The Mystic Chords of Education

Learning is a temporal art. It is defined by experiences in liminal spaces, as well as by the processes that take advantage of those spaces to offer access points to past, present, and future discovery. Edmund Husserl suggests that experience can be understood as a convergence of three stages of consciousness, operating simultaneously: retention, in which past experiences are retained in memory; attention, in which immediate sensory impressions are encountered; and protention, in which we construct expectations for the future that inform our understanding of the present. [1] With such a multilayered approach to time, boundaries of the experience of learning are not easily demarcated, and real learning is rarely encapsulated in the linear structures we so often assume to be critical for legitimacy in teaching.

 Before institutionalized learning begins, we develop a relationship with learning through the novelty of everyday experiences. Maxine Greene describes this early construction of knowledge systems as a process of beginning to structure the phenomena that engage us: 

“We are first cast into the world as embodied beings trying to understand. From particular situated locations, we open ourselves to fields of perception. Doing so, we begin to inhabit varied and always incomplete multiverses of forms, contours, structures, colors, and shadows. We become present to them as consciousnesses in the midst of them, not as outside observers; and so we see aspects and profiles but never totalities. We reach out into the world – touching, listening, watching what presents itself to us from our prereflective landscapes, primordial landscapes. We strain toward horizons: horizons of what might be, horizons of what was. Because we have the capacity to configure what lies around us, we bring patterns and structures into existence in the landscape. Before we enter into the life of language, before we thematize and know, we have already begun to organize our lived experiences perceptually and imaginatively. We inform our encounters by means of activities later obscured by the sediments of rationality.” [2]

 As learning beings, we initially welcome a process where knowledge is absorbed and undone, repeatedly, through layered experiences (conscious and unconscious), in a context of ever-widening fields of perception, with a developing awareness of memory and anticipation that accompanies those perceptions. If we accept the premise that learning is, at its core, experiential, the question arises as to why we have such powerful distinctions between institutionalized learning and experiential learning. The separation likely began (in the Western tradition) with Pythagoras, and may hint at the beginnings of this now well-worn dichotomy. However, it is worth noting that its origins are murky.

 The school established by Pythagoras in the fifth century BCE in Crotona emphasized an institutionalization of activities of “higher learning.” Students studied mathematics, astronomy, music, metaphysics, and theology. [3] 2500 years later, we retain the names of many of these disciplines (and those that followed in the schools of Plato, Aristotle, and later ecclesiastical traditions) in our institutions of higher learning; we have expanded our concept of a discipline to allow for many more subdivisions and inclusions, all with supposedly distinct boundaries. However, in laying claim to the boundaries and procedures of our disciplines, we have lost track of their origins, which began as orientations to support exploration and discovery from a variety of angles and emphasized a relationship to the unknown that could be confronted through a combination of experience and disciplined thinking. The origins of our academic disciplines were mystical in nature, as evidenced by Pythagoras’ relationship to older mystery cults that informed his practice. The mathematics (μαθηματικός) of Pythagoras’ time, a word connected to mathema (μαθήμα), which meant learning in a much more general sense than our current associations, emphasized the metaphysical relationships between number and reality. Because Pythagoras was operating under the belief that everything can be understood through number, mathematics over time came to be associated with the manipulation of numbers. It was once (and occasionally still is) full of mystery and possibility; it unveiled integrated relationships that only later were bisected into disciplines as we know them now. 

 Education, when oriented around experience, has the potential (and perhaps the imperative) to serve as a modern-day, humanist exploration of those same cross-disciplinary themes of human life that were once approached with mystical reverence. Math has not always evaded experience, and music was once considered a corollary discipline, both offering a way into a deeper cosmological understanding of the world and its mysterious origins.

 Perhaps the distinction between institutionalized and experiential learning that has emerged is one of politics, rather than one of modality. Institutionalized education as it currently exists carries with it a set of unexamined experiences that work to preserve society as it is. The unspoken values that are implied via desks, chairs, whiteboards, fluorescent lights, and rote memorization codify a relationship to education that is a distinct type of experience – one that is passive, hierarchical, and authoritarian. We accept and perpetuate canons, with the assumption that those who came before have already done the work of determining what is worth knowing. Why do we so often relinquish the right to this question?

 As the canons of thought and carriers of culture that we rely upon for traditional education send out roots that take hold in the unexamined depths of our collective psyche, the surface-level conversations about education give rise to structures that limit our access to those more formative questions of worth. The contemporary educational landscape in the United States, for instance, is developing in a context of ever-increasing codifications. We speak of standards and rubrics and accountability and learning targets and backwards planning and measurable outcomes as though outcomes result directly from specific, definable inputs, and as though all those inputs can be accounted for. Students in the United States from as early as kindergarten learn to parrot “I can” statements about concrete skill acquisition that teachers are required to define daily on whiteboards; the students have a clear understanding of the goal of each lesson forced upon them, but through this process they are losing contact with the sense of discovery that might propel them towards the unknown and allow them to glimpse the liminal spaces where so much authentic learning takes place. Control of that which falls within the boundaries renders the teacher irrelevant, removes the sense of self in learning from both teacher and student, and dishonors the relationship of an ever-changing individual in the context of an ever-changing collective. Our cultural attempts to impose artificial structures of control to define all things as measurable are at odds with an experience-driven education, and the dichotomy is increasingly polarizing. Greene describes this dichotomy as structured by official languages of domination, entitlement, and power: “…where what we conceive to be our tradition is petrified, located in private enclaves, or surrounded by auras that distance it from lived experience, from the landscape of our lives.” [4] Our canons, in the form of curriculum, represent established nodes of power that generate from sources long forgotten.

