Issue 153 Is Online!

search index
of all issues

Search This Site Enter word(s) to search for:

It's the sheer zany offbeat impenetrability of the title that first catches the eye, then rattles about in the brain. What on earth could The Turtle Hypodermic of Sickenpods possibly mean? You may smile, shrug and loiter on past the nonfiction section, but perhaps the term "sickenpod" lingers and intrigues, finally bringing you back to reach out and lift the book off the shelf. After all, in a world beleaguered by dreadful manifestations of the weird ranging from Ronald McDonald to Osama bin Laden, there have to be a lot of sickenpods out there. And as for "turtle hypodermic," well now, surely one cannot avoid visualizing the dripping reptilian instrument of some frightful injectable habit, more menacing than heroin, more addictive than crack cocaine . . . .

Actually, it's all somewhat like that. Perusing the back cover blurb, then pushing on into the acknowledgments, we learn that the title has been lofted into immortality out of a student essay on the perilous state of contemporary education: intending to attribute the myriad perplexities of a system gone berserk to "the total epidemic of psychopaths" currently in charge of the business, the novice author had recourse to a malapropism so delightfully appropriate that his mentor could not resist rendering it permanent in the literature. Which ushers us instantaneously into the puckish presence of David Solway, teacher, poet, philosopher of education, wryly attempting once again to help us see what's wrong with our collective cultural being - and how we might fix (no addictive pun here) those difficulties that beset us most.

As with the earlier study Education Lost, there is a vital autobiographical edge to this presentation. Scorning "the evasive courtesies of academic writing" that so often prove more obfuscatory than ingratiatory, Solway contends "the questions I am dealing with need to be confronted squarely and vigorously." Such square and vigorous dealing requires a frankly personal touch, one impelling him to dispense with "scholastic punctilio" and "discursive etiquette" in their more egregious manifestations. "All writers pursue one or another form of self-confirmation of which the counterfeit of cool neutrality is one and a sort of trendy briskness another," he remarks. "I happen to find both uncongenial." However, the authorial mode he finds congenial, he warns, others may find truly disconcerting: this is a book offering pages casually festooned with in-text references and footnote citations, conveyed in a style occasionally moving beyond the brusque into the near-abrasive. Nevertheless, what else could we expect? This is very much a serious venture into contentious intellectual territory, a work "conceived as both an analysis of educational practices in a culture under siege and an act of homage to the book, the true Promethean gift which, for all its possible abuses, underwrites and defends that culture." And, this author adds, not without a hint of pride in defense of his exacting technique, "at least I have not pureed my words."

No, indeed. But our author is far less formidable (and far more fun) than he initially makes himself out to be. Acerbic stylistic mannerisms aside, he is above all else a dedicated teacher exploring with wit and sometimes surprisingly good humor the cultural dissonances so adversely influencing the proper exercise of his craft. Chief among those dissonances is the all-pervasive and rather manic idolization of efficiency, with an attendant "surfeit of theories swamping the profession," a remorseless tendency towards "increased centralization," and an almost reflexive dependency on "electronic substitutes for human faculty and faculties." Education, Solway maintains, "was never meant to be efficient." On the contrary, "it was meant to be difficult, interesting, pleasurable, errant, prodigal in every respect, transgressive, personal, lengthy, demanding, and hospitable - but not efficient." In opposition to prevailing practice, he proposes intensive support for "the only viable scholastic constituency," the one consisting of "students, teachers, and support staff assisted by the necessary minimum of moderately paid administrative personnel." At the heart of this constituency are dynamic teachers, persons possessing "talent, flexibility, sportiveness, erudition, and a fundamental generosity of the soul," persons capable of "the kind of teaching that can light an emulative flare in the pedagogical darkness of the contemporary classroom." And yet, Solway laments, such persons are precisely those being crushed into irrelevance by a system oblivious to an elemental truth of the enterprise: "there is always something mysterious, something unaccountable in the education of the mind that must be respected and cherished."

