David P. Levine
Graduate School of International Studies
University of Denver
2002
If anything characterizes higher education at the beginning of the twenty-first century, it is uncertainty about the ends it serves and the values it embraces. We can see evidence of this uncertainty in the preoccupation of institutions of higher education with such matters as core curriculum, outcomes assessment, and the technology and methodology of teaching. We can also see it expressed in the proliferation of degree programs aimed at better adapting institutions to an external environment with which their relationship is no longer well defined.
If institutions of higher education have lost their way, this does not imply that they were previously on the right track. The fact that in the past there was greater certainty and consistency in goals, methods, and values does not mean that those goals, methods, and values were in some sense the right ones. It may simply mean that they were better protected from doubt. But, since to think is to doubt, protection from doubt is also protection from thought. So, if we now have doubt, perhaps we also have the possibility for thinking. But, it is only a possibility, and it remains to be seen what we will make of it. The awkward situation of the contemporary university may foster its own dogma, and thus assure that neither doubt nor thought will be allowed to interfere with a new agenda.
Within the university, the most significant doubt we can entertain is the doubt that teaching matters for learning. I will refer to the proposition that underlies this doubt as the null hypothesis. We can formulate this hypothesis as follows: Teaching does not matter for learning. Were the null hypothesis correct, we might be forced into one of the following two conclusions. Either the university is the center of a group delusion concerning the importance of teachers to the learning process, or the university is essentially a device for extorting money from students and their families to provide incomes for faculty and administrators, who might otherwise be forced to work for a living. The extortion succeeds because the life prospects of students are made to depend on their ability to acquire a form of certification available only through colleges and universities. Because society invests the system of higher education with the right to grant or withhold certification, society enables those holding franchises within that system to extort the funds required for their maintenance.
Even were the null hypothesis correct, it need not imply that nothing worthwhile takes place within the university. As we know, activities other than teaching occupy a significant portion, perhaps the greater part, of the time and effort of those employed there, and some of these activities may even be useful and worthwhile. This judgment might apply, for example, to research and to creative endeavors. The university might also offer a useful service as a setting in which students can pass some time after high school and before beginning their careers. Perhaps the university’s main task is to oversee the process of emotional development during late adolescence.
The opposite of the null hypothesis in teaching is the hypothesis formulated by Jerry Harvey as follows: “If the student hasn’t learned, the teacher hasn’t taught.” Harvey suggests that this second hypothesis involves a perverse logic “because it implies that the basic responsibility for causing the student to learn belongs to the teacher. … Thus the student doesn’t exist except as a rather inanimate receptacle … for the teacher’s competence or incompetence” (1988: 69). While we might assume that most of those involved in teaching and learning would argue that the reality falls somewhere between the null hypothesis and its opposite, I suspect that the dominant standpoint is less a middle ground than a position that embraces both extremes at the same time, fluctuating between them according to circumstance. To see how the issues play out in a concrete setting, consider the following example.
The example involves a workshop offered recently at my university featuring a short film on the subject of students’ failure to learn.[1] In this film, a number of graduating seniors at Harvard University were asked to explain the phases of the moon and the changing of the seasons. Few got the answer to either question right. Virtually all of those interviewed sought an explanation for the seasons in the changing proximity of the earth to the sun as the earth negotiates an elliptical orbit around the sun, moving closer in summer, farther away in winter. This misconception was held by twenty-one out of twenty-three Harvard students, faculty, and alumni randomly selected at the Harvard graduation ceremony. The audience at the workshop found this part of the film both amusing and disturbing. By and large, those in attendance drew the conclusion they were meant to draw: there is something wrong with education at even the best institutions if students come out lacking basic knowledge.
The film offers a suggestion about what went wrong. This suggestion has to do with the hold that unexamined assumptions have over thinking, and with the failure of teachers to force students to confront those assumptions. To show how misconceptions about phenomena express the work of unexamined preconceptions, the filmmakers sought out a ninth grade class at a local high school, where they discovered that the same theory of seasonal change dominated students without four years of education at a premier institution of higher learning. This discovery led to the following conclusion: college graduates hold the same misconceptions they had before entering college.
The second part of the film featured a high school student who was also asked to explain the phases of the moon and the changing of the seasons. Although among the best students in her class, she did not know what accounts for either phenomena, and her construction of planetary motion used to develop an explanation was quite bizarre, involving the earth in a complex and completely implausible orbit around the sun. Her teacher described this student’s effort as “mind-boggling.” Try as she might, the student could not come up with the correct answer. And try she did. Indeed, the film offered a compelling and appealing image of a bright and curious young woman struggling to come up with a plausible explanation for two everyday phenomena. What she seemed to discover were not the correct answers to the questions, but the inherent complexities and difficulties hidden in apparently straightforward phenomena. As she finally put it: “it’s confusing.”
Her teacher seemed discouraged; members of the audience seemed worried, one indicating that he found the interviews with the Harvard graduates “scary.” After the film was over, the teachers in the audience offered parallel examples from their own experiences, one lamenting that his students did not know what the term “globalization” meant, another noting how ignorant students were of elementary facts of chemistry.
