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Seeing the Education Behind Education: What

Romans on Truth Suppression Means for Teachers.
Presented at International Community of Christian Teacher Educators, Redeemer
University College, Ancaster, Ontario, May 30, 2014.
I The problem
This presentation expands on one line I read fifteen years ago. The line was:
Every learning situation has two characteristics--things learners want to know and those
things learners cannot afford to let themselves know.
Maybe I liked this as a kind of buried Romanticism. Things learners cannot
afford to let themselves know has a Gothic Romantic ring. Turned out that the line
summarized an article by a Yale literature professor and critic who uses psychoanalytic
perspectives, Shoshana Felman.
The assertion of two characteristics offers a whole new view of a classroom.
Teaching is not just imparting knowledge. The classroom appears as an arena of
conflict, of struggle. Students are not blank white sheets of paper. They meet you with
their own dispositions, experiences, prejudices, histories, as male or female, older,
younger, richer, less well off, unmarried, married, etcetera. Like you, unlike you. They
can resist taking your perspective. Not only must the teacher stretch to meet, but the
student must also become willing to be met. Felman's work makes clearer how much a
challenge is repression or suppression.
Teaching is heart searching tough work. Freud (again) included teaching as an
impossible profession. Teaching has its rewards but it is a challenge, like, say, shadow
boxing. You the teacher experience the way that they seem not to be getting you, maybe
even active resistance. It is hard to see why. If your teaching is not working it could be
because your presentation is not clear. Maybe if clear, then cognitively the students just
cannot grasp it. Or if clear, they can grasp it but more or less choose to stand aside from
it for unknown reasons. If one could see behind the curtain, then the disappointment or
the struggle of teaching could be bearable. Of course you cant see back there. Here's the
benefit from seeing teaching as conflictual. Knowing that it might not be just you is a
relief though.
Especially understanding resistance could be helpful to those who teach value
loaded subjects with touchy topics. Social studies, history, literature, sociology,
psychology, philosophy, and religion or theology come to mind. But not only those.
Preservice education too. Take this example. In our preservice B Ed program, students
learn that objectives of lesson plans must be as closely specified as possible. If you know
exactly what you are teaching, your job of evaluation is clear. Our students learn about
Blooms taxonomy, and more or less a Ralph Tyler approach to curriculum from other
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profs. I am interested in narrative approaches to education and take cues from Kieran
Egan. Five years ago, I prescribed Egans Teaching as Storytelling for a module of about
nine classroom hours in course called Theory and Practice II. Now Egans process of
lesson planning does not work from the known to the unknown, or concrete to abstract.
Students have to work out a way to teach that capitalizes on the human capacity to
remember information in story-form. Students develop a lesson plan on some binary
conflict inherent in their topic, good-evil, organized-disorganized, black-white,
beautiful-ugly. Childrens literature works from conflict to resolution, adult literature
works the same way, ancient and preliterate societies remembered because of the
narrative structure of their lore, anthropological evidence indicates it is deeply
embedded in all human cognition, and so on. No way would the students take in this
whole new way to plan a lesson from the foundations professor. In just a few months
time, the students were all going to face classrooms of Grade Seven boys. They were not
going to allow their hard-won knowledge about lesson plans with objectives based on
Blooms taxonomy leading to clear evaluation to be subverted. No way was a
philosophically idealist or holist approach to teaching such as Egans going to challenge
the empirical approach they knew. If it was meaningful or attractive or imagination-
fueling for their pupils did not matter. They more or less told me: We dont want to
know. You are wasting our time. So not only are things learners cannot afford to let
themselves know a feature of humanities or politics or religion classes. Also education
classes.
Of course false understandings appear in other educational philosophers or
psychologists. Piaget's whole theory and career is built on childrens predictable
misconceptions. Kant or Piaget or Vygotsky posit the need to construct learning. But
with Freud, Lacan and Felman we seem to move away from a cognition of a human
being who is essentially good and open for construction towards resistance from
challenges to the self one cannot face. Romans 1 told us a long time ago that human
beings live in a world that drips God, yet suppress that knowledge. It seems to me that a
Christian theory of education has to take sin seriously.
For instance: Shoah is a nine-hour documentary from 1985 which details the
bureaucratic arrangements that were the engine of the Holocaust. A lot of people had to
be around such a massive venture. For example, station-masters between, say, Bordeaux
France and the heart of Poland received papers authorizing transit for trains with as
many as fifty cars. Dozens of station-masters. Month after month. Could a stationmaster
really know nothing? Raymond Aron said something like this: I knew, but I didnt
believe it, and because I didnt believe it, I didnt know.
