A bit of cultural—and educational—theory
The paradox of education is precisely this, that as one begins to become conscious, one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated. — James Baldwin (American writer, 1924-1987)
What is college good for?
Incurring debt? Getting crunk? Discovering your inner entrepreneur so you can network your way into a fabulous career? All of the above?
It’s easy to be cynical about college. Especially for someone, like myself, who taught and worked within the walls of Academia for 40 years. Like any organization, college is full of hype and nonsense and contradiction and turf war and deceit—and all the rest.
Maybe what sets college apart from most organizations, however, is that it is supposed to be Noble and Pure and Good and Right...somehow.
Everybody knows that a corporation is out for profit—specifically, since the 1980s, for shareholder value maximization. When ExxonMobil says of itself, “We strive to be a leader in environmental management, and work to understand and mitigate potential environmental and socioeconomic impacts,” everybody knows it’s horseshit. Stockholders would never put up with such pansy-ass managerial objectives. Nor would managers risk their fat bonuses by pursuing such unremunerative activities.
But college...well...that’s supposed to be different. College isn’t there to turn a profit. College isn’t supposed to be a business.
But it is.
So, yes, it’s easy to be cynical about college. And the longer I worked in one, the more disheartened and pessimistic I became about the enterprise of American higher education and the general direction it’s heading.
Except in my own classroom.
In my own classroom, I could do something about it. I could discard the fossilized methods of yore. I could buck the new revenue-seeking trends of free market deathmatch. Like all teachers worth their salt, I could apply my professional training and experience to craft courses of instruction that would help prepare students—in my estimation—to deal with the shitstorm that is our social moment—that is, maybe, any social moment.
What more can a teacher do?
Accordingly, by way of introducing a bit of cultural and educational theory this week, I offer the instructional objectives to one of my college courses. Below is a direct quote from the syllabus of my First-Year Writing Workshop (more commonly known as the dreaded “freshman composition” class) that I title, provocatively, Mayhem.
Learning Goals of course:
- Writing Workshop: The primary purpose of this course is for you to learn and to practice educated argumentation—that is, to take part in the Big Debate within the Marketplace of Ideas. This learning activity will take place mainly in the field of the Humanities; elements of the Social Sciences will pertain as well. Note well: the thinking and writing skills you acquire in this workshop will transfer nicely, each in its own way, to whatever learned discipline you pursue.
- Critical and cultural literacy: In order to develop your skills as a critical thinker, reader, discussant, and writer, we will study a cultural phenomenon that might be called Mayhem—that is, the disclosure of consensus posing as objectivity. (Or, if you want to speak more plainly, the unmasking of Bullshit masquerading as Truth.) Note well: Your primary job in this pursuit is to formulate, express, and justify your own informed critical opinions about the material we examine. You are here to create knowledge, not regurgitate information.
- Teaching style: In this class, my job is fundamentally one of being a problem-poser and a problematizer. That means I will be providing no Truths during the semester; rather, I, like you, will be engaged in expressing my critical points of view about the issues and the texts we explore. What will be required of you, then, is the same: real engagement with the material being presented for your consideration. Therefore, never look to me to tell you what any of this “really means.” Instead, you will be expected to formulate, express, and defend (both verbally and in writing) your own critical opinions about the material. I know what I think about this stuff; I want to know—and to be influenced by—what you think about it. In short, then, take up the intellectual challenge of the course.
At the top of my course syllabus, directly above these learning goals, I provide the following thought-provoking illustration:
You get the gist, I’m sure, of my aim to have our class rethink the teacher-student relationship.
Applying—or maybe just explaining—this bit of cultural-educational theory
Writing Workshop:
The first bit of (bad) news I give to first-year writers is that an “A” in high school should translate roughly into a “C” in college. Otherwise, why waste your time and your parents’ money? I follow that disclosure with the (good) news that college should change and refine the way your mind works—not necessarily what you think but definitely how you think. College is not there to indoctrinate you, but to enable you to participate in responsible adult conversation. Informed debate is a skill few of us have leaving high school—and one that evades many of us our entire lives.
So I make every effort to acquaint students with the fundamentals of educated argumentation.
