Standards

Standards

I was sitting on a retaining wall with my legs crossed in a half-lotus reading Écrits when another student walked up to me and said: “you look just like a student!” Of course, not being quick-witted enough, I failed to utter the correct comeback: “Hey, I resemble that remark!”

As I mentioned yesterday, I have a big problem with goal-oriented strategies. If I adopted one, I would have quit being a student last year. I have two shiny degree certificates that arrived in the mail yesterday (I hate ceremony) that are emblazoned with magna cum laude. One of them is in “Professional and Technical Writing,” the second in English literature. If I jumped on the corporate train, I could make far more money with those certificates than I could dream of with the doctorate that everyone is urging me to get. Bah. I’ve got higher standards than that— it has nothing to do with letters after my name or financial success. It’s a way of life. I won’t be jumping on any trains or issuing any manifestos, because ultimately, I do feel like I have a clue.

Driving home, a different perspective on the argument I made yesterday occurred to me. Dr. Yoder once simplified the debate between John Locke and William Blake to me in this way:

Blake’s standard of measure was Genius.

Locke’s standard was mediocrity.

That says it much better than I did yesterday. I choose Blake as a model of effectiveness rather than Locke.

It’s a completely different perspective. Rather than saying that things are better or worse than the norm, why not measure them against the ultimate attainment? Of course, everything suffers by this comparison, and it makes life a quest for higher levels rather than complacent acceptance of a norm.

What I was reading in Lacan yesterday just resonated with me as the ultimate in educational philosophy. I spoke to Dr. Levernier this morning, and in the process realized that his strategy is much the same. In teaching American Literature, he does his best to overcome everyone’s programmed notion of literature. It’s a hard fight, especially for people like me who are steeped in the British tradition. But he did it for me, and I hope that someday, I can do it for other people as effectively as Dr. Levernier. What Lacan proposes in “Function and Field of Speech and Language” is this:

I consider it to be an urgent task to disengage from concepts that are being deadened by routine use the meaning that they regain both from a re-examination of their history and from a reflection on their subjective foundations.

That, no doubt, is the teacher’s prime function — the function from which all others proceed, and the one in which the price of experience is best inscribed.

If this function is neglected, meaning is obscured in an action whose effects are entirely dependent on meaning, and the rules of psychoanalytic technique, being reduced to mere recipes, rob the analytic experience of any status as knowledge and even of any criterion of reality.

No “seven habits” for me, thank you. That stuff impoverishes the soul. As Blake so aptly puts it, it’s all about the “mental fight.” Which implies a proactive conflict, a constant assault of new knowledge against old. Begin with an end in mind? NEVER!

I prefer Isocrates’ notion of Antidosis, echoed by Shelley in his Defence of Poetry. The flexing of the mental muscles strengthens the mind in the same way that one strengthens the body through exercise. Use your brain, not a recipe. That is, unless you are comfortable with forever reaching for mediocrity.

/soapbox mode off