Primary Narcissism

As human beings we have a tendency to believe that the world began at the same time we became aware of it; we assume the structure that we discover when we are young represents the proper functioning of the world. This includes all human patterns and rituals but it even extends to such things as the weather.  If we had lots of snow when we were young, we consider that to be normal. 

We believe on some level that our parents were always grownups. It is almost always a shock when a child sees a film of their parents as teenagers full of adolescent hormones.  It is not always easy to stretch our imagination to picture our parents as youths getting into the same kind of mischief we get into.   To really believe in our hearts that a bigger context and time frame exists is a prolonged process.   Only after we have experienced several revisions can we see what has been happening: one simple opposition does not permit sufficient perspective.

Recently I was talking with an artist who has a reputation as a legendary and exceptional teacher. He said that with the way higher education is structured today he would not be able to teach in the same way he did in the past — the way on which his considerable reputation is based.   New students, he said would be unaware of this, because a new batch arrives every three or four years.  That time frame is exactly the size of their world. They, like all of us, take what they discover as the way things are. They would never know if anything has been lost.  They might, however have heard of his reputation.

For those who want education to be a process of forming the unformed, this modular amnesia is ideal. Some people still feel that students are shapeless goo able to be moulded and manipulated as needed.  Scholars have suggested that structured  education can be traced back to the training of warriors in early Greece, inspired jointly by the malleability of metal out of which their armors were made, which can be shaped as desired, and the structure of the military itself with its need for the rigid identity of fungible soldiers. The word docile is etymologically connected with teaching.

Our positions on such gradients as coercion, persuasion, deceit, example, encouragement or praise set a complex stage. We are responsible to the future for our current conduct. In the sense of responsibility, both teaching and living are related processes. “Our primary responsibility” said Jonas Salk,  “is to be good ancestors.” He does not just mean biologically.  The escape clause that some unscrupulous leaders use is that they will probably not be around to witness the consequences. The business model we addictively adopt for use in education today (personal profit, monetary value on everything, and kind of short term gains which push the real cost into the future) is very different from the traditional idea among, for instance, American Indian tribes to consider the impact of every act with a period of seven generations in mind. Addictions are short term payoffs with long term losses. “Our most important actions,” Tolstoy reminds us, “are those consequences which we will not see”.  Real assessment of our contribution comes after we are gone.

We are often asked to function in a world we improperly understand and conform to criteria that may be amiss. “If they can get you asking the wrong questions,” wrote Thomas Pynchon, “they don’t have to worry about the answers.” It is an uncertain world and human beings are increasingly uncertain about how they might be held accountable. Within many institutions fear is a predominate mood but its source in unclear. We might find the source but the source is not necessarily where fear settles anyway. A subtle bullying uses unrealistic deadlines to precipitate fear.

An unspecified nervousness is understandable for both tops and bottoms in this drama. There is an increasing desire to eliminate uncertainty. Often those in charge of structure do not have the wisdom to distinguish essentials or confidence in their own abilities.  More destructive still, they do not believe in the abilities of those they oversee, often in error. Even so they are compelled to act. There is a great hunger everywhere for anything that is quantifiable — hence the proliferation of increasingly rigid structures all hoping that uncertainty can be banished.

Twenty-eight years ago, in About Looking, John Berger suggested that behaviorists  “imprison the very concept of man within the limits of what they conclude from their artificial tests with animals.”  Now a few years later, those of us who are professional educators are complicit in the process of imprisoning the concept of man within increasingly rigid boxes. We are in danger of internalizing this process. As writer Sally Kempton observes, “It is hard to fight an enemy who has outposts in your head.” Short term assessment goals and quotas — now part of a contemporary aesthetic — seem to create more anxiety than any long-term effects of our actions. These ephemeral goals are near parodies of an invisible serious but postponed judgment. A brief look at the issues shows that a comparison of immediate with long-term assessments would result in opposite outcomes — success in one is almost certainly failure in the other. Kitsch is defined as false emotions masquerading as real ones.   Accountability can also have a similar dual nature, especially if its purpose for us is to cover our asses.

The attempt to remove all risk and doubt turns education into a kind of caricature of itself.  False discovery and false investigation replaces authentic search.  We need to protect risk rather than be protected from it.  Protection is sought against litigation rather than harm. I remember a study about playgrounds that showed that today, after playgrounds have been made “safe,” there are just as many injuries as there were before. The world has a way of getting inside the bandage.