In worrying about the lack of knowledge evidenced in the film, the audience took its interpretation of the film in a particular direction, one linked to the now familiar lament about the failure of students to gain knowledge considered in some sense basic. This idea was clearly a part of the message of the film, but offering support for it may not have been the filmmakers’ main intent. Rather than simply focusing our attention on what students do not know, those who made the film also had it in mind to focus attention on how students use already formed mental constructions to shape what they can and cannot learn. I will return to this aspect of the problem of teaching and learning further on. Whatever the actual intent of the filmmakers, it is interesting that the workshop participants took that intent to be to highlight students’ failure to learn content, and not to advance a specific hypothesis about the obstacles to learning. We may wonder if by focusing on the matter of what students do not learn, the workshop participants sought to avoid the more troubling matter of what it means to learn, and what part teachers can and cannot play in the learning process.
If the film’s message is that students do not learn material they need to know, that message clearly came home to the audience. What also came home to the audience was the teacher’s responsibility for student’s failure to learn. Yet, viewing the film as a story of learning failure leaves out much of importance in it. Whether the high school student featured in the film got the answers right or not, she did engage the issues; and she did exercise her capacity to think analytically, however peculiar the outcome might have been. So, if developing analytical skills through the use of intellectual capacities is what we mean by learning, perhaps she did learn even if she did not get all the right answers, and even if she did not retain those right answers, something we cannot judge from the film. Indeed, the film offered a rare opportunity to observe the learning process in action; and it is interesting how those in the audience rejected what they saw, insisting against the evidence that what they had just observed was an instance of the failure to learn. We might go so far as to say that it was not the student who failed to learn, but those who made the film and those who watched it. Because they came in with a fixed idea about what learning meant—it meant getting the answer right—they failed to learn from observing this student what other, and perhaps more important, meaning learning might have. What did occur in the film, but was not considered learning, was that the young woman entered into a thoughtful encounter with the unknown.
If learning means getting the right answer, the teacher moves to center stage. In the words of the narrator of the video, “we must make them aware… We must free them from this private universe.” The teacher is the owner of the right answers, and the classroom the location for bestowing those answers on the student. Getting in the way are the confused misconceptions students bring into the class. Thus, the high school teacher gets the point of the video when she offers this comment: “until you straighten out their ideas, it closes off their minds.” Given this interpretation of learning, we need never concern ourselves with the possibility that the null hypothesis about teaching might prove correct. But, if learning means undertaking a thoughtful encounter with the unknown, the locus shifts from teacher to student. Indeed, here the essential point is that the teacher does not control the process or its outcome, because if he or she did, then learning in this sense could not occur. It is the student’s ownership of the process that makes it learning in the second sense. The more control is taken over by someone outside, the less the result can be described as learning. But, the less control taken by someone outside (the teacher), the less certain we can be that learning will eventuate in the right answer.
Note how, by insisting, against the evidence of the film, that the student did not learn, we enhance the importance of the teacher and reduce that of the student. This suggests an explanation for a peculiar aspect of the discussion in the workshop. The discussion was marked by expressions of dismay at the failure of teaching to accomplish what it is presumably meant to accomplish: learning. Thus, the teachers in the room were encouraged by the film to question their own vocation. Indeed, given a teacher-centered idea of learning, the film and the workshop become an indictment of teaching. Because of this, they feed into the hostility we sometimes find directed toward the academy from outside. Yet, for the same reason the film becomes an indictment of teaching, it also serves to reinforce and enhance the importance of teaching. By interpreting the failure to learn as a failure to teach, we make the work of the teacher the vital element. This interpretation encouraged some of those attending the workshop to seek solutions to the “problem” depicted in the film through improved teaching strategies and techniques that might better assure that students learn what they are meant to learn, which is to say that they get it right.
We can highlight the distinction between the different kinds of learning by taking a closer look at the fear expressed by members of the film’s audience about what they had seen. This fear has a number of dimensions, and I will consider some of them in more detail further on. Let me begin, however, with the obvious. I think it fair to assume that, for those expressing it, the fear is that students will graduate without knowing something that it is in some sense vital for them to know. This would be a straightforward and compelling argument if it were true. In the case presented in the film, it would mean that knowledge of planetary motion adequate to explain the changing seasons and the phases of the moon is somehow vital not only to future astronomers and meteorologists, but to any well-educated citizen. But, is this true? Do most Harvard graduates, or graduates of any university or college, need this knowledge to have a meaningful and productive life?
Of course, questions such as this are the raw material of the now long-standing debate in higher education over the so-called “core curriculum.” Those who favor the core curriculum assume that learning should be judged by what the student knows and not how he or she knows it. So long as we define learning in terms of outcome in this sense, teaching is the vital element, the teacher takes center stage, and the failure to learn must be considered a failure to teach. Thus, the movements both for a core curriculum and for outcomes assessment in education fit well into a teacher-centered idea of learning.
Yet, do students need knowledge such as that found missing in the film to lead meaningful and productive lives? A null hypothesis for the film might be that the knowledge missing for the majority of Harvard graduates is not important to them, that, by remaining ignorant of it, they demonstrate not their failure to learn, but good judgment. Of course, for some graduates, this would not be the case. Those students contemplating careers in astronomy surely ought to understand how the orbit of the earth around the sun and of the moon around the earth account for the seasons and the phases of the moon. Yet, are even these students well served by learning in the first of our two senses? Is a good astronomer someone who knows why it is that the seasons change; or is a good astronomer someone who is able to discover why it is by a thought process? Is a good astronomer someone who keeps an open mind, never fully rejecting the possibility that what is known to be the right answer might not be? Perhaps a strong case can be made that a good astronomer is not someone who knows the answers, but someone who does not. In the language of the video, a good astronomer is someone who approaches his subject without preconceptions. Of course, not all of us have the ability to become good astronomers, or good poets, or good economists, or good mathematicians. Yet, if we can lead productive lives within the limits of our capabilities, why worry about a lack of knowledge that reveals nothing more than the limits inherent in being human?
