Not a Battlefield

Education is not a battlefield. It is not a war on ignorance, or a war on anything, for that matter. When we use metaphors that suggest otherwise, we undermine the process of learning, which, at heart, is what the educational project should be about. Earlier this week, I posted a link to an op-ed piece by Michelle Rhee, in which she urges that the US take educational reform as seriously as it takes Olympic competition () By no means do I disagree that educational reform should be taken seriously. But the more I've thought about her piece over the course of the week, the less convincing I find it, and the reason that I'm experiencing cognitive dissonance over it comes down to the way she conflates "seriousness" with "competitiveness," as if learning we quite naturally a global arms race that we, as a nation, no longer appear to be winning. This leads me to two questions. 1) Have we as a society really become so immersed in the metaphors of warfare that we can't even take the subject seriously without it being framed in terms of conflict? 2) Where does the use of war as metaphor crop up in education to begin with? I'll focus on the second question here by summing up some of my observations, and at this point I should probably explain that I am resurrecting this blog as a space to sort of think aloud about the processes of learning and education. I'm doing this now because I'm in the probably fairly rare position of having: 1 child at home, 2 children in grade school, 1 child in middle school, 1 child in what used to be called junior high, 1 child in high school, and a semester where I am teaching students from first-year undergraduates to graduating seniors. So I will be afforded an almost panoramic view of the American educational system. One of the staples of western thought is that humans are innately curious and interested in learning from birth. And if I remember Aristotle correctly, it is primarily learning via imitation. I mention this for two reasons. The first is that I wonder how, if learning is an innate pleasure we reach the point where our educational process seems to be in perennial crisis; if everybody is wired to learn, shouldn't learning be a relatively uncomplicated process? Second, if imitation is one of the primary ways we learn, than our actions and attitudes in the classroom, including the metaphors we use to describe the educational process itself are likely to be picked up by the learners we work with every day. Carl Jung is quoted as saying "what we resist persists." If we view education not as fulfilling an innate need and desire for learning, but rather as a war on ignorance, we have defined the process in terms of a massive resistance. What will persist? Ignorance. When I think back to the education classes I took as a secondary education minor, what I most remember is that classroom discipline was the most frequently addressed topic. I remember thinking at the time that we often find what we are seeking, and that when I began teaching, if I looked for responsible, developing human beings I would find them, and if I looked for monsters and delinquents I would find them. During my semester of student teaching, we were required to attend a weekly seminar during which time we were supposed to bring all the troubles we had encountered during the week to offer on the altar of the educational gurus leading the seminar, so they could tell us how to regain our classroom authority. And so I would spend three hours on a Wednesday night listening to how so-and-so set someone's hair on fire in class, or how frightening it was to have to break up a fist-fight in the middle of a math lesson. I was speechless for the entire semester. How could I speak up in front of the class and reveal that the two problems I encountered were that my students were frankly, kind of boring me, and that the principal was a bit snarky when I wore a Shakespeare festival t-shirt to class to kick off our unit on Romeo and Juliet? The fact is, the belief that students are discipline problems waiting to happen, potential sociopaths resisting knowledge at every step, is drilled into us from day one. The idea is so ingrained that when I try to point out the possibility of learning as a more cooperative experience, I'm often countered with either hostility or incredulity. I mention that in the seventeen years I've been in the classroom I have never encountered a single disruptive student, and the response I typically get it, "well, look at you," as if my mass somehow gives me magical powers to ward off behavior that would otherwise show itself. My point is that when we talk about learning solely in terms of discipline problems and classroom authority, or even the slightly more innocuous sounding but related problems like diminishing attention span, etc., we are inadvertently sending the message that learning is an unpleasant chore that students must be forced to do against their wills. Compare this with the other discourse, that of learning as an innately pleasurable act. Which wolf win? The wolf that we feed.