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Brainstorm: Lives of the Mind Mark Bauerlein

Less Critical Thinking, More Learned Appreciation

In an earlier post I wrote on the condescension of professors, commenter “POD” sounded a sober call for one aim of humanities teaching. “I’m with the party” of teachers, he declared, that “want to make ‘the public’ and more particularly our students a little uncomfortable with language, or world view, or familiar habit of mind. Perhaps a little more discomfort with our assumptions about the world — communicated through language — might lead us to a better place, eventually. Maybe not; there are no guarantees.”

That’s the critical thinking pedagogy, and it may be the most popular rationale for humanistic inquiry. A colleague whom I admire argued it recently in a meeting when I mentioned that a lot of resentment has built up in public life against the humanities, and it stems not only from conservative critics. He replied that if the goal of education is to get people to question their values and beliefs, then it’s bound to raise tensions. If we see resistance in the public sphere, then we may assume that we’re doing a good job.

I’ll say what I said then. The critical thinking agenda is fitting and proper, but only 50 percent of the time. Yes, we should set conventions up for scrutiny, challenge common sense, and ponder alternative frameworks. Those efforts look to the future and foster progress. But the other half of our duty lies in imparting the best legacies of the past — not critiquing them or dismantling them, but passing them on to the rising generation. It is to sustain the beauty and wisdom of the past against the blandishments and pressures of the present.

Humanities teachers assume that fragile charge when they enter a classroom. In fact, their strongest claim in public life rests in their stewardship of tradition. For when professors don the adversarial mantle too proudly and constantly, not only do they shut their students off from unbiased access to the past (that is, just taking in the bunk before the debunking comes). They also commit political suicide, losing resources and respect off campus. Like it or not, the legitimacy of college teachers still follows more from their straightforward presentation of Great Books and Great Ideas than from their sophisticated interrogations of “straightforwardness,” “Greatness,” and other enabling values. Critical thinking, yes, but also guardianship of what wiser and more talented minds than we have conceived and created through the centuries.

Posted at 08:05:59 PM on January 23, 2008 | All postings by Mark Bauerlein

Comments

  1. This two-track approach was also recommended in one of the most influential documents in American higher education: The Yale Report of 1828 which argued that liberal education should not only seek to develop the “discipline of the mind” — the student’s critical thinking ability — but also enlarge the store of “furniture” in the mind — the student’s body of knowledge.

    There is a great deal still of value in the Yale Report, and it deserves to be read by everyone in higher education today. It contains much practical wisdom, too: many of us will share its authors’ belief that “our students are not so deficient in intellectual powers, as they sometimes profess to be.”

    — R.J. O'Hara · Jan 23, 09:44 PM · #

  2. I had been thinking something along these lines too—not necessarily quite that “cultural transmission” is the other half of the equation, but that most of the defenses of the humanities are oddly empty of content, as if what we do as humanities professors, for instance, is purely about transmitting a skills set. I like to think that students leave my classes, not just knowing something about how to read and think critically, put arguments together, and so forth, but also knowing about things they did not know about before (historical, literary, aesthetic…)—not to mention having read (and thus experienced and thought carefully about and maybe even enjoyed) books they would not otherwise have picked up or understood very well.

    — Rohan Maitzen · Jan 24, 08:24 AM · #

  3. The problem is that the instant a professor “transmits culture” that somebody disagrees with, “cultural transmission” will become “indoctrination,” and then Mark B. will tell us that our jobs as educators is not to teach a certain view.

    Thus, when a professor tries to teach, say, a queer reading of Moby-Dick, he’ll be told that he’s imposing his views on the students. In his mind, he may be passing on an important — to him, anyway — way of reading of the novel.

    So then we’ll be told to be “fair and balanced” in the content we teach: teach intelligent design AND evolution.

    Personally, I’m all for teaching both the methods of a field and its most reliable findings — which is another way of saying “critical thinking” and “content.” But it’s the cultural Right that has been going after professors for teaching specific content

    — Lion-O · Jan 24, 09:25 AM · #

  4. The issue of crying “indoctrination” is real, but it has also been with us for a while. The liberal “indoctrinations” of today got to where they are because they called foul about what had come before them. This is just politics as usual, and it’s a part of the package. I don’t think you’re right in applying all of the problems of cultural transmission to the “cultural Right”. Everyone has always been to blame for this, and it’s not any different today.

    — disagree, lion · Jan 24, 10:29 AM · #

  5. The cultural transmission of Moby-Dick would begin with making sure that students read the book, know the plot and characters, remember important speeches such as Ahab’s doubloon offering, and place it in a literary tradition. Then, and only then, should more advanced interpretations such as a queer reading take place.

