Shame

National Forum, Fall 2000 by Trout, Paul

Called the "the master emotion" (James Twitchell), shame, according to psychologist Robert Karen, "is the preeminent cause of emotional distress in our time." Shame is felt when one becomes aware of having unintentionally violated a social boundary or of not measuring up to a standard in front of others. Suddenly, one feels inferior and, at least for a moment, one's dignity and self-respect evaporate.

Shame permeates education. From preschool through grad school, students are constantly subjected to potentially shaming experiences as their limitations of mind and character are repeatedly and publicly exposed. The very inequality of instructors and students entails the subtle - and sometimes not-so-subtle - shaming message, "I know more than you do." (Law professor Edward H. Levi would say to students, "I won't keep you long, because I haven't much to say to you. I haven't much to say to you, because you are too ignorant to talk to.") And what could be more "murderously shameful," Frederick Turner asks, than one person telling another person what to think? Or using the power to shame - like the dunce's cap - to coerce behavior through ranking and "grading"? Education, for students, amounts to an assault on the ego, on the facesaving formulas of self-deception used to avoid shame.

Education would be psychologically intolerable had it not evolved ways to humanize and dignify the fonts of shame. Education swathes itself, for instance, in the ennobling trappings of religion (black robes, deans and rectors, a canon of texts, recesses, diplomas in Latin, "baptismal" ceremonies of installation and graduation, and so forth); the message to students is that education is a deeply serious enterprise whose endured pain and shame will lead to (secular) salvation. The shame of professorial privilege and influence is transformed into a mutual pursuit of higher truth and ennobled by such concepts as mentoring and Festschriften. At graduation ceremonies, students - cloaked like their mentors - acknowledge that the professors who once triggered their shame also redeemed them from that shame. And the daily interaction between instructors and students is governed by proprieties and euphemisms designed to soften or bypass the shame lurking in every pedagogical transaction.

Nowhere is the shame of education given more powerful expression than in David Mamet's Oleanna. Often said to be about sexual politics, Oleanna really depicts an explosion of pent-up shame that academic etiquette can no longer contain.

John, an education professor about to be tenured, is visited in his office by Carol, his student. Carol, wallowing in shame, confesses she does not understand anything said in class. "You think that I'm stupid. I know I'm stupid. I know what I am. I know what I am, Professor. You don't have to tell me. It's pathetic. Isn't it?"

John, aware that this is "humiliating" to Carol, tries to palliate her withering sense of shame - and his own, for having not taught her. He blithely suspends "arbitrary" requirements just for her; no papers and a guaranteed "A." Then, to dispel Carol's shame even more, John attacks higher education itself as a "curse," a method of "warehousing the young." Tests are "for idiots, by idiots," so there is no shame in failing them. Education's obsession with learning, studying, memorizing, he reassures her, is just a bunch of "garbage." A lot of kids would be better off not even going through this "prolonged and systematic hazing."

But John's "compassionate" response only serves, disastrously, to intensify Carol's shame until it explodes. By unfairly offering Carol an "A," John underscores his shameful, arbitrary power over her. By claiming that Carol's ignorance is his "fault" alone, John strips her of agency. And by announcing his contempt for education, he turns her painful efforts to learn into a shameful joke. As she puts it, by calling education "hazing," "you mock us" and "mock and exploit the system which pays your rent."

Fed up with being "insulted" by John's arrogant, pedantic, patriarchal, and elitist attitudes, Carol counter-- shames John. Empowered by her "group," Carol demands that John no longer use obscure words she does not know, and she ridicules his shaming power "to strut, to posture, to "perform," to "call me in here," to "grant this, to deny that." "You drag me in here, you drag us, to listen to you `go on' and `go on' about this, or that, or we don't 'express' ourselves very well. We don't say what we mean. Don't we? We do say what we mean." She laughs at his own shame at having been "found wanting" (thanks to her accusations) by the tenure committee, and points out that this "self-same process of selection I, and my group, go through every day of our lives. In admittance to school. In our tests, in our class rankings." Students endure "humiliations I pray that you and those you love never will encounter." By shaming and destroying the "vile" instructor who humiliated her, Carol expunges her own shame: "I don't think that I need your help. I don't think I need anything you have. You little yapping fool."