Education As a Human Activity

Education as a Humanising Activity

Dr Felicity McCutcheon

Dialogue Australasia Conference

Auckland 2006

“We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids but by an infinite expectation of the dawn” (Thoreau)

I have changed my title slightly. The change issmall but important. ‘Education as a human activity’ states that educating is something humans do. ‘Education as a humanising activity’ suggests that education is something that helps us become human. And it is this latter meaning that I intend to explore with you this morning. Yes, educating is something that human beings do, but I want to claim that true education is essential to helping us become more fully human.

I recently read an article written by a friend who, although Anglo-Saxon, teaches in an Islamic college in Melbourne. He and a Muslim colleague were together exploring the concept of education and role in it played by the creative imagination.[1] My friend teaches English. His colleague teaches Religion. It was not an accident that I was sent this article for I had mentioned to my friend that I was collecting my own thoughts on the topic of education, in readiness for this very presentation. And I thought I was doing okay until I read his article[2]. In it I encountered an idea from which I could not avert my mental gaze. The striking idea that lay at the heart of my friends paper was this: that true education involves nothing more (and nothing less) than to ‘make oneself capable of God’.

Now by this I don’t mean that one has to become God or think of oneself as godlike. I take it to mean something like this. To become ‘capable of God’ is to become ready for and worthy of all that is designated by ‘God’; a concept that designates Ultimate Reality or Ultimate Concern, and which is often thought of, or approached in, secondary concepts like Hope, Beauty, Love, Goodness and Truth. The reason this idea transfixed me completely (it comes originally from the medieval Sufi master, Ibn Arabi) was because I had been trying to find a way to articulate the notion that education is the bringing to potential (thedrawing out) all that lies within the human being. And I was struck by the beauty and richness of the central claim that what it means to be fully human is tobecome capable of God.

There are many ways to make sense of such an evocative image. I am going to focus on just two of them. I am going to suggest that becoming capable of God involves two things: to become capable of reality and to become capable of love. I am then going to look at the some of the challenges educators face today, in the hope that identifying them will help us address and go some way towards overcoming them.

Becoming Capable of Reality

Many of you will have read M Scott Peck’s well known book, The Road Less Travelled. Some of you may also have heard me speak about it before (to you, I apologise if I am about to repeat myself!) The key idea of the book is this. That human growth (and psycho-spiritual health – Scott Peck was a psychiatrist) is intimately tied to our ability to face reality. Conversely, he claims that all mental illness has its origin in an inability or refusal to face up to some feature of reality.

Scott Peck provides a very helpful framework for understanding the process whereby we become capable of reality. He writes: “The more clearly we see the reality of the world, the better equipped we are to deal with the world. The less clearly we see the reality of the world – the more our minds are befuddled by falsehood, misperceptions and illusions – the less able we will be to determine correct courses of action and to make wise decisions. Our view of reality is like a map – a map with which to negotiate the terrain of life. If the map is true and accurate, we will generally know where we are and where we are going. If the map is false and inaccurate we will generally be lost”.[3]

[Whiteboard illustration, including distinction between embodied and disembodied experiences, our current context, need for simplistic maps, and generalised state of anxiety[4]]

“The self is self only because it has a world – a structured universe to which it belongs and from which it is separated”[5]

An acquaintance wrote in an email recently, that to become human self is to be ‘brought to the end of [ourselves] so that we can reflect on our own understanding and see what manner of creature we are”.[6] And what manner of creature are we? Here is how Irish writer, John O’Donohue describes us:

“The first light was born out of the dark. All through evolution the light grew and refined itself, until, finally, a new lamp was lit with the human mind. Before electricity came to rural areas, the candle and the lamp brightened the home at night. There was one special lamp with a mirror fitted behind it to magnify the light. If you looked into the light at an angle, you could catch a heart-shaped light reflected in the mirror. It was as if the light wished to see itself. Of all the previous brightness in creation, this was the new secret of the light of the mind: it was a light that could see itself.”[7]

I haven’t managed to find the kind of lamp and mirror spoken of here, but I do have a candle that illuminates within and without. I want it to burn before us as a symbol of all the young people in our care, and as a reminder of the reason we are here.

