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Toward a Place for Study in a World of Instruction
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Robbie McClintock
Institute for Learning Technologies
Teachers College — Columbia University
December 2000
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Section 2 — After Plato
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¶ 26
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Before charting the historic swings between Platonic pedagogy
and didactic instruction, before, that is, observing the practical
frailty of study, let us note two cautions: what follows is
a point of view that should not be confused with the past itself,
and what follows is meant to celebrate any form of schooling,
even pedantic instruction, provided that it is energized by
the aspiring student. A world of instruction does not include
all efforts at schooling; rather, it includes those that do
not believe that the students' active studying is the essential
educative power. Schooling that respects the autonomy of study,
even though it might deal with study in a quite formal, disciplinary
way, should not be confused with a system of instruction, a
system of injecting knowledge into inert and empty spirits.
Schooling keyed to the self-active student is properly part
of the world of study. For this reason the guiding principle
in a world of instruction should be understood to be, not schooling,
but the delusion that the teacher, on his own initiative, can
shape plastic pupils and unilaterally fill their vacant slates
with the wisdom of the ages.
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¶ 27
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Further, in opposing a world of study to a world of instruction,
I write primarily as a critic, not as a Rankean historian who
aspires to describe the past in all its details as it actually
was. At any time, real life is infinitely complicated; it is
all things imaginable and cannot be summed up under any single
heading. Amidst this complexity, instruction and study at all
times co-exist; they will always both be present in varying
proportions in all educational phenomena. Consequently, to characterize
a particular time and place as either a world of study or one
of instruction is to make a defensible judgment about the dominant
tone in its educational practice; it is not to make an exclusive
description that must hold absolutely with respect to all particulars.
And further, the purpose of making such a judgment is not to
assert a real, implacable progression in history, as it were,
for such progressions are but specters conjured up by scholars
turned prophets in order to harry the probity of practice. The
purpose of estimating the pedagogical character of various periods
is critical; it is to provoke and evoke a sharpened awareness
of past, present, and future. By putting the case for a particular
characterization as compellingly as possible, one challenges
the proponents of contrary views, which may have grown slack
for want of opposition, to look at the past anew, to revise
or revive their convictions as they then see fit. To put the
case for study vis-à-vis an excess of instruction is not to
deny categorically the value of instruction, but to try to save
it from its own prodigality, for instruction will not suffice
to the near exclusion of study.
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¶ 28
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Those who doubt this proposition might attend to the classical
experience. As small cities grew into giant empires, the reliance
on instruction waxed. To be sure, here and there the post-Platonic
theorists — whether Stoic or Epicurean, skeptic or cynic — preferred
to stimulate and assist the inquisitive few, or at most to shock
the stolid into self-sustaining doubt. But in far higher numbers,
and with greater prestige and influence, the ancient practitioners
took up Sophistic rhetoric with didactic diligence. Imperial
expansion always creates a heavy demand for paternal schooling;
dependably, the gracious government, the magnanimous military,
and the many, well-regulated enterprises that sustain their
noble efforts all send forth frequent calls for functionaries.
Dutifully responding, educators in the Hellenistic and Roman
empires created worlds of instruction in which the schoolmen
flourished. As never before in the West, they became honored
servants of a paternal state, disbursers of coveted skills,
the Charons ferrying fated spirits over the Styx of success.
"Hellenism," an authority states, "has world-historical significance
in the full sense only as an educational power. This was in
great part the result of a new valuation and use of training."
[ 21 ]
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¶ 29
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In this world of instruction, this scribal culture as H. I.
Marrou has termed it, paternal teachers flourished until. .
. — until their profligate pedantries consumed the capital of
the pagan spirit, a capital that had been slowly built up by
the chancy, passionate labors of great men studying. Greek and
Roman authors had movingly hallowed the aspiring spirit. But
the imperial scale, especially in late Rome, overwhelmed creative
effort; talent became degraded as the ersatz esteem of affluent
crowds jumped from one empty idol to the next. With self-important
caution, the schools won munificent patronage while they adroitly
managed to transmit a sycophantic mediocrity from one generation
to another. Among the well-instructed, deep thought earned suspicion;
to speak truly was imprudent where so many could flatter with
finesse. The house of intellect ceased to be a home; it became
a whoring road to preferment or to ruin. The young would mock
the endless hypocrisies of this righteous sham, until their
turn would come to heed the Imperial call: then they too would
don their mask according to their rank. Thus sorely used, the
state schools became sites of tumult; scholars gave way to placemen
who vied for the patronage of the powerful; sincere instruction
gave way to entertainment, an aimless effort to gain and hold
the fleet attention of the aimless. [ 22
]
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¶ 30
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Instruction did not suffice; it left too little room for human
doubt, inquiry, uncertainty, the search for self. One by one,
more and more, men gave up the sham in this way or that. Hollow
figures filled each empty office, and thus the spirit rebelled
against the sword. Classical paganism, equipped with an apparatus
of self-propagation unmatched until modern times, could not
command allegiance. With mounting frequency, in every order
of the state, for good reasons and for bad, a miraculous series
of personal conversions occurred: ineluctably the triumphant
idea of Rome, the universal city, withered and gave way to love
for the wretched victim, to belief in the martyred God and in
his martyred followers with their subversive strength in weakness,
and to hope for a personal salvation through the grace of an
unfathomable father, son, and holy ghost.
