INTELLIGENT IGNORANCE, THE PLAYFULNESS OF LEARNING, AND THE CHRISTIAN TEACHER * ROBERT J. BRAKE * Associate Professor of Business & Management Concordia College Charles Kettering, one of America's most distinguished inventors, possessed a rare quality he called "intelligent ignorance"-a well-informed curiosity coupled with the persistent willingness to try.1 Kettering never wanted problems improved. He wanted them solved. To solve problems, this "self-starter who invented the self-starter" counseled people to analyze their failures intelligently. Kettering urged educators to "teach a highly educated person that it is not a disgrace to fail and that he must analyze every failure to find its cause. He must learn how to fail intelligently, for failing is one of the greatest arts in the world."2 What profound advice to Christian educators facing the perplexing problems and controversies of the 1990s! How can the practice of "intelligent ignorance" make us better teachers? This essay will first explore two major problems we must face during the 1990s-the information explosion and the danger of specialization-then suggest some qualities and behaviors of great Christian teachers and make some recommendations about how we can become better Christian teachers. The Problem? More and More About Less and Less It is not a lack of information that plagues 1 contemporary Christian teachers. In one day's edition of The New York Times, for example, there is probably more information than a single man or woman had to process in the whole of his or her life in the sixteenth century. How intimidating! It is estimated that all available knowledge doubles every five years. Each year more than 850,000 new titles appear around the world. And we know more and more about less and less.3 In Megatrends, John Naisbitt warned that "the world is drowning in detail, but starved for knowledge." He suggested that what we most need now is meaning, coherence, unity, and connections-without resorting to handbooks and bulletins that bypass our need to think critically.4 However, there are great possibilities that unethical individuals will manipulate society by inundating us with trivia-giving us so much information that we cannot possibly digest it in order to make informed, enlightened choices. If each of us is continually forced further and further into fragmentary knowledge, so as to feel utterly isolated from the whole of it, how do we determine our choices and how do we make them? Indeed, no one has any excuse not to be "educated" in terms of the availability of information and not to make intelligent choices based on that information. But as Barbara Tuchman's March of Folly reminds us, it isn't our lack of knowledge that often makes us act incorrectly: it's 2 our arrogance-we know that we're sometimes wrong, but are reluctant to accept our limitations.5 The Barbarism of Specialization One of our greatest limitations is our preoccupation with specialization. In the early 1930s Ortega y Gasset warned us of the "barbarism of specialization." He was worried then that we may be educating one-dimensional people who will be insensitive to the totality of human experience and the human predicament. (Sound familiar?) Albert Einstein too would warn us of the danger of specialization. In his essay, "On Education," Einstein observed that "the school should always have as its aim that the young man leave it as a harmonious personality, not as a specialist. . . . The development of general ability for independent thinking and judgement should always be placed foremost, not the acquisition of special knowledge."6 No doubt about it. More than ever, Christian teachers need to help their students develop critical minds in order to be able to differentiate between the chaff and the wheat, so that they can know what, among that mass of information out there, is truly obsolete, what is only obsolete in appearance, and what is potentially useful in ways we don't even know now. It's a very difficult problem. All those undigested facts can lead us to mental gridlock. And if we have traffic without traffic policemen, we have gridlock. So Christian teachers need to provide the traffic as well as a way to guide it. And that imperative 3 leads to at least seven needs or requirements for the Christian teacher. First, we need to recognize and confront our students' desire for easy, quick solutions-so they can't avoid what Thomas Sheridan described in 1779 as "the fatigue of judging for themselves."7 Second, we need to help students find ways to discover the range of choices available to them-moving beyond true-false options or simple multiple-choice questions to "other." Third, we need to help our students discover the limitations of their choices and perhaps the need to reject them and start a new quest for answers. We must return to the Socratic dictum-true knowledge is to know what you know, but also to know what you don't know. Fourth, aware that students often insist on finding instant gratification before launching into something new or insist on wanting to "see the point" quickly, Christian educators must remind students of the need for patience, for struggle, and for the discomfort and pain that sometimes precedes the achievement of their goals.8 Here educators and students must heed Aristotle's admonition (Politics V.v): "Learning is not child's play; we cannot learn without pain." Fifth, Christian educators must continually remind students that life is complex, that we're living in awesome and exciting