Monthly Musings are published during the last week of every month. In each Monthly Muse, I recap content from the past month of Handful of Earth, offer some freewheeling reflections, and share a quote or passage that I’ve found especially thought-provoking.
Here’s the June 2023 Monthly Muse.
Recapitulation: Published this month on Handful of Earth
Contemplation
In response to my June 19th essay, “The Truth of the Anecdote,” one of my readers informed me of a trend in education inspired by Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM). It’s called (you guessed it) “Evidence-Based Education” (EBE). This trend has its roots in New Labour’s late-1990s educational reforms in the UK as well as No Child Left Behind in early-2000s America. How about that for a political pedigree?
It's significant that medicine and education have become such central arenas for the ideological promotion of “evidence” (very narrowly conceived) in opposition to tradition, anecdote, and theoretical reasoning. Medicine and education were also the central targets of critique for some of the twentieth century’s greatest thinkers. See, for example, Ivan Illich’s pair of 1970s classics, Medical Nemesis and Deschooling Society. While already constrained, there was at least some space for critique decades ago, but this space seems to be shrinking every year. In any article entitled “The Paradox of Evidence-based Education,” Japanese scholar Ryohei Matsushita helps explain why:
The first step in the process by which evidence-based education came to be accepted as natural is that the primordial education which incorporates the fundamental essence of education, what we might even call the educational base of humankind has been withdrawn further and further into the background, through the introduction and acceptance of “education,” born in 16th-century Europe, into school education, and further its expansion outside schools. The fundamental education carried out by humankind throughout the very long pre-modern period has become lost to sight as modern “education” comes to the fore and traditional societies are disassembled. This process has gone on for centuries in Europe, so that for a long time the majority of people have been unable even to grasp the existence of this fundamental education.
Many of my favorite thinkers on education, like Illich, John Taylor Gatto, and Rabindranath Tagore, have, in contrast to the approach of EBE, always emphasized the centrality of “fundamental education” and the tragedy of its loss. In a remarkable 1922 essay, entitled “An Eastern University,” Tagore writes:
Mind, when long deprived of its natural food of truth and freedom of growth, develops an unnatural craving for success; and our students have fallen victims to the mania for success in examinations. Success consists in obtaining the largest number of marks with the strictest economy of knowledge. It is a deliberate cultivation of disloyalty to truth, of intellectual dishonesty, of a foolish imposition by which the mind is encouraged to rob itself. But as we are by means of it made to forget the existence of mind, we are supremely happy at the result. We pass examinations, and shrivel up into clerks, lawyers and police inspectors, and we die young.
A far cry from the “evidence-based” perspective, but over 100 years later I think everyone can see where this “mania for success in examinations” has taken us. Lest this sound like pure doom and gloom, Tagore elucidates the principles upon which his alternative educational philosophy rests:
The educational institution…which I have in mind has primarily for its object the constant pursuit of truth, from which the imparting of truth naturally follows. It must not be a dead cage in which living minds are fed with food artificially prepared. It should be an open house, in which students and teachers are at one. They must live their complete life together, dominated by a common aspiration for truth and a need of sharing all the delights of culture. In former days the great master-craftsmen had students in their workshops where they co-operated in shaping things to perfection. That was the place where knowledge could become living - that knowledge which not only has its substance and law, but its atmosphere subtly informed by a creative personality. For intellectual knowledge also has its aspect of creative art, in which the man who explores truth expresses something which is human in him - his enthusiasm, his courage, his sacrifice, his honesty, and his skill. In merely academical teaching we find subjects, but not the man who pursues the subjects; therefore the vital part of education remains incomplete.
Indeed, just as EBM removes the human being from its artificially-constructed equation, its educational copycat, EBE, substitutes “labelled packages of truth and authorized agents to distribute them” for “truth in its living association with her lovers and seekers and discoverers.” One of the central struggles of our times is to find forms of “living association” amidst the “evidence-based” onslaught.
Provocation
“Sugar is produced to the orchestration of noisy machines; tobacco is worked up in silence or to the accompaniment of the spoken word. Sugar calls for choral harmony; tobacco for a solo melody. The sugar worker’s tasks are active, heavy, deafening, and monotonous; the cigar worker sits down to his labors and can enjoy the pleasure and advantages of talking and listening.”
—Fernando Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar