Beyond School

[The Unsucky English series so far: Gilgamesh 1: Dangerous Questions ~ Gilgamesh 2: The Day I Thought Gilgamesh Would Cost Me My Job - this post concludes #2.]

~     ~     ~

So there I was: caught, before all my new 14-year-old students’ eyes, with Enkidu’s pants down - and his wee-wee in hoo-hoos I knew nothing of.¹

When we would come to Genesis later in the semester, I knew I’d be walking the netless tightrope over the heads of the many 14-year-olds who had predictably swallowed whole, since before their first teeth, their literalist childhood teachings about Adam, Eve, and the Six Days’ Creation.

But I had no idea I’d be dealing now, in tender Week Three of their high school careers, with this whopper of a sex scene between Shamhat, the temple prostitute, and Enkidu, the innocent, half-neanderthal and half-Adam “wild man” - and his jaw-dropping seven days’ erection: ²

Shamhat stripped off her robe and lay there naked,
with her legs apart, touching herself.
Enkidu saw her and warily approached.
He sniffed at the air. He gazed at her body.
He drew close. Shamhat touched him on the thigh,
touched his penis, and put him inside her.
She used her love-arts, she took his breath
with her kisses, held nothing back, and showed him
what a woman is. For seven days
he stayed erect and made love with her,
until he had had enough.³

Again, in the schooly translation I read when I was in high school, somebody had forgotten to include that part.

But the alley cats were out of the bag. Since we were all reading this translation for the first time together that night, half of my students were surely at that very moment in pop-eyed sync with me, “wtf?”-ing their margins and asking the same questions:

Would the “good people” students tell their parents? Were those parents emailing or calling the principal at the very moment we were all sitting there gawking at these lines? Tomorrow, when the monster lumbered into the school-building to corrupt their young, would a mob of torch-bearing parents send this poor, misunderstood Frankenfreak to his tragic end?

All that monster wanted was to give their kids the deepest, most relevant, coherent, and beautiful year of literary studies they would ever receive. And now, because of an unexpectedly graphic scene about what birds, bees, and each of these parents do - or did, at least once, when they made the shiny-eyed wonders brightening my classroom - would it all come down in flames?⁴

And would they make allowances for the fact that I first found the book in the school library? If I went down, should I bring the librarian with me? (Joking. Joking.)

I was jealous, suddenly, of math teachers. They never had problems like this.

But there was nothing to be done, for now, but finish the homework by finishing Book One. In the end, I realized, it all depended on whether these three-week-old high schoolers could handle it. I couldn’t wait to check the chapter annotations I’d assigned.

I finished the chapter and went to sleep.

The Next Day

“Beautiful.”

“Profound.”

“Deep.”

“Lovely.”

I couldn’t believe my eyes. All the students’ annotations sang this section’s praises. Not a single immature reaction.

I was so proud of them. And I was saved.

The class discussion was even better.

“It’s a different culture, so it’s not surprising that sex would be treated with a different outlook,” said one.

Answered another: “The sex scene itself is wonderful for its simple narration of the events we study in biology - the voice is so objective, it’s almost scientific.”

A third: “And that shows how radically different this culture saw sexuality. It’s just another thing in life, described as simply as the weather, or a flower, or a beautiful sunset. It’s not pornographic or anything. It’s just part of life.”

A fourth: “But it’s more than that.”

“Explain that,” I said. “What do you mean?”

This student went on to give the most perfect explication of what happens after the sex scene, and what a deep, beautiful, mysterious, and alien point of view the world’s earliest civilization had, 2,000 years before King David and 3,000 years before Jesus, about the meaning of sexuality.

Before Shamhat

“Look at what happens to Enkidu after the sex scene,” he said, “and compare it to who he was before it.

“Before it, Enkidu was this weird wild man, created by the goddess Aruru - in exactly the same way, by the way, that the later god of Genesis created Adam - from clay - which makes me wonder if this isn’t another Judeo-Christian-Islamic borrowing from the older Sumerian/Babylonian culture.

