McClintock's Essay

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Toward a Place for Study in a World of Instruction

Robbie McClintock

Institute for Learning Technologies
Teachers College — Columbia University
December 2000


 

Section 5 — Dropouts
¶ 59
 		 Here, however, we may touch on premonitions of yet another great historic change, for many — some silently and some with a show — are making use of their actual opportunities. Affluence and social security are greatly diminishing the urge to make the competitive climb up the scholastic ladder. Many of the young find themselves sent to school for reasons they do not accept, and they soon realize that the didactic machine in which they are caught harnesses culture to purposes that they disdain. A number react; they reject the system; they drop out, emotionally if not physically. In response, the aging pundits pontificate, bitter that their parental love is not requited: the young of the day scorn culture, despise reason, and subvert the highest values of tradition. Perhaps, perhaps for a few, but the blanket judgment is too quick. At their most chaotic, modern universities are still quite staid in comparison to those medieval colleges where rules stipulating that students must check their weapons on entering academic buildings usually could not be enforced. [ 58 ] 
 
¶ 60
 		 To find the place of study within our current world of instruction, look first at those who do not succeed within the system. The ubiquitous dropouts and the non-students who seem to hang around every center of learning are officially perceived as educational losses simply by virtue of their non-presence in the all-important process of instruction. Little is known about the way that the particular people who insist on not being present in scholastic circles are actually developing intellectually over a significant period, and what generalizations there are, positive and negative, about their intellectual attitudes are based most often on public positions that they have asserted at one or another strained moment, not on a sense of their inner intellectual trajectory as it unfolds over time. Too often, the youth who stomps out of school, trashing windows while shouting obscene, anti-intellectual slogans, is immediately stigmatized as uneducable; the inane violence of his adolescent acts and the vacuous character of his passing imprecations are taken as indicative of the inevitable, irrevocable character of his life. For some, this may be the case, but for many, disequilibrium, rebellion, and breakdown may be essential steps on the way to mature, sustained self-development.
 
¶ 61
 		 That, at any rate, is a suspicion we might infer for our cultural history, which abounds with redeemed rebels. Take, for instance, Goethe, the great Goethe. He was sent from his home at Frankfurt to study jurisprudence at Leipzig at the tender age of sixteen, affluent, emotionally unprepared, and intellectually unwilling. Cocky, talented, adventurous, he quickly found his way into Leipzig's bohemia; he took to dressing rebelliously, like Werter, in high boots, bright blue pants, and open shirt, to indulging in affairs shocking to good society, and to muttering valuations that outraged the guardians of culture. At nineteen he gave up his pretense to academic study, and as a sympathetic biographer described it, "he returned home a boy in years, in experience a man. Broken in health, unhappy in mind, with no strong impulses in any one direction, uncertain of himself and of his aims, he felt, as he approached his native city, much like a repentant prodigal, who had no vision of the fatted calf awaiting him. His father, unable to perceive the real progress he had made, was very much alive to the slender prospect of his becoming a distinguished jurist." [ 59 ] Yet, through such disasters the young make real progress towards developing powers of self-direction.
 
¶ 62
 		 In recognition of this fact, Goethe's biographer reflected profoundly, "The fathers of poets are seldom gratified with the progress in education visible to them; and the reason is that they do not know their sons to be poets, nor understand that the poet's orbit is not the same as their own. They tread the common highway on which the milestones accurately mark distances; and seeing that their sons have trudged but little way according to this measurement, their minds are filled with misgivings. Of that silent progress, which consists less in traveling on the broad highway, than in the development of the limbs which will make a sturdy traveler, parents cannot judge." [ 60 ] Thus, after years of seemingly aimless experiment, the young man may suddenly take hold of himself, his imagination fired by some demanding goal towards which he will make astounding progress. Yet even that will not be the end of the saga, for the very quality that first held him back, the power to reject the given, is precisely the quality that will enable him repeatedly to reassess and renew his purposes as each approaches fulfillment. Thus it is a grave error to believe that those who leave the system are uneducable or irrelevant to a substantive assessment of education in our time. On the contrary, we are likely to find among these the most educable representatives of the young, provided we recognize that, for better or for worse, study is the operative principle functioning in the education, curiously, of the so-called non-student.
 
