Ellen Dissanayake, an independent scholar, has written several wonderful books on the central evolutionary role that art plays in human life. Her assertion has been that art, and music, and all the forms of aesthetic expression, are not “added on” to human culture, but are the foundation of human culture. Social relationships, rituals, artistic expression—all are vital to building and maintaining community. She explains art as “making special” in Homo Aestheticus, writing that ceremony, ritual, play, and other social conventions are all focused on engaging, stirring, and maintaining attention by way of special practices—something “extra” that provides pleasure and appeal. That “something extra” can involve style, or rhythm, or repetition, or other kinds of aesthetic patterning.
In a world guided by instrumental reason, ritual and ceremony and art have no place. They are, precisely, something extra(neous). But we don’t live in such a world, nor should we desire to. Reason does not account for feelings, intuitions, values, beliefs, dreams, hopes, love, or death. In short, it is an instrument that operates only within a very limited range. Why do we elevate it to godlike status? Because it offers apparent clarity, simplicity, and lasting order. It eliminates the troubling transiency of life and meaning. It promises knowledge that will never fail us. And it lies to us, and cheats us, and castrates us. Reason makes nothing special—in fact, it insists that everything is “information” of the same type. Reason “processes” reality rather than exploring and engaging it. As Robert Pirsig wrote in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, “It was reason itself that was ugly and there seemed to be no way to get free.”
Yet reason also provides a counterbalance for strong emotions and misdirected energies. It can guide us back when we are wandering the wrong paths. But how do we know which paths are “right”? Can we know? Creativity often leads us into strange places. To create something new we must often threaten or destroy something old. While we can’t trust reason, we can’t dismiss it entirely. Can we?
Well, I suggest that the way to align and balance our energies is through the discipline of “making special.” In other words, I am arguing that art is the fundamental subject in our curriculum, and everything else should follow it. Art as a process cultivates attention, provides a situation which demands focused and ongoing practice, and culminates in “added value” in a variety of ways. By “making special” we train our minds for focused engagement with any work that we may take on, we learn to value every new situation as an opportunity for “magical involvement,” we learn to value our own ability to make a situation or a thing extra-ordinary, and we add beauty and grace to our lives and the lives of others. Pretty important stuff!
So how did we begin to treat art as something extraneous that can be removed from the curriculum without cost to our children? And how do we turn school into a situation in which nothing is “made special” in terms that children can understand and relate to? The answer to these questions is long, but I will provide an abbreviated view here for reference.
Western culture has been founded on a fallacy. That fallacy has several faces, all of them created by Plato. The first face is embodied in the myth of the cave. For Plato, sensory involvement was confusing and inaccurate. Reality existed outside the world of the senses, and we could only understand reality by ignoring the evidence of our sensual involvement with the world. The ideal forms were real, horses and cows and people were not. This idea, interestingly enough, has an element of truth in it. We are indeed patterns of energy in motion. The pattern is more real than the “flesh” itself. The molecules that make us up die and are sloughed off or replaced. The “matter” of which we are made is entirely different after seven years of this process. We are not “matter” but pattern. Even the “matter” that builds us up out of nothing is mostly nothing itself. Most of it is empty space. Atoms are tiny packets of energy vibrating. We are patterns of vibratory energy.
Plato’s mistake was to assert a perfect pattern that existed outside the warp and weave of the sensory world. There is no such pattern. The universe is infinitely creative. Each person, each creature, each society is unique. Everything is evolving, changing, and becoming. The universe is moving with the purpose of an artist towards a coherent, but unforeseen, conclusion. But the sensory is our gateway. We should attend with great vigor to the world of sensation and perception, and cultivate our relationship with it. If we are true to this practice, it will lead us to knowledge. This was Wordsworth’s insight. For him, “the mighty world of eye and ear” was the source of understanding. Shunning it, and removing ourselves from it, we cut ourselves off from nourishment and wither away.
The second face of the Platonic fallacy was this: emotion is flawed and should be held in check. This was the story of the two horses that pull the chariot of the soul. One was white and strong and good, one was black and strong and unwieldy. The black horse leads us astray down corridors of lust and desire and emotional response. The white horse holds back and controls and leads us to angelic righteousness. Blaaauugghhh. What a bunch of simplistic bullshit. Emotions provide our basis for relating to other people. Only by empathy and imagination can we identify our own purposes and plights with those of others. We must literally “feel our way” toward an understanding of those who are different than us. Feelings and beliefs and hopes and dreams provide the desire, the impulse, to do great things. Reason tells us that we are small, and unimportant in the vast scheme of things, and unable to give great gifts to the world. Our feelings, unshaped but powerful, lead us to act in gracious and giving ways. The “little unremembered acts of kindness and of love” are attributable to our feelings and emotions and connection to others. They do not exist in a world in which everyone “holds back” with rational poise and deliberation. Reason dictates that we save ourselves. The unknown forces within us compel us to try to save others, and to save the world. Which is the larger and more meaningful?
