Teaching Backwards in the Arts and Humanities

Teaching the arts and humanities in the United States is ass-backwards. Do students learn more by following a teacher laying out points A-Z in sequence or a teacher who starts with A, digresses to J, P, D and then eventually gets to Z at the end if you’re lucky?

I had both types of teachers and I learnt more from the rambling pontificators because they generated more “light-bulb moments” in their students. Learning is at its best when it is self-directed and the student synthesizes disparate ideas to form ideas and conclusions. In philosophical terms I am defending inductive reasoning and criticizing deductive reasoning, which more properly belongs in mathematics.

Guess which one totally dominates American education: deductive reasoning. The primary goal of student essays is to get to the point quickly and then lay out a logical argument. Unfortunately the consequences of this are superficiality and rapidly induced boredom in both writer and reader. It is not this way internationally. It’s one reason international students struggle when they come to the U.S. and vice versa.

Look at it another way… If students are asked to study a Shakespeare play or a “great” American novel, the assumption is that the “work” is the starting point and that the class – all reading the same book - will end up at the complex “theme” of the work. This is backwards thinking. Start with a concept that means something to the students – like vampirism (a metaphor after all) or teen rage or technology - and have them find it in many plays and books, not just one, from which they extract what they find meaningful. This does place a greater burden on teachers, of course, but isn’t that partly the point? To share the load?

I was reminded of this by the announcement that reality show producer Mark Burnett and AOL are teaming up to produce comedic videos based on CliffsNotes. First up: Huckleberry Finn, Romeo & Juliet, Macbeth, The Odyssey, etc. This may horrify English teachers but it promises to do what I suggested above - inspire students to actively pursue their own inquiries into why these works are classics, instead of passively regurgitating what they are told to say.