Jacques Barzun
Excerpts from Begin Here: The Forgotten Conditions of Teaching and Learning
Forget EDUCATION. Education is a result, a slow growth, and hard to judge. Let us talk rather about Teaching and Learning, a joint activity that can be provided for, though as a nation we have lost the knack of it. The blame falls on the public schools, of course, but they deserve only half the blame. The other half belongs to the people at large, us, -- our attitudes, our choices, our thought-cliches.
Take one familiar fact: everybody keeps calling for Excellence -- excellence not just in schooling, throughout society. But as soon as somebody or something stands out as Excellent, the other shout goes up: "Elitism!" And whatever produced that thing, whoever praises that result, is promptly put down. "Standing out" is undemocratic.
This common response is a national choice, certified by a poll: we have a self-declared "Education president." Good. But what happened soon after he took office? His popularity rating went up when it was discovered that he was less articulate on his feet. One commentator said in a resigned tone, "It's not pretty, but it works." It works only because of our real attitude toward "excellence" -- we won't have it.
--Jacques Barzun, reprinted in Begin Here:
The Forgotten Conditions of Teaching and Learning, pg 5
In the name of progress and method, innovation and statistical research, educationists have persuaded the world that teaching is a set of complex problems to be solved. It is no such thing. It is a series of difficulties. They recur endlessly and have to be met; there is no solution -- which means also that there is no mystery. Teaching is an art, and an art, though it has a variety of practical devices to choose from, cannot be reduced to a science.
--Jacques Barzun, reprinted in Begin Here:
The Forgotten Conditions of Teaching and Learning, pg 5
Our liberties are safe until the memories and experiences of the past are blotted out . . . and our public school system has fallen into decay.
--Woodrow Wilson, reprinted in Begin Here:
The Forgotten Conditions of Teaching and Learning, pg 6
[...] in the new ambulant university, what might have been fresh and engrossing was presented in its least engaging form, that of the specialists: not Anthropology as a distinctive way of looking at peoples and nations, with examples of general import, but accumulated detail about a tribe the instructor had lived with -- and apparently could not get away from. At best, the announced "introductory course" did not introduce the subject but tried to make recruits for advanced work in the field. This attitude no doubt showed dedication of a sort. It was easier to bear, perhaps, than the indifference of other professors who, in the name of discussion method, let the students "exchange ideas" without guidance or correction -- each class hour a rap session. But in none of these forms could the exercise be called undergraduate teaching; and its parallel in graduate school was equally stultifying to the many who in those years went on, hoping against hope, to obtain higher learning from institutions claiming the title.
The violent rebels against boredom and neglect, make-believe and the hunt for credentials never made clear their best reasons, nor did they bring the university back to its senses; the uprising did not abate specialism or restore competence and respect to teaching. The flight from campus did cease, but that was owning to the drying up of federal money and the foundations' partial retreat from a world salvation by academic means. What the upheaval left was disarray shot through with the adversary spirit. It expressed itself in written rules arrived at by struggle and compromise, through committees and representative bodies set up as the arena of divergent needs and claims. Student, faculties, and administrators tried to rebuild in their own special interest the institution they had wrecked cooperatively. But, alas, the duty to teach well cannot be legislated.
--Jacques Barzun, reprinted in Begin Here:
The Forgotten Conditions of Teaching and Learning, pg 10/11
[...] we have but ruins barely concealed by ivy. For students, not the monastic life, but a shabby degradation of the former luxury; not the scholastic life, either, but a tacitly lowered standard, by which instructors maintain their popularity rating on the annual student evaluation, and the students thereby ensure the needed grades in the credentials game. For the faculty, salaries dropping faster under the inflation that also raises the cost of operation and tuition. For the administration, nothing but the harried life among demands, protest, and regulations. To expect "educational leadership" from men and women so circumstanced would be a cruel joke.
The manifest decline is heartbreakingly sad, but it is what we have chosen to make it, in higher learning as well as in our public schools. There instead of trying to develop native intelligence and give it good techniques in the basic arts of man, we professed to make ideal citizens, supertolerant neighbors, agents of world peace, and happy family folk, at once sexually adept and flawless drivers of cars. In the upshot, a working system has been brought to a state of impotence. Good teachers are cramped or stymied in their efforts, while the public pays more and more for less and less. The failure to be sober in action and purpose, to do well what can actually be done, has turned a scene of fruitful activity into spectacle of defeat, shame, and despair.
