ENGLISH COMPOSITION AS A HAPPENING
By Charles Deemer
EDUCATION, n. That which discloses to the wise and disguises from
the foolish their lack of understanding.
(Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary)
Our entire school
system, like our over-organized economy, politics, and standard of living, is
largely a trap; it is not designed for the maximum growth and future
practical utility of the children into a changing world, that they too
will hopefully improve, but is a kind of inept social engineering to
mold, and weed out, for short-range extrinsic needs. An even when it
is more benevolent, it is in the bureaucratic death-grip, from
the universities and the boards of education down, of a uniformity of
conception and method that cannot possibly suit the multitude of
dispositions and conditions. (Paul
Goodman, "From John Dewey to A. S. Neill")
*
For better or worse, our
educational system is undeniably rigid. Not even the university is
free from its demands. The English Composition course, as we
should expect, is the rigid child of a rigid parent. It is, after
all, taught in a classroom, a medium (in its present form)
Marshall McLuhan would call "hot" and of
"low participation."
Consider the fragmentation of
the composition course in its daily inaction. The "teacher"
speaks from his place in the front of the classroom, sheltered
more than likely by the wall of his podium, while the class in the
rear listens or pretends to. Even when discussion occurs, the
fragmentation of the inaction into two segments (the "teacher"-as-wise-authority
and the class-as-recipient-of-knowledge) is retained. The division is
as clear as stimulus and response. Lecture and note-taking.
Assignment and essay. Bell and saliva. Watch the class yawn for its food.
*
Certain mental habits
are commonly instilled by those who are engaged in educating: obedience
and discipline, ruthlessness in the struggle for worldly success,
contempt towards opposing groups, and an unquestioning credulity, a
passive acceptance of the teacher's wisdom. All these habits are
against life. Instead of obedience and discipline, we ought to aim at
preserving independence and impulse. (Bertrand
Russell, The Basic Writings of Bertrand
Russell)
*
This is the way of the university,
and as the university has gone, so has English Composition. Yet in at
least one respect, the composition course is a university maverick
because it has no real subject content. Logic, literature,
linguistics, political science, philosophy -- these and other
disciplines crop up in the course but as subject matter certainly they
are covered with more rigor in their home departments. Clearly, then,
English Composition is a methods course, concentrating not on a subject
matter but on ways to get at and write about any subject
matter. And here the influence of the university on the way
English Composition is taught has been highly detrimental.
To begin with, my criticism of the traditional misdirection of education is twofold: first, I see education as an experience (in Dewey's sense) involving both student and "teacher" (a flagrant misnomer), an experience unrealized in the present fragmentation of the classroom unexperience (as Cummings might say) into "teaching" and "learning"; I also object that the traditional rigidity of our educational institutions puts the generation behind the podium forever out of touch with the younger generation in the lecture hall, making effective communication impossible. This is more true today when the acceleration of change at every level increases the cultural distance between generations. And English Composition suffers more than other disreputable products of the university because it, of all university products, could be the most influential.
Potentially, English Composition could become an introduction to what the University is about, a preview of the university's forms and a familiarization with its current media (the traditional medium being the so-called academic essay). Thus the responsibility of English Composition is great. But by following the organization of content-courses, English Composition has suffered. A self-perpetuating disease. Regeneration of inactivity. A "hot" course.
*
The passive consumer
wants packages, but those who are concerned in pursuing knowledge and in
seeking causes will resort to aphorisms, just because they are
incomplete and require participation in depth.
(Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media)
*
If fragmentation and lack of
mutual participation by class and "teacher" (we need a new
word) in a genuine educational experience constitute the disease, then a
unified, joint experience should provide the remedy. Although only
a complete remodeling of the university will ever completely correct
our "compulsory miseducation," a prior reshaping of the English
Composition course could be influential once the course is raised
to the status of an introduction to the university. Certainly it can do no
worse than many of the too-many organizations of the course reviewed
by Kitzhaber in Themes, Theories, and
Therapy: The Teaching of Writing in College. A reshaping might
be the kernel of needed change. Just such an experiment I wish to
propose.
*
If the object were to
make pupils think, rather than to make them accept conclusions, education
would be conducted quite differently: there would be less rapidity of
instruction and more discussion, more occasions when pupils are encouraged
to express themselves, more attempt to make education concern
itself with matters in which the pupils feel some interest. (Bertrand Russell, The Basic
Writings of Bertrand Russell)
*
Let me be more explicit in the delineation
of my goals. English Composition is a proper introduction to the
possibilities of the university, a preview of what the university is about.
This is actually the unadmitted, and ineffective, tradition of the course,
since the written medium has been the essential vehicle of scholarly
communication between members of the university, student and
"teacher" alike. English Composition is what the university is about.
Or should be what it should be about.
*
I believe that the
only true education comes through the stimulation of the child’s powers by the
demands of the social situations in which he finds himself. (John Dewey, Dewey on
Education)
*
And the university should not be
a factory molding students. Campuses should not be educational
"plants," despite the current accuracy of popular jargon.
*
I believe that
education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future
living. (John Dewey, Dewey on Education)
*
Neither should English
Composition instruct in the pleasant phrasing of nonsense. It should
actually instruct in nothing, in the sense that a "teacher"
reveals and a class digests. What does a "teacher" know? He
is merely human.
*
I believe finally,
that education must be conceived as a continuing reconstruction of
experience; that the process and the goal of education are one and
the same thing. (John Dewey, Dewey on Education)
*
But the "teacher" often has one
advantage -- a greater accumulation and variety of experience and it is
upon this advantage, not upon any supposed wisdom or knowledge, learned or
mythical, that I would like to base a new organization of the teaching of
English Composition. The goal is a class of students actively aware and
participant, a class that does not swallow the
"teacher's" remarks but considers them. One thing that
needs correcting, of course, is the student's head. It should surprise no
one that essays are largely written by heads, not hands. But the heart
(that forgotten organ) should work with the head. Correct the head and the
heart and the essays take care of themselves.
