing them to monopolize the souls of our students. So far as art education is concerned, our schools ought to serve as a “counterenvironment,” as if to say, “The equipment you now have to respond to the arts is incomplete. Your capacity for nourishing your feeling life will be expanded and, yes, elevated.”

This brings me to three highly charged arguments about the arts (and about culture): first, whether or not there are higher and lower levels of sensibility; second, whether or not the canons of literature and other art forms have legitimacy; and third, whether or not schools can justify transmitting, indeed celebrating, Eurocentric culture, especially as it is dominated by dead white males.

I can be brief, since I think that for all the sound and fury, there is not much to argue about. I have, for example, already given my answer to the first question, and I would only add that if there are not higher and lower levels of sensibility in responses to art, language, and other forms of human communication, then there is no need for education. This applies to intelligence as well. Even if there are, as Howard Gardner has postulated, various kinds of intelligences, we must assume that there are higher and lower expressions of each one. The task of a school is to increase students’ capacities. That means to have them move from lower to higher modalities of thought and feeling.

As to the legitimacy of canons, the word simply refers to
agreed-upon examples of excellence in various genres of creativity. Any canon can be added to, modified, or even discarded if it no longer serves, in part or whole, as a model of excellence. This means that any canon is a living, dynamic instrument, and it is certainly not limited to those artists who are dead, and long dead. The long dead dominate for the obvious reason that their works have given pleasure and instruction to diverse people over long periods of time. They have earned, so to speak, their place. To the extent that teachers believe in the importance of conveying a sense of continuity in artistic creation, they must give respectful attention to the long dead. But, of course, teachers must not be reluctant to include models of excellence produced by living artists. If teachers know of better examples of Western dramatic art than have been provided by Shakespeare, Molière, Ibsen, Shaw, Williams, and O’Neill, then they must let us know about it and explain why they think it so. If there are better examples of symphonic music than those produced by Beethoven, Brahms, Mozart, and Tchaikovsky, then we should hear them, along with explanations as to why they should be preferred.

A problem does arise, however, when someone injects a confusing, irrelevant point into the argument. I refer, for example, to Saul Bellow’s rhetorical question concerning the absence of Swahili novels (or was it Navajo novels?) that are the equal or superior to the novels of Proust. I think he meant to justify Proust’s place in the canon and to ridicule the largely political motive of including Third World writers on the list. Of course, if we are talking about the canon of the genre known as novels, then Bellow has a point. There are no Swahili or Navajo novelists who will threaten Proust’s place in the canon (although there may be Chinese or Japanese novelists who do). But the speakers of Swahili or Navajo and
scores of other languages do not normally write the kind of literature we call novels. They express themselves in other genres, often associated with the oral tradition. There is, I am sure, a canon (that is, examples of excellence) in every form of literature from Navajo poetry to Japanese Noh dramas. In the interest of diversity, our students ought to experience some of these forms, and teachers may introduce them as additions to the conceptions of excellence developed in our own culture.

I should add that the remarks above are not intended to suggest that art and especially literature teachers should confine themselves, and their students, to models of excellence. There are many reasons to ask students to read a particular book, and only one of them is that the book is an exemplary example of literary art. Teachers may choose even badly written books if such books are of sociological or political interest. At the same time, there are books that have earned a place in the canon but are not suitable for students at a particular stage in their development. (Proust in high school? Not a good idea.) The main point, however, is that teachers ought to have a
conception
of models of excellence; indeed, they are obliged to.

Last, there is the nonproblem of the dead white males. I believe it was Camille Paglia who remarked that if not for the dead white males, we would all be living in grass huts. A more refined but equally definitive comment was made by James Earl Jones (when interviewed by Charlie Rose). He noted that, for good or ill, our culture was formed from the religion, politics, literature, science, technology, philosophy, and art of mostly dead white males who lived in Europe and Asia Minor. There is, he said, no use pretending otherwise. What the dead white males gave us is now being enacted, criticized, and re-created by living black males, by living white females, and by several other interesting combinations,
including quite a number of living white males. I should not be taken to mean that the cultures of dead Chinese or dead Africans ought to be ignored. Anyone who has urged that anthropology and archaeology be major subjects in school must be exempt from the charge of cultural chauvinism. I would add that in the interest of a robust diversity, studies of Asian, African, and other significant cultures would be highly desirable, provided they were available to all students. I am keeping in mind that the purpose of public education is to help the young transcend individual identity by finding inspiration in a story of humanity.

Meanwhile, it is well to remember that (by my count and my canons) the dead white males who gave us our religious, scientific, and artistic traditions came from at least thirty-seven different cultures. They were as diverse a group as one could imagine. Could there be any two people more different than Jesus and Martin Luther? Than Kepler and Einstein? Than Milton and Cervantes? Than Dostoyevsky and Emerson? Nonetheless, it was they who somehow taught us that diversity is a great and noble principle. If anyone has argued persuasively to the contrary, I haven’t heard of it.