    — Mark Bauerlein · Jan 24, 11:44 AM · #

  6. I think that the author is right in thinking that critical thinking is only 50% of the equation, but the other 50% is not stewardship of tradition, but methodological belief. See Peter Elbow’s essay “Methodological Doubting and Believing: Contraries in Inquiry” in his 1986 collection Embracing Contraries.

    — Sara Weisman · Jan 24, 11:46 AM · #

  7. But the ability to tease out plot and characterization are very low-level skills — the teaching of them would be more like skill-based teaching than “cultural transmission.” Of course, professors need to teach these skills in intro level courses, but once we’re dealing with upper level undergrad and grad courses, we musn’t identify teaching with instruction in low-level skills.

    “Critical thinking” is a paper tiger, and so is cultural literacy. Neither factors into real empirical research in education, which usually breaks things down into varying levels of skills and the factual information on which those skills are exercised.

    It’s just simple-minded to see humanities education as an either/or choice between some vague “critical thinking” and some even vaguer “cultural stewardship.” We need to identify clearly the professional skills and content sets a student of a particular field must have in order to succeed in that field. Being able to parrot “Shakespeare is sublime” is no better than being able to parrot “Shakespeare is sexist.” An English teacher wants students who can analyze the structure of a text, show how the genre and form are tied to literary and social history, and make connections across genre, period, nation, etc.

    It’s not my job to force students to appreciate a particular poem, play, or idea — any more than it’s the political science prof’s job to teach students to love one idea over another. It’s my job to introduce students to the ideas and skills of the profession and to give them the tools that will enable the students to make up their own minds about the value of particular texts, ideas, methods, and so on.

    — Lion-O · Jan 24, 02:02 PM · #

  8. I do not believe my personal opinions about this topic are worth anything at all. Even if I like them I dare not trust them—I have been let down by such personal opinions of myself too many times in the past. Therefore, 2 years before my PHD was awarded, when taking up my first academic job, at the U of Chicago, I asked myself what my mission of “educating” people was. I bought 75 or so books on the topic in the half a dozen languages I read ploddingly in, and interviewed a few dozen people I admired in academia. From all that I got about 12 utterly trite ideas. Finding that road a dead end, I asked myself what competent research methods were around for defining vague, general terms like “creativity” “educatedness” “effectivity” “expertise” and “quality”. Fortunately, the latter two had recently been defined well in extensive published research literatures, with the methods that produced such results attached. The expertise term was defined via a dual level nomination process and final protocol analyses of the second level nominees. The quality term was defined via something called “benchmarking” for all the foundational defining functions of any business, using statistical measures of process capability of repeated attainment of six sigma levels of missing of targets. A little Julia Child in the kitchen of my mind and voila—a bone fide research project over 5 years interviewing 8000 eminent people, 150 in each of 54 “orthogonal disciplines” cutting accross all traditional ones and defining who rises to their tops. One of those 54 was “educatedness”—315 people nominated the “most educated-acting people” they knew in general and in their specific field (out of 63 strata of society they themselves were chosen from, 5 for each strata). 150 of these nominees were given questionnaires and interviews on what educatedness was for them and how they spotted it in others and what good was it for them and others. This type of method does not produce Newtonian style physics results but it is better than bandying about my amateurish personal opinions on what I as an educator should be and could be doing. The results, 64 capabilities of highly educated-acting people, published in two books 7 years ago, astonished me and showed that I was woefully inadequate not only with the means I used but more importantly and dismally with the goals I aimed for. I really did not have the slightest coverage of “educatedness” going on in my personal life or in my research and teaching.

    Having had 9 plus years to contemplate in 64 levels of detail my failings to aim for and achieve educatedness in my own life and work, the very idea of amateurishly “choosing” or “deciding” that “educatedness” MUST mean installing a society’s favored stuffs into young minds and doing the opposite, un-doing all the unconsciously written into young minds stuff societies install—that it is these “two” things—is laughably simple, laughably amateurish, and cry-ably petty. It is also partial—1/32nth to be exact, of what my research found as “educatedness” contents.

    That grown men and women, adults, should discuss “educatedness” at such a sloppy level of detail, indicates no sincere aim to either know it or attain it. If you are willing to discuss whether “it” is one of two amateurishly-selected unbased-on-any-evidence common trite-isms, you are so far from basic levels of responsible professional functioning that you might as well join our federal government or run for President of the US.

