Context
This week I received a fan letter about my book Minding American Education: Reclaiming the Tradition of Active Learning. I rarely get such messages because the book has had such a small circulation; but this email was particularly gratifying because the writer is a veteran teacher and administrator on the eve of publishing his own powerful book on education. I was proud that the author singled out the two aspects, the writing itself and the middle chapter, “The Turbulent Embrace of Thinking: Prose Style and the Languages of Education.” I’m encouraged, then, to make this week’s Newletter out of the closing pages of that chapter, with some modifications to make it more continuous with last week’s work on the Spouter Inn Passage.” Again, I would particularly value your own ideas and critiques either in Comments or in a longer disquisition.
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Suppose Melville had Ishmael say only that he saw a picture of a whale jumping over a ship with three dismantled masts in a hurricane. Would that statement be as true as the entire three paragraphs that actually appear in the novel? What would be lost if Ishmael had given us only his conclusion, his bottom line? To get more accurately at the differences between the two versions, we can borrow a distinction made by William James in The Meaning of Truth between “ambulatory” and “saltatory”: “Ambulatory” describes “knowing as it exists concretely, while the other view only describes its results abstractly taken.” “Ambulatory,” as the name implies, gives all the intermediate steps from not knowing to knowing, including missteps and detours, and includes any particulars from which generalizations are made; “saltatory” versions give us only answers and certainties, a leaping or jumping to conclusions, as the word implies. Ideally, the two should not be opposed as either/or binaries, but should describe poles of a single continuum. But in practice, philosophers often discard the particulars and processes, and pretend that the generalization is separable and truer. For James, however, ambulation is an indispensable part of knowing, and the generalization becomes meaningless without it: “My thesis is that knowing here is made by the ambulation through the intervening experiences . . .. Intervening experiences are thus as indispensable foundations for a concrete relation of cognition as intervening space is for a relation of distance.” As James said of Louis Agassiz, “no one sees further into a generalization than his own knowledge of details extends.” This preference for ambulation was anticipated by one of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s notebook entries, suggesting continuities from him through Marsh and Emerson to James:
In all the processes of the Understanding the shortest way will be discovered the last. . . . The longest way is more near to the existing state of the mind, nearer to what, if left to myself on starting the thought, I should have thought next. The shortest way gives me the knowledge best; the longest way makes me more knowing.
We can now see that Melville gives us not only Ishmael’s conclusion, his “final theory,” but the processes through which he ambulated to get to that point. We can weigh how much warrant and certainty are behind the statement, whether it is one of a number of possibilities or the indisputable answer to the confusion. And we see not only what sense Ishmael made of an apparent chaos but a sense of that chaos itself. What we witness as readers is not simply the painted object but a mind in the process of seeing, imagining, reconstructing that object. As we read Ishmael’s ponderings on the threshold of his adventure, we can begin to see parallels with our own reading of this elusive, seemingly amorphous text created by “some ambitious young artist”—Melville was only thirty-one when he wrote Moby-Dick. The passage becomes self-reflexive in that Ishmael’s problems in reading the painting become ours in reading him and the entire book.
To make more concrete William James’s argument I can describe a difference in learning between my children and myself. I was taught the multiplication tables in a thoroughly saltatory way many years ago in an authoritarian urban school system. The tables were given to us on a piece of cardboard, and as we memorized each table and recited them in front of the teacher, we were given a gold star on top of that table. My children, by contrast, went to a Montessori school where they worked on several different math manipulatives to help them understand the concept of multiplication. One was a bead chain which had a separation between the number of beads for each table. For, say, the sevens table they would count out the first grouping of beads and write down “7” on a tag they placed at this point, then “14” after the next grouping, and so on. In a saltatory way, both they and I could write down the answer “49” on a paper and pencil test that asked “7 x 7= ?” But our actual knowing—both the process and the extent—was quite different. If someone asked them, “Now, can you tell me how many 7s there are in 49?” they could answer, while I, if I were able to come up with anything, could say only that division would not be taught until the next grade. Similarly, my children could visualize that 7 beads times 7 beads can easily be arranged as a square, and that a cube is formed by 7 times 7 times 7, so the concept of a number squared and cubed had an immediacy and use for them that it did not for me.