“He was ‘one-third man, two-thirds animal,’ remember: the perfect ‘double,’ just as the god Anu ordered, for the ‘one-third man, two-thirds divine‘ Gilgamesh. And I mean ‘perfect’ in the ‘balancing’ sense too. Remember, Anu said Gilgamesh’s ‘double’ should ‘balance’ him - to bring ‘peace’ to Uruk by making Gilgamesh stop snatching all the new brides from his subjects’ beds.

“But the ‘balancing’ doesn’t stop there,” he continued. “It gets deeper.”

“How?” asked another.

“Setting, basically. Gilgamesh is the king of the first city in the world, and he knows that and is proud of it. He’s proud of civilization.  I would argue he sort of symbolizes it.

“But the setting associated with Enkidu?  ‘Wilderness’ - Nature. Enkidu drinks with gazelles at watering holes, runs with them (and as fast as them), and knows nothing, literally, about cities and civilized humankind.

“So Enkidu ‘balances’ Gilgamesh by symbolizing Nature - the opposite of the city, and its civilization, which literally has a wall to keep Nature out.

“But it gets deeper still, this ‘balance.’ Because contrary to what we’d expect, ‘civilized’ Gilgamesh is not superior to ‘wild and natural’ Enkidu. We see that because Enkidu saves the other animals from the ‘civilized’ hunter’s traps. He’s compassionate, this natural man. And he’s innocent. Gilgamesh, though, is screwing the brides of every groom in town. The civilized king is glorious, yes - he built Uruk’s walls and is semi-divine, after all - but he’s also really flawed by his heartlessness. Enkidu ‘balances’ this, too.

“Finally,” he continued, “Enkidu ‘balances’ Gilgamesh in his physical strength. It’s like Achilles and Hector in the Iliad - perfectly matched superhero types. So that’s it: Aruru did a bang-up job of creating exactly what Anu ordered - a ‘balancing double’ to Gilgamesh.”

I couldn’t believe my ears. Who was this kid? I had to break in: “Did you steal my annotations?,” I asked. “Who are you? I haven’t memorized all of your names yet.”

“Not now, Mr. B.,” he said. “I’m on a roll. Don’t interrupt. I’ve only covered the ‘before Shamhat’ Enkidu. I want to get to the ‘after Shamhat’ stuff now.”

Could I adopt this kid? Buy him from his parents? He was too good to believe.

“Wow. My apologies. Go for it.”

After Shamhat

“I’ll keep it short. It’s this: Gilgamesh’s mysterious ’solution’ to the ‘problem’ of the wild man worked brilliantly - though I don’t quite get why. Sex with this prostitute from the goddess Ishtar’s temple transforms Enkidu. And it does it in clear stages. I numbered them when I annotated.

“First, this sacred sex lifted him above the other animals that he used to hang out with. He doesn’t realize it - this is the weird thing - but the other animals do. They all run away from him when he tries to rejoin them at the watering hole.

“It’s mysterious, for sure,” he said, while I fought back exultations over this kid’s genius. “But the best guess I can give is this: All animals have sex, so it can’t be the simple sex that makes the other animals realize he’s no longer like them. So the only thing I can figure is that the poet is trying to say that sex seen as a holy thing - initiation into Ishtar’s mysteries, maybe? - is what separates man from animal. Seen this way, it’s not a brute act with Shamhat.

“And did you notice,” he went on, “that thing where Enkidu tries to run after the fleeing animals - before Shamhat, he was as fast as them, remember - but now he can’t catch up with them? Where is it . . . . yeah, here:

He tried to catch up
but his body was exhausted, his life-force was spent,
his knees trembled, he could no longer run
like an animal [he emphasized this line], as he had before.

–doesn’t that remind you Samson and Delilah in the Bible? It did me. I tell you, Mr. B., you’re right about that one. You see a million things in Gilgamesh that you thought were unique to the Bible.

“But Delilah is bad for Samson, while Shamhat is good for Enkidu.”

“I never thought of that,” said another. “I think I see what you’re saying.”

“Yeah. It’s all there. The next thing that happens because of Shamhat is deeper still: Enkidu realizes - where is it -

‘his mind had somehow grown larger.
He knew things now that an animal can’t know.’

“So what are these things he ‘knew’? It doesn’t say. But it reminds me of the scene in Genesis where Adam and Eve eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and it doesn’t tell us what they learned either. All it does is show us that they covered their private parts.

