Category: Motives

A Kind of Certainty: V. Fleeting Uncertainty

Click here to read Pt IV. A Kind of Faith

A Kind of Certainty

V. Fleeting Uncertainty

Like a vast sea of experience is all that we know and learn and encounter every single day. We are but tiny ships bobbing and rolling upon its waves, its currents steering us here and there. How on earth do we discern and decide what we value, what we believe, in order to collaborate with others in meaningful curricular relationships? (One almost prefers they might be waylaid by pirates, or something.) For me, one way to decide is to consider our shared motives, then find incentives to collaborate from there. Notwithstanding the degree to which people are educated, or by whom, everybody has motives.

But we do not all necessarily have a particular destination or a future port-of-call. So the aim for curriculum appears to be that of shaping motives to coincide with the current state of affairs such that, in a broad sense, people can (a) function – a measure of the self-ful[1] – and then (b) contribute – a measure of the selfless. Upon this vast sea, we are not so much bound for any one destination as we are bound to assist each other, each underway to wherever best suits our particular circumstances at that time – yours for you, and mine for me – and let the tangents direct us as they will.

Education, I have come to learn, is learning to have more than a destination or purpose of my own. It is to convoy with others and have faith that they do the same for others and for me, and putting in to decidedly worthwhile ports-of-call on the way. On the way, we chart our courses, but as similar as the ocean might look any given moment, wave after rolling wave, no two moments are ever exactly alike. To that degree, everyone must chart on their own. How intentionally we aid each other, how much or how little we trust, how sincerely we navigate, it is our shared curricula that will determine how effectively we undertake any particular decision we are ever likely to face, alongside whomever we find ourselves. The more we convoy in earnest, the safer we will be. With that kind of support, what is it that would sink us?

One final cautionary note: if and when some finally do make landfall somewhere, with certainty to their decision, we must acknowledge that their perspective will shift dramatically from those others who remain, however more or less certain to remain, out at sea. Not everyone wants to remain out at sea, and such variances our curricula are obliged to accommodate, if not fully comprehend or appreciate. There on that solid shore might be a tighter homogeneous culture that yields a more one-sided – or dogmatic? prejudiced? – communal certainty all its own. On that shore we might find a trade-off that sets the communal trustworthiness of the bobbing convoy against the stable individual footing of landfall. Yet somehow we all must sustain what we share, no matter the differences that may arise between sailor and landlubber – and why?

Because what remains the same amongst us – indeed, that which makes us who and what we are – is what we have in common. Common to all of us is being alive, being a person, being a human being, someone deserving of a basic respect for human dignity. Each of us, all of us, every one of us. We are all people. In this regard, really all that differs between us is where we are, and when. For people to think in any way differently than this about other people is narrow, delusional, perhaps cruel, and flat-out wrong. That may hardly feel a satisfactory closing, maybe even anti-climactic, but who ever said learning was meant to be entertainment?[2] Learning’s the thing wherein we catch the conscience of each other.

Click here for the Bibliography

Click here to read Pt I. An Uncertain Faith

Endnotes

[1] Forgive the invention, “self-ful.” I hesitated to use “selfish,” which tends to connote self-seeking and self-aggrandizing behaviour (in that colloquial sense of “No, you can’t have any of my ice cream”), and taking inspiration from the Bard, I just made up a word of my own. Likewise, I do not use “selfless” in some altruistic way so much as simply to counter “self-ful”; as a pair, I intend them to signify simply the notion of there being, for each of us, an intrinsic “me” and plenty of extrinsic “not me’s.” Further, with my students, I would liken self-fulness to each one’s academic efforts and scholarship, and selflessness to voluntary service and community stewardship of whatever kind. The longer-term idea was teaching students to balance these as required by kairos, by circumstance – an appropriate time for each, and the wisdom to know the difference.

[2] Or maybe, just maybe, there’s a curricular role for those gnarly amphibious surfers, after all.

Hawai'i Summer 2008
Teacher at work: catch a wave to catch the conscience?

A Kind of Certainty: III. A Scripture of Truth

Click here to read Pt II. Curriculum, or What You Will

A Kind of Certainty

III. A Scripture of Truth

Motive is the key, I would suggest to students: to know motive is to know the truth. And I offered this suggestion knowing full-well the timeworn joke about the actor who asks, “What’s my motivation?” Whats the Motivation Just as we can never cover it all and must go with whatever we decide to include, we also cannot (nor should not) try to present it all, ask it all, or attempt it all in one go. Yes, the odd non sequitur can break the monotony – everyone needs a laugh, now and then. But as with all clever comedy, timing is everything, and curriculum is about more than good humour and bad logic. In that regard, given what has already been said about spotting pertinence, curriculum is about motives: to include, or not to include.

And we must try to comprehend this decision from more than one perspective; each in their own way, both teacher and student ponder what to include and what to disregard during any given lesson: “Teachers are problem-posing, not just in the obvious sense that they require students to doubt whether they know something… [but] implicitly [asking] them to question their understanding of what counts as knowledge” (Beckett, 2013, p. 54-55). People generally will not doubt themselves without good reason, or else with a lot of faith in whoever is asking. Challenged to reconstruct or reorganise an experience (Dewey, 1916), more than likely we will want to know why. Curriculum addresses ‘why’.