William James’s analysis provides a philosophical underpinning for the two main stylistic strategies we have just chartered: the urge to restore the concrete, physical dimension to language, to re-embody it, and the desire to make language both register and represent the shifts and turnings of the active mind. William James’s work in psychology, which generally preceded his philosophical work, can help us understand this latter desire through another distinction he makes, that between “substantive” and “transitive” states of mind and their parallels in grammar. In The Principles of Psychology, James depicts the mind as a “stream of consciousness,” containing both flux and discrete images:
When we take a general view of the wonderful stream of our consciousness, what strikes us first is the different pace of its parts. Like a bird’s life, it seems to be an alternation of flights and perchings. The rhythm of language expresses this, where every thought is expressed in a sentence, and every sentence closed by a period. The resting-places are usually occupied by sensorial imaginations of some sort, whose peculiarity is that they can be held before the mind for an indefinite time, and contemplated without changing; the places of flight are filled with thoughts of relations, static or dynamic, that for the most part obtain between the matters contemplated in the periods of comparative rest.
Let us call the resting-places the ‘substantive parts,’ and the places of flight the ‘transitive parts,’ of the stream of thought. It then appears that our thinking tends at all times towards some other substantive part than the one from which it has been dislodged. And we may say that the main use of the transitive parts is to lead us from one substantive conclusion to another.
Just as with “saltatory” and “ambulatory,” the terms “substantive” and “transitive” should not be ftaken as excluding opposites but as poles of a continuum, where each passes into the other. For For James the mind is primarily a whole, a unity that can be segmented into pieces only through introspective analysis and the razor of language. This view of the mind is radically different from that of Locke, where the atoms of sensation are the primary building blocks in creating larger associations and ideas. Indeed James and our entire tradition of active learning always remain skeptical about the adequacy of language to represent consciousness in all its wholistic flux. As Emerson wrote in Nature: “Words are finite organs of the infinite mind. They cannot cover the dimensions of what is in truth. They break, chop, and impoverish it).”
But some words are more adequate than others. A prose that emphasizes the relations among substantives as much as the substantives itself and that holds particulars and generalizations together in a dialectical tension, will best present and encourage the process of thinking. William James continues to suggest how such a language might work:
“There is not a conjunction or a preposition, and hardly an adverbial phrase, syntactic form, or inflection of voice, in human speech, that does not express some shading or other of relation which we at some moment actually feel to exist between the larger objects of our thought. If we speak objectively, it is the real relations that appear revealed; if we speak subjectively, it is the stream of consciousness that matches each of them by an inward coloring of its own. In either case the relations are numberless, and no existing language is capable of doing justice to all their shades."
"We ought to say a feeling of and, a feeling of if, a feeling of but, and a feeling of by, quite as readily as we say a feeling of blue or a feeling of cold. Yet we do not: so inveterate has our habit become of recognizing the existence of the substantive parts alone, that our language almost refuses to lend itself to any other use.”
The “almost” is well taken, since we have seen such a use of language by Emerson, Thoreau, and Melville, a style which emphasizes relations rather than substantives—which explodes substantives such as the form of the circle or descriptions of a painting to foreground the movement of thought in words like “yet” and “however.” Indeed, as we look at Ishmael’s language, a sense of “but” comes through more clearly than any particular content. Similarly, Emerson’s prose enacts more the motion of his thought than any single, static “truth.” In “Self-Reliance,” Emerson suggests that such a stasis would be death: “Life only avails, not the having lived. Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim.” What helps create the sense of movement here, aside from the present participles “shooting,” and “darting” is the rapid succession and clustering of prepositions as the sentence moves on—“in,” “of,” “from,” “to,” “in,” “of,” “in,” “to”—as we begin to feel that the functional words are taking over from the lexical words. Emerson returns to this theme in “Plato”: “Every great artist has been such by synthesis. Our strength is transitional, alternating; or, shall I say, a thread of two strands. The sea-shore, sea seen from shore, shore seen from sea; the taste of two metals in contact; and our enlarged powers at the approach and departure of a friend.” The first laconic and abstract statement is explained by the second, the latter part of which is a concrete image that restores a tactile quality to the earlier word “strength.” The rest of the passage is a series of correspondences, moving from the concrete to the abstract, from the grammatically simple to the complex, without itself completing a syntactical sentence. The alliterative and onomatopoeic chiasmus—“sea seen from shore, shore seen from sea”—makes us aware that the word describes not so much a thing in itself as a set of relations, at once a boundary and a meeting place. The echoing “t” sounds both between “taste” and “two” and within “taste” and “contact” reinforce the sense of joining in the gustatory metaphor; and again we see a preponderance of prepositions as we move towards the end of the passage.
