At a K through 12 school like mine, if I were to ask my sophomores,
how many of you are painters?, there
might be a couple hands raised in a given class, but if I travelled down to the
ECC (Early Childhood Center) and asked the same question, I imagine a swarm of
hands would shoot into the air proudly and enthusiastically. What happens
between Kindergarten and 10th grade? Where do all the painters go?
One answer might go like this: we begin to divide up the world for them;
through our language, our conceptual binaries, students start seeing the world
as one made up of amateurs and experts, of inferior intellects and superior ones;
they start seeing themselves as having strengths and weaknesses, things they’re
good at and things they’re not. And this got me thinking: How do we cleanse the
doors of their perception? How do we inspire students to claim back their place
as painters again? After all, “…it’s not
a matter of making great painters; it’s a matter of making emancipated
[students]: people capable of saying, ‘me too, I’m a painter,’ a statement that
contains nothing in the way of pride, only the reasonable feeling of power that
belongs to any reasonable being. ‘There is no pride in saying out loud: Me too,
I’m a painter! Pride consists in saying softly to others: You neither, you aren’t
a painter.’ ‘Me too, I’m a painter’ means: me too, I have a soul, I have
feelings to communicate to my fellow-men” (Ranciere 67). When did high school
students stop believing that they have something to communicate? How can we get
them to paint their masterpieces again?
Yesterday in class, we were reading one of Macbeth’s
soliloquies from Act One, and a student continued reading until I interrupted:
“Ok, stop,” I said. The class directed their eyes towards me as I asked, “Do
these opening lines mean anything to you?” Blank stares were accompanied by
silence. “You guys are having a hard time understanding the language, right?”
Gradually there were confessional nods across the room. “Well, let’s walk
through it, phrase by phrase, and see what’s troubling us.” We went through it,
and sure enough, the students unpacked every word and those they couldn’t (such
as verb phrases like trammel up)
there were footnotes supplying the meaning. I did nothing other than
reinforce/redirect their will and attention towards the text; the students were
the ones who constructed the meaning, albeit slowly, but with no problem. They could do this, but why did they
stare blankly at me the first time I asked? Why weren’t they doing it? Were they convinced that
Shakespeare was “above their heads”? Had I contributed to their self-contempt?
French philosopher Bernard Stiegler in Taking Care of Youth and the Generations (2010) makes a connection
between the loss of responsibility and the infantilization
of youth in contemporary culture. His definition of education reads as follows:
“…education is our name for transmitting the social competency that produces
responsibility… [which] leads to ‘maturity’” (2). Stiegler worries about
education (on a philosophical level) because students are not taking
responsibility for their own capacity to exercise intelligence (or their own capacity to be painters!). Students
aren’t to blame, however. It’s a cultural issue, says Stiegler, one that
involves difficult questions about the social practices of adult culture. After all it is the language games of
adulthood which dulls their sense of wonder, namely their capacity to fancy
themselves as painters… So this got me thinking about Jacques Ranciere’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation (2007).
Ranciere’s work explores the pedagogy of a French
Enlightenment figure named Joseph Jacotot who courageously posited the
following claims:
1. All men have the equal capacity to exercise
intelligence
2. All men have the equal capacity to instruct
themselves
Both principles contradict directly certain “common sense”
assumptions that shape our daily pedagogical practices as teachers. Take
principle 1. We often concentrate on the rhetoric of outcomes as well as metaphors
of progress, which in my opinion conflicts with Ranciere’s radical strategy to
treat principle 1 as a fact of nature, not as a hoped-for destination to be
reached. Equal intellectual capacity is not an idealized, pie-in-the-sky goal;
it’s a practical starting point. Students are equally intelligent the day they
walk through the classroom door, no progress is needed in terms of improving
the intellect. Ranciere writes, “There aren’t two sorts of minds. There is
inequality in the manifestations of intelligence, according to the greater or
lesser energy communicated to the intelligence or by the will for discovering
and combining new relations; but there is no hierarchy of intellectual
capacity. Emancipation is becoming conscious of this equality of nature” (27).
Underperforming students are not lacking in capacity nor are they less
intelligent in some sense; instead, the real challenge is revealing the student’s
intelligence to his or herself. “…Our
problem isn’t proving that all intelligence is equal,” Ranciere writes. “It’s
seeing what can be done under that supposition” (46). Differences in student performance
and success, says Ranciere, has more to do with the amount of Will and
Attention one has exercised towards a given task than with one’s capacity for “natural
talent” or “superior intelligence.”
Ranciere urges us to shift our pedagogical focus and
language away from concerns about outcomes and to direct it toward how we frame
the learning experience from the very outset. This means emancipating students
before teaching them, namely convincing each learner of the idea “that every
common person might conceive his human dignity, take the measure of his
intellectual capacity, and decide how to use it” (17). This gets back to making
students aware of the fact that they can take responsibility for their own capacity
to be intelligent. Ranciere urges the educator to “give not the key to
knowledge, but the consciousness of what an intelligence can do when it
considers itself equal to any other and considers any other equal to itself”
(39). It’s not about knowledge as much as about empowerment; it’s more about the
outset than the outcome. Our culture
makes this shift difficult, however, due to the industry’s obsession
with results, data, and progress, which puts a lot of pressure on students and
teachers alike. |
| Jacques Ranciere |
In reference to principle 2, Ranciere advocates for learning
as doing, meaning the teacher’s role is more about creating a learning
environment where students want to do, where students want to exercise their
capabilities. When students aren’t performing, one’s first instinct should be to
focus on the learner’s Will and Attention, not their Intellect. As Ranciere
states, “There is stultification whenever one intelligence is subordinated to
another. [However] a person – and a child in particular – may need a master
when his own will is not strong enough to keep him on track,… but that
subjection is purely one of will over will” (13). Thinking back to my situation
in English class yesterday: the students could do the work, so my task was to focus
on redirecting their will and attention to see it through. What I didn’t have
to do was “explicate” the Shakespearean text. Too much explication stultifies a
learner, for “It is the explicator who needs the incapable and not the other way
around; it is he who constitutes the incapable as such. To explain something to
someone is first of all to show [the student] a world divided into knowing
minds and ignorant ones, ripe minds and immature ones, the capable and the
incapable, the intelligent and the stupid” (6). I do think there are times when
explication is necessary but it need not be the default modality for
facilitating learning. Instead, one’s default should be to address them as
people “under the sign of equality.” “What
stultifies the common [student] is not the lack of instruction, but the belief
in the inferiority of their intelligence” (39). Too often, I rely more on
explication, instead of targeting the student’s will in order to awaken her own intellectual
capacity so she can explicate the subject matter for herself and for her peers.
To put in Gilles Deleuze’s terms, when the teacher explicates, the students
need only trace that which has been
explained for them (a.k.a. rote regurgitation); when the student explicates for
herself, she is mapping her learning
experience in her terms.
To get back to Stiegler, students need to take
responsibility for their own capacity to exercise intelligence, but we must
guide the process by practicing a language of emancipation that worries less
about quantifiable outcomes and more about the authenticity of the learning
environment we invite them to inhabit and explore. As Ranciere claims, “[Students
develop] their intellectual capacities as the circumstances demand… They develop
the intelligence that the needs and circumstances of their existence demand of
them” (51). It's our job to make such demands
but we must do so while treating them as equals. And who knows, maybe some will start
painting again.
Whoever teaches
without emancipation stultifies. Whoever emancipates doesn’t have to worry
about what the emancipated person learns –J. Ranciere
Ranciere, Jacques. The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons
in Intellectual Emancipation. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007.
