The Romantics and the Stoics
I remember reading an essay on the Romantics versus the Stoics.
Romantics say a lot of the shit you hear at commencement speeches. At motivational conferences. In commercials. Live a great, wonderful, dynamic, unique life. Be you. Be a star. You’re special. Make your dreams come true!
The Stoics say, that’s really dumb. It’s going to make you selfish and bitter over your lack of glory, and most people will feel like failures because it’s just not realistic that everyone, or even the majority of people, can actualize that. You also create a tiered society: in all likelihood it will be the more affluent who can achieve these things. What you really ought to do is live a life of service to humanity, to society, as a matter of duty, and don’t invest so much of your worth in what you do for a living or your individual achievement.
Which mentality is better for society? For mental health? For well-being, national vitality? For the individual, whoever they are?
Is it right to raise children in the Romantic tradition? Remember, the world needs plumbers and garbage collectors. If plumbers and garbage collectors were raised in the Romantic tradition they would all be miserable. Because they’re plumbers and garbage collectors. Not that our children shouldn’t be aspirational. I guess a better question is, is there anything wrong with being a plumber or garbage collector?
Should we value, promote, and robustly compensate those who have no desire whatsoever for academic success? Don’t we depend on those people for things like not being surrounded by fecal swamps and mounds of trash? Joe Feldman in Grading for Equity scolds teachers who “acculturate and assimilate students to be effective manual laborers in factories, not to be college-degreed professionals.” But is this a desirable outcome for every citizen? I’m less optimistic than Feldman over how achievable it is to get students to be engaged and self-motivated in all of their classes, no matter what their relationship to the content is (were you?), and I dislike his tendency to blame teachers for not getting every student to this place, but also – does everyone need to be taught in a way where the goal is to be a “college-degreed professional”? Is this a byproduct of the affluent liberal’s prescription for society: everyone should be like us and rack up degrees and join the professional classes, the “knowledge economy”? Does this turn a blind eye to how much harder it is for the poor to do it?
Right now only about 35% of adults in America have a BA. In 1965, 12% of men and 7% of women had four years of college. Then and now, most people don’t go to college and experience academic success. I wonder about the collateral damage of herding everyone into this system, into emphasizing how important “academic success” is, how if they fail, they have to do something less prestigious and financially-rewarding with their lives. Consider this is most people. Consider the poor student, with parents who don’t support them, who have noise and poverty and abuse in the home, who came up through terrible systems, who have learning disabilities and little support for them in the home or at school, who are taught by undertrained and unmotivated teachers; meanwhile, everyone must be academically successful to get on in life. And the teachers must be able to get them there, or get scolded for their ignorance and incompetence. I wonder if we’re trying to justify the political value of a degree in the workforce by overemphasizing college’s importance in training critical thinkers, to make people ethical, to make them cultured and well-rounded, whatever those things mean.
Should we punish students for being nonacademic? Should we consider college graduates more knowledgeable about life, the world? More, prestigious, more cultured, more ready to go to work? What if Person A spent four years working in a variety of nonacademic places: the prison system, then a wellness industry, then in the agricultural sector, or a mechanical trade, then they lived in another country, and were evaluated, or “graded,” on how well they maintained their living space, their personal hygiene and appearance, their vehicle, their financial affairs, their health, their ability to work cooperatively with others? Person B, meanwhile, went to a good college, studied a lot, got good grades, and most of the time had a sink full of dirty dishes, and a dirty car, and loads of dirty laundry, and wore pajamas to class, got wasted a lot, never held down a full-time job, and has lived among wealthy, smart, supportive people their whole life.
Which one is better prepared for the world? The workforce? Which is more knowledgeable about the human race? Life?
Wait, don’t answer.
In an interview, David Foster Wallace (1:08:00-1:10:47) talked about elite, smart, affluent students who spent years studying the humanities at an elite school, and the abrupt transition they make into the workforce, where they feel they are using hardly anything they got out of college. Could you argue with that, and discuss how humanities educations on the contrary prepare people for life, for being moral beings, for being good public citizens, for having well-developed souls? What about college’s legacy as facilitating improvement through one’s status as a degree holder, and who really gives a crap about the vast majority of it?
What is the Athenian model of education? For elite people to separate themselves from society even more than before; less cynically, to become enlightened, cultured, well-rounded, questioning, ethical, responsible, capable of making good life choices. What is the vocational model of education (perhaps “working class model”)? To learn a trade, a skill, a profession. Which is a better way to look at college? Are there other ways? For many students, college is the continuation of a process in which they do work that’s been put in front of them: the teacher gives you work, and you do the work, because that’s what good children do. Don’t be a bad child. They’re not really passionate about a major, or a career; they’re motivated by not failing, by a vague understanding that this is what’s expected of them, what winners do, what will get them a job, somewhere, doing something.
How will you encourage students to look at college? What should they get out of it? Not just your classes, but college. How might we outline an “Eat Your Broccoli” pedagogy, in other words, we don’t care if you don’t want to do it, you have to, because it’s good for you in our learned opinion? Skills to get through school, an understanding of their own rich potential, immersion in the best of human achievement, a sense of obligation to society?
Do you know what Ikigai is? Nothing less than the Japanese guide to eternal happiness, of course. If what you love, what you’re good at, what the world needs, and what you can get paid doing are all the same thing, you have Ikigai. Should we center our teaching in “Ikigai Pedagogy”?
I can’t answer these questions for you. You need the space to make your own meaning. Proust once said “That which we have not been forced to decipher, to clarify by our own personal effort, that which was made clear before, is not ours. Only issues from ourselves which we ourselves extract from the darkness within ourselves and which is unknown to others.” Flaubert said received ideas are the enemy. Paolo Freire: getting banked is bad. Maybe you won’t even be able to put it into words. As the Tao Te Ching states, the Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao. One more: Zen mind is not Zen mind. Chew on that one awhile.
One last question: how are you going to find joy in the profession?
My advice: remember the great moments, for starters. My students threw a surprise pizza party on my birthday once. One offered his bedroom back at home for me to stay in when I went to Washington D.C. for a conference. Students write sweet things at the bottom of the final, get you presents, send you emails years later, go on to do great things and sometimes even give you some credit. Some students need, more than anything else, an ally, someone out there in the world who is kind to them, who shows them respect. Someone at college making them feel like they matter is a huge deal. As is its opposite.
There is a huge need in the world for even competent teachers. Never mind good or great. The world needs competent teachers more than great artists. Or dancers, or athletes, or singers. All that Romantic shit.
My mother, who spent her career at the elementary school level in the infamously gruesome Los Angeles Unified School District, said part of the challenge is to find joy in working with wonderful children and having patience with the more challenging ones (and often their parents, and faculty and administrators). My grandmother, who taught kindergarten for many years, had this to say when I asked her if she felt a sense of responsibility to prepare kids for the world, for life, for the rest of their educations: “Well I don’t know that I thought about it like that. I just really enjoyed it.”
If you can see some kind of wisdom or motivation in what these two lady relatives of mine have to say, you’ve probably got it in you to be a good teacher. Don’t forget: the world can never have enough of you.