If we are to believe the synopsis offered with the film, those who made it had it in mind not simply to exemplify learning failure, but also to link that failure to the tenacity with which students hold onto what they think they know, especially to foundational constructions that can be used to account for phenomena, no matter how idiosyncratic and even bizarre those constructions appear from the outside. The title of the film—A Private Universe—suggests that problems arise for learning when a disjuncture develops between the privately held foundations for thought and those sanctioned by the larger community.
The synopsis that comes with the film tells us that it demonstrates “how preconceived ideas can interfere with learning.” If this is so, then learning means giving up preconceived ideas. What is unclear, however, is whether the problem arises because the student’s ideas are preconceived, or because they are wrong. Put another way, do problems arise because ideas are preconceived, or because they are preconceived by the student? If they were the preconceived ideas of the teacher or of the community, even the community of scientists, would holding them be an obstacle to learning? Is the problem that students live in a “private universe,” or that they protect certain ideas from doubt? If the latter is the problem, then learning depends on the student’s ability to give up whatever set of grounding assumptions he or she uses to make sense of the world. We expect a great deal when we expect this to happen; and it would be useful to take a closer look, as the film does not, at what gets in the way of learning in this sense.
Students do not learn because what they already know gets in the way, which it does primarily because they do not think about what, or an important part of what, they know. In the video, what got in the way of learning was the incorrect premise that the earth has an elliptical orbit around the sun. Given this premise, and the student’s knowledge that there is an association between temperature and proximity to the source of heat, it is not surprising that the dominant explanation of the seasons appeals to the changing distance between the earth and the sun. The narrator surmises that the premise about the earth’s orbit originates in students’ experience with perspective drawings in textbooks that, indeed, make the earth’s orbit appear elliptical. Viewed in this way, however, students’ misconceptions are not evidence that they exist in a private universe, but that the message in the text has been misunderstood, or poorly communicated.
We can say of the explanation of the seasons offered that, given the false premise, it is not at all a bad explanation. So far as it is not within the power of students to arrive on their own at an accurate picture of planetary motion, they must appeal to authority for this piece of the explanation of the changing seasons. In the student’s search for authority, he or she might find the wrong authority, or might misunderstand what the source of authoritative information intends to communicate. Understood in this way, the problem of learning turns once again into a problem of teaching, in this case of finding the right authority and assuring that the student does not misunderstand what that authority intends the student learn.
This would be simple enough were it not for the holding power of the misconception as evidenced by the fact that teaching the right answer in no way guarantees that the correct interpretation will displace the wrong one in the student’s mental landscape. It may be temporarily dislodged by a better theory, but, if the evidence of the video is to be believed, for most students, it soon enough regains its lost ground. Why is this the case? I think two possible explanations bear consideration. The first has to do with the simplicity of the commonly held but incorrect explanation; the second has to do with the irrelevance of the correct explanation.
If we base our understanding of the changing seasons on the distance between the earth and the sun, then our explanation calls upon little more than a piece of common sense: how warm we are depends on our distance from the source of heat. To grasp this explanation, we do not need to devote much thought to it. The explanation does not demand that we deal with complexity, or risk becoming confused.[2] We arrive at this explanation without losing our secure base. Reticence to giving up this sort of explanation of phenomena can, then, be understood to express fear of complexity. If we hold simple ideas to avoid anxiety, there must be something in the complex idea or in our relationship with it that causes anxiety. In some cases, of course, the content and implications of the idea may provoke anxiety, but this seems hardly likely for the case at hand. It is more likely, in cases such as this, that the anxiety drawing us back to the simple, if incorrect, explanation is linked not to the content of the idea, but to its form. The anxiety is not about the idea itself, but about its complexity. To understand why complexity might cause anxiety, it will help to consider the difference between the way complex and simple ideas are held in the mind.
What distinguishes complex ideas is that they cannot simply be known at once, as a single entity. We must instead be able to think our way to them, or more precisely to construct and reconstruct them through a thought process. In a sense, we never really know them, but must always rediscover them. Because of this, we cannot merely assume, or believe in, a complex idea. We can, however, assume and believe in simple ideas, ideas that can be held at once and as a whole. This means that we can know simple ideas; we need not always rediscover them. If we fear not knowing, then we must also fear complexity. Something can be made known to us in two ways: we can believe it or we can think our way to it. Thinking is the activity by which something in which we do not believe becomes known to us. Since the distinction between simple and complex ideas parallels that between believing and thinking, it follows that resistance to complexity is resistance to thinking, and more specifically to the challenge thinking poses to belief. If this is so, then resistance to thinking can help us explain the failure of students to learn.
