Teaching, truth, technology and trust

Some lessons in learning from Christ and Socrates

To derive “education” from the Latin educere is etymologically questionable, but pedagogically sound. Unless one subscribes to the Rousseauvian “blank slate” model of the mind, one is forced to go some way towards accepting the conclusions of Plato’s Meno: not necessarily to the extent of positing a previous life dimly remembered, but at least recognising that there is a certain pre-subsisting architecture to the mind. One may go further, and find some sympathy with Owen Barfield’s suggestion that the human mind is only one element in a mind-saturated cosmos. In any event, the practice of “drawing out” what is residually or potentially already within the mind by means of Socratic elenchus serves learners better than pedagogies which focus exclusively on “filling in” a supposedly empty space.

It is noteworthy that Socrates, like Christ, left no writing for posterity, yet all three are regarded as some of history’s most effective teachers. As early as the Iliad, Homer warns of the dangers of sēmata lugra, “baleful signs:” the blind poet sees something sinister in capturing the power of speech on skin or stone. It is thought that he represents a line of prehistoric oral poets who memorised tropes and verbal formulae, then improvised on these for what seemed spontaneous delivery. Perhaps the greatest challenge writing presents is to the memory. The ancient bards, like a contemporary hafiz, could memorise thousands of lines of verse. Mediaeval Christian clergy were expected to remember the whole Psalter. But such feats seem incredible today, and it was the printing press which sealed their fate. It is true of all technologies that the more they increase our power when we yield them, the weaker we become when deprived of them. Our ancestors hunted and made fire with rocks, and while electricity and supermarkets allow us to keep warmer, eat better and live longer, if we were deprived of these technologies, we would be far more vulnerable than they. Likewise, our memory cannot compare to the books or photographs, still less to the Internet that we rely on, and yet our very reliance on them diminishes our capacity to remember.

Exegi monumentum aere perennius, wrote Horace of his own poetry, with characteristic Roman humility: “I have established a memorial more lasting than bronze.” Little could he know that  2000 years on, electronic waves would outlast any metal and carry his words throughout the aether; but far fewer people now read them and commit them to heart. Any modern pedagogy needs to recognise this trajectory and its implications, and confront the challenges that not only the Internet but AI raise in the entire enterprise of human learning. The air was once the medium of human conversation, in which human memories meet and co-create. Today, AIs write teachers’ lesson plans and then help students write their essays in response. Humans are becoming the medium for disembodied digital memories to communicate with one another, students and teachers becoming intermediaries for an exchange of electronically stored words: sēmata lugra writ in silicon, transmitted by tongues of flesh.

Christ’s method was to teach parables which defy singular interpretations and prompt thought. He also transmitted a certain spiritual experience which exceeds words, through the institution of the Eucharist passed on in the community led by Apostolic successors. Socrates’ method was to question, claiming to know nothing. Both show that the best teaching is not a monologue which might be trapped in text, but a conversation, between people, face-to-face: ideally, in both Jesus’ and Socrates’ cases, over dinner and in friendship. Hence Plato, torn between this desire and the need he felt to present Socratic teaching for posterity, chose to write in dialogue form, the next best thing to a real conversation. Still, it could not replace physical encounter, and so Plato left behind him not only books, but the Academy, a community of scholars who would continue his pursuit of the wisdom he so loved. Prerecorded content and even AI instructors may well replace lecturers who see their role as mere content diffusion; they cannot, however, replace the human interaction of the symposium.

Yet the symposium should not be confused with the mere pooling of ignorance which sometimes passes for education: it is a lazy teacher who simply collects student opinions on sticky notes and shares them on a board. There is a body of knowledge to be transmitted, and the didactic monologue has its place, even within the symposium. So, for that matter, does reading the “baleful signs” committed to paper and to webpage over the centuries. Educators’ collective abdication of authority as guardians, preservers and transmitters of knowledge can lead to a mere relativism, the danger of which is on the one hand, a naive gullibility towards the information sources which most thoroughly saturate one’s own particular social milieu, and on the other, a collapse in trust of any authorities. But teaching must be built as much on trust as on knowledge, since without trust, however knowledgable teachers may be, their words will not be heard.

This is because the transmission of knowledge will always come with an editorial decision about the canon of what knowledge is to be transmitted, otherwise known as the “curriculum.” There is, then, a tension between the authoritative act of determining the body of knowledge to be transmitted, and the more elenchic and conversational means of eliciting knowledge. This tension cannot be evaded: there can be no “neutral” or objective curriculum, and teachers who pretend to defer from judgment are in fact by stealth promoting their own particular commitment to relativism. Trust is needed to resolve this tension. Teachers, instead of donning the mask of “neutrality,” need to openly acknowledging their motivations in determining the canon of knowledge they choose to transmit, and so make themselves open to challenges to that canon from the students themselves. They need to earn their students’s trust.

Those of us who are teachers, in the broadest sense of the word, need to build an atmosphere of friendly trust in which ideas can flow freely among people, aided by the technologies of the written word, but not subjugated to them; respectfully open to historic authorities, but not unthinkingly uncritical of them; and most important, to prioritise the real joy of discovering truth, goodness and beauty where they may be found, over the nihilistic Schadenfreude that comes from deconstructing them.