We expect too much from our students. It’s not because what we are asking of them is unachievable; it’s because we don’t give them what they need in order to do what we are asking them to do. The failure does not belong to those who came before us, the elementary schools, the High Schools. It doesn't belong to administrators. The failure occurs in our own classrooms every day. Yet, we go home convinced that, if only our students had been better educated, they would have seen the pearls we so foolishly cast into their pens. Yet, we continue to practice our old habits, teach the way we were taught, and decry the limitations of each generation of students. We roll the stone to the crest of the mountain convinced we’ve made progress, and there at the bottom lay another strangely similar stone. I shall not praise Sisyphus!
A striking feature in Prof. Nussbaum’s argument, and one that is commonly neglected, is that education in Humanities has become overwrought with failure on the part of its practitioners, and no one else is to blame but ourselves. By “its practitioners” I do not mean the elementary school teachers, the high school teachers, the college professors; I mean all of us who profess to teach in the Humanities.
In what follows, I will reconstruct Prof. Nussbaum’s argument to reveal the thesis that, I think, is at the core of what she is saying, something that is at the core of Humanities education, viz., that to teach humanistically, we must individualize instruction, avoid authoritarian reliance on tradition, and emphasize the development of intellectual skill over dogmatic insistence upon content. We must become practitioners of humanistic education rather than keepers of the mystical cult of wisdom. Following these considerations, I shall recommend a new way to approach teaching Humanities, one that needs no institutional approval, no financial backing, and no media press to fan the flame. What it will take, however, is self-honesty, the dethronement of our academic egos and the willingness to become teachers, real teachers.
In Ch. 4 of her book, Prof. Nussbaum leads with the Socratic mantra that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” Liberal education, she tells us, functions according to the belief that “through both content and pedagogy” students will begin “to think and argue for themselves”, that the ability to think and argue “in this Socratic way” is deeply valuable. The “Socratic way”, then, begins with a deep awareness of ourselves. No doubt the self-reflective, Socratic way of thinking is under strain. But is the strain merely that from economic growth? Prof. Nussbaum argues that, “[t]o the extent that personal or national wealth is the focus of the curriculum, Socratic abilities are likely to be underdeveloped.” I don’t disagree that our Socratic way of thinking is under strain any more than Socrates believed that good reasoning was under strain during his time. I would disagree, however, if the strain on education were believed to be any different now than during Socrates’ time on account of the economic motive driving modern education. Nussbaum points out that the result of a culture that fails to examine itself is that it leads to the pursuit of ambiguous goals; it is easily influenced by the appeal to authority; and it is openly disrespectful of reason by treating argumentation as a zero-sum competition. Humanities education generally has failed in all three areas, but I don't think it's because of the pressure of economic growth. Regardless of the cause of the strain, the effect is the same; so too is the solution.
As Aristotle taught, “[the purpose of our examination is not to know what virtue is, but to become good…Otherwise the inquiry would be of no benefit.” Nussbaum’s emphasis on Socratic self-examination and her consideration of the Aristotelian purpose of “the inquiry” provides sufficient evidence for the consideration that, what we have failed at in education is to take an honest, self-reflective look at the benefit of what we are teaching as THE driving force behind our practice.
Let me illustrate: Most of our students write very poorly. They also generally have limited critical thinking skills and a serious difficulty engaging in disciplined, academic conversation. Yet, we ask them to independently work through some of the most difficult literature in the Western philosophical tradition; we tell them how to think about this literature and criticize their naive interpretations; we, then, ask them to write on that literature in a clear and unambiguous way. Finally, we are surprised when they aren't any good at what we have asked them to do. The real question is not why they cannot think well or think critically or think Socratically. The real question is what are we doing to teach them to think well, think critically, think Socratically.
Humanities education today is on the defensive. While it is certainly possible for us to enter into the debate to show the economic relevance of Humanities education and the prudence of ultimately taking a Humanities degree a la Daniel Pink in a new Right-brained world, we haven’t done ourselves any favors in defending the Humanities because we often fail to do the one thing we most promisingly espouse: to teach our students the skills to think critically and imaginatively (and how to write similarly). We too often make the mistake of believing that, if we just throw texts at our students (and the standard critical objections and replies that we learned to pass our comps) our students will magically appear at the end of our courses as disciplined, critical thinkers. Alas they don’t, and we’re surprised when the next generation of students enters our classrooms far behind where we expected them to be. But wasn’t their previous teacher, instructor or school doing exactly what we have been doing all along, pretending that the encrypted texts we have come to value will transform our students into disciplined thinkers, even though they are without the skills to do so?
