Teaching / Spectacle

I will try to address what I have been observing and experiencing in the past few years. Since the complete domination over attention and will was established by the techno-hegemony of social media and its ilk, the act of conversation has either vanished or has taken on a sinister shape of constant stimulation and provocation.

I am primarily referring to the pedagogic act of conversation, or teaching. A constant need has emerged for 'engagement' in class, through activities, and make-believe scenarios, and movement, and song, and dance, and a hundred other ways to do anything but engage in a dialectic of ideas. Yes, there is a need for 'activities', but anything that is done as an escape for the harder (and richer) experience eventually turns in to a habit of lethargy. While activities and movement suggest energy and vitality, they can be a garb, a patina - so thin that a few minutes of silence breaks the illusion of learning.

Before the invasion of social media, television played a similar role and began the disease that I now talk about.
Pierre Bourdieu in his book “On Television” says:

In a world ruled by the fear of being boring and anxiety about being amusing at all costs, politics is bound to be unappealing, better kept out of prime time as much as possible. So, insofar as it does have to be addressed, this not very exciting and even depressing spectacle, which is so difficult to deal with, has to be made interesting. .....there is a tendency to shunt aside serious commentators and investigative reporters in favor of the talk show host.

I propose replacing the word “politics” with “teaching” and “prime time” with “classroom” in the above quotation in our attempt to examine the state of teaching.
One must give special attention to the word spectacle. This singular tendency to look for and seek out spectacle in everything that one encounters in one's waking life (perhaps even in dreams) is the malaise of our times which has, without any surprise, infected the classroom and the school as well. Perhaps with even more potency to cause harm than any other human pursuit, for what can be more dangerous than to seek spectacle in the classroom. Every act of pedagogic intent has to be tuned to 11, every word has to be dramatised, every image has to be a moving image, saturated beyond the visual range of perception. A teacher must dance, figuratively, to hold the attention of students.

What must be a solemn act, made in earnest by the teacher, that of the pedagogic intent, must become a polemic. Model United Nations, meant, I hope, to build the ability to listen, and empathise, and negotiate, are a cacophony of unthought, unfelt barrage of shouts over one another - the winner being the one who shouts the loudest. That, of course, counts for entertainment.

I am jaded enough to realise that there is no going back. I will be made to dance, just like all teachers do. But I will find my groove - slow ambient, downtempo, a jazz ballad.

And here is one stanza from my poem “Consummate Fangs”:

In the consummate fangs
Of the fiddle device
Everything is a spectacle
A performance, a caprice
His voyeuristic instincts
Blindingly perverse
Not unlike my doggerel verse.