Alister McGrath comments on C.S. Lewis’s teaching style:
Lewis did not see it as his responsibility to impart information to his students. He resented and resisted what some then called the ‘gramophone’ model of tuition, in which the tutor simply imparted the knowledge that the student had so signally failed to discover for himself.
Lewis saw himself as enabling the student to develop the skills necessary to uncover and evaluate such knowledge for himself.
–C.S. Lewis – A Life, p. 164
This type of teaching philosophy is something I contend for, and something I’ve had to debate and defend for the past couple of years in my studies in Instructional Technology. I always go back to a Wendell Berry quote I came across a while back:
‘Information,’ which once meant that which forms or fashions from within, now means merely ‘data.’ However organized this data may be, it is not shapely or formal or in the true sense in-forming. It is not present where it is needed; if you have to ‘access’ it, you don’t have it. Whereas knowledge moves and forms acts, information is inert. You cannot imagine a debater or a quarterback or a musician performing by ‘accessing information.’ A computer chock full of such information is no more admirable than a head or a book chock full of it (Another Turn of the Crank, p. 96).
My contention is that the true teacher, that is the good teacher, is not someone who sees his or her task as merely imparting information; rather, he or she is the one who sees his or her task as the work of in-forming – that is, actually working to inwardly form the student. Another way of saying that is this: the teacher’s job is not simply to teach the students what to think, but to teach them how to think. In practice, this takes a thousand different forms. For the Literature professor, for example, it means that you don’t simply make your students learn facts about Shakespeare and his plays and sonnets; rather, you teach them to read Shakespeare profitably for themselves. You want them to be able to pick up Hamlet for themselves, even if it’s a year from now, and actually be able to read it and enjoy it. I am having almost daily discussions with a young friend of mine who is taking a summer Lit course at the moment. His daily quizzes involve the remembering of names and places primarily. This is precisely what McGrath says Lewis was against. Teach them to engage the story, not to remember facts about the work. Stop niggling over the data and teach them to engage the actual narrative.
Another example: For the Bible teacher, this means that you aren’t content to teach content; instead you want to impart your students with tools that will enable them to engage the Bible when you are not around. I teach a Sunday School class on a semi-regular basis. I am not the least concerned whether my students can recite all 66 books of the Bible. If they can, that’s great. I’ve never asked them to. I’m more worried about their grasp of the narrative of the Scriptures and their engagement with the Law and the Gospel. If they get those points down, they will essentially be able to engage any passage they come across in their own reading.
I’m tempted to give more examples of how this can play out, but Literature and Bible are my own areas of interest. I’ll leave it to others to make applications in those areas for the time being.
The world around us is in-forming us. Movies are catechisms for our imaginations and impulses. Technology is shaping the way we learn and look at the world. If teachers, especially Christian teachers (and preachers), are content to see themselves as so many shovelers of data, then we are really only digging a hole. If we actually are shoveling something, it probably doesn’t smell too good in terms of pedagogical aroma. Don’t be content to inform. in-FORM.
I like the approach very much. Would you suggest reading a physical or literal book over a kindle with the easy access bookstore? I tend to do both types of reading….I have read in a earlier post, you like to read the puritan on the kindle. I also see this as handy, is there any cons of reading from a electronic device. I personally like the feel of a book but I do see that kindle books save money.
Personally I would always choose a physical book over Kindle or any other form of electronic reader. I use a Kindle purely for economic and pragmatic reasons. I only use Kindle to read books that are free or very cheap in that format. I’ve never paid more than 0.99 for a book on Kindle. If I am going to spend a significant amount of money, I am always going to choose a paper copy.