As expected for one who values the ambulatory over the saltatory, relations over entities, transitives over substantives, James elaborates further on this Emersonian vision, with his own vivid images and turns of phrase: “Life is in the transitions as much as in the terms connected; often, indeed, it seems to be there more emphatically, as if our spurts and sallies forward were the real firing-line of the battle, were like the thin line of flame advancing across the dry autumnal field which the farmer proceeds to burn.” What we have been trying to trace in earlier chapters as an American padeia is also and inextricably a linguistic philosophy and practice, that a sense of reality as wholistic, fluid, always novel and always under construction, implies and is implied by a related set of styles. No one has reconstructed this stylistic literary dimension better than Richard Poirier, most notably in The Renewal of Literature: Emersonian Reflections and Poetry and Pragmatism. Poirier writes in the latter: “Emerson never asks us to reclaim some heritage of civic virtue or rational virtues as these have been embedded, so it is assumed, in works of the past; he wants us instead to discover traces of productive energy that pass through a text or a composition or an author, pointing always beyond any one of them.” Poirier’s recuperation of what he calls a tradition of linguistic skepticism includes virtually all the writers we have been discussing. He sees the lines of influence moving from Emerson through William James to modernist writers who were at Harvard during James’s tenure there. The most succinct summary of his position can be found in Ross Posnock’s review of Poetry and Pragmatism:
Emerson both inspires the kind of criticism Poirier practices and initiates his book’s principal concern—the experiments in language conducted by the “extended tribe of Waldo” (principally those mentioned above, but also Thoreau, Dickinson, Dewey, Whitman, and Williams). Poirier describes its members as “Emersonian pragmatists” who share a “liberating and creative suspicion as to the dependability of words and syntax,” a skepticism premised on the fact that language is a cultural, historical inheritance that at once entraps us and incites our evasive action. This action manifests itself in the act of troping, whereby the human will turns language from predetermined meanings and fashions and refashions new figures to live by. To retain energy, troping can only be a “momentary stay against confusion” (to borrow Frost’s famous phrase), a stay that functions as “less a solution,” in James’s words, than as a “program for more work.” Poirier shows the incessant, antagonistic, and exhilarating effort of Emerson and the “line of force” he engenders to keep words in motion and thereby escape (or at least loosen) the gravitational pull of the conventions and conformity that make language possible in the first place.
As noted these literary artists handle the tensions between form and openness, between society and the self, between what T. S. Eliot calls tradition and the individual talent much more successfully than have American educators. American literature has become world literature, best known for its tradition of breaking with tradition, for its exuberant and perpetual incorporating of innovation. Meanwhile, American education is as inert and lifeless as a glacier. The contest between fluidity and stasis, between thinking and habit has been repeatedly decided in favor of the latter.
There is a certain urgency, then, in seeing if American teachers can learn something from American writers. Indeed, Poirier himself seems to have envisioned such a possibility when he wrote:
“The greatest cultural accomplishment of pragmatism remains the least noticed, and one which it never clearly enunciates as a primary motive even to itself. It managed to transfer from literature a kind of linguistic activity essential to literature’s continuing life but which it now wants effectively to direct at the discourses of social, cultural, and other public formations, always with an eye to their change or renewal.”
A curious thing about this passage is that it is in the past tense. Yet it is difficult to find examples of this kind of conscious reshaping of our public formations, especially education, through the kinds of consciousness encouraged by philosophical pragmatism. Except for some of the small-scale experiments examined in this book, American education has stood in antithetical relation to such a vision. Further, Poirier and other academics leading the current revival of pragmatism have shown little interest in using their ideas to restructure even their own classrooms, let alone their own institutions. Only when we ourselves eliminate this gap between what we say and what we do can we move these insights about language into the social realm.