times, and that ready answers aren't always 4 available. We educators can only provide a base of information. We are only kidding ourselves if we believe that by providing "Fifty Great Moments in Music" or Hirsch's Cultural Literacy, we're "producing cultured people." Sixth, Christian educators must help students discover connections-connections with our past, our present, and our future. Commenting on Dante's Inferno, T.S. Eliot once described hell as someplace "where nothing connects with nothing."9 "Nothing connects with nothing" when teachers abdicate their right to think and explore. Christian colleges exist to encourage intellectual adventures and to help students rediscover their possibilities and potentials. Our students should value education, not for what it gives them, but for what it makes out of them. Finally, Christian educators must heed the injunction of St. Augustine, quoting Jesus: "Compel them to come in." Students have to "come in," to discover what they are not tapping, what they are missing. We can help them by reminding them that the Founding Fathers did not create a land of opportunists; they created a land of opportunity. That includes the opportunity to live well by discovering and practicing the shared moral values of a Christian society. It is here that Christian educators occupy a position of paramount importance to their students. Profile of the Great Christian Teacher Some people regard teaching as a calling. They have wanted it all their lives. Many are extraordinary. They're 5 the ones with energy and commitment and the passion to do well. They're the ones who encourage students to recognize what they have to give, as well as get, in school. They're the ones who help students learn how to tolerate ambiguity, consider possibilities, and ask questions that are unanswerable. They're the ones who want students to think, to explore, to weigh ideas, and to consider what might have happened. They're the ones who recognize that the students who desperately seek easy answers and certainty should heed the wise remark of John Henry Newman: "We can get information from books, but real knowledge must come from those in whom it lives."10 Great Christian teachers are the ones who recognize that there is a culture alive and throbbing in the Christian college-a culture that takes on the character and color and vitality of the students and teachers inside. They're the ones who know that students need to be praised for individual expression, for the ways in which they are different from others and not always praised for the ways that they are like others. They're the ones who not only have knowledge, but want to convey it. They're the ones whose good Christian schools allow them to disturb their students' inertia, who sense the diversity of expression among their students and the colorfulness of that diversity. They're the ones whose Christian college has a clear identity and sense of mission, who sense the special character, sturdiness, and unique quality of that college. 6 They're the ones who set high goals and standards and hold themselves and their students accountable. They emphasize discipline-against a backdrop of love and respect. And they're the ones who value the "playfulness of learning."11 Playfulness of Learning A lot of learning has lost its element of play because teachers and students regard learning as concrete, literal, and exacting. Many well-intentioned teachers focus on moving toward ends or conclusions rather than turning ideas on their sides and laughing about them. Yet some of the best Christian teachers are humorous teachers who see the playfulness of language and are quick and intuitive. They know that learning is at its best when it's deadly serious and very playful at the same time. They're aware that learning should be disciplined and that students should discover ways to ask questions, how to think about evidence, and how to find the truths that are "out there." But they're also aware that good teachers are often at their best when they have something they feel passionate about and can talk seriously about, but at the same time, find a way of presenting the play in it. To find that sense of play, good teachers have to be very confident as thinkers and confident of building relationships (connections) with their students. And if they're worried about discipline or preoccupied with "covering" a prescribed curriculum in a particular period of time, they often lose that sense of joy 7 and possibility-the sense of play. The playfulness of learning is not something frivolous or trivial. But it is becoming increasingly important in these turbulent and challenging times. The special value of regarding learning in a playful way is that such an attitude links students and teachers, and it links them through enjoyment.12 After all, when people laugh together, they cease to be young or old, master or pupil, worker or boss, jailer or prisoner. Instead, they become a single group of human beings enjoying the group's existence. Certainly, one of the Christian teacher's main tasks is to create a group feeling. But as Gilbert Highet reminds us, "it cannot exist unless there is a rapport, a give-and-take, something like a unanimist relationship between the pupils and the teacher."13 And one way to establish that rapport is humor-because when a class and its teacher can all laugh together, they cease for a time to be separated by individuality, authority, and age. Instead they become a unit, feeling pleasure and enjoying a shared