The 'Natural Aesthetic' of Teaching
Natural, hardwired dispositions of the brain are replaced by private formats that have to be worked at to be discovered and appreciated.
In this blog, I'd like to explore a connection among some of the ideas I have been quoting in this space. The center of these connections—and where we will start—is in Samuel Jay Keyser’s excellent The Mental Life of Modernism.
The Central Argument
The main argument presented in The Mental Life of Modernism is as follows:
Starting in the middle of the 19th century and continuing into the 20th century, painters, poets, and composers began deliberately, consciously, voluntarily moving away from the 'natural aesthetic' for each medium—a set of rules shared by artists and their audiences that guided both the creation of artworks and their interpretation. In painting, this aesthetic was "faces, places, and bodies"; in poetry, it was meter and rhyme; and in music, it was a tonal center, or the sense that the composition was in a certain key. The collective abandonment of these shared rules in art came to be known as modernism. Thus, modern art threw away (for the most part) concrete objects such as faces, places, and bodies; modern poetry got rid of meter and rhyme; and modern music (or perhaps modernized classical music) did away with keys and tonal centers and often even repetition of any kind.
The primary effect of this collective abandonment of shared rules was to alienate audiences, making art, music, and poetry difficult to appreciate using "natural, hardwired dispositions":
I think the shared rules were abandoned because artists felt that the rules had been fully explored and overused. It was no longer a challenge to produce a work of art by means of them. Art had become too much of a muchness. This did not mean, of course, that the new art forms fell on deaf ears and dimmed eyes. What it meant was that for the sister arts after modernism, appreciating a work of art became a different process both for the artist and for the audience. The natural, hardwired dispositions of the brain no longer participated unconsciously in the process of creation or appreciation. They were replaced by private formats that had to be worked at to be discovered and appreciated.
To me, one of the more memorable examples of popular culture calling attention to this alienating effect of modern art—which will definitely show my age—is from this episode of Bosom Buddies (starting at roughly 10:00 if you can handle the ads). When you watch Tom Hanks yell "It's the flag of Japan!" you'll be at the end of my example.
The Connection to Teaching
Did the same thing happen in teaching? That is, did teaching follow the example of the "sister arts" and voluntarily abandon some kind of natural aesthetic attached to teaching and learning? We can only speculate, I think. But students of education history will notice that the timeline is right, for starters. Here's E.D. Hirsch writing in American Ethnicity:
This book has also explained how a widespread mind-change about natural child development shifted classroom furniture from front-facing desks to tables where children faced each other. Historical dates that the book has highlighted in that transformation were 1890, 1897, and 1915. These were respectively the years when Elizabeth Peabody issued Froebel’s Education of Man; when John Dewey’s [sic] issued My Pedagogic Creed; and when W. H. Kilpatrick's [sic] issued The Project Method—all near the start of the 20th century. Those personalities were adherents of a viewpoint that intellectual historians name "romanticism." That word came to mean faith in nature to reliably take care of human life so long as we "let nature take her course" and so long as we don't impose artificialities. This nineteenth century romanticism powerfully influenced the founders of our current grade schools—Froebel, Peabody, Dewey, and Kilpatrick, and they influenced a whole generation of Americans in the 20th century.
But is there a 'natural aesthetic' of teaching and learning that these educational "artists" could have moved away from? I believe so. (There is a body of scientific work (see this paper, for example) that suggests that human teaching behaviors were exposed to selection pressures and thus evolved. If this is true, it would seem to make it more likely that some kind of 'natural aesthetic' is attached to teaching and learning.) And I think this quote from Steven Pinker's The Sense of Style captures that aesthetic brilliantly:
The guiding metaphor of classic style is seeing the world. The writer can see something that the reader has not yet noticed, and he orients the reader's gaze so that she can see it for herself. The purpose of writing is presentation, and its motive is disinterested truth. It succeeds when it aligns language with the truth, the proof of success being clarity and simplicity. The truth can be known, and is not the same as the language that reveals it; prose is a window onto the world. The writer knows the truth before putting it into words; he is not using the occasion of writing to sort out what he thinks. Nor does the writer of classic prose have to argue for the truth; he just needs to present it. That is because the reader is competent and can recognize the truth when she sees it, as long as she is given an unobstructed view. The writer and the reader are equals, and the process of directing the reader's gaze takes the form of a conversation.
"Modern" education—starting with Froebel, Peabody, Dewey, and Kilpatrick—turned a lot of this on its head.
The reader-student was expected to orient the writer-teacher's gaze, not the other way around.
Teaching (writing) was no longer about presentation, nor even about trying to provide the student (reader) with a clear, simple, unobstructed view of the world. It was about questioning, not presentation, allowing the student-reader to develop their own private view of the world.
And, indeed, in "modern" education, the teacher-writer and student-reader are not equals. The teacher-writer holds all the knowledge and must slowly and carefully dribble it out over time, lest the incompetent student-reader become brainwashed by the teacher's view of the world.
What Are the Consequences?
Did this 'modernization' of teaching have the same alienating effect on audiences (students) as did the abandonment of the 'natural aesthetic' in poetry, painting, and music? We have plenty of evidence to suggest that the answer is yes.
But Keyser is quick to point out—often—in his book that many people still enjoy and profit from abstract art, meterless and rhymeless poetry, and atonal music. And the same point should be made about 'modern' presentationless teaching, which is valuable and has a place in education.
What we should not be confused about, however, is how unnatural it all is. I suspect that, if we're honest with ourselves, we would all admit to understanding what it's like to be confused by abstract art, groping for some kind of meaning in modern poetry, annoyed by atonal music, and, yes, bewildered and at sea with what is essentially teacherless teaching. There's no reason to pretend to "get" any of these things just to appear sophisticated and intelligent. They are all unnatural.
