Would You Hire Shakespeare?
Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 9/3/17
Here are a few questions to ponder as
educational technology gallops forward while literature and the other
humanities stand still.
Does “the pursuit of happiness”
refer only to jobs and decent compensation?
Is happiness quantifiable? Can
the sciences and other job-producing studies help us understand and appreciate
the mysteries of love, suffering and death?
Should education include the study of ideas (Jefferson, Madison,
Aristotle, Martin Luther King) or is its main purpose to point us toward
employment?
I know, I know. If money can’t make you happy, it can still
buy you a boat. But can boats help you
understand and appreciate the mysteries of love, suffering and death,
especially when, say, fire or flood have taken them from you?
Today in schools and in many of the
nation’s oldest and most storied universities, the humanities are getting short
shrift. Technology is becoming the
centerpiece of all things educational.
There’s no doubt that technology has increased students’ access to knowledge,
but so did encyclopedias. Like the old encyclopedias, technology is merely a
tool. It brings knowledge to the classroom,
but it doesn’t process it or teach students to analyze, integrate, or discard
it when it isn’t relevant.
Basically a conduit, technology
cannot do what teachers do, which is to aid students in the analyzing,
integrating, and discarding. As tempting
and alluring as online learning is – we’re drawn to its immediacy and its
convenience, two characteristics that don’t foster true learning – it still
cannot provide what an eyeball to eyeball communication with another human
being can provide. I’m speaking not of
technology generally, but of its use in teaching, particularly the humanities.
Recently I experienced firsthand the
extremes to which we’ve taken the use of technology. A college student approached me for help with
writing a speech for her speech class. When
I asked how many were in her class, she replied that she didn’t know because it
was an online course. Stunned, I
attempted humor. “Then to whom do you
deliver your speech, your dog?”
“No, we video ourselves and email
the video to our teacher.” Well, so much
for real life experience in public speaking, and for nuance, audience contact,
and other such human elements that enter into learning it!
Such is the thoughtless use of
technology. Teaching speechmaking via
video may be convenient, but convenience, like casualness, is the enemy of
excellence. Learning often requires
mental stillness, a condition that constantly moving screen images don’t allow.
Technology has definitely diminished
literature. Literature, from which students can learn values, requires mental
stillness. It requires classrooms that
are sanctuaries of focus and that allow discussion of those values.
To illustrate the waning of
literature, who knows or cares that July 12 was the 200th birthday
of Henry David Thoreau, the 19th century American writer who “went
to the woods because [he] wished to live deliberately, to drive life into a
corner and reduce it to its lowest terms”?
Americans can probably recite several facts
about England’s Shakespeare, but few if any about Thoreau, the Concord,
Massachusetts gadfly who annoyed his contemporaries with statements about what
comprises the good life. Like
Shakespeare, Thoreau taught that man cannot live by good jobs alone. Man needs to learn to think and to give
thought to wisdom.
Perhaps this line of thought is what
led London Business School, the University of San Diego’s School of Business
Administration, and other business schools in Europe and the U.S. to try
teaching philosophy and literature to M.B.A. students. Eschewing technology, students and professors
read and discuss the classics. They
learn to think beyond the bottom line, to study human nature, and “ponder
business in a broader context,” as one London University student put it.
It was my country boy background
that drew me to literature and to Thoreau, the nature lover. As for Thoreau, “he ain’t country,” but was
actually a city boy who moved to the woods and composed his famous “Walden” in
which he argued that we are wasting our lives when we try to be like others,
and that self-reliance should be every citizen’s goal. Thoreau bemoaned what he called “the curse of
trade” (educating for employment only), and argued that education was for broad
knowledge, not marketability.
Shakespeare believed all of that,
too. That’s why I would hire both of
them. I’d also be inclined to hire the
student who has seriously studied them.
Such a student is far more likely to think things through and to realize
that smart phones aren’t smart after all.
Unlike
Shakespeare and Thoreau, smart phones don’t teach us to pause and ponder. They foster scatteredness which is the
opposite of what learners need.
Roger
Hines
8/30/17
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