    Note I exaggerate deliberately here because I was unable to change me without exaggerating to me how bad I really was. Only now, having made a little tiny bit of personal progress along the 64 capabilities, can I fully admit to myself some portion of how bad I was before doing the “educatedness” research above.

    We in the humanities continually—for at least 3 decades—lament all sorts of failings in our relation to society and its relation to us. We have to, at some point, apply contemporary research methods to demonstrate both to ourselves and to society and to other departments in universities, that we are serious about defining what we aim for, what we achieve, and how we affect careers, lives, and the societies that receive them. To just bandy personal amateur opinions on and on decade after decade PROVES we, as a community are neither serious nor competent.

    — Richard Tabor Greene · Jan 25, 06:43 AM · #

  9. I think the comments above that suggest an exclusive identification of literary or humanistic studies with critique has become strangely vacuous are right on the mark. And, in reality, it’s not clear that critique per se has changed very much over the course of the last two or three decades. This is because critique must always have an object of it’s attention and is therefore always dependent on some kind of received culture.

    In an older form of literary study, criticism meant not simple-minded passing on, nor simple-minded tearing apart, but critical evaluation. That is, what is worth passing on, what is worth reading, and for what reasons? The literary academy and the humanities more broadly have almost entirely defaulted on this particular task because to make an affirmative act of construction is to lay oneself open to the, I guess, humiliating preference for deconstruction or other forms of political critique.

    In our curriculum I teach both the courses on literary theory and a course on book reviewing, and in both attempt to get student to think in concrete and critical ways about what’s worth reading and why. I have to say that students find the classes incredibly important to them. Far from feeling like the web—with its massive democratization of product and opinion—has done away with the need for discussion of value, they really find it an important question. Why should I spend my time with this book rather than that book? With Mark Bauerlein’s blog instead of Moby Dick? These are theoretical questions, critical questions, and questions that involve themselves in the construction of traditions and cultures rather than simply critiquing them.

    — Peter Kerry Powers · Jan 25, 08:38 AM · #

  10. It may not be a professor’s job “to force students to appreciate a particular poem, play or idea” but it may be that professor’s job to explain to students why the particular poem, play or idea is considered a great poem, play or idea. It’s up to the student, ultimately, to determine whether or not he or she admires or is inspired by said poem, but in some cases the burden of proof, as it were, falls on the student — it is up to the student to give a cogent and rational explanation of why he or she doesn’t like the given work. I would suggest that admitting the “greatness” of something is not at all the same thing as expressing a personal liking for something. One can admire the genius of Milton without personally enjoying a reading of Paradise Lost. I think students are too often confused, and professors too often adding to the confusion or at least doing nothing to alleviate it, about the difference between preferring something and understanding something. I guess another way of saying it is that some great works — no matter the genre — are an acquired taste. I would like to see professors help students gain the tools to acquire the taste, even if ultimately they choose to dine elsewhere.

    — Epiphany · Jan 25, 09:15 AM · #

  11. Critical thinking doesn’t stop when “imparting the best legacies of the past.” It merely shifts and operates on background, helping one to decide which works to pass on and which to leave behind. A quick command of those judgments will be needed to respond to charges of indoctrination. Reasoned responses will educate in their own right, serving notice that informed opinion – opinion grounded in reasoning – trumps casual, shrill opinion every time.

    — wm · Jan 25, 09:41 AM · #

  12. Epiphahy, your initial distinction — between forcing students to like a poem and teaching students why others like a poem — doesn’t really shed much light on the matter. Why should it be a scholar’s job to explain to students why people in the past found a particular book good?

    You then draw a line between liking a poem and considering a poem “great,” but you never delineate exactly what it means for something to be “great.”

    I begin to catch your drift when you distinguish between liking and understanding a text. Well, now we’re in the territory of real scholars. This is why I argued originally that a scholar doesn’t teach that a poem is good; a scholar teaches how to understand a poem.

    Once one understands a poem, one might appreciate it more, like it more, whatever. (Personally, I don’t find an exact correlation between understanding and liking. I attended great lectures on Faust and Uncle Tom’s Cabin, neither of which I enjoyed during my own reading of them. Each set of lectures helped me understand each work a great deal more, but while I found UTC more likeable after the lectures, I still haven’t found a way to enjoy reading Goethe’s poem.) In any case, stimulating pleasure in the student is not the job of the scholar. I don’t care if students love Wordsworth. I don’t love Wordsworth. But if you’re gonna teach poetry, you had better have the skills to analyze and understand Wordsworth’s poetry.

