Teaching as a Subversive Activity

I’ve just finished reading a powerful and provocative book, Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner’s Teaching as a Subversive Activity. (Inside joke: The book was recommended by one of the speakers at the First Year Seminar Teaching workshop. Can you guess which speaker it was?) The book was written nearly 40 years ago (1969) and yet, most of it is still relevant today. At least it speaks to me.

Postman and Weingartner make a scathing indictment of the U.S. education system and argue for radical changes, while recognizing that such changes won’t come easily. They call specifically for adoption of the inquiry method of teaching. Much of what they propose seems to have been more formally developed subsequently as concepts such as student centered-learning, active learning, metacognition, just-in-time teaching, and context-rich or ill-structured problems. More on these points later.

Postman & Weingartner make a damning description of school as a game called “Let’s Pretend”.

The game is based on a series of pretenses which include: Let’s pretend that you are not what you are and that this sort of work makes a difference to your lives; let’s pretend that what bores you is important, and that the more you are bored, the more important it is; let’s pretend that there are certain things everyone must know, and that both the questions and answers about them have been fixed for all time; let’s pretend that your intellectual competence can be judged on the basis of how well you can play Let’s Pretend.

Does this characterize higher education today? It certainly resonates with me, at least in part. In thinking about higher education, I’ve wondered if academia doesn’t have an implicit contract with students, in which we pretend to teach and they pretend to work. If they follow the “rules,” we give them decent grades and a diploma. There does seem to be a sense in which (many/most?) students are playing a role , nominally doing what we ask while not really engaging themselves.

Is formal education merely a screening device—people that succeed in school tend to succeed in life even if they don’t learn very much, so schooling helps to identify the winners? If so, this begs the real question: how much richer would life be for students if school was done better?

There’s much more to this book. It’s not possible to discuss it all in one posting, so stay tuned for the next installment.