A second possible explanation for the failure of students to learn the correct explanation is that explaining the phenomenon in question is of no importance to them. However much the teacher may be convinced that matters such as the correct explanation for the seasons are important, the student remains unconvinced. The problem is that convincing the student is not a matter of offering arguments, but of finding a way of connecting the student to the phenomena under consideration on an emotional level. Put simply, we only really learn those things that matter to us. If the only way in which learning something matters to us is that it affects our grade in a class, at best we might learn it for the time required to use it for that purpose. But, once that period has passed, we have no reason to hold onto what we have learned, which is to say that we never really learned it in the first place.
Clearly, those who made the video were concerned with learning that involves a real attachment of knowledge to the student, the sort of attachment that endures so that the knowledge in question becomes a permanent part of the student’s mental landscape. What they did not consider is that we only attach knowledge in this way because we are interested in it. Further, what the filmmakers and many teachers fail to take into account is that taking an interest is a personal and emotional act. Things are not interesting in themselves, or in the abstract; they are interesting or not to this particular person because they affect him or her in some important way, because they have an emotional resonance. Insisting that the student ought to be interested in something misses the point. Once again, we have no reason to expect students who have no special interest in astronomy to learn astronomy. They probably won’t, and there is no good reason why they should.
Given the equation of thinking with doubting suggested earlier, we can surmise that what gets in the way of learning is the danger associated with subjecting certain foundational ideas to doubt. If learning is a thoughtful encounter with the unknown, learning requires us to doubt what we know. What we need to consider is the nature of the risk we are asking the student to take, and the nature of the environment in which it is most likely the student will be willing to take that risk. If we are to make progress in understanding the tenacity with which people hold to what they believe, especially about foundational matters, we must take into account that belief is an emotional connection of a particular kind, the kind we associate with the idea of devotion. Devotion to objects represents an uncompromising and unconditional investment in them; and it is these qualities that link devotion, belief, and the obstacle to learning represented in the film.
If we are to give up the connection with objects of the type associated with our devotion to them, we must replace that connection with one of another kind. That is, we must substitute a new and more mature form of connection with objects. This is the task that precedes learning. If the task has not been fully accomplished, then learning must encompass not only the exercise of the capacity to suspend what we know—to not know—but also the development of that capacity out of an earlier way of relating to objects. To promote learning, then, we must provide an environment that makes it possible for students to take the risks involved in giving up one kind of attachment to objects in favor of another. The problem of learning then becomes a problem in the nature of emotional attachment, not in what we are attached to, but in how we are attached to it.
We can consider the form of attachment referred to in the language of belief as an attachment designed to avoid doubt. It is, then, in doubt that we will find the danger from which belief protects us. Doubt is, of course, a destructive force, and we might suppose that it is from the prospect of destruction that belief is meant to protect us.[3] To doubt is to destroy what we know. Since to give up preconceived ideas is to doubt, to give up preconceived ideas is to exercise the capacity for destruction. Learning is, then, connected to the access we have or do not have to our destructive capacities. If, however, exercising those capacities endangers our connection with those on whom we depend, we must repress them, and with them our capacity to learn. If, then, we are to have any chance of learning, we must find others who can tolerate the expression of our destructive impulses. Put another way, we must find those who can tolerate an attack on what they know, so we can feel safe doubting what we know. An attack on what we know means an attack on those whose connection with us is contingent on our believing in what we know. For learning to happen, we must find others whose connection with us is not contingent in this way.
Teachers may or may not offer such an alternative. That is, they may instead offer the student the same sort of connection based on the repression of destructive impulses with which he or she is all too familiar. When this happens, belief displaces learning. Even should the teacher offer an alternative, the student may not be able to use it. One of the student’s preconceived notions, perhaps the most important of them, may be that no potential object for connection can survive the expression of destructive impulses and the capacity for doubt. Intolerance of, and inability to survive, an attack is assumed to be inherent in objects—its being so is a preconceived idea—and no evidence or argument against it will alter the student’s conviction, just as no argument against students’ assumptions about planetary motion can dissuade them from their convictions about them. Then, the student has the capacity to adopt preconceived ideas, ideas preconceived for him or her by others, but not the capacity to conceive ideas, which is the capacity for creative thinking (Winnicott 1986: 52).
I suggest above that faculty’s concern for students’ failure to learn might be motivated by a conviction that this failure will in some way prove harmful to them. But this is only one possible explanation for faculty fears on the matter of learning. There are others. Here I will consider two additional possibilities, one having to do with existential concerns on the part of the faculty, the other with the faculty’s projected fear of the unknown.
One possible explanation for teachers’ concern with students’ failure to learn material they most likely do not need to know has its roots in teachers’ personal investment in the subject matter they teach, and in their inability to distinguish themselves and their life trajectories from those of their students. Thus, insistence on the importance of knowledge of astronomy might express the inability of astronomy faculty to grasp the difference between what has been important for them and what will be important for their students. Faculty in other disciplines go along simply because they see how an argument applied to knowledge of astronomy can also apply to knowledge in their own areas of expertise.
The inability to appreciate the difference between what is important to teachers and what is important for students can originate in a wish and a fear. The wish is that the discipline with which the teacher is identified be in some way of vital importance, not simply to its practitioners, but to all who might consider themselves well-educated and responsible citizens. The fear is that this is not the case. The wish and the fear both express a narcissistic investment of a particular kind. This is the narcissistic investment connected to the idea that whatever worth the individual has stems from the worth of the particular enterprise with which he or she is identified. What drives the fear about the lack of students’ knowledge is the fear that knowledge in the area of the teacher’s expertise might not matter to most students, which then translates into a judgment that what the teacher knows does not matter, which then is taken to mean that the teacher does not matter. But, of course this only means that what the teacher knows does not matter in a special sense: it does not matter that most people do not know what he or she knows, that most people can have fulfilling and productive lives with no direct connection to the knowledge that constitutes such an important part of that teacher’s identity.
