The very existence of obligatory schools divides any society into two realms: some time spans and processes and treatments and professions are “academic” or “pedagogic,” and others are not. The power of school thus to divide social reality has no boundaries: education becomes unworldly and the world becomes noneducational. …
[E]ducational materials have been monopolized by school. Simple educational objects have been expensively packaged by the knowledge industry. They have become specialized tools for professional educators, and their cost has been inflated …
In this atmosphere the student too often uses the map, the lab, the encyclopedia, or the microscope only at the rare moments when the curriculum tells him to do so. Even the great classics become part of “sophomore year” instead of marking a new turn in a person’s life. School removes things from everyday use by labeling them educational tools. [Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society, Harper & Row, 1971, pp. 35, 115-116]
[A student] reads any book in a university class within the total context of a system that has blasted him with minutiae and dried him out with boredom. A book by Camus is not a novel, but an assignment. Another experience like waiting in line to register, listening to roll call, filling in the space in the test booklet. [Ken Macrorie, Uptaught, Hayden Book Co., 1970, pp. 55]
This is something that almost all successful students know, almost by instinct. … [They do] most of [their] schoolwork thinking not, “What is this English or Math or History or Science all about?” but “What do they want? What are they likely to ask?” … There was no continuum of experience for us; schoolwork was schoolwork, life was life, and they had nothing to do with each other. Our Physics teacher told us one day about the first splitting of an atom, and the enormous amounts of energy it released. Once satisfied that it would not be on any test, neither in or out of class did we ever give it another thought. [John Holt, Instead of Education: Ways to Help People Do Things Better, 1976, Sentient, 2004, p. 217]
I asked [students] one day to take home a weekday copy of The New York Times and study it …
I knew my students weren’t looking at the Times. They weren’t developing a capacity for independent observation or for generalizing rigorously on close examination of details.
And when I think of their indoctrination, why should they? I ask them to look at a film or newspaper and put down what they see. “What does he want?” they are constantly saying as they look, seeing nothing for themselves. [Ken Macrorie, Uptaught, Hayden Book Co., 1970, pp. 161]
Nowhere … do I find two words to suggest the possible goal of being one who enters history. … “Why study history?” asks the wall-sized poster. The answer that we get is plain and uncomplex: in order to teach it, total it, tell it in writing, cash it in for profit, or list it alphabetically on index cards.
School teaches history the same way that it teaches syntax, grammar and word-preference: in terms that guarantee our prior exile from its passion and its transformation. [Jonathan Kozol, The Night is Dark and I Am Far From Home, Houghton Mifflin, 1975, p. 83]
Here is another idea, not meant to be funny: We can improve the quality of teaching and learning overnight by getting rid of all textbooks. Most textbooks are badly written and, therefore, give the impression that the subject is boring. Most textbooks are also impersonally written. They have no “voice,” reveal no human personality. … But worse than this, textbooks are concerned with presenting the facts of the case (whatever the case may be) as if there can be no disputing them, as if they are fixed and immutable. And still worse, there is usually no clue given as to who claimed these are the facts of the case, or how “it” discovered these facts (there being no he or she, I or we). There is no sense of the frailty or ambiguity of human judgment, no hint of the possibilities of error. Knowledge is presented as a commodity to be acquired, never as a human struggle to understand, to overcome falsity, to stumble toward the truth.
Textbooks, it seems to me, are enemies of education, instruments for promoting dogmatism and trivial learning. They may save the teacher some trouble, but the trouble they inflict on the minds of the students is a blight and a curse. [Neil Postman, The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School, Vintage, 1995, pp. 115-116]
[N]o textbooks should be used in a liberal arts college … and formal lectures should be kept to the minimum … Textbooks are largely devices for enabling students to memorize answers without learning to read or think in the process. Lectures in course are often, too often, nothing more than oral recitations of, or commentaries on, textbook materials. Neither textbooks nor lectures in courses require much activity on the part of the student’s mind as opposed to his memory. [Mortimer Adler, Reforming Education: The Opening of the American Mind, Macmillan, 1988, pp. 145-146]
Authors are fallible and have distinctive points of view, I reminded my classes. When we lose sight of the person behind the words, we forget that those words can be challenged.
