AUSSIE

Blog entry posted January 6th, 2010 by Dale Worsley

I ran out of space in my last post (last of the decade!) as I was turning to Neil Postman for perspective on the problem of questions that can’t be answered. His book The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School actually offers perspective on both questions that can and should be answered and those that can’t and shouldn’t. In the first category, he told the story of Elizabeth Eisenstein, author of a monumental two-volume study of the printing press as an agent of cultural change. After a speech, a member of her audience asked how she came about her interest in the subject. Turns out her sixth grade teacher made the remark that the printing press with moveable type “represented one of the great advances of human civilization, almost the equal of speech itself.” This aroused the question, “How so?” in Eisenstein’s mind.

But the answer didn’t come that year, nor during her middle school years, nor during high school, nor during college. She finally got to it via her own research after her formal schooling.

I once heard the mathematician Hassler Whitney, from the Institute for Advanced Study, recommend to a group of teachers that they pause frequently for reflection. It seems like a good time take his advice, the better to ponder the implications of Eisenstein’s delay. For my part, I’m wondering two things: why the history of the printing press was never taught, and why her question was never honored – in school.

(Take a moment here…on your honor.)

Postman’s anecdote offers a perfect example of a question that should find an answer.

His wisdom on questions that shouldn’t be answered, at least not definitively, comes in his discussion of a Florida law obliging schools to teach that America is superior to all other nations. I suppose Postman objected to the content of the law, but he didn’t actually discuss that. What troubled him was the law’s effect: that it definitively answered the question, “What is America?” To him, America was great not because it answered the question of its identity, but that its contentious democratic process forced us to constantly try, but never to finish answering it.

“What is America?” then seems like a dandy example of a question that shouldn’t be answered with a sentence ending in a period, or an exclamation point, but rather another question mark.

Do I have enough time, Gina, to fit in an apposite anecdote? Yes? If I keep it brief?

It is the one I mentioned a few posts ago, when I promised to tell the story about a Socratic seminar I facilitated in which one of the participants proposed we discuss the question, “How do I get rid of my wife?”

I had just finished reading, at the recommendation of Tom Lynch, a question-asking colleague at the New York City Lab School for Collaborative Studies, Christopher Phillips’ Socrates Café: A Fresh Taste of Philosophy. Phillips had made it his business to go to public schools, nursing homes, coffee houses and the like, for the sole purpose of having groups of people ask questions. From participants’ spontaneous questions, he would mold a philosophical discussion that touched upon the mysteries of life. My friend Tom had shown me how to do this as well. I had to try it for myself. My first session, at the Lab School, worked out handsomely, and persuaded me to try it at other sites.

One of the other sites was the High School for Mathematics and Science, a mini-school then housed on the auspicious Erasmus Hall campus, educational spawning ground of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Barbra Streisand. The mini-school was being phased out, and teachers were looking for work in other buildings. It seemed an especially fertile site for philosophical exploration and reflection. I put a “Socrates Café” on the agenda for one of our catered lunchtime collegial circles. Four hungry, inquisitive teachers showed up that day – all male, I should add. After orienting my courageous group to the concept of a “Socrates Café,” I asked if anyone had a question we might pursue. That’s when one of the guys piped up with the humdinger, “How do I get rid of my wife?”

After a few minutes of nervous banter, during which I pulled the slot-machine handle in my brain hoping for a row of cherries to get me out of this pickle, I suggested that instead of discussing murder weapons or lawsuits, he should listen to Paul Simon’s “Fifty Ways to Lose Your Lover” and we should move on to the pithier (to me) question, “What is marriage?”

It was a good call. We contemplated the psychological, economic, biological and cultural dimensions of the institution, and everyone said they enjoyed our seminar, even if we didn’t come up with any final answers.

So here is another question to add to the list of open-ended questions that matter: “What is marriage?”

“But what does the question of marriage have to do with the classroom?” I hear some of you skeptics in the peanut gallery asking. “Does it belong in any curriculum? Is it in the standards?”

In the first place, it’s not the question of marriage that I was promoting with the teachers, but the process of pursuing open-ended questions. (Matt Copeland’s book Socratic Circles: Fostering Critical and Creative Thinking in Middle and High School, along with instruments such as Text-Based Seminar guidelines, Accountable Talk rubrics, and the Harkness Method are helpful in this pursuit). But I do take the skeptics’ criticism seriously. The question about marriage may not appear on anyone’s curriculum map, but does that mean it shouldn’t? If it should (and I can think of plenty of reasons why it should), but doesn’t, that raises another question: What is school, anyway?”

“What is school?”

A good question to toss about for the new decade, don’t you agree? The potential answers are infinite in number. They appear every second of every day in every classroom. Enjoy pondering – and experiencing – them in each of the coming enigmatic moments.