The implication of the interpretation just offered is that, for some teachers, knowledge takes on an existential significance. What they know is what they are; its value is their value; if it is false, so are they. Knowledge is identity; doubt about the value of knowledge is an attack on identity. To question the value of knowledge is to provoke identity diffusion and an associated existential crisis (Erikson 1980: chapter 3). Everything that can be done must be done to defend against this possibility.
Problems do not arise simply because teachers have an emotional involvement with curriculum or simply because the design of curriculum engages aspects of their professional identities. Curriculum and its delivery would be lifeless indeed without the faculty’s emotional involvement in them. Problems arise because that involvement takes a special form and is given a special interpretation. Specifically, problems arise when teachers treat their psychic or emotional existence as contingent in some important way on the indispensability of the knowledge they hold within their disciplines. Design of curriculum then becomes a concern of existential proportions for teachers.
Now, it is clear enough that for many, though perhaps not all, of the disciplines and areas of study into which contemporary institutions of learning divide themselves up, an argument can be made for the objective value of their subject matter, a value independent of the personal interests and identifications of practitioners. Art is important not only to the artist, chemistry not only to the chemist, psychology not only to the psychologist. Yet, none of this implies that all citizens can or should be artists, chemists, or psychologists; nor does it mean that they need the knowledge held within those disciplines. Society as a whole may need to have this knowledge in a usable form, but that does not imply that all of its members must have it.
I have so far considered the matter of why faculty insist on the importance of their special areas of study for all students from two angles: the possibility that those areas of study are vital to all well-educated citizens, and the possibility that the self-esteem of the faculty member has gotten mixed up in a special way with the idea that no one can lead a fulfilling life without knowing at least some of what the faculty member knows. There is, however, another possibility, one that I think deserves special emphasis. It is possible that teachers fear their students’ lack of knowledge because they fear their own. This I will consider in part a result of the teachers’ projection onto students of their own ignorant selves, awareness of which is what they most fear. [4]
In stark form, my suggestion is something like this: The teacher’s greatest fear is that he knows nothing and has nothing of value to teach. This fear is rarely present at a conscious level. Rather, it takes the form of an unconscious fantasy whose presence is felt more in the way we avoid knowing it than in our knowledge of it. One way we avoid knowing it is by projecting it onto our students, a group of readily available people who, in fact, do not know much. Because students represent this state of not knowing, they are important to their teachers.
In saying this, I do not mean to suggest that students are only important to their teachers as receptacles for their ignorant selves, though, on an emotional level, this may be the primary element in the relationship for certain teachers and at certain times. Neither do I mean to suggest that the fear driving the fantasy that the teacher knows nothing is always well grounded and reality based, though in some cases and in some circumstances it may be. What I would like to suggest is that, if the film considered here provides evidence of anything, it is not that students do not learn, but that teachers harbor the fear just mentioned, and that they use students to contain it for them. If this suggestion is correct, it has several important implications.
One implication is that teachers need students to be ignorant for them, and, because of this, they will be tempted to enhance their own self-esteem at the student’s expense. Teachers need not do this in an obvious or aggressive manner. They need not humiliate students to make their point, though humiliation of students can occur. Students may even collude in the exercise since it would seem to confirm the stature of their teachers, and therefore help justify the investment they have made in the university and its faculty. However students may collude in their use as containers for the teachers’ ignorant selves, when the classroom becomes primarily a setting for this collusion, student-centered learning cannot take place. This is because the classroom has become a vehicle not to serve the student’s developmental needs, but to serve the emotional needs of the teacher. Indeed, we can interpret teacher-centered learning as a statement that students are ignorant and teachers are not. Understood in this way, teacher-centered learning is part of a strategy to alleviate the teacher’s anxiety by displacing his or her ignorant self onto the student. When this happens, the teacher’s need to cope with anxieties associated with not knowing creates an obstacle to student-centered learning.
We may consider the teacher’s fear of not knowing an obstacle to learning, but it is not the only obstacle, or necessarily the primary one. Students also play their part in defeating the learning process. This is because the fear of the unknown resides not only on the teacher’s side of the relationship, but also on that of the student. Thus, it may not be the case that students’ desire to learn runs into its main obstacle in the teacher’s need to teach, as I suggest it might. Rather, the assumption that the student desires to learn may embrace a fantasy about the student as a curious and knowledge-hungry creature whose only limitations are those imposed on him or her from outside, for example in the form of incompetent teaching. This fantasy about the student obscures a reality of student resistance to learning. This resistance may be organized around an all too common student fantasy: that learning poses no special difficulties, calls on no special competence, and does not demand any significant change in the way we think about ourselves and the world around us. This second fantasy expresses not students’ desire to learn and develop, but their hostility toward the learning process. All too often, students do not want to learn, and will engage in sometimes subtle and devious maneuvers to avoid doing so. Among the most effective of these maneuvers are those designed to prove the null hypothesis by demonstrating that the student has nothing to learn, and/or the teacher has nothing of value to teach.
