On The Ignorant Schoolmaster

A certain toddler adds notes to my book.

“We can thus dream of a society of the emancipated that would be a society of artists. Such a society would repudiate the division between those who know and those who don’t, between those who possess or don’t possess the property of intelligence.”
— Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster, (1991)

Recently I finished reading "The Ignorant Schoolmaster" by the French philosopher Jacques Ranciere. Despite having some reservations about confronting another French descendant of the Heideggerian line, I actually found the book immensely thought provoking and almost entirely accessible. Indeed it was heartening to read: “Man is a being that knows very well when someone speaking doesn’t know what he is talking about.” In fact Ranciere does a ‘masterful’ job of interweaving historical record and philosophy in what could be considered a 21^st Century manifesto.

The book centers around the work of Joseph Jacotot, a 19C schoolmaster who developed a “panecastic” method of teaching what he didn't know  - hence the "Ignorant" in the title. One of Jacotot’s five fundamental precepts in his “Universal Education” was that everyone is of equal intelligence. Ranciere makes a fantastic case in championing Universal Teaching – so much so that I found myself making copious notes in the margins. It just so happens though that I've also been reading "The Blank Slate" by Steven Pinker which makes a yet more convincing case for the reverse, backed up by overwhelming evidence and clear - but characteristically lengthy - argument. Ranciere does nonetheless concede that:

“It is true that we don’t know that men are equal. We are saying that they might be. But we know that this might is the very thing that makes a society of humans possible.”

If, as Pinker’s research seems to prove beyond all doubt, we are not of equal intelligence, is it then the case that Ranciere and Jacotot’s arguments entirely crumble? Whilst I would like to have had a good deal more evidence to be convinced that Jacotot’s method really had the impact that is claimed for it, I think it would be a mistake to simply dismiss it. Instead I think we have to seek an alternative explanation for the apparent success of Universal Education. The conclusion I am left with after weighing up the evidence and arguments presented on both sides is that where learning is concerned it is not so important what you are as what you believe. In other words, if you believe you are just as able as everyone else (i.e. of equal intelligence) then this belief is far more likely to lead you to persist where anyone else would desist and to have confidence where anyone else would have doubt. As is becoming increasingly clear; talent is certainly advantageous, but when compared with gritty determination its influence upon achievement is nowhere near as profound. There are exceptions of course, but as Stefan Zweig has pointed out in his book “Casanova: A Study in Self-Portraiture”, talent can be little more than superfluous unless it is allied to persistence and determination:

“He excelled in mathematics no less than in philosophy. He was a competent theologian, preaching his first sermon in a Venetian church when he was not yet 16 years old. As a violinist, he earned his daily bread for a whole year in the San Samuele theatre. When he was eighteen… he became doctor of laws at the University of Padua... He was well informed in chemistry, medicine, history, philosophy, literature, and, above all, in the more lucrative (because perplexing) sciences of astrology and alchemy... As universal dilettante, indeed, he was perfect, knowing an incredible amount of all the arts and all the sciences; but he lacked one thing, and this lack made it impossible for him to become truly productive. He lacked will, resolution, patience.” - Stefan Zweig (2009)

Another important precept in Jacotot’s teaching is this: “every man has received from God the faculty of being able to instruct himself.” i.e. given an opportunity and properly facilitated - especially with a meaningful subject - people are very adept at self education. This may have been a radical claim in its time, but in the present day it appears to be little more than a commonplace. More to the point, it doesn’t in the least explain why in some cases teachers do make a difference. We’ve all been taught by ignorant teachers in our lives but the results were rarely, if ever, positive.

When reading The Ignorant Schoolmaster I was frequently reminded of something Goethe wrote:

"Treat a man as he is, he will remain so. Treat a man the way he can be and ought to be, and he will become as he can be and should be." 

