More or Less (Part Seven)
- By Woody Brown
MORE OR LESS
A Seminar on the Massive Open Online Course
(in Seven Easy Lessons)
Lesson Seven: Wanting It
“One has but to look to see that, wherever one does not come by such knowledge by pounding it into one’s head by tough experience, it falls flat. It can neither be imported nor exported. There is no information that stands up unless it is shaped for use.”
--Jacques Lacan, Seminar XX
What does it mean to educate? Education is not the communication of facts from one mind to many. Education is something very different. There is no evidence that Mark Twain ever really said the following line, but the quote is germane nonetheless: “Never let your schooling interfere with your education.” It seems that MOOCs and their proponents have successfully allowed schooling to interfere with the true and difficult work of education, a unique kind of work, and one that cannot be streamlined.
The bifurcation of learning (e.g. schooling v. education, intellectual knowledge v. emotional knowledge, knowing v. comprehending) is not new. Most recently, we have the popular discussion of cognitive learning v. non-cognitive learning.[1] They are all different names for the constitutive split between conscious and unconscious. All of these dichotomies, which are structurally synonymous, posit a truth periodically acknowledged for centuries: namely, that there is a difference between knowing something and knowing something. That last sentence is an example of the second kind of knowing. You know what I mean (or that I mean) despite that fact that I have done nothing but italicize a word. I have given you no new, easily explainable information. Yet somehow, you know.
Knowledge and love are intimately linked. The transmission of knowledge does not occur apart from the coincident dialogue of desire, whether or not that desire is experienced as unrequited. Even Bill Gates recognized this when he spoke of giving education “to every kid who wants it.” How do we make a child want to learn? Is that not the final, central kernel of this discussion that ultimately refuses to dissolve? The MOOC now appears as something selling itself as education with all of the hardest parts removed, a poor, unsuitable substitute for education whose sole goal is to make it easier to want and more palatable to the public’s varied palate. It is an enterprise whose aim is not to lead the horses to water, but to funnel the water straight to the horse’s face. And yet the horse may still refuse to drink.
There is a word for this act of “wanting it”: transference. Transference, in short, is the presence of love and hatred in a situation that ostensibly involves (or so the student believes) only the transmission of information. She is a naïve teacher who does not admit the presence of transference in the classroom, and she is a brilliant teacher who uses transference to her advantage.[2] Information cannot be meaningfully taught without transference.
I understand that “meaningful” is a category that might be lightly termed suspicious. Certainly students retain information that is taught poorly—the way I formulated that sentence belies its answer, though. If something is taught poorly, a fortiori it is taught. And in any case the experience of being taught poorly is not identical with the absence of transference. You may interrupt me here to say, “Wait—I retain stuff that I read in books all the time. I would say that the book taught me something, but how can a book enact a transferential relationship?” Not the book; the author. Transference is a name for the formalization of the effects of narrative voice. All texts, whether we’re talking about a mathematics textbook or Ulysses, are composed of a constructed discourse whose voice produces effects (and, crucially, affect) in the reader.[3] And for the record we should not take for granted a student’s assertion that she was taught poorly. We students are occasionally fickle, not to mention by definition unqualified. The same transference that teaches also produces strange, sometimes violent, and often unfounded reactions in the student, reactions that may not have their origin in anything resembling a given professor’s actions or words.
The problem is that the MOOC discourse misrecognizes the utter crisis of education for impoverished students as the result of difficulty, which finally reduces to the unspeakable idea that poor people are uneducated because they’re too lazy to do the work. This is the hidden prejudice that behind the scenes unites statistics about education for people in lower income brackets in the U.S. and the MOOC method, which is in all respects a pale imitation of education. If poor people keep dropping out of college, the discourse says, then we just have to make it easier to not drop out of college. But why can we not make education, real education, the type of education that the wealthy get to enjoy, less expensive? We can, but we will have to overcome the subterranean desire to give to the impoverished members of our community an anemic, generic, ineffective substitute.
Our examination of the MOOC’s own discourse reveals to us that it even regards itself as an imitation, albeit not a pale one but one that is shining and sleek and skeuomorphic. Though the information contained within a MOOC is valid (or at least, the video lectures by President Roth in my MOOC were), they amount in the final analysis to very little in comparison to a course at a traditional college. They certainly offer no significant improvements to higher education as it is today.
The job of a teacher is to recognize in the student a capacity that the student does recognize in herself, and then to drag the student kicking and screaming to the realization of that potential. It is not the job of a teacher to be right always, or to be smart always, or to be peerless and profound without hesitation. It is the job of the teacher to make a student want to learn, and then to answer that desire with her own. The point is to incarnate in the student the answer that is already there. The point is to counter the desire for ignorance with the stronger desire to know, a desire that leads, in the words of Biddy Martin, to “hard-won knowledge and wisdom, which is much harder-won.”
That is education. That.
[1] See Paul Tough, How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012).
[2] “Advantage” is an interesting term here, one that might comprise both the benevolent and the sinister. One does not need to have attended Horace Mann to be inclined to think of several nefarious results a teacher might enjoy by abusing transference. This is a subject for another essay, but for now I will note for the record that this abuse of the transference (which is wholly and entirely the fault of the teacher, despite what may appear as willingness or desire on the part of the student) results from the teacher’s misrecognition of her self as her role, which in Lacanian terminology is a fatal conflation of the imaginary with the symbolic, respectively.
[3] Even dictionaries. Consider the delightfully inflected entries in Dr. Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language or “Authority and American Usage,” David Foster Wallace’s extraordinary essay that is ostensibly a review of Garner’s A Dictionary of Modern American Usage.
