A Tangled Situation

Yesterday I heard two little things that got me thinking. The conversation was between me, my ESL mentor teacher, and another TA. My ESL mentor teacher, who teaches in a public school in Massachusetts, mentioned that they have a day care on campus at her school to serve the 22 teenage mothers enrolled there. The school has something like 1000 students, I think. The TA who graduated from boarding school called Choate piped in, “Oh, those kids just disappear on 'medical leave' at my school.”

Two radically different approaches to the same sad reality. It was weird seeing them back to back. The Guttmacher Instistute, which conducts studies every year on pregnancy and abortion, found in 2002 (the latest stats) that about 4 out of every 100 girls are pregnant at some point between the ages of 15 and 17. Of this group, about 31% of girls end their pregnancy with an abortion, around 14-15% miscarry, and about 55% give birth. (FYI, girls who have abortions at this age have no obligation to inform their schools about it.) In 2002, this meant that there were nearly 139,000 girls that gave birth while in high school. In the 15-19 age range, though, about 13% of girls become pregnant. The good news is, the pregnancy rate has gone down 36% since its peak in 1990 and it looks like it will continue in that direction.

For schools, it must be quite a challenge to know how to deal with these students. The various options for these girls, I would guess, fall along socio-economic lines first of all, and secondarily according to whether they plan to keep the baby. For many girls in public school, having a baby means dropping out of high school. What I've found on the web says that while a few of these eventually get their G.E.D.s, the majority soon get on welfare and never graduate. To keep them in school, some public schools have set up day care services—a helpful offering, but also an odd thing to have in a high school. I wonder if this changes the attitudes other girls have about getting pregnant while in school. It keeps kids where they need to be, but also probably normalizes what shouldn't be normal. A third option I just heard about is Independent Study, where students make a contract with a school to meet certain requirements outside of the formal classroom. Regardless of the options, it's kids in public schools who confront this issue at its worst. It's most prevalent here, and as a result the stigma is not as severe.

On the flip side, if families have the money and decide the girl should not keep the baby (whether through adoption or abortion), they will take their daughter out of school or away to a different school for a year. I remember hearing of this back at Cambridge. This way the girl can avoid the social pressures and still continue with school afterward. What do they learn from it, though? I think it sets the precedent that parents are always there with the safety net in case I screw up too badly—a rescue mentality. For these girls, both the natural and social consequences are minimized so that life remains as normal as possible.

There are probably other options I haven't mentioned. Anyone know about charter schools?

How should schools mediate between the task of education and such personal issues as this? Or, should they at all? These questions probably lead into private v. public discussions and questions of how badly states would like their residents to be educated. It's certainly a mess of conflicting interests and natural constraints.

The million dollar question, of course, is: how can we teach kids to be responsible enough that they don't get pregnant unintentionally? Another tangle of parental v. institutional responsibilities.

Boarding School and Pluralism

Why does a family decide to send their kid away to boarding school? I've asked this question to myself in the last three weeks at Phillips and I've kept my ear to the ground for sounds. I can think of about four reasons:

1. Parents want the very best education for their children and they think boarding schools provide it.

2. They want their kids to get into top Ivy League colleges, and boarding schools feed students into these schools.

3. Kids struggling with disciplinary issues at day school are recommended that a more strict or structured environment at boarding school would be better for them.

4. The parents are sick of parenting for whatever reason and want someone else to deal with their offspring. (Boarding school = day care for teenagers)

There's room for adding to or condensing this list, but it doesn't serve my purposes here. What I find most interesting is the commonality in all these reasons. In every case, parents who make this choice essentially agree that what can be learned from day school in tandem with parenting is inferior to a boarding school education. They forfeit their roles as real parents for ¾ of the year, with the expectation that the boarding school will play both teacher and parent in a more conducive environment than at home and day school together. This is no small sacrifice for a parent, and I suspect those that make it conscientiously feel the full weight of the duties they are transferring to the institution.

Schools like Phillips, then, take on the in loco parentis status in true fashion. This brings with it all sorts of serious legal responsibilities designed to protect the students and the institution. First of all, it means no student should die in the school's care. The school is required to guarantee the safety and security of its boarders, even to the point of knowing the students' exact location at any given time in case a parent calls to check in. Household rules start to look mild in comparison to boarding school rules.

Now, take this scenario in the context of school that is idealogically pluralistic and postmodern. How can the school in its “parenting” dimension address the character development of students? How can it guide kids in the formation of virtue when it at the same time espouses a view that truth and morality are ultimately relative to each person's culture? The idea of teaching students how to become good or orienting them towards the good life reeks of dogmatism.

