Brazen Chains of Madness

Venus Petitioning Jupiter on behalf of Aeneas, 18th century

In Book I of the Aeneid, Jupiter describes to Venus a coming age of peace for the as yet unfounded Roman people.  One of the features of that peace was that Madness

saeva sedens super arma, et centum vinctus aenis
post tergum nodis, fremet horridus ore cruento.

Upon its savage weapons and bound with a hundred bronze knots

Behind its back will frightfully roar with its bloody mouth.  (Aeneid I.295-296, translation mine)

But what if those brazen chains were created by insanity itself?  Surely those bound would also roar frightfully, and so they do in the halls of many American schools.

When Teachers Talk

I recently attended a conference during which those in my session shared some of the evaluative practices in their schools.  As soon as one teacher mentioned having to provide documentation of various instructional practices for year-end evaluation, the others almost unanimously chimed in to share their own experiences of the sort of top-down hamstringing of educators that is all too common.  I immediately thought of the scene in the movie Gladiator in which Maximus exclaims to his trainer, "Marcus Aurelius had a dream that was Rome, Proximo.   This is not it.  This is not it!"

Imagine Pope Julius II requiring Michelangelo to document how he involved the painters on his team in the painting of the Sistine Chapel ceiling.  Imagine the great painter being forced to provide evidence for the different approaches to fresco he had employed.  Wouldn't it have been better simply to gaze at the finished ceiling in awe and wonder?

This insanity of binding our teachers with chains of bronze stems from treating education like a quantifiable natural science, which it is not.  It stems from the belief that such control improves learning.  It stems from the belief that a pseudo-scientific veneer will give credibility to a maligned profession.  It stems from the need to justify various administrative positions created to orchestrate this circus of bedlam, a word used here in its original sense as a colloquial pronunciation of "Bethlehem," the famous mental hospital in London.

If This Bothers You

I do not suffer from such professional indignity, such deliberate obstruction of true education, at the school where I currently teach, but far too many of my friends and colleagues in other schools do, and this is one reason private, public charter, hybrid, and homeschool models have the freedom to operate more nimbly and efficiently.  As I once told a friend who was on the school board of the public school district in which I taught, this should bother you, but the response should not be to shackle non-public educators in a similar way, but rather to remove the ridiculous restraints from all teachers.

A good friend of mine who is not in the field of education replied after I had told him about the experience with my conference colleagues mentioned above, "Bureaucrats will, by nature, legislate the life out of innovators and entrepreneurs -- leaving organizations highly regulated but without a pulse."  Any good teacher at the primary, secondary, or university level can testify to the truth of that statement, and tax-paying citizens should know that this is what is happening in their schools.  Would you rather the teachers of your children spend their time designing creative ways to help their students learn from the past and prepare for the future or in keeping track of artifacts to prove whether a particular approach to teaching was used the correct percentage of time?

Living in the Land of Sokal

In 1996 Alan Sokal, physics professor at NYU and University College London, published an article in Social Text, a journal of postmodern culture studies.  The article was titled "Transgressing the Boundaries:  Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" and proposed that quantum gravity was nothing more than a social and linguistic construct.  The article was sheer nonsense, and Sokal's aim was to expose academic publishing for the Emperor's New Clothes that it too often peddled.  The article was published, and a few weeks later Sokal revealed the whole thing had been a hoax.

I am willing to bet that most teachers today will recognize the academicese of Sokal's article title.  Consider for a moment the following paragraph.

"If one examines precapitalist deappropriation, one is faced with a choice: either reject constructivist capitalism or conclude that art may be used to marginalize minorities. But Marx uses the term 'precapitalist deappropriation' to denote the paradigm of postsemantic sexual identity. A number of discourses concerning deconstructivist neocultural theory exist."

To the teachers reading this, I ask how similar that sounds to something you were supposed to read for a professional development session you have attended in the past few years.  It is precisely the kind of thing we are used to, and yet that paragraph came from an article that was intentionally created as pure nonsense at elsewhere.org/pomo.  The creators of the site use a tool called the Dada Engine, "a system for generating random text from recursive grammars."  As they note on their website, "The essay you have just seen is completely meaningless and was randomly generated by the Postmodern Generator."  They describe the background for this in an actual, non-nonsensical article here.

In that article, author Arthur C. Bulhak of Monash University references the work of Douglas Hofstadter in his Pulitzer-winning book Gödel, Escher, Bach:  An Eternal Golden Braid.

Hofstadter is a brilliant and inquisitive person whose work takes him through philosophy, cognitive science, computer science, linguistics, and more.  Many years ago I had the pleasure of taking him to dinner and, as I wrote in another post, he was no fan of jargon.

Years ago I had the opportunity of taking Douglas Hofstadter to dinner before he gave the inaugural lecture in an annual series a colleague and I had developed at our high school.  This Pulitzer-winning author who works in cognitive science, philosophy, computer science, and seemingly everything else, spoke on what may have seemed a strange topic for him.  His talk was titled "Is Modern Poetry Complete Rubbish?," and in it he took issue with poets who write in such confused ways and on such esoteric topics that no one reads their work.  In fact, he found the poetry of "Surrey With a Fringe on Top" to be of more value than much contemporary work, which he considered little more than prose with a ragged right margin.  Even in discussing other more heady topics, he had a particular abhorrence for jargon.  In that he reminded me of the character Margrethe Bohr, who in Daniel Frayn's play Copenhagen persistently asked her husband, Niels, and Werner Heisenberg to put their theories in plain language.

No Vermicelli With Red Sauce

A fellow graduate student asked me one day years ago if the lunch I was heating up in the office microwave were vermicelli with red sauce.  It was rather obviously just spaghetti, yet "vermicelli with red sauce" apparently sounded more sophisticated.  To educators everywhere, resist the urge to use jargon and the pseudo-scientific collection of data as if doing so actually improves teaching and learning or gives any respect to our profession.  It doesn't.  It is merely laughable.  Teaching is a difficult calling.  Those who cannot understand and respect that...well, that's on them.  Posturing merely hinders the work of teachers who are leading their students on the shared journey of discovery that is education and working to correct the true causes of failing education.

To parents, do not be fooled by lofty language and jargon about time spent by your children's teachers on some of the practices of their job.  One of my students' parents used to ask me about what teachers were being asked to do in the school where I taught.  She was involved in what was going on in the lives of her children, as she should have been.  If your "Spidey senses" begin to tingle when you hear what is happening in the lives of your children's teachers, if you begin to sense that "something is rotten in the state of Denmark," then dig a bit deeper.  If it turns out that those teachers are being bound by the brazen chains of madness, help them to break free by telling administrators and school board members that you will not accept it.  Good schools see their enrollments increase and teaching positions easily filled.  Bad schools do not.