learning

The other day I overheard a teacher indignant that a student inquired how they might find a job - there was so much more to teach, and this, this cheapening of the process. Maybe the student should try google maps, the teacher's friends chortled. Whatever the motivations of either party: maybe the student is craven or stupid or earnest - but she was "just" a student - the actual consumer (and someone who could say, "I determine what information my education pays for: I'm paying you for information."). I certainly took classes from "rock star" professors - some of whom could be pastoral (that is, they remembered the uncertainty of studenthood) and others who felt the student was lucky to be paying them. 

But I think what happens in such a situation is what Deleuze describes in his book on Bergson: asking the wrong questions: mis-identifying the problem. For the student, the answer to her problem is not finding the job, per se. But she doesn't know that, and, perhaps because she has parents hectoring her to major in something with proven financial rewards, asks this question (that is so offensive of the purity of the study). 

I can see something like this working out: 

Student: [a question which content is How do I justify my existence?]

Teacher: [an answer which content is I am only prepared to justify my own existence.]

Student: How do you justify your existence?

Teacher: I'm being paid for this [which is usually framed in language which describes the echtness of procedures or some variation of work ethic or some engagement with coded valences of alien/suzerain/subaltern agency in postcolonial speech.]

If the student follows up, the teacher might admit that they don't know. 

This is the truth. That turning education into a living is a crapshoot. The people who don't realize this have won enough that they entertain the illusion of skill. There are people with skill scattered all over our society. Many of them are not winners per se. They are surviving. They know what it is to miss - to be sent back without being called up again.

So something more is desired from education. The need to ask the right questions, to recognize the right problems. The teacher here is caught in the same problem as the student. A problem neither recognizes. So the teacher comes prepared with his own justification, his own rules and accomplishments - as if that is the Thing he is teaching. The student wants to learn How to be justified (that is the root of all questions from home and peers: How will this class get you a job, or make you a better person - or failing that get you a job [which is also called a career when speaking from a nonworking class vantage point]). 

Lacan and Jung would say that what the teacher wants to teach and what the student wants to learn are being missed by both parties. Lacan would say that they are both operating on their demands - and that for either of them to give the answer the other wants, or accept the question the other asks, would be castration. Jung waves off the reduction of education to an exchange of information. He might say that the teacher must be prepared to teach an example: this is different than telling "how I do things". It is being willing to be and to fail and to discover again - it requires a vulnerability, a willingness to be intimate: as in, Yes, this is the way I am. I am showing you how I look when I fail, so that you needn't be afraid of failure.

Lacan frames these things in terms of competing desires - which are not the same as the demands - think of the demands as defenses, and then think of the desires as the gap in subjectivity of both teacher and student. In some ways the student would learn better if she could accept the fact that she will not learn what she demands to from this teacher. The teacher would do better if she could accept that her demand to be venerated, accepted as the example qua example, by the student will be a failure. [it is another kind of failure when the teacher does receive that veneration - because such veneration proceeds from a lack of knowledge on the venerator's part. The venerated is only venerated for her persona].

This seems to require a collegial model of learning. In this sense, the "teacher" is in the same position as the "learner". What Paolo Freire attempted is more sensible to me. The thing is: this anti-banking method (banking method = I, the teacher, fund your ignorance with my knowledge - you have nothing to give me but your attention. Freire abolishes this division) of Freire's is the way most of us learn outside of a classroom - we share information; we share successes and failures; we relate to each other on a human level. There seems something de-humanizing about the way education is set up. Whether it is in terms of the adept filling students minds with facts or the technical advisor inculcating the material of a vocation, there is the assumption that the person behind the podium is More Than and the pupils sitting at desks or easels or benches is Less Than. As Blanchot points out - The distance from teacher to student is not equal to the distance from student to teacher.