When boarding schools lose sight of such objective principles in favor of relativism, it is conformity to the law (both federal and state) that effectively becomes the summum bonum of all action within the community. It is the full-stop answer for all questions ethical. Since the larger, more meaningful ethical issues permit of disagreement, schools fall back on the indisputability of their legal obligations to parents as the guiding principle for action. Things that might result in lawsuits are clearly things that ought not be allowed.

The majority of school and dorm rules, then, are in the long run more for the sake of the school's liability coverage than about the way they are shaping kids' souls. This just doesn't do justice to the immense' responsibility schools take on as stand-in parents. What good is it to care for the body to the detriment of the soul?

We need schools that will not shy away from the challenge of character formation.

What's Love got to do with it?

Passion, then, is an incorrigible element of fine teaching.

Let us say passion or love and mean eros (we can haggle about semantics at a later time if we must). I have just re-read Plato’s Symposium for faculty orientation and thus have been contemplating love and its role in education.

And here I must offer warning in true Socratic fashion: I am in no way an authority on this text. It is my third time to read it and first with this specific slant. In what follows, there will be much halting and several uncomfortable moments of indecision. But as this is a mere blog post, I hope that I shall lose little sleep over ineptitude and that you will forgive me for it beforehand.

Like an Aristotelian drama, the Symposium has a beginning, middle, and an end. The beginning consists of the introduction to the twice-removed dialogue and the first five speeches made in honor of Love (eros). The speech-givers are supposed to proceed according to their seating arrangement. After the second speech, though, that order is upset, and to good and insightful purposes, I think.

The first speech-giver is young and bright Phaedrus. His speech in honor of Love is a literary one. His thesis is that love inspires great deeds and prevents shameful ones, but to back his claim, he calls upon mythological sources. By citing the deeds of heroes and the gods’ goodwill such deeds earned them as proofs, Phaedrus thus buries a promising notion amid a flurry of flowery allusions without much investigation.

The second speech-giver is older Pausanias. His speech echoes with tinny legalism. He introduces a distinction between common and heavenly eros and then uses that distinction to too-neatly divvy up love. On the common side is lust and heterosexual love, engaged in by the vulgar and condoned by those cultures with primitive customs. On the heavenly side is homosexual love and Athens.

The third speech-giver is supposed to be the comic Aristophanes but due to a coincidentally timed hiccup-fit, Dr. Eryximachus takes his place. Eryximachus’ thesis is that love is significantly broader than his fellow speakers have allowed. Medicine, farming, meteorology, astronomy, music and divination are all the “science of love on…insert appropriate subject matter here…” And thus is Eryximachus’ scientific account of love.

The now-fourth speech-giver is the newly-cured Aristophanes. His speech seems a throw-back to the lost field of natural philosophy. He says that we must first look to human nature to understand love. For humans, once two as a whole now split and lacking our natural partner, love is seeking our other half. Love is making whole wounded human nature.

Let us examine the progression: first, a literary account, built on stories and mythological citations; second, a legalistic account, drawing from customs and laws; third, a scientific account, utilizing one broad pragmatic example after another; fourth, a naturalistic account, set upon the inherent nature of human loving. I do see a progression here, a sort of genealogy of human intellectual endeavors. It seems also a progression which our students undergo. Beginning with stories, fables, myths; growing to see the morals (in an Aesopian sense) extrapolated from said stories applied; broadening then their notion of their place in the wide world; then turning inward to figure out their inborn nature and the ramifications of that nature.

So we arrive at Agathon’s speech with appetites whetted and feet eager for the next step. Agathon, the triumphant tragic-poet, begins his speech with an exciting promise: he is going to leave off talking about the effects of love, the powers of love, the instances of love. No no, he is going to talk about what love is. (Can you not see Socrates salivating at the words “ti esti”?)

And then he doesn’t.

And Socrates gets mad.

But that’s ok because Socrates does give us what we’re wanting. He tells us what love is: Love is pursuit of the Good and one loves by giving birth in beauty in both body and soul. His account is, of course, philosophical, turning on the absolute and perfect Forms of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. And so for our students, the final step, after the stories and morals and science and human nature, the final step is to become little lovers of wisdom.

This means we, as teachers, need to make whatever the students are learning so irresistibly beautiful that they cannot but desire it, cannot but let it germinate, and cannot but at last give birth in beauty, thereby pursuing the good.

Every human intellectual pursuit, be it literature, law, science, or psychology (in the good ole’ Greek sense of the word), should be toward the end of engendering lovers of wisdom and thus pursuers of good.

I haven’t sufficiently thought about the end of the Symposium, but if I do, I will let you know.

