Repurpose the Classroom

A Prescription for Shutting down failed Learning Strategies

My theory of education is very influenced by Ivan Ilich, an Austrian, and Rudolf Steiner, a German. So the likelihood that their methods are embraced in America within the next ten years is unlikely. Moreover, universities answer to bureaucrats who set curricula, apportion money, and hand out standardized tests so that teachers know that they are supervisors of 22 year olds trying to memorize facts and formulas. This makes idyllic learning spaces difficult to create.

I am also skeptical of the "everyone goes to college" mindset. Many students don't have the intellectual curiosity to add to an existing discipline, let alone understand its history. I think I would downsize admissions and divert some money from Universities into job training schools. This would hopefully make Universities less responsible for being pre-professional job training institutions and give the merely careerist 18 year olds a place to go that suits their needs.

Universities are as good as the people within them. I went to an unremarkable state school and had a mediocre time there for the most part. But one Professor I met sparked my interest in Classical political theory and Greek moral and philosophical thought. I learned from him during office hours. I must have spent 40 hours in my last two years at school in his office.

So that worked for me. I want there to be many office hours and chats after class between two students talking heatedly about something their mind is caught on and needs to work through, like a bubble in a roll of cloth. I want there to be lagunas everywhere, for building relationships and finding classmates and professors with shared interests.

small groups, lots of practical experiments, suspense, contingency!

So teachers should have discretion and autonomy. That is my first principle. Teaching will be stressful inevitably, but it should also be an outlet for nerds who have hundreds of hours of thought that has been bubbling through their liquid, fertile brain since they were kids. Teaching should also be an outlet for another type, a simple, methodical problem solver. A mathematician or Biologist who does not put on airs and uses the smallest number of words possible. Who explains things quickly, moving through the formula or cellular structure as water itself moves through plant life.

Ideally, the University system is less virtual. The curricula designers have not plopped college students in front of online, AI powered programs. This is a real temptation as the Universities can downsize teachers departments and spend less money on materials, from books to charts. Virtual learning does not train the living mind and body to work in a real life situation. Virtual learning is alienating. It kills the joy that comes from discovering that you can learn how to manipulate the world. The hunger to know, to build, to see a pattern, to understand it. That lets the learner find his way through the subject from the tangible to the academic. Virtual learning begins with abstract formulas and vocabulary and then tries halfheartedly to connect that to the world.

That is the layout of the business that universities are and the delivery system of the curriculum.

Now for the Curricula itself. I am against the Nonthinkers and the Overthinkers.

The pre-professional nature of Universities means that they now work as conditioning facilities. They mold students into actors who complete the next task they are assigned within a bureaucratic structure. The students do not ask how or why this serves the company as a whole or serves them or gives them a story to share with their family or makes them a more advanced and understanding person.

This form of acculturation to meaningless technocratic work divorces students from their work and numbs them to learning. This purpose of modern universities will vanish if we are to make Universities better.

In its place, business schools and law schools will educate students in how what they do affects others. What the court cases they argue mean for others. What the capital they extract from America and send overseas does to the national fabric. The life force which drives people to applaud success, but which has also led to such contempt, resentment, and disrespect toward the corporate and legal class among the vast majority of Americans, will be renewed. This life force is a "yes and" exercise for stem and not drama majors. When you have a question about what the effects of your action are, ask it. When you have a moral objection, state it. These schools of STEM will reintegrate the whole person, moral, physical, sensory, into their disciplines.

Then there are the humanities, where overthinkers reign. Here, a relentlessly narcissistic, self-scrutinizing spirit of criticism and problematization has taken over. This endeavor strip mines great works of literature, art, and political foundation for problematic elements. In particular if the work was made by an American, or European, or white man or conservative, non-radicalized white woman, this project calls for the work to not be admired and examined as a pleasing construction which holds truths from every angle. Rather the work must be desecrated, and joy can be taken in launching personal invective against its maker.

Freud was a Fraud and self-scrutiny is often counter-productive

This form of inquiry is as self-defeating as the psychoanalysis which sometimes forms the basis of theory by which these works of art are deconstructed. Aristotle told his students to look at an object and understand the forces working on it, as well as how it can be used. Today students are too busy trying to read their own minds, traumatizing and retraumatizing narratives, liberating and contextualizing stories and traditions. The aim of the thing itself is not considered and the power of a beautiful sculpture or poem from oceans away and centuries past are not allowed to do their job. That job is to sweep away the student on a gale wind of pure artistic or intellectual force, embracing life and filling the soul as full as it can be, confirming just how deep we can feel and think. A revised education policy will repurpose Humanities Departments away from self-defeating critical theory and deconstruction and toward wonder and embrace of the glories of visual art, rigorous historical reading, and soaring opera and fable.

Ideally, Universities will be smaller, more directed by enthusiastic teachers who love the subjects they are studying. They will educate the whole person and, instead of herding the student along, cramming countless novels into a single course, they will allow time for the writing to wash over the student and rearrange their mind.