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Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is indeed making me think. Or, at least, remember. I'm at the part where the recollection of Phaedrus is asking his students in an English class, "What is Quality?".
What I'm remembering are two things from my own English classes. I was good at English, and got a relatively rare A1 in the Leaving Certificate in it. Why in the hells I went into science, I'll never know. Ideas planted in childhood and never really considered, I suppose.
The first one was the first time I ever cracked a poem, the first time I ever realised "This is what this poem is about!", without the aid of the teacher. I did realise that that was the point of the class, for us to gain that ability. But I could not explain that to anyone else in the class. The teacher sort of shrugged, and said, "of course", without noticing that I had realised something the rest of the class apparently didn't.
The second thing is that we were taught this particular essay-question form, "compare and contrast". This is obviously not the point of the question; it's just a method of getting in and examining two poems, using one as a sort of mirror to see the other better. But I know - because I held the belief myself, and because many of the others in the class held it until the end of the curriculum and possibly beyond - that there was some inherent worth in the comparition of and contrast between two poems.
This leads me to conclude that there was something very odd about the class, or possibly about the curriculum. It was never made clear to us that we were being taught these things so that we could understand them. We were being taught them as though comparing two poems were a valuable skill, like tying your laces, or making bread. It's not, it's just a widget, a way to get into the meaning of a poem. The contrast doesn't bloody matter.
The more I think about it, the more I wonder if the teachers knew that. I think the English teacher did; he was a good bloke, if jaded by years of trying to teach uncomprehending uninterested teenagers. But I wonder about the Irish teacher who made us rote-learn huge chunks of text, the history teacher who never compared any event in the past with any event in the present - even though we were dealing with both in the class, and the whole missing of the point that there seemed to be. I'm not 100% certain that we were never told "you're here to learn to understand", but if we were, it didn't sink in, or we were told it once on the first day, when we were still staring at the masses of people.
I can't help but wonder if I would have done better if I'd known that.
What I'm remembering are two things from my own English classes. I was good at English, and got a relatively rare A1 in the Leaving Certificate in it. Why in the hells I went into science, I'll never know. Ideas planted in childhood and never really considered, I suppose.
The first one was the first time I ever cracked a poem, the first time I ever realised "This is what this poem is about!", without the aid of the teacher. I did realise that that was the point of the class, for us to gain that ability. But I could not explain that to anyone else in the class. The teacher sort of shrugged, and said, "of course", without noticing that I had realised something the rest of the class apparently didn't.
The second thing is that we were taught this particular essay-question form, "compare and contrast". This is obviously not the point of the question; it's just a method of getting in and examining two poems, using one as a sort of mirror to see the other better. But I know - because I held the belief myself, and because many of the others in the class held it until the end of the curriculum and possibly beyond - that there was some inherent worth in the comparition of and contrast between two poems.
This leads me to conclude that there was something very odd about the class, or possibly about the curriculum. It was never made clear to us that we were being taught these things so that we could understand them. We were being taught them as though comparing two poems were a valuable skill, like tying your laces, or making bread. It's not, it's just a widget, a way to get into the meaning of a poem. The contrast doesn't bloody matter.
The more I think about it, the more I wonder if the teachers knew that. I think the English teacher did; he was a good bloke, if jaded by years of trying to teach uncomprehending uninterested teenagers. But I wonder about the Irish teacher who made us rote-learn huge chunks of text, the history teacher who never compared any event in the past with any event in the present - even though we were dealing with both in the class, and the whole missing of the point that there seemed to be. I'm not 100% certain that we were never told "you're here to learn to understand", but if we were, it didn't sink in, or we were told it once on the first day, when we were still staring at the masses of people.
I can't help but wonder if I would have done better if I'd known that.
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From:
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As someone who is good at and loves literature and humanities, your questions strike a deep chord, and present something really hard to answer. I teach developmental (High-school equivalency) English and Reading, and as the teacher, I struggle every semester with how to convey the importance of understanding, of reflection, and of real learning, not regurgitation. Speaking personally, I learned little from classes in which I merely had to memorize, not understand. They were a waste of time and money. I came through 2 semesters of World Civilizations, and I rememer "Hishitga." But the classes where we had to work for our answers, analyze, seek out, understand -- in a way practice intellectual, literary-historical sicence -- those classes gave me things I can carry with me.