Class Revolt
The purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions, to say to himself this is black or this is white, to decide for himself whether there is a God in heaven or not. To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity. But no society is really anxious to have that kind of person around. What societies really, ideally, want is a citizenry which will simply obey the rules of society.
- James Baldwin, “A Talk to Teachers”
1. At which to marvel
File this under Conversations Teachers have with GenPop, among whom millions are of the very strange faith that on the subject of teaching, and perhaps only on that subject, solipsism confers not only expertise but also moral weight.
Well Meaning Person at my aunt’s cocktail party says, “What do you teach?”
I respond, “Usually I teach American literature and a rhetoric course called Advanced Placement English Language.”
“Is that like AP Literature?”
“As physics to biology.”
Well Meaning Person lifts her eyes, sure and knowing, the speed of response a condescension: “And in the rhetoric do you teach Aristotle?” Syntax indicates question; diminishing pitch in the final syllable indicates assertion approaching command: I dare you to say “No.”
Now I am wondering, Can you hang in this conversation? and I am tempted to voice the question, Have you actually read Aristotle? But we’re not having a real conversation anyway, are we? This is something else, a public performance, its structure derived from the ritualized behaviors and interpersonal power dynamics of the classroom: part kabuki, part Ionesco absurdism. I say, “I teach some of Aristotle’s ideas on rhetoric, of course, but only as a beginning point. I hope my students come to understand that the art of persuasion and the artful use and understanding of language are important, but that the more important goal is interrogating and understanding the ideas students inhabit and how those ideas are built in the language, even if that means finally persuading no one and ‘knowing’ nothing at all, even whether they have selves to be true to.”
Well Meaning Person had not realized I was not there to sit for her exam. “That’s very interesting,” she says, “Well, keep up the good work.”
At this point I am picturing a smart but difficult student’s appreciative, conspiratorial smile that the shade I just threw on this lady will not leave her until I burn in hell. “I will,” I tell her as she walks away.
Exchanges like this are typical, if infrequent. It is a worn trope that everybody, especially parents, for obvious reasons, think they are experts on teaching because they went to school, but there is another element here worth exploring. The work of schooling is a kind of performance art that recursively perpetuates and is informed by the larger society. Each person involved has a defined role, and mostly we follow unwritten scripts — in conversations with Well Meaning People, in conversations with Not-Well Meaning People, in meetings with students and parents, in meetings with administrators, in local Board of Education meetings, sometimes even in meetings with each other, and nearly always in the Antonin Artaud theatre of cruelty known as Professional Development meetings. If the script metaphor seems too cynical, consider that we are often said to have meetings so that we will “be on the same page.” We also frequently speak nobly of “building consensus,” as though doing so means democratic norms and rational deliberation will have worked for the benefit of all concerned rather than that someone, or some several, simply gave up trying to speak rationally, or were outright silenced one way or another.
Just yesterday I endured nearly two hours of a webinar for what they call an “assessment system,” which means an online standardized test designed to tell us things about students that we are presumed not already to know. Within the first 10 minutes my amygdala had colluded with my water-spirit to de-animate my body so as to protect me from phrases like “drill down into the data” and “instruction piece,” like the case of the 15 year old who developed native antibodies to rabies while in a medically induced coma. Generally, if you don’t follow the script, you are marked for calumny, or thought to have breached etiquette, which amounts to the same thing, your professionalism becoming suspect. Or, if you are clever enough about it, you are merely thought to be an asshole, or simply weird, both of which you can get away with to varying degrees. You learn quickly not to say anything too serious as if you really mean it.
2. Warped Frames
Since our Well Meaning Person brought up Aristotle, let us take a cue from classicist Eva Brann, who in Paradoxes of Education in a Republic cites Aristotle’s four kinds of intellectual pursuit to raise the question, What is teaching? Aristotle distinguishes: knowledge, or vision of truth (θεωρῐ́ᾱ), a kind of passive apprehension of divine, and by extension, natural phenomena; practical wisdom or discernment (φρόνησῐς); know-how or rationally accountable making (τέχνη); and experience, the knack for things learned by experience (εμπειρία).
