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Subjective Authenticity

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California State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Soka University Japan - Transcend Art and Peace
Created: August 19, 2002
Latest Update: August 19 2002
E-Mail Icon jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu

Site Teaching Modules Learning for Learning's Sake

Site Copyright: Jeanne Curran and Susan R. Takata and Individual Authors, August 2002.
"Fair use" encouraged.

Soul Training By MARK EDMUNDSON. New York Times Magazine. 8-18-02 The Way We Live Now. August 18, 2002. At p. 9. Backup.

"Many of us are being told that our primary task is to prepare students for fact-based tests, to stuff our charges with information, like Christmas birds." Well, yes. That's the emphasis on trivia that views the mind as an encyclopedia of knowledge. Unfortunately in this information age knowing how to access that information is often more important than having it memorized. Yes, we do need some acquaintance with basic facts we need to know to communicate well in ourculture. (Giddens position: that we can't really do social research unless we understand already the social system in which we try to do that research.)

Edmundson is right, though. To place restraints in the form of increasing numbers of tasks and indadequate budget on us that tend to limit us to such fact-based teaching is a source of tremendous frustration and quite a lot of finding of ways to teach in spite of the system.

"We are encouraged to inflate our grades, pushed to turn our recommendations into exercises in Madison Ave. puffery, urged never to say or even imply a critical word about students." But I need to strenuously disagree with this position. Edmundson teaches English at the University of Virginia. I can imagine that there he may consider that his students aren't used to working as hard as students once did. But he is responding out of an elite perspective. That doesn't happen at my school. Students are just as often seen as incompetent, never mind that it's blamed on their preparatory schools, and faculty wish they could teach at a school like the University of Virginia, "where the students are real students.

Truth be told, we're all wrong. Students have the same needs and motivation to learn they always have had. We've just created a fast track world that asks them to have too many allegiances, be too many things, to too many of us. There isn't time enough anymore for discovering our authentic identities. Students cheat, or so I'm told. But students are also pressured to cram too much in too fast. And those that are trying to "have a life" or at an even greater disadvantage. Putting this site together doesn't leave me time for a life. But that doesn't make somenone else less diligent, less kind, and maybe of less significance to making the social changes we need than my work on the site does. We each take different paths, work and learn differently, lose our way along different paths.The problem is our readiness to judge others by the same measures we used in the past, when the world was different, when we were different.

The more I struggle to give my students what they willingly tell me they want and need, the more I see them as just as interested in learning as we ever were. And the more understanding they are when I am exhausted trying. They tell me then that, yes, they would like more self-tests, but it's not so important I should feel guilty if I can't get them done. We have changed their world. Crowded it. Introduced toxicity. Introduced more information than any of us can keep track of. And they are changing our world in turn, by shifting their priorities, by realigning their choices, and sometimes by confronting us directly.

I suspect that Edmundson and I share students who are very much alike in their fundamental love of learning. We've just forgotten to listen in good faith to their validity claims. If we still judge them by their GPA, then don't expect them to learn for the sake of learning. But if we respect and dignify their learning, I'll bet they all respond. After all, Socrates told us the "unexamined life wasn't worth living." I suspect that Edmundson's students are met everywhere with unreasonable expectations that they will sacrifice all to their learning. And mine are met everywhere with increasingly hectic traffic and job demands and family members faced with financial problems. Our students' love of learning can be seen only through the context of that social world of their everyday life. Maybe that world doesn't respect and dignify education enough to support edcation over other demands. But we are also of that world, feeding into it our values. And we are better equipped than they to fight dearly for our values. Have we done that?

Edmindson goes on to say "More and more, the culture is asking us to be part of the service economy, providing our customers with what they think they want rather than what we believe they actually need." Now, it's important to ask here who is demanding this. It is a corporate perspective, and it is harmful, since education is not and should not ever be a corporate endeavor. Education is about excitement and sharing wonder, about gaining skills and discipline, about seeing work through to fruition, and experiencing genuine satsifaction in that work. But that very perspective of learning tells us we need to look to the "long wall" research in which it was found that miners did not function as efficiently or as happily at doing the same repetitive little tasks over and over (as in Hernry Ford's factories), but were much happier when they were allowed to work at the many tasks of seeing the whole wall to completion. But it's easier to trivialize and bureaucratize small repetitive tasks, and so somehow the long wall research never had much of an impact, though many of us know about it. Is this another point at which we missed the chance to fight for our values. Or were we just assuming that work was somehow value-free?

Knowledge-based tests and knowledge-based teaching were rejected by those who fought for freedom in South Africa. They called it Bantu education, which meant education programmed to maintain apartheid. Here we might call it banking education, as Freire did, meaning that it is education designed to keep the elite in place and/or prevent the disadvantaged from climbing out of that disadvantage.

I am often discouraged at how much I cannot get done. I am sometimes discouraged at how much my students cannot get done. And then I look back at what we have produced in the last twenty-five years. Not just a good student here or there who surmounted all odds, but all of us, working collaboratively to make learning a greater part of our lived experience. Edmundson tells a story.

Edmundson tells a story. had never heard this as a story. I'd read it in a graduate social psych class in a text on attitude persuasion and behavior change by Jones and Gerard. The Solomon Asch studies on conformity, wasn't it?

" One day, this teacher sent the most popular, smart and athletic guy in the room out to do an errand. When he returned, about 20 minutes later, he found the class in the middle of a game. One day, this teacher sent the most popular, smart and athletic guy in the room out to do an errand. When he returned, about 20 minutes later, he found the class in the middle of a game. On the blackboard were a dozen sets of parallel lines, some the same length, others radically different. When our teacher pointed to the congruent lines, everyone agreed that they were entirely different. Then, when the lines were different, all arms rose to affirm they were the same. Sometimes, the class star stuck to his guns, the only one with his hand up when the teacher asked if two, short, perfectly congruent lines were in fact the same. But other times he caved in. When all those hands shot up, like salutes at a rally, endorsing something absurd, Mr. Popular went along.

"When the show was over and the teacher finally revealed that it was all a trick (an ''experiment in conformity'' was what I remember him calling it), our classmate was deeply chagrined. But then we all had to think -- we were forced to -- how well we would have done ourselves. And we had to admit that Mr. Popular was the best we had to offer. No one had his combination of smarts and easy confidence. We all would have more or less followed along, clip-clopping with the herd."
Scroll about halfway down the file.

Yes, that's education as I remember it. Stories that place us right in the middle of life experiences. Taking the time to know each other, so that one day, we, too, will be able to think back to the teachers and students of our past. But, hopefully, not just one. Hopefully, many, all of them different, all of them having stories, all of them crowding the memories that make our education so special.

Theory: Subjective authenticity for both teachers and learners.