Worthwhile Learning Is Risk-laden, Failure-ready

Matrix: The Magazine for Leaders in Education, Sept, 2000 by Christopher R.L. Blake

One of the leading news magazines is running an on-line survey, asking readers to comment on teachers who help students cheat on state-regulated assessments. The issue driving this idiosyncratic survey is the alleged problem that students and teachers are unreasonably pressured to shine and that any performance less than stellar means irredeemable shame. The surveys results are less interesting than what the issue shows about learning and success in our culture: That the only learning worth doing is that which can produce measurable indicators of economic success, and that failure is too fearsome to contemplate.

Any faculty member in higher education knows this Zeitgeist well. Recently I was asked to overrule a Fail grade for an alum who graduated eight years ago. He claimed that the record would undermine his budding career in law. I should add that his transcript contained 14 other more impressive grades. Equally illustrative of the fear of failure is the plea from some students at the start of each new semester class: "Just tell me everything I need to know to get a grade A." There is a similar end-of-semester ritual, when students argue for grade inflation by debating the semantics of the fine print in their syllabi.

One cannot blame the student body for this reductionist view of learning. We in higher education have made the bed, and now we must lie in it. We have done this in two ways. First, by seeing learning success in terms of individual advancement, despite the truism that we learn nothing alone and everything via our interactions with those around us. And second, by playing the invidious game of pretending comfort in learning and by thinking that our discipline knowledge can be created or explored without risk or speculation.

Buying Into the Myths

In short, we have bought into the twin cultural myths of individuality and security (personalized immortality, the Greeks would have called it) without realizing how oddly they fit with learning. Rarely do we tell students that we do not know how much they will learn, that we cannot even be sure of the outcomes, that they will have to participate communally before they will learn, that learning may confront their status quo in an uncomfortable fashion or, even more important, that we all fail sometimes and so will they. Indeed, we do our best to exclude such shocking realities from our sanitized curricula and learning environments. Now this imaginary brave new world of learning would be fine but for one problem. It is facile non-sense. Any learning worth its name is troubling, engaging, shared, interdependent, and uncertain: It can be destabilizing to our present selves, individually and collectively.

To re-create this ambiguity in learning in higher education I offer two points. Pragmatically, we could start by abandoning the usual marketing appeal of higher education. So long as we depend on the modes of competitive advertising as the motivation for entering the academy, we are not being honest to our students. Let's stop pretending that getting a MBA will bring a smiling beautiful family dressed in cashmere, infused with a feel good certainty that "ain't nothing gonna stop us now."

Philosophically, there is a further change we can make. Plato's dualism between body and mind has been neglected since the Enlightenment, but now is a good moment to revisit it, at least in terms of a dualism not of our biology but our cultural behaviors. Let's keep schools, colleges, and universities safe environments for physical living. Let's also keep them dangerous, risk-laden, and discomforting places for mental exploration, where we don't have to be stellar individuals to justify our presence. Let's cut the safety net from below our students but help them back on their feet when they fall. We might then begin to make the academy a more secure place for dangerous learning.

Christopher R.L. Blake chair of education department and director of teacher education, Mount St. Mary's College, Emmitsburg, Md.