The educational philosopher Elliot Eisner identified a paradoxical, curriculum
which he terms a null curriculum, beside the public written curriculum and the hidden
or structural curriculum. While hidden curriculum stamps its sponsoring societys
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characteristics onto students by passing on habits of thought and action, that which is
nullified in schooling also shapes ways of thinking and being.
An example: Mariko Oi reported via the BBC on March 13, 2013 on the Japanese
school system's history curriculum. 300,000 years are covered in a single year of
lessons, from homo erectus to the present day. Thus only limited time is given to the
1930s and 1940s. The nineteen pages about Japans empire period include a footnote on
the 1937-1938 Rape of Nanking, China; a footnote on the non-Japanese comfort
women who were forced to prostitute themselves with Japans military; and one line on
coerced labor from China and Korea. Neighboring nations take these light treatments to
be Japans cover-up of the shameful past. Yet Japanese nationalists challenge even the
slight disclosures.
The curricular choice to offer only one overloaded year of history proves to be a
value-laden choice. No wonder, as Ms. Oi says, that most Japanese fail to understand
their neighbours' sensitivities. This practically null history curriculum is not a style or
structure. Null curriculum is not learned, is evaded, is suppressed.
What of subjects where the moral implications of knowledge seem remote? The
personal implication of 2+2=4 seems slight. One might expect the least resistance to
knowledge construction in the physical sciences but not so. From Thomas Kuhns
Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962, 1996) we would be mistaken. Kuhn shows that
physical scientists routinely dismiss anomalies or discoveries that do not fit with the
prevailing paradigm that is normal science.
Eisner mentions the absence of subjects like economics or law, of art. 103-104].
What is it, if learned, would affect the learners attitude toward religions?
Sigmund Freud wrote,
It is a long superseded idea. . . that the patient suffers from a sort of ignorance,
and that if one removes this ignorance by giving him information ...The pathological
factor is not his ignorance in itself, but the root of this ignorance in his inner resistances;
it was they who first called this ignorance into being, and they still maintain it now. The
task of the treatment lies in combating these resistances. [Standard, XI, 2251]
Freud's follower Jacques Lacan puts it like this: Ignorance is a passion not a void
to be replaced. felman 1982 30 Paul the apostle says that all humanity is under the power
of sin. Human beings both know and do not know:
by their wickedness (they) suppress the truth. 19 For what can be known about
God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. 20 Ever since the
creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they
are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made. So they are
without excuse; 21 for though they knew God, they did not honor him as God or
give thanks to him (1:18-20)
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There is knowledge unbelievers cannot allow themselves to know. Created order
speaks reliably of Gods eternal power and transcendent nature. Passages such as Psalm
19 (the heavens are declaring the glory of God) underline self-deception. Humans know
and they do not allow themselves to know.
If Romans 1 is correct, that about which we do not talk is not only abortion,
death, marital sexuality, or politics. Suppression of the knowledge of God is bigger than
any blockage seen by Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, or Lanzmann's Shoah. Marxs concern at
false consciousness or a rationalization of group advantage can be readily mapped to
suppression of the knowledge of God.
II The solution
You might be thinking that I have strayed from mundane suppression to religious
suppression and the two are not the same. But the examples I gave show that
suppression of unwanted perspectives is at many levels and is universal. B.Ed. students,
Christian undergrads, all learners are prepared to see what we want to see. The process
of cultivating or enculturing sets up familiar patterns of knowing which makes
unfamiliar phenomena implausible. To conservative students, genre studies of the Old
Testament which broaden possible approaches to Genesis 1s six days of creation may
seem irrelevant. Feminist studies of scripture may seem misguided. Conversely,
complementarian views of marriage receive little coverage in mainstream seminaries.
Perspectives outside one's own framework seem irrelevant, ridiculous, or seriously
misguided. Blockages to learning arise when knowledge bears moral implications that
challenge a students identity construction.
The difficulty of education is not mainly due to poor pedagogical practices or
educational technology. The empiricist philosopher John Locke taught that students are
blank sheets of white paper on which a teacher can write at will. Wrong. Students are
not passive. A predictable source of difficulty in education is resistances which are
derived from the identity construction of the learner. In other words, resistances are
moral or worldview derived. Some stones in the existing construction might move slowly
if at all. Not only construction of knowledge is necessary but demolition. Teaching is a
process of both establishing and disassembling at the same time.
