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Some Meditations On Knowing Too Much

John Hildebidle

Lawyers, insurance operatives, poets – none stand high on the list of comic figures. Since Wallace Stevens was all three, with considerable success, you might expect high-flown language or elaborate and incomprehensible word-pictures. During his life he compiled a long assemblage of what he called "Adagia." The ponderous Latin of the title – why not just call it "Observations"? – adds to the dread.

Sure enough, the collection contains a number of knotty enigmas. But surprisingly, there are some deft one-liners, as well. One of my favorites – I can never decide which category it best fits – is this: "One's ignorance is one's chief asset." I like to urge my students to commit that one to memory ("a fine aphorism to offer if and when you flunk a mid-term," I always say). But I think there may be a serious applicability to our endeavor here at MIT. And a sort of warning, as well.

Not, I hasten to add, that I want the designer of the next bridge I have occasion to cross or airplane I find myself boarding to be ignorant of the fundamental principles of civil or aeronautical engineering. I may be naive, in my way, but not self-destructively so. But we should admit to ourselves that we operate in a hierarchy of information at the Institute, and we like to think that information can be used as a measure of wisdom as well. If "ignorance" is taken as a kind of imaginative originality, then maybe Stevens was right. But how painful it is for all of us (we got here, and stay here, by "knowing the answers," after all) to admit our own ignorance. Of course we ask our students to do it all the time, to move into areas about which they know little or nothing.

My contention is that as teachers we may well find honest (put heavy emphasis on that) and well-timed ignorance to be an asset indeed. Let me approach this apparent paradox by way of the short-story writer and novelist Eudora Welty, whose book, Losing Battles, tells the story of a large family gathering somewhere deep in the South, to celebrate a matriarch's 100th birthday. Over two summer days in the 1930s there is heroic eating and even more heroic talking. Not surprisingly, the celebration has its share of ghosts, one of the most prominent Miss Julia Mortimer, for years the local school teacher.

Almost everyone in the novel has experienced Miss Julia’s pedagogy – not always comfortably or profitably. She remains a mystery to all of the celebrants, until one person suggests a key to the conundrum: "She reads books in the daytime." (I once heard Miss Welty read this section of the novel to a Harvard audience, in full pomposity gathered. When she ended with that line, it took some seconds for us to realize how deftly and thoroughly we had been skewered.) Miss Julia, in a letter written shortly before her death, laments a life of what she sees as failure: "All my life I've fought a hard war with ignorance. Except in those cases you can count off on your fingers, I lost every battle. Year in, year out, my [students] took up the cause of the other side and held the fort against me. . . . Mostly I lost, they won. But as long as I was still young, I always thought if I could marshal strength enough of body and spirit and push with it, every ounce, I could change the future."

Thankfully, few if any of us will need to teach under the nearly-missionary circumstances that faced Miss Julia; none of us here at MIT will encounter true and full-bodied ignorance on its own ground (I used to think those "Stupid People at MIT" t-shirts were comical; now they make me angry. SPAMIT is, as you might say, a null set. I know – I've taught in a public school.)

And at least on our better days we refrain from her imagery of warfare; but if we are honest we will admit there is at least an imagery of physical struggle that frames our daily work as teachers. Miss Julia goes further and further down this dark road, though, and from the faint hope of making a better world, she descends to a sense of Darwinian struggle. The novel as a whole proves she didn't do much to enlarge or deepen or enrich the minds of her students. But she did leave a mark: "She was pretty smart herself! She rammed a good deal down me, spelling, arithmetic – well, history's where she fell down . . . There's a heap of history I don't know . . .But she knew it all. She had it by heart." The fellow who offers this estimation bears an even more astounding mark of her impact: he always writes his name with a question mark afterwards. "Because she told you to?" someone asks. "Well, she told me not to," he replies.

Miss Julia, despite heroic effort, hard work under thankless circumstances, ability and, yes, sheer obstinacy, has (even if she has won a sort of legendary immortality, the Socrates or Louis Agassiz of her tiny corner of the universe; to which roster I must add the stiff-backed woman who tried mightily to teach me to diagram a sentence in the eighth grade) just never overcome the burden of her own knowledge. She failed, I think, largely because she knew too much, and was unabashed about piling it on the minds of her students.

Let me concoct a hypothetical instance from my own academic speciality. Imagine a student who has, probably with limited pleasure and even more limited comprehension, completed a first reading of Walden. Bravely, she/he admits to some confusion, and the teacher weighs in: Well, it will help if you keep in mind what stands behind the book – the kinds of things Thoreau had read. He was Ralph Waldo Emerson's neighbor and – in a way – student. So a lot of what he has to say is an elaboration of some of Emerson's more renowned lecture-essays, like "Self-reliance" and "The American Scholar." And even though Thoreau insisted he never left his home town, he loved to read travel books, so when he says, "I have traveled widely . . . in Concord," he is not only joking. He says he took only one book with him to the pond – Homer. And of course makes lots of references to what he could find of Eastern writing. Then there's Romantic poetry, especially Wordsworth. And maybe (although he said he never read novels) he had read Robinson Crusoe, too. All I'm trying to point out is that, in spite of his insistence on originality, much of the book he wrote is an imitation or echo of other books he may well expect his reader to recognize.

