What is Education?

When older people think about education, those older people who are not in the field, they typically look back, rather than forward.

This is not necessarily a bad thing; in order to understand what it is you are trying to accomplish for those generations which follow you, it helps to have some idea of where you would like to see them go.

One of the distinguishing features of Homo Sapiens is they possess not just brains and muscles and highly complex central nervous systems, they possess a culture and they can pass it on to succeeding generations, not through chromosomes or plasmids, but by teaching their young. In this way the young have a better chance to survive and they do not have to go back to square one with every newborn.

So the next generation is taught how to use and how to make tools and most important, they are taught values, abstractions about the purpose of life, the best rewards and what to avoid. Children whether in America or China are taught engineering, i.e. problem solving for the practical world in which they live and they are taught philosophy, i.e., why bother?

Reading Higher Education? in which Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus describe the Humanities 2510 course at Florida Gulf Course University, a course taught on line without live professor or classes, in which students are taught the names of paintings and then asked in multiple choice questions who painted a particular painting (Starry Night--van Gogh) and they now think they have an appreciation of art, I laughed aloud.

Then I asked myself, what made my own college experience so life changing?

Well, there were social, personal things. There was self discovery and reinvention of self and all those things which have to happen when you leave home and travel 500 miles away from your parents and all the friends you grew up with from age 8 to 18.

But, more important, there were moments, good and bad, which occurred in class.

I looked forward to class because I spent most of my time in the library, and class was one of the few times during the day I was actually interacting with people. Sometimes I spoke in class, but mostly I listened.

And the most exciting thing was, unlike my public high school, where, with perhaps five exceptions, I thought the teachers had nothing to teach me, I was lucky enough to have real professors, even as a freshman, who knew their subjects in great depth. When a student asked a question, the professor would spin off into a realm of knowledge which had me sitting there thinking: Wow, that was an amazing answer. He actually knows something. (As opposed to high school, where it was obvious the teacher was caught and faking it.)

Even now, I remember a class with a professor named Rosenfeld, a class in literature, in which Rosenfeld asked a student what he meant by the word "fact." They went back and forth for some time and it was really exciting.

Another professor, David Krause, was teaching Shakespeare and he could reel off stuff from any of the bard's plays at will, to illustrate a point, but more than sheer feats of memory, he made it mean something in today's world; he showed us why we still read Shakespeare, not because it's Shakespeare but because what he was talking about then, is still so important today. "There's honor for you," says Falstaff, pointing to a rotting, swollen corpse, a dead soldier. Falstaff has no desire to die honorably. He wants to live, to enjoy wine and women. Dying for king and country has no appeal. In 1967, when every male in that class was thinking about the Vietnam which awaited him as soon as he graduated, the ideas of "honor" and "Peace without Honor," were relevant.

Then there was Professor Thomas, who taught the one and only gut course at my college. Every football player, every hockey player signed up. Thomas gave the questions and the answers for the final exam, all typed up, twenty five pages. All you had to do was read through them and write your exam from them. Of course, Thomas was cagier than we knew: He got all those jocks focused on that playbook and they learned at least that much.

One day, Thomas started talking about the Bible story of God, Abraham and Isaac. God told Abraham to kill his son. But why, asked Thomas, did Abraham not say to himself, wait a minute, the God I know would never tell me to murder a child, my own child? Must be the Devil speaking. There were objections from around the room. No, in the Bible, the people always knew the voice of God. The whole point was: would you do what God told you to do, on faith?

No, Thomas persisted, you have to ask yourself, does this make sense? Otherwise, how different are you from the guy who hears his dog commanding him to murder young women? The class erupted, there were Bible thumping defensive lineman who'd grown up in Alabama Baptist congregations just about levitating from their chairs; their teammates, guys from Maine and Wisconsin, who were laughing at them. They thought they knew each other, from so many hours on the practice field, and now they were fighting pitched battles over how you know what you know.

It was thrilling.

I was a science major, and there were some pretty well done classes in biology, but never anything like what I experienced in Philosophy, English lit, courses in drama and poetry which still stay with me even today, forty years later.

MaybI suppose you could do this sort of thing with Sykpe or some other videostreaming program.e, but I doubt it. I suppose you see some real interaction on The News Hour, but that takes a lot of production skill.

I visited a class with a girl I knew at the University of Maryland. We filed into a huge amphitheater with 400 students and there was a big screen in front and the professor was giving his lecture in another building. This was 1968. I was appalled. How could you learn anything in a setting like that?

When she visited me later, we went to Professor Thomas's class. It was one of the biggest classes at my college, about 100 kids in the chapel, sitting in the pews with Thomas on stage.

"Well," she sniffed. "This isn't all that different from Maryland"

Then, Thomas prowling around his stage fastened on her.

I'm not sure why he called on her. Probably because most of the other students were scribbling notes or looking out a window and she was staring right at him, and, truth be told, she was a very fetching young lady, eyes the color of azure skies, dark hair, high cheekbones and heads turned whenever she walked into a room, if there was anyone of the male persuasion lurking about.

So there she was, staring at him, and he did a double take and asked her some question, and she missed the point completely, and I tried to save her by saying, "I think what she is saying is..."

Our relationship went straight downhill from there. If I hadn't noticed before, she was as clueless as she was beautiful, and looks could get you on the train but eventually, they didn't take you where you wanted to go.

She was not stupid. And she was not without character. She put herself through Maryland as an undergraduate and then through law school and ultimately became a judge and she stood up to some local politicians, at some cost to her career.

But that day, she was unprepared. None of her courses in rooms filled with 400 students and professors in another building had taught her to analyze and to think abstractly. She was fine on the multiple choice tests. She had an excellent memory. But faced with a question about how we know what we know, how can we trust what we think we know, she was at sea without a rudder.

There is a great line from The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, in which Miss Brodie says education is the leading out from students. She does not mean teachers have nothing to put in to students' heads, but she means you must bring the learner from where they are to where they must go, and that is a more difficult task than simply asking, "Who painted Starry Night?"