[MD] teaching Quality

[Platt Holden]

Ron:

Thanks for the excerpt. If academics want to know why they are held in low
esteem, Pirsig provides the answer.

Regards,
Platt



On Sat, May 29, 2010 at 10:27 AM, X Acto <xacto at rocketmail.com> wrote:

> RMP's 1961 paper
>
> an exerpt:
> "The answer presented here is in the disguise of an old answer, so
> that at first it doesn't appear very new. The problem being fought is
> the old problem that is renewed each time a student brings in a
> rewritten paper saying, "Is this what you want?"  The question seems
> ordinary enough to the student but every time one tries to answer it
> honestly it becomes a frustrating and subtly maddening question.  An
> instructor often gets the feeling that he could spend the rest of his
> life telling the student what he wanted and never get anywhere
> precisely because the student is trying to produce what the instructor
> wants rather than what is good.
>      One also notices that on many of these occasions the particular
> student is as frustrated and angered as the instructor.  The student
> keeps trying to figure out how to please the instructor and to his way
> of thinking, the instructor doesn't seem to know himself.  The student
> turns in a rambling paper.  He is told he needs better organization
> and should make an outline.  He goes to work, makes an outline and
> writes a new story that follows the outline but is told the story is
> too dull.  He goes to work, tries to brighten it with choice bits of
> liveliness and brings it in.  He is then told the story sounds too
> artificial.  He begins to look at the instructor with a deep feeling
> of estrangement.  He decides in his own mind that from the evidence
> available it is clear that he is talking to an incompetent instructor.
>  He goes his separate way with little accomplished and the cause of
> English composition has fallen another tiny step backward.
>      I suspect that the particular problem involved in this situation
> is a deep one, a fundamental problem that pervades all teaching of
> English composition and perhaps all teaching.  Because instructors are
> compelled to say what they want they do say what they want, and when
> they do, they force the students to conform to artificial molds that
> destroy ideas that students have on their own.  Students who go along
> with their instructors are then condemned for their inability to be
> creative and take a stand of their own or produce a piece or writing
> that reflects a student's own personal standards of what is good.
>      At this point an instructor's disciplinarian hackles can rise and
> he can say that in the final analysis he is teaching conformity and
> that the students had better learn to like it.  He can argue that
> students should learn to be creative only after they have learned the
> discipline, presumably when they are all through school.  When he says
> this it is unlikely that he is thinking much about the fact that when
> they get through school they will enter another form of
> work-discipline which will carry them through until they are ready for
> retirement and death.  The disciplinarian argument, carried through,
> seems to lead logically to the conclusion that the purpose of a
> college or university is to train willing and obedient servants, not
> to encourage the growth of free individuals capable of thinking for
> themselves.  But this conclusion is in such obvious violation of the
> whole American way it is absurd.  We are, in fact, dedicated to the
> ideal of free thought, and when we insist upon conformity to what we
> say or feel is good in English composition we are not following that
> ideal.  I am not interested at this point in whether this is necessary
> or not, I am simply pointing out that it is wrong and will continue to
> be wrong until solutions are found.  I suspect that this fundamental
> wrongness is the basis for much hatred and apathy that English has
> earned in the past and will continue to accrue justifiable hatred in
> the future.
>      The classroom dilemma of saying what you want without producing
> conformity is a dilemma that, I believe, has a solution.  The solution
> lies in a common word which on first analysis seems as simple as the
> word, "time," and which, on further inspection, turns out to be fully
> as complex as that word, "time."  The word is quality.  When a student
> asks what is wanted in English composition he should be told that what
> is wanted is quality.  This seems ridiculously simple at first but it
> is an often overlooked primitive concept that is absolutely necessary
> to put across before a student can learn to write."
>
>
>
>
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