An educational drift connected to administrative ticking of boxes is an education where everything is explained. Students have less opportunity to figure something out for themselves.  Both the teachers and students seem to desire this but it is not good for either one of them.  How can a student “own” something in the way of achievement if it is given to them completely?  It takes more effort from the teacher to set up a situation where students feel as if they have discovered things by themselves. Ultimately when achievement by discovery is missing, the process diminishes both the rewards and the chance of real accomplishment. The teacher and the student have to accept the concept of risk.

I once had a teacher who used whatever was happening on that day as a structure for the class.  It could be a fire alarm that had sounded just before class, a rain and hail storm from the night before, identical but accidental dresses on two different students, even someone entering the class late. He demonstrated flexibility in thought as well as flexibility of teaching. More than that he showed a kind of interrelation of all things, and a genuine connection of class discussions to the world in which we were living.  He didn’t follow a strict program but nearly everything of importance found its way into the daily discoveries. His approach allowed for one form of information to brush against other kinds of information. He brilliantly integrated primary and secondary experience something that I have since come to regard as what education should be. His daily exercise was to use what was given to him to apply the principles, concepts or skills he wanted his students to acquire during their time with him and to use these principles to illuminate new or unfamiliar problems.

Multiple choice is the ancestor of today’s ticking of boxes. We all remember that some answers didn’t fit, that if we were ever tempted to look at any of the questions from several points of view, the whole exercise quickly turned into nonsense. The content, which was different from subject matter, was a consistent drive toward superficiality.  The descendents of this horror around today are things like the size restrictions imposed on EEC fruit.  Apples are forbidden to be marketed if they are too large or too small. Packaging is a convenience similar to ticking boxes. In kitsch assessment, some things become invisible because their qualities are not included, or the flow of the process forces everyone involved to disregard what might be important qualities. By the phrase “ticking boxes” I include all varieties of inappropriate and time-consuming paperwork.

In the original versions of Cinderella, the stepsisters try to adapt their individual feet to the glass slipper.  One sister cuts off her toes so that the shoe would fit. The other cuts off her heal. The shoe fills with blood.  Neither walked very well afterwards.  In the early years of the industrial revolution shoes ignored any differences between the left or right foot.  Both shoes were identical, made from the same template.  Traditionally they would be soaked in water and then the new owner would walk until they were dry, at which point the shoes had conformed an individuals specific feet.  Now with standard shoe sizes, and designated left and right shoes, the implication is that everything should be better. Not necessarily. It is common for a person to have one foot up to a half size larger or smaller than the other.  Either one shoe or the other probably doesn’t quite fit. The foot rather than the shoe adapts. 

Categories give the impression that the world can be worked out from a single point of view, even when those categories cause distortion because they don’t really apply.  The implied value proposed by the structure of ticking boxes can lead to a superior quality being replaced by an inferior one, a kind of Gresham's law controlling what is to be considered important.  In some cases, contrary to the original intent, and particularly here, this tendency can suppress the specific and dilute standards. Suppressing the specific in preference to an average has its own hazards.  A wise person understands specifics and would never try to walk across a river because it has an average depth of four feet.  “Don’t live down to expectations” cautions Wendy Wasserman. Such a caution is broadly relevant.  The irony is that a stated desire for fair and equal standards can lead to mediocrity. Gresham’s Law, we might remember,  becomes active when something genuine is replaced by its imitation, a superior situation loses out to an inferior one. Fast food might be an example of Gresham’s law, or grade inflation, or the educational institutions increasing tendency toward what would have to be called “education lite.”

Since culture is imbedded in learning techniques and patterns there is some cause for concern here. Whether the education is reflective or determining, what new students take as normal will be perpetuated.  In our passivity and ignorance we are allowing others to design our future cultural climate. The unrecognized content of education may determine much of the future potential of human creative power.    

Much of my own teaching, certainly my conceptual grasp of teaching structure owes a debt to my own work as a sculptor. From sculpture I have adapted a number of insights, several of which will be useful here not as absolutes but as examples. I assume that all art forms will be informative but in different ways.  I do, however,  believe that sculpture can offer a particularly useful philosophical aid to teaching.

The first approach we can adapt from sculpture is that a single point of view is never sufficient, and in fact, can be dangerously misleading. In sculpture, of course, a single approach and a single point of view is not possible.  Multiple approaches is something which can be adapted immediately into teaching with broad implications about how things can be understood. I have come to believe that art education is useful well beyond art as discipline. It can be preparation for numerous other fields. These are insights to be gained as a viewer in the comprehension of sculpture and the way we access it. Circumnavigation is essential: as we circle the work we shift viewpoints

There are further benefits to those involved in actually making the work.  Making sculpture requires a level of skill from the practitioner in various patterns of thinking.  It demands that one approaches the work from different angles, to visualize it in space, to understand the qualities of materials, and to harmonize levels of work, whether immediately visible or not.

