Teacher, Thou Servant, Part 3

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Read Part 2

Despite that fact that industrialization created modern public education, education itself has not benefited from industrial techniques. Industrial techniques are those that increase the productivity of the worker, but a single educator today can’t educate any more students than she could a century ago. While a mediocre factory-worker produces more and more shoes with each industrial innovation, a good teacher still gets flustered when they cram more than thirty kids in her classroom. If we were keeping pace with widgets, we’d all teach in arenas and the Jumbotron would take care of most of the hard work.

The implications of this educational supply curve are myriad. The one on my mind at the moment, however, is the very strong possibility that we haven’t learned anything new about teaching in the last two hundred years. I’m inclined to a Marxist reading of Dewey, his descendants, and his detractors. And a Marxist reading would, perhaps, be too good for the pile of garbage that is written for the professional development of educators. (Servant, this is what they see fit to serve you!) In any event, Dewey’s progressive education seems to have as much to do with, well, progressivism as it does with teaching. Perhaps he was an originator of educational ideas; or maybe an industrial society with a progressive strain is likely to produce a philosopher who comments upon education.

But what educator doesn’t think we need new ideas in education? And what’s wrong with progressive democracy, the best ideal to have been wrestled from the clutches of industry? The only thing wrong with our philosophy, as with all philosophy, it that it makes us forget our history. Our history is not the history of industry. Our history ended when industry began, at the moment of our creation.

Our history ended then because that is the moment we were born. We are all, we teachers of public education, younger than the cotton gin, siblings to Dewey himself. We are new upon the world, and like all newborn souls, philosophy must guide us where tradition does not. But industry, born only moments before us, has created its own history, a history we have not been able to keep pace with. Here we are, doing what no one has ever done before, exactly the same way it has always been done: a few students at a time. What no one has done before is try to teach everyone in the world (universal compulsory education). Other than that, things are the same. We assist in the raising of children according to the dynamic needs of the one and the many. History describes how this dynamic varies, but our history has been foreshortened in relation to the industry that created us. Thus, in a twist of fate, we have as much to learn from ancient history as we do from our own lives.

To think historically, one must first accept the distance and difference of time. It is profoundly ahistorical to find the same thing in the past that you see today. And yet we mustn’t forget our own premise: Difference is the evidence of history. For my part, I have yet to meet or hear of the human being that seems so different from me. Not so different, that is, that I can’t watch the way they raise their children to see if there’s something to learn about teaching.

Yes, we should resist positing similarity before difference. But the history of teaching does not parallel the history of its own maker. Or rather, we have a half-history, told to appease the historical consciousness. It is the story of our emergence as an institution of universal compulsory education. This story is important, and it is, indeed, a history: It includes our panoptic architecture, our regular bell-schedules, our legal and hygienic procedures. And yet these are all but the setting for what we like to call the job of teaching. The job itself has changed less in the last hundred years—two hundred, a thousand—than most jobs that people do. It’s easy to get swept up in the excitement and pretend that the way we do things has changed over a few hundred years. But, no, that is the history of our books and our buildings. The history of what we actually do doesn’t even register across such a small scale.

The history of teaching belongs to the history of human families, and we are closer to matters of raw evolution than we are to the industry that created us, or anything else so young. Teacher, if you want to know the secret of teaching, consider how you serve your families before you bother with the next best practice. You can count on that rule of thumb, because it won’t change in your lifetime or in a thousand years.

Teacher, Thou Servant, Part 2

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Those who can do, do. Those who can’t, teach.

--Old Saying

The old adage is an insult, and it is true. No amount of truth can disguise the fact that this is the bromide of a vindictive student; yet no pedagogical sophistry can change the fact that teachers don’t do, we teach. The difference is entirely one of definitions, of course. The doing that is implied, I presume, refers to the actions of important people. The actions, it follows, that unimportant people like teachers teach their students about. Put more simply, the implication is even harder to deny: Teachers teach Shakespeare, we don’t write it.

The epistemological litigator in my mind is quick to say, Yeah, and so what? It’s not like our crabby ex-students are doing so much with their lives, either. (Whose fault is that, teacher?) Tell me about those who can do, do when you’re telling me about something you’ve done, son. Until then, let’s accept insignificance as a part of the human condition and consider that people in general don’t do much worth teaching about. At least some of us teach about it, is my litigator’s rejoinder.

His job is to take my side, of course, just like my job is to teach students about what someone else actually did. I won’t waste my breath denying it, but I will take the time to point out that not everybody can do this job of not doing (teaching). Part of this job is to be obsequious, let us remember. We are the nanny with her fingers near the infant’s throat; we must be trusted to act with our special capacity to bear insults on behalf of our expertise. It is our expertise, after all, that makes us necessary, and a necessity that flaunts its status is a sign of starvation. We are not involved, as teachers, in the luxuries of doing, the art of doing, the war of doing. We are basic—staples, paint, bullets.

