One battle every teacher has to fight in our current intellectual climate is the temptation to replace instruction and dedication to a craft, even if this at times and of necessity borders on rote instruction, with mere entertainment. I have no idea how in the hell this organization got my email address and why they keep hitting me up (no one else in my department gets these emails), but I get monthly emails from Pop Culture Classroom with tactics for making learning fun and one invite to their Denver ComicCon booth. How well they know me! That's an interesting phrase, though: Make learning fun. I cannot help but think the adjective here is actually of more consequence than the gerund. For if we are not entertaining above all, so the thinking goes, how can we expect actual learning to occur?
It also seems as if the teachers who capitulate most readily to the entertainment model are popular teachers. Take two teachers, each teaching Frankenstein to a group of high school junior: Teacher 1 sits her students in front of a text and makes them practice the rigorous task of rhetorical analysis. Teacher 2 just shows his students the movie version of Frankenstein. Which one is likely to be more popular? All things equal, it's Teacher 2. In the same way my son would prefer a dinner of pizza and apple juice and ice cream every night of the week, most students would prefer the academic equivalent of Little Caesar's pizza over, I don't know, a kale salad. But we eat kale salad because it is better for us, both in the long term and the short term.
I devoured over the last week Matthew Crawford's new book The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction. While not explicitly about education, the need for proper education undergirds the entire book. I will write more about this book in the time to come as I process it and return to it, but for now I wanted to throw out an observation Crawford makes in the introduction. In a section titled "The Ascetics of Attention" he writes:
"The existentialist writer Simone Weil and the psychologist William James both suggested that the struggle to pay attention trains the faculty of attention; it is a habit built up through practice. Grappling with a problem for which one has little aptitude or inclination (a geometry problem, say) exercises one's power to attend. For Weil, this ascetic aspect of attention--the fact that it is a 'negative effort' against mental sloth--is especially significant. 'Something in our soul has a far more violent repugnance for true attention than the flesh has for bodily fatigue. This something is much more closely associated with evil than is the flesh. That is why every time that we really concentrate our attention, we destroy the evil in ourselves.' Students must therefore work 'without any reference to their natural abilities and tastes; applying themselves equally to all their tasks, with the idea that each one will help to form in them the habit of attention which is the substance of prayer.'"
To educate is to form a young person. Not simply their mind and the content that fills it, but to form their emotions, passions, convictions, and ability to attend to difficult, sometimes intractable problems. Education that cuts off any ascetic element--any rote memorization, deep rhetorical analysis, quiet, contemplative reading--is going misshape the students being taught. Attention has always been hard to cultivate; the difficulties are exponentially greater now than they ever have been. But to attend to the world around us is to be human. To pay attention is indispensable in becoming an individual. I pray for myself, and for all teachers, at the cusp of this new year that we are mindful of this charge. That we seek to educate the whole person under our charge and give them what they need rather than what they think they want.
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