Suffer the children

I have suggested that the relentless over exposure to information and imagery is contributing to a generalised anxiety and sense of meaninglessness. This appears to be true for adults but how much more so for children? In his beautiful article, my friend writes that ‘parents ought to be the firmament above and the firmament below for a child. They are the arms of love’[8] A child needs an above and a below. A child needs to be helped and guided as it steps forth into the world.This is what it means to be shown how to make a map of reality that is true and accurate. Plato warns of the consequence of failing to provide such guidance:

“We know that the beginning is the most important part of any work, especially in the case of a young and tender thing; for that is the time at which the character is being formed and the desired impression is more readily taken…Shall we just carelessly allow children to hear any casual tales which may be devised by casual persons, and to receive into their minds ideas for the most part the very opposite of those which we should wish them to have when they are grown up?” (Plato, The Republic)

Many of the parents I meet and talk to admit to being in a kind of free fall, in no better position to guide their children (and in many cases, giving up all responsibility for doing so) than the children themselves. An episode of Super Nanny affords us a glimpse of the chaotic and humanly destructive environment that ensues when the grown ups relinquish responsibility for their young. (Would this, could this, ever happen in the animal kingdom?)

Thomas Merton describes the kind of environment we are condemned to when casual tales by casual persons abound: “Where men live huddled together without true communication, there seems to be greater sharing and a more genuine communion. But this is not communion, only immersion in the general meaninglessness of countless slogans and clichés repeated over and over again so that in the end one listens without hearing and responds without thinking…Each individual in the mass is insulated by thick layers of insensibility. He doesn’t care, he doesn’t hear, he doesn’t think. He does not act, he is pushed. He does not talk; he produces conventional sounds when stimulated by the appropriate noises. He does not think, he secretes clichés.[9]

This is the kind of environment we are all in danger of inhabiting, but our young people especially, I think. I recently visited the matrix capital of Australia, the Gold Coast. I happened to be flicking through a local newspaper and came across a story on plastic surgery. Apparently, the fastest growing group seeking ‘cosmetic enhancement’ are teenage girls, predominately after breast implants and botox (presumably in the hope of acceptance, beauty and therefore love). 16 year olds worrying so much about wrinkles that they are willing to have themselves injected with a poison that paralyses! I couldn’t help but see this as a metaphor for a deeply troubled mentality of refusal and denial: a refusal to accept reality (‘paralysing’ is a form of being ‘frozen in time’…a denial, if you like, that aging - and death - belong quite naturally to the order to things).Scott Peck has warned us of the consequences of retreating from or refusing to accept reality.

But as we have also seen, a young and tender thing needs to be protected from certain aspects of reality in order to develop the ability to face it. O’Donohoue writes: ‘If we loot our sensibility we have nothing to open the door to welcome the world’.A child is born, full of spontaneity and sensibility. And then the looting begins.

The task of educating (and therefore of humanising) is much more difficult in an age where the implied assumption is that there is no objective reality. It was easier in the days when young people rebelled against their elders because that rebellion at least required a rejection of something. What we have today is, as Merton described it, immersion in general chatter and meaninglessness.

Time magazine published an article earlier this month[10] exploring the life of Gen M. Gen M apparently stands for the ‘multi-tasking generation’, (it might be more apt to think of the ‘M’ as standing for Generation Matrix!). A comment by a university professor, quoted in the article really struck me. Speaking of students at M.I.T.,one of America’s premier tertiary institutions, Sherry Turkle comments, “People are going to lectures by some of the greatest minds, and they are doing their mail…I tell them this is not a place for e-mail, it’s not a place to do online searches and not a place to set up Internet relay chat channels in which to comment on the class. It’s not going to help if there are parallel discussions about how boring it is. You’ve got to get people to participate in the world as it is” (p.52)

You’ve got to get people to participate in the world as it is. Easier said than done! As we have already seen, being able to participate in the world as it is is difficult at the best of times, but how much more difficult it becomes when I have deeply entrenched strategies, attitudes and technologies to protect myself from having to engage with it.

One of the worrying, although completely understandable survival strategies developed by young people is the demand for over-simplification. When your world is full of chaos and confusion, you are in need of clarity and order. In the Time article, Claudia Koonz, from DukeUniversitydescribes her students thus: “They demand clarity. They want identifiable good guys and bad guys…their belief in the simple answer, put together in a visual way, is, I think, dangerous” (p.52). It is dangerous, because as we have already seen, reality is essentially complex and ambiguous. Learning to encounter it necessarily demands of me the capacity to accommodate complexity and ambiguity. The more simplistic my understanding, the greater injustice I do to reality. Fundamentalist systems of thought are the best example of this. In applying a simple map to a reality that transcends it, I reduce that reality and thus harm both it and myself.

