Why you won't learn anything from English class

Aside from trying to salvage your midterm grades, the biggest issue faced in education is how to define it. Traditional concepts of “school”--a place of raised hands, exams, and lectures--are already becoming outdated, replaced by the curiosity-driven learning described by John Taylor in “The Examined Life” and Mr. Arcand in his English 300 class. These attempts at experimental learning represent the clash of progressive teaching in a system of grades and teacher evaluations--or, in other words, why you may not learn anything from Mr Arcand’s class.

Although Taylor advocates for Socratic learning in “The Examined Life,” he doesn’t address integration: how to create internally-motivated learning in the face of the college process. Taylor describes the purpose of progressive learning as “[to] teach students… how to think” through a classroom based on passion, not textbook knowledge. Taylor’s ideal classroom, a question-based environment in which students draw on collective knowledge to further their understanding, initially seems like any student’s paradise: it encourages “spaces where students can think about the meaning of what they learn” as they explore topics they genuinely care about. However, this idea doesn’t account for societal barriers which obstruct its authenticity. Taylor’s self-driven learning lies alongside a college and career process founded upon outside evaluation. As Taylor himself states,”Education [today is] reduced to a dry, soulless process of ‘delivery’ dictated by the demands of standardised tests.” And his proposed teaching method--students creating authentic questions through self-motivation--can't maintain authenticity in the face of this process. Acting as though standardized evaluations don’t exist won’t make those evaluations any less there--making an environment not of learning, but of negotiating for the highest grade. When passion-based education is driven by teacher evaluation, it contradicts the very creation of that passion. And for all of Taylor’s progressive gusto, the reality of high school--a place where college exists as the ever-present anvil over students’ heads--makes purely student-motivated classes much less doable.

The difficulties of integrating progressive education are also seen in Mr. Arcand’s English 300 class, where Socratic ideals of questioning and collaboration lay underneath a school system that prizes correctness. Unlike Taylor’s theoretical classroom, Mr. Arcand has put these ideas into action: creating a class where, as he states, “The teacher is no longer the holder of information… [Education is] autonomous learning by doing.” And although this may seem like a replica of Taylor’s ideal Socratic classroom, it’s not. In an environment built upon “understanding of the world in which [students] live and [their] ability to have [their] voice heard,” the real world is, ironically, the biggest inhibitor. What’s in that “world”--college, parents, term reports--is outside pressure that forces students to work for the wrong reasons. No one asks questions about Romanticism because they’re interested in Romanticism: it’s to make the “right” questions, on the “right” topic, leading to the “right” grade, enabling admission to the “right” college, achieving the “right” career, for the “right” life, ending in the “right” death. Students aren’t working because they care--or, if they are, it isn’t because they care about English. Choate’s ingrained emphasis on the “right,” a domino effect of decisions spiralling to the eventual college acceptance, means that the environment of self-generated curiosity Mr. Arcand tries to create is inherently incompatible with the environment that it’s in. Authenticity at Choate is something that must be made out of nothing: and even though ol’ Arc is a fan of suddenly appearing in the classroom, he’s no magician.

Despite the idealized classroom described by Taylor in “The Examined Life,” putting progressive techniques into education is much less simple. In a theoretical world, with theoretical schools, where theoretical students could learn without the pressure of outside forces, Taylor and Mr. Arcand have created groundbreaking programs--ones that will impact students for years to come. But in the current system of blue books and SAT tests, questioning and authenticity only matter when they add to 1600.