Education and the Human Voice

The only privilege a student had that was worth claiming, was that of talking to the professor, and the professor was bound to encourage it. His only difficulty on that side was to get them to talk at all. He had to devise schemes to find what they were thinking about, and induce them to risk criticism from their fellows. Any large body of students stifles the student. No man can instruct more than half-a-dozen at once. The whole problem of education is one of its cost in money.

The lecture system to classes of hundreds, which was very much that of the twelfth century, suited Adams not at all.

—The Education of Henry Adams

Preface

When I was fourteen I fell in love with Plato. I thought at the time it was because I loved philosophy. In fact, as I eventually discovered, it was because I loved dialogue.

When I got to college, I read Plato in a freshman philosophy course and came to feel that the pleasure I used to take in Plato was cheating, or at the very least childish, like counting on your fingers rather than in your head. Ideas, I learned, were pure thought. The fact that they were articulated and transmitted by human beings in particular circumstances was unfortunate and was as much as possible to be ignored. Plato, it was explained to me, had said something of the sort himself.

I now think that belief was wrong, that it was childish, or more accurately adolescent, since adolescence is the age of simple clarities—Euclid’s geometry and Caesar’s prose, one eternal love, and one flawless politics.

For I later discovered (or rediscovered) that no human endeavor is ever very far removed from a particular human handprint and that most human ideas and all human opinions are inseparable from the people who express them and the occasions on which they are expressed. To understand what is really said and meant, we must hear, at least in our mind’s ear, the speaker’s voice, tone, and inflections; the pauses as well as the words, the rests as well as the notes; and, if possible, we’d want to look the speaker in the eye.

I thought I should make all that clear before I began to make my arguments for the educational value of dialogues, lest I seem to be passing off what follows as objective fact or revealed truth.

Introductory Dialogue

Cast of Characters

• • myself, more or less

• • norman rosen, a comparable colleague. A physicist.

• • bradley, my nineteen-year-old nephew, if there were such a person. A sophomore at Darwin University.

norm:

So I hear you’re writing a book.

i:

Not a book, Norm. A cri du coeur.

norm:

A what? Remember me, your old friend Norm? The monoglot particle physicist?

i:

Sorry. A cry from the heart. A plea. To reform American education.

norm:

Yeah, that would definitely be worth doing. How?

i:

By bringing dialogues back into the center of American education.

norm:

Dialogue? Like in plays?

i:

Yes. And dialogues. Plural. Like in Plato. Walk me to the library and I’ll tell you about it. I’m supposed to walk a mile a day.

norm:

I remember when you used to jog a mile a day.

i:

I remember when I used to jog five miles a day. I also remember when I used to be able stay awake past the eleven o’clock news. Please don’t remind me of what I used to be able to do. Norm, slow down.

norm:

Slow enough? All right. Now give. What’s up?

i:

Okay. You’ll agree that American education is in terrible shape.

norm:

Absolutely. I teach at this joint too, remember?

i:

The question is, why is American education in bad shape?

norm:

Why? Asbestos in the classrooms? Rats in the lunchrooms? Morons in the administration? Brain-dead grant officers at the foundations who won’t give major grants to brilliant particle physicists with whom you might be acquainted?

i:

No.

norm:

No? Okay, then tell me, if you’re...