So the positive element (the ‘pro’) is that you can get old books at a no, or very low, cost. As far as the negatives, it doesn’t feel like you’re really reading a book; making notes doesn’t feel the same (though you can highlight passages and make notes on Kindle). When you read a paper book, especially if it is your own copy that you can mark up, you feel like you are engaging the book, or forming a relationship with it, that you just cannot replicate on an electronic reader. This leads, at least for me, to less depth of interaction with electronic books. I love being able to pick up books from my own library, books that I may have read few years ago, and look at my handwritten notes, and remember the feeling or thoughts that were going through my mind back when I made those notes. I do this on a regular basis. Reading on an electronic device simply can’t duplicate that.
I can’t give a hard and fast rule on this. I can only say that I prefer real books as opposed to electronic books. But I am thankful for my Kindle.
It seems that the sheer quantity of data that people are exhorted to “process” has had a profound influence on this worldview. As consequence of working in a job environment where the average corporate employee “processes” over one hundred emails a day, I’ve heard and watched a lot of people find their satisfaction in the mere “processing” of things. “Ok, I’m feeling pretty ‘productive'” I’ve heard countless people say, “I just got through 50 emails.” You just “got through” them? And that feels… “productive”? Which, to you, means fulfillment?
Conversely, I have observed a kind of anxiety from people who are required to stick to a single task for an extended period of time, like a meeting. Their remarks afterward are always about how “unproductive” a meeting was- and they run out of the room in a hurry to “be productive” like somebody just lit them on fire. When pressed further, I find they often are frustrated that in such a setting they are not able/allowed to multi-task to “get done” all that is on their agenda for the day.
I have probably been apologized to for 90% of the meetings I’ve been in that lasted anywhere near an hour or more. Not because there was no worth in the meeting, but because of the sheer time spent on one subject. “I know that was a lot of time spent working on that guys. I appreciate you sticking it out.” Seriously? Should my Pastor apologize then every Sunday for our church service, since it goes more than an hour? (Probably some people think so.)
I’ll finally note that this simple-minded quantitative obsession is a disease we all have to fight. Allen Jacobs wrote a book a little while ago discussing this problem in relation to reading. Even as a professor, he found that although he was not reading any less, he was reading everything in small bits. An article here, an essay there. He was scarcely sitting down and working his way through anything of length, (like……….. a book.) I really think this is because we are being groomed to feel a pay off simply by “completing” a task. Thus, having read 50 articles “feels” better than having read one book of the same volume.
I’m not saying that there is no such thing as a long meeting that is a waste of time, or a bad book, but that because the people of this age are so “quantitatively” obsessed, they miss out on being able to digest anything of quality.
…Ok, I lied. One more thing about email culture. I remember when email became vogue. I was taught, “yes, and in email, you don’t have to adhere so strongly to punctuation rules.” Whether everyone else go that memo or not, they’ve certainly by-and-large followed suite. In addition to abandoning such “frivolities” such as capitalization and commas, folks deeply embroiled in email culture do not read-over what they’ve written….like….at all…. I cannot help but think this is because something like proof-reading is not a quantitative practice, but a qualitative one. Why “polish” this email, when I could write five more emails in the same time and be more “productive?” And then of course, the person on the receiving side (if he even opens the email before deleting it,) just skims over the information, because skimming is “so productive.” Good thing we’ve all but abandoned “snail-mail.” This is all so much more… “productive.”
We are going to skim right over our lives in a very productive fashion…
The idea of productivity is interesting and worth mulling over. It seems we’ve equated productivity with machine-like output – mass producing of things, when our primary concern should be more akin to a farmer whose ‘produce’ is fruit. We want fruitfulness primarily.
“We read deeply for varied reasons, most of them familiar: that we cannot know enough people profoundly enough; that we need to know ourselves better; that we require knowledge, not just of self and others, but of the way things are. Yet the strongest, most authentic motive for deep reading…is the search for a difficult pleasure.” —— Harold Bloom
There is the “know” of reading, it’s a given, but there is this other aspect of reading that is pleasure or even joy.
I agree Austin. And on top of that there is what McGrath regularly emphasizes in this book (what C.S. Lewis argued for in An Experiment in Criticism), an enlargement of ourselves as we experience things through the eyes of the writer whom we are reading.