“But here, they don’t cover anything, and no god gets angry. Instead, Enkidu just keeps transforming. Since the bell’s about to ring, I’ll rush: the next thing he learns sitting ‘at Shamhat’s feet’ is language and communication:

‘He understood all the words she was speaking to him.’

“And man, those words were interesting:

‘Now, Enkidu, you know what it is
to be with a woman, to unite with her.
You are beautiful, you are like a god.’

“‘You are like a god‘” he repeated. “So what’s happening here? Gilgamesh is ‘two-thirds god,’ remember. Is it okay, Mr. B., to read into this that sex with Shamhat maybe makes Enkidu less of a ‘balance’ to Gilgamesh now?”

“It’s okay to read anything you want into it, as long as you can justify your interpretation with good evidence. And you’re doing fine so far.”

“Because I was thinking that again, it was Gilgamesh that sent Shamhat in the first place. He wants to bring Enkidu over to his ‘civilized’ side. And it seems like it worked.”

“How?”

“Because the next thing that happens is that Shamhat tells Enkidu that he should not ‘roam the wilderness and live like an animal,’ but should instead come with her to Uruk, to Ishtar’s temple, and to Gilgamesh’s palace. And he goes. Because of Shamhat, a temple prostitute, Enkidu is no longer an animal. He’s closer to the gods now; and because of Shamhat, Enkidu is about to become civilized.

“And that’s like Adam and Eve upside-down and inside-out.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“It’s obvious,” he said. “Eve seduced Adam and the result was God’s curse. Shamhat seduced Enkidu and the result was Ishtar’s blessings of godliness and civilization for Enkidu.”

“Strictly speaking, weren’t Adam and Eve cursed for disobeying their God?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “But it’s still pretty opposite. After all, the gods here aren’t giving any orders at all - the absence of orders is the opposite of their presence, right? - and the result of the seduction is a blessing, the opposite of a curse.”

“Maybe,” I said. “We’ll see what happens. It’s been ten years at least since I read this story, remember - and I’ve never read this version, either. And I’ve forgotten most of it. So I’m as clueless as you about what will happen next.”

“There’s just one thing I wanted to ask, though,” he said.

“Shoot.”

“The plot’s really weird. The gods create Enkidu to make Gilgamesh change his ways.  But now, instead, we see Enkidu changing, not Gilgamesh. What’s going on?”

“It’s a mystery to me, too. We’ll see. But you left one thing out.”

“What?”

“You didn’t mention the last way that Enkidu changed: when Shamhat described Gilgamesh to him, isn’t his reaction confusing? The narrator tells us Enkidu ‘felt‘ something ‘deep in his heart . . . . the longing for a true friend.’ So that’s one more point for your theory that Shamhat civilizes him - he wants to escape his solitude and join human society, enjoy friendship.

“Again, that’s what he felt. But what he says is totally unexpected:

‘Take me with you
to . . . the palace of Gilgamesh the mighty king.
I will challenge him. I will shout to his face:
I am the mightiest! I am the man
who can make the world tremble. I am supreme!’

“Those hardly sound like words of friendship to me,” I said. “So maybe the gods’ plan for Gilgamesh is not as off-track as it seems.”

End of Class

The bell rang.  I turned off the alarm, and rose to get ready for work. An interesting bit of fantasy that was. “Too good to believe” indeed? I could only hope. I’d find out after the shower and drive to work.

~     ~     ~

Just kidding. I wouldn’t pull that on you. Here’s the real story:

Most of the annotations from the girls in the class were minor variations on: “ewwwww.” Sometimes three w’s, sometimes ten.

The boys? Smiley faces in the margins.

I wonder if those gender reactions for this age group are cross-culturally similar, or different. And I don’t know.

I imagine I tried to elicit discussions like the points made by the dream student above.

When I explained to them that I was as shocked as they were to read the scene, and was afraid they wouldn’t be able to handle it, they all assured me it was unexpected, yes, but nothing they hadn’t seen before online, on TV, in the movies.

“But it was weird to see it in English class.”

~     ~     ~

Can You Take a Minute?