The second insight from sculpture is that a work’s apparent boundaries are not its real boundaries.  This is most evident in larger sculptures.  As an object in space, sculpture makes palpable a larger space around it. When we consider mental boundaries sculpture and teaching have much in common.  Curiously the views we are no longer are apprehending are still directly stimulating our experience of the work.  In each the boundaries can be very large indeed.

The effects of a good teacher, for instance, can linger for years, not just as a memory but as an active force.  The influence of a good teacher often exceed the lifetime of the teacher. Or even the student. Something that Josef Albers said to me some forty years ago is still actively engaging my mind  “A child's education” said Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. “should begin at least one hundred years before he is born.” 

A third adaptation concerns two approaches to thinking. Sculpture is one of the only disciplines that contains comfortably within itself two distinct ways of thinking: these are characterized by carving or modeling).  The exercise of carving is one of the few places in any discipline where reductive thinking is preserved.  Additive thinking and accumulation is currently the dominant mode of achievement in nearly every other field of study.  These two approaches represent two distinct types of thinking.  Reductive processes may become increasingly useful in the future, and if this is a possibility we need to preserve it somewhere. Education in general must be about preserving potential not eliminating it. Variety, we are taught, would have prevented the Irish potato famine, and genetically we know that alternative DNA paths increase the species chances of survival in a changing environment. Nature seems to know the importance of multiple solutions but except in sculpture the lesson is not really been incorporated into education on any practical level at all. The two alternative approaches inherent in the discipline of sculpture are akin to creating seed banks of potential in individual minds.  Specific solutions may be taught as formulas but far more important is the knowledge that there are different approaches possible. This gives hope in times of difficulty and instills a will for perseverance.

A fourth insight we can adapt considers individual skills not only as skills that combine hand and mind but also as metaphors or models of thought: mould making, to take one example, requires an understanding of those parts of an object eclipsed from a specific angle. If from any single approach you cannot see every part of an object, a mold made from it will not come away from that direction.  A mould is unforgiving. What cannot be seen will lock it into place. This skill is not intuitive and must be learned. Without an ability to see undercuts flawlessly a mold will never work.  Such an understanding, once learned, can be applied to other situations.

A further gift from sculpture to education is cooperation.  Sculptors tend to help each other, making cooperation an identifiable characteristic of sculptors.  The origin of this is surely because working with materials of mass and weight requires occasional help from others. Need becomes culture. The habit of mutual assistance has not remained with its original realm of moving heavy things, but extends into a generosity of ideas as well. Cooperation creates community. The thrill and generosity of a group of talented individuals working together gives everyone hope. Motivation can be contagious. As sculpture is forced more and more into deskwork, and required to share various common templates with other disciplines, this aspect unfortunately begins to fade.

Summary

Risk is disappearing in almost every educational structure and this is potentially a serious loss. What is called the ‘workmanship of risk’ means that at any moment, whether through inattention, or inexperience, or accident, the application of inappropriate force is liable to ruin the job.

This is an incisive concept that can cut through much of the confusion in other areas. The application of inappropriate force is a phrase that can be interpreted broadly: it may be contributing to an endangered research community, to the culture of fear endemic in many institutions, to the belief of staff that they are undervalued, or to the creation of an alternative reality by forcing assessment by means of inappropriate or compromised ticks in compromised boxes.

In recent years the visual arts community within higher education has tried in humility and cooperation to make do and adapt to structures that have not always have allowed their very best qualities to emerge. The future potential of a vocation has been subsumed by an educational model created for ease of management, one that endangers creativity and scuttles initiative in both students and staff. Appearance is everything. To copy the appearance of success is not difficult, it is not difficult to frame a report to make a structure look “pretty.” This is like allowing others to predigest our nourishment.

This is the Primary Narcissism of our current structure, a quality that is simultaneously natural and imposed. It makes it difficult for learning to be dynamic.   Picasso explained his work using a concept that suggests the complex structure that real education is. “ When you make a thing, it is so complicated making it that it is bound to be ugly, but those that do it after you they don’t have to worry about making it and they can make it pretty, and so everybody can like it when others make it.”

Maybe not everyone likes it.