Part One:
Beginning to Teach
"The
Nine and a Half Commandments of Good Teaching"
"Lecturing:
Using a Much Maligned Method of Teaching"
"Teaching
by Lecture"
"On
Discussion Teaching"
 The
Profession of Teaching
"What
Little I Think I Know About Teaching"
"The
Necessary Lie: Duplicity in the Disciplines"
The
College Curriculum
The
Academic Advisers
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The Necessary Lie: Duplicity in the Disciplines
Jonathan Z. Smith
George Bernard Shaw once made a wisecrack that I think defines the academic
disciplines as social entities: "I may be doing it wrong but I'm doing
it in the proper and customary manner." This raises at least two questions
that I would like to examine. First is the white lie, which comes up when
we are self-conscious about speaking in a nondisciplinary fashion about
our subject. Second is disciplinary lying, which is part of the process
of initiating somebody into a discipline. Indeed, disciplinary lying may
be the marker of what it is to belong to a discipline.
The white lie.—We lie, it seems to me, in a number
of ways. We sometimes cheerfully call the lie words like "generalization"
or "simplification," but that's not really what we're doing. We're really
lying, and lying in a relatively deep fashion, when we consistently disguise,
in our introductory courses, what is problematic about our work. For example,
we traditionally screen from our students the hard work that results in
the production of exemplary texts, which we treat as found objects. We
hide consistently the immense editorial efforts that have conjecturally
established so many of the texts we routinely present to our students
as classics, not to speak of the labors of translation that enable many
of them to read these texts. Then we read them with our students as if
each word were directly revelatory, regardless of the fact that the majority
of the words are not in the language in which the text was written. In
fact, we have a curious strategy of when and how we decide to display
some of this hard work. For example, Chinese or Japanese texts in translation
read like Yiddish—every third word is followed by some indecipherable
foreign word in parentheses as if this would in some way enhance understanding.
We are really reminding our students that this is foreign and hard to
understand. In Shakespeare, we display an enormous glossary material,
implying that this, too, is a foreign language that, nevertheless, can
be mastered with effort. Yet the King James Bible, another Elizabethan
text, is characteristically taught in God knows how many humanities courses
across the country with never a single footnote indicating that the language,
while simpler than the language of Shakespeare, is just as foreign and
just as difficult. One would like them to note, for example, that the
word "let" often means to stop somebody from doing something, and the
word "prevent" at times means to let them go ahead and do it. One gets
odd moral conclusions by reading the King James Bible without such
footnotes, and yet our mutual lie is that it is infinitely accessible
while Shakespeare is accessible with difficulty; foreign texts remain
inaccessible.
Moreover, we conceal from our students the fields-specific, time-bound
judgments that make objects exemplary. We display them as if they are
self-evidently significant and allow the students to feel guilty when
they do not feel this self-evidence. We rarely do what some German critics
have called a reception history of the object in front of us, examining
why or how the object became in some way exemplary of humankind in a particular
discipline. Thus, when we deal with a figure like Plato, we rarely reflect
on the fact that, after all, the dialogue that was Plato for the Western
world for most of its history (i.e., The Timaeus) is no longer
read. Jefferson and other wise people despised The Republic thoroughly,
finding it an absolutely impenetrable document. They thought Cicero—today
all but dropped from the canon—was the place one went in order to
think about democratic institutions. That is, we don't introduce our students
to the fact that the artifacts that we examine are scarcely blooming with
self-evidence. We conceal the revisionary histories of the objects we
examine. If they're written works, we conceal their drafting and their
changes. If they're scientific objects, we conceal the history of failed
experiments and the history of sheer serendipity. That is to say, we convey
to our students a specious perfection of the object and a specious necessity
to the history of that object.
When we conceal from our students our hard work, that which is actually
the way we earn our bread and butter, we produce a number of consequences.
I remember testifying once before the California state legislature and
facing a legislator who wanted to know why professors should be paid to
read novels, when the legislator himself read novels on the train every
day. Well, that was the price of our disguising the work that goes into
things. There are, I think, more serious educational consequences. If
we present the work as perfect or as work without a revisionary history,
then we present a work that no student could hope to emulate. Indeed it
serves, if it serves at all, as a standard for how far below that standard
the student falls. If we present the material without displaying the effort
that goes with it, students tend to conclude that things are true or false,
or alternatively, that it's entirely a matter of their opinion whether
the object is exemplary. In that case, what we have is a contrast between
his or her feelings and my feelings. Thus, in the name of simplification,
what we really end up doing is mystifying the objects we teach at the
introductory level.