Exactly the same thing happens when students encounter a series of finished products, whether they are books, scientific laws, or ethical precepts. Thus, one solution is to allow them to watch something being written, or proved, or decided, in order to make the activity in question more accessible and less intimidating. Good writing or thinking isn’t up there and out of reach, done only by others and handed down to us. Rather, it’s something students realize they might be able to do themselves, even if they can’t do it all that well yet. [Alfie Kohn, Feel-Bad Education: And Other Contrarian Essays on Children and Schooling, Beacon, 2011, pp. 38-39]
We have built up around the “classics” such an atmosphere of pedantry, we have left them so long to the scholarly dissectors, that we think of them as incomprehensible to the ordinary man to whom they were originally addressed. [Robert M. Hutchins, The Great Conversation: The Substance of a Liberal Education, Encyclopedia Britannica, 1952, p. 77, https://archive.org/details/greatconversatio030336mbp/mode/2up]
I can put my difficulty as a teacher as follows: It is impossible to convey that Milton and Keats were for real, that they were about something, that they expected that what they had to say and the way in which they said it made a difference. … [I]f one goes back more than thirty years, [students] don’t have any inkling that these poets were writers and in a world. [Paul Goodman, Compulsory Mis-education and The Community of Scholars, Vintage / Random House, 1964, p. 117]
Shakespeare idolatry is easy to trace: it comes from school and it serves … like a bulwark against all other literature. When you’ve [read the] “greatest master of dramatic art,” you’ve paid your debt, you’ve dropped your pinch of incense on the altar of the hall of fame. …
Shakespeare is only a representative example for the English-speaking world. But everywhere the old-masters feeling is bred by the schools and resented by the pupils. … Samuel Butler has defined the canonization of books by teachers as “the meanest revenge that dullness can take upon genius,” and this is so painfully true that in the life of a teacher who feels not only humble before genius but exhilarated by it, there come moments when he would gladly banish it and its works from the classroom.
This does not come from the fear that “youth will wipe its feet on Milton” but from the fact that in order to acquaint the student with a fine book the teacher must begin by taking all the savor out of it. Imagine the paradox of what might be called the Shakespearean destiny. At one moment in history, Macbeth is the latest thing out—a rattling good play—horror, murder, thrills, ghosts, with good poetry thrown in free. It could, should be, and was, described in Hollywood terms. Gradually it becomes last year’s success, then old stuff, then quaint old stuff. More time and it rises from its ashes, but transformed into a “text.” Scholars peck at it like domestic foul. … Children are made to feel guilty for failing to remember where the climax comes. In due course, the name “Shakespeare” stands for a consecrated bore, with the odd result that once in a while a good stage performance surprises everybody into feeling that “it isn’t so bad after all.” [Jacques Barzun, Teacher In America, 1945, Liberty Fund, 1981, pp. 209-213]
[H]ence arises a grave mischief. The sacredness which attaches to the act of creation, the act of thought, is transferred to the record. The poet chanting, was felt to be a divine man: henceforth the chant is divine also. The writer was a just and wise spirit: henceforward it is settled, the book is perfect; as love of the hero corrupts into worship of his statue. Instantly, the book becomes noxious: the guide is a tyrant. The sluggish and perverted mind of the multitude, slow to open to the incursions of Reason, having once so opened, having once received this book, stands upon it, and makes an outcry if it is disparaged. Colleges are built on it. Books are written on it by thinkers, not by Man Thinking; by men of talent, that is, who start wrong, who set out from accepted dogmas, not from their own sight of principles. Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views, which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries, when they wrote these books. [Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar,” 1837, Selected Essays, Lectures, and Poems of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Pocket Books / Washington Square Press, 1965, pp. 67-68]
The conventional teaching of literature and the humanities assumes that literary documents, like natural phenomena in the sciences, lie outside the student’s immediate life. They are to be studied and learned in the same way that one might study biology or mathematics, viz., to be comprehended as so much more verbal material concerning the world that lies beyond and independent of the learner. To look at the humanities in this way, the Existentialist educator might say, is to mutilate them and to destroy their most prominent contribution to human learning, namely, the awakening of sensibilities, the intensification of feelings in the individual.