The question remains: how to use these insights about language and thought as a force for educational reform. We can begin with how we educate our educators. Reading some of the textbooks prepared for courses like the History and/or Philosophy of Education or Social Foundations of American Education, I found that the complex thinkers we have been dealing with were reduced to the print equivalent of sound bites. The very turns of language, the protean play of thought that characterize and even constitute the active mind become homogenized into a single bland pudding. Take the following example from a typical text, America’s Teachers by Joseph W. Newman:
Wedded as they are to change and adaptation, pragmatists do not believe in absolute and unchanging truth. For pragmatists, truth is what works. Truth is relative because what works for one person may not for another, just as what works at one time or in one place or in one society may not work in another. Pragmatists admit the concept of relative truth, applied to morality, could lead to chaos.
And so on. While it is hard to disagree with any of the above, it is also hard to extract from it any sense of the nature and quality of pragmatist thinking. Although intended for university students, the prose rates a grade level of 7.7 on the Flesch-Kincaid scale. But despite this syntactic simplicity, it is not particularly clear how we move from one sentence to the next. Complex ideas are reduced to self-contained bumper sticker mottoes like “truth is what works,” or banalities like “what works for one person may not for another,” and there are no concrete examples to anchor these vapidities. Ironically for a paragraph about pragmatism, there are no feelings of if or but.
One of the reasons this prose fails is that “ideas” are perhaps the least important part of a piece of writing by Emerson or Melville or James. To simply summarize and paraphrase is to create a collection of perches or resting places without the crucial flights and transitions; it is more like taxidermy than birdwatching. These Cliff’s Notes of the Mind parallel the “cultural literacy” movement at the K-12 level. For example, the appendix to E. D. Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know, lists “Emerson, Ralph Waldo,” as well as “James, Henry,” and “James, William,” with Jesse between the two of them, as though he were yet another family member. One wonders what and how the students in the Core Knowledge schools that Hirsch’s work has inspired come to “know” these figures. Cultural conservatives like Hirsch and Allan Bloom offer us not so much a defense of reading as a defense of someone else having once read. As Saul Bellow has his character Herzog say: “We mustn’t forget how quickly the visions of genius become the canned goods of the intellectuals.”
The language of textbooks, unfortunately, is only a special case of a problem that pervades the academic discipline of education, which has difficulty finding a language to talk about the classroom that is neither trivial and anecdotal nor pretentiously abstract. Most often the general bias of schools and departments of education is towards active, humane, student-centered methods, but this impulse is thwarted by a soporific style constantly at odds with the dynamics of reform. Here is an example from what otherwise could have been a valuable book edited by Nadine Lambert and Barbara McCombs, How Students Learn: Reforming Schools Through Learner-Centered Education, published by the American Psychological Association to inform laypersons about empirical studies of learning. While I was pleased to learn that these studies support the same views of learning as those in this book, my mind numbed at the language, as in this example by Barbara McCombs:
Empowerment in this model is reciprocal and is embodied in training for parents, teachers, administrators, and students. As parents, teachers, and administrators develop positive belief systems in themselves and their students, and as they acquire a higher level understanding of student’s inherent mental health and how to uncover it through enhanced communication and interactions (will component), they are empowered to create a positive emotional climate and to develop enhanced interpersonal relationships with their students that embody qualities of mutual trust, respect, caring, and concern (social support component). As students display enhanced will and skill, teachers, parents, and administrators are empowered by seeing and realizing how they can nurture children’s inner potential to learn and develop in positive ways. In addition, administrators are empowered by seeing and realizing how they can nurture teachers’ inner potential for creative and wise educational practices that lead to enhanced student outcomes.
The diction is Latinate, polysyllabic and repetitive, clogged by near-meaningless three word noun phrases such as “positive emotional climate” and “enhanced personal relationships.” If there are realities to which these composite abstractions relate, they have long since evaporated from the text. The problem underlying these difficulties is the lack of steady thinking in the process of writing. Does the writer stop to consider whether “mutual trust, respect, caring, and concern” are different elements or repetitive ways of talking about the same thing? Is “inner potential”—used twice—different from some kind of outer potential? And do administrators need to both “see” and “realize” this “inner potential”?
Another more recent style of thoughtless educational writing has been influenced by the jargon of postmodernism, especially as it appears in much current literary criticism. Here is a sentence written by Peter Trifonas, the editor of Revolutionary Pedagogies: Cultural Politics, Instituting Education, and the Discourse of Theory:
Although this characterization of the chapters presented in this volume is self-consciously forefronted by the title of the anthology (and any title worthy of the appellation “title” should surely thematize the heterogeneity of a body of work so as to do just that!), the text does not speak only to those who have embraced the ethical value of opening the empirico-conceptual and epistemic limits of one’s work and oneself to the risk of less than canonical modes of thinking.