Similarly, still in the name of simplification, we treat theory as if
it were fact. We treat difficult, complex, controversial, theoretical
entities as if they were self-evident parts of the universe that we inhabit.
Students coming out of introductory courses in the humanities know that
there is such a thing as an author's intention, and they regularly and
effortlessly recover it from the text they are looking at. Students in
introductory social sciences know that there is such a thing as a society
that functions, and they effortlessly observe it doing so. Students in
introductory sciences are wedded without their knowing it to a tradition
of induction from naked facts, in what Nietzsche called "the myth of the
immaculate perception." Indeed, I've often argued when teaching in the
social science Core that, if I could only have the first week of Chemistry
101, my job would be infinitely easier because at least we would have
raised the possibility that one wears eyeglasses when one gazes at these
naked facts.
Despite the proud claim that we make over and over again that we teach
the how rather than the what of the disciplines, we, in fact, do not;
it is the theoretical conclusion that our students underline in their
books. I spend a half hour with each of my students looking at what they've
underlined, and they've always underlined the punch line and never anything
that might be called the process that led up to it. That is to say, theoretical
entities have been reduced to naked facts. The process of discussion often
becomes one of show and tell for these unproblematic, now self-evident
conclusions. In other words, we have skillfully concealed from our students
the power of the remark once made by a mathematician, "I have my results,
but I do not know yet how I am to arrive at them." Even a false generosity
with respect to method conceals the process when we present this method
one week, that method another week, allowing none of them to have the
kind of monomaniacal power or imperialism that a good method has when
we're honest about it. Without the experience of riding hell bent for
leather on one's presuppositions, one is allowed to feel that methods
have really no consequences and no entailments. Since none of them is
ever allowed to have any power, none of them is ever subjected to any
interesting cost accounting.
Another way we end up reducing our students to the notion of a subject
being all opinion (and we're very angry when they assert that to us) is
the way that introductory courses, whether seminar or lecture, whether
of a large field of study or a small field of study, are never introductions.
They are always surveys. They may be shorter surveys or longer surveys,
quicker surveys or slower surveys, but nothing is allowed to be truly
troublesome. It suggests that one might think that a freshman seminar
devoted to a single work is probably a far better introduction than our
vaunted Core. That is to say, one really ought to be able to work on a
limited number of exemplary objects and to answer all the various sorts
of questions that one might come up with. Though I don't like a lot of
the framework, Jeff Robinson has a book, Radical Literary Education,
about a classroom experiment in which he takes the introductory English
class through a reading of a Wordsworth ode for an entire semester at
Colorado State. They're into a complex unpacking and unfolding of the
enterprise. I'm not terribly thrilled with the message he'd like you to
get from this; nonetheless, the strategy, it seems to me, is one worth
looking at.
Disciplinary lying.—The self-justified white lie is
done in the name of our students, in the name of simplifying, of generalizing,
of speaking to a wide and a diverse audience. However, one also has to
look at the place in which lying becomes built into the structure of things,
in which it becomes that which constitutes a discipline as a discipline
over and against other disciplines. Here, at least in principle, we lose
the excuses that go with the introductory course. One would presume a
student who had been through a program of rigorous disciplinary lying
would emerge at the conclusion of his or her baccalaureate experience
with some measure of sophistication. Yet, when I used to do something
called the dean's seminar in which we talked about the disciplines as
seniors graduated, I was struck by their lack of the sense of the conventionality
that governs what we do. These seniors still sought the cost-less method,
the cost-less theory, even at the end of two to three years of allegedly
depth study in a field.
Fields are taken not only as self-evident but as singular, without real
understanding that what's a style for one is not a style for another.
Take a simple example in my own field. If I want to publish an article
in one of two general journals in the field of religion—History
of Religion and The Journal of the American Academy of Religion—I
have to at least redo the notes. History of Religion does the so-called
humanities-style notes and The Journal of the American Academy of Religion
does the so-called social science—style notes. It's not just
that it's inconvenient; what I am doing is fundamentally altered by which
of those two styles I accept. In the humanities, the footnote is exegetical,
and you will accept what I say on the basis of my exegesis of that particular
passage. On the other hand, when I read something that says, "Levi-Strauss
1970—83," I'm supposed to find the one sentence in a four-volume
work that justifies the paragraph I have just read. That's a very different
understanding of how you justify your work. That really is an authority
model, which has very little to do with any claim to exegesis. Yet, one
never talks about such differences with students.