The third face of the Platonic fallacy is related to this second face. Here, Plato asserts that rhetoric, or the interested use of language, is like emotion itself. It is to be avoided, shunned, and, if possible, outlawed. This is the impulse that made Plato both fear and trivialize poets so much that he expelled them from the Republic. They speak in persuasive language without absolute knowledge, and so they are likely to mislead us, like the black horse of the soul. Funny. I think we all speak in persuasive language without absolute knowledge. Don’t we?
So the fallacy of Western Culture, and Western educational practice, centers on ideas of “pure knowledge” that transcends the sensory world, “holding back” from sensory and emotional enjoyment, valuing only “fact” and “truth” and refusing to participate in persuasion. In short, we are in the business of cultivating indifference and alienation. Hmmm. Why would we want to do that? Interestingly enough, it was the persuasion of Plato—his stories—that helped get us into this mess. So perhaps he was right about rhetoric. But the goal is not to let bad persuasion to sneak into the world as “truth” like a wolf in sheep’s clothing. And only by studying rhetoric, by understanding its workings, and by making good use of it, can we reach that goal.
In the Platonic world, “making special” would be a travesty. It would be ornamental, and probably misleading. The work of the black horse. Rather than using art to elevate and engage, he would insist on flat, simple language employed in dialectic in the name of “Truth.” By telling persuasive stories, he taught us that we should never tell persuasive stories. Weird.
In our world today, however, we have a strange paradox at work. In the domain of education, we teach silence and orderly behavior and facts and information and “objectivity.” In the world of pop culture, in the meantime, suasion rules absolute. Celebrities live fictional lives; advertising encourages us to live fictional lives too. Facts rarely take up residence in the “Now . . . This” world that Neil Postman described in Amusing Ourselves to Death. Everything is appearance. Everything is style (mawkish and superficial, but “style” in the most simplistic sense). Where is the “rigor” of long school days and boring exercises? Where is the “purity” of knowledge being transmitted by teachers? Nowhere. And kids recognize the disconnect and disdain schools for it. Our schools are so far out of touch with reality that it is flabbergasting!
More importantly, however, where is the subversive edge of education that might provide us with the tools to counteract a culture that has gotten out of control? Where is the critical thinking that can only come with perspective and with an awareness that everything’s rhetorical? We live in a world of “symbolic action” (Kenneth Burke’s term for rhetoric), and we must know how to operate in such a world. If we don’t understand the tools of rhetoric, we are going to be manipulated and managed in ways that are completely inappropriate.
Schools need to be “making special” too—and “made special” for our kids. My son has had a lousy experience in school. Teachers that are boring, and disconnected from their students. A curriculum that is moribund, and rarely if ever connected to the life that he expects to lead. A daily structure that is stifling to creativity. Only the disruptive and the subversive teachers and students survive and encourage survival in this educational wasteland. One teacher of World Civilization made a difference for Luke. He was engaged with students from day one, and would not let them avoid interaction or active participation in class. He gave them hands-on learning activities to do and to share with the others in class. He had them perform skits in costume about historical periods. He brought enthusiasm and excitement about learning to the classroom each and every day. And my son, who has struggled mightily in school, missed making an A by a couple of points.
Energize. Engage. Challenge. Connect. Education needs to focus on these things instead of testing results. The results will come when students care enough to learn. BUT IF STUDENTS DON’T CARE, NO LEARNING WILL TAKE PLACE. Education, in a democratic culture, is partly about helping students LEARN TO CARE—to learn to be interested, how to have interests. And we don’t teach this now, except accidentally.
Everything is Artful. And that is good, as long as we help people learn how to cultivate it and live it well. Life is about attention, and practice, and caring, and craft, and sharing what we make and what we are with others. Life is Art. But if we don’t help our kids to live with this awareness, then life becomes artificial, inauthentic, and stifling. Beauty is all around us; it is not limited to the superficial beauty of supermodels or sports cars or Las Vegas casinos. The painted beauty of the whore is all around us too. But we must discern between deeper, richer, more engaging beauties and that painted, cracked “beauty.” And only an education of the mind, an extension and refinement of the sensibilities, can help our kids recognize and value the difference.
