#Ranciere18 - One Student, One Intelligence: A Case for Making Learning Personal, A Guest Post by Nick Dressler

My dog died yesterday. She was a thirteen-year-old epileptic basset hound on whom we spent an ungodly amount of money, first on an MRI to rule out a brain tumor as the cause of her convulsions, then on a surgery to remove a grapefruit-sized tumor from the base of her tail, and then on two medications that worked well to assuage her initial tremors but failed to control the fifteen or so consecutive seizures that saw her euthanized just eighteen hours ago. She brought us a lot of happiness over the years, Margo, and she led a full life surrounded by an adoring extended family and some creative, energetic children—neither of which makes the loss any easier, but both of which have generated memories more indelible than even her ashes in my mother-in-law’s backyard—Margo’s favorite place in the world.

I tell you this for no other reason than because I can hardly write anything anymore without some kind of personal anecdote as a lead-in. On one hand, such reflection plunges me into that concentrated mode of introspection necessary to disinter the amorphous abstract muck lurking somewhere between my subconscious internal dialogue and my primitive animal instincts. It puts me in the writing zone, so to speak: it’s like the squint and gaze needed before you view one of those Magic Eyes from the nineties (Remember Magic Eyes? Remember the nineties?). Just look past the picture—the thing—pull it away from your face, and there it is: the radically three-dimensional hidden image. Yes, the personal anecdote unlocks my ability to communicate from the depths whether or not there is even an audience to read what I write, and it ensures the authenticity, I find, of whatever comes next in the manuscript as the eventual subject of the piece rises from the same place as the memory of the actual experience that has formed me—whatever I am, whatever “I” is. Secondly, the personal story transports the reader from their real-life into the abstract thesis of the manuscript by creating a space in which writer and reader—the two parties in the transaction—find the common ground before splitting hairs later in the essay. You are human; I am, too such an introduction implies, and, as far as I’m concerned, that is the commonality required for the intercommunication of our deepest, most nuanced ideas. It’s a little bit like mapping out the exact longitude and latitude to set sail for a potentially lucrative undersea treasure hunt as opposed to selecting some random spot, jumping in, and having a look around. The sailing? Not the point, and it requires a different set of skills than does diving, but without it, good luck excavating that wreck—you won’t even make it to the diving, even though that’s what you set out to do in the first place.

I’ve taken a substantial amount of criticism for this habit over the course of my formal schooling. Less so in grade school, of course, but the disapproval increased in direct proportion to my progression through high school, undergraduate, and grad school. Don’t use a personal pronoun, obviously we’ve all seen that one, but also it’s a solipsism to assume anyone cares about your personal experiences. Wow. That’s quite a charge. I do see where the comment comes from: overreliance on the personal anecdote can imply a certain self-importance, I suppose, as if to suggest all of the writer’s individual experiences matter toward the discussion of some, perhaps, more important, more socially relevant discussion of literature, or philosophy, et al. However, this is true only for the idealist, who insists his ideas reign supreme over the natural world. The materialist, though, claims no power over the world around him and, as such, his experience is only an effect or symptom—one possible result—of the sum total of his external stimuli instead of some Romantic, magical idea he implemented of his own, God-given volition. I view each person as a puzzle piece in a larger, ever changing truth: we each have a bit of a picture on our front (our perspective), and the solipsism would be in believing as the guards in Plato’s cave do that said image is the total truth. In reality (again: whatever that is), these perspectives matter only when fastened together with their neighbors’ to unearth the larger, more complete picture—human nature, our species-nature, as Marx would have it. I see a lot of good, in the personal anecdote, maybe even a great necessity in sharing individual stories as toward the goal of communal understanding and so insist when a teacher chastises a student for sins against the old covenant of writing or history or what-have-you, that teacher fetishizes intelligence and divides society into those who have (the teacher himself, in this scenarios) and those who lack (the student)—convenient enough for the teacher: the only one who can give what he has. The student, in this case, pursues the approval and then the endorsement of the teacher in order to have learned the material, thus rendering powerful the teacher, the one who gives what he has, and leaving powerless the student, the one who takes what she has not. Good teachers subvert this relationship.

But how to do so? I’ve long theorized that our traditional school system creates two mutually exclusive versions of the same student—one who learns skills and content in school for school’s sake, and another who feels free, acts naturally, and learns life skills outside of the classroom. The first version switches on at the beginning of the school day and enters hibernation at the final bell; the second one, the real one, takes over during all the other times, the fun times, the authentic times, the times that involve emotion and common sense and personal growth and heartache and success. The second version actively switches to the first only to as a means to an end: a college admission, graduation, and reception into the workforce—exactly when the second version takes over full stop and real life can begin. When first version disappears so do the knowledge and skills it acquired as part of traditional schooling. Up in smoke. Floating around the atmosphere like the rocket that propels the shuttle through the Earth’s atmosphere before detaching itself never to return. And yet, for as many Marxist and/or Structuralist philosophers and cultural critics I’ve studied in my day, I never have come across someone who pinpoints a similar argument as the one I have limned here until I met Ranciere in The Ignorant Schoolmaster who suggests, “There is not a popular intelligence concerned with practical things and a scholarly intelligence devoted to abstract thought. It is always the same intelligence at work.” Right on the money. In other words: the classroom must be a place in which the school teacher encourages natural behavior from the students—the same behavior the student exhibits outside of the classroom. The student should bring herself as she is into the room every day and should practice skills each period that directly affect that authentic person.

To use a sporting analogy, since I used to play and coach basketball: one of the coach’s biggest challenges when designing a practice session is to engender the same intensity from the players that they naturally exhibit in the game so the plays and skills and techniques they learn in practice may be applied when the chips are down and each play actually counts toward the result of a contest—the reason the players play in the first place. It serves neither the coach nor the players if the coach creates two versions of each player—one who practices and one who plays the game—for the second version will not perform the skills of the first when the chaos of the game obfuscates the lessons learned in practice. One player who performs at the same intensity all the time, that’s the type who succeeds. The same is true for the student: one kid, one set of skills, one sense of humor, one subjective experience. Not two. Two only muddies the water. Encourage their authenticity in the classroom—practice equality as Ranciere encourages us to do—and the knowledge and skills they encounter and perfect will serve to ameliorate exactly that authentic person, and that person alone.

This has been a post by Nick Dressler (@nick_dressler) for the #Ranciere18 reading project. Go here to see the google doc, and go here to join the hypothes.is group.