Is teaching a kind of knowledge? Aristotle claims that the sign of something being knowledge is that it can be taught. But teaching, although it is dependent on knowledge of this or that subject, and is a mediation of such knowledge, is not thereby a knowledge itself. There are schools for teachers, and courses on curriculum theory, planning and assessment, child development, psychometrics, cultural and social analysis of various kinds. But teacher preparation programs always depend on the lived experience of doing the job, the ritual of student-teaching, which implies that it is at least in part a craft or a knack. We shall turn to those below. Teaching, as such, cannot be taught except, maybe, as a facet of a much broader project of learning in the humanities. If we concern ourselves with the business of knowledge, then we must immediately engage not only the workings of the mind as that study is formulated in the field of psychology, but also the question of what may constitute knowledge in the first place, and we must neither mistake that for nor seek to reduce it to a psychological question. We must also be, in a word, philosophers. Most in our field do not think of our work in such terms. Those that do more often than not get flushed out by viciously uncomprehending superiors or quit in a paroxysm of despair.
Is teaching then a kind of practical wisdom? It is similar to the work of the statesman of Aristotle’s conception in that it depends on purposeful, persuasive speech, but such speech in teaching is not verifiable in the same way as in politics. The etiology of learning is inscrutable: you can’t really tell whether or what students have learned, or if they have learned it because you taught it or because of how you taught it. School officials say that’s why we analyze assessment data, but that’s all a delusion, dependent on the most absurd presumption that we can proclaim what constitutes knowledge itself and measure the contents and workings of little humans’ minds relative to that proclamation. The notion is flat-out stupid, which means that, our culture being what it is, a whole billion-dollar industry has encrusted it with the veneer of respectability and necessity. And taking tests, like most other things in school, is much more of a performance art than a demonstration of learning. Witness, if you will, the manic proliferation of high-dollar supplementary schools, like Khan Academy and Kaplan, parasitic on our perceived need for and obsession with standardized tests, that make perfectly clear, without any sort of charade, that they are concerned with test performance rather than learning, that any overlap between the two is incidental. Test makers and marketers don’t know this because they and their psychometricians conceive of their work as psychological projects instead of epistemological questions. We’ll return to that.
Students have not infrequently told me it took them several years to understand the value of what I did in their classes, and those most often were not the best test takers. They ended up doing much better in college, precisely, I think, because at 16–17 they would not have the contours of their knowledge so rigidly defined. On the one hand, I take that as a very high compliment indeed. On the other, so much more learning and life experience went into that realization than anything I did for them that it’s hard to say how much I had to do with it. In vanity I hope to claim some small piece of it.
So, is teaching a craft, a learnable method for bringing results out of “student material”? Certainly the prophets and profiteers of what they call evidence-based or data-driven “best practices” will tell you that’s what it is, and will tell you to “think outside the box” while beating you like demented maniacs with cudgels of stats and charts to keep you in that damn box. Accordingly, educational institutions are said to turn out products: humans prepared for productivity. But that is industry-speak, and it is a dehumanizing and repugnant metaphor.
Finally, is teaching a knack? All good teachers certainly have bags of tricks. But they have bags of tricks because they are good teachers, not the other way around. They are not made into good teachers by having bags of tricks, or “instructional strategies.” Good teachers possess some confluence of qualities, some alchemy of their personalities and intellects, that makes tricks work for them, but teaching strategies do not confer that quality unto them.
Not incidentally, those last two types are what passes for “Professional Development” in our world. That explains why good teachers often don’t like to deal with PD. More insidiously, it explains why so many other teachers, and indeed administrators, are resistant or even resentful when some of us try to make of teaching something higher — to conceive of it and indeed to do our work in terms of some comprehensive vision of real knowledge, however finally unattainable, and of genuine practical wisdom.
At a deeper level, all that resistance and resentment is symptomatic of a fundamental fear of real introspection in our culture. We aren’t built for that. We’re built to produce stuff; schools and families build us to produce stuff. Teachers are supposed to produce educated people, while other sectors of the society are to produce a salable concept of what an educated person is and how educated people behave. In this view, we may say that teaching is a function of Capital, part of the machinery of capitalism. This is in a way obvious, but it is also a way of saying that at the most basic level, capitalism has warped, almost inverted, what it means to do our jobs properly. (Marxist ideology may have the same fundamental problem as it relates to teaching, however differently constituted, but that’s irrelevant for now because it’s not an ideology we inhabit.) We will return to these ideas in somewhat augmented form.