So what exactly is the problem? Humanities education is not the education of a set of doctrinal forms, propositions and institutions. It is not the education of a cultural elite that are gatekeepers of the promise. Humanities education, as it has been passed down to us from its founder and greatest practitioners, is the teaching of the skills that make relevant what it is we are thinking about, be it Aristotle or Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I am not arguing for the removal of Aristotle for Buffy, but I think we ought to consider that, when teaching, teaching the skills of writing and thinking is more important than the content we are trying to teach.
So what exactly is the solution? In a response to one of the earlier posts at ISW, Michael Cholbi makes a distinction between the investigative and the developmental face of education. The value of this distinction, I believe, was unfortunately lost when it became a question of teaching moral traits as opposed to intellectual traits. Discovery, or “investigation”, involves tools that need to be developed. The developmental process of acquiring the skills of intellectual investigation, however, is massively under-taught in our high school and college classrooms. Textbook instruction in basic logic is not enough. What we are after are the skills necessary for being able to have considerable access to a variety of points of view, and to be able to traverse these points of view, moral or otherwise, with relative calm, ease, understanding and clarity.
A few decades ago, the American Philosophical Association published “The Delphi Report” on critical thinking. It came out of the APA’s committee on pre-college philosophy. It is an amazingly helpful text when thinking about what skills we need to be working on with our students and what we need to develop in them through a wide range of intellectual practice. The irony of the document, however, is that it’s origin was a committee on pre-college philosophy. If you are lucky enough to have students with all of the intellectual skills imaginable in your classroom, kudos to you! But if you’re like most of us, it’s not just the pre-college practitioners that need to figure out what and how to teach about critical thinking. We need a good dose of honest reassessment, clarification and assistance ourselves.
We need to reevaluate the way we teach our courses. What if we put the development of intellectual skills first and content second? What if we made the focus of the course student-driven rather than exercise our degree given right to be the "sage on the stage"? What would our classrooms look like, and what would the experience of our students be? Consider Bok’s book on the underachieving colleges that Prof. Brighouse mentioned earlier. What happens when our students are moved from passivity to action when they begin collaboration? I don’t think collaboration is the “key” to the problem, but it is a good example of how passivity doesn't work, but agency does, because it’s finally a chance for our students to focus on the skills they need to begin understanding what we are asking of them. I see it everyday. I teach high school by choice. I have taught at four different high schools and one university. What I have experienced in unambiguous terms is that when students engage in the activity of developing their own intellectual skills, they learn very quickly and love what they are learning. But when they are stuck in tedious passivity, whether because of busy-work, or because the professor won't stop talking, their own intellectual skills atrophy, and they become bored and uninterested in learning. Perhaps it's not their fault; maybe when our students fail to learn it's because we are failing to teach. That's my thesis.
I think the most important idea that has come from the ISW project over the past four years has come from its creator: we must recognize that in education, we are the weird ones, not our students. We love studying this stuff, and they don’t; we have the intellectual skills to penetrate these texts and ideas, and they don’t. We cannot expect our students to do what we do until we teach them how to actually do it, because they don’t know how. Recall Aristotle: “The inquiry is of no benefit if it doesn’t help facilitate making people better.” When we teach Aristotle, it’s not because Aristotle has intrinsic value. It’s because of what Aristotle offers, the benefits that come from reading him. But if our students can’t read Aristotle, then we need to teach them how. That is what our practice should be about; and that is what we are not admitting, that we are actually pretty bad at teaching. We practice these skills pretty naturally; others don’t. And if we really value what Humanities has to offer, then we better begin thinking about how to teach the skills, not just the content, necessary for good thinking, and for democracy for that matter.
In conclusion, I want to offer a perspective from my own classroom. We study the standard content of the discipline, but the focus of my courses is how to develop the skills necessary to understand what we are studying. The point of teaching this way is that every student be taken seriously as an individual and taught to advance from where he or she is in the development of his or her intellectual skills, to the next level of investigative inquiry necessary for them to move forward. They learn how to think critically, to write and to dialogue in a disciplined, organized and thoughtful way, all the while learning how to see what is so interesting about the standard cannon of intellectual literature. I have changed my paradigm: I do not teach two classes of 17 students each; I teach 34 classes with two labs for inquiry and investigation. I believe this individualistic approach to teaching and the emphasis on skills is central to any Humanities education. We take students where they are and teach them forward. That is what Prof. Nussbaum insightfully had in mind when she wrote, "Each student must be treated as an individual whose powers of mind are unfolding and who is expected to make an active and creative contribution to classroom discussion."
I am deeply grateful to be a part of ISW and for the opportunity to reflect on teaching, teaching philosophy and the Humanities. I believe that what we do here is a small, but significant, step forward toward giving back what we have been given. There is hope for Humanities education, and it begins with taking seriously what our role is as teachers. Therefore, I shall not praise Sisyphus!