experience. So the effective Christian educator of the '90s should focus also on creating an atmosphere where the "playfulness of learning" is paramount. Final Thoughts George E. Woodberry once suggested that "the willingness to take risks is our grasp of faith."14 The inspired Christian teacher must assume risks. What other 8 choices does he or she have, in light of the information explosion, the focus on specialization, and the myriad range of choices, challenges, and changes facing students and teachers in the 1990s? The inspired Christian teacher must possess great energy which, like the biblical grain of the mustard seed, will remove mountains. A strong will, a settled purpose, and an invincible determination, can accomplish almost anything, and in that lies the distinction between great teachers and mediocre ones. The inspired Christian teacher must also possess great courage, heeding the counsel of Joshua (1:7,8): "Only be thou strong, and very courageous. Then thou shalt make thy way prosperous, and then thou shalt have good success." Courage is a prerequisite to greatness as a Christian educator. And the inspired Christian teacher must have great strength. That strength, as Henry Ward Beecher reminds us, "consists in finding out the way God is going, and going that way."15 The primary challenge of Christian teachers during the 1990s is to encourage our students to become more self-reliant, entrepreneurial, self-managing, and dedicated to community service and lifelong learning.16 And a major part of that challenge is to keep students excited by winning their commitment. We can do that by setting an example of excellence, by being ethical, open, empowering, 9 playful, and inspiring. Perhaps the most straightforward way, however, is to earn our students' loyalty through our own personal commitment to and practice of Christian values. References and Notes 1Mark Bernstein, "A Self-Starter Who Gave Us the Self-Starter," Smithsonian, (July 1988), p. 125. 2Cited in William Safire and Leonard Safir, eds., Leadership (New York: Fireside, 1991), p. 88. 3Vartan Gregorian, quoted in Betty Sue Flowers, ed., Bill Moyers: A World of Ideas (New York: Doubleday, 1989), p. 183. 4John Naisbitt, Megatrends: Ten New Directions Transforming Our Lives (New York: Warner Books, 1984), p. 17, pp. 1-33, passim. 5Barbara W. Tuchman, The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam (New York: Ballantine, 1984). p. 7. 6From A.P. French, ed., Einstein: A Centenary Volume (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979). p. 318. 7Moyers, A World of Ideas, p. 185. 8That patience, struggle, discomfort, and pain can result in spectacular achievements, as evidenced by the rich scientific lore involving the tapping of the unconscious to achieve problem-solving breakthroughs. For example, Niels Bohr was puzzled over the structure of the atom and couldn't seem to find an answer. Then he had a dream in which he was standing on the sun, watching the solar system orbit around 10 him. Instantly, he knew that he had hit upon the planetary structure of the atom. Friedrich Kekule was working diligently to discover the shape of the benzene molecule, when he dozed off on a bus. He dreamed of a snake biting its tail, and awoke knowing he had discovered the benzene ring. And I. M. Singer couldn't figure out how the needle would be threaded on his new invention, the sewing machine. Then he had a dream of natives chasing him through the jungle, hurling spears at him. When he awoke, he realized that the spears all had holes in their tips, and he knew the answer. The point is-students can sometimes struggle, study a problem intensely, steep themselves in it, study every detail, turn away, allow the problem to gestate, and achieve a breakthrough solution. See Success (October 1990), p. 4 and pp. 32-39, 61. 9Moyers, A World of Ideas, p. 184. 10Ibid., p. 159. 11Ibid., p. 156. 12Gilbert Highet, The Art of Teaching (New York: Vintage, 1950). p. 55. 13Ibid., p. 56. 14Donald O. Bolander et al., compilers, Quotation Dictionary (Little Falls, NJ: Career Publishers, Inc., 1981), p. 231. 15Ibid., p. 247. 16Some recent, compelling works that address American higher education's failure to meet that challenge are Jack 11 D. Douglas, "Freedom of Education Will Solve Our Education Crisis," The Freeman (June 1992), pp. 216-25; John Gatto's "An Award-Winning Teacher Speaks Out," Utne Reader (September/October 1990), pp. 73-6); and Page Smith's Killing the Spirit (New York: Penguin, 1990), a brilliant historical indictment. Smith (pg. 1) accuses American higher education of "academic fundamentalism," a flight from teaching, meretricious research, alliance with governmental agencies, biotechnology and communications corporations, and "corruptions incident to 'big-time' collegiate sports." He suggests (pg. 7) that "there is no decent, adequate, respectable education, in the proper sense of that much-abused word, without personal involvement by a teacher with the needs and concerns, academic and personal, of his/her students. All the rest is 'instruction' or 'information transferal,' 'communication technique,' or some other impersonal and antiseptic phrase, but it is not teaching and the student is not truly learning." Gatto urges students to accept "confusion as [y]our destiny" and to develop "important appointments" with themselves and their families to learn lessons in self-motivation, perseverance, self-reliance, courage, dignity, love and service to others (Epiphany Journal (Spring 1992), p. 12. 12