Education vs. Training

I've been involved, engaged, or caught up in education at least since I was six years old. Let's just say it's been a long time. Under the circumstances I might appear to have a vested interest in education, whatever we mean by that. For a brief time when I was an undergraduate I took a few courses in the history of education and educational psychology, courses which I enjoyed, but which hardly prepared me or fitted me for my later career as a teacher. By some lights education is a science, by others an art, and we have institutions labeling it as one or the other. And yet despite all the noise I've heard over the years, I've rarely encountered much serious consideration of what exactly we mean by education.

At some point, probably around the time I was first encountering Latin, I realized that the root meaning of education was "a drawing out (or leading out)," from the Latin verb ducere (to draw, shape, construct) and the prefix ex (out, away from). I've always liked that definition, suggesting the role of the teacher is to lead but also to draw something forth from students. Education is essential for human beings, since our instincts are so stunted, and our lives are so complicated, and have been from our earliest existence. I don't know whether we as a species deserve the generic qualifier homo sapiens, but we certainly depend on knowledge and learning to survive and to thrive as a species.

What then are we to say about this distinction between education and training, a distinction that goes back at least to the Greeks. Some kinds of knowledge are instrumental, the tools we need to get things done. If you want to build a table, you need to learn some skills. On the other hand, if you want to define a table, classify it, place it within a context of other similar objects, derive a category of such things as furniture, if you want to think about tables in some more or less abstract way, you require a different set of tools or intellectual equipment. An excellent maker of tables may never give any thought to such matters. No reason why he or she should. The table maker needs only to know how to construct a table. Labels for things used in the process of making a table, even the name of the finished object itself, if necessary at all, are still only instrumental.

So who needs to think about tables? That's a good question. In fact, that's the essential question lying behind all education. Who needs to think about courage? Who needs to think about war? Who needs to think about farming? Who needs to think about government? Who needs to think about love? Who needs to think about anything? Here's my answer. The first human who made a table did not do it by means of training. That person had to conceive of the idea of a table before making one. Education should enable us to think about things, often in an abstract way, sometimes even before we know how to put those thoughts into action or to make some use of them. That first table was very likely made to serve a purpose, to solve a particular problem or at least answer to a perceived need. That's something human beings are pretty good at. Solving perceived problems, thinking abstractly, coming up with novel solutions and new ideas, sometimes coming up with stuff just for the fun of it.

How do we train someone to think? Ah, there's the rub. That's what education is for. Kenneth Burke, a philosopher and literary theorist, once suggested that "literature is equipment for living." That's true of education as well. Education, even education in literature, can be instrumental. You can learn how to do useful things from reading literature. But it's also good for exercising the mind and opening it to new possibilities. That's why literature has always been a part of education. Storytelling is a means to an end, a way of passing on knowledge. It's certainly entertaining, but it's also foundational. Education is training the mind to think about things.

When education becomes focused only on training us how to do things or make things (and other manifestations of purely instrumental knowledge), we are in danger of losing sight of the fundamental purpose of education, which is to make us human -- wise enough to know how to respond to novel problems, to think abstractly about all those things we encounter in our lives. Educational psychologists have discovered that the capacity for abstract thought seems to appear naturally at a very early age in humans. Education draws that capacity out of us and helps us learn how to use it. You never know when you may need to solve a problem you haven't been trained to solve or to understand something you've never before encountered.

Arthur Koestler

I've been reading Michael Scammell's new biography Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic. It's an excellent book, and Arthur Koestler was a complex and fascinating man. There is much to admire about him, but principally his honesty. Not that he always behaved well. In fact, he didn't, and frequently revealed an array of human weaknesses, including cowardice and fear, but also amazing strength of character under some of the most distressing circumstances.

Most of this is already available in Koestler's own work. He was a prolific and talented writer and storyteller. What Scammell provides is context. Koestler lived through one of those eras of political and social upheaval that leave the world permanently altered. Although he was a Hungarian and a Jew by birth, he was by experience a European, an urban cosmopolitan who saw the larger picture of European collapse and transformation and recorded it as it was happening. The biography is a book worth reading and thinking about.

It strikes me that there are many similarities to our own time. I sometimes fear we are similarly on the brink of chaos; perhaps not so precariously as in the 1920s and 1930s, but near to, politically, economically, and morally. Maybe that is just the nature of humans and our social failings. When Koestler actually confronted the men and women on the street, the famous proletariat of his Marxist fantasies, he was amazed by the disconnect between theory and practice. Eventually he was forced to rethink his views on Communism and Fascism. Revolutions fail because most people don't want revolutions, nor do they want instability. Koestler marveled that the great social, political, and economic upheavals that were destroying the lives of his friends and family were endured more successfully by many ordinary people who found ways to adapt and ignore unpleasant realities. With more limited expectations, they coped and made do with whatever was available to them.

Koestler was also interesting in that he was a joiner who never seemed to fit in with the groups he joined up with, always remaining an outsider and a critic. He was rather quick to find fault with the Zionists, the Communists, and most of his fellow intellectuals both on the right and the left. Scammell calls him a skeptic; and perhaps that's what he was, but he was also a dreamer, yet one who kept awaking from his dreams to find them disappointing. He sometimes tried to deny the evidence of his own eyes, as he did in Palestine and later in the Soviet Union, but eventually he had to admit the truth that was staring him in the face. The best thing about reading this excellent biography is that it has made me want to return to Koestler's own work. Might be just the thing for our uncertain times.

Shakespeare's Not for Everyone, . . . So?