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¶ 31
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From the start, Christianity was a religion of considerable
complexity; it harbored diverse, divergent tendencies. Be that
as it may, at least in that portion of Christianity that became
dominant as Western Catholicism, there was considerable respect
for the Platonic view of education, for no matter how much ritual
might help, in the end — before one's end -- the spirit had
to move communicants from within. Mechanistic behaviorism could
not suffice for teachings meant to redeem the soul. Consequently,
the apostolic Church functioned strangely like an institutionalized
Socrates: at its best it did remarkably little instructing and
a great deal of reminding. Rome withered, and, together, chance
and the Church turned the ancient world of instruction into
the medieval and Renaissance world of study.
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¶ 32
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Augustine set the tone. His Confessions reveal the inward struggle of the honest
student, the demanding search for a sense of significance, the
ever-recurring need for relevance. [ 23 ] And in De
magistro, he gave a rationally rigorous Christian statement
of the Platonic theory of study. He began with an inquiry into
the limits of speech, respect for which gave rise to his carefully
limited conception of instruction. Formal teaching must occur
through words and other signs; but words do not by themselves
give an understanding of their referents, the physical and intellectual
things they signify. Rather it is quite the reverse: only with
a prior, personal comprehension of the thing can we make sense
of the sign; hence people learn by judging what others say according
to their inner sense of truth. "All those sciences which they
profess to teach, and the science of virtue itself and wisdom,
teachers explain through words. Then those who are called pupils
consider within themselves whether what has been explained has
been said truly; looking, of course, to that interior truth,
according to the measure of which each is able. Thus they learn.
. . ." [ 24 ]
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¶ 33
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And truly, thus they learned. In far off Ireland, in isolated
monasteries, a heritage passed from student to student according
to an intense. convoluted, runic measure. As monasteries multiplied,
their scriptoria slowly enlarged the repertory of texts, which
they so carefully manufactured so that the precious books might be
studied over centuries. Devout artists learned to transmute
words into pictures of paint and stone so that more people might
measure their meaning according to the interior truth. The urge
to study touched not only the devout; Charlemagne called Alcuin
to his court so that the worldly might better discipline both
their speech and their conduct. Despite setbacks, the urge to
study spread to the Ottonian north, to the Norman south, and
along the Romanesque routes of pilgrimage; and when the medieval
world burst into the Gothic era of dynamic expansion, study
flourished in that fast growing institution, the studium generale, or as we call it, the university.
Here, students gathered from across Europe to listen to the
doctors, the learned ones, and to test their wit and knowledge
in the clash of disputation.
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¶ 34
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Make no mistake, this world of study harbored a significant
but subordinate place for instruction, which instruction kept
well through the Renaissance. Despite the limits that Augustine
put on teaching, he did much to make room in the Christian system
for the classical curriculum of rhetorical instruction, the
circle of studies that was coming to be known as the seven liberal
arts. Throughout the Middle Ages, these were celebrated in poetry,
iconography, and learned treatises; these were the stuff of
the young cleric's early education, his prelude to independent
inquiry and self-sustained study. Unfortunately, the elementary
arts were a drudge to study; they were at once difficult and
dull. Therefore, regardless of the age at which students took
up these studies, and it might be at any time from six to twenty-six,
a teacher was an important aid, not because he could ease the
students' ways with lucid explanations, but because he could
pace and regulate their work and, with sermon and ferrule, stiffen
their flagging wills to get done with the dreadful task. The
teacher was the magister, the master, the director of the ludus,
the place where the body or the mind was exercised. Thus the
school, the ludus literarius, was a place for literary
exercise, and that is precisely what early schooling involved,
a set of exercises that helped students acquire command of the
elementary arts.
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Endnotes
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| Note 21 |
Carl Schneider. Kulturgeschichte des Hellenismus. Munich: Verlag
C. H. Beck, 1961, Vol. I, p. 131. [Back] |
| Note 22 |
For the world of instruction in the Roman empire, see Tom
B. Jones. The Silver-Plated Age. Sandoval, N.M.: Coronado
Press, 1962; G.W. Bowersock. Greek Sophists in the Roman
Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969; and H.I.
Marrou. A History of Education in Antiquity, trans.
George Lamb. New York: Sheed and Ward, 1956, pp. 306-7, 310-12.
For the Hellenistic world, see M.P. Nilsson, Die hellenistische Schule. Munich: C.H. Beck Verlag,
1955, which puts excessive stress on the archaeological reconstruction
of school buildings, rather than on their function in the culture;
and Carl Schneider. Kulturgeschichte des Hellenismus, op. cit.,
pp. 131-147. [Back] |
| Note 23 |
Augustine. The Confessions, trans. J. G. Pilkington, in Whitney
J. Oates, ed. Basic Writings of St. Augustine. New York: Random
House, 1948, Vol. I, pp. 1-256. [Back] |
| Note 24 |
Augustine. Concerning the Teacher, trans. George G. Leckie.
New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc., 1938, p. 55. [Back] |
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