The "How" of Teaching

The quote by Strauss above on teaching is sadly not a sentiment I can say I share with him—something I've inherited from his thinking. I chose it instead precisely because I do not yet grasp the wisdom of his remarks and would like to understand them better. Since learning that I would be teaching at Andover this summer, I've been wondering about the question of how one becomes a good teacher. I've put this question to some of my favorite former teachers, but not even my bullheaded curiosity was enough to seduce a satisfying answer out of any of them. I came back with surprisingly little, excepting one comment that I only understand in hindsight. This might make sense to those more experienced, yet it's frustrated me more than I thought it would. How is teaching so mysterious an enterprise that no one can give me an account of it?

Until this summer, I think I've assumed that being passionate about a subject and being able to teach it well are probably synonymous. After all, isn't this passion what one sees most of all in an excellent teacher from one's seat at the desk? Perhaps this can be refined by saying that loving a subject would be enough to become a great teacher. That is, it's a requisite for carrying a person through the teaching process, but not so powerful that it makes one good from the start. We could say it is a necessary but not sufficient condition for excelling. So, if a person already has the love of the subject, how does he gain the rest of what is needed to really excel as a teacher? Often, the choice is to pursue the route of education programs and degrees in “education.” I put this in quotes because I'm not sure these programs really teach education per se, i.e., its telos, its nature, or why it is worthwhile to devote oneself to it. My sense is that they teach methodologies, procedures, and management skills that could apply to any number of disciplines. Does this decrease the learning curve for teachers in any measurable way? I have trouble imagining that data received like this would be a substitute for the actual experience of teaching in real-time. It's like trying to address the question of how to ride a bike without ever touching the bike—it seems dubious to address the “how” question in this context. Why not spend these years instead in mastering a certain branch of learning and increasing your love for it all the more? In my very limited experience, this approach fails to understand the nature of the object; it suffers from the same flaw as my initial question.

The art of teaching, on another view, can't be captured in statements that are inherited or received as facts from those who know. This is precisely why we call it an art. What I had not grasped in my questioning is that teaching is more analogous to learning to play Tchaikovsky or to paint. We learn these through practice, and it is by virtue of this that we call them practices or arts. Teaching is none other than such a practice: it is learned only through continuous practice and development over a period of time. It seems that one has to experience the practice first and only afterward can it be understood. As with the virtues, we become good by doing good acts, and this though the constant work of aiming to do good. No wonder I was not getting satisfying answers.

The knowledge that teaching is a practice, then, still leaves one wondering how to proceed with the practice. The piano teacher, if asked, could give step by step instructions for a student who wants to progress from a beginner to a concert pianist. First learn this scale, then learn this arpeggio, then study this and that piece, and practice all of this many times over until you begin to gain proficiency. Where is the analogue in the practice of teaching? Even if there is no definite sequence to the process of becoming a good teacher (and I hope there is), how does one discern the guiding principles of the practice? The short answer for me is that I do not yet know. Thankfully, I've found myself in a place that acknowledges the value of the practice of teaching. For this summer my job is not only to assist my teachers, but to be mentored by them in the context of the classroom. As trite as it is, experience will be my guide—the experience of teaching for the first time, of observing a teacher who has experience, and of letting his experience inform my practice as we go along. The teaching art is mimetic art as it is with many of the others: it is learned by imitation. This is the same principle as in ethics, that becoming virtuous begins with imitating good men; we become what we model.

Knowing that experience and practice are so essential quiets the urgency of my initial curiosity. But this whole discussion, we should note, depends on a much larger question about the purpose of education generally. The questions about how to teach are actually subordinate and hence secondary to the larger question of the end of liberal education as a whole. The order of knowing demands that we confront the end at the beginning. It makes little sense to think about how to teach until we have decided on why we teach, on what result we hope to accomplish. Leo Strauss, a political philosopher and educator, takes this a step further by saying that the means is in fact only known through the end: “One knows [the how] once one knows what education is meant to do to a human being or once one knows the end of education.” How is it possible that the how is revealed once the telos has been demarcated? How is it that the efficient cause is contained within the final cause of education? I wonder what kind of gems lie embedded in Strauss' suggestion. The questions indicate to me that he might have in mind much more than an intellectual apprehension of the goal. I think I have some notions about the end(s) of liberal education, but less of a sense about how these are accomplished. On the other hand, I may be worlds away from really understanding these goals. For now, what I have learned is that 1) excellence as a teacher comes only with much practice, imitation, and failure (I am sure) and 2) that it may be fruitful to pursue this idea that the means is somehow implicit in the end. Here's to the lifelong pursuit of mastering the art.