The Idea Man: No. 31 in a Series Teaching:
Experimental premise: Trace the word "teach" back to its roots and you find that it comes from a word meaning "to show". But if you ask teachers today what they do, how many would say, "I show"? Now many, because teaching, under constraints of time, space, and money, now generally means not only to show but also to explain and then to test to see if the students have understood, or at least retained, the explanation. While educationists talk about discovery, the practice of teaching now largely involves the imparting of information. It is, I suppose, a kind of showing, but those on the receiving end too often perceive the process as forced viewing. Working under the pressure of time-- one year per grade-level, teachers move hordes of students through the basics, always testing, testing, testing to be sure everybody's staying up with the pack. In a sense, it works, this teaching which is little more than page-turning. We produce generations of adults with a certain survival-level of knowledge. And at the far right end of the bell curve, there's always that handful that absorbs it all and then pursues its own compulsive curiosity into new territory where Nobel Prizes are won, political theories are born, and new art takes shape. Cultural progress, we call it, the movement from decade to decade, age to age. All well and good, and certainly enough to keep us all (or most of us) interested, entertained, piqued, always on the lookout for the next new thing. What's missing here is any hopeful awareness of the defining critical limitation in the process of teaching: our fleeting mortality. Oh, sure, we bemoan our three-score-and-ten, the vale of tears, the shadow that struts across the stage and then vanishes. We take it as a given: We have these few decades in which to learn, in which to be taught what we need, and to do something with what we've been taught. A few decades and then pffft! No more. <> If... if, if, if, if our mortality were not so brief, many things would of course be different. As a little thought experiment, bear with me and let's focus only on what would happen to teaching if we lived for, oh, say, 5,000 years. How would the strategies of a good teacher change if the constraint of time were removed? To answer that question, obviously, we have to define, or identify, those strategies. My own experience, as both student and teacher, indicates that they are three in number: 1. Loving attention. 1. Loving attention. A drill sergeant on Parris Island gives you lots of attention, but love is not part of it. Loving attention involves nudges, the gentlest encouragements to persist no matter what the difficulty. Perseverance furthers. Gentle perseverance furthers best, both for the teacher and for the student. Loving attention watches, and also watches out for.Hot stoves teach their own lesson very fast. Electric sockets, like busy streets, are so self-involved and so dangerous that the lovingly attentive teacher has to intervene and show the danger. Rubber balls reveal their own potentials of delight instantly. Pianos are much more recalcitrant. As are books. The teacher, paying attention, can point, can direct the student's attention, saying, "Here, look!" Having pointed, the truly good and loving teacher then looks the other way. Here comes paradox, for the really good teacher knows that the key part of teaching is the obverse: loving inattention. The teacher is present, aware, but aware that true learning comes from discovery. The teacher attends when necessary. The rest of the time, the teacher inattends. 2. Patience. One of the wonders of computers is that they offer a simulacrum of patience. Mistakes are ephemeral, instantly gone, and the computer never, never gets angry at my slow-learning. But of course the computer gives me nothing of the loving attention which we all long for, and the praise, for which we are all starved, is cold and hollow when it comes from a computer. The good teacher is always there, ready, waiting for the light of comprehension. And ready to respond, to share the joy. 3. Hints, or seeds. Enmeshed in the struggle to grasp, the student is, unknowingly, open to suggestion, to hints of what may come next and next and next. Thus the good teacher, even while showing the present challenge, is always planting seeds, dropping hints about wonders to come. <> If we take those three elements as the critical and essential parts of good teaching and apply them to our little thought experiment, we find a surprise. We are able to look at human history and do a bit of unexpected reverse engineering. Individually, physically, we are trapped in these bodies with their 70-year limit of usability. But historically, the race, with its ability to transmit culture-- what we've been taught-- beyond that brief limit, in fact finds itself in precisely the situation postulated by the thought experiment. As a race, we are much longer-lived. And looking at the first 5,000 years of human culture (which is about what we now have behind us), I see a number of signs indicating the existence of good teaching. No, I'm not suggesting the implied presence of some patriarchal deity. I'm only suggesting that our serpentine path is anything but the willy-nilly anarchy that present-day reductive science and philosophy would predict. On the contrary, what we see along that path is the route-- rocky at times, to be sure-- the difficult learning experience of a bunch of short-tempered, impatient, violent, greedy little s.o.b.'s who clearly have a whole lot of potential. Sounds almost like your typical kindergarten, class, eh? Except what a kindergarten! And if the teacher knows that death is not the problem that the kindergartners think it is, the teacher uses a strategy of patience and loving attention Just as we are far more violent than five- year- old kindergartners, so too are our inferred teachers far more patient than those in the school system. Our progress, such as it is, this bizarre path that we see behind us, as beautiful as it is bloody, seem to me to imply the presence of just such teachers as I've described. Attending, but also inattending, patient beyond anything our young consciousnesses can grasp, and dropping the subtlest hints in the most unexpected forms in the unlikeliest of places. Imagine, then, yourself as an entity sprung from a race which, a million years ago, was approsimately where we are now. Using our greatest mental powers, we cannot begin to conceive of the scope and nature of such an entity. But surely, one of its concerns would be the tending to, teaching of, and nurturing sheep like us. Even with our limited vision, we have some dim conception-- as I have tried to suggest-- of the nature of true teaching. Such an entity, or entities, would of course apply those primary principles of pedagogy in the most efficacious ways: Loving attention without brutal interference, virtually infinite patience, and subtle seeds carefully planted but not over-planted. The little thought experiment, then, is no experiment. It is us. Welcome to kindergarten. END
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