I
n an effort to clear up confusion (or ignorance) about the meaning of a word, does anyone ask, What is
a
definition of this word? Just about always, the way of putting the question is, What is
the
definition of this word? The difference between
a
and
the
in this context is vast, and I have no choice but to blame the schools for the mischief created by an inadequate understanding of what a definition is. From the earliest grades through graduate school, students are given definitions and, with few exceptions, are not told whose definitions they are, for what purposes they were invented, and what alternative definitions might serve equally as well. The result is that students come to believe that definitions are
not
invented; that they are not even human creations; that, in fact, they are—how shall I say it?—part of the natural world, like clouds, trees, and stars.

In a thousand examinations on scores of subjects, students are asked to give definitions of hundreds of things, words, concepts, procedures. It is to be doubted that there are more than a few classrooms in which there has been any discussion of what a definition is. How is that possible?

Let us take the equally strange case of questions. There will be no disagreement, I think, to my saying that all the answers given to students are the end products of questions.
Everything we know has its origin in questions. Questions, we might say, are the principal intellectual instruments available to human beings. Then how is it possible that no more than one in one hundred students has ever been exposed to an extended and systematic study of the art and science of question-asking? How come Alan Bloom didn’t mention this, or E. D. Hirsch, Jr., or so many others who have written books on how to improve our schools? Did they simply fail to notice that
the principal intellectual instrument available to human beings is not examined in school?

We are beginning to border on absurdity here. And we cross the line when we consider what happens in most schools on the subject of metaphor. Metaphor does, in fact, come up in school, usually introduced by an English teacher wanting to show how it is employed by poets. The result is that most students come to believe metaphor has a decorative function and only a decorative function. It gives color and texture to poetry, as jewelry does to clothing. The poet wants us to see, smell, hear, or feel something concretely, and so resorts to metaphor. I remember a discussion, when I was in college, of Robert Burns’s lines: “O, my love is like a red, red rose / That’s newly sprung in June. / O my love is like the melodie / That’s sweetly play’d in tune.”

The first questions on the test were: “Is Burns using metaphors or similes? Define each term. Why did Burns choose to use metaphors instead of similes, or similes instead of metaphors?”

I didn’t object to these questions at the time except for the last one, to which I gave a defiant but honest answer: How the hell should I know? I have the same answer today. But today, I have some other things to say on the matter. Yes, poets use metaphors to help us see and feel. But so do biologists, physicists, historians, linguists, and everyone else who is trying to
say something about the world. A metaphor is not an ornament. It is an organ of perception. Through metaphors, we see the world as one thing or another. Is light a wave or a particle? Are molecules like billiard balls or force fields? Is history unfolding according to some instructions of nature or a divine plan? Are our genes like information codes? Is a literary work like an architect’s blueprint or a mystery to be solved?

Questions like these preoccupy scholars in every field. Do I exaggerate in saying that a student cannot understand what a subject is about without some understanding of the metaphors that are its foundation? I don’t think so. In fact, it has always astonished me that those who write about the subject of education do not pay sufficient attention to the role of metaphor in giving form to the subject. In failing to do so, they deprive those studying the subject of the opportunity to confront its basic assumptions. Is the human mind, for example, like a dark cavern (needing illumination)? A muscle (needing exercise)? A vessel (needing filling)? A lump of clay (needing shaping)? A garden (needing cultivation)? Or, as so many say today, is it like a computer that processes data? And what of students? Are they patients to be cared for? Troops to be disciplined? Sons and daughters to be nurtured? Personnel to be trained? Resources to be developed?

There was a time when those who wrote on the subject of education, such as Plato, Comenius, Locke, and Rousseau, made their metaphors explicit and in doing so revealed how their metaphors controlled their thinking.
¹
“Plants are improved by cultivation,” Rousseau wrote in
Emile
, “and man by education.” And his entire philosophy rests upon this comparison of plants and children. Even in such ancient texts as the Mishnah, we find that there are four kinds of students: the sponge, the funnel, the strainer, and the sieve. It will surprise you to know which one is preferred. The sponge, we are
told, absorbs all; the funnel receives at one end and spills out at the other; the strainer lets the wine drain through it and retains the dregs; but the sieve—that is the best, for it lets out the flour dust and retains the fine flour. The difference in educational philosophy between Rousseau and the compilers of the Mishnah is precisely reflected in the difference between a wild plant and a sieve.

Definitions, questions, metaphors—these are three of the most potent elements with which human language constructs a worldview. And in urging, as I do, that the study of these elements be given the highest priority in school, I am suggesting that world making through language is a narrative of power, durability, and inspiration. It is the story of how we make the world known to ourselves, and how we make ourselves known to the world. It is different from other narratives because it is about nouns and verbs, about grammar and inferences, about metaphors and definitions, but it is a story of creation, nonetheless. Even further, it is a story that plays a role in all other narratives. For whatever we believe in, or don’t believe in, is to a considerable extent a function of how our language addresses the world. Here is a small example:

Let us suppose you have just finished being examined by a doctor. In pronouncing his verdict, he says somewhat accusingly, “Well, you’ve done a very nice case of arthritis here.” You would undoubtedly think this is a strange diagnosis, or more likely, a strange doctor. People do not “do” arthritis. They “have” it, or “get” it, and it is a little insulting for the doctor to imply that you have produced or manufactured an illness of this kind, especially since arthritis will release you from certain obligations and, at the same time, elicit sympathy from other people. It is also painful. So the idea that you have done arthritis to yourself suggests a kind of self-serving masochism.