Koonz goes on to analyse the aversion her students have to complexity: “it’s as if they have too many windows open on their hard drive. In order to have a taste for sifting through different layers of truth, you have to stay with a topic and pursue it deeply, rather than go across the surface with your toolbar”[11] Recall the whiteboard. What else can these students do if they are not in a position to ‘meet and make sense’ of the world?

There is probably nothing new about university students attending lectures by some of the greatest minds and chatting to each other about how boring it is. Perhaps the lecture is boring (not all great minds can teach well!)What concerns me is not that students are being typical students, but that a dangerous attitude lurks behind such behaviour, an attitude that must be challenged by educators if we are to help our students develop a stance towards reality that it not governed by ignorance and arrogance.

I encounter the same attitude in my own classes (and I suspect you do, too). Of course they are too polite to say this but my students carry the assumption that anything I know, they can look up on the internet when they need to know it, so my presence in the classroom is pretty much irrelevant. They might as well be doing their mail.

And it would be much easier to let them! But as teachers, we too, should be the firmament above and the firmament below, for our students. If we are to help them become capable of God then our responsibilities are no less great than that of a parent. And it does take effort. Becoming capable of reality, learning to deal with complexity and ambiguity, is both an intellectual and an ethicalachievement. It requires work of mind and spirit. It is why, as my friend and his Muslim colleague claim, ‘the well-argued essay is an instrument of transformation, and it has this instrumentality precisely because the students can’t produce one until they have overcome specific difficulties within themselves” (p.17) The difficulties to be overcome, as anyone who has struggled to order and clarify their thoughts, construct an argument and communicate truth will know, include silencing the ego self…listening to…and being held accountable to standards of truth and accuracy that lie outside oneself.[12] As the Muslim teacher remarked “we are used to believing in our own realities, but the argument of the essay has to come from another reality” (p.17). Refusing the standards of good thinking (or refusing to put in the effort required to achieve them) amounts to refusing the existence of another reality, a reality other than my own. And this is why Simone Weil describes all genuine learning as an act of love because to truly learn, I must pay attention to another reality. “Although people seem unaware of it today, the development of the faculty of attention forms the real object, and almost the sole interest of studies. Every time a human being succeeds in making an effort of attention with the sole idea of increasing his grasp of truth, he acquires a greater aptitude for grasping it even if his efforts produce no visible fruit. The other true purpose of education is to inculcate humility – not just a virtue but the condition of virtue”.[13]

‘The argument of the essay comes from another reality’. That other reality speaks to us in all kinds of unexpected ways. It happened during an interview I was listening to on the radio a couple of months ago. NickCave was talking about his involvement in that extraordinary film ‘The Proposition’. The interviewer, unaware perhaps, of the kind of being he was interviewing, made some fairly unfavourable comments about Kylie MInogue and Cave’s work with her a few years ago (you may remember they sang some duets together). The interviewer implied that Cave had somehow trivialised his creative genius by collaborating with ‘the singing budgie’. Cave’s response to the interviewer’s bait (intended to be a kind of joke a Kylie’s expense), which I can still hear, was not to chuckle and agree. He paused and then in a voice, gentle, deep and true, he said “How little you know of a person”. It was a most moving moment. (I couldn’t help but think that if only we could truly hear his voice, no-one would ever again, pick up a gossip magazine).

Cave was speaking on behalf of another reality.

‘The time is out of joint’

John Cougar (now Mellancamp) once sung “If you don’t stand for something you will fall for anything”.

What we stand for should decide what is called for in education (and is intimately tied to what we think education calls forth.) Do we believe in objective reality and objective value or not? The ‘educational problem’ is wholly different as you stand within or without of ‘The Tao’, the belief that certain attitudes and values are true/false, ordinate/inordinate to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are.

I recently came across a very helpful description of what is at stake here. In his fascinating article on AN Whitehead,[14] Colin Wilson writes: “Postmodernism[15] is based upon the simple assertion that ‘meaning is an illusion that can be analysed into its constituent parts. Look at a newspaper photograph of a smiling girl through a magnifying glass; it dissolves into dots. This, say [the postmodernists] proves that the smile is constituted by the dots [it is only dots]. But look at the photograph from a distance and you see that the smile is genuine, and that the photograph captures an essence. Try to break down the essence into the property of the dots and you fail utterly. It was there, in the smiling girl”.

Do you believe the smile is real? That it captures an essence? How would you present an argument to a student who claimed that there are only dots and you make of them what you like?