TOK “As If” Manifesto – April 13, 2020
Our educational system is undergoing a major stress test. Many parts of it will not survive. The standardized tests that typically dot the spring calendar appear to be an early victim. Yes, there will be a few workarounds plus strained attempts to make the data seem legitimate and, yes, there will always be tests in school — whatever current or future guise school takes. For the moment, however, we are invited to ask the rare question: What is the point of all this study?
The usual ready answer: To prepare ourselves for college and the working world beyond seems similarly hollow, at least in the current the moment. College will come back as a reality for us to consider as will work. But in what form? One can easily picture a fall landscape in which 10-20 major colleges, the kind whose brand names cover the back windows of sport utility vehicles across America, have suspended operations pending taxpayer bailout funds or an endowment review.
In the meantime, the remainder of the 2019-2020 school calendar affords us the rare opportunity to play the “as if” game.
As in: What would school look like if students and teachers went about the work of education for its own sake — treating school as if it was a place (physical or virtual) of learning?
No more, no less.
I borrow the loaded term “as if” from the late Christopher Hitchens and his 2001 book Letters to a Young Contrarian. It’s a piece of writing I typically turn to this time of year, that moment in early to mid-spring when it dawns that the energy, enthusiasm and creativity of the first semester has given way to frustration, fatalism and sentences that start with “These kids….” and end with sigh.
In a key passage (published here as an excerpt). Hitchens uses the “as if” phrase to summarize the mental revolution that helped Vaclav Havel and the liberal-minded citizens of Czechoslovakia outsmart the bland tyranny of the postwar Communist system.
Writes Hitchens:
Havel, then working as a marginal playwright and poet in a society and state that truly merited the title of Absurd, realised that “resistance” in its original insurgent and militant sense was impossible in the central Europe of the day. He therefore proposed living “as if” he were a citizen of a free society, “as if” lying and cowardice were not mandatory patriotic duties, “as if” his government had signed (which it actually had) the various treaties and agreements that enshrine universal human rights. He called this tactic the “power of the powerless” because, even when disagreement is almost forbidden, a state that insists on actually compelling assent can be relatively easily made to look stupid.
As noted above, I turn to this passage each spring, because it helps me combat the usual late-in-the-year malaise: Instead of planning lessons with one eye on the coming state tests, why not plan lessons “as if” the real goal was to deliver a lesson the student retained in their memory into adulthood.
This spring goes beyond mere malaise, which is why I am proposing, for week that was never originally slated for school work, we follow a similar “as if” model of thinking. The current educational and economic moment is its own frightening absurdity. To survive, one must be willing to accommodate an extreme degree of cognitive dissonance, to act “as if” the video and worksheet your teacher posted qualifies as a instruction, “as if” a 20 minute Google Meet in which 80 percent of the participants had their video turned off was a class, that the five second check-in survey you just filled out on Google Classroom qualifies as a valid indicator of attendance.
I propose flipping the virtual classroom to a more positive “as if” model: What if students treated the next 24 hours as if it was an opportunity to learn something new, as if the primary purpose of the classroom teacher was to facilitate this process or, at the very least, to not stand in the way? Assuming they were successful, what if we asked ourselves the same question 24 hours again from now?
One day at a time as they say in the language of recovery.
During a recent online seminar, I asked students a modified version of this question. What would you study next week if you didn’t have to worry about tests or grades? The list came rolling down the chat window like a waterfall: “World War II,” “How to pay my taxes,” “art history,” “quantum physics,” etc. I resolved then and there to give my students the freedom to study that topic for one hour a day this week and to count it towards my class.
Freedom, of course, has its price. In today’s 20 minute class period my students and I will have to set the terms of this new social contract. My class is called Theory of Knowledge, and knowledge of self is always a good starting point. The student who chooses to spend this week staying up until 4 a.m. or sleeping until noon, I will remind them in a fatherly fashion, stands to come away feeling far more miserable than they did going in, especially in comparison with the student who sets out a clearly defined study schedule. Similarly, the student who uses the allotted study time to, say, read a book or push themselves a unit ahead in pre-calculus but refuses to reflect on or share back his or her newfound understanding to the TOK community at large will find herself gripping a fistful of empty knowledge in one week’s time.
Finally, there is the deeper problem of freedom: The problem, as the Trench Periscope sees it, is that, as a teacher, I exert zero control over the goals, moods or prerogatives of the six or seven other peer teachers each demanding their own slice of a students’ school life. In other words, my class might be giving you a digital hall pass, but the next teacher you encounter onscreen might be readying a turn-it-in-Friday-or-else ultimatum. It’s hard to tell. In our new digital “building,” I can’t see the English teacher’s list of drop dead dates on the white board. Nor can I hear the Biology teacher’s building frustration from three doors down. All I know, literally, is what the students tell me.
What they tell me is this. The current work load isn’t difficult, it’s just trivial. Also, there’s a lot of it. One reason, we mutually determined in seminar, is because, in the current regime, no teacher wants to make the mistake of not asking for work and looking weak or lazy. Many of us, myself included, are living in fear and working from a standpoint that all bases need to be covered, all surveys answered, all checkboxes checked.
This is where “as if” thinking comes in. Just as Havel and the survivors of the Prague Spring saw that opposition to the system meant learning how to avoid triggering the part of the system built to crush opposition, I think students and educators who sense opportunity within the current educational crisis need a mixture of creativity and bravery. Some assignments will have to be honored. Some deserve only notional respect. It is up to each individual to do their own personal sorting and ranking of risks. At the same time, however, it is up to the entire community of participants to see some form of risk as necessary and to see the system itself as providing the language and rhetorical tools needed to oppose it.
In the case of my particular class, which is part of the International Baccalaureate diploma program, those tools lie within the IB Learner Profile, a statement of collective values that seem banal (IB students are Inquirers, Knowledgeable, Communicators, Risk-Takers, etc.) until you actually try to honor them in your daily educational practice. I’m lucky to teach a course where I can say, simply, “What IB Learner Profile values did you exhibit this week?” as a writing prompt and take the resulting reflective summary as its own proof of work. Then again, I teach other classes (freshman Algebra) where students gripe about the long term utility of certain math topics only to gripe even more when I suggest setting their own educational agenda.
Hence this short(ish) manifesto. As much as I would love to end things with a rousing “we have nothing to loose but our chains,” I fear that many, teachers, students and administrators alike, might still need their chains if only to keep them connected to the shifting earth beneath their feet. I, for one, have no desire to pick a fight with a system that pays me well, affords me enough trust to make the profession of teaching feel like more than just a job and which puts me in communication with earnest, inquisitive students. I am merely proposing that, given the shrinking list of options, we treat educational moment, absurd as it may feel, as a welcome opportunity for, as Havel himself would have put it, “living in Truth.”
My “as if” prescription isn’t for everyone, just as it wasn’t for everyone in 1968 Czechoslovakia. For those willing to give it a one-week try, consider the next five days and Theory of Knowledge your momentary safe harbor.
The Trench Periscope 