To read the tales of Chaucer’s pilgrims, to hear the lines of T. S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men,” to study the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson is not to be studying English. It is, rather, to be placing one’s capacities for feeling at the disposal of an author who seeks to arouse feeling to a new, more intense level of awareness. To study literature is to lay bare the nerve endings of one’s emotions and to invite stimulation from the author’s work … [Van Cleve Morris, Existentialism in Education: What it Means, 1966, Waveland, 1990, pp. 139-140]
The business of education is to give the student both useful information and life-enhancing experience, one largely measurable, the other not; and since the life-enhancing value of a course in literature is difficult to measure—since, moreover, many people in a position to put pressure on education programs have no real experience in or feeling for the arts—it is often tempting to treat life-enhancing courses … on the same “objective” level as courses in civics, geometry, or elementary physics. So it comes about that books are taught (officially, at least) not because they give joy, the incomparably rich experience we ask and expect of all true art, but because, as a curriculum committee might put it, they “illustrate major themes in American literature,” or “present a clearly stated point of view and can thus serve as a vehicle for such curriculum objectives as (1) demonstrating an awareness of the author’s purpose, (2) reading critically, and (3) identifying organizational patterns in literary selections used to support a point of view.” One cannot exactly say that such teaching is pernicious, but to treat great works of literature in this way seems a little like arguing for preservation of dolphins, whales, chimps, and gorillas solely on the grounds of ecological balance.
At all levels, not just in the high schools (as above might suggest), novels, short stories, and poems have for years been taught not as experiences that can delight and enliven the soul but as things that are good for us, like vitamin C. The whole idea of the close critical analysis of literary works … has had the accidental side effect of leading to the notion that the chief virtue of good poetry and fiction is instructional. [John Gardner, The Art of Fiction, Vintage, 1985, pp. 40-41]
After five years in the public schools, [Jose] could not read …
By what process did Jose and his schoolbook come together? Is this process part of his reading problem?
Who asks him to read the books? Someone asks him. In what sort of voice and for what purpose, and with what concern or lack of concern for the outcome?
And who wrote the book? For whom did they write it? Was it written for Jose? Can Jose actually partake of the life the book seems to offer? …
Obviously not all of Jose’s problems originated in school. But given the intimacy and freedom of the environment at First Street, his school-induced behavior was easy to observe. He could not believe, for instance, that anything contained in books, or mentioned in classrooms, belonged by rights to himself, or even belonged to the world at large, as trees and lampposts belong quite simply to the world we all live in. He believed, on the contrary, that things dealt with in school belonged somehow to school, or were administered by some far-reaching bureaucratic arm. There had been no indication that he could share in them, but rather that he would be measured against them and be found wanting. … Nor had it ever occurred to him that one might deliberately go about the business of learning something, for he had never witnessed the whole forms of learning. What he had seen was reciting, copying, answering questions, taking tests—and these, alas, do not add up to learning. Nor could he see any connection between school and his life at home and in the streets. [George Dennison, The Lives of Children: The Story of the First Street School, 1969, Vintage / Random House, 1970, pp. 75-80]
Many students don’t really believe in the reality of words that come in books studied in school. …
I feel students in [my own class, however,] doing with each other’s writing the one thing—and a rare thing—that is a precondition for the appreciation and study of literature: taking the words seriously; giving full inner assent to their reality. I phrase the writing assignments as a requirement to “put words on paper such that it’s not a waste of time for the reader or the writer.” At last students wrestle with the main question—especially in an introductory course: What real value is there in putting words down on paper or in reading them? … Students came to enjoy literature more than they ever have done in a course of mine because this question of whether it’s worth putting words on paper at last became the center of the course—and operationally, not intellectually or theoretically. [Peter Elbow, Embracing Contraries: Explorations in Learning and Teaching, Oxford UP, 1986, pp. 74-75]
Related:
– What are the effects of coercion in education?
– What is motivation? How can we cultivate it in ourselves and others?
– Why might young people dislike school?