I take what’s known in the trade as the “process-oriented” approach to writing rather than the “product-oriented” approach. Instead of having them write data dumps—as typified by the good old-fashioned high school “research paper”—students engage in various kinds of writing, informal and formal, that teach them higher-order thinking skills.
In the category of writing-to-learn, I have them write short Summaries where they synopsize the main arguments of a specialist essay, deciding what they think are the key ideas of the author and reporting those ideas accurately. I also have them write short Quote-and-Contemplate pieces where they quote an interesting idea or two from one or more of those readings and then ponder the ideas in whatever interesting way they like. Both of these informal exercises get students to engage meaningfully with the viewpoints of others—something we all often neglect to do.
The writing process culminates in students undertaking writing-to-communicate papers. These are longer, formal Essays where students must state clearly their own critical opinions on a subject and then support those views with sound reasoning, convincing textual evidence, and suitable applications of cultural theory. As you can imagine, the building blocks for such formal essays are the informal Summaries and Quote-and-Contemplate papers they write beforehand.
Drafting, revising, peer evaluations, and one-on-one writing conferences with me are all essential elements in this process-driven approach to teaching writing. Learning how to construct a good argument is an iterative process.
Critical and cultural literacy:
More than any writing instruction I can provide, the most important bit of advice I offer to first-year students is this:
Forget the academic challenge of college and take up instead the intellectual challenge of college.
By academic challenge I mean just jumping through the hoops of getting decent-enough grades and ticking the box of all your General Education and Major requirements. Of just trying to “figure out what the teacher wants” and then mirroring that back at the professor without really engaging in the materials and ideas of the course. Such a transactional approach to school makes for a hollow—and pretty boring—educational experience.
By intellectual challenge I mean sincere engagement with the materials and ideas of any course you take. Don’t play the empty game of figuring out what the professor wants, but discover what you want from the course. It might be nothing (I sure didn’t want any more of the Chemistry class I took as a first-year student!), but it might be a lot. You never know what field or area of study might strike your fancy.
Of course, one big problem with my bit of sage wisdom is that students emerging from 12 years of primary and secondary schooling have been programmed—to within an inch of their lives—to do nothing but jump through the hoops of academic challenge. By and large, the best high school students getting the best high school grades are expert hoop-jumpers. So I’m asking them to give up not only all they know, but what they’ve become very good at and amply rewarded for.
The incentive I hold out to students is twofold. One, the pursuit of the intellectual challenge will automatically take care of the academic challenge—that is, you’ll get better grades! (A welcome phenomena I didn’t experience myself until I went to graduate school.) Two, although playing the academic challenge game is really pretty easy and generally works quite well in high school courses, more often than not, that approach to school doesn’t work so well in college courses. It will depend on the professor and on the discipline of study, of course, but really good college courses require more in-depth intellectual engagement from students. First-years need to adjust to the new educational culture they’ve entered.
That’s why I tell students in my Mayhem course (and in all my courses) that they are here to create knowledge, not regurgitate information. Sadly, this requirement freaks them out at first (expect for the counter-culture kids sitting in class, who start to smile). Hitherto, mostly what they’ve done in school is memorize and obey. They have little experience in—and even less confidence about—themselves as independent critical thinkers.
I tell them not to worry. The knowledge they’ll be creating is the informed critical opinions they’ll be shaping and debating about the material we consider in class using the critical and cultural theories we’ll be deliberating in class. My hope is to show students that not only do other people have intriguing viewpoints deserving our careful consideration, but that the students themselves are capable of developing stimulating viewpoints worthy of careful consideration by other people.
If that’s not the point of college, I don’t know what is.
Teaching style:
In my classroom, I use the ideas of Brazilian educator Paulo Freire (1921-1997) as the basis for my educational approach. Specifically, I endeavor to put into action what Freire characterizes as problem-posing teaching as opposed to the more standard method of banking-style teaching. Freire’s ideas are spelled out in a chapter titled “The ‘Banking’ Concept of Education” in his influential book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970). Early in the semester, I have my students read this chapter (see here), write a Summary of it, and then we discuss Freire’s notions closely in class.