*
As the audience
becomes a participant in the total electric drama, the classroom can
become a scene in which the audience performs an enormous amount of work. (Marshall McLuhan, The
Medium Is the Massage)
*
To remove the "teacher's"
authority. To engage the student's active participation. Fortunately, a
recent art form provides a model upon which to base a reconstruction of English
Composition that will attain these ends. I refer to
the happening.
*
Perhaps the most
striking feature of the Happening is its treatment (this is the only
word for it) of the audience. The event seems designed to tease and
abuse the audience. (Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation)
*
Universities, though they often continue
the unfortunate process rather than try to correct it, are continually
plagued by the fact that students have been compulsorily miseducated for years
prior to their university enrollment. Against this great handicap the
reconstruction of English Composition after the model of the
happening has certain advantages. Shock and surprise are essential features of
the happening, and they should also be frequent moods in the
composition course. Clear writing and clear thought follow only after
clear experiences, yet the inspiration of such experiences has been
virtually neglected by educators. But clear experiences never come
easy. For the student who, in the classroom, is not used to
participating in any experience at all, the clarity of shock will be quite
dramatic when a real experience is presented to him. Let the
"teacher" shock the student. Let him speak, not from behind
a podium, but from the rear of the room or through the side window. Let
him discuss theology to Ray Charles records. As long as there is
reverence for the student and the process of education, no shock is too
great.
*
The Happening operates
by creating an asymmetrical network of surprises, without climax or
consummation; this is the alogic of dreams rather than the logic of most
acts. (Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation)
*
If I make the "teacher" in this
experiment a near cousin to the actor, it is a relation I am willing to
defend. The best "teachers" have always been actors to by their
very ability to move an audience to an experience, an active
engagement with and in the performance, a process fundamental to real
education. It is no surprise, for example, that Stokely Carmichael by
putting on a pair of shades in an auditorium punctuated by the annoyance of
flash-bulbs, or Timothy Leary by symbolically stripping out of his
establishment gear to preach by candlelight from a stage floor, can
elicit enthusiastic responses from a highly participant student audience.
What Carmichael and Leary have learned about the university auditorium --
how to make it "cool -- we must learn about the university
classroom.
*
What goes on in the
Happenings merely follows Artaud's prescription for a spectacle which will
eliminate the stage, that is, the distance between spectators
and performers, and "will physically envelop the
spectator." In the Happening this scapegoat is the audience. (Susan Sontag, Against
Interpretation)
*
The "teacher," having upset
through surprise and shock the student's expectations of the organization
of the classroom medium, should find it less of a problem than usual
to get at the student's pat ideas and opinions and to inspire
an experience, a happening, that will get the student to participate
in the realization of his own awareness of his inadequacy. But such a
drama in the classroom happening should never take the form in which a
student changes an opinion because the "teacher" disagrees with
him. With this, authority returns. Rather the student should
experience the difficulty of holding any opinion. Should
the "teacher" choose to reveal (unmask) his own inadequacy
(humanness), the revelation might prove efficacious and distinctly human.
It is with reason that I have
neglected to present a more explicit blueprint for the happening
after which to model a reconstruction of English Composition. In the
first place, happenings happen; they are not passed down from one
to another. Spontaneity is essential. Each "teacher" must
inspire his own happening. What I suggest is that the characteristics of the happening
that reduce the distance between actor and audience, hence between
"teacher" and class; that feature shock and surprise as vehicles to
raise the audience from comfort to insecurity; that result spontaneously
from the "teacher's" own subtle influence, yet never occur
without the student's participation; these characteristics, I suggest, can lead
to valuable educational consequences with important emphases. Unity over
fragmentation; "thinking" over "writing"; doubt over
belief; questions over answers; present over future; impulse over plan;
insecurity over comfort. Life over death.
*
Taken in their
totality and in their general intention, the kinds of progress which we
celebrate can be summed up in the word sterilize. Whether it be in love
(contraceptive measures); in professional life (insurance); in the
education of youth; in medicine; in international politics, we are engaged
in carrying out to the limit an unprecedented experiment in generalized asepsis
and in extinction of risks before they fall due.
(Denis de Rougemont, The Devil’s Share)
*
But there is yet another, and I
think more important, advantage to modeling English Composition after
the happening. Western education has long suffered under the delusion
that scientific abstraction is the unique way to knowledge. This,
unfortunately, to the neglect of the poem.
*
I argue that the
apologists for science are not justified in claiming, nor the apologists
for poetry in admitting, the sole right of science to know. I insist that
poetry is also capable of knowledge. . . .
(Archibald MacLeish, "Why Do We Teach Poetry?")
*
But the poem alone can give
two things: the present and the thing-as-thing. MacLeish concludes
"that we really know a thing only when we are filled with a
wonderfully full, new and intimate sense of it, and, above all,
of our relation with it. This sense, this knowledge in the truest
meaning of the word knowledge, art can give but abstraction
cannot."
*
As the professor snips
the richest bud
For his lapel, his
scalpel of reason
Only transfusion of a
poem's blood
Can save them,
bleeding from their civilization
(A. D. Hope, Collected Poems)
*
The happening is a first step
toward such a revitalizing experience. And so English Composition as
a happening properly previews all that a university should be.
Witness the reengagement of the heart, a new tuning of all the
senses Taking the first step toward poetry.
*
The antinomy between
mind and body, word and deed, speech and silence, overcome. Everything is
only a metaphor; there is only poetry.
(Norman Brown, Love's Body)