Reinforcing the Comfortable Is Just Not Teaching : Education: When the instructor is thrust willy-nilly into the therapist-entertainer role, learning suffers.

The recent Gallup survey of college seniors that revealed an alarming ignorance of basic literary and historical facts is the latest in a string of studies gauging the cultural literacy (or illiteracy) of the American university student. For the most part, the educational system, from poor teaching to inadequate core curricula, is blamed for the dismal results.

Singularly lacking in the attempts to account for this sorry state of affairs is a recognition of the part played by the conditioning that many students bring with them to the classroom.

If a student cannot date the Civil War within a 50-year period or identify the theme of “The Scarlet Letter” (two questions in the Gallup survey), it does not necessarily mean that he has never been exposed to these things but that he perceives such facts as useless. After almost 20 years of teaching, I think it is fair to say that in the last 10 or 15 years, a student’s chief (sometimes his only) criterion for judging whether something is worth learning and remembering is its “relevance” (the same ‘60s word, without the heavy weight of social consciousness it carried back then).

The salient question with regard to any fact is not whether it is true, informative or significant, but whether it is relevant. If it is not, then it bounces off deaf ears and blank faces and is consigned to the limbo of Non- Relevance.

Take, for example, 18th- and 19th-Century history. Try to point out to your students that the major literary minds of the 19th Century gave less than two cheers for democracy, or that the men who framed the U.S. Constitution believed that political minorities were unhealthy, even dangerous to the commonwealth, and you are likely to be met with a sea of silent, stony hostile faces.

In the first place, who cares? We’ve corrected all those old errors. In the second place, do I mean to say that there was once a group of responsible men, of sound mind, who believed differently from the way we do? Horrors. Off with their historical heads, and out with the whole period, facts, figures, ideas and whatever other baggage it might come with.

Suggest, however gently, that a student’s beliefs have very little validity unless challenged by and compared with those that had validity in another time; suggest that he try to determine why these men might have been wrong (or right, as the case might be) and why his own beliefs have greater validity; suggest further that until he is able to do this, his “beliefs” are nothing more than conditioning--and chances are that you have effectively alienated him.

Suggest finally the political implications of all this--that minds conditioned to accept certain beliefs, however admirable, as the only right ones can just as easily be prevailed upon to accept other, not so admirable beliefs, in the absence of lessons drawn from the past and the clarity of mind to see the difference--and you have lost the student altogether.

Some educators, questioning the validity of studies such as the Gallup survey, suggest that they are unfair, that they test only factual knowledge and not the student’s ability to think. But it is very difficult for a conditioned mind to think for itself. To expect it to do so in such a test would probably produce even more abysmal results than we have already seen.

Like most teachers, I have had my share of bored faces. From time to time, I venture to inquire as to the cause. Is it my delivery? “No.” What then? “It’s just not relevant.” Relevant to what? I ask. To the student’s life style, to his goals (chief of which is to make a lot of money), to those things that directly or indirectly affect him in some way?

Fair enough, I say. Then why don’t we take the past and show how it is relevant to his concerns? After all, the study of literature and history is rather pointless unless we can apply what we learn from them to our own lives.

But no, it seems that is not it either. Further inquiry reveals that what the student wants is to dispense with the past altogether and get on to the real subject: himself and what’s happening around him. The Now. I’m reminded of an acquaintance of mine who loses interest in a conversation the moment it drifts away from herself.

I see that deep down, the student wants only to discuss his own immediate concerns. And what he really wants to do is rap.

Sooner or later, most teachers are tempted to abandon the hard, often thankless, sometimes futile effort of dealing with this extraordinary lack of curiosity about anything outside the present sphere of most students’ interests. It helps very little to point out to them that to teach only what is “relevant” simply reinforces what they already feel comfortable with, without providing the incentive to find out if there is something better. They see education not as a broadening experience but as a means of reinforcing the validity of their present beliefs, the viability of their goals and the unquenchable desire to “feel good about” themselves.

So the teacher, thrust willy-nilly into the role of therapist-entertainer, seeing that it is the only way to hold the attention of his students, gives up educating and starts rapping.

There are some teachers (you can recognize them by the look of desperate determination on their lined faces) who still try to educate--to teach what is, was and may still be true, desirable and significant, as well as the ability to distinguish what is not. There are still more who have fallen into the relevancy trap along with their students. And there are a few who have capitulated and turned their class periods into rap sessions.

It’s easy, it’s therapeutic and it’s fun. But it’s not education.