Once again it comes down to the idea of self-belief mentioned above. It seems to me that what really drives the success of Jacotot’s  teaching - indeed all good teaching - is the way that people are treated. Self-belief is an incredibly potent instrument, whether it comes directly from the individual or whether encouraged in them by the conviction of a respected parent, friend or teacher. If it comes from the individual, as seems to have been the case with Jacotot’s students, then all to the better. But if it can be facilitated, enabled or encouraged - so long as this doesn’t engender dependence - then all to the better too.

So, in spite of all the evidence in Pinker's favour, how you "treat" people seems more profoundly crucial for the vast majority of people than those rare and fickle gifts of talent. I don't think I know anyone who hasn't at some point in their lives been inspired by someone - whether a teacher, parent or friend - that made them feel as though they had a special ability - a “talent” if you will - that was worth serious attention and effort. Whether these teachers were in fact correct in spotting some unique gift is perhaps peripheral to the immense force of conviction that comes from being encouraged by the evident faith of someone one respects or admires – by being treated as you can be and ought to be.

The Talented and the Undeserving

During a tutorial last week a student told me that she thinks I’m wrong to be skeptical about the notion of talent. She presented me with the example of two equally able and hardworking individuals who decide to learn a new skill. Invariably one will become better - sometimes markedly so. She asked me how I might account for such inevitable divergences other than through the agency of talent.

I don’t doubt that variations amongst individuals within any culture can be the result of genetic differences but the thing I find objectionable about common conceptions of talent is the tendency to attribute seemingly inexplicable or untraceable variations in performance to a genetic source without first considering the equally plausible alternatives. Two individuals of comparable ability who take up learning a new skill and find themselves unevenly matched despite expending comparable energy, need not explain their differences by recourse to genes. For example, one individual may have enjoyed a now forgotten childhood pastime that predisposes them to learn a related skill more quickly. They may find something humorous about their new learning that lends it more significance and promotes greater cognitive processing and memory retention. Equally likely is that an entire complex of subtle biographical details and influences are combined in unique ways to bring about a measurable difference in performance. Such causes of variation can have significant influence over peoples’ development and are extremely difficult, if not entirely impossible to trace. But just because we can find no simple explanation for something, is it therefore necessary to invoke what amounts to speculation dressed up as certainty?

“Both popular and scientific explanations of behavior, accustomed to invoking genes, parents, and society, seldom acknowledge the enormous role that unpredictable factors must play in the development of an individual.” –Steven Pinker

If accepting the notion of talent did not betray an underlying assumption of immutable genetic superiority and were simply a way of describing otherwise unattributable causes (both environmental and genetic) of advantage, then I might be more inclined to accept it. But, to assume that any given example of superior performance is due to genetic advantage is to make a leap into territory of which few of us have any thorough understanding. Philosophers, neuroscientists, psychologists and evolutionary biologists are still researching and debating these issues and although they are beginning to reveal many fascinating and often counter-intuitive insights in the process, many questions over the relationship between nature and nurture remain unexplained.

But the arguments over whether talent is a truth or fallacy are perhaps an irrelevance when considered beside the fact that believing in talent - other people's talent that is - has a well documented and measurable influence on student achievement – a negative one. Studies across cultures, genders and age groups have shown that students who attribute the success of others to talent are less likely to persist in the face of difficulty and are therefore more susceptible to sub-optimum performance when compared with individuals who view hard work as the road to achievement.

Some teachers take the view that it is possible to identify talent; to 'see' potential in students. We might well ask how such 'gifts' influence teachers’ perceptions of student potential and of how much attention they are prepared to devote to those they feel lack talent? As one colleague recently quoted from a now retired teacher: “Good students don’t need to be taught, because they’re already good, and bad students don’t deserve to be taught.”

An Insight into Creativity and Innovation

Following on from an earlier discussion of the theories of Donald Brook and applying some elements of this (though avoiding his memetic theory for the moment) to an emerging trajectory within a number of posts on this blog I’d like to put forward what seems to be a radical new understanding of creativity and innovation that finds support in the work of Wasserman and Blumberg (here). I realise that this is a grand claim so until it can be more extensively tested and debated I offer it up here simply as a conjecture.