If anybody has made it this far, I’d appreciate feedback on the three approaches I’ve tried so far in this Gilgamesh series. Number One was straight lecture style; Number Two was told as a “teacher story,” but in the second-person “you” point of view - I wondered if that would make the experience more immediate for readers, but also feared it might get old, especially if I continued it for months. This one was still a “teacher story,” but told in first person, with heavy Socratic dialogue.

If any of you care to share which of the three you think I should stick with, I’d be very appreciative.

Photos:
Belly-Dancer by macwagen
Bizarro World © DC Comics,
used under Fair Use Law

If you like this post, please spread it: (But don't tag it "education." That will bury it.)

1. I stole this “wee-wee/hoo-hoo” line from Bill Maher’s brilliant “New Rules” rant about how American Puritanism silenced John Edwards, the most important voice for the poor “since Robert Kennedy,” per Maher. It’s very relevant to the discussions we’re having in this series. [↩]
2. And did I later joke in class, “This guy’s a walking Viagra commercial”? Or, “And you thought the Six Days’ Creation was impressive”? Or, “Talk about needing a rest on the seventh day”?  I don’t remember. But if asked, please say that I did. [↩]
3. all excerpts taken from Stephen Mitchell’s admirable 2004 translation of Gilgamesh. [↩]
4. If you think I’m exaggerating, check out this and this from readers who have seen it happen to other teachers. [↩]

[The Unsucky English series so far: Gilgamesh 1: Dangerous Questions ~ 2: This Post ~ 3: Adam and Eve, Backwards]

So you’re in Week Three of your two World Literature classes for those wonderful, squeaky-clean ninth-graders.¹

You spent Week One warming them up with a couple of fun David Sedaris shorts.  “Big Boy” - the story of Sedaris’ epic Easter Sunday struggle to flush someone else’s stuck turd down the toilet, so the person waiting outside the door won’t think it was his - is only a page and a half long, and is suitably light and hilarious for a first read. It’s also the perfect story to trot out for the lesson on plot.

And schooliness aside, it serves to start the conversation about how real literature finds grist for its alchemical mill everywhere, from the ridiculous to the sublime, and is not the trite moralistic stuff they’ve probably been taught to believe it is in k-8 English classes.²

“From the bathroom to the bedroom to the throne of God,” you intone, “literature knows no limits. Get used to it. You’re in high school now.”

Sedaris’ “Us and Them”³ is equally fun but infinitely more subtle, with its narrator making his bad self seem good and his good enemy seem bad, and is another perfect vehicle for trotting out the “unreliable narrator” lesson:⁴

“Beware of the authority of the author, kids,” you warn them, “in every book you read and speech you hear - including mine.

Suspect the narrator.

This story’s narrator made a fool of you. Worse yet, he made you a hateful fool.

Sedaris showed you that narrator was a hateful ass, but had his narrator tell you that he was the good guy.  Sedaris also showed you a good, kind character,  but had his narrator tell you this kind person was the bad guy.  And every one of you believed the narrator instead of your own eyes.

You followed the bad guy, and joined him in hating the good guy. All because you are suckers who trust the authority of the written word.

Look how dangerous books are, how books can blind you if you don’t think. Sedaris just showed you that books can turn you into hateful followers of hateful writers - while all the while thinking you’re the “good people.”

Can you think of any other books that do that?  They surround us. Maybe you’ll notice them after experiencing this story. But you probably won’t.

Learn from it. It’s probably the most important lesson anybody could ever teach you in life, but you won’t get that. Learn to see with your eyes, instead of continuing to try - as all of you did in this story - to see with your ears.”

You don’t tell them that Sedaris, being gay, knows from experience how many bad “good people” find it good to hate good “bad people.” One thing at a time. Almost all of these kids have been conditioned once a week since infancy to hate gays and other types different from them. Let them read more Sedaris on their own for now - they’re all begging to borrow your personal copies - and come to love him as a person first.

Then tell them.

~     ~     ~

That was all good fun. You like them and they seem to like you. And they’re annotating the margins of what they read, as you require, more than they text message their friends in a year - thinking back at the text, inscribing it with their own interpretations. Life’s good.

