Rote learning and the hive mentality are the greatest danger of our age. As I approach the beginning of another school year, I am struck by the words of Stephan Zweig in World of Yesterday, inspiration for Wes Andersons Grand Budapest Hotel. In revealing the world of his youth that led to two World Wars, and 60 million dead, let us beware the creation of the hive mind that allowed it and that threatens our world. Zweig started writing it in 1934 when, anticipating Anschluss and Nazi persecution, he uprooted himself from Austria to England. He posted the manuscript, typed by his second wife Lotte Altmann, to the publisher the day before they both committed suicide in February 1942. (Wikipedia, the World of Yesterday) Zweig, who became one of the most celebrated of Viennese authors, describes his education and that of his peers. It puts me in mind of the recent mania for testing of rote learning, the antithesis of true thinking, and the danger to our nation that it represents in damaging the minds of young people, so that they crave only entertainment, and detest the thinking necessary to penetrate the hypnotism of authority, and its imposition of the hive mentality on the constituencies and functionaries of power. For us school was compulsion, ennui, dreariness, a place where we had to assimilate the “science of the not-worth-knowing” in exactly measured portions – scholastic or scholastically manufactured material which we felt could have no relation to reality or to our personal interests. It was a dull, pointless learning that the old pedagogy forced upon us, not for the sake of life, but for the sake of learning. And the only truly joyful moment of happiness for which I have to thank my school was the day that I was able to shut the door behind me forever... [A]fter a hundred years of experience, the curriculum had been carefully worked out and, had it been transmitted with any inspiration, could have been the basis for a fruitful and fairly universal education. But because of their accurate arrangement and their dry formulary our lessons were frightfully barren and lifeless, a cold teaching apparatus which never adapted itself to the individual, but automatically registered the grades, “good,”“sufficient,” and “insufficient,” depending on how far we had complied with the “requirements” of the curriculum. It was exactly this lack of human affection, this empty impersonality and the barracks-like quality of our surroundings, that unconsciously embittered us. We had to learn our lessons and were examined on what we had learned. For eight years no teacher asked us even once what we personally wished to learn, and that encouraging stimulus, for which every young person secretly longs, was totally lacking... It was an odor of overheated, overcrowded rooms, never properly aired, which first attached itself to our clothes and then to our souls. We sat in pairs like galley slaves, on low wooden benches that twisted our spines, and we sat until our bones ached... Nor were our teachers to blame for the dreariness of the institution. They were neither good nor bad; they were not tyrants, nor on the other hand were they helpful comrades, but poor devils who were slavishly bound to the schedule, the officially designated curriculum. They had to accomplish their task as we had to do ours, and – we felt this clearly – they were as happy as we were when in the afternoon the school bell rang and gave them, and us, freedom. They did not love us, they did not hate us, and why should they, for they knew nothing about us; even after a year or two they knew only a few of us by name. According to the teaching methods of those times, they had nothing to do but to determine how many mistakes we had made in our last lesson. They sat up at their desks and we sat below, they questioned and we had to reply, and there was no other relation between us. For between teacher and pupil, between teacher’s desk and school bench, the visible above and the visible below, stood the invisible barrier of “authority” which prevented all contact. For a teacher to regard a pupil as an individual would have demanded particular attention to the special qualities of the pupil, or the preparation of “reports” or written observations about him, which is a matter of course today) would at that time have exceeded not only the teacher’s authority but his capabilities as well... It is from this unusual attitude alone that we can understand how the State exploited the schools as an instrument for the maintenance of its authority. Above all else we were to be educated to respect the existing as perfect, the opinion of the teacher as infallible, our father’s words as uncontradictable, the provisions of the State as absolute and valid for all eternity. A second cardinal principle of the pedagogy of those times, which also was applied within the family, directed that young people were not to have things too easy. Before any rights were allowed them they were to learn that they had duties, and above all others the obligation of complete docility. It was to be impressed upon us from the very start that we, who had not yet accomplished anything in life and were entirely without experience, should simply be thankful for all that was granted to us, and had no right to ask or demand anything... Whether we were happy at school or not was unimportant. Its true mission, according to the spirit of the times, was not to advance but to retard us, not to form us inwardly but to fit us with as little opposition as possible into the ordered scheme, not to increase our energy but to discipline it and to level it off. Zweig, Stefan (2011-09-04). The World of Yesterday (Kindle Locations 814-821). Plunkett Lake Press. Kindle Edition.
Posted on: Mon, 18 Aug 2014 09:11:09 +0000
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