On Wonder and Pain
There are two paths in pedagogy. One is
the Path of Pain, and the other the Path of Wonder. Like
many people, I
have experienced both.
On the Path of Pain, memory and knowledge
are instilled through calibrated infringements on the apprentice's
flesh. Personal examples include the slap my French teacher
administered
to me for "smirking" in the third grade
and the caning I received in the headmaster’s office
for baring my bottom in chapel when in seventh grade. I know
I will
never forget those moments of punishment, even when senile
and barely able to recognize my own name. And I have to admit
that knowing that I carry within me something burned into
the hardware of my mind is at times comforting. These experiences
are part of my flesh, in much the same way that the sins
of the criminal are literally written onto his skin in Kafka’s
The Penal Colony.
Much to the chagrin of benevolent progressive souls, the
Path of Pain remains as effective today as it has been for
millennia. According to Nietzsche, it is the primary means
by which we were transformed from an animal into what we
are. "If something is to stay in the memory, it must
be burned in: only that which never ceases to hurt stays
in the memory," he writes in the Genealogy of Morals.
"This is the oldest, and unhappily most enduring, psychology
on
earth." The sphere of contractual obligations, for
example, required the proto-human to learn to make and keep
promises. Only pain, and large doses of it, could teach the
absolute necessity of not reneging on promises. The law administered
this pain carefully by outlining in minute detail the specific
acts that the injured party could carry out on the body of
the promise-breaker. This venerable tradition of pedagogy
continues throughout the world, obviously less so in schools
now than before, but it will remain in place as long as some
accursed share of what is animal remains in us.
Viewers will
be happy to know this exhibition is concerned with an alternative
tradition, the more palatable Path of
Wonder. I say tradition because it is neither the twentieth
century nor the nineteenth nor even the Age of Enlightenment
that recognizes the place of wonder and curiosity in learning,
though it is true that eighteenth-century philosophers like
Rousseau did much to rethink the idea of pedagogy from ground
up. The story of Thales, the pre-Socratic philosopher, falling
into a well at night while walking and observing the stars
is doubly relevant here; the first is that it offers an example
of a sense of wonder and curiosity beyond all measure. It
is a window into an early moment in human history where the
entire world was a cause for wonder. More importantly, though,
Thales’s story was already circulating as a story by
the time of Aristotle. As a story, it gives the listener
the satisfaction of being wondrous at someone else’s
state of wonder and rapture. This vicarious experience gently
nudges us away from a sense of wonder at the world and toward
a sense of wonder at the human ability to wonder at the world.
And such reflexivity is one root of what psychoanalysis calls
transference, the structural identification that needs to
be in place between student and teacher in any true pedagogy.
The teacher knows something wonderful, or so the pupil imagines,
and this fantasy makes the student porous to the supposed
knowledge of the teacher. It is a form of love that is apparently
directed toward the teacher but is in fact aimed at the knowledge
that the teacher seems to harbor. It is, quite literally,
philosophy (the Greek meaning "love of knowledge").
Without transference, not knowledge but raw information is
passed from one person to another.
The idea of a formal pedagogical
system based not on the memorization of facts and information
but on the development
of the "natural" curiosity inherent in every
child emerged out of the eighteenth century. One book above
all signaled the sea-change that education was about to undergo—Jean-Jacques
Rousseau's Émile, where we find the following
summary:
"Remember that this is the essential point in my method:
Do not teach the child many things, but never let him form
inaccurate
or confused ideas."
An anecdote about Immanuel Kant succinctly
demonstrates the impact that Rousseau's tract on education
had on the world. It is said that Kant took a walk at the
same time
every day; he was so punctual that the inhabitants of Königsberg
set their clocks by his walk. The only occasion on which
he forgot his walk was the day he was reading Émile.
In
contrast to the educational systems in place at the time,
Rousseau's proposal emphasized play and first-hand
experience. Books, for example, were banned before the age
of twelve. The educational reforms that Émile suggested
soon resulted in a number of famous experiments: Johann Pestalozzi's
school in Yverdon, Switzerland, and more lastingly, his disciple
Friedrich Fröbel's late 1830s invention—kindergarten.
As Norman Brosterman has outlined in his book Inventing Kindergarten,
features that distinguished the new pedagogy from previous
systems included the central role of play, of self-initiated
activities guided by the child's own sense of curiosity,
and of the materiality of conceptual ideas. This latter gave
rise to the notion of an "alphabet" of forms,
a set of material objects whose manipulation would allow
the child to sense the unity of the three spheres of life,
science, and art. Originally a crystallographer, Fröbel
devised objects and exercises that would develop the child’s
perception of form to such a degree that the underlying unified
structure of the universe could be grasped. The revolutionary
effect these ideas would have on the rise of abstraction
in modern art is meticulously documented in Brosterman's
book.
Where the instruments needed for the Path of Pain are
well-known and quite limited (cane, back of hand, shame),
the Path of
Wonder is always in the process of producing new devices.
Juxtaposed with artifacts from Fröbel’s original
system of kindergarten, the Logic Alphabet devised by Shea
Zellweger and the computational origami innovated by Jeannine
Mosely both follow Fröbelian principles where the tactile,
the visual, and the conceptual are merged into one. Playing
with Zellweger’s beautiful devices and with Mosely’s
seductive paper confections is an object lesson in the structures
of logic and geometry respectively, a pedagogy that happens
as much through our fingers and eyes as it does with the
mind. Or as Rousseau puts it in Émile, "Our
first teachers of philosophy are our feet, our hands, and
our eyes."
Sina Najafi
© 2005 |