In Week Two, you’re ready to lay the foundations for the chronological survey of (mostly Western) literature you’ve been lucky enough to design from scratch. You’re not yet ready to plunge into mythologies of Gilgamesh, Genesis, Hesiod and Homer, because you want them to write their own myths first - from the imagined perspective of the pre-historic, pre-literate, pre-scientific, and pre-iPod tribes that originated all those myths in the Stone Age.

The best way you can figure to bring fire to the imaginations of these 14-year-olds is not with an ancient book. Instead, you dim the lights, draw the blinds, fire up the LCD projector, and show them “The Dawn of Man,” that great paleolithic prelude to that great space-age myth in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

(The Youtube clip below leaves out about half of it, but it’s a good taste:)

As they watch, you’re driving them crazy by pausing the film, pointing to details and asking questions, probing and pushing.

“What is that? … Exactly! Paleolithic war!”

“And what is that? … Brilliant! The discovery of tools, of technology!”

“And that? Yes, yes, yes - the first murder. ‘Cain and Abel,’ the evolutionary version.”

When it’s done, the lights go up, and you ask them if they understand now why Kubrick is a name to remember. Then, you give them their first major writing assignment of the year: decide on some aspect of the natural or subjective world that you, like the homos in Kubrick, don’t understand, that fills you with maybe wonder, maybe fear, maybe both - but above all, with the need to “explain” it. “Points taken off if any of your explanations are drawn from what was claimed or known in later stages of human history.”⁵

When they turn in the final drafts of their myths, my god are you impressed with their imaginations. Daniel, particularly, blows you away with that scene in which his god reaches into his own mouth, drives his hand down his throat into his chest, withdraws it with a fireball he then flings into the sky - and which has stayed there to this day, giving light to us all. You want to throw a parade for his brilliance, and really don’t care that the grammar is non-standard. He’s Korean, after all. You’ll take broken grammar with perfect imagination over a broken imagination with perfect grammar any day. Broken grammar you can fix.

Now You’re Ready for Gilgamesh

You’re so excited you can’t stand it. The Kubrick and the creative mythologizing maybe, just maybe, prepared these young imaginations for the world’s oldest story.

You’d read Gilgamesh yourself in college, maybe a time or two since then, in uninspired translations, but you haven’t read the Mitchell translation from 2004 that your students are reading. You’d ordered it the year before after skimming a copy in the school library. You know Mitchell from other works he translated, and this one looks fine indeed.

You’ll read it for homework just like your students do. It’s a stimulating thing to do anyway.

The first chapter was fun: a “Prelude” that was both an introduction of the hero (with nice rhetorical use of the “delayed subject” to create suspense, using the pronoun “he” for several pages before ever telling us “he” was Gilgamesh), and an ode to that other star of the story, Uruk: the primal city itself.

Good enough, fun, interesting.  We’re just warming up.

“Tonight I want you to read Book One,” you tell them. “And be sure to annotate it. I’ll check next class.”

You go home that night and read Book One yourself, just like your students.  And just like them, no doubt, you have one of the most unforgettable experiences of your years in school - as a student or teacher.

Because you read about the stuff covered in the last post - Gilgamesh outraging his subjects by helping himself to their brides, the chief god Anu telling the goddess Aruru to solve the problem by creating a double for Gilgamesh “to create balance and bring peace,” and Aruru doing just that by creating the one-third human, two-thirds animal named Enkidu - but you read more, too, that you hadn’t counted on.

It’s all good stuff at first. Finally, this 2004 translation dresses this regal story in the stylish regalia it merits. You’re annotating like a madman:

“Enkidu wild, an animal drinking among gazelles at a watering hole. Shades of Darwin - and Kubrick!”

“Hm. Enkidu as ‘animal rights activist?!’ - he frees animals from traps, saves them from hunter.”

“Hunter goes to Gilgamesh to complain.”

On you scribble. You notice an interesting parallel between Anu and Gilgamesh, and it makes you really admire the Sumerian story-tellers who crafted this story, and wonder at this second piece of evidence of a radically non-punitive and jarringly humanistic response to law-breakers or disturbers of civic order in this old culture.⁶  Because just like Anu dealt with Gilgamesh’s excesses by setting him up for an experience that will presumably give him the wisdom to outgrow those excesses,⁷ Gilgamesh reacts to the news about Enkidu with a similarly unexpected twist.

