Sit Down and Shut Up

I remarked a few weeks ago on re-reading Less Than Words Can Say, a wonderful book on how stupid we've become about language in particular and education in general. One of the main points which the books makes is that we know how to teach, and we know how to learn. Stripped down to the very core, we teach by making folks Sit Down, Shut Up, and Pay Attention. 

Why is this so? Because it really isn't that hard to master subject-predicate agreement. Essential scientific principles are pretty straightforward. Axioms of philosophy are readily comprehensible. Theorems in geometry are not difficult to understand. IF you sit down, shut up, and actually pay attention to the subject matter. 

Yes, yes, yes, there may be individual, legitimate exceptions which require compassion, charity, and greater consideration. But by and large if you want to learn something you need to sit down, shut up, and pay attention to those who know the subject. 

Richard Mitchell, the author of the aforementioned book, argues that we are willfully being stupid about how to teach and learn. I think there's something to that. I think we want (well, some of us, and typically folks who get prestige and money from the rest of us, not incidentally through the force of government) to make what we call education into a grand scheme of virtually religious proportions, understandable only to an elite class of specially deep minded and concerned people. Yet our modern schooling is really mere training, taking on the skills we need to get along in the world. We are not educated into subject-predicate agreement. We are trained to recognize and employ the principles within it so that we may usefully communicate. It is no cosmic ideal.

Education itself? That is something much greater and vastly more profound. It is also something beyond my point today. But I'll get back to it soon. You've been warned.