"Why Converse?"
I spent eight weeks in Haiti this summer, talking with colleagues, students, and friends about books, about teaching, and about our lives. The experiences we shared, whether in conversation or in deed, continue to cast a bright light on many of the questions that I think about, most especially on the classroom practice, the effort to learn and to teach, that makes up the very center of my life. Over the next weeks I want to write down some of my reflections as a way to both clarify and share my sense of where my work in Haiti is leading.
We cannot spend too much time thinking through the conversations we find ourselves in and asking ourselves what these conversations are for. This is true even of all the little conversations we engage in each day because these are an important way we have of being together with others. And it's all the truer when the conversations in question are those that form the centerpiece of a kind of education, because when we choose to spend our classroom time in conversation, rather than in lecture or in drill, we are deciding what our education ought to be.
It's not enough to say that classroom discussions are an exciting and engaging alternative to traditional practices, because we've all seen lecturers who are exciting and children who gleefully memorize and recite poems or other texts. Classroom conversations should have specific goals that lectures and drilling can't achieve or can't achieve well, and we owe it to ourselves and to one another to think carefully about these goals.
One of those in a series of conversations that I had with a young Haitian man who was applying to Shimer College. The young man was talking to me about one of the essays that he had to write as part of his application. The application required him to write about a book he had read that held particular importance for him. He was concerned that his essay was too short, just two pages. It had been longer, but as he edited it he found that much of what he had written was his own opinion. He therefore went through the essay, eliminating everything but a threadbare summary of the book he was writing about.
I was surprised, but I shouldn't have been. Though he was growing up in an environment in Haiti where education is given extraordinary importance, and though the neighborhood he was living in was full of teachers and students learning and developing new ways to organize and to study together, the governing fact about his formal education was nevertheless that it aimed, more than anything, to equip him to pass the national high school graduation exam, an exam that would test his mastery of wide range of information and a few basic skills. In philosophy and literature, for example, he would be expected to reproduce standard critical evaluations of certain authors viewed as having particular importance, mostly from the classical French tradition. His own evaluation of those authors would be beside the point, to say nothing of any thoughts he might have about the issues that the authors raised.
What was clear from my conversation with him is that what he needed towrite, what would matter to the people reading his application, would be just the lines he had eliminated. What was worth expressing was not a quick summary of a book's contents, but his own thoughts about what it said. He is now struggling to organize and articulate those thoughts. It won't be easy for him because his education has never asked to do anything of the kind.
Talking to him about what would matter in an application essay was a good way to remind myself what matters in the education he was applying to undertake. The conversations we have in the classroom are not, first and foremost, about the opinions that the authors we read express -- though working hard to understand those opinions well is useful towards our more important goals. Our conversations aim, rather, at bringing out our own opinions. Brother Robert Smith has said that education is about learning to make good judgments and that conversation serve us a place where we make our judgments publicly, thus opening them to criticism and to change.
The education that my friend is receiving in Haiti specifically excludes work towards that goal. The memorization and drilling that are its basis require of students that they do not judge -- at least not publicly. The discussion project that my Haitian and American colleagues and I have been developing since 1997 -- Wonn Refleksyon -- aims, on the other hand, directly towards this goal. Participants in Wonn Refleksyon discussions are asked to share their judgments and are pushed by one another to question them. The project's political goal -- to democratize the classroom so that it can be a source of liberation -- is one side of a coin. It's commonplace to say in the political realm that democratic rights must go together with democratic responsibilities. In the classroom, democratization of educational practices goes hand in hand with the challenge for each of us to express and to question our own points of view.
The question for me as I return to Shimer from Haiti is whether and how such an approach can become part of formal education in Haiti. Not just as a complementary but separate activity -- like Wonn Refleksyon -- but as an integrated part of the school program itself.