Jean-Luc Godard: “be sure you usurped
everything that can be said by silence“, a filmmakers advice to
avoid the dominance of the in principal non-filmic language of words
to enhance the language of image. Paraphrasing and applying this to
education: be sure you usurped every opportunity to learn without
being instructed. As to educate yourself, a researchers advice to
avoid being dominated by the, in principal, stultifying instructions
of a teacher to enhance the intelligence cycle of
observing-comparing-verifying.
But, despite this advice, almost all
films are driven by language and not by images
And, almost all education is driven by
the dominant master-pupil matrix and not by intelligence. The way we
educate people in schools is still based on the principles of
supplying an effective Fordist workforce. Despite many modifications,
the basic hierarchical principle remains that the schoolmaster
assesses the quality of the student’s knowledge and not the student
him/herself. This erases the individual student’s ability to
perceive, to assess, to qualify her/his own observation. Let’s call
this, the ability to enhance ones own general intelligence. This is
not new. Many people recognize have recognized the technique of
repression as a basic principal of the current educational system.
Many are opposed. Some even consider it a prefascistic education, as
it teaches a strong dependancy on dependance. Why then can’t we put
a halt, a stop, to this? Because everybody seems accustomed to it.
Read: addicted. Addicted to repression, to hierarchy, to
deresponsabilisation. It feels comfortable. Although for many,
teachers and students alike, it’s a kind of comfortability of the
uncomfortable. To educate oneself promotes self-reliance, reliance on
one’s own perception, and intelligence. We do this all our life:
observing-comparing-verifying.
Self-education comprises two possible
approaches: 1. the education of the self to become a self or to
become oneself and 2. an education where one teaches oneself
(reflexivity, and an ability to problematize). In this article we
talk about the second approach. Self-education is based on the
possibility to freely choose topics, methodologies, time, space, and
intensity/ quality of learning. That also comprises the necessity of
learning how to learn. Self-education is not a matter of more freedom
of choice (one makes one’s own curriculum, and therefore, becomes a
project of oneself), but it is about a programme of experimentation,
which needs to be constantly questioned for its specificity (what and
how), consistency (how to maintain motivation as desire rather than a
pragmatic/utilitarian interest), transformation (process of change
which can entail a radical shift of thinking patterns), and
availability for others (the questions of authorship and ownership).
To develop a machine of reflexive learning start with questions, in
order to translate to another way of reading. Translation is the
medium, the operation and the means of gaining knowledge, whereas
schools reduce gained knowledge to what is translated (the object).
Translation transposes something by changing its side, it transports
it, but it also loses something of it, or it changes that which it
transports. In order to translate, one needs to abstract, recognize
the rules of a system one is unfamiliar with in analogy of the rules
of the system one is familiar with (comparison by analogy, homology,
equivalence). Self-education should not be understood as a lonely
process. On the contrary, a technique of thinking together and
outloud should be applied. Training the ability to shift the
viewpoint, translate from one mindset (thinking pattern, method,
procedure) to another, one can do by oneself, but it is helpful to
use an environment, a dialogue or a collective process with fellow
students, mentors, collaborators. Not to produce new problems, not
that which should be problematized, but to produce new contexts of
problematization.
Much knowledge until some years ago was
difficult to obtain. The teacher was the guardian of knowledge.
Nowadays it is much easier, one can say, since the last decade, to
find the desired knowledge oneself. Google and friends opened up many
resources and will continue to do so. Paradises and jungles of
potential knowledge cannot wait to be used and explored. A necessary
shift from “learner” to “user” is underway. As information is
available and free – and we are also overwhelmed by it – one
needs to learn how to use it, because information in open source
doesn´t include the grammar (rules and protocols) of use. We
have to acknowledge that library, archive and other places of
knowledge dissemination have been until recently (information age)
the privilege of the educated middle-class. Nowadays with the open
source and free software movement there is a struggle for open
access, availability and computer-literacy which enhances the
potential for acquiring knowledge on a non-discriminative basis.
This means that,
Teachers can change from instructor to
facilitator. Teachers can change from better-knowers to
fellow-researchers. Teachers can change from master to
sparringpartner. Teachers can change from conveying only specific
knowledge to facilitating processes and methods of problematization.
A teacher can even be ignorant of the
specific knowledge to be obtained and still be an excellent
facilitator, as s/he went through similar processes to obtain
(different) knowledge.
The advantages seem to be many.
Much more time will be left for the
teacher to spend on quality, individual, or small group exchanges,
when s/he does not need to lose her/his time anymore in conveying
content most students can find for themselves.
Much more time can be spent by the
student to search for knowledge, read it, do it, interpret it, and
appropriate it, when s/he doesn’t lose her/his time in the
impersonal and unspecific conveyance of knowledge in classrooms. More
individual and dynamic packages of knowledge can be constructed in
order to fit this filigrain of diverse abilities, needs, and desires,
to this wide range of personalities that society consists of, and of
which a modern society with an ever changing market, will soon
desperately be in need of.
The typical school is thought to be
efficient, although I tend to doubt it, in producing standardized
knowledge, but it is highly inefficient in producing a specific and
individual variety of knowledge.
Despite that for decades the existing
prevailing education system has been in deep crisis (violence in
schools being a symptom of a stultifying hierarchy), this mammoth
called education has hardly changed its course. Why is it so
difficult to change when so many successful experiments have shown
that self-education isn’t less effective at all. A recent
experiment in a Swiss high school, in Wetzikon an outskirt of Zürich,
in which the last year gymnasium students were left to learn by
themselves, showed that good students became better while the less
good ones did not worsen, they simply kept their level. Many working
in the field of education recognize the need for fundamental changes.