Classroom experience sometimes offers striking confirmation of the presence of the fantasy that teaching and learning are unnecessary. One task faculty often take on in teaching is the task of simplifying complex ideas so that students can have access to them. Simplification can serve the purpose of helping students embark on a long and difficult process of intellectual development. But it may also serve a different and opposed purpose. It may be used to avoid some of the anxiety provoked by complex and difficult ideas, confrontation with which forces students to acknowledge not only their ignorance, but also their intellectual limitations. However we might wish students would respond to this situation as a challenge and a stimulus, as often as not they respond to it as a narcissistic blow to their already vulnerable self-esteem. Response to narcissistic injury takes the form of aggression, sometimes passive, sometimes overt. Simplification then becomes a means to avoid dealing with aggression on the part of students.
This interaction intensifies the pressure toward simplification, which becomes not an aid to learning, but an alternative to it. If a simple and straightforward version of a complex idea can be substituted for the real thing, the student need not confront his or her limitations, and no narcissistic injury need be felt. Once the simplification has been offered in place of the more complex version of the idea, it reinforces the fantasy that the student has little or nothing to learn. What the teacher has to offer now appears simple, even trivial, and the student may wonder what all the fuss is about. Having eliminated the danger posed by the prospect that they might be expected to undertake a thoughtful encounter with the unknown, students can turn to the time-consuming, but considerably less anxiety-provoking, tasks that take up so much of the space of education, specifically those tasks involved not in learning how to think about and master complex ideas, but in learning the right answers to whatever questions teachers deem significant.
In brief: students’ fear of learning leads them to use aggression and the threat of aggression to force faculty to simplify complex ideas to the point that they become accessible to students without their having to think. Teachers give in to this pressure, and offer simplified, and ultimately inaccurate, versions of those ideas. Students judge correctly that what they are being offered is obvious and probably trivial, from which they conclude that learning, in the sense of engaging and exercising the thinking faculty, is unnecessary. So, they turn their attention to the other sort of learning, since, however tedious it might be, it offers a way for them to affirm the value of their education and to imagine that they have become educated.
The simplification just considered typically involves transforming ideas—which must be thought—into propositions—which are held or believed, but not necessarily subject to thinking. Thus, through such a process of simplification, the idea developed in this paper might become a proposition such as the following: We can learn what to think, or we can learn how to think. Turning the idea into a proposition makes the paper trivial. The proposition may be something sufficiently vacuous that we cannot disagree with it; or it may be so one-sided that we are justified in dismissing it. Either way, simplification serves to make thinking and the doubt associated with it unnecessary.
All of this can be considered part of an effort to validate fantasies about teaching and learning. Simplification that makes the material offered by the teacher trivial validates the fantasy that the student can learn without experiencing the confusion of not knowing and the demands of thinking. Demanding that students absorb knowledge the teacher deems important validates the teacher’s fantasy that he or she is the vital element in the learning process, and that the ignorance in the teacher-student relationship resides wholly on the side of the student.
Where there is a fantasy, there is a wish. The student’s fantasy contains the wish, in the words of Wilfred Bion, to arrive “as an adult fitted by instinct to know without training or development exactly how to live” (1961: 89). The teacher’s fantasy contains the wish that what he does will prove indispensable to others, and that this will make the teacher himself indispensable. In the classroom, the teacher’s fantasy of indispensability encounters the student’s fantasy of self-sufficiency. This no doubt makes the classroom a potentially explosive setting. To avoid the destructive potential in the encounter can mean finding an accommodation of the sort offered by teacher-centered learning. Within the terms of this accommodation, the student and teacher agree to restrict the objectives of teaching and learning to those that the student can achieve without undertaking a thoughtful encounter with the unknown. In particular, the student is not asked to think, but only to have different thoughts, the thoughts of the teacher. Rather than a thoughtful encounter with the unknown, learning becomes the student’s encounter with what is already known by the teacher. Thus, the teacher is made vital to the process, and the student is not asked to learn. The student is asked to have thoughts, but not to think.
I have thus far taken it more or less for granted that those engaged in teaching believe that it is important for students to know what they are attempting to teach them. The teacher may be misguided in this belief; the belief may be driven by factors having more to do with the teacher’s self-esteem regulation than the developmental needs of students. Still, we can assume that conviction about the value of what is being taught remains the driving force in shaping curriculum and the classroom experience. I would like now to consider the possibility that this is not the case. In suggesting this, I do not mean to imply that teachers are duplicitous, or that they are perpetrating a conscious fraud. Rather, I would like to consider the possibility that an unconscious driver of the curriculum is to make students learn things they do not need to know, that unnecessary learning is the goal and not merely the unintended byproduct of a misguided commitment to a false educational philosophy.
I might make this proposition more plausible by appealing to a variant on the principle of doing unto others what has been done unto us. This is the variant Anna Freud considers under the heading “identification with the aggressor” (Freud 1936). Specifically, the idea that teachers sometimes intend to make students learn what they do not need to know becomes more plausible if we consider that teachers were at one time students; and, when they were, they were likely subjected to a substantial dose of teacher-centered learning. So far as teacher-centered learning constitutes a form of aggression, the student experiences the agent of teacher-centered learning—the teacher—as an aggressor. For those students who become teachers, then, identification with their teachers means identification with the aggressor. This may not be all it means, but, in some cases, it can be a significant part of the meaning the mentoring relationship has for future teachers.