LACAN: What this all means is that Teaching is not the transmission of
ready-made knowledge, it is rather the creation of a new condition of
knowledge the creation of an original learning-disposition. (S-11,368) there
is no true teaching other than the teaching which succeeds in provoking in those
who listen an insistence this desire to know which can only emerge when they
themselves have taken the measure of ignorance as such of ignorance inasmuch
as it is, as such, fertile-in the one who teaches as well. [S-11,2421
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Since students come to higher education already educated, Christian education is
re-education. Many attended a public school, and yes, paid attention to their parents,
went to church and youth group, heard sermons. . They participated in Scouts or Guides
or Cadets. They watched television, listened to CBC news, watched studio films, played
video games, surfed the internet, had a Facebook account, had a smartphone. Those
converted to Christian faith retain the old nature with the new nature, old man with new
man, a this-worldly orientation with a Holy Spirit led one. The struggle to make a whole
world, the struggle for intellectual sanctification which is moral sanctification will not
cease in the present life. The people of God have proven able to mix allegiances to nation
and God, economics and God. For all of us, God-substitutes must be unmasked and
something substantial offered.
Jesus does explicit re-education: This is what the gentiles do, this is what YOU
must do. He names the specifics of the old way so the contrast will show what they are
and why they do. Life connections. Contextualization.
Telling it slant, in poet Emily Dickinsons phrase, may get truth through.
Success in Circuit liesThe Truth must dazzle gradually, she says.
(Dickinson ret fr
http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/emilydickinson/1129.shtml 2012
05 08)
Art may possess rhetorical power where cold truth would be dismissed.
The visual power of Picassos Guernica outmatches dozens of newsprint
stories. Because poets know not what they write Felman
Biography can work as parable. Many moved toward the abolitionist cause
after reading Frederick Douglasss 1846 story of a slaves struggles with
racism and injustice.
As Felman says,
knowledge is what is already there, but always in the Other. Knowledge, in
other words, is not a substance but a structural dynamic: it is not contained by
any individual but comes about out of the mutual apprenticeship between two
partially unconscious speeches which both say more than they know. Dialogue
is thus the radical condition of learning and of knowledge, ...(so) For teaching to
be realized, for knowledge to be learnt, the position of alterity is therefore
indispensable: felman 1982 33
Accurate self-knowledge can come from a crisis experience. A parable like the
prophets to King David, some speech event like Jesuss parable to the lawyer who
wished to limit the definition of neighbor (Sammons) may force a perception and
resolution. Though a parable is not enacted, it obliges the hearer to enter into a thought
experiment and to choose a side. Jesus reluctance to waste patience on contrary minded
persons may indicate his understanding of the depth of resistances.(Burbules)
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Communities boost resistance. A community of resistance can raise intellectual
and moral resistance, like the White Rose at the University of Munich resisted the Nazis
in 1942-43. The educational role of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in
resisting settled ideas of race relations in the 1960s was similar. Gerbner in his last
decade tried to develop a community of resistance to media concentration. A hundred
examples could be added. A classroom can be such a community.
Which case studies, which assignments, which field trips, which learnings in
presence of the Other, might lead Shoah bystanders to grieve? (boys) How could
bystanders be led to see their complicity in terrible unjustice? This line of approach for
teachers is about technique. As Edward Farley notes, The persisting corruptibility of
reality especially as it creates structures of oppression is the central theme of Paulo
Freireprecisely because reality is complex and corrupt education must always be
'problematising' crt3 depravity p43
Seeing through
Terry Eagleton sees through everything in terms of politics or economics; but
where does he stand? Historically he takes apart everything; all knowledge is relative
imperfect. So someone say even your Christianity is relative to its time and place. To
which I say yes but I have a fixed point of relativity I know Jesus Christ is historically
conditioned and cultural expression, but he is also the Son of God so I can translate. The
point is not all this taking apart which one can do ad nauseum. CS Lewis said you can't
just be critical you must be critical in terms of something. The point is not to see
through everything, it is to deconstruct the idols so that the true God gets what is due to
him. The stationmasters did not know and knew. The scale of ignorance in the
Holocaust is so big it is only exceeded by one phenomenon: the truth suppression of the
true God. People live in God's world and deny it.
So believers ought to be alive in a qualitatively different world, a world of beauty
where the true God reigns. They ought to be genuinely grateful people and Christian re-
education is a means to that end. To the glory of God in Christ. Idols for destruction are
supposed to be replaced by worship. Paul said, we take captive every thought to the
obedience of Christ. May Christian teachers live the tension.
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Bibliography
Felman, Shoshana. Psychoanalysis and Education: Teaching Terminable and Interminable. Yale
French Studies no. 63 (1982): 2144.
Britzman, Deborah P. After-education: Anna Freud, Melanie Klein, and Psychoanalytic Histories
of Learning. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003.
Shawver, Lois. Postmodern Pedagogy. The Praeger Handbook of Education and Psychology.
Edited by J. Kincheloe and R. Horn. Westport and London: Praeger, 2008.
Walls
Jacobs
Blocher
Bahnsen