I discovered a stunning example of disciplinary lying in a book by the
now late Nobel Prize winner, Richard Feynman, Surely You Are Joking,
Mr. Feynman, written for no other purpose that I can determine but
to make money. He writes, rather cockily, that he finds world travel a
rather dull way of spending a vacation, so instead he travels to another
discipline. He spent one summer working in the biology laboratories at
Cal Tech, and, according to his report, his results were significant enough
to interest James Watson and have him invited to give a set of seminars
to biologists at Harvard. Yet when he wrote up his results and sent them
to a friend in biology, his friend laughed at Feynman. As he recalls,
"It wasn't in the standard form that biologists use, first procedures
and so forth. I spent a lot of time explaining things that all the biologists
knew. Edgar made a shortened version, but now I couldn't understand it.
I don't think they ever published it. I learned a lot of things in biology.
I got better at pronouncing the words, knowing what not to include in
a paper or seminar and detecting weak technique in an experiment."
Now, that's really, when you stop to think about it, a rather remarkable
paragraph. Consider how much Feynman is signaling when he uses the phrase,
"It wasn't in the standard form that biologists use." Feynman tells us
that he did get some sense of the language domain of the field—how
to pronounce the words—he did learn something of the tacit conventions—what
not to say, what was not needed to say—he learned something about
what counted as appropriate according to the conventions of the fields.
What he could not recognize was the fictive modes of accepted disciplinary
discourse. As a result, we have a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who, when
he writes up an experiment, is laughed at by his biological colleagues;
when they write it up "properly," he is incapable of understanding his
own work.
This is what lying in the disciplines is all about. It is constructed
very much as an initiatory process. As some of you may know, among the
southwestern Amerindians, as well as among a number of other people, initiation
consists of an act of unmasking. Certain figures wear masks and are called
gods. When you reach the age of maturity, the elders take you to the other
side, the figures take off their masks and show you, "hah, hah, hah, it's
just good old Uncle Joe," as if you hadn't recognized that earlier. At
least the convention is "now we unmask." A great deal of what a discipline
does is initiating its neophytes, pulling rugs out from under things you
thought you knew and unmasking things you thought were clear. The initiated
use another kind of language, forming a set of those who are in on the
joke.
When we talk about disciplinary instruction, we're talking about creating
a corporate entity arrived at through an initiation that proceeds through
a rigorous sequence. Within some of the sciences, in theory at least,
that sequence is carefully arranged. It's carefully structured from elementary
school to postdoctoral work as one endless and lengthy series of unmasking
what you thought you knew. The ideal, often quoted in books on science
and education, is the breathless individual who, when Oppenheimer was
at the Institute for Advanced Research at Princeton, was asked, "What
is it like to study with Oppenheimer?" and who responded, "It's wonderful.
Everything we knew about physics last week isn't true." Well, this is
what it means to be an initiated member of a discipline. The science you
learned in elementary school is no good when you get to high school, which
is no good when you get to the first year in college, which is no good
by the second year of college, and so forth.
What, however, happens to the person who doesn't stay the course? This
notion of the delayed payoff is problematic. My son came home very depressed
from high school chemistry because he said he "got an experiment wrong."
I told him that you can't have an experiment wrong. An experiment is trying
to find out something. You put your two things together, and you found
out something. He said, "No, no, no, it wasn't the way it was supposed
to come out." Well, then it wasn't an experiment. If he performed the
same experiment in college, they could show him twenty-eight more variables
that went into the results, and he would have understood that he didn't
get it wrong. If that is his only experience with science, he'll never
have that particular idea unmasked.
In most of the fields that we teach, there is no such even rudimentary
recognition of sequence or corporate responsibility. Too often the sequence
listed in the course catalogue is only political, requiring one course
with each professor in a department. The majority of concentration programs,
or for that matter graduate programs, don't acknowledge the underlying
initiatory sense that what we knew for sure yesterday we now know as somewhat
problematic.
Though I think there is something to disciplinary lying, I think there
is very little to justify introductory lying. In the case of the introductory
courses, we produce incredibly mysterious objects because the students
have not seen the legerdemain by which the object has appeared. The students
sense that they are not in on the joke, that there is something that they
don't get, so they reduce the experience to "Well, it's his or her opinion."
On the other hand, disciplinary lying—the conventions within a discipline—enables
me to get moving. You have to allow me some measure of monomania if I
am to get anywhere. I can't do my work when I have to stop and entertain
every other opinion under the sun. This is why such work must always be
done in a corporate setting, so that the monomanias mutually abrade against,
so that they relativize each other; so that the students, the initiates,
are let in on the joke. I had an old teacher who, when you said something
you thought was very smart, would say, "That's an exaggeration in the
direction of truth." I have always thought that was the best definition
I have ever heard of the academic enterprise.
Robert O. Anderson Distinguished Service Professor,
The College and Committee on History of Culture, the University of Chicago.
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