The aggression to which I have just referred is aggression against the self, more specifically against that part of the self that contains the impulse and capacity for the individual to act as a center of creative thought and conduct. This aggression is perpetrated in the name of virtue. That is to say, aggression is used to enforce compliance with norms, in this case those norms involved with belief in the validity and importance of what the teacher knows. Thus, when successful, aggression leads to replacement of the creative self with a compliant self more appropriate to the adaptation of what the student knows to what the faculty member knows. The struggle between teacher-centered and student-centered learning, then, becomes an internalized struggle between two selves: the creative and the compliant selves (Winnicott 1960).
The great casualty of teacher-centered learning is the student’s creative self. In his essay on creative living, Donald Winnicott offers a useful way of thinking about the creative self and its involvement in the learning process. In that essay, he reports on his own effort to prepare a presentation on creativity:
I could look up creativity in The Oxford English Dictionary, and I could do research on all that has been written on the subject in philosophy and psychology, and then I could serve it all up in a dish. Even this could be garnished in such a way that you would exclaim: “How original!” Personally, I am unable to follow this plan. I have this need to talk as though no one had ever examined the subject before, and of course this can make my words ridiculous. … Evidently I must be always fighting to feel creative, and this has the disadvantage that if I am describing a simple word like “love”, I must start from scratch. (Perhaps that’s the right place to start from.) (1986: 41, emphasis in the original)
Note how closely Winnicott’s description of his effort to think about creativity parallels the description offered above of the young high school student attempting to arrive at a theory of the phases of the moon. Hers was a creative effort in Winnicott’s sense; and her words, or some of them, were a bit ridiculous. But, it was her creative self we saw in action. To use her creative effort as evidence of learning failure constitutes an attack on creativity in learning. It serves to reinforce ideals of learning that repress the creative self and seek to substitute the compliant self for it.
Identification with the aggressor might help explain the prevalence in education of the demand that students learn things they do not need to know. But, the idea of identification might also offer a way to understand the vital role teaching and teachers can play in the learning process. So far as identification is the vehicle for learning, the teacher becomes important by providing an object with whom students can identify. It matters, of course what kind of identification is fostered by the interaction between teacher and student. While identification with the aggressor supports teacher-centered learning, other kinds of identification can support a more student-centered learning process. Where the teacher does not seek to impose knowledge on the student, but attempts to encourage the student to exercise and develop his or her intellectual capacities and creative potential, the teacher also offers an object for identification, though a different sort of object.
Identification becomes important when we consider internalizing an ideal of a learning process represented in the external world by the teacher as part of the goal of education. Identification with the teacher, or with that aspect of the teacher relevant to attaining the habits of mind and skills needed to succeed in a profession, is this process of internalizing an ideal. If this is the case, then it becomes important for the teacher to demonstrate to the student how he or she might go about learning, which is to say it is important for the teacher to learn in the presence of the student so that the student can also learn. In the language used earlier, it is important for the teacher to undertake, together with the student, a thoughtful encounter with the unknown. When the teacher does this, he or she offers the student an appropriate object for identification since the teacher offers the student not an object that knows, but an object that learns (Salzberger-Wittenberger et. al. 1983: 60).
It needs to be emphasized that the college student’s task is not to form a whole identity in the relationship with his or her teachers, but to form a particular part of an identity, that part relevant to being in a profession. Professional identity involves specific knowledge and specific ways of thinking. The teacher makes that knowledge and those ways of thinking available to the student; and, in this sense, we can say that the teacher teaches. But, teaching only works because of the special connection formed between teacher and student.
The college student has already formed much of his or her identity well before reaching college. It is not the university’s task to shape the whole person, as is sometimes assumed, since that task is well beyond its competence. But, it may be the university’s task to provide the student with the material needed to shape a part of his or her identity. If the university understands what this part is, and what the student needs for a successful identification to develop, it will serve its students well. Among other things, this means that the university must understand: the limits of the needed identification, when the connection with the student has violated those limits, and how to keep the connection within the appropriate boundaries. The university also needs to assure that the objects for identification it offers are appropriate, specifically that they are competent practitioners capable of entering into the appropriate teacher-student relationship.
The idea that teaching is about providing the opportunity for an identification of a particular kind to develop constitutes a powerful argument against the null hypothesis, which fails in so far as developing the capacities needed for a productive life in society requires an appropriate object for identification, and an appropriate opportunity and setting for the identification process. If this is correct, it has important implications for how we understand the obligations of the teacher and the goals of education. In one sense, the idea that the teacher offers an object for identification rather than specific pieces of knowledge imposes a special burden on the teacher-student relationship, and introduces complexities into that relationship that also offer substantial opportunity for abuse, for example of the kind considered under the heading of teacher-centered learning. It is a much simpler matter for the teacher to consider himself simply the source of right knowledge than for him to consider himself part of a complex emotional connection with the student, and to consider that connection the essence of the learning process.
