The Learning Curve

In class Dr. Sexson had mentioned this nation's aversion from smart people. "We want leaders who are just like we are...STUPID!" he exclaimed after lamenting the anger felt towards smart people. Dr. Sexson also jokes about losing friends when they catch just a whiff of your brilliancy and intelligence. This week I received in the mail Vol. 1, no.3 of Lapham's Quarterly. It is a publication that takes a general topic that has a great deal of influence in our lives, such as money or nature, and compiles, in about 300 pages, quotes, excerpts, and articles from a diverse selection of literature. This Fall the topic of choice was learning. The opening essay from the editor, Lewis Lapham, discusses the crisis of learning in our culture, and among this issues contributors on learning (and its efficacy, or lack thereof) are Thomas Jefferson, Sylvia Plath, F. Scott Fitzgeralt, Helen Keller, Carl Jung, Don Delillo, Descartes, Quintilian, and Buddah, to name a few. I'm about half way through and one excerpt, on children, is very relevant to our class. The except is from Maria Montessori's The Secret of Childhood, and was written in the Netherlands (where many fairy tales originate) in 1936. The piece essentially says that a child's mind is not inactive and in need of molding by adults, but very active, forming a potent psychic live within the child only waiting to surface. Adults and teachers take it upon themselves to manifest a child's imaginative capabilities before they have a chance to do so and adults "have looked upon such assistance as a personal responsibility and have imagined that hey were the molders of the child and the builders of his psychic life. In so doing, adults claim for themselves an almost divine power, making themselves gods to their children, and applying to themselves the words of Genesis: "I will make man in my image." Pride was man's first sin; his attempts to replace God have been the cause of the misery of all his descendants." These are awfully big words, but they have raised one of the more interesting points in all that I've read, except for maybe Booker T. Washington suggesting that slavery was, in a way, good for African Americans because it gave them an industrial education and a great deal of self-reliance. But, in postbellum America, African Americans started to receive a more liberal education. Motessori's main point is that adults need to allow a child, who "is like a soul in a dark dungeon striving to come out into the light, to be born, to grow, which slowly but surely animates the sluggish flesh, calling to it with the voice of its will", the time to externalize their internal, psychic self on their own. But things like fairy tales, which help a child to realize his imaginative capabilities through an agency created and passed on by man and not by the child himself, corrupt a child, Montessori argues. It is as if we force feed the child the apple!, corrput them before they have free will and are given to the mercies their instructors and teachers, made in their image and likeness! Like Francis Picabia said, "Knowledge is an ancient error reflectiong on its youth."