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Posted January 23, 2005
Like a growing number of people, I am an education critic.
I'm not merely a schooling critic.
Though largely deschooled
myself, I have few illusions (I hazard) about the wisdom of auto-didacticism. And yet my experience with
has led me to a variety of educational heresies. Certainly the current system of schooling in America is nothing to be proud of.
Now, I had no complaints about a teacher until I got one that was treated almost like a goddess. Mrs. Hill, beloved of generations of students, pooh-poohed my standards and expectations. When I got Bs in math, she publicly taunted me for being a worry wart.
And yet I had learned an important truth, something I hadn't understood before: mastery is what you should strive for. It is painful not to understand. It is painful to learn slowly, and not well. Complete mastery is the goal. When someone does not attain that, they have in an important sense failed. Teachers who do not help them achieve after failure, or avoid failure, are themselves failures.
Of course, people have different degrees and even kinds of intelligence. But in the third grade I realized what it was like to be a slow student,
even if I was pretty fast. I began sympathizing with most of my classmates, perhaps for the first time on educational matters.
Unfortunately, I took my teacher's public taunting of me as an excuse to hate math rather than as a challenge. She thought I was smart enough, and thought it hilarious that I thought I was having problems.
But I was the one who was right: I needed to work on math. Instead, I turned my interests and efforts elsewhere.
In that same year I learned my most important lesson about education. I had been interested in dinosaurs and astronomy since the first grade (see my first-grade drawing of a brontosaur). I was also raised a Christian, and found the tales in the Old Testament to be quite moving and inspiring. I gleefully appreciated both without seeing contradiction or tension where contradiction and tension were readily apparent to my mother and to the pastor of our church.
What happened next was . . . something I won't write about, now. But it led to my abandonment of faith as a knowledge standard. Reason became, from that point on, a guiding principle. It was probably my first great education experience, something I'll write about in the future.
The lesson I learned had nothing to do with public schooling. It was all about learning, personally. And at age ten I suddenly felt that I had no masters. Yes, I was surrounded by people who knew more than me, but I realized at that time that I could not rest easily on their assurances that they were telling the truth. I had to work everything out for myself.
I doubt if this is a principle advanced in many education classes. But because it became my touchstone, I've since felt free to question all sorts of education standards and methods.
This self-seen duty to comprehend on my own was born, in part, from a confidence that my earliest schooling experiences inspired. Example: In first grade, the teacher had me draw the solar system on the blackboard and lecture the class on astronomy. I can hardly underestimate the importance that this and similar events had in my life. And I was quite cognizant from where I got the knowledge that I could share: books. Books that the teacher had encouraged me to read, had even let me read during recess period.
But my first bouts of skepticism about teachers did not come at my struggles with arithmetic. It did not come from any interpersonal static. It came earlier, with my frustrations with art.
I enjoyed drawing, like most kids. But almost all we ever did in art
was cut paper and paste paper and glitter together.
Whereas I wanted to learn to draw better. I had some talent. I'm afraid no frustration was greater than watching my classmates scribble outside the lines that they themselves had drawn for whatever man or beast they had sketched. I obeyed the line.
But at no point in school did we ever take drawing seriously. Not even in eighth-grade Art Class did we do that. We made puppets, instead.
So my evolution as an artist went from scribbled dinosaurs to somewhat detailed nature pictures (see second sample) to caricature animals (third example).
I never progressed beyond that. Other interests crowded out my interest in drawing.
There's nothing horribly tragic about this. My own efforts — here retrieved from old boxes and displayed as if they were masterworks — may show some talent, but no great talent, surely. But if one does wish to impart skills to young people, and let them nurture their talents, then drawing would be something that some teacher, at some point in twelve years of forced education,
would be interested in encouraging. You'd think.
But that wasn't my experience in school. It's easier to corral kids to muck about with finger painting
and cutting and pasting colored bits of paper and glittery bits of . . .
Well, you get my drift. I realized early on that art was something my school had no interest in encouraging. We never even spent more than a few minutes on art appreciation. No posed nude women for us! And certainly no help learning basic artistic skills, like . . . taking a line for a walk.
Yet when I worked for a magazine, my ability to handle scissors and paper and paste (well, wax), came in awfully handy! Yes, we did paste-up
rather than handle everything, then, on computer. And yes I, the only student in my class to protest handicrafts,
may have been the only one to grow up professionally using those very skills that I had maligned.
One of the things that the honest education critic learns is that there are antinomies everywhere.
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