What If Students Aren’t Learning Because They Cannot Be Taught?

The Impossible Lesson

You are a schoolteacher. The year is 1950. Place? The suburbs of Stalingrad. You are dedicated to your calling, you love your class full of eager, hardworking students, and you long to teach them the best lessons you can. There is indeed much you can impart to them: the beauty of mathematics, the rules of grammar, the laws of physics, and much, much more. But… can you teach them Orwell? Is Animal Farm likely to make it onto the reading list? Of course not. Why? The answer, I believe, explains a great deal about the failure of education – not in the Stalinist Soviet Union, but in America today. 

The obvious reason why a Soviet teacher couldn’t introduce his high schoolers to Orwell is that he would be fired, tortured, and killed. Pretty good incentive to stick to trigonometry. Yet that’s not the whole answer. Why can’t the teacher be allowed to teach Orwell? Why would a teacher in such a school, regardless of his own personal commitment to communism, never even consider teaching Orwell? Because in a society built upon a lie, you cannot teach the truth.

Imagine what would happen to students in a Soviet system given a lesson on Orwell. Their minds couldn’t compute it. It would lead them to question everything – everything – they had ever been taught. It would make them ungovernable overnight. They could never ‘fit’ back into the Soviet system again. No matter how hard they tried, part of them would always understand they were living a lie.

There are certain things that simply cannot be taught. I’m picking on the Soviets, but you can think of a thousand examples. For Huxley, writing Brave New World, his choice was Shakespeare. Shakespeare had to be banned in the World State, because to love Shakespeare would make life in that soulless, drugged-out tyranny unbearable. Once you’ve seen the light, you can’t continue to live in the dark. Similarly, I imagine that if you lived in a society built upon evils like racism, sexism, or the slaughter of unborn children (ahem), your teachers would be unable to teach lessons on how race doesn’t matter, or female minds aren’t inferior, or babies are people, too. Such lessons would subvert the society itself. It would be like a school of fish spending a semester learning to breathe air. They are impossible lessons.

CS Lewis, making the case for why we should read old books (and future books, were they available), argued that every age has its blind spots, and if you stick to reading only your contemporaries, you will never be exposed to your own. Only by learning the history and literature of other times – and recognizing the blind spots of those eras – can you hope to get a glimpse of your own era’s false assumptions. One logical extension from Lewis’ argument: if your schools don’t teach the history and literature of other times, children will never see your era’s blind spots. Go further still: if your schools and the people who run them depend on society’s current blind spots, they cannot teach the history and literature of other times. An impossible lesson is born.

When you understand what I mean by the impossible lesson, the scary statistics we see in the news about how little our children learn in school today begin to be seen in a new light.

Imagine being an educational reformer in Huxley’s Brave New World. “Our kids aren’t learning literature,” you and your fellow parent activists lament, “they’ve never even heard of The Tempest!” You come up with a detailed plan to present at the next school board meeting: a new high school curriculum, incorporating Shakespeare, Dickens, Austen. Your chances of success, in Huxley’s world? I would say approximately the same as a Soviet educational reformer’s chances of getting Animal Farm on the Stalingrad summer reading list. The problem in the World State isn’t that Shakespeare is missing from the lesson plan, it’s that teaching him is impossible. You cannot fix the curriculum until you free the society – until the world stops living the lies that necessitate Shakespeare’s banning.

Another example, not from Huxley, but our own brave new world. You are a high school English teacher. Twenty to thirty percent of your class is on mind-altering pharmaceuticals – in most cases, because you yourself sent them to the doctor to be drugged, so they would better conform to your classroom expectations. How can you face this class, and lead them in a careful study of Huxley’s dystopia – in which the entire population is drugged to conform to their leader’s behavioral expectations? Could you even teach Brave New World as anything but a how-to manual? Forget Huxley, plenty of great literary minds have warned of the dangers of arrogant scientist rulers playing God and drugging the populace for its own good (almost like that’s a fairly predictable, real danger of human hubris). Take Walker Percy, for instance. Could you teach Percy’s tale of the evils of mass drugging to a classroom you were responsible for mass drugging?

More along these lines, though I’m sure you can supply many of your own examples: if you are teaching in a one-size-fits-all, factory-model school system, can you teach your students about the incredibly successful educational diversity of the founding generation? If you are teaching in a school system that has thoroughly scrubbed every trace of the divine, can you teach about that school system’s profoundly religious, originally intended purpose? If you are punishing your kindergarteners for not completing their worksheets quickly enough, can you teach them that kindergarten used to be about eradicating worksheets from childhood? Put simply, if the regime you are a part of is dedicated to erasing the past and making man new, can you be counted on to teach a good history lesson?

Some food for thought as this latest school year gets underway. Next time you find yourself bemoaning the sad state of the curriculum, ask yourself: are my children not learning X,Y,Z because the classroom is underfunded, the teacher didn’t get to it this year, the curriculum just needs some fine-tuning – or is it because the lesson is impossible?