    Finally, though, Epiphany, your post winds up conflating understanding again with “taste,” and that’s the real problem. Understanding is a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for taste. But the cultivation of taste is not the work of the teacher. David Hume’s essay on the standards of taste remains the single best statement on the issue, and nowhere will you find Hume suggesting that taste requires a teacher.

    — Lion-O · Jan 25, 10:21 AM · #

  13. Lion, epiphany speaks of the greatness of a work, or the “genius” of a canonical literary figure, and I don’t think this should be reduced to “why people in the past found a particular book good”. I can sympathize with the egalitarian intention here, trying to level the playing field of the “great books canon”. But I think, perhaps even BECAUSE the “canon” is sometimes guilty of human failings rather than true greatness, the preservation of a cultural heritage like this isn’t just a matter of “taste”. It can truly be about understanding the text, because a very real part of the text is the significance of its transmission and its place in the cultural memory. Or maybe a better way of stating it is, if it IS a matter of “taste”, as you say, then perhaps “taste” itself is an important part of the legacy and understanding of the work. The “taste” of people who have come before us isn’t important to teach as a matter of taste itself, but because it has come before us and it lays the foundations for our own time.

    — disagree, lion · Jan 25, 10:46 AM · #

  14. Wait, wait. I know that Epiphany wanted to distinguish between “liking” a book and finding it great. It’s simply that s/he didn’t provide any concrete means for making this distinction; that s/he wound up identifying understanding with liking; and that, in the end, his/her post began identifying greatness with taste.

    Look, I’m a fan of the canon. But literary scholarship is not just about the canon. To fully understand The Scarlet Letter, one must read plenty of the popular, sensationalist novels of Hawthorne’s time that used the Puritans in a similar manner to how gothic literature uses monks and Catholics.

    So a literature scholar must be like an historian, not limited to issues of ‘greatness’ or ‘taste.’ Taste, of course, can become an issue, a topic of analysis — compare neoclassical aesthetics to romantic aesthetics, for example — but the teacher shouldn’t be teaching her students to be neoclassicists or romantics.

    Of course, this whole conversation only makes sense in humanities subjects like art history or music history or literature. Historians and philosophers don’t teach “appreciation.” They teach students how to think historically and philosophically.

    Then again, I’ll take $60,000 a year to sit around with a bunch of young people and tell them to love Shakespeare. It’s a lot easier than teaching them to understand Shakespeare. I’m pretty good at booming “O altitudo!” in a surprised manner.

    — Lion-O · Jan 25, 12:20 PM · #

  15. Here is what I don’t get, yet: 1) why is it that the experience of estrangement is glossed as “critical thinking” (as if the Socratic “sting-ray” only prompts critique, and not also wonder or a change in perspective, which are both at least partly “aesthetic” in character)?; and 2) why is it that the task of preserving, say, literary traditions is tied solely to works of the past (as if cultivating the ability of students to place and appreciate contemporary works in relation to some version of a literary tradition is not something we also seek to do)? Wouldn’t it be simpler and more accurate to say that we should construct our syllabi so that they include a mix of works students will feel more or less “at home” in and works that will require students to undergo a kind of sting-ray, de-familiarizing experience? Then the more useful question would be, not whether our priorities are ideological or traditional, but how we mix these experiences, with what sense of timing, and according to what tempo, so that students can better appreciate what works they feel more or less “at home” in while being challenged to wonder about the habits of mind that tend to make up their “habitat.”

    — Tim · Jan 25, 01:38 PM · #

  16. Tim, I wonder in this day and age whether reading almost anything longer than a blog will be , for many students, a de-familiarizing and unsettling experience. That is, one doesn’t have to buy in to all the hype about a reading crisis to recognize that the nature of reading is changing, and the ability to read extended and complex texts has been eroding among college graduates.

    Because we are so habituated by our own reading practices and training, we often make deeply flawed assumptions about what students will find de-familiarizing. And, to be honest, we often default to simple-minded notions of unfamiliar cultural content. “De-familiarization” first developed among formalists as a conception of how literary language served to shock readers from their comfortable linguistic frames of reference. On that score, I think we often find that contemporary students find reading much of anything “literary” at all to be unfamiliar, defamiliarizing, and unsettling. Especially so in poetry, but in a different register in long novels and plays they no longer even bother to try and read. Rather than experiencing the sting of defamiliarization in Shakespeare’s Tempest, students are quite as likely to go get the Sparknotes so they can pass the test and even write their essays.