In the nearly total vacuum of serious thinking about what teaching is, we tend to uncritically say whatever we happen to feel about it. Far too often that means calling it “service” or “giving back,” even missionary work. Teach for America sells this service and has become one of our country’s most celebrated non-profit pimps for it. Teaching as “service” is an incarnation of the old noblesse oblige, inflected with egalitarian sentiment, sure, but nonetheless operating on the same principle of condescension. Certainly there are very decent people who do good things in the name of service. But the idea itself is part of an aristocratic worldview masquerading as enlightened, even woke, social care. This is pervasive in schools and reflected in the language in ways that seem innocuous. Administrators and instructional coaches like to say “my teachers,” and to suggest that they should step back, lose the shepherd’s mentality, and proceed with greater respect is, at the least, considered bad form. Teachers like to say “my kids,” despite that they’re someone else’s kids, however much we may care for them or how vast may be their needs. Beyond that, few ever really consider that the kids may simply belong to themselves, and certainly have no concept of what that means for our self-awareness as professionals.
But wait, you say, these are just colloquialisms or convenient metaphors. Surely no one, least of all teachers, thinks of teachers as aristocrats condescending to serve lesser people to enhance their own moral self-regard. But that is exactly what some of us think, especially, of late, as it relates to racial justice and equity. We get away with it only by not having money. The more cynical use the job merely to play at concern about equity and public moralisms so that their resumes may be ennobled. They get away with that by ending up having money.
The idea of teaching as missionary work is even more monstrous. We don’t need to save or repair kids. They aren’t broken. We need to teach them, so that they can break the things that have always sought to subsume their emergent wills — including the institution of schooling itself as it is now constituted. I would like to see, one day, a mass, national movement of students who do not refuse to take standardized tests, but instead sabotage them: deliberately get all the answers wrong, or sit down, take the test booklets, and immediately walk out and post every page online — in other words hold their own data hostage, since the data are not data anyway, and upend the concrete effects of bad educational theorizing until those nominally in charge start making more reasonable and responsible decisions. This will eventually take us back to Mr. Baldwin.
3. How much more they know
Sometimes I give my students this essay prompt:
Defend, refute, or qualify the claim that the curriculum and manner of teaching you have encountered so far in your years of school distort your perception of reality.
The prompt is perfectly defensible in terms of Georgia’s high school English standards and the AP English Language curriculum proffered by the College Board. It is also a declaration of open war on the entire institution of schooling in its current form. Suggesting to students that they have the right and the power to dismiss from within the institution everything the institution does is not part of the script.
Since the emergence of the standards movement in education in the 1990’s and the No Child Left Behind law of 2001, there has been a rash of bickering and contention regarding the strengths, deficiencies, nature, and even the purpose of our public schools. Most opinions offered in public, whether by GenPop or by seemingly knowing opinion sellers, have no real bearing on our work, or on what makes it worth doing, or what constitutes doing it well. And very rarely do teachers make public pronouncements on these matters. We’re usually incredulous at the sheer unknowingness of the conversations we hear about it, or too busy grading papers. It should be obvious enough by now that my aim here is not to take a side in popular versions of these debates, or to make friends or even to convince you of this or that point of view, but to put everyone on notice: on this subject you are all utterly tiresome and, if you wield some form of power over educational institutions, you should altogether quit making decisions.
Now then, the poet Ezra Pound once wrote thus to professor Hugh Kenner (of Johns Hopkins and UGA, obit 2003):
Dear HK:
Nacherly you can’t egg-speck a prefessor to read fer to learn wot he don’t know….
And Kenner being who he was, alert to the multi-ways of language, made the following two observations in two pertinent articles.
He observes in “Up from Edenism” that Roman legionaries who’d made a home of Gaul didn’t see much of what Romans in Rome called a beautiful equus, “horse.” They knew the nags locally called caballi. Hence French cheval, English chivalry. Likewise, in Rome they called that which could be cut from your shoulders caput, “head,” but the slang for that was testa, “pot,” which got pronounced teste, and so the French tête. Thus, what became la tête d’un cheval once meant something like “that there nag’s noggin,” and if the galoots who talked that way thought it was proper Latin, the specter of Cicero was unable to rap their knuckles. As they were stumbling towards the language of Racine and Baudelaire, we may count ourselves fortunate for their slovenliness.
