This post owes a great debt to to Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. There's a long section in Part II where Phaedrus gives his "Two Universities" lecture, and I admit, that that notion has always stuck with me. What this is is an attempt to use that and both apply it to K-12 and hopefully frame some of what is going on in the larger school world today.
Here is the crux of Pirsig's argument about the Two Universities:
That night, for the next day's lecture, he wrote out his defense of what he was doing. This was the Church of Reason lecture, which, in contrast to his usual sketchy lecture notes, was very long and very carefully elaborated.
It began with reference to a newspaper article about a country church building with an electric beer sign hanging right over the front entrance. The building had been sold and was being used as a bar. One can guess that some classroom laughter started at this point. The college was well known for drunken partying and the image vaguely fit. The article said a number of people had complained to the church officials about it. It had been a Catholic church, and the priest who had been delegated to respond to the criticism had sounded quite irritated about the whole thing. To him it had revealed an incredible ignorance of what a church really was. Did they think that bricks and boards and glass constituted a church? Or the shape of the roof? Here, posing as piety was an example of the very materialism the church opposed. The building in question was not holy ground. It had been desanctified. That was the end of it. The beer sign resided over a bar, not a church, and those who couldn't tell the difference were simply revealing something about themselves.
Phædrus said the same confusion existed about the University and that was why loss of accreditation was hard to understand. The real University is not a material object. It is not a group of buildings that can be defended by police. He explained that when a college lost its accreditation, nobody came and shut down the school. There were no legal penalties, no fines, no jail sentences. Classes did not stop. Everything went on just as before. Students got the same education they would if the school didn't lose its accreditation. All that would happen, Phædrus said, would simply be an official recognition of a condition that already existed. It would be similar to excommunication. What would happen is that the real University, which no legislature can dictate to and which can never be identified by any location of bricks or boards or glass, would simply declare that this place was no longer "holy ground." The real University would vanish from it, and all that would be left was the bricks and the books and the material manifestation.
It must have been a strange concept to all of the students, and I can imagine him waiting for a long time for it to sink in, and perhaps then waiting for the question, What do you think the real University is?
His notes, in response to this question, state the following:
The real University, he said, has no specific location. It owns no property, pays no salaries and receives no material dues. The real University is a state of mind. It is that great heritage of rational thought that has been brought down to us through the centuries and which does not exist at any specific location. It's a state of mind which is regenerated throughout the centuries by a body of people who traditionally carry the title of professor, but even that title is not part of the real University. The real University is nothing less than the continuing body of reason itself.
In addition to this state of mind, "reason," there's a legal entity which is unfortunately called by the same name but which is quite another thing. This is a nonprofit corporation, a branch of the state with a specific address. It owns property, is capable of paying salaries, of receiving money and of responding to legislative pressures in the process.
But this second university, the legal corporation, cannot teach, does not generate new knowledge or evaluate ideas. It is not the real University at all. It is just a church building, the setting, the location at which conditions have been made favorable for the real church to exist.
I don't think that K-12 is the continuing body of reason... I think it is the continuing body of wisdom. Perhaps it is at the university level that we teach reason as our highest value, and maybe that's o.k. To me, the largest goal of K-12 is to teach our students the wisdom they'll need to thrive in the world. Everything else we do stems from that. Math, Literacy, Science... all those things should serve a larger goal of teaching students to be wiser.
And yet, today, so much of what we are focusing on in our schools is the "Second University," as Phaedrus would say. Yes, we cannot deny that part of the job of our Second School is to sort kids for college. It is only the Second School that cares about whether or not you properly file your fifty-page School Improvement Plan. And yes, we cannot deny that our Second Schools must make AYP, and yes, the Second School cares whether or not you use Holt or McGraw-Hill. But our First School doesn't. Our First School -- our ideal -- doesn't.
At best, the metrics of the Second School apes the goals of our First School ideals. At worst, the Second School distracts us... makes us forget what really is important to us. The mistake of "teaching to the test" is not whether or not it is a good test, it is that it reduces our goal to the Second School, not the First.
The hard part about the First School is that it's ethereal. It defies attempts to strangle it into rules and regulation and replication and simple metrics of who is and isn't achieving. The First School isn't accountable to others, it is responsible to itself, to the very purpose it serves.
But even though it's hard, in fact perhaps because it is, that's why we always have to keep pushing ourselves to find ways to serve that larger goal.
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