Peripheral Visions

Philippines both empowers and disempowers. It is both a distribution of wealth and an investment, portable after political turmoil. Where land reform fails to put the basis of prosperity into the hands of peasants, schooling can still do so, and education, unlike landownership, can be shared by all. Knowledge can represent both domination and humility, courtship and combat. Education creates a malleable and skilled workforce, but it also perpetuates elites and creates revolutionaries. It can create xenophobia or cosmopolitanism. In interviews given by the shah in the late sixties, it is possible to detect a tenuous and dawning awareness that modernizing education was the only way for Iran to go but that the process could eventually end the monarchy. After the Islamic revolution, schools and universities were closed for months and even years so the education system could be reconstructed to match the ideology of the new government. They knew all too well that education is not just about literacy and numeracy, that it has always been contested ground, the stuff of power and identity.
    I never found a fully satisfactory answer in Iran to the conundrum of schooling for Vanni, but then, I have never found a satisfactory answer to what I am doing in my own teaching. In Iran, the local schools seemed to me so preoccupied with issues of authority and correctness that they suffocated creativity. Secular American schools were separated from the society around them, while mission schools had too much hidden agenda. Eventually we turned to schools founded by American or English wives of Iranians, hoping that in at least a few of those marriages there was mutual respect, continuing learning, and an effort to find and make a home, a home which could provide a model for the schooling of bicultural children. Even when both parents come from the same background, a successful marriage is a continuing learning experience, constantly involving communication across difference so adaptation does not threaten identity. In successful bicultural marriages, cultural differences enrich the process.
    I still teach for a portion of every year, puzzled by the ambiguities of the enterprise. A professor is supposed to be authoritative and well prepared, so it is hard to resist offering answers without questions and conveying the message that the world is divided between those who know and those who do not. My own greatest resource as a teacher is the learned willingness to wing it in public, knowing that I will be faced with unexpected questions, some of which I cannot answer. This is the challenge—improvising, learning on the job—that my students will confront all their lives. Oddly, I find myself trying to convey two contrasting ideas. On the one hand, I try to teach students to benefit from difference instead of being put off by it. On the other hand, I find myself discouraging the notion that learning depends on that specific difference we call authority.
    Today there is a wealth of new thinking about schooling, yet it is fashionable in America to say that schools are failing and there is a groundswell of anger against educators of all kinds. This is not in the main because they are not doing their job—it is because we have no adequate understanding of what that job is in the kind of society we are becoming. We think the issue is the transmission of specifics, the meeting of specified goals, but these are illusory and children are wise enough to know it. It is a mistake to try to reform the educational system without revising our sense of ourselves as learning beings, following a path from birth to death that is longer and more unpredictable than ever before. Only when that is done will we be in a position to reconstruct educational systems where teachers model learning rather than authority, so that schooling will fit in and perform its limited task within the larger framework of learning before and after and alongside. The avalanche of changes taking place around the world, the changes we should be facing at home, all come as reminders that of all the skills learned in school the most important is the skill to learn over a lifetime those things that no one, including the teachers, yet understands.
    It may be that withholding commitment and retaining skepticism even in the classroom is the wisest course, for we cannot tell our children with conviction that the civilization we know will always be right or true. We know it must change.