There is a certain artistic mystery that must be maintained in approaching the mind of a child for which science doesn’t leave room.  To say we can’t scientifically determine what makes great teaching or education is not to say it can’t be accomplished. The fact that music has remained mysterious while education has become quantifiable is the reason we still regularly reproduce the fine notes of Beethoven. It’s not certain the same could be said for the fine thoughts of Aristotle. Science may improve the acoustics in a hall or the camera in the director’s hand but in the end has no say over the product created.  That is still left up to the people creating it.  When science crossed over into the educational realm it was not so bad as long as it kept its humble distance from the liberal arts as it does from so many other things.  Science can give us fertility treatments but must hang its head in ignorant shame on the subject of foreplay.  Science cannot rule a joke, a home, a friendship, a poem, a marriage, a novel, a tradition, a composer, a mother, a path or a painter.  So, why do we let it rule a teacher, a school or a curriculum?  Is a teacher that different from a parent; a curriculum that different from a novel; a school that different from a home? Thorough science, research or technology has not, as of yet, made a great parent, composer or painter. If we don’t allow science to dictate our arts, why do we let it rule the art of teaching?

This goes to the heart of the matter and a founding premise which all good teachers know. Teaching is an art. It is more akin to acting a drama or painting a picture than it is to doing an experiment.  That science has shown us episodic memories require no effort to be recalled should be science enough to point us in the right direction. Episodic memories are nearly impossible to forget because they are, if life is to be looked at as a great drama, acts of creation. Episodic memories involve participation at a level more correctly indicated by Aristotle; they involve our hearts.  Long ago, before the outside world spent its trillions of dollars to lure our children’s hearts away for profit, the periodic table, Dante’s Inferno or Charlemagne might have been episodic by their very unique mysterious existence -apart from the farm or family business. Teaching, when done properly, is an act of creation.   It is this creative act which allows the memory of it to exist as an ‘episode’ in the life of a child.  This is why our best teachers are also the ones from whom we remember the most information. Good teachers are such because they live in our episodic memories (along with what they taught) long after the bell has rung.

And yet for all of our research, education has at best stayed the same and arguably become much worse.  To paraphrase Fulton Sheen, psychologists (and educational scientists) have made great strides in treating the very ill but when it comes to the very normal they have failed. In their failure they have desperately begun to say that none of us are normal.  Trusting the opinions of a committee of ‘educational scientists’ with regard to a perfectly normal child is as useful as trusting their opinions in how to make Michelangelo’s David more beautiful.  Human thought on a broad scale is a realm more properly left to philosophers, theologians and artists…and the human trinity of those, the teachers.

  The real world is made of stimuli that are perceived by the various senses. It is the stuff we see, touch, hear, smell or taste. This physical energy is converted into neural energy through the process of transduction.  The sensory system then passes the neural energy on to the brain and cortex. Here the information is dispersed throughout the cortex by massive parallel distributed processing.  This is memory. Science has sorted out several types of memory (besides short and long) among which are semantic, episodic and implicit. Episodic memory is the memory of an experience.  We have almost no trouble recalling episodic memories: a first kiss, a death, a birth. Semantic memory refers to the memory of concept-based knowledge unrelated to specific experiences. This is the stuff we learn in school that is usually difficult to remember. Commercials have perfected the art of transforming their semantic information, their brand, into an episodic experience.  The same can be done for education.

Most Americans have had the privilege of being in school. Those old enough may recall when memorization of certain knowledge was the required first step in a process that would eventually include comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis and evaluation. Bloom’s Taxonomy, as it is otherwise known, is a multi-tiered model of classifying thinking according to six cognitive levels of complexity created by a committee of educational scientists. Bloom’s Taxonomy was describing in 1956 the naturally occurring strata in education to that point. They were excavating the layers of an existing pyramid constructed after thousands of years of thought.  Their classification was not a plan for building a pyramid; it was a description of the pyramid built. Teachers and the schools that train them, however, have been convinced that the levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy are a two-dimensional ‘skill acquisition’ stairway to be climbed instead of a three-dimensional pyramid to be built. There is a hierarchy of skills in doing great work but there is also a volume of labor. This is especially true at the base which determines, almost irrevocably, the heights to which our thoughts will reach. That base in education is the primary knowledge in the mind of a child.

The phrase to know something ‘by heart’ likely comes from a notion the Golden Age of Greece was never disabused of by modern science; namely, the heart as the seat of intelligence. The heart, biologically, is not the brain. Its sinews do not contain thought in the cardio-centric model proposed by Aristotle.  Nor is desire seated in the belly as Plato thought.  Modern science and society take as given the obvious centrality, if not absolute exclusivity, of the brain in all human exploit. For those who believe in an eternal soul, this premise should be at least as dubious as the one Egyptians used in their treatment of the gray matter.  The current monochromatic approach to human thought is pervasive and in need of examination.  We are looking at the human animal through brain-colored glasses, and nowhere to our greater distress, than in the modern classroom. Plato and Aristotle were biologically wrong but perhaps their ignorance allowed for the existence of a deeper truth about man, one which the certainty of modern science does not allow.   We cannot think with our brains alone. We still must learn things ‘by heart.’

 Commercial media have perfected the art of connecting information in our children’s brains whether we want it there or not.  The knowledge base students draw from is completely over run with artifacts created outside the classroom.  It’s not students’ memories that have become flaccid but our teaching. The outside world is fighting for their minds with tanks and machine guns while our teachers have horses and swords.

With the extreme proliferation of technology, many have settled into thinking every problem must have a scientific answer. We look to esteemed research departments and Ph.D’s for the solutions to what ails our schools. Many have forgotten that the greatest advances, even scientific ones, come from creative thought: Newton’s apple, Einstein’s elevator. The problems in a bad school cannot be solved by science or research anymore than the problems in a bad orchestra could be. A bad orchestra is made better by great musicians or great art, not great research. There are not scientific solutions to the problems in modern education.  The scientific solutions are the problems in modern education.