What of those long forgotten sources? Of the Pythagorean mandate that we cultivate the spirit in and through our learning spaces? In Plato’s Symposium, Socrates and Diotema explore this spirit through an exegesis on Love and Beauty. Diotema tells us that Love is “a longing not for the beautiful itself, but for the conception and generation that the beautiful effects.” [5] This illuminates the real promise of experiential education: it is in the interstices of being, doing, searching, and longing that we are able to integrate learning and living.  

Notes:

1: Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), pp.168-169.

2: Maxine Greene, Releasing the Imagination: Essays on Education, the Arts, and Social Change, (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1995), p. 73.

3: Philip Wheelwright, The Presocratics, (New York: Macmillan, 1966), pp. 200-201. 

4: Greene, pp. 47-48.

5: Plato, Symposium, in Collected Dialogues, Ed. Hamilton and Cairns, (New Jersey: Princeton, 1961), p. 558/206:e.

Copyright 2019, Melinda Russial

(Re)discovering North America

The UWC-USA Arts and Culture program features a series of Cultural Weeks, each culminating in a two-hour multidisciplinary performance that highlights one of six geographical regions. The regional designations feel somewhat arbitrary (South Asia combined with the Middle East and Central Asia, separated from East Asia; Mexico linked with the United States, separated from the Caribbean which is combined with South America and Brazil, but not connected to origin cultures in Sub-Saharan Africa; North Africa joining both Africa and the Middle East, Europe separated from its colonial consequences, etc.) 

My first two-year cycle as showcase director for these regional performances concluded with the North American Division (which, curiously, includes Australia and New Zealand, but not England). Working with my own region at the end of a cycle that introduced me over time to teenage impressions of global cultural life offered me a unique opportunity for reflection on the substance and process of enculturation. I have wondered throughout these two years how these productions reflect, inform, and challenge regional stereotypes. I have noticed that students often remark that their behavior in groups reflects the stereotypes of their regions – these kinds of comments are especially common from students who belong to more than one region (or who perform as guests) and have the opportunity to participate in multiple cultural showcases.  I also noticed a level of familiarity of process for myself with the North American show that was much more organic for me than in all of the others – I was better prepared to anticipate sources of possible conflict and stress, and I felt more fluent with methods of managing leadership decisions, conflict resolution, and decisions and values related to show content.   

This raises questions for me, personally, about the impact of cultural conditioning in areas that are so deeply embedded in the unconscious that they are rarely discussed, including: how we respond to concepts of hierarchy and the characteristics we value in leadership; how we behave in groups and how we respond to each other under pressure; and how we value public and private engagement in performance activities. These behavioral identities reflect values frameworks that may be less obvious components of culture, but perhaps they are at the core of cultural conflicts that often masquerade as something more concrete and specific.

One frequent comment I heard in response to this show that I found particularly compelling was that it seemed especially “political” when compared to previous shows. I raised this issue in the arts leadership seminar that followed the show, and in doing so, I happened upon an especially complex conversation – the connotations that we carry unconsciously for a word that is used with such impunity seem to have the power to define these conversations before we are even allowed to start them. It was surprising to me to realize how many people carry negative associations for the word “politics;” this was reflected in criticism for show content that I personally saw as positive and instructive. It made me wonder how our decisions to avoid political engagement function as unconscious political decisions, reinforced by cultural norms. 

For example: a jazz performance opened with a monologue that drew attention to the problematic racial elements of an art form that has a long history of appropriation, erasure, and economic disparity. While dominant (white) narratives might suggest that the jazz without the monologue is “apolitical,” allowing people to “just enjoy the art,” this reflects an avoidance of context. It may be apolitical for those who hold a position in society that allows them to experience the art outside of context. But for anyone impacted by or interested in the ramifications of this history, its exclusion is also political – it allows for a narrative of erasure to be perpetuated, a narrative that is rarely discussed but that is nonetheless embedded in our cultural landscape.

Another question that came up during our debriefing seminar was whether politics is something that specifically defines the US-American character, and whether this impacted the direction of the show. While this is reductive, it may reference a US tendency to engage in embittered oppositional political statements that don’t often result in action, as opposed to organic and authentic engagement in political activities for concrete change that is sometimes evident elsewhere. The question may unveil something about the nature of US politics that was reflected in show content. Themes that students integrated throughout the show often spoke to related quandaries, including: the complexity of identities perceived as “mixed,” challenges with labeling national, regional, and politically marginalized identities, the relationship between the US and Canada and the impact of perceived US dominance, and the impact of colonialism across several historical British colonies. All of these themes (and others) offer opportunities for considerable exploration related to the manifestation of political behavior and orientations in North America. 

I remembered, while working on this show, how it was precisely my immersion in other cultures through travel that helped me begin to recognize and understand the values and conditions of my own culture. I have heard many US-Americans say that they didn’t know that they had a culture until experiencing similar moments of contrast, as well, an odd casualty of belonging to a culture so globally imposing as to be habitually perceived as universal. The attempt to define these moments of contrast in a performance medium also betrays many of our more problematic assumptions: How often, when we talk of US-American culture, do we really mean white culture? Do we picture some midwestern town surrounded by cornfields as the Real America? How often do we ignore indigenous narratives, immigrant narratives, the cultural collisions that define our political structures, the impossible task of belonging as a perceived “other” when the concept of an “other” goes against our sacred melting pot mythology?  Why is it that when we do highlight those narratives, the result is perceived as “political,” but the dominant cultural narratives are perceived as neutral? 

This collision with the “other” through the medium of performance is an extremely powerful site for collateral learning. It forces us to reckon with that perceived neutrality in the distilled and concentrated reality of the stage. It unwraps the labels we unconsciously apply to ourselves and each other, and broadens our sense of identity. It shows us who we are.