Just the Facts?

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According to this article, Massachusetts public schools, inspired by the theories of E.D. Hirsch, have performed an education reform “miracle” by implementing knowledge-based standards for students and holding students to those standards through rigorous testing. As the article explains, Hirsch has long maintained that “learning how to learn” is not enough. Students must face the world armed with facts. Context (the hermeneutic circle?) matters as much as text, and without a shared cultural context, some of us grow up without the ability to grasp what the rest of us are talking about.

I agree wholeheartedly that context matters and that facts, far from “lifeless” but enlivened by their very nature with history, language and implied worldview, are indispensible but I worry that a simple-minded reliance on cultural transmission through the authority of a knowledgeable teacher is dangerous because, with it, there comes the risk of forgetting what education is for. Do we teach our children so that they may preserve our culture or so that they may transform it? Perhaps we should aim for something of both, preserving that which deserves to be preserved while transforming or transcending the rest. More importantly, we should ask what we get when we receive a cultural transmission—through art, literature, the findings of science or from someone who has been privileged with an experience that we have not.

Peter Kingsley, a contemporary interpreter of Pre-Socratic philosophers such as Parmenides and Empedocles believes that culture as we know it was a gift to the philosophers from the gods. It was not discovered or developed but received by a few human beings with the capacity to stretch human consciousness enough to make room for the gift. Furthermore, he argues, the time has arrived for us to receive something more. When we encounter nature, for instance, or a work of art with an open mind and heart we take into ourselves (perhaps through a deep identification) something that ultimately defies analysis, something that cannot be taught in the way we tend to think of teaching. This “something,” this breath of the essence of what things truly are, is as inexhaustibly knowable as the universe itself. We can never get to the end of it. Therefore, it can never be measured. There is more to see in every vision than is immediately apparent in the vision itself. It is our sight that needs adjusting. As philosopher Jean Gebser puts it, “Every ‘novel’ thought will tear open wounds.” In any cultural tradition (and I can only speak with experience if not authority about the Western tradition), we have in our hands a sometimes clumsy, occasionally precise scalpel with which to perform the operation.

The passing along of information and its context (and, perhaps, the two are not as distinguishable as we believe) is an essential part of teaching but learning, true transformative learning, takes place when we are able to cultivate enough silence, attention and humility to integrate more and more of what the words—and the sights and the sounds and smells, the taste, the touch and the senseless intuition—wordlessly suggest to us about ourselves and our world. It is not the information, itself, or the skills for uncovering the information that changes us but our thirst for knowledge and our knowledge that the thirst was never meant to be fully quenched.

By the way, I am not aware of any research data to back this up but it seems quite likely that cultivating silence, attention and humility will raise your SAT scores.

At this point, all of this must seem more poetic than legitimately argumentative (though perhaps that is not a bad place to start) but it is these ideas that I would like to begin to tease out through a careful look at the works of Goethe, Steiner, Hadot, the Inklings (Tolkien, Lewis, Barfield and Williams), the literary critic Erich Heller and others. I’ll just have to see what happens next.