On Education (7 July 2003)

Contrary to popular wisdom, I think television is a great tool. I watch a lot of it. I am married to a director who is always doing research. Because we don’t have an active theatre scene in the country any more (something which bears discussion, but not now), he keeps his hand in and his mind tuned by watching the best television programmes he can. And I watch them with him.

Recently, one of the programmes we watch reminded me of a quotation that I’ve heard on occasion, but not enough to be always with me. It was this:

Good teachers instruct. Great teachers inspire.

I like that.

Every semester, you see, I walk into classes full of students who are straight out of high school. They sit in the classroom, prepared to be bored, with pens at the ready (if I’m lucky) to catch what wisdom drops from my lips and stash it in their exam-hoard, ready to suck it in and vomit it back up in fourteen weeks’ time. Their purpose: to swallow as much knowledge from me as they can hold and use it to mount the next step in the stairway to Jobs.

It drives me crazy.

I am not, for one thing, the possessor of All Wisdom. I am not God (and if I were, I wouldn’t be handing out knowledge like it were candy anyway. When last did God explain the mysteries of the universe to us in language we could all understand?) I am simply a signpost, a gatekeeper, and I can only open up the road. The students have to walk it for themselves.

But they have been taught to sit, wait, that they are little vessels to be filled with the nectar that is poured from the teacher, the pastor, the politician — the big vessel.

But here’s the thing. Good teachers instruct. Great teachers inspire. The quotation draws a distinction between instruction and inspiration, and so shall I. If we go back to the roots of the words, we’ll see that they really mean two very different things.

(I can hear some of you rustling the paper a little impatiently, thinking to yourselves — I knew it, we’re going to have a lesson. But I promise: I’ll keep it short, and try to make it sweet. Bear with me.)

Both words come from the Latin, as many of our abstract concepts do. Both of them are composed in a particularly Latin way: with a base verb at the core, whose meaning has been changed to some degree by the addition of a prefix. The prefix has its own meaning in Latin, and it’s used to enhance the meaning of the root.

Here’s the Latin basis of instruct. The prefix in, which means into or onto, among other things, is added to the base verb struere, to pile/heap. Let’s do the math: in + struere = to pile stuff into/onto something.

Well, that sounds good enough, doesn’t it? After all, that’s what we want to do with our children, our future generations. We want to heap into them what we already know to prepare them for the future.

Don’t we?

Well I don’t know. Let’s have a look at inspire. It’s got the same prefix as instruct, but its core verb is very different: spirare, to breathe. So the sum can be done thus: in + spirare = to breathe into.

I think that sounds better.

I am not at all sure that what we want for our futures are young people who have had information heaped into them as though they are empty grain-sacks waiting to be filled. I think we want people who have had basic values and visions breathed into them, so that they can use what they know to build a new and better world.

I think we want more inspiration, less instruction.

I think we want education.

You see, instruction is not a synonym for education, though many of us seem to believe it is. Parrots and monkeys and performing elephants can be instructed (my apologies to the animal kingdom, which often possesses far more good basic sense than humankind), but I’m not sure they can be educated. Why not?

To educate is the sum of these parts: the prefix ex, which means (among other things) away from or out of, and the verb root ducare, which means, roughly to lead. So if we do this math, we find out that ex + ducare = to lead out of/away from.

I like that better. You see, instruction assumes that the people who come before always know better than the people who are coming up now. Now while that may be true in certain areas, and to some degree, it’s not always true by any means, and it’s especially not true in a world that changes every time I blink my eye. In this world, the people who know better could just as well be those who have grown up in it, not those of us whose knowledge was gained in a different place and time. What we know more about is life itself — what it throws at us, what it doesn’t give us. Instruction is not necessarily our best strategy here. What we want to be doing is educating — giving our children the tools they need to lead themselves away from what doesn’t work and into what does.

I began by telling you about television. I want to end with it too. You see, many people consider it mind-rot, an addiction that is as bad for the mind as sin is for the soul, the channel by which foreign corruption is filtered into our unique society. But it doesn’t need to be. If we’ve spent our time and energy on education, we need have no fear. Because then we’ve given our children the skills they need to navigate through any new confusion, and they, like my husband, can continue to sharpen their minds as they watch.