Of course, this connection does not develop between the student and every teacher with whom he or she comes into contact. There is also a powerful element of selection by which the student seeks out those teachers with whom the specific relationship needed or desired by that student is most likely to develop. Since the desired relationship and its object vary from student to student, the identification will develop differently for different students. This reduces the burden on the individual teacher, who need not offer an object for identification appropriate to all students. This is another way of making a point made earlier. What the individual teacher has to offer is only relevant to a subset of students; not all students can learn from all teachers and in all classes. What the individual teacher has to offer is of limited rather than universal applicability. This puts in the language of identification the idea that knowledge suitable to astronomers is not knowledge needed by all students, but only by astronomy majors. Again, an important obligation of the teacher is to understand the limits of what he or she has to offer.
If we take the link between teaching and identification seriously, we can begin to see why the core curriculum often seems irrelevant to students, and why pre-professional education poses special problems for teaching and learning. The core curriculum seems irrelevant not only because the specific content offered may not be relevant, but because it is not a setting for the shaping of a professional identity, except perhaps for those students interested in careers as teachers. Pre-professional education poses special problems when the professional activity for which the student is being prepared is sharply different from the vocation of teaching. Then, when the teacher is an academic rather than a practitioner of the student’s prospective profession, the object offered for identification is not an appropriate object. Thus, it is for good reason that professional schools sometimes seek to hire retired practitioners in their fields, who, unlike scholars, can offer appropriate objects for identification.
I suggest above that the teacher can offer the student an object that knows or an object that learns. So far as the faculty of a university contains both sorts of teachers, the university offers the student the opportunity to choose between them. As we observe choices such as this being made, we are encouraged to consider again how factors internal to students govern vital aspects of the learning process. Not all students will choose to learn, and, indeed, not all students seem capable of doing so.
We might think about this situation in the following way. The capacity to learn is a human capacity, or at least the potential to develop this capacity is a human potential. Therefore all, or virtually all, humans come into the world with it, however it might vary in quality from person to person. Similarly, the capacity not to learn is also a human capacity, or it is an expression of the exercise of a human capacity. We might refer to this latter as the capacity to believe. What sort of learning takes place for the particular student depends on which capacity dominates, and on how the environment encourages the exercise of one or the other of the two.
So far as a capacity to learn has developed within the student to a sufficient degree, the teacher can either engage that capacity or repress it. Now, the student’s desire to learn is in part an expression of an identification with a teacher who learns, and in part the desire to exercise an intellectual-cognitive capacity: the student desires to think because he can. Learning is the exercise of this capacity to think. Because to think means to doubt, the exercise of the capacity to learn means exercising the capacity to disbelieve. In relation with a student who can think, teaching means stimulating the capacity to disbelieve. The teacher does not create doubt in the student; rather, the student with the capacity to doubt desires to exercise that capacity, and the teacher encourages the student to do so.
The university can provide students who have the capacity for doubt an environment appropriate for that capacity to flourish. So far as the capacity requires a facilitating environment, teaching matters for learning since teaching is the provision of a facilitating environment without which the capacity to learn would wither. Thus, the null hypothesis fails even where our interest is in student-centered learning.
The conclusion I would like to draw from this discussion is not that we should embrace the null hypothesis because it is true, though it might be truer than we allow ourselves to imagine it is. Attention to the null hypothesis is important, however, because it can alert us to some of the dangers teaching can pose for learning. Teaching poses a danger to learning not because the null hypothesis is correct, but because our fear that it might be correct encourages us to adopt ideals of learning that assure it will not be. A parallel danger to learning arises from those who are not teachers, but who fear that teachers do indeed have something to do with learning. Their response is to embrace one or another form of the null hypothesis as part of a strategy to avoid learning. The conclusion I would like to draw from the reflections offered here is that an educational framework we construct out of the struggle between those who would avoid the null hypothesis and those who would embrace it will likely serve the developmental needs of students poorly.
Bion, W. (1961) Experiences in Groups (London: Tavistock Publications).
Erikson, E. (1980) Identity and the Life Cycle (New York: W.W. Norton).
Freud, A. (1936) The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense (New York: International Universities Press).
Harvey, J. (1988) The Abilene Paradox and Other Meditations on Management (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass).
Levine, D. (2001) “The Fantasy of Inevitability in Organizations,” Human Relations
Salzberger-Wittenberger, I., G. Williams, and E. Osborne (1983) The Emotional Experience of Teaching and Learning (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul)
Winnicott, D.W. (1960) “Ego Distortions in Terms of True and False Self,” reprinted in The Maturational Process and the Facilitating Environment (International Universities Press, 1965)).
___ (1986) “Living Creatively,” in Home is Where We Start From: Essays by a Psychoanalyst (New York: W.W. Norton).
[1] A Private Universe: Misconceptions that Block Learning, a video by Matthew Schneps, produced by Harvard University and the Smithsonian Institute (Santa Monica, Ca.: Pyramid Media, 1989).
[2] On the problem of dealing with complexity in learning, see Salzberger-Wittenberger et. al. (1983: 26)
[3] On the role of destruction in creativity, see Winnicott (1986: 84) and Levine (2001).
[4] While teachers may deal with their fears of incompetence by using students as containers for their own ignorant selves, there are other possibilities. Given their shared fear of the unknown, student and teacher may agree that the unknown does not exist or does not matter. The teacher may decide that having nothing to teach is not a problem since students have nothing to learn. The classroom then becomes a celebration of whatever those in it already know, rather than a place for an encounter with what they do not. The possibility of collusion of this kind arises because both sets of participants in the learning process do not want to learn, have a fear of learning, and possibly even a more or less substantial hostility toward learning.