Similarly, he notes in “The Word Police” that in New York City where the linguistic heritage is Dutch and Yiddish, latterly Italian, they say things like “change of a dollar” to request four quarters and “since I’m fifteen” to mean “ever since I was fifteen.” These get called idioms and they are part of what trusses a community. Eventually tourists distinguish what is prosaically called a dialect. As Kenner puts it, “Such localisms have their charm, like the aardvark, and bother no one.”
Expanding these points leads to questions of far greater concern to our scholastic security guards. Paralyzed in disbelief, red pens snapped in two, they regard African American English, which James Baldwin argued in a 1979 editorial should be considered its own language. Baldwin cites two supervening needs that distinguish the evolution of African American from other forms of English: slaves’ with different languages from different parts of Africa to communicate with each other, and parents’ to warn children of the danger they may be in and to do so in ways that nearby white people might hear but not understand.
Examining the world of expression that grew from such needs, Baldwin cites jazz, once a term for sex, and beat to his socks, a desperate evocation of poverty. These, he says, have been taken and “purified” by the pasty, uptight, middle-class inheritors of Longfellow and Hawthorne into things called The Jazz Age and The Beat Generation. Sixty years ago you could marvel at such people trying desperately to be “funky” and to imitate poverty. Latterly they evolved into classroom peddlers of affected hipstery. Today you can observe the results in boutiques where $400 will afford you a pair of jeans someone evidently threw into an aeroplane propeller.
If the evolution of languages by dispersion was in earlier generations sped by the function of geographic separation and isolation before travel became fast and easy, the codification and standardization of language more recently has been a function of the printing press, which prompted a shift in linguistic sense from what the ear hears in time to what the eye sees in space. Thus many a wrong spelling is said to be “phonetic” and commas can disregard cadence. So norms get established in pointless defiance of changing style and usage, knowledge of language becomes familiarity with established convention regardless of whether people understand you when you talk, incorrectness becomes a thing to test for like herpes or schizophrenia, and eventually normed tests become the arbiters of thought regardless of how the sense of your thinking may be rationally communicable. Thence to the overt racism of Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve in barely two more steps. Chamber of Commerce conservatives, including those Arne Duncan or Rahm Emanuel-style Democrats for whom numerized data are the measure of everything, really should stop and listen to themselves for once.
At least in public James Baldwin fastidiously did not use the language he described: he built his prose out of finely wrought systems of subordination and clever understatement. He was a master stylist of what we now call Standard American English. Its standardization is an odd perversion: SAE is merely another dialect, though a largely confected and prescriptive one, derived from the way white people talk in those parts of Iowa where more than 100 buildings have been put close together.
Nevertheless, the student anywhere whose dialect (or language) is incongruous with that system of norms is said to have low achievement; the unwritten script of teachers’ professional self-awareness says we are to feel shame for that lest we be thought unsuited to the moral demands of the job; we must accept that we can control something called learning outcomes without mentioning that the disfigurement of the school mirrors its larger social and political context; we must learn from somebody, somewhere, what to do about that; and we’d best acquire an updated set of dispositions from the right Instagram activists and critical theory memes, and be studiously unaware that the library is that-a-way and that it contains millennia, not mere caricatures of old stuff.
What then can we make of various official judgments of literacy?
The student systematically marginalized from the SAE system of norms — the English language learner, often the rural or impoverished, frequently but not always the African American — whose world reflects the truths of, say, Sula and Native Son, more than The Great Gatsby and The Red Badge of Courage, finds himself torn in two: he knows his world has an incorruptible, intrinsic value and an ineffable richness and a set of experiences suffused with meaning, but school has told him his whole life it does not: his language is wrong and must be corrected, his culture is defective, his teachers cannot see him though he sits expectantly right in front of them. And so he decides school is not for him. James Baldwin described this phenomenon, too, but the wrong people seem to have got the message, and it has been treated as a problem for criminological or anthropological study rather than a concrete fact that surely means we have not fully met or even seriously engaged our obligations. This is another way of saying that both the far right and the moderate-liberal middle class should sit down and try to learn things they imagine they already know.
