some thoughts on education on a monday morning

James Lee Byars - World Question Center from Michael Werner Gallery on Vimeo.

yesterday a friend posted a link to james lee byars world question center - an art happening transmitted on belgian tv in the late 60ies which involved contacting various figures round the world (often by telephone) arthur c.clarke, cedric price - ok possibly mostly the anglophone world - and getting them to say which questions they thought were most important for humanity. it looks great (kind of like an outtake from logan’s run). there is a sort of link here to cedric price’s proposed funpalace.

it’s 10.30 on a monday morning and horsemouth is just coming down from a burst of bad temper. he likes the work to be easy. he likes things to work. don’t stick him in a situation that doesn’t work (and especially not first thing), he’ll only get grumpy. 

one difference between IT and so-called ‘real life’ is that IT does not respond to bursts of temper. horsemouth’s experience is that IT requires calm and hopeful optimism to be got working, and time. now he is superficially calm again but in fact he’s till grumpy and would happily smash, rage and break a few things until he feels better. in a bit he will go for a walk. 

the main driver of horsemouth’s rages is insecurity (he is not someone who can adopt a cheery ‘oh well it doesn’t work. never mind’). horsemouth likes to be helpful, he doesn’t like to let people down. it doesn’t help that work has somewhat flexible boundaries and that over the years (and especially in recent times) additional unpaid pseudo-tasks have been added to the original task. horsemouth is happy, up to a point, to muck-in and just get on with it, but that point is that it work. 

horsemouth is very goal oriented. he’s not very process oriented. this is why horsemouth is not actually good at science (despite having studied it). he is not good at sitting there not understanding, trying to work things out, it just makes him anxious. things need to be very calm and peaceful for him before he can successfully do this. 

he supposes he has been harmed by education which, while supposedly being process oriented and about teaching skills is actually very goal oriented. students are trained to experience a release from anxiety and an endorphin rush whenever they get a tick. the focus becomes not understanding the thing in a nuanced way but getting the tick. accumulating lots of ticks. passing exams (there’s a revealing phrase). receiving a certificate (horsemouth is a big fan of the tin man). and becoming a member of the middle class who need never have to worry about these things again. 

much of the purpose of education is not to render people smarter and more able to learn (an emancipatory education) but rather to fractionate society out into different social classes. he’s kind of with ranciere and jacotot on this one. 

there are, given a skills focus, attempts to counteract this with discovery based learning. in this the students are not given the answer but are expected to work out themselves how to find out the answer (often with groupwork). the usual result of this is to set the students whining that they haven’t been given the answer (and pretty soon the teacher comes along and gives them the answer). it is kind of like a virus of emancipatory education that has lodged within the whole to the annoyance of everyone. 

horsemouth normally works out a way of doing things. then stops. once he has one way of doing something that is sufficient. 

the correct response to situations that don’t work is thus. horsemouth tried. it didn’t work. no blame. what’s the way forward? (the problem with horsemouth is that it takes him a long while to become this philosophical).