[MD] 42

[david]

Just some relevant quotes on the topic.... Obedient mules or free and creative persons.


Now, at last, the standard rhetoric texts came into their own. The principles expounded in them were no longer rules to rebel against, not Ultimates in themselves, but just techniques, gimmicks, for producing what really counted and stood independently of the techniques... Quality. 

...The whole Quality concept was beautiful. It worked. It was that mysterious, individual, internal goal of each creative person, on the blackboard at last."

In other words, rules are tools, they're not supposed to constrain you. And they don't really make any sense until you have something to say first. When you have a purpose, when you have your own internal goal then the rules become a helpful guide, a helpful aid, then they make sense. 



At first the classes were excited by this exercise, but as time went on they became bored. What he meant by Quality was obvious. They obviously knew what it was too, and so they lost interest in listening. Their question now was 'All right, we know what Quality is. How do we get it?'Now, at last, the standard rhetoric texts came into their own. The principles expounded in them were no longer rules to rebel against, not Ultimates in themselves, but just techniques, gimmicks, for producing what really counted and stood independently of the techniques... Quality. What had started out as a heresy from traditional rhetoric turned into a beautiful introduction to it.He singled out aspects of Quality such as unity, vividness, authority, economy, sensitivity, clarity, emphasis, flow, suspense, [brilliance, precision, proportion, depth and so on]; kept each of these as poorly defined as Quality itself, but demonstrated them by the same class reading techniques. He showed how the aspect of Quality called unity, the hanging-togetherness of a story, could be improved with a technique called an outline. The authority of an argument could be jacked up with a technique called footnotes, which gives authoritative reference. Outlines and footnotes are standard things taught in all freshman composition classes, but now as devices for improving Quality they had a purpose.Now that was over with. By reversing a basic rule that all things which are to be taught must first be defined, he had found a way out of all this. He was pointing to no principle, no rule of good writing, no theory but he was pointing to something, nevertheless, that was very real, whose reality they couldn't deny. The vacuum that had been created by the withholding of grades (another experiment he created) was suddenly filled with the positive goal of Quality, and the whole thing fit together. Students, astonished, came by his office and said, "I used to just hate English. Now I spend more time on it than anything else." Not just one or two. Many. The whole Quality concept was beautiful. It worked. It was that mysterious, individual, internal goal of each creative person, on the blackboard at last."In other words, rules are tools, they're not supposed to constrain you. And they don't really make any sense until you have something to say first. When you have a purpose, when you have your own internal goal then the rules become a helpful guide, a helpful aid, then they make sense. The students discovered this on their own. Well, not completely on their own. But he began to wonder why it worked. And he soon realised that this was no small gimmick.


The students biggest problem was a slave mentality which had been built into him by years of carrot-and -whip grading, a mule mentality which said, "If you don't whip me, I won't work." He didn't get whipped. He didn't work. And the cart of civilization, which he supposedly was being trained to pull, was just going to have to creak along a little slower without him. 

This is a tragedy, however, only if you presume that the cart of civilization, "the system", is pulled by mules. ...The purpose of abolishing grades and degrees is not to punish mules or to get rid of them but to provide an environment in which that mule can turn into a free man. 

The hypothetical student, still a mule, would drift around for a while. He would get another kind of education quite as valuable as the one hed abandoned, in what used to be called the "school of hard knocks." Instead of wasting money and time as a high-status mule, he would now have to get a job as a low-status mule, maybe as a mechanic. Actually his real status would go up. He would be making a contribution for a change. Maybe thats what he would do for the rest of his life. Maybe hed found his level. But dont count on it. 

In time six months; five years, perhaps a change could easily begin to take place. He would become less and less satisfied with a kind of dumb, day-to-day shopwork. His creative intelligence, stifled by too much theory and too many grades in college, would now become re-awakened by the boredom of the shop. Thousands of hours of frustrating mechanical problems would have made him more interested in machine design. He would like to design machinery himself. He'd think he could do a better job. He would try modifying a few engines, meet with success, look for more success, but feel blocked because he didn't have the theoretical information, he'd now find a brand of theoretical information which he'd have a lot of respect for, namely, mechanical engineering. 

So he would come back to our degreeless and gradeless school, but with a difference. Hed no longer be a grade-motivated person. He'd be a knowledge-motivated person. He would need no external pushing to learn. His push would come from inside. He'd be a free man. He wouldn't need a lot of discipline to shape him up. In fact, if the instructors were slacking on the job he would be likely to shape them up by asking rude questions. He'd be there to learn something, would be paying to learn something and they'd better come up with it.