I started to call this one, "Up with Betas!" I'm hearing a lot of chatter about that Frontline Digital Nation show, which I did not watch on TV, but have now watched online (ain't the Internet cool!). The program presents lots of stuff to worry about (or not). Flash: the world is changing. It will never be what it once was. There's a generation gap, and a digital divide. Kids these days, they don't understand what they're missing. They don't read Shakespeare. Hey, some of them don't read books at all.(Comic books and graphic novels don't count.)

But why is that a problem? I know it's probably just my own warped point of view, but I keep thinking about Huxley's Brave New World. (Probably another book nobody reads anymore.) You've got your Alphas, your Betas, and your Deltas, Gammas, and Epsilons. (That's the way it was at my high school, too.) The more advanced things get, the more we're going to need those happy Deltas, etc. If they don't want to read Shakespeare, that's fine. They'll catch the movie, or take some soma.

By the way, I went to Sparknotes, and I have to say, I'd rather read the book than wade through the dreck on that site. But I suppose that's not really fair. I've already read the actual books, so I know what's missing. In my time it was Cliff Notes. (Now, of course, they're online too.) Here you go kid, this is all you really need to know. By the way, check my own truncated classics here!

So Long, Jerry.

J.D. Salinger has been much on my mind since I heard about his death last week. I first read The Catcher in the Rye when I was in high school. By then it was already well established as a classic. And having fallen under Salinger's spell, I quickly read Nine Stories, and Franny and Zooey. I next purchased two copies of Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction, which had just appeared in hard covers. One, a first edition, I gave away as a birthday present to my (then) girlfriend (and later wife).

Salinger is one of those authors who take you along on a journey. At journey's end, you feel somewhat exhausted and perhaps even, as in his case, abandoned. At that point I went on to my next literary passion, Aldous Huxley, I think it was, but I remained a sort of fan of Salinger, keeping up with sightings, trying to read the nearly incomprehensible "Hapworth 16, 1924," which came out in the New Yorker the summer after my first year in college. I was so far under his spell as a writer that I used to torture my English professors with my long self-conscious, convoluted, parenthetical compositions. I even published one of my first short stories that year or the next about a very precocious little girl who engages a Seymour-like young man in conversation in a doctor's office. I was, needless to say, much taken with Seymour and his alarming sensitivity.

Soon, however, I moved on to other authors and other passions, literary and otherwise. I suppose by then Bob Dylan had taken over from Salinger, as my friends and I became part-time Dylanologists, and began charting his journey into the sixties and beyond. The times they were a'changin'. And Salinger languished pretty much unread on my bookshelf until a few years ago when, for some reason, I picked up a copy of Ian Hamilton's In Search of J.D. Salinger in a used book store. Suddenly, as I read that very much unauthorized biography, many of the old fascinations returned, and I found myself once again falling under the Salinger spell. I especially enjoyed re-reading all of the stories collected in Nine Stories, which I think anyone can enjoy without having to learn the elaborate Salinger/Glass family mythology.

I also recommend Hamilton's book. It helped me appreciate the many complexities of Salinger and his writing. He was an amazing writer and a tremendous influence on literature, either despite or because of his attempts to remain aloof from many aspects of literary life. I think I do understand his desire to write and even to make his writing available, but not engage with other aspects of the publishing business. It's somehow fitting that his last published work amounted to a very involved and painful letter to his most faithful readers, as well as perhaps also a gentle put down and a reluctant farewell. I wonder what he would think of the huge outpouring of memories and tributes following his death? I hope he isn't too disappointed, but that may be too much to ask.

Lives of Quiet Desperation . . . Not!

One wonders what Henry Thoreau would have thought of the media circus we now live in, with various pundits holding forth twenty-four hours a day on dozens of television and radio stations, not to mention the thousands of blogs and assorted websites on the Internet and the World Wide Web. Well, actually, anyone who has ever read him would not wonder for long. The man thought newspapers were a waste of time. Surely he wouldn't have bothered to check his email, let alone sign up on Facebook or Twitter or browse the Web. But he would no doubt be astounded to learn that most of us are no longer condemned to lead lives of quiet desperation, then go off to the grave with our songs still in us. No, not any more. Now we can publish our thoughts for the world to read (or not).

For some reason another famous quotation from a nineteenth-century American writer comes to mind. Mark Twain is reputed to have said, "It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open one's mouth and remove all doubt." Some say it was Abe Lincoln who said this, but either way I've always thought it was good advice, especially when I've failed to follow it.

But with that as prologue, I have to ask, has anyone else noticed how many nuts there are out there? It reminds me of a column I read by John Dvorak in PC Magazine years ago when the Internet was just cranking up for ordinary folks. He remarked that one of the downsides with such a network is that it allows all the nutcases who would otherwise be isolated and marginalized to find kindred spirits and join together with like minded wackos who believe the end is near or the moon landing was a hoax or the Commies are trying to destroy our purity of essence by putting fluoride in our tap water.

Apparently all you have to do to get some of these folks going is send them an email. The power of text is so great that if it's in writing someone is guaranteed to believe it, no matter how far fetched. All of which is okay, I suppose, but then they want to send it around to everyone else they know, lest we be left in the dark. That's where you find out what's really going on with your tax dollars. Check your email. But first be sure you remove all those spam filters. That way the really good stuff will be sure to get through. Otherwise I would never have found out about this wonderful pill that the medical profession has been keeping a secret. It's better than Viagra, lasts longer, and makes you more than you ever dreamed you could be, and it works for men and women. Thoreau and Twain knew all about it, but they kept it to themselves.