Why! take Hamlet, for instance… deigning to know a little something about role-playing, he offers some curricular particulars while lecturing the Players ahead of the Mousetrap performance, although really this is to say Shakespeare offered them. Writers famously cringe as rehearsing actors and directors dismember their carefully worked dialogue – or is that another hackneyed joke? In any case, Shakespeare opens Act 3 with some forty lines of advice from Hamlet to the Players, whose replies are little beyond short and polite (although ‘why’ has evidently been left for you and your theatre company to ascertain). These follow some forty lines in Act 2 during an exchange between Hamlet and Rosencrantz about theatre companies, all of which could simply be played as a dose of comic relief amidst the far “weightier matters” of the play (Guyton, 2013). Tried another way, Hamlet’s lines about acting embody the very perplexity of his prolonged tumult: he takes for granted that his listener will attempt to reconcile what he says with whatever uncertainty they might have. What better job description, a “teacher”? Otherwise, why even bother to open his mouth?

What need to teach when we trust that we are all alike, that all around is 100% certain? As it pertains to telling the Players about acting, Hamlet wants no assurance that his audience must bridge some gap of certainty over his trustworthiness, not so far as he is concerned.[1] Indeed, common to live productions that I have watched, he is as relaxed and certain in offering his advice as the Players are in hearing it, like preaching to the choir.[2] Their relationship, apparently going back some time, suggests mutual respect and a shared faith not merely to listen but to understand in listening. It suggests a kind of shared attunement, something mutual, like a kind of curriculum founded upon trust. For all we might want to trust those around us, for all we might want some certainty that we are respected by others – or, perhaps more so, that we are believed – what a torment life would be if our every utterance were considered a lie. Then the only certainty would be the assurance that no one ever believed you, and if that still counts for something, it is dreadfully cold comfort.[3]

We citizens of 21st century post-modernist [ your label here ] North America may not have descended nearly so low although Klein (2014) does presciently discuss politics, the national discourse, and an observed decline in public intellectualism (Byers, 2014; Coates, 2014; Herman, 2017; Mishra & Gregory, 2015). Where Klein encompasses individuals and the processes, systems, and institutions that they innervate while going about their daily lives, he describes Dewey’s “conjoint communicated experience” (Dewey, 1916, p. 101) and implicates “an extraordinarily complicated conversation” (Pinar, Reynolds, Slattery & Taubman, 2006, p. 848), one that occurs everyday and includes everybody.

But since we are forbidden to compel but only persuade the beliefs of free thinkers, we realise that all our perceived uncertainty can only be bridged by a kind of faith: we depend either upon others to see things as we do, or else we depend upon our rhetorical skill to persuade them toward our way. Or we live tense lives full of disagreement and antipathy. ’Swounds, but life would be a lot more stable and certain if we all just believed the same things!

Hamlet craves certainty, to the point where the dilemma of his doubt halts him so dead in his tracks that he is prompted to question existence itself. Where it comes to enacting vengeance – but, really, where it comes to everything we witness in the play – Hamlet – and, really, every character[4] – craves certainty and assurance while suffering from uncertainty and reluctance, which means, of course, that he craves and suffers from both ends. Indeed, a piece of him is certain. But comprising “one part wisdom and ever three parts coward” (4.4.42-43), he wages an unequal battle against himself. He wanders from room to room searching to free himself from his purgatorial tesseract, challenged not simply by one retrograde faith but by several, the consequence of conveying curriculum from Wittenberg back to Elsinore where, previously, he had received, to say the least, an impressionable upbringing. The upshot, given the conflicting decisions he faces, is that Hamlet would rather renounce any mutual faith of any sort and rely upon a certainty all his own: himself.

Yet he even doubts his ability to self-persuade, just as he holds no faith in anyone whose judgment he fears. As a result, he is rightly miserable and lives an exaggerated moment-to-moment existence, “…enraptured with, submerged in, the present, no longer a moment in but a suspension of time, absorbed by – fused with – the images in front of [his] face, oblivious to what might be beyond [him]” (Pinar, 2017, p. 12). Pinar describes a kairos moment of chronos time, as if Cecelia, while watching The Purple Rose of Cairo (Greenhut & Allen, 1985), could press ‘Pause’. He may not have been Woody Allen’s modernist contemporary, but Shakespeare still appeared to possess enough prescience to machinate a rather, shall we say, enlightened viewpoint; many consider The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark to be the Magnum Opus of English literature, not just Shakespeare. Evidently, he knew exactly how to craft such a rich and roundly individuated protagonist, one certain enough to persist for over 400 years. Certainty the Bard found within himself, and this he bestowed (albeit perversely) upon Prince Hamlet, who “[knows] not seems” (1.2.76). Faith he found within himself, too, but that he saved for his audience, trusting them, freeing them, to spot it as the time was right, rendering what they will get unto those who will get it.

By the same token, may the rest get whatever they will get. As far as curriculum is concerned, one size has never fit all, nor should it ever be so.

Click here for the Bibliography

Click here to read Pt IV. A Kind of Faith

Endnotes

[1] I always suspected a handful of my students were just humoring me – have I mentioned they were brilliant?

[2] Sometimes, these lines have even been cut, to help shorten the play from its typical four-hour length.

[3] Elsinore seems just such a place. But they are wise who “… give it welcome” (1.5.165) since at least, then, you can get on with functioning, knowing where you stand relative to all the other prevaricating liars and weasels who inhabit the place alongside you.

[4] Every character, that is, with the possible exceptions of the Gravedigger, who apparently is most cheerful and self-assured, and Fortinbras, who suffers perhaps not pains of doubt so much as loss, and then always with something up his sleeve. I might also include Horatio in this reflection, but I fear, then, the need for an endnote to the endnotes, to do him any justice.