Freire’s description of banking-style teaching matches well with the idea of students engaging in only the jumping-through-hoops academic challenge of school. Both this manner of teaching and this manner of learning involve the undemanding educational formula of information in = information out. Students are like a bank: the teacher deposits information into them via textbooks and lectures, and then the teacher withdraws the same information back out of them via quizzes, papers, and exams. Students are reduced to mere empty vessels. Human ATMs. They memorize and regurgitate “facts”—but whose facts? Devised for what purpose? Who gets to decide on these bits of information? What has been left out?
Freire regards this method of teaching as leaving students with no authentic agency, no room for individual or creative thinking and exploration, no real say in their own education. Students are being trained to be plugged into someone else’s system. Period. As an educational strategy, then, their worldview is kept limited and their gullibility is maximized. They learn to follow rules for rules’ sake. They come to understand that risks are not worth taking.
By contrast, Freire’s description of problem-posing teaching matches well with the idea of students engaging sincerely in the intellectual challenge of school. This manner of teaching and this manner of learning put instructor and student on equal footing as co-explorers of the world. The teacher is still there to impart knowledge to students, but the key difference is this: Unlike the banking-style teacher, the problem-posing teacher requires students to do something with that knowledge beyond just memorize and regurgitate it.
Students are asked to put the knowledge to use. To investigate and to question the knowledge. To create new knowledge in the form of working out and expressing their own thoughts and perceptions about the world around them. All of this is difficult and messy work. Banking-style education is far easier and more straightforward for teacher and student alike. But whereas banking-style teaching serves to mask social reality—yup, such teaching is one of Althusser’s ISAs—problem-posing teaching serves to reveal the reality of the students’ social conditions.
Thus, as James Baldwin points out in the quote at the top of this post, the student begins to examine the society in which she is being educated. Instead of school just slotting students, like cogs, into the machinery of the existing social order, students begin the task of investigating, thinking about, and helping to create a social order.
In short: citizenship.
So, yeah, sorry Governor DeSantis, but this Freire shit is WOKE AF.
If fostering informed citizenship isn’t the point of college, I don’t know what is.
So what?
As ever, I’m not claiming that my way of thinking or going about things—in this case teaching—is the best way or the only way it should be done. Far from it. All I know is that decades ago, when I first started teaching, I went about it pretty much in the way I was taught: banking-style. I quickly realized, though, not only how boring that kind of teaching was for me but, far worse, how boring it was for my students. And I sympathized with them. I sure was bored and frustrated a lot as a student. In fact, I was a largely indifferent and mediocre student until I wandered into grad school—where taking up the intellectual challenge of schooling finally kicked in for me.
The difference was this: I wanted to be in grad school. It was schooling of my own choice studying a field of my choice. Prior to grad school, I’d only experienced anything similar in a bare handful of high school and college courses. And, lo and behold, I came to realize that in those classes, the teachers were pursuing a pedagogy more or less like problem-posing education. In other words, in those classes and to those teachers, I mattered as a person needing—with guidance—to wrestle with the ideas myself.
My teaching mission became, therefore, never to be boring. A lofty ideal I know I didn’t always achieve. But the quest for educational non-boredom led me to explore and adopt pedagogies like those of Freire and subject matter like the kinds of cultural theories I write about in these posts. Stuff that deals with problematizing rather than going with the flow of the status quo.
I can honestly report that students were never bored in my courses. They could love what we were doing. They could hate what we were doing. They could try to bury their heads in the sand about what we were doing. But, in my classes, there was no place to run and nowhere to hide. When the topic of study is always, in some way, your own social circumstances and your own educational moment, well, you’re always involved—whether you like it or not.
If you’re not uncomfortable, you’re not being educated. (More WOKE AF)
College needs to be a place driven by intellectual challenge. A place of off-the-wall thinking. A place dedicated to bursting the bubble of “normal” and deliberating the state of affairs of the here and now. College needs to be a place of anti-indoctrination.
Otherwise, you have mere vocational training.
But that’s a topic for a future post.
Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons—that’s philosophy. — Mustapha Mond (character in Brave New World)