Living in the Moment

Now, I will finally get around to talking about what alternatives we have to magical thinking about transcendence. If you remember from my January post, I suggested that the way people approach education leads them to assume that what we most should concern ourselves with is the goal. And that having gone through the process of training or education, one has attained a state of enlightenment of sorts. We are "trained" or "educated" or whatever it might be. This is, I now suggest, a kind of magical thinking. If we approach education in this way, then we encourage people to treat the time in the classroom, or time studying, or whatever else, as part of some sort of ritual. They simply must go through the required steps, and then they will attain the desired transcendent state. As I also suggested in that earlier post, it just doesn't work that way. The end of training or education is always just a new beginning. The very existence of time prevents us from reaching some perfect state. Nonetheless, there seems to be a pronounced tendency to concentrate on goal over process, destination over journey. As a result, people may end up getting less out of most things than they could.

Further, this tendency is reflected in the packaging (as a commodity) of education, the pacing of learning, the kinds of assignments used to assess learning, and the very need for external accountability in the first place. To be clear, it is important to have goals and objectives for learning. However, when the goals and objectives become more important than the process of learning, when outcomes become more important that the person doing the learning, then education gets dehumanized. The process of education becomes a process by which we learn to be less human. Goal oriented thinking about education has developed in a way that requires that education be about the endpoint rather than the process. The grade is more important than the knowledge: More important for later schooling, for seeking a job, for determining one's value as a learner, for receiving scholarships and financial aid, and for a variety of other reasons. Practically, because of how education is framed, students very rationally seek to achieve the highest grades possible. In fact, some students get very, very angry when they don't get the grades they are certain they deserve. They question, complain, accuse, threaten, weep, argue, appeal, rationalize, and more or less manifest any behavior that they believe will manipulate a teacher to change an unwanted outcome.

I personally had a graduate student in a course on public education reform formally complain to administrators of a school I taught at. He called me unfair, incompetent, a joke, and a variety of other things. He impugned my motivations, my abilities, my knowledge of the topic, and so forth as loudly and as publicly as he could. He called for my removal from the course for gross incompetence. Why? Why did he do this? Because he got a B instead of an A. That B, he told me in one of many abusive emails I received, had lowered his overall GPA by 0.04 points, and probably had torpedoed his chances to get into law school. This is goal- and outcome-oriented thinking taken to its extreme. When a course becomes just one more thing to check off on one's transcript, and when the people who teach it have the option either to recognize one's excellence or to become obstacles to one's success, then you have more or less ignored the process of learning and why it exists, and fully dehumanized the people doing the learning and teaching. Commodification of education leads to commodity fetishism, which leads to dehumanization of the process of learning.

Oddly enough, the way things are set up from primary to post-secondary to graduate education almost always lead to this kind of thinking. We are trained from an early age to experience education as a series of outcomes: grades received, usually, or degrees achieved, or some such rot. These things are not unimportant, I think, but certainly an over-emphasis on them leads to collateral effects.

If, instead, students were better able to pace their own learning, better able to tailor it to specific personal interests (where possible), and were led to worry more about what they are learning instead of what grades they are receiving, things might be different. Think about it this way. If one wants to become a great writer, it's not a matter of getting an A in a writing course. It's more a matter of learning by doing, by looking at exemplary writing, rote practice of grammar, spelling, compositional forms, etc., working with people who are interested in doing and learning about writing, and so forth. When I was a sophomore or junior at Oregon State University, I took a Short Fiction Writing course from a guy named Ehud Havazelet. On the first day of class, we walked in, and he was sitting at the desk. He said nothing to anyone. He was looking at a class roll or a syllabus or a gradebook or something like that. At the appointed time for class to begin, he looked up and silently took an accounting of the students in the room. He asked, "So, you want to be writers?"

We voiced timid, confused agreement. Of course we did. Why else would we be taking his fucking class if we didn't?

"Well," he asked, "why aren't you writing?"

The rest of the quarter, he spent teaching us to love literature, to recognize talent, to try to say something more real than cliched, and to want to learn to be better writers. I got a B in that course, I think. It was the best grade I received as an undergraduate, though I earned many A's.

So, you want to be educated? Then why aren't you educating yourselves? Why do I need to threaten you with a grade in order to get you to want to know about these things, to be able to do what I'm trying to teach you to do? Where is your interest in getting good at this stuff?

Strangely enough, as a result of that course, I have never stopped wanting to be a better writer. I've never stopped being interested in the mechanics of writing, in different modes of writing, in well-written works, and so forth. Ehud Havazelet taught me how to see that these things were more important than any grade I might receive. Being a writer is not about the assignments or the grades; it is about the craft of writing.

Sela. Reflect upon this.