    In this kind of reading context, it seems to me that discussions on how to upset the cultural applecart on the basis of whether folks read Shakespeare or not are increasingly arcane and disconnected from cultural realities in which long form reading is taking place. While I agree that the task can’t be a simple passing on of received tradition, I think the cultural situation does call for engaging students on with the question of why certain forms of reading may be valuable, and thinking through what texts might be worth the time required for reading them. In other words, the philosophical conception of “The Good” surely can’t be “Whatever has always been.” But it also surely can’t be, “Whatever I decide might make my students talk in class,” or “Whatever an individual wants it to be.” To go this route is, I think, to give up on the question of “The Good” entirely, something I think most students are still unwilling to do.

    — Peter Kerry Powers · Jan 25, 02:07 PM · #

  17. Up at #6, Sara Weisman reminds us of Peter Elbow’s dual concepts of the doubting game and the believing game. She’s right that the argument about cultural transmission versus defamiliarization might be better conceived in Elbow’s terms.

    That is to say, professors should neither tell students what to think nor tell them what not to think (outside of particular parameters: Barnaby Rudge is not a real person, etc.). Instead, professors should introduce students to ideas and teach them the skills to inhabit those ideas and then to examine those ideas from the outside. This is what Elbow meant by playing the doubting and believing games.

    From this perspective, I can see Bauerline point: not many professors ask students to play the believing game when it comes to certain ideas in their professions. In literary studies, a lot of the bias comes not just from theory or politics, but from the New Criticism. Very few professors will talk about the author’s intention or biography, and this was true before Foucault and Barthes killed off the author.

    But while it would be good for professors to ask students to inhabit, before doubting, certain ideas, I still don’t think this is a case of cultural transmission. First of all, it’s about the ideas, not the cultures that produced them. Secondly, both the doubting and believing moments are moments of strategy, of playing dress-up with ideas. In neither case is it about telling students to respect certain ideas just because they are old and grey-haired and on Social Security.

    — Lion-O · Jan 25, 04:06 PM · #

  18. To paraphrase Ayn Rand, as a re-creation of reality, art by definition must be representational. Therefore anything lacking intelligibility is not art. This is hardly a severely restrictive standard, and allows quite a wide latitude in what is considered acceptable as such.

    My belief is that professors who deign to ‘question everything’ are in fact engaging in little more than agitation for its own sake, or in support of their vainglorious illusions. Sadly I find this affliction to be endemic in the academic community. It was true 25 years ago during my undergraduate course of study, and it is true today. I agree with Bauerlein that there is entirely too much of this sort of thing going on in today’s universities, and it rightly draws political fire from the outside.

    Ultimately a professor’s job is to impart knowledge along with the ability to think analytically, and that necessarily involves teaching certain classic works without deconstruction. While I recognize that there is a continuum along which reasonable people may disagree as to where this line should be drawn, be drawn it must if the university is to retain any measure of respect from policymakers, let alone the public at large.

    — Mark Koenig · Jan 26, 05:00 PM · #

  19. 1. Stewardship of tradition means stewardship sometimes of a tradition of dynamic change—the Wordsworthian “wellspring” idea, as opposed to the weight.

    2. Sometimes it is our job to make our students (and ourselves) a little less comfortable with our assumptions and output. Yes, by all means celebrate achievement—but as a stepping stone, not as an end in itself. As the motto over my desk reads, “Don’t believe everything you think.” I guess that includes everything I’ve written and read here.

    — Don · Jan 28, 01:51 PM · #

  20. Lion-O – I did not attempt to define “greatness” because that is a whole other discussion. I was accepting, for the moment, that some works are considered “great.” Arguing the contents of the canon — that’s far too ambitious for me! There is, though, a world of difference between a literary scholar and an undergraduate who may or may not be an English major (since we’ve both leaned to discussing literature). How does a literary scholar choose his or her particular specialty? Many many reasons, but personal preference surely plays a part. And preference comes partly from appreciation, which in turn comes from understanding — which may be described, in some ways, as “putting it into context.” It seems to me a professor should be able to distill some of that specialized knowledge acquired along the way to help a student new to the world of literary scholarship — or just visiting — to understand some of those elements in a work like “The Scarlet Letter” that are not immediately accessible to a modern reader. A meal of crab legs is a whole lot tastier if you know to crack the shells first. Sometimes a professor has to be the one to introduce the claw crackers.

    — Epiphany · Jan 29, 09:29 AM · #

  21. Epiphany, I agree with much of what you write above. I just don’t think appreciation precedes understanding. We wouldn’t expect historians to “appreciate” the topics they research, which can be dark and terrifying.

    — Lion-O · Jan 29, 12:10 PM · #

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