Steering through the Two Pitfalls of Modern Education
In the Ancient Greek epic poem The Odyssey, Odysseus and his crew have to, at one point, steer their ship through a perilous passage. On one hand lies the infamous whirlpool, Charybdis, and on the other the she-monster, Scylla. Those who veer too close to one or the other are destroyed.
It is a good analogy for what I see as the two main pitfalls of modern education.
On the one hand, we have schools run according to the book. This is the traditional schooling method. It believes in teacherly authority, in rigorous instruction and austere behaviour management. At its best, it produces disciplined and educated young adults. At its worst, it can sideline student voice and agency, and negatively impact their wellbeing.
On the other hand, we have alternative schools which are run with what I am calling an anti-school ethos; which effectively side with the students’ perspective - that traditional schooling sucks, teachers are too strict, and wellbeing and student voice is paramount. At its best, it produces students who enjoy their school experience. At its worst, it coddles and disempowers them, and fails to discipline and educate them.
These are two competing approaches. Symbolically, we can see them as embodying masculine and feminine archetypes which have both positive and negative attributes.
I think they both have something valid to contribute to the ongoing ‘education’ question.
We can go back and forth between the two forever - but that debate is fruitless, because it doesn’t go deep enough.
To complete the analogy, if we want to steer the students home to their own potential educated and capable self, then we need to take the best of both worlds and avoid the worst of both as well.
This third option I want to call something like a ‘Rigorous Voluntarism’ approach. That will have to do until I can think of a pithier phrase.
In the traditional approach, we force students to learn. The goal and often the outcome is great: learning. But the means - force - is problematic and often works precisely counter to the goal of learning, insofar as it shuts students down and inhibits the kind of free expression and exploration that would lead to the deepest kind of growth.
In the alternative approach, wellbeing becomes paramount and learning optional. The means - social enjoyment - is great, but the lack of an academic driving goal is not. It too works counter to its own purported goal, as lacking this kind of rigour is ultimately going to work against the students’ wellbeing.
These approaches shoot themselves - or rather, their students - in their foot.
It is a result, partly, of not thinking things through sufficiently.
Before I propose a picture of this third approach, I will say that there is an inherent element of chaos in it, which seems right to me, given the human-focus of education. Creating a perfectly ordered system - a ‘matrix’ - cannot work for imperfectly ordered humans.
What we want is an alignment of the means with the goal:
The goal should be learning and increasing capacity, however we want to understand this last word. The goal, in other words, isn’t wellbeing, so much as the kind of capacity that will naturally result in wellbeing as a side-effect. If we don’t get this right, the process is, as we have said, abortive.
The means should not be coercion - not unless absolutely needed (as it sometimes is). The means should be authentically driven by curiosity, exploration, interest and self-ownership. Everything in the classroom needs to be geared towards cultivating and eliciting this response; towards fueling this fire; and growing and harnessing this drive in our young adults.
Naturally, with some, this is close to impossible - and then we can use stricter measures - but even then, such measures should be used with professional judgement, and not in a blanket fashion.
Understanding why this should be the driver is, I think, key to understanding where education as a whole needs to head.
When we force learning - noble as that goal is - we do something interesting to the child’s psychology. Yes, we can scaffold their learning with our clear boundaries, but the impulse for action - productive as that action is - does not come from them.
I am reminded of the saying about teaching the man to fish.
Sometimes the man needs to be taught to fish, yes - I’m not making any hard and fast rules here - but similarly, the man also needs to initiate the fishing process on his own. I think there’s something profoundly deep about the impact this can have on a student. Initiating something on their own accord trains this very capacity. We want them to be independent agents freely engaging with the material at hand.
Otherwise, psychologically, the student may not mature until much later in life; they undergo what the developmental psychologist Erik Erikson referred to as an ‘identity moratorium’, in which they leave to the side their unique identity, identifying instead with the ‘accepted’ persona given to, and decided for, them by others.
There’s a lot in what I just said.
To use a violent analogy, they say there is a big difference between a soldier who has volunteered and one who has been conscripted. The volunteer will endure more, because they have chosen their path.
We want our students to emerge from education with their self intact and integrated as much as possible, not cut off, pushed to the side and repressed, as too easily happens. Not just so their ‘wellbeing’ is improved, but because without this self-confidence and maturity their capacity to learn and engage with the world itself will be impaired. And then we are shooting them in the foot.
We want our students to buy-in to the lesson and rigorous learning, but without force. That’s the third way.
It is messier than traditional schooling, and more rigorous than alternative schooling.
It is oriented towards real, rigorous, difficult learning - but knows the path there must be open and accepting, and above all (this is the point) intriguing enough for them to actually want to do it. Because without this tacit consent we split our students and in the long run harm their growth.
This approach is masculine in that it incorporates difficult and rigour, and feminine in that it does not use force.
It steers through the anti-student whirlpool of masculine judgement and tradition and through the anti-teacher she-monster of feminine coddling.
It brings them home safe and sound, but also more mature and worldly for their journey, with all that it entailed.