¶ 63
 		 Furthermore, this fact that study may be functioning fruitfully among the dropouts and non-students of our time leads to the decisive refutation of any stigma of elitism that may be attached to the tradition of self-directed study. The Bildungsroman has become the literary genre natural to spokesmen for the dispossessed. The theme is incessant: one cannot break the bonds of degrading dependence by depending on the gracious aid of others; turn within and there one will find an unconditioned energy that can be brought to fruition in spite of obstacles if one will but will it. In this world of instruction, The Autobiography of Malcolm X is our sequel to Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship and George Jackson's Soledad Prison cell was our doomed equivalent to Montaigne's study. And because study is the great unconditioned force in human development, it is the truly democratic agency of education. Moreover, although unconditioned and open to any man, rich or poor, study is a drive that draws on a certain dissatisfaction and critical unease; hence it can function as a great leveling up force, for it will most passionately move those who chafe at exploitation, who rancor at injustice, not those who complacently believe that they and theirs have surely arrived. [ 61 ]
 
¶ 64
 		 It is not enough, however, to observe that the place for study in our world of instruction is outside of the system among dropouts, non-students, and those subjected to a heritage of discrimination and exploitation. If the leveling up potential of study is to be allowed to do its work, a place for study must be created within our world of instruction; the system must be opened up so that the self-directing student can achieve the unexpected, so that those who are going to erase centuries of dependence are not absurdly expected to do so by being servilely dependent on their paternal teachers or by being forced to adopt a resentful, separatist program of self-help.
 
¶ 65
 		 But the goal of finding a place for study in a world of instruction is too easily proclaimed; the basic character of any system is not changed by calling merely for an altered goal. To change a system significantly men need a coherent vision of possibilities, like that propounded by Comenius; and they need, too, a set of real historic forces, like the political, economic, and demographic drives that gave rise to the industrial nation-states, from which they can derive sufficient energy to actualize their vision. On this realistic basis, what chance is there of finding a place for study in our world of instruction?
 
¶ 66
 		 To begin, recall that Comenius developed his vision of universal compulsory instruction by ignoring study as a motive force of education and by instead locating the educative drive in the process of teaching and learning. As soon as one accepts that teaching and learning is what makes education happen, most features of the great didactic follow smoothly. Then instruction becomes the key; the great question becomes that of deciding what should be taught and choosing the means that will effectively teach it. By assuming that learning is indeed what pupils do in response to teaching, one naturally concludes that whatever is in the curriculum, manifest or latent, will eventually find its way into the child. Thus, in present-day discussions of the curriculum, one often hears assertions that by determining what the instructional program will be, one is determining what a people will learn. What the schools will teach, the citizens shall learn. But this is not the case. Each student always exercises a final modulation, which can be thorough and complete; and as long as curriculum planners base their labors on the question of what ought to be taught and learned, they are doomed to frustration, for it is not in their power to answer this question effectually.
 
¶ 67
 		 Comenius was only half correct: teaching is the teacher's function. But learning, in passive response to the teacher, is not the job of the student. Study is his business; and the motive force of education is not teaching and learning, but teaching and study. In designing a curriculum, men should not pose the impossible question of what ought to be learned; rather they should put to themselves the more productive, restrained question of what opportunities for study should they offer to the young. What opportunities for study ought to be offered? What agencies should be used? What helps should be given? These are among the important questions that educators would pose if they saw the motive force of education to be a process of teaching and study. This conception leads logically to a vision of universal, comprehensive, voluntary study drawing sustenance from diverse educational agencies. This vision might be described in a book with the Comenian title --  The Perfect Paideia, Setting forth the Complete circle of Studies Opening all Things to all Men, or a certain Inducement to provide Opportunities for Studying all Subjects on all Levels through all Agencies of Communication, so that every Person, regardless of Creed, Color, or Class, will at all Times find Open to him a Multiplicity of meaningful Means for mastering the Sciences, refining his Purposes, and partaking in Culture and Art, and in this manner to have the occasion to realize his full human possibilities as he should see fit. . . .
 