Ordinarily we think of discovery and innovation arising as the consequence of human ingenuity and creative engagement with the world. But imagine if this were a wholly inaccurate representation. Imagine instead that innovation arises as an epiphenomenon, side effect or by-product of variations in human engagement with the world. Imagine also that creativity is no mystery of talent and divine ability but is simply a process of multiplying - of varying - the physical and cognitive approaches we apply to problems, materials and relationships and that the consequent variety of outcomes and perceptual perspectives results in an increased probability of innovation and discovery.

How different would this world appear to us?

In such a world there would be numerous people engaged in a vast multitude of activities, from fearsome risk-taking to mindless repetitive drudgery, from feats of unutterable beauty and wonder to acts of unspeakable immorality. Far from being a chaos of variation though, such a world would have to carefully monitor and guard against all forms of exploitation and criminality to ensure that these did not infringe or impede the more general impetus toward cooperative engagement and variation. Similarly there would be a need to avoid unintentional harm or obstruction of the free flow of variation. Laws and codes of practice would therefore have to be instituted and on occasion these processes of regulation, legislation and policing would themselves slow and even halt the progress of variation in some quarters.

It will already be obvious that this description bears all the hallmarks of exactly the world we inhabit. What is most striking about this hypothesis is how snugly it fits all situations to which it is applied. But it isn’t simply a case of a convenient fit or a congenial alternative view but more importantly that the outlook it affords makes clear a whole range of what were previously murky and confused ideas about creativity and innovation. It explains why notions of creativity are mired in the hocus-pocus of genius and talent peddled by such people as Sir Ken Robinson, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi or Eric Booth. It explains why so many so-called geniuses rarely have more than a single major insight in their lifetime to which they return in endless variety. It explains why other geniuses (perhaps the only ones who deserve the title) only arrive at further insights via a mountain of hard work and failure. It explains why using FMRI scanners to locate the neurological core of creativity is a wasteful and futile quest for the most impossibly wild goose, a goose that is in fact no more than a phantasm. It explains why all forms of regulation are a hindrance to innovation and why highly regulated cultures exhibit such a paucity of innovation. It explains the unwavering tension between tradition and innovation and how science’s lack of concern for tradition propels it forward with far greater momentum than art. It explains why innovation will continue to consume ever-increasing quantities of natural and human resources. It explains why there can never be a "calculus of discovery or a schedule of rules by the following of which we will be lead to the truth" and why the notion of "the" scientific method is a myth. It explains how the desire for specialist expertise is very often a desire for access to a territory of greater opportunity. It explains the tension between learning (as a form of pattern recognition) and discovery (as a form of play). In short, it corroborates and deepens the vast majority of the principal insights I have shared on this blog in the last 2½ years.

So to reiterate the main thesis: innovation arises as a by-product of variations in human engagement with the world. And what makes some people stand out from the crowd is that they are in the right place at the right time and/or that they have worked damned hard to get where they are - simple as that.

Talent

“Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.” -Stephen King

The comments from my last blog post have led me to brush up a little on Attribution Theory. Most especially I've been reading about Fundamental Attribution Error: the tendency to attribute the causes of behavior to dispositional traits rather than situational effects. For example, when someone spills something we tend to assume that they're clumsy rather than considering that the glass might be slippery or that they've been distracted by a friend or by stressful thoughts about a situation at work or at home.