4. And how little they know
This carries a corollary. To extrapolate from different points Baldwin makes in various essays and speeches, the well-heeled child who outperforms her peers on standardized tests is in some ways more damaged by them than the child said to be in need of remediation: she does not, cannot, know who she is: the mirror of her self-regard is warped by the scholastic mediocrity she has learned to imitate with such perfect, studied intricacy and refinement. These children, the academic stars, have been fooled much like Emma Bovary was fooled: their selves, at least their academic selves, are counterfeits. As Ms. Bovary learned the norms of femininity from the cheap fiction of her day, so these students learn norms of learnedness from the cheap fictions of our day.
We call those standards, and we call them rigorous. They are not standards, and they are not rigorous. They are a strange collection of artifacts, and they operate on two basic presumptions: that they define and delimit the essence and contours of knowledge itself, and that they are general and transferable from one text to another. In fact, they are descriptions of the behaviors — we could say programmed parameters — of a creature-confection we may call Homo sapiens erudita, the Educated Human. The Educated Human is not a person, but a telos, the ideal end of schooling. It is also, in its various corporeal approximations, a kind of machine. Machines are designed for specific purposes, and this one was designed to produce that which is structurally needful to perpetuate its own idea. That is to say, the telos Homo sapiens erudita is a tool, and it exists to serve another telos larger than itself: as Mr. Baldwin said, it exists to obey, and hence we may add to promulgate, the rules of society.
Students can, without too much effort, learn to imitate the behaviors of Educated Human without knowing much of any substance. If I teach a lesson on the symbolic resonance of the celestial rhetoric in Romeo and Juliet’s speeches, even if I am brave enough to explore its thematic importance in its contrast to Mercutio’s earthy, pornographic vulgarity with 15 year olds, it is thought that students then should be able as well to disentangle the symbolism of the Charles family’s piano in August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson. The standards presume that to understand one is as good as to understand the other, on a principle of transferability: it’s all just figurative language having to do with something called theme. A scrupulous student may very well uncover such a connection on an exam, and be duly installed in the ranks of the Educated. That has no bearing whatsoever on the question of that student’s comprehension that The Piano Lesson is, among other things, about the theft of history, and the moral indictment of American history in the Charles family having to steal the piano from the descendants of their forebears’ owners to possess their own history. The standards just say students should understand an “author’s choices,” and theme is theme is theme, symbolism is symbolism is symbolism: the sun, the moon, the stars, a piano with unusual carvings, a bad check; the tragic complications of celestial beauty and fate, the theft of history. As literary concepts, these are said all to be the same. But clearly they are not: they require altogether different kinds of historical, emotional, and philosophical understanding. To understand one is not to understand the other in any serious way, and to read them as though they are the same, even merely according to the standards, is to read carelessly, not to say stupidly, and that is why our rigorous standards are neither rigorous nor standards.
Consider here another of Kenner’s stabbing observations. He describes in Flaubert, Joyce, and Beckett: The Stoic Comedians the imbecilic fictional researches of Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pecuchet, satire-protagonists for instance trying to raise the temperature of bathwater by moving in it, and how similar this ludicrous act is to the very real Luigi Galvani, discoverer of galvanism, running electricity through the spines of dead frogs to make their legs move. The two are “equally absurd, irremediably absurd, dismally open to the charge that man created in God’s image is on this occasion passing his time in a very strange way.” Bouvard, junk-shrunk in his cold tub; Pecuchet, advising intensified movement and dutifully consulting his thermometer; Galvani, using electrodes to make a trans-Styxian counterfeit of amphibian animism; the school administrator, entoiled with the charge to shape a whole populace by shelling its progeny with incoherencies, falsehoods, and weird invocations to productivity; teachers, beaten and incredulous, behaving very properly, not to say dully; and finally students, by nature incomprehensibly vulnerable, suspecting the con but seeing the advantage in buying it anyway and proudly showing those test scores, little copper wires still trailing from their brain stems. Thus the grotesque weaves its way so thoroughly, so convincingly, into the real that distinguishing one from the other involves contortions no reader of Aristotle could imagine.
Whether the child does well or poorly, the result is similar and the real purpose of testing stands clear: not to gather data to discern where students are on their journey to master the standards, but to train children with the skills to behave like good human capital and in doing so make them just ignorant enough not to know they should, or imagine they can, refuse such treatment. In becoming good capital, the contours of their humanness are thoroughly, carefully, purposefully defined for them, and relieved of what may be most humanizing: the fundamental need and the radical responsibility to state, with whatever indefinite, ineluctable ambiguity and approximation it may require, what they think on their own terms. They also thus become elements of satire, young Buster Keatons spinning on giant digital pinwheels. The dishonor thus brought upon students by local boards of education and district administrators is cause for shame, and it is worth asking who told any of them they could work with adults. It is worth noting as well that if we applied the same ethical standards for informed consent for data gathering to schools, school boards, and Departments of Education, that I apply to research proposals as a member of UGA’s Institutional Review Board, we’d all be doing 5–10 in Leavenworth.