--Jacques Barzun, reprinted in Begin Here:
The Forgotten Conditions of Teaching and Learning, pg 13
[...] the system must create -- not by force and not by bribes -- some measure of common understanding and common action in the teeth of endless diversity. A government deals mainly with divergent wills, a school with divergent minds. Both try to generate motive power by proposing desirable goals. But all these elements are fluid, shifting, barely conscious, mixed with distracting, irrelevant forces and interests. And just as there are few statesmen or good politicians who can govern, so there are few true teachers and no multitude of passable ones.
[...]
And yet we cannot do without teaching -- or governing. We see right now all around us the menace of the untaught -- the menace to themselves and to us, which amounts to saying that they are unselfgovernable and therefore ungovernable. There is unfortunately no method or gimmick that will replace teaching. We have seen the failure of one touted method after another. Teaching will not change; it is a hand-to-hand, face-to-face encounter. There is no help for it -- we must teach and we must learn, each for himself and herself, using words and and working at the perennial Difficulties.
--Jacques Barzun, reprinted in Begin Here:
The Forgotten Conditions of Teaching and Learning, pg 14/15
All the schemes profess to overcome a monumental deficiency: the young are not learning to read. The number of illiterates is climbing toward a majority of the population and at this rate we shall soon be back at the early ages of literacy, when only a small caste could read and write -- a true elite, and thus able to govern the rest.
The general anxiety is fit retribution for the 50-year folly of the look-and-say method method of teaching reading, coupled with the assumption that the children of the poor, the black, and the Hispanics cannot learn. Being "disadvantaged" is now thought to be an insurmountable bar to learning.
That is criminal nonsense. All children can learn and do learn. By the time they first go to school they have learned an enormous amount, including a foreign language, since no language is native to the womb. So if they stop learning when in school, it must be because the desire to learn is killed by protracted non-achievement and non-teaching. It is true that there may be extraneous causes, such as undernourishment or mental defect, but these have long been noticed and taken account of.
For the normal and healthy, it is the very character of the school that seems to stop learning, and this at a point of no great difficulty: simple reading, writing, and arithmetic. The fifth grade is for many too many the stopping place.
--Jacques Barzun, reprinted in Begin Here:
The Forgotten Conditions of Teaching and Learning, pg 16/17
The desire, the "motivation," as jargon has it, was there, stifled by a state of mind which, if not created, had at least not been counteracted by the school itself. The unwritten law was: to show desire or ability to learn lowers one in the other fellow's regard. But the urge was there all along, nourished in secret and ready to burst out in private.
So taking as something native or family-inspired the resistance of the disadvantaged is a culpable error. A teacher must believe in the capacity of those he is teaching; it is defeatism to start out with the opposite assumption. If resistance continues, then the student's assumption that learning is beneath their dignity, sissified, must be met head on. The school must be assembled, the issue discussed, and the consequences explained until the attitude is turned inside out and the deliberate non-learner ceases to be a hero for bucking the system.
--Jacques Barzun, reprinted in Begin Here:
The Forgotten Conditions of Teaching and Learning, pg 17
Children want to know how. Teaching helps to learn how when able people teach. But they must be allowed to do it, with guidance and encouragement from outside. Teaching is a demanding, often back-breaking job; it should not be done with the energy left over after meetings and pointless paperwork have drained hope and faith in the enterprise. Accountability, the latest cure in vogue, is to be looked for only in results. Good teaching is usually well-known to all concerned without questionnaires or approved lesson plans. The number of good teachers who are now shackled by bureaucratic obligations to superiors who know little or nothing about the classroom cannot even be guessed at. The deserve from the Education President an Emancipation Proclamation.
--Jacques Barzun, reprinted in Begin Here:
The Forgotten Conditions of Teaching and Learning, pg 19
When good teachers perform and pupils learn, the sense of accomplishment produces a momentum that lightens the toil for both. Discipline is easier to maintain and failures become exceptions instead of the rule. As a further result there is no need for the fiddling and innovating, the "crash programs," all with more special funding and still more reports and evaluations and assessments. Since millions go chiefly into new bureaus, new manuals full of "guidelines," and new textbooks that make only the publishers happy, the saving can be great. The taxpayers themselves benefit from a school that works.
--Jacques Barzun, reprinted in Begin Here:
The Forgotten Conditions of Teaching and Learning, pg 19
Anybody who has ever taught knows that the act of teaching depends upon the teacher's instantaneous and intuitive vision of the pupil's mind as it gropes and fumbles to grasp a new idea.
--Jacques Barzun, reprinted in Begin Here:
The Forgotten Conditions of Teaching and Learning, pg 20
Whether this movement toward analphabetism can be reversed is what no one can predict. But before leaving the subject, it may be useful to mention the cultural forces that encouraged and still maintain the hostility to reading, to the alphabet, to the word.