The teacher's remarks are accurate and would serve well enough in a survey of American literature, to open up the issue of what is new and what is old about Thoreau's book and perhaps even in American culture generally. I would suspect it is the sort of laying the groundwork we all do, frequently, in our various disciplines. But consider this "helpful" disquisition from the student's standpoint. Suddenly she/he feels rather a fool; look at how much she/he missed, how inadequate her/his preparation is. What has happened is that she/he has gotten the impression that you can't read anything until you have read everything. A less literary, but no less chilling (to me, at least), version of this was offered by one of my colleagues – "You can't have imagination without information." In rebuttal to which, I offer Albert Einstein's dictum: "Imagination is more important than knowledge."

And I suspect the motives of the instructor, as well (I verge on confession, here). Is he (I wrote the explication, so I will not play political-correctness games with the pronouns, for once) not in fact at some level maintaining his own sense of power? In a culture that is fundamentally a hierarchy of information, as I have argued MIT is, to know more data is to rank higher on the scale. And to demonstrate to the students how much you know is to remind them of where they stand in the local scheme of things, as well.

One modest personal anecdote – before I scaled the heights of academia sufficiently to win faculty status, and then tenure, at MIT, I spent eight surprisingly happy years teaching in a local public junior high school. One day I was doing what I thought was a superb job of explaining the workings of the Supreme Court. One fellow toward the back – I wonder what John Spaulding is doing, these days? – politely raised his hand and asked, "How many people are there on the Supreme Court?" My mind went blank. I knew it was an odd number, and could explain why this had to be the case, to allow resolution of cases. I knew where and how to find out the answer, and in fact pointed John toward the library, right then. But I simply didn't know the answer to a simple question. The class was shocked. It was my first year in the classroom, and I was terrified – surely I had lost all hope of "control" or "influence" or "respect." For the moment, I suspect I had. But I had gained something as well – a sense that my students and I were engaged in a communal enterprise, called "learning." Communal and continuous and subject to frequent refreshment, you might say.

Which is by way of moving from what we do wrong to the benefits we might hope for if we altered our approach. In the promotional matter in the Course Guide (check out the sections under the School of Science and of Engineering, some time. I did so only at the earnest behest of Dean Birgeneau) – what you find presented is something rather near that tired old "Star Trek" formulation – "to boldly go where no one has gone before." And of course that's how to get tenure, isn't it? This from the introductory matter for the School of Engineering: "Engineering is a creative profession concerned with developing and applying scientific knowledge and technology to meet societal needs." How bravely prospective that is, with its emphasis on creativity, development, and application, not on finding out what the professor knows already, from years ago. This from the same portion of the catalog about the School of Science: "Above all, science is elegant, beautiful, and mysterious; it ennobles the human spirit. It is a privilege, whether for a semester, four years, or a lifetime, to attempt to understand Nature at its most fundamental level." That is good, even inspiring prose; but does it represent the way we run our classrooms? Do we communicate the excitement of mystery and elegance, the tentativeness and acceptance of risk contained in that one word "attempt?" I doubt it, and it saddens me to admit it.

A teacher who has all the answers, always, does so little to make the student (who at best has some of the answers, sometimes) feel at home engaging in intellectual dialogue. Again I am not naive enough to think that we ought to spend all of our time in mutual bafflement; but I would argue that the class cannot either always meet on our ground. There ought to be time, each day, when the issue under consideration either has no immediately apparent solution, or so many possible solutions that the teacher's is no better than another person's in the room. It is at that point that the class becomes a community of inquiry, rather than a tedious, unidirectional information off-load. We must be honest, as I said before, and ask open-ended questions that are truly open-ended. Our students are after all no fools, and they can read our body language and our tone of voice when we are playing some sort of "deduce what I want you to say" game.

It is highly unlikely that Miss Julia Mortimer had any time for open-ended questions. She may well have been as all-knowing as her students suspected. They can recall only one thing she couldn't do better than anyone else: milk a cow. That suggests to me that her class should have met, at least once in a while, in a barn. And I don't mean to be hard on Miss Julia – a brave and effective woman, much less of a failure at her vocation than she fears. But it is a telling point, I think, that she is remembered (and with a healthy dollop of affection, if with some fear mixed in) for what she knew, but her students can retrieve only snatches of the things she taught them. She mistook – and are we not victims of the same misapprehension? – the acquisition of data for true learning. It is my own impression, after more years in the classroom than I sometimes like to admit, that the most memorable things do not occur there because someone (least of all the pedagogue) causes them, as because they just, sometimes almost miraculously, dawn. Of course teaching involves preparation, planning, classroom management. But in the end the credit is due the one who has mastered something new. If we as teachers always know it all by heart, we deprive ourselves of much of the joy and wonder of learning. And that joy, in the end, is ample repayment for the momentary discomfort of saying those short but significant words: "I don't know."

I offer the following modest proposal: that we consider it one of the delicious perquisites of our pedagogy to take the opportunity to be taught by some of the brightest people in the known world, which is to say our students.

In memory of Chris Christiansen.

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