Verbose, abstract, polysyllabic, this writer is also deaf to the sound of his own words. All three passages keep the reader at bay, the first two through a patronizing scorn of his or her intelligence, the third through an involuted and exclusionary language that makes sense, if at all, only to other initiates—a discourse that undercuts in its very utterance its political pretenses to help build a democratic community. If the language in which we write about education is to actually improve it, we need to create a continuity between it and the ways in which we speak to our colleagues and students at our best, a language imbued with an empathic desire to communicate, a self-awareness, and a responsiveness to ideas that arise through the act of writing itself.
The chapter on the language of education in Jerome Bruner’s Actual Minds, Possible Worlds seeks such continuities. For Bruner, “a culture is constantly in process of being recreated as it is interpreted and negotiated by its members.” There are certain institutions such as storytelling, science, and law that particularly serve the role of what Bruner calls a “forum” for these kinds of negotiations and explorings, and education should be one of the most central forums, giving “its participants a role in constantly making and remaking the culture—an active role as participants rather than as performing spectators who play out their canonical roles according to rule when the appropriate cues occur.”
Bruner then gives an example from his own experience as a student of how the language of education can facilitate this process:
I recall a teacher, her name was Miss Orcutt, who made a statement in class, “It is a very puzzling thing not that water turns to ice at 32 degrees Fahrenheit, but that it should change from a liquid into a solid.” She then went on to give us an intuitive account of Brownian movement and of molecules, expressing a sense of wonder that matched, indeed bettered, the sense of wonder I felt at that age (around 10) about everything I turned my mind to. . . . In effect, she was inviting me to extend my world of wonder to encompass hers. She was not just informing me. She was, rather, negotiating the world of wonder and possibility. Molecules, solids, liquids, movement were not facts; they were to be used in pondering and imagining. Miss Orcutt was the rarity. She was a human event, not a transmission device.
Unlike his fellow psychologist Barbara McCombs, Bruner speaks not as a detached clinician but in an immediately personal, concrete, and ambulatory way. His language suggests the world we live in is extraordinary to the point of the miraculous, and that not the least miracle is the ability of the human mind to make some sense of it.
Miss Orcutt’s language “invites”—to use Bruner’s apt verb—her students to participate in the act of discovery in ways similar to how literary writers invite the reader to engage in the process of discovery. While as teachers we may not be able to speak in Emersonian or Melvillean prose, we can use a language that is more affective (hence effective) and engaging, more responsive to alternative possibilities. But we too use a classroom language that is less personal, less inquisitive, and less qualified than the ways we speak in other situations. Bruner cites a study by his wife, Carol Feldman, who was
interested in the extent to which teacher’s stances toward their subject indicate some sense of the hypothetical nature of knowledge, its uncertainty, its invitation to further thought. She chose as an index the use of modal auxiliary markers in teachers’ talk to students and in their talk to each other in the staff room, distinguishing between expressions that contained modals of uncertainty and probability (like might, could, and so on) and expressions not so marked. Modals expressing a stance of uncertainty or doubt in teacher talk to teachers far outnumbered their occurrence in teacher talk to students. The world that the teachers were presenting to their students was a far more settled, far less hypothetical, far less negotiatory world than the one they were offering to their colleagues.
Neither Bruner nor Feldman speculate in depth on the reasons for this situation, but it has a great deal to do with a teacher’s sense of role and authority in the classroom. The impulse behind many teaching behaviors, especially those of beginners, is to convince the students and themselves that they really deserve to be where they are, that they know what they are talking about. On their side, students often display the speech characteristics that are the opposite of their seemingly self-assured teachers for a complementary reason—the fear of being “wrong.” They will often hedge their bets by prefacing their remarks with “This may be beside the point but. . .” or “I don’t know if this is what you’re looking for, but. . .”
An essential aspect of active learning for both teachers and students, then, is the ability to monitor, reflect upon, and analyze one’s own language. Every utterance we make has not only content, but also a stance towards that content and towards reality in general; each word if heard or read rightly is a witness to the absence or presence of mind behind it.