¶ 68
 		 A vision is a vision; it is not practical, right now, that is; the means to its implementation cannot be specified in actionable detail. Nor does a vision become real through a single policy; rather it takes many different steps, here and there, big and small, direct and oblique. Hence, as a practical measure of trying to implement such a vision, it would be imprudent to stake everything, as some proponents of de-schooling society seem to do, on imposing an involuntary volunteerism. [ 62 ] A future cannot be built by blank opposition to the present, no matter how imperfect that present may be. Rather, a future is built by making innumerable, diverse trials at living according to new principles; by many positive attempts rather than by a single grand negation. As manifold efforts are made to create various places for study in our world of instruction, the basis of a new system will grow within the interstices of the old. 
 
¶ 69
 		 Historically, the path from the Comenian vision to the modern reality was by no means straight, and it is strewn with the wreckage of numerous, delightfully bizarre experiments; so too the way to the future will be a crooked path marked by fascinating failures. To traverse it, we need a superabundance of possibilities so that on the foundation of each failure we can make our next attempt, perhaps with slightly more success. Hence, halting, diverse development can best be encouraged by the playful imagination setting forth all manner of quasi-practical, quasi-utopian possibilities. In this spirit I present the suggestions that follow, knowing full well that some are more practical than others, that with each serious difficulties might block implementation, and that at best all are quite limited measures. These difficulties do not seriously bother me, however, for I suggest the ideas, not as an immediate basis for a program of practical reform, but as a speculative beginning that may engender more and more speculation, out of which there may eventually come sufficient ideas and energy to recreate a world of study. Thus, the exercise that follows should be entered with speculative glee, with a boyish enthusiasm for pure possibilities, with the inclination to preface everything with Why not? and I wonder if. . . . . 
 

 

 

 

Endnotes
Note 58 See Ariès' interesting chapter on "The Roughness of Schoolchildren," in Centuries of Childhood, op. cit., n. 31, pp. 315-328. [Back]
Note 59 George Henry Lewes. The Life of Goethe. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1965, p. 8. [Back]
Note 60 Ibid., p. 58. [Back]
Note 61 This point is put very well by Alice Walker, a young Black writer, in "The Civil Rights Movement: What Good Was It?" The American Scholar, Vol. 36, No. 4, Autumn 1967, pp. 550-54. See also, The Autobiography of Malcolm X. New York: Grove Press, 1966; George Jackson. Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson. New York: Bantam Books, 1970; and Goethe. Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship. trans. Thomas Carlyle. New York: Collier Books, 1962. [Back]
Note 62 See Ivan Illich, "Why We Must Abolish Schooling," The New York Review of Books, Vol. XV, No. 1, July 2, 1971, pp. 9-15; Ivan Illich, "Education Without School: How It Can Be Done," Ibid., Vol. XV, No. 12, January 7, 197 1, pp. 25-3 1; and his remarks in "Toward A Society Without Schools," Center Report, Vol. IV, No. 1, February 1971, pp. 3-6. In some ways, my analysis parallels Illich's position. There are some important differences, however. Illich, it seems to me, does not break out of the trap of equating education with a process of teaching and learning. Like that other wandering East European priest, Comenius, Illich speaks continually about teaching and learning, objecting rightly to the Comenian agencies through which these activities now obsessively occur. Illich does not dwell on the importance of study, and I think that as a result of this omission, he falls into an excessively negative position in which the success of that which he favors, an open system of teaching and learning, entails the failure, the rejection, of that which he opposes, the closed, scholastic system of teaching and learning. If, however, that which we favor is conceived of as an opportunity for study, not as an alternative system of teaching and learning, the negative endeavor of "de-schooling" becomes unnecessary and one can go about the positive task of making diverse places for study in the world of instruction. [Back]