No. They recognize and value the difference when they enter the world naked. The problem is different. Life has been cheapened even as it has become suffocatingly expensive. Education has become pointless. Work has become “making money.” Fame has become prostitution. And our kids know shit when they see it. They are contemptuous of our schools, of our values, and of us. And it’s because we have lost our center. We don’t make things anymore, we simply consume them. We are giant mouths gobbling and smacking our giant lips. We are Pac Men swallowing mass-produced dots in the market mazes of our consumer world. Where is the sense of responsibility that comes with making things with our own hands and guaranteeing them as good for our neighbors? Where is the pride of making something that is functional and beautiful and enduring? Where is the patience of the craftsman at work? Where is the joy of completing good work and sharing it with others?
All of these things are still here, still alive among us. But our cultural and educational practices militate against their survival. And that is wrong. Our children should be nurtured and sustained as makers, not as consumers. They should learn early how to “make special,” and they should have ample opportunities to use their precious knowledge. “Making Special” is the same thing as making meaningful. Life requires it. And we must respect it and teach it.
With that in mind, I will offer a different view of the curriculum that I hope will be helpful as a starting point for change. In essence, I think that we should create focus areas as follows: languages and symbolic structures (including mathematics), artistic practices, historical contexts, inquiry, and rhetoric. These areas should all be explored at every stage of education, but obviously they will generally be taught in this order:
I. Languages, symbolic structures, historical contexts, and artistic practices
1. Languages and symbolic structures. First, students should learn at least two languages in elementary school. They should immediately develop the comparative view (of language, of cultural understandings, of “realities”) that comes with understanding two languages. This will sustain and fuel their interest and inquiry in other areas of learning. Second, they should learn math as a language of relationship and not simply as a “skill.” Mathematics is a language for describing numeric relationships, and it is vital to broader understanding. It should be taught that way, and not as a dull, repetitive practice. Children should also be taught the power of symbols early on: flags, advertising jingles, images of beauty and so on. How do these symbols influence us? How do they make us feel? How can we manage and make use of symbols?
2. Historical contexts. Students need to understand early on that everything has a history. Where did this (whatever it is) come from? Why did it turn out the way that it did? Process orientation is built into the understanding of history. We must think of everything as an unfolding process of making meaning (which is artful). Help students to see science, math, philosophy, the human story, as embedded in and emerging from historical circumstances. In elementary school, don’t teach compartmentalized “units” of factual history. Teach history as the drama of human experience, starting with TODAY and working backward. Engage students with the issues we face NOW and then work our way backward into the origins of these issues. This makes history interesting, relevant, and generative as a field of inquiry. They should certainly learn about Western Culture, but they should also learn about Eastern culture. Comparison is the key to broader understanding.
3. Artistic Practices. From the very earliest possible age, students should be engaged in making beautiful things. Every student should have the opportunity to draw, to paint, to sculpt, to work with wood and other materials, and to make music. Acting out and skits should be regular parts of the school regimen. Imagination is fed by the work of making stories come to life. Students should be able to share their work and to present it formally. By doing so, they learn to be responsible and to seek excellence (as well as approval). They should be able to learn patience as they work without distraction EARLY IN THEIR LIVES. Once they have learned the pleasures of slow and deliberate making, they will be able to withstand the temptations of instant gratification more easily and enduringly. Every subject should be taught as an unfolding process of making meaning; the students should learn to see themselves as participants in that amazing process—not simply consumers of it.
Obviously, at the elementary and every level, active participation and DOING are vital to this curricular approach. Teachers are leaders and facilitators—not “subject authorities.” The teacher’s job is to create an environment that is interesting, challenging, and creativity-generating. The student’s job is to try, to participate, and to develop his or her own interests and enthusiasms.
Self-esteem comes from being challenged and rising to the challenge—not from being told “that’s good, honey” when no effort has been put forward. Bullshit remains bullshit, no matter what we try to call it. Real respect for others means demanding that they be and do their best. Coddling is nonsense.
So the “making special” curriculum centers on:
PROCESS
MAKING
HISTORICAL UNDERSTANDING
DOING AND EXPLORING
Service to others is also important. Each student will be required to take on a service project each year. In addition, each student will do one full YEAR of service between high school and college. This will provide a labor force for good works that is unbelievable!
Instead of adding these elements on at the college level, they will be “built in” to the ways in which our young people see the world.
We need to refute the Platonic tradition. Truth is not pre-existent. Life is evolving and changing. Learning is central to life, and dynamic. Making and making meaning are the core activities of human beings. Rather than teaching “truths” we need to teach modes of making, modes of inquiring, modes of exploring, modes of interpreting. Everything is process, and performance, and revision. Sharing and connecting is vital to our well-being. So education and our philosophy of teaching and learning must reflect these things.
