"Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these [students]. Stick to Facts, sir!"
Of course, I've tricked you – this is not a transcript of a speech at an MIT faculty meeting. What I find chilling is that it almost could be, if I didn't know it was the villainous, unfeeling Thomas Gradgrind, from Dickens's slender but powerful satiric novel Hard Times. And the one thing that must be said in Gradgrind's defense is that he has a fully-developed theory of education (or perhaps miseducation) to back up his polemic.
There was a dinner, a while ago, for those of us who offered Freshman Advisee Seminars; and we were invited to reflect on how the freshman year could be improved. I was surprised to hear, as the first suggestion, "Abolish problem sets." To which came the predictable response (I paraphrase, but fairly, I promise), "Yes, freshman year puts our students through hell. But after all, that's a good preparation for life, isn't it?" That's New England Calvinism cubed, at the very least. But what seemed to me to emerge from the rather desultory conversation that night was a profound drift in our enterprise. We agree, in the main, with Gradgrind's devotion to fact - it was said, explicitly, at the dinner of which I've been talking, that "you can't imagine without data." Which may be true of Chemical Engineering (how on earth would I know?) but surely is not true of most of the subjects taught in Literature or Writing or Music, to name just three areas at the Institute.
When, some years back, I was invited to be part of the IAP Charm School, my acerbic then-thirteen-year-old son offered the opinion that I was more suitable as a student than as an instructor. Well, now I have my Ph.D. in charm framed and hanging on my office wall, much like a diploma from some Caribbean medical school. And Charm School has become a habit, you might say.
My usual "area of expertise" is how to start a conversation, usually disguised under some flippant label. This year I offered a "course" grappling with "The Ten Most Profound Questions of Our Time." Trying out a rough draft on my wife and a few friends, they balked at the very first item – "Which is better, Coke or Pepsi?" "Feeble," was, as I recall, the kindest characterization they offered. I challenged them to do better, and of course they did.
By consensus, the best, and most truly "profound," question was offered by my wife: "What will be the five most fundamental attributes of an educated person of the next century?" Which leads me, in a horrifically roundabout fashion, to my real subject here: what the heck are we up to, anyway?
I have come up against the realization that everyone at MIT, not just we humanists (truly anomalous at a "technological" institution, as I have argued in these pages before) but everyone, feels somehow marginalized. Everyone has the suspicion, grounded in what they feel is hard observation, that "somebody else is really in control." Didn't Machiavelli offer the realization that power breeds wariness in the powerless? If so, there is much powerlessness abroad at MIT, these days. The "Hard" Scientists feel excluded by the Engineers, the bulk of the Engineers feel trampled by the Computer Scientists, the faculty at large, after the recent decision about Freshman Housing, feels excluded from power by the Administration. I can't imagine whom President Vest worries about, in the dark of night – but I'd wager there is someone.
But I have, after due consideration, come to a further conclusion. It is not just that we are, at the Institute, in a condition of Power-Bog; it is that we don't clearly know what we are trying to do. We aim to "educate the brightest young people in the world" – but educate them for what? Do we stop, ever, and try to imagine the world they will inhabit and (if past experience is any guide) tend even to dominate and control? When I asked this question of Larry Bacow, he pointed to the Report on Campus Life – which misses the point entirely. It is not "what sort of community should this be, ideally?" which is the question I propose; it is "what should we be teaching, and why?"
Absent a good idea of what our overall purpose is or might be, we fall back too easily on a sort of "add-on" system. Biology seems to be a coming thing – so let's add a "Biology Requirement." Our students seem to have trouble "communicating," so let's add a "Communication Requirement." It's hard to believe we will hold out much longer against the realization that the world is remarkably polyglot, so why not have a "Language Requirement?" Students have a limited pool of available time and energy, of course – but we have surely long since abandoned that as a limiting condition.
When, at one of those grandly collegial faculty dinners Jay Keyser hosts from time to time, I offered the basic proposition of this essay, I was roundly rebuked by a fellow sitting across the table. But when I, in reply, asked him to articulate the "clear sense of purpose" which MIT surely had, he found himself at a loss for words. I take that as evidence for my argument. We are, of course, compelled to fall back on our own education as a model, for good or ill: either to be repeated or avoided, in much the way a parent will reflect on his/her own parents, as models or warnings or a baffling mixture of both. Quick now, what are the most important attributes we can offer to our students, to prepare them to function effectively (no matter as what) in the next century, presuming we all manage to sidestep the horrors of Y2K? And dare we really assume that that century will resemble ours in any conveniently predictable way?
When I ran the idea behind this essay past one of my humanist colleagues, he rebuked me firmly for having given way to engineering-style thinking: "Too goal- or product-oriented." Well, I refuse to let technology imperialize the whole notion of purpose to that degree. Surely Aristotle and Aquinas and the framers of the first public education law in the country, passed in this very Commonwealth around 1638 (they wanted everyone to be able to read the bible and thus to resist Satan), and Cardinal Newman and John Dewey and even James Bryant Conant knew – or believed they knew – what an "educated person" was, and guided their notions of "curriculum" and even "pace and pressure" (that perennial MIT buzz-phrase) by that notion. Can we say the same?
I think I have a Favorite Physicist. He writes for the Globe and meditates on science and other matters; his name is Chet Raymo. Recently, he pondered an encounter with a Great Blue Heron (a bird that seems to engender powerful thought – Adrienne Rich has a fine essay on the subject in her book What Is Found There, and Mary Oliver writes poem after poem about these birds). Raymo, finding words not quite up to the mark (and not even trying, blessedly, to run the numbers, aeronautical or otherwise), falls back on the poets John Ciardi and Theodore Roethke, and even Chekhov, and builds to a conclusion that flies in the face of much of what passes for "educational thinking," nowadays: "Instead of putting computers in our elementary school classrooms, we should take the children out into nature. . . ." It is an old, old song, of course, which Raymo sings. My own version would observe that we have much to be ashamed about, when almost every single one of our graduating seniors has spent four years in Boston without once going to the Symphony (or even the Pops) or visiting the MFA or the Gardner. But then I'd just be adding-on more work for them to do, wouldn't I?
Well, as Whitman remarked, usefully, "Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself." And surely you have heard Emerson's rejection of consistency as "the hobgoblin of little minds." I would add one more useful apothegm, this time from Wallace Stevens: "One's ignorance is one's chief asset." But not, I hasten to add, when it amounts to an ignorance, even an avoidance of considering, the fundamental goals and purposes of the entire Institute itself.
I offer a final exam – but this will not be true-false or multiple-choice. Take out a piece of lined paper, put your name in the upper right-hand corner, and, in 100 words or less, write out the fundamental goal of the educational enterprise at MIT, at the undergraduate level. Make your answer specific and comprehensive. Style will be considered in the grading. No extensions, no incompletes. Ready, set, go . . . .