The first is the emotion of scientism, which for seventy-five years has preferred numbers to words, doing to thinking, and experiment to tradition. This perversion of true science led to calling "experiment" almost any deviation from common ways of teaching. That it took half a century to begin admitting the error of look-and-say (through another "study," not through daily evidence of failure) shows the extent to which science has turned into superstition.
Second, the last phase of liberalism which by 1910 had proclaimed everybody's emancipation, including the child's, took the form of total egalitarianism. Everybody was, by democratic fiat, right and just in all his actions; he was doing the best he could; he was human; we knew this by his errors. It therefore became wrong to correct a child, to press him, push him, show him how to do better. Dialectal speech and grammatical blunders were natural and, as such, sacred; the linguists proved it by basing a profession on dogma. Literature was a trivial surface phenomenon, the pastime of a doomed elite: why read books, why read, why teach the alphabet?
Third, the extension of free, public, compulsory education to all and in increasing amount (the high school dates from 1900) soon exhausted the natural supply of teachers. They had to be manufactured in large numbers, out of refractory material which could be more easily prepared in the virtues of the heart and the techniques of play than in any intellectual discipline. Themselves uneducated and often illiterate (see James Koerner's various reports [The Miseducation of American Teachers]), they infallibly transmitted their inadequacies, turning schoolwork into make-believe and boring their pupils into violence and scurrility.
Fourth and last, the conquest of the public imagination by the arts, by "art as a way of life," has reinforced the natural resistance of the mind to ordinary logic, order, and precision -- without replacing these with any strong dose of artistic logic, order, and precision. The arts have simply given universal warrant for the offbeat, the unintelligible, the defiant without purpose. The schools have soaked up this heady brew. Anything new, obscure, implausible, self-willed is worth trying out, is an educational experiment. It has the aura of both science and art.
--Jacques Barzun, reprinted in Begin Here:
The Forgotten Conditions of Teaching and Learning, pg 26/27
[...] no principles, however true, are any good when they are misunderstood or stupidly applied. Nothing is right by virtue of its results. A stifling tradition is bad and a "great" tradition is good. Innovation that brings improvement is what we all desire; innovation that impoverishes the mind and the chances of life is damnable.
--Jacques Barzun, reprinted in Begin Here:
The Forgotten Conditions of Teaching and Learning, pg 27
Above all institutions, the school is designed for only one thing -- fruits. But nowadays we despise the very word cultivation. Unweeded soil undoubtedly grows wondrous things that nobody can predict. Such things we have in abundance, but it would be a rash man who would call it a harvest.
--Jacques Barzun, reprinted in Begin Here:
The Forgotten Conditions of Teaching and Learning, pg 27
It cannot be too often repeated that reading, writing, speaking, and thinking are not four distinct powers but four modes of one power. That last word is diagnostic: it means able to do at will. If instead of always using that jargon like word "skills," school people used the word power, they might judge the result of their teaching more concretely. They would see that passing a fill-in test in English composition means nothing if the passer is powerless -- not able -- to write ten clear lines of prose. They would see further that something ought to be done for the student whose score on the test, again, was passing, but who cannot put together and utter the right words to make himself understood orally.
--Jacques Barzun, reprinted in Begin Here:
The Forgotten Conditions of Teaching and Learning, pg 29
The truth is, when all is said and done, one does not teach a subject, one teaches a student how to learn it.
--Jacques Barzun, reprinted in Begin Here:
The Forgotten Conditions of Teaching and Learning, pg 35
Each individual must cure his or her own ignorance. Accordingly, all sound educational theory enjoins individual attention.
--Jacques Barzun, reprinted in Begin Here:
The Forgotten Conditions of Teaching and Learning, pg 36
To bring back essay examinations would call for reviving the lost art of framing and grading questions. Every question ought to elicit knowledge of a unified portion of the subject covered and bring out what the teaching has aimed at over and above the factual underpinnings. To frame such question and make them fair, precise, fully relevant is not an art the unpractised teacher can improvise. Good teachers learn how to compose an examination by recalling their own best experience in college and by consulting and imitating their elders in the department.
These same aspects of question-making enter into the case against multiple-choice testing. Thirty years ago [1962 --MN], the late physicist and mathematician Banesh Hoffman, wrote a book entitled The Tyranny of Testing, which was attacked by the test-making and ignored by educationists. What it showed by examples over a wide range of subjects was how the multiple-choice questions in use, by their form and contents, worked against the aims of good teaching. Leaving to one side the errors of fact and misleading wordings that he came across in sample tests, he found that this mode of testing suppresses the natural diversity of minds, penalizes the more imaginative, and perpetuates conventional opinions. The students who handle multiple choices best are not the best, but second best.