In a world of luxuries, people do not want to be reminded of necessity. Because what is a necessity, if it isn’t proof that we are not self-sufficient? The pang of hunger is our reminder that we are ever-incomplete, and so it is among our chief desires to escape an empty stomach. And once we have eaten, we find that bread alone is not enough to make us whole, and that we need other things, too. And these needs are the same as the first: they cannot be ignored until they are satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until we can ignore them. The old adage about teachers is an expression of this ambivalence toward necessity.

The nanny with her hands near the infant’s throat is emblematic of all servitude. She is trapped, not because she has accepted her role as servant, but because she has accepted her nobility. She, most of all, knows the power she possesses. She can end a dynasty with the snap of her fingers. But she also knows that that is all she can do. She can build no empire of her own by destroying this one, because the master will wreck the whole world, and himself with it, before he lets a servant rule. Indeed, the master will do this for much less than infanticide. Any overt reminder of his heir’s vulnerability is enough to endanger the servant, which is world enough for most. And even when it is not, the only nobility worth noting is the one that refuses to destroy the world for its own sake. (I’m sure Nietzsche would disagree; or perhaps he would get the point.) In any event, the deadly hands of many nannies have been stayed through no fear of personal death. Just as often, I’m sure, they were given pause by the vision of a world deprived of something it needs. Or rather, the world as it is, deprived of what it is made of.

The world is made of many hierarchies, each of which bears some resemblance to servitude. Servants are the necessities of masters, and masters hate being reminded of this as much as they love the luxuries of their position. When the servant is a teacher, the master is wont to say, Those who can do, do. Those who can’t, teach. Teachers would do well to heed this as a reminder of where we came from.

Teacher, Thou Servant, Part 1

I.

A scene from Deadwood captures it beautifully:

A rich woman asks a question of the little girl that is her ward. The little girl smiles brightly and nods in answer. The little girl’s teacher, a young woman, stands beside her. The teacher rests her hand on the girl’s shoulder and murmurs, “Answer in words, please.”

All other context aside, what strikes me is the delicate precision of the teacher’s tone. Her message is disciplinary, but her position is deferential. Her voice conveys both the tender sternness of her duty and the requisite deference due her employer. And yet, the relationship is more than employer and employed. In educating the little girl, the teacher is taking on the rich woman’s role as mother, and she anticipates the rich woman’s envy. This is a good teacher, though, and she does indeed know her role. She is a highly-trained servant, and she emotes perfectly for the part. She speaks with enough insistence to do the job the rich woman can’t—or won’t—do. Still, she speaks softly, she says “please,” and she confines her comments to the subject of her expertise. The scene is historical fiction, but it captures a historical moment in education.

Historical moments are moments that destroy mythology. We speak of myths in different ways, it is true. Sometimes, we refer to myths with reverence, like we speak of ancestors. At other times, however, myths are no more than prejudices. It turns out that history is the force that makes myths into misconceptions. History both destroys and discredits mythology by revealing it as simply untrue. It is simply untrue, for instance, that teachers of the past were allowed greater disciplinary freedom with their pupils than today’s teachers. And yet the myth of the Age of the Wooden Paddle is still alive and well among contemporary educators. Whether we pine for the day of the ruler-across-the-knuckles or pride ourselves on having progressed beyond such a barbaric practice, we still believe that teachers used to be able to beat their students into submission.

When my dad first started teaching, parents told him, “Beat the boy if you have to.” As a parent, Dad was not above a spanking. As a teacher, however, he wondered why parents didn’t want to take care of their own beatings. Or, I suppose, why their own beatings weren’t enough to get the job done. Maybe this anecdote proves the myth of the good old days of discipline, but I don’t think so. I think what it proves, if anything, is that parents have always considered it their right to tell teachers what to do. Put thus, it may sound more familiar to contemporary teachers. The only thing worse than a parent who is not involved in their student’s education, we know, is a parent that is too involved. What is striking, however, is that it has always been this way.

The first myth that is destroyed by history is the myth of recurrence. Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it is not a historical comment. To the historical consciousness, everything under the sun is new, every day. History, in other words, is time insofar as it makes a difference. The first thing we suspect, then, is anything that has always been the same. And yet history is also genealogy, and it is, indeed, the study of where we came from. Time may be what changes everything, but it may also be the only thing that changes. In any event, teachers come from somewhere, and we do not escape the place we came from.

We are from a class of highly-skilled servants and dangerous slaves.

II.

What makes us dangerous is that we specialize in certain kinds of nurturing. This is the same as to say that we specialize in certain aspects of parenting, and are, therefore, surrogate parents to our students. As surrogates, we accept carefully defined limits to our authority as parents. The purpose of these limits is to prevent the usurpation of the true parents by the teacher. Thus, teaching is a dangerous human activity because it threatens to replace ancestral relationships with economic ones. The day the first teacher taught a lesson was the day we decided we could live with this danger.

Nevertheless, living with dangers does not diminish them, and history is replete with the destruction wrought by teachers. History itself is a destruction wrought by teachers. What we have destroyed is our old myths, and what we have given you in return is everything you have.

This is true, and if you don’t believe it, maybe someday I’ll explain.

III.

As teachers, are we not public servants?

As teachers, are we not servants?

The only difference is the word “public,” and all that means is that we don’t work for a rich lady from Deadwood.