5. Revolt
The closing of Baldwin’s “A Talk to Teachers” is worth quoting at some length:
“I began by saying that one of the paradoxes of education was that precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience, you must find yourself at war with your society. It is your responsibility to change society if you think of yourself as an educated person. And on the basis of the evidence — the moral and political evidence — one is compelled to say that this is a backward society. Now if I were a teacher in this school, or any Negro school, and I was dealing with Negro children, who were in my care only a few hours of every day and would then return to their homes and to the streets, children who have an apprehension of their future which with every hour grows grimmer and darker, I would try to teach them — I would try to make them know — that those streets, those houses, those dangers, those agonies by which they are surrounded, are criminal. I would try to make each child know that these things are the result of a criminal conspiracy to destroy him. I would teach him that if he intends to get to be a man, he must at once decide that his is stronger than this conspiracy and they he must never make his peace with it.”
Baldwin here is of course speaking of the education of African American children in the 1960’s, and the world is different now. But it’s not that different, and we may appropriately universalize his point. In fundamental ways, the eliding of thinking itself, its transformation into an exteriorized and ritualized performance, is, if not exactly a violence, then at least a confusion, inflicted on every child in every school everywhere.
Each day, we are told, we must have students explicitly know what they are to “know, understand, and do.” There are prescriptive processes for that, and the engraving of those processes onto children’s minds has come to be called instruction. This term is worth pausing over for a moment. I have steadfastly refused to use it over the years. An instruction is what one reads in a manual: how to change your brake pads, how to manipulate a graphing calculator, how to assemble Homo sapiens erudita.
What very few people think to ask children or to help them see as a question is what might be worthy of their dignity as human beings to know, understand, and do. Should they want to be members of a churning economy? Might they want to do everything they can to wreck that economy, or at least not to participate in it, if they decide it is fundamentally undignified? How may they decide, on their own terms, of what their human dignity consists and what it is worth? No one dares ask them those things. Too many of us would be unwilling to live with their honest answers. We are terrified of our children’s minds, and that is why we have carefully prescribed paths to make them into Homo sapiens erudita, and convinced ourselves of the machine’s humane nobility and the necessity of its telos.
That is the inner reason the profession of teaching has become so maniacally, bizarrely unserious, except to those vanishingly few of us who can tell a James Baldwin from some pendejo consultant or writer of popular tracts about achieving equity. There is a dearth of teachers like us in local classrooms. But you will never find enough to fill the need: teachers are not trained this way: you don’t really want teachers like us around, or else Pearson Publishing, Houghton-Mifflin, and the Eli Broad Foundation with its skeevy school leadership program would have died years ago from sheer mockery of their ideas. Your snorting consternation and hypocritical rectitude will not permit too many of us to be around. You have never really wanted an educated public because you can’t deal with what that would mean — the litter of broken pieties and the sheer irrelevance of your shitass squabbling. You wouldn’t recognize an educated public if it spanked you. You are your problem. I dissent, and I do not want your approval, and I don’t believe I’m entirely alone.
6. Stop acting and think
We are conditioned always to be doing. Our culture approves of leisure because that generally involves some activity or another, usually for which one pays money, the just reward for having earned that money, as opposed to having to work a 16-hour double shift because you are thought to be a worthless person who does not deserve to spend that time with your children, never mind whether your children deserve to spend that time with you. Leisure is an object one is supposed to aspire to possess. Idleness is different, an affront and even a sin: sitting and thinking need not cost anything, and you can do it anywhere, at any time — the tub, the park bench, on a walk, sitting in your home with the TV silenced in front of you. Thinking in idleness is a challenge to the machine-purpose essence of Homo sapiens erudita, so much so that its spouse, Homo sapiens economicus, has to holler abusive clichés about time being money and idle hands being the devil’s playground, just to keep the family together and functional — and note, if you will, the larger resonances of that term, functional, and especially of its antonym, dysfunctional. This is familiar ground, having found voice in essays by Bertrand Russell and more recently Mark Slouka, but its connection to the institution of schooling can hardly be overstated.
