Pandora's curiosity

An entirely new side to the new school. We have seen that the fundamental misapprehension which may undo the new school is contained in its very motivation—can the essential voluntary attitude towards reading the great works be freed within a curriculum requiring those books to be read? So far we have more or less turned a blind eye to this difficulty, banking upon the invincible appeal of the books and the maverick Socratic teachers, as well as faith in the students’ natural intelligence and good will; however, and not that there is not some hope in these prospects, a completely different perspective may resolve the situation indirectly.

The thing is to make the school what it has always aspired to be: a place people gather to learn because they want to learn, not because they have to go. What if as it became more strict in certain areas—the chronological curriculum, for instance—the school loosened up in others—in the demarcation between ‘social’ conversation and ‘work-related.’ And if this informality, let us call it more precisely and idealistically, this friendliness, if it were extended even into the curriculum itself?

What I have in mind gets there via the long-overdue realization that there is something analogous between the way some people just don’t get schoolwork and other people just don’t get social relations, and so for the opposite extreme as well: some people do school effortlessly, others are never awkward with people. (Not totally effortlessly, but with a talent for it, not ashamed of it; not never awkward, but making it work.) Why should only the one count in school and determine your standing, while it is the other that is really essential in all other aspects of life? Why this dichotomy? And of the two ways to bring the two back together—either bringing books out of the classroom or bringing personal relations in—why not see that doing either fundamentally changes the nature of the whole enterprise of learning, and be courageous enough to see it through?

Books will be taught, but they will actually be read first, allowed to work their magic; social ease and the art of conversation will be taught, but it will be constantly practiced in so doing, so as to stave off that double standard, that hypocrisy which hamstrings every noble idea poorly implemented. What I am suggesting is that teaching the appreciation of books is actually as hard as teaching, what, coolness, friendliness, charm, grace. But like a foreign language, it is easier the sooner you start—like a mother tongue, it too starts out as something exterior to the child, but is eventually so completely acquired that it is impossible to say it was not inherent to begin with.

Nurture and nature, recollection and the fullness of time, genius and grace—aren’t they all different ways of looking at the same thing, and isn’t it time we knew something about all of them, rather than squinting at everything so narrowly without knowing there was any other way? When we once have in mind the new school as a place where everything contributing to the good life is taught, ideas as well as behavior, sympathy, character, athletics, creativity, we begin to see how inadequate our notion of teaching is. These are not objective quanta being transmitted—but a series—and the order is important—of pointings-toward, of invitations and directions to worthwhile experiences and the perspectives and ways by which these experiences will be recognized as worthwhile.

Plainly, the notion of testing with a scantron cannot be meaningfully applied to the lessons in taste and comportment and enjoyment being taught—the only test is in the student himself, the only question is, Is he a better human being for having spent all this time in school rather than left to his own devices? And it is for no one else to judge, ultimately, than the student himself. If he is dissatisfied it is up to him to try something new; if he is happy, we must show him how much there is yet to do—but not so as to make him despair, only to make his happiness the more balanced, more grounded, more complete.

But given this hope, this wish to be happy, to be our own best self and do all that we have imagined to do—what are we waiting for? Is it forces outside our control that are keeping us down—religion, tradition, culture, society, economics, politics? Well, it sticks in my throat, but yeah, partly it is, if only because so many people believe it is—and they can’t help what they believe, of course. But when we talk about these intractable social ills, the resolution voiced, though we have not got the resolve to see it through—is always education.

Education alone will break the vicious cycle of poverty, racism, violence—but in the meantime our money and resources are still needed to patch the leaks, giving fish while teaching to fish. Of course, then you look at the people who have been lucky enough to receive enough food and security and an education, and you have to wonder if we are better off after all, in any essential way. Is it too much of a stretch to wind up here and say, education of hope is required? In the sense both of suggesting what people hope for and that they then know their hope in such a way that they can follow it out, a thread through the labyrinth. And never suggesting that the people born into poverty are responsible for staying there, but always asserting the educated, really educated individual as above any social constraints or wiles.