Mr. Stickfigure on the Perils of Being a Dilettante

I.

On the night of my eighth grade graduation—an affair whose celebratory vigor I have only seen matched in Brooklyn—Dad took me aside. “As you go through life, you will see that you can do this and this and this”—he pulled fates from thin air with the tips of his fingers—“and you will see that this is beautiful, this is good, that is good. For someone like you,” he said, “the only danger is in there being too many ways to go.”

As I listened, I knew he was right, but I could not see why this fecundity of fortune would ever be a problem. Now, I’ll admit, I’m beginning to guess.

I recently read an article written by a friend of mine who I went to undergrad with and who now teaches college English. The article is a critical review of an art installation, and it is both profound in content and professional in form. I am accustomed to profundity from my friend, but the professionalism of his prose was new and almost startling. And there was no denying what made the difference: ten more years of experience and training in a field of study, ten more years of knowledge. Yes, there was evidence of practice, of the honing of a craft, of my friend’s axiomatic intelligence. What was new to me, however, was the competence with which he handled knowledge. This knowledge, moreover, was knowledge that had been gathered up and worked on for ten years, irreducible to a shorter span of time or fewer pieces of paper than are contained in the thousands of books my friend has gutted over the decade.

What worries Stickfigure, then, is that it was the knowledge, or the implication of this knowledge, that made the piece so well-written. This is by no means to imply that the profundity of ideas was enough to shine through clunky, academic style—quite the opposite. The coherent elegance of the style, rather, seemed inextricable from the vast, coordinated field of knowledge it relied on. This worries me because I’m afraid that if I’m ever going to be a writer, I’m going to have to do more than practice writing.

The dilettante, you see, goes through life hoping that a quick wit and attention to immediate details will somehow compensate for a lack of experience. Given the diverse superficiality of our world, one can, apparently, live to be thirty without really digging in. So Dad was trying to tell me two things, I think. One was that the world would be my oyster. The other was that to find a pearl, you have to dive down deep.

II.

Of course, one does not live to thirty without digging in. Mr. Stickfigure is now neck-deep in balanced literacy, and it’s close enough to his nose that he can smell it. If it wasn’t for the overwhelming stench of decay that permeates urban education in general, the whiff of balanced literacy would now be unbearable.

I wouldn’t let it bother me if balanced literacy wasn’t the best evidence of my own professionalization. Too bad I don’t want to write those big, soft-cover best-practices books that get handed out at study groups and lugged home to be dropped on a pile of un-graded papers. Sorry, Pops, I’m still reaching for fifty fates. In the meantime, I write stuff like this.

III.

And there is the secret side. I went to my ten-year high school reunion, far away from Brooklyn. Many of my old classmates are also teachers by now. As we stood around comparing notes, someone said, “I can’t believe no one has done anything really big.”

Are you kidding? I though. I’ve flipped the world on its head and I walk on what you call the ceiling.

I may be a dilettante, but I’m a patient one. Give me ten more years and I’ll show you something worth the time it took to learn. I’ll show you what only I have ever seen.

Deep Grammars: The Network

In our times, it is important to understand the concept of a network. The need for this understanding flows out of the reality of actual networks and their importance to our world. By actual networks, I mean any of those things we commonly refer to as such: computer networks, professional networks, criminal networks. The question arises, however, as to whether all of these networks—and many more, besides—actually have something in common. It’s not impossible that we are using the same word to describe incomparable things. In a sense, we haven’t proven otherwise until we can define the network as a concept that accounts for all of the things we call networks. And if we are able to come up with such a definition, it won’t be because of our rhetorical dexterity. No, such a definition can only be provided by history itself.

The concept of a network has much to do with the concept of a net. A net is composed of strands arranged in a grid. A net cannot be defined merely in terms of its perpendicular and parallel lines, however. At every place where two strands meet, the point of intersection is a point of resistance—not just a geometrically incidental overlap, but the place where a net is proven to be an object. When the body of a fish is captured by the net, it is the points of intersection that hold it back. Without the points of intersection, the net cannot exert force upon the world, and has no ontological reality.

And yet a net is not just the sum of its points, or even its ontological reality. To catch a fish in a net, what is not there and does not exist is at least as important as what does exist. It is absence that allows the water to flow through the net; it is the fact that most of a net cannot exist in order for it to be a net at all. As far as water is concerned, there is no such thing as a net. Fish, however, find nets to be their most voracious predators.

A network, like a net, is created through the coordination of objects and absence in order to achieve a purpose that objects alone could not achieve. Imagine you have a hundred pennies and you throw them on the table. One dollar. Scoop them up and put them in a cup. One dollar. Exchange them for ten dimes. One dollar. There is no way to arrange or exchange the pennies in order to make them worth more than a dollar. This is a poor metaphor for a network, but a good way of proving that we do recognize certain objects as having intrinsic value which cannot be increased or decreased by organizing the objects in relation to each other. A network can do this, however, and does so by definition.

In our times, it is important to know if you are dealing with objects that are part of a network. Perhaps, like pennies on a table, you are working with objects that merely happen to have landed side by side. But if you are involved in a network, you better know that there’s a lot more going on than what you see.