We are accustomed to hearing sincere and well-meant invocations to something called critical thinking. Frequently in the same breath we hear about problem-solving skills, and the two appear to be thought interchangeable. This is what the Reverend Billy Gates means when he says kids should learn how to write code. And witness virtually every single time Well Meaning Person in the New York Times editorial page presumes to have something intelligent to say about schooling and teaching. On one level, this seems merely careless: it does not take too much critical thought to realize that criticism and problem-solving, while related and occasionally useful for each other’s purposes, are not only not the same, but nearly opposite. If I solve a problem, I have deployed some kind of technical expertise to construct a response to it, to create a solution, at the least to cast new light to show why it is not the problem it had been said to be. If I critically analyze something, for instance the solution to a problem, then I am very likely either to create or to uncover problems where there were none before. I have, by sheer thinking, unmade something. Careless, indeed, that conflation of the two.
How did this happen? I suggest that it wasn’t actually careless; it serves a purpose. The conflation of critical thinking and problem-solving is the solution to a problem, which is to say it is a product of the directive to be productive. What problem, then, does this production solve? It protects order from the destructiveness of the critical faculty, from what some may call its anti-social quality.
Conflating critical thinking and problem-solving tempers critical thinking with a quality of perceived health and nobility while conferring unto problem-solving an aesthetic of hard, sharp knowingness. These are the desired effects, never mind that it is inherently nonsensical. Here we move from Bouvard and Pecuchet attempting to raise the temperature of bathwater by moving in it, to their creator, Gustave Flaubert, satirizing them, satirizing the organized project of education itself as an organized project; to Mr. Baldwin’s putative student, refusing to make his peace and by that refusal insisting, often furiously, that we see the difference between our egalitarian words and our inhumane, not to say vicious, actions; and indeed to all the other students, most of whom at least dimly perceive the ludicrous, absurd direction to which we pointed them when we lit the fuses underneath them.
Earlier this year our school entertained a proposal to partner with a corporate-funded group that takes cohorts of students through a curriculum written in part by their business partners. Various companies that sponsor them present the cohorts with real problems for them to solve: to figure where exactly to build a needed warehouse, or whether to rent one; to figure how many restaurants of a fast food chain a town can profitably sustain, or to create a new menu item with a precise calorie count; how to more efficiently package a product for shipment. These problems, as they are given by the companies, would orient the curricula of all four core subject areas: English, math, social studies, and science. In this way, students’ academic studies would be directly connected to what they call the real world. As we endured their presentation, in which they called our students a market, I asked them whether they would accept problem-proposals from students. For instance, instead of creating a new menu item, might our students to help the restaurant chain figure how to cut upper management salaries sufficiently to pay the hourly workers enough that our students working there could work 10 hours per week instead of 20? That would be a real-world problem to solve: how to stay on top of their studies and still be able to help mom keep the lights on. And it’s the kind of thing that many of our students, if we would just leave them alone for a while, would come up with. I did not make any new friends that day.
In our school we even have explicitly stated in our meeting norms that if you state a problem, you should offer a solution. “No BMW’s,” one of our principals used to say: no bitching, moaning, or whining. This is monstrous, but it keeps everyone following the script, barreling mercilessly toward what gets called consensus. Good manners are the apparatus of silence and that peace which suffocates you. So we return again to what Mr. Baldwin called the rules of society, and the productive role of the machine, Homo sapiens erudita, in keeping it all going.
Thinking in idleness is a fundamentally political act. It says, sometimes implicitly, sometimes explicitly, that the mania for production is just that: a mania. We may decline to partake in that, and we may name it a sickness. We may learn, in our solitude, in our quietude, in the open spaces of our minds unpestered by obligation, that we can still think on our own terms; that such thinking, too, is still hard work, but that it need not be worth anything to anyone else to nonetheless be worth something. Claiming that time goes far beyond doing the recreational drug we now call self-care: a collection of doings that one must do, it is said, to be good to oneself.
No, to show students what the open quiet may feel like, to help them suspect the joy in hovering untethered and perhaps also terrified over an absolutely merciless void, that is the thing. The rest is just paying the bills, but they don’t really even have to learn to do that if they should decide such a life just isn’t very interesting.