A slightly more complete thought on dignity
In a previous blog post I discussed how popular humanist and neoliberal ideals are at odds with "drill-and-kill" techniques that seem useful in early mathematics education and language learning. I argued that teachers who inherit those beliefs around dignity, flexibility, and creativity might fail their students by refusing the seeming mindlessness or baseness of times tables flash cards, for example. I didn't provide a solution, merely the question:
The more interesting task here is to critically examine the feeling that making students do 1,000 reps of something is undignified, unbecoming of a STEAM-pilled creative free-thinking future middle manager.
Well, yesterday I was reading an interview with Guyanese author David Dabydeen (the author of A Harlot's Progress, my favorite novel1). And he said something fascinating:
And we had an art exercise book to do drawings and paintings and [my teacher] said, your task today, and he wrote it out on the blackboard, write out – I still remember the words – I have a dream, civil rights are human rights.
So, we had to write it out, he said write it out in the tiniest handwriting and cover the whole page. So, we spent an hour and a half writing these words, I have a dream, civil rights are human rights. And we all wrote and we wrote thousands and thousands, you can imagine, there were about 20 of us in the class, thousands and thousands of these lines. Which he then, to our surprise, said this is a work of art and he put it on the wall. Can you imagine? You’re a young kid and suddenly you’re an artist just by learning about this. And we didn’t quite know about the Civil Rights Movement, but if you’re writing one thousand lines on a piece of paper you bloody make sure afterwards you find out what it is you did, right?
This is another step toward cutting the knot. It was in front of us all along, hidden in the bowels of the principle that students learn best what's relevant to their lives. The thing we didn't see is that relevance isn't prediscursive; that is, what we see as relevant to our lives is determined by our interactions with one another (including schooling!) as opposed to some "inner self".2 In Dabydeen's case, the rote repetition became a performative act that anticipated and caused its own relevance.
What's nice is that the teacher doesn't actually say all that much. In other words, this sort of exercise is relatively robust with respect to the ambient biases of the teacher; it would be cruel to make a student write something horrible over and over[^contra], but it wouldn't brainwash them. Really, the main thing the teacher brought to the table was that "I have a dream" is something important, something that you could write on a piece of paper until it becomes an asemic blob and then hang on the wall.
And that blobification, the component where it becomes art, is another key. In the last post I said that 1000 reps of "I pledge allegiance..." would be a cruel and overbearing task, something that I'd be disgusted by if it were hanging on the wall at my child's school; I stand by that. The point, however, is to find a structure for these rep-tasks that will mitigate or annihilate the bad values. (We already have the principle "teach your students good things and not bad ones".) In this case, I think the art component of it partially overcomes the latent propaganda of it all, so the harm is mitigated. When you write something 1,000 times, you end up exploring the words: their sensory qualities, their multiple meanings, the wide denotative range of the word "I". In the end, the creation of conceptual art would make the moral of the story further from value installation and closer to a catalyst for the only thing we can ask for: an exploration of the cultural abyss of the pledge that's neutral (relative to the ambient values). Still value installation because of the content, mind you, but then prescribing content rather than form has bitten us in the ass theoretically and in practice.3 (It's not so fun when the prescriptions are "nothing woker than Plato, please"!)
To be clear, this isn't advocacy for solely the narrow form of Dabydeen's exercise (although I do think it's pretty neat). My point is, of course, that this art exercise from 1960s Guyana is an instance of a greater groupoid of exercises that imbue rote repetition with meaning and, indeed, dignity. All that's left to do is generalize.
A Harlot's Progress is a postmodern deconstruction of an Equiano-style "slave narrative", via ekphrastically extracting and reimagining a character from the titular Hogarth engraving. It's gripping but anti-voyeuristic, grotesque but human; it's my favorite novel. I was reading interviews with Dabydeen because I'm about to reread it. If it sounds like your thing, this is your sign — read it.↩
"Why don't schools teach us to file our taxes or ace an interview?" is a classic cry for help from the miserable student, and while I hate to defend the current state of American K-12 education it's a doomed cry for this reason.↩
I feel like I need to justify this, actually. I expect a criticism along the lines of "Yeah, education isn't value-neutral, silly; why are you so concerned with forms when we should just be prescribing the right content!" My response is twofold. First, that's the equivalent of claiming any given political system is good because we can just make the good guys win every election. Second, society is clearly more ethical toward students when those students are given autonomy and the tools needed to iterate on their surroundings. Obviously I'd prefer Bart Simpson to write "The woman is the subject of feminism" instead of "Women belong in the kitchen". But we can format education to better produce the Butlers who will eventually critique the first claim, and more importantly to me focusing on the prescription of facts still treats students like waste receptacles for the cultural shits of society, bowels to be passively filled with sludge (but at least the sludge gets asymptotically cleaner as history continues to morally arc).↩