So how does this relate to talent? Well, talent is principally something we attribute to others and it's also something we tend to think of as arising from internal processes rather than being produced by external factors. Whilst many people may believe that we can do little to induce talent, it's generally accepted that it’s possible to draw it out and encourage it (or the reverse). Teachers especially, are in the business of spotting talents in students and assisting their fuller development. In many ways teachers have the daunting responsibility of identifying underlying talents and guiding students to pursue them – in effect shaping the course of their lives. But at what point might the identification of talent be thought of as a fundamental attribution error? Perhaps Timmy just appears to be talented at maths because his older brother took a few moments to help him understand a few useful underlying principles and now Timmy enjoys maths more than anything else and is in advance of his classmates because of it. Perhaps Timmy had the temerity to paint on the classroom wall last time he did an art class and got told off. Perhaps he just likes the maths teacher. There are so many potential variables which contribute to the formation of each individual that to generalise by assuming someone is talented seems narrow minded at the very least. As we well know, teachers make mistakes, sometimes grossly. Consider, for example, the headmaster who said that a five-year-old Bertie would never amount to anything. Later, in Technical College, this same student was described as “a lazy dog who never bothered about mathematics at all.” Fortunately Einstein didn't take much notice of what these teachers thought, but many students lack such independence of thought.

Much as I agree with the above quote by Steven King, I think it also highlights a pervasive misunderstanding in contemporary attitudes which see success, rather than fulfillment, as the pinnacle of human achievement. Should we be encouraging young people to pursue their talents, that we have skillfully identified with our unique but untutored gift for talent spotting, or should we encourage what they find fulfilling? I fully admit that the two often overlap, and all for the better. But sometimes they don’t and we do students a serious disservice, much as it may break our hearts to see them squander the talents we perceive, when we encourage them, oblige them or subtly coerce them into pursuing routes which do not accord with their own desires.

But it isn’t only external perceptions that shape student achievements. Self perceptions also play a significant role in determining how individuals develop (though these perceptions are by no means immune to the influence of parents and teachers either). In various studies carried out by Carol Dweck and collaborators it was repeatedly found that students could be divided roughly equally between those who sought “learning goals” (increased competence) as opposed to those who sought “performance goals” (goals that provided favourable judgements or – crucially - the avoidance of negative judgements about their performance). These different goals were found to be predicated on contrasting beliefs about the nature of ability. Students who believe that ability is a fixed entity tend to seek performance goals and to avoid risk taking whilst students who believe that ability is alterable (ie: can be improved) are more persistent, relish challenges and see failure as an opportunity to learn (learning goals). Unsurprisingly these students also achieve significantly better results in challenging tasks. The upshot of this research has been a strong advocacy for methods of teaching that shift student perceptions of ability as a fixed entity to ones that see ability as malleable and therefore subject to hard work and determination. This makes a real difference.

Imagine the obstacles in Art Schools then, where many students have come specifically because school teachers have encouraged their unique talents? And what is talent after all, other than a stubbornly immutable conception of innate ability? No wonder you hear the word used so little in studio discussions or tutorials – it’s practically taboo. But that’s not the only obstacle art school teachers face. In this world increasingly dominated by X-Factor’s and Nation’s Got Talent shows it seems to be becoming increasingly difficult to persuade young people that hard work isn’t a sign of weakness but, on the contrary, is the road to mastery that even the most talented need to tread.

"I know quite certainly that I myself have no special talent; curiosity, obsession and dogged endurance, combined with self-criticism, have brought me to my ideas.” -Albert Einstein

Here's a good article on a similar theme.

“Science has to catch up to art”

Sticking with the science theme started in my last post, Ted.com just posted this video of Charles Limb talking about some preliminary research into what happens when musicians creatively improvise in an fMRI scanner:

It’s interesting…ish but somehow comes across as a rather naïve attempt to split atoms with an elaborate vacuum cleaner. So far the findings are pretty meager, to say the least, and the questions based on these are very unenlightening:

Just for the fun of it, let’s make a cursory stab at providing some answers to these questions (without the aid of an expensive bunch of wires, magnets and electricity of course):

1: What is creative genius?

Extremely open minded focus.

2: Why does the brain seek creativity?

Because it’s pleasurable, solves problems and has a selection advantage.

3: How do we acquire creativity?

It’s in our genes, but is often inhibited and/or underdeveloped (see next question)

4: What factors disrupt creativity?