Enter the sickenpod, legions of him and her, ruinously funded educational theorists and administrators, bristling with "fixed schedules and ironclad syllabi and straitjacket lesson plans," ardent fetishists every one, proselytizers of "the idol of efficiency." Emanating benign officiousness, they bustle and blunder about, distorting and frustrating everything they profess to enhance. These are the tacticians of our brave new academic world, incessantly questing after measurable results, proliferating endless reams of paperwork to document the latest phantasma of the latest theory, sweeping even the most creative of teachers aside with an avalanche of mindless administrative bumph. Nothing of this furthers genuine accomplishment in the classroom, and most (if not all) simply gets in the way. "One needs to be absolutely clear about this," Solway protests, crying out in italicized anguish: "neither administration nor technology as such has anything to do with the fundamental learning process." Yet in our system the paperwork keeps coming and coming, and Solway has the courage to furnish abundant illustrative material from his own institution, John Abbott College of Montreal. In the book's epilogue, we encounter page after page of administrative meddling, coercing the suffering pedagogue into additional extraneous training schemes requiring "position papers, summative portfolios, evaluation documents, reflective essays, marking grids, feedback sheets, designed assessment procedures, word-processed handouts, videotapes, personal philosophy papers, learning indicators, analytical descriptions, rating surveys . . . ." This is outright lunacy. How on earth, in the assemblage of this profusion of professionalized trivia, could there ever be time to meet with the students and teach? "The ineluctable result of putting such quixotic ravings into practice," Solway fumes, "will be nothing more than terminal teacher burnout."

All this places us, educationally speaking, "on the move to nowhen." We have become "time's exiles," trapped in a cultural milieu obsessed with the immediate and purely mechanical aspects of learning: documentation of educational performance becomes more important than actual educational accomplishment, the entire intellectual activity becomes regimented into a lockstep process of "dismal one-dimensionality," the real teacher becomes unwillingly subverted into "a mere pedagogical hireling serving a clientele." History becomes blurred and then lost in the paperbound exigencies of immediacy, while the computer replaces the book as the instructional instrument of choice. The model for successful achievement is globalized commerce, with education reduced to little more than preparation for the workforce, "its material imperfectly assimilated in any sense other than that of technical programming." Directing the legions of sickenpod academic tacticians, there are cadres of sickenpod corporate strategists, spokespersons for "a concerted effort toward the clearcutting of the past and the reduction of cultivated thinking to the level of instrumental applications to isolated problems and techniques." Typical of these is "media banshee Diane Francis," advocating in the Montreal Gazette the need to "recalibrate education" by diverting all government funding from the arts and humanities to investments in "engineering, computer science, life sciences and mathematics." The inevitable consequence of this sickenpod strategy, Solway rightly argues, is "a society composed largely of historical amnesiacs, cultural wastelanders, and what Vaclav Havel has aptly called 'idiot specialists'."

Ultimately, who is responsible for such a melancholy state of affairs? Though we live in a supposedly democratic society, Solway points out, we nonetheless have all become so conditioned by the globalized corporate mentality that we have largely abandoned our more significant social and cultural obligations. Never mind the sickenpods: in Pogo Possum's marvellously inverted version of Commodore Perry's triumphant military message, "we have met the enemy, and they is us." We have made economic development paramount in our lives, to the extent that both parents (in families not already sundered by financial stress) hold down jobs primarily to keep the social machine functioning. Necessarily, then, there is nobody at home for the children: and no educational system, let alone the strangely cumbersome technocratic apparatus now dominant, can compensate for the loss. The kids go off to school, then return to empty houses, where the television and computer games must inadequately suffice as babysitters. When the parents return, they are too exhausted to read to their offspring, even assuming that there are books in the house. The situation is exacerbated by programmed learning that imposes and boasts the odd phenomenon known as computer literacy, a mastery of mechanical techniques as substitute for a more sophisticated understanding of letters and numbers. "When language becomes code," Solway advises, we should feel "chastened by the spectacle of young minds desperately striving to break free of a condition of galloping agraphia caused by inadequate schooling, lack of reading, media overdose, and systematic neglect at the hands of just about everybody involved in their upbringing and education."

Stern stuff, this: but absolutely necessary. "Sweet poison to the age's tooth," Solway terms his uncompromising analysis, a medication devised to counter potentially devastating intellectual decay. "The education system we have put in place today," he contends, "mainly ensures that the mind will soon become our last unsustainable resource." Still, as ever in a democracy, the resolution of our manifest difficulty rests in our own hands. First individually, and then collectively, "we should ask ourselves why the idealism of the teacher should be used to subsidize the indifference of the parent and the citizen." Only return parents and citizens to an acceptance of their respective duties, and the idealism of the teacher will then achieve much finer things. To quote television's Mrs. Fixit, a symptomatic sage of our mechanistic age, "It's just that simple." As for the prospects of that utopian eventuality, however, the last words should remain with David Solway. "Don't hold your breath."