Why then this resistance to change?
Teachers, students, parents,
administration, and society are convinced that the ONLY way to learn,
is when one is taught. One is convinced of the impossibly of learning
oneself. One believes that a teacher is indispensable. Because
without him or her, how should a student know where to start and how
to continue? In this system the teacher knows and the student is
ignorant. But it is the teacher who withholds information, conveys it
in packages. It is the teacher who controls the knowledge to be
produced. In this approach, the teacher not only stultifies the
students general intelligence, but keeps him or her ignorant. Quite
opposite of what we think a teacher does, or should do. This is quite
close to a crime isn’t?
Unfortunately the alternative of
self-education is alien to the existing teaching principles based on
obedience, discipline, and reliance on external assesment, which seem
to be integrated in society as good common sense. Despite the fact
that modern enterprises demand a creative and flexible workforce, it
seems unimaginable, for too many, that self-education could be a
possible solution to the countless problems schools have to contend
with currently.
The disciplinary, repressive process of
learning seems necessary, seems, in a system that lacks an ethic of
self-responsibility, in a system that denies the complexity and
individuality of appropriation of knowledge. It is evident that a
repressive system needs discipline. Therefore, it is not the
knowledge to be obtained that presupposes the role of a teacher, it
is the system to be upheld that requires it. A teacher is
indispensable to the rigid, classical structure of the conveyance of
knowledge.
The strict selection process in a
school proves to the market that if one sustains certain standards
one can successfully appropriate certain knowledge. It is not the
individual student, their actions, their manner of thinking and
maintaining a certain level of technical or specific knowledge, but
the assessment of the school, according to a standardized system of
testing, that counts. For the sake of efficiency of selection the
market traditionally accepts this repressive school system as the
most reliable. The resistant to change the educational system derives
from a fundamental belief that growing, curiosity, and a desire to
function well in society, aren’t stimulating enough to sustain the
necessary motivation that can help a student through difficult phases
in the learning process. Of course, the perspective of becoming a
member of the fordist workforce isn’t stimulating at all, even
though most of this type of work belongs to the past or if not, it is
outsourced. But the postindustrial society of information economy
needs other qualities and therefore promotes more differences of
knowledge and of gaining knowledge. These different methods fit in
the need of a society that is constantly under change and therefore
needs the ability to change. (…) The self-education approach
fits perfectly in a society that requires individual initiative,
creativity, responsability and an ability to change. Art needs a
strong desire to communicate something specific. What this
‘something’ might be, how this might change in the course of an
artistic life and into what means one might translate/mutate this
‘something’ to, and how these means might change in the course of
an artistic life, are all part of the critical, reflexive, artistic,
self-steered process. The self evident independence kept in the
course of becoming an artist in a learning environment based on
self-education, of becoming an exception and not a product of the
rule(s) of a school, is of crucial importance for the quality of what
the artist wants to communicate.
And the fun of self-education, the
independence, the strong reliance on ones own perception, does not
only produces better artists but counts for any product of the
education cycle as a whole.
In an art education community everyone
should be an exception
The institution is there for the
students, not the students for the institution, but the students must
work there intelligently and at full tilt. The institution and the
students expect a lot from each other. Not as ventriloquists but as
sparring partners.
I am of course talking about courses
for creative artists. It is better for courses for performing artists
to communicate knowledge and skills as efficiently as possible.
Although for these courses it is also true that a good performing
artist is at the same time a creative artist. I am not so keen on
these two sorts of course being separated, because in modern
performance practice they often overlap. But in everyday educational
practice there is a great difference between the needs of a
performing artist and those of a creative one. The performing artist
cannot and does not want to operate without high-grade skills and
knowledge, whereas the creative artist wants above all to be an
artist, whatever it implies. What is clear is that the latter
presents a product he has assembled himself. He is interested in both
the mechanisms and the route that lead to the clearest possible
conception of the product of their mind, and in the mechanisms and
route to its realisation. After all, laws and practical difficulties
stand between dream and action.
These processes are hard to
communicate, because they are fitful and always different. That is
what I meant when I wrote above that Education and Art are at odds
with each other. Courses whose staff think they know the professional
ins and outs of being a choreographer or director have no problem in
passing them on. But they are past-oriented institutions that
consolidate artistic practices rather than wanting to discover them.
Nevertheless, a course can have a great influence on a young artist’s
development. There is after all a difference, a difference between
having to invent it all oneself, the autodidactic way, having to go
without the confrontation with one’s fellows, and not feeling the
need for it. As long as the confrontation is not pedantic, meaning
stripped of any form of ‘knowing better’, of any form of
repressiveness, a young artist can accelerate his development by
doing, doing, and once again doing and by always exposing what they
have done to a keen and penetrating and direct confrontation. This
confrontation need not be hard, but should be direct, though
sensitive, gentle, subtle artists should not suffer a block as a
result of too much directness. The privilege of an educational course
lies in this fair, respectful confrontation.
(fragment)
Jan RITSEMA
Jan RITSEMA is an independent theater
director, actor and dancer. He makes his own performances and stages
repertory as well. He shows his performances mainly in Europe. He
works in the field of experimental and political theater, develops
research in theater and teaches in art schools. He is based at PAF
(PerformingArtsForum) near Reims in France (http://www.pa-f.net).
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