Previous articles in this series:
Assaying Entropy II: Dying During Covid
Assaying Entropy III: Thinking about Covid
Assaying Entropy IV: Covid and America
Assaying Entropy VI: Democracy in America
Assaying Entropy VII: American democracy
While the Federalists created the form of American constitutionalism based on minimizing the power of the people, their opponents the Republicans – later called the Democratic Republicans or Jeffersonian Republicans – responded to Federalist reservations about the common people (the working class, serving class, under-educated, those without property, the demos who formed the majority of Washington’s army) with the idea of public education [primarily of white males].
Public education would give the people a sound base to make political decisions rather than allowing sheer numbers to overwhelm reason and knowledge. Jefferson’s decades long work on his Academic Village that became the University of Virginia was part of his vision of democracy’s need for informed citizens (race and gender issue apart). Benjamin Rush, the only physician to sign the Declaration of Independence, proposed a national system of public education to promote national ideals.
These ideas linking education and political theory created the successful development of public education in the United States and characterize that education as both an expression and an indoctrination of democratic values. Since I see those values as essentially conflicted and misunderstood leading to an assertion of the individual above the collective, I want to look at education as an institutional place where that conflict and misunderstanding continues today to form all of our views, attitudes, and feelings.
In the 70s, I was teaching Milton’s Paradise Lost, a 10,000 line 17th century poem about the creation of the world, Adam and Eve, and the origin of sin – not light reading. Students were unfamiliar with archaic English, with poetic syntax, with Christianity – much less 17th century protestant theology – with classical Greek and Roman mythology, English political history, etc. As a result, many students made mistakes in reading sentences, missed what was being said by whom to whom, all of which led to misunderstandings and misinterpretations of what they read. In teaching, this situation is normal, and I thought that my job was to help student surmount those difficulties.
However, a professor of literature at the University of Indiana’s School of Education told me I was wrong. Education theory had rejected objectivism and embraced subjectivism. I was mistaken to think that what Milton meant was relevant or to think that the words on the page had any objective meaning at all. Reality was subjective and personal. I should simply encourage students to develop their own subjectivity by encouraging whatever their reading told them.
I thought then and still do that rejecting the hypothesis of objectivity is catastrophic . First, it misunderstood the philosophical objections to 19th century objectivism in Europe. Twentieth century thinkers questioned the objectivity of our perceptions of reality, but they didn’t argue that our personal perception was all there was. For example, while relativity theory places the observer into the equation for motion, it also demonstrated the validity of Newton’s objective world. I return to my example of the coin seen as a circle from one perspective and a rectangle from another. We don’t personally, individually, see the whole reality of the coin, but we can create an idea of its reality if we agree to the hypothesis that there is a real coin that we are both seeing, that there is a coincidence of viewing. Without that assumption or agreement that there is such a coin, each viewer can only insist that his perception is the coin and no other.
Second, I doubt that our ideas are genetically determined. Every individual is inevitably inflected if not created by the external world, physically and mentally, ideationally and linguistically, so that every subjectivity is beholden to things outside the self. Without reckoning with that outside world, one could never know one’s own self or be able to express it in a communicative way.
Third, our perception of reality may not be very objective, but without the idea of a possible objective world that is sharable there can be no relationships between people. To think that we are all locked in our own individual, subjective world is a concept of social chaos. Without an intent towards objectivity we are just deaf people grunting our private, idiosyncratic perceptions at each other in noises no one else can understand.
But the professor of education was right that primary and secondary education in America shifted its focus entirely to student subjectivity and the molding of a confidence in personal points of view. Although there was pushback from conservative politicians in the 1990s with the movement for a standards based (that is, dominant culture based) reform, student and teacher subjectivity continues to be a major concern in American education, and we have now several generations of Americans who are habituated to think and speak about their identities as the basis of opinions about the world.
Reading matter was more oriented after the 1960s towards first-person narratives, lyric poetry, diaries and journals, etc., and beginning in grade school students were introduced to writing through journals and poetry. The standard form of reading literature was for a student to find a character in a story to identify with. The standard response to reading literature was to say how the reading affected the student personally, how important it has been in his or her life, how the reading fits into his or her life, preferably by narrating anecdotes of his or her life to show those affects. As a college professor of writing and literature, I often saw these ways of reading and writing.
This tendency towards student subjectivity, tailoring an education to the student’s growing sense of self in the world, is not a bad thing. It fostered self-confidence and paid attention to emotional life. It allowed public recognition of fissures between identities caused by class, race, sexual orientation, etc., fissures that were until then hidden behind a hegemonic narrative of America.
But if helping the student build his or her own subjectivity, identity, is of concern, the teacher needs to avoid burdening the student with the fear of being wrong, and that would devalue the learning of facts of geography, history, science, or mathematics and favor those studies which allowed interpretation. It would replace deriving a procedure for accomplishing some task from understanding basic concepts by a set of directions for doing that task, that is, replace an intellectual process of reasoning by a memorized sequence of performance. Thus, watching a circle appear on the computer screen because the student inputs a sequence of computer commands can replace drawing a circle on paper with a compass, but it will not give the student an understanding of the way the equality of a radius informs the figure. In the same way, using a calculator to do arithmetic, the pressing of a sequence of buttons, gives only a sense of the keyboard’s spatial relationships but not the understanding of quantity and the foundational notion of sequential counting for all numerical ideas of relationship.
Certain fundamental – and objective – aspects of language have disappeared from secondary education. I once asked a group of about 25 college students what the subject (grammatically and in meaning) of the first sentence of the Declaration of Independence is: “When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands that have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”
Not a single person could tell me; though, obviously, everyone was literate and able to write. Some said it was about independence; others thought the sentence was about dissolving political bands; yet others thought Laws of Nature was the subject. I would call this associative reading. All the students scanned the sequence of words and caught onto some beefy matters and thought the sentence was about those subjects. These may be their interpretations, but they are invalid for being based on a misreading. Many comments to “Assaying Entropy” are associative in this way. Because I mentioned Covid deaths, these readers continue to think Covid and anything related to Covid was my subject. But my mention of Covid was like a subordinate clause that simply gives the situational context of what is said.
Jefferson’s subject is “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind,” and what he says (predicates) about this respect is that it “requires” the people in this situation to declare the causes of the separation. Without understanding this sentence, the second sentence – about equality – has no foundation. Written language is not just a list of topical words for the reader to riff on. It is a sequence of structures of meaning and intents running through the words and between the sentences. That continuity is the reasoning behind the words, which mean something to the reader not because the words alone have dictionary meanings but because those words are caught in a grammatical web that tells the reader the relationship between the words.
I’m sure Jefferson and the signers thought this sentence and the following ones were understandable. They no longer are. I think the reason is that we no longer respect decently a collectively shared and hypothetically objective world.