Stress, fear, distraction, poverty etc and in some cases their opposites ie: affluence, success, achievement etc (and possibly lying down in fMRI scanners)

5: Can creative behavior be learned?

I've argued in the past that the answer should be Yes, but to a degree this depends on what we mean by “creative” and “learned” and also on not getting too fussy about the difference between "creative behavior" (as the question asks) and creative ability (which seems likely to be influenced by a whole wealth of factors).

And lastly, if creativity behaves in any way differently when you're lying down as opposed to when you're standing up (as anger does¹) then the whole experiment will need to be repeated.

Hmm, it seems like there are probably better uses for an fMRI scanner at this time. Perhaps in the future, with finer instrumentation, better data gathering techniques and more sophisticated questions we might actually get some useful information. But despite this, I’m reminded of something Richard Feynman said about thinking processes and the ways thoughts are generated by different individuals.

This is extraordinary from a couple of perspectives: 1: the contestation of genius and 2: the evidence of, not exactly learning styles² as such, but different cognitive functioning leading to the same result but involving different cognitive load and therefore having differential influence on other cognitive functions (it relates closely to what is called "The Split Attention Effect"³). If Feynman was right, and there seems little reason to doubt it, then the hope of finding a neurological formula for creativity seems likely to be fanciful at best.

External References:
1: The Split Attention Effect
2: Learning Styles
3: Anger behaves differently in fMRI whilst lying down as opposed to standing up.

The Myth of Genius

"I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious."

-Albert Einstein

Let's think about this for a moment. What do we mean by genius? Someone who consistently creates objects or ideas of sheer brilliance in great flashes of inspiration or skill, or someone who works doggedly at something, making multiple mistakes and iterations to eventually arrive at a successful outcome? Presumably the former. But who fits the bill? Nobody, absolutely no one.

Everything of substance which we use, read, see or listen to, which has been wrought by the hand of woman or man, either sits firmly atop a mountain of forgotten or concealed failures, or has been encircled and elevated by culture and history to such a degree that it is invested with an almost sacred aura. 


But what about Mozart you may ask? Well, if he'd stood before he crawled, or ran before he walked (metaphorically that is!) I would probably have to agree with you, but that doesn't appear to have been the case.


Certainly there have been, and continue to be, individuals with prodigious talents, but it is only through the deft concealment of support, determination, hard work, frustration and a plethora of failures, that anyone might be seen to be a genius. And it is thus that there appear to be no contemporary geniuses despite the fact that by all probability, there should be significantly more than ever.
 History has a canny knack of casting a soft veil over the many toils and disappointments in the lives of our heroes and in so doing it gently polishes their lustrous portraits whilst our own more contemporary representations either sit in dusky corners or reveal their countenances in high-definition with every lurid pixel an embarrassing imperfection.

“The myth of the artistic genius serves to de-socialise the production of art, to disguise the facts of privilege and convention which regulate access to training and advancement. A product of a classed and gender-divided society, this idea of the artist is a veil for the inequalities which sustain its elites.” – Griselda Pollock

But this is great news - not because the idea of genius has turned out to be a fabrication and a delusion, but because now the peak of the mountain is clearer for us all to see and since it’s a mountain of our own making, it should be even easier to climb. So, let's just make sure that each failure is a genuine and dogged attempt to succeed. Then fail, fail, fail again.

"If I find 10,000 ways something won't work, I haven't failed. I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward." -Thomas Alva Edison

Sgurr a' Bhealaich Dheirg (Rocky Peak of the Red Pass) © J.Hamlyn

Refrences:

Griselda Pollock in R. Parker & G. Pollock (1987). "Framing Feminism". pp. 84-85

Gleick, J (1992). Genius, The life and science of Richard Feynman. New York: Vintage Books.

Imaginary Boundaries blog (specifically this post).

Designing Minds by Edward A. Wasserman, Mark S. Blumberg

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