He doesn’t send out a posse to capture or kill the wild man, and he doesn’t gird himself for battle with the wild man himself.  Instead, you read, he tells the farmer:

Go to the temple of Ishtar,
ask them for a woman named Shamhat,
one of the priestesses who give their bodies
to any man, in honor of the goddess.

“WTF?!” you annotate in huge letters.

What you read next is intriguing too - but gosh, you can’t help but get a bit uncomfortable imagining your 14-year-olds reading it that night too:

“Take her into the wilderness. [-Gilgamesh continues]
When the animals are drinking at the waterhole,
tell her to strip off her robe and lie there
naked, ready, with her legs apart.”

Another huge interrobang - ?! - in the margin. A bit more graphic than that Victorian version you read years ago.  You’re nervous now, and read on:

“The wild man will approach. Let her use her love-arts.
Nature will take its course, and then
the animals who knew him in the wilderness
will be bewildered, and will leave him forever.”

End of section, you note with relief. Thank goodness.

~     ~     ~

A few pages later, though, when Shamhat does accompany the farmer to the watering hole, the jitters come again.

Shamhat and the farmer wait for three days, and Enkidu finally comes. “The man was huge and beautiful,” you read. “Deep in Shamhat’s loins / desire stirred….”

Then the bomb drops:

Shamhat stripped off her robe and lay there naked,
with her legs apart, touching herself.
Enkidu saw her and warily approached.
He sniffed at the air. He gazed at her body.
He drew close. Shamhat touched him on the thigh,
touched his penis, and put him inside her.
She used her love-arts, she took his breath
with her kisses, held nothing back, and showed him
what a woman is. For seven days
he stayed erect and made love with her,
until he had had enough.

Undeniably beautiful, wonderfully erotic, but again, nothing like those Victorian versions you read back in the day. And my god, you wonder how you’re going to deal with the lecture tomorrow. Most of the kids go to Sunday school (we’re talking today’s Korea here, where you’ll see more crosses in a city block than you’ll see in all of Alabama) - and yeah, they’re all “in high school now,” but only three weeks in. And they’re all only freaking fourteen.

“Touched his penis, and put him inside her”? - wtf indeed. Interrobang.

Sweat.

Next: Shamhat’s Lessons: On Teachable Moments, and Civilized Sex

The “Unsucky English Lectures” Series So Far:
1. Gilgamesh, Part One

–

David Sedaris photo by Sporky

If you like this post, please spread it: (But don't tag it "education." That will bury it.)

1. for you non-Americans, those are 14-year-olds in their first year of high school [↩]
2. ”Big Boy” is from the laugh-until-you-bleed Me Talk Pretty One Day. [↩]
3. full story here, great student webcam-review here [↩]
4. ”Us and Them” is from the also-brilliant Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim. [↩]
5. You put them through their paces by familiarizing them with the writing process, using the Six Traits of Effective Writing model that they will follow all year. [↩]
6. But “beware the author,” you remind yourself. The story might not reflect the reality of Sumerian life. Yet it still reflects, if nothing else, an intended motif on the part of the poet. These unexpected reactions of Anu and Gilgamesh to troublemakers do clearly share, at root, a belief that experience, not authoritarian “Thou shalt nots” and punishments for disobedience, is the key to self-improvement and social order. And you’re deeply intrigued by this. [↩]
7. that “wtf plot twist” we discussed this in the first Gilgamesh essay [↩]

“Piper, sit thee down and write
In a book that all may read!”
So he vanished from my sight,
And I plucked a hollow reed,

And I made a rural pen,
And I stained the water clear,
And I wrote my happy song,
Every child may joy to hear.
–William Blake, Songs of Innocence

“And I stained the water clear”: look at that line a few times, and see the beauties of that exquisitely ambiguous modifier, “clear.”  It’s a line to cherish.¹ And it has to do with the thoughts below - after which, in the next post, we’ll get to an also exquisite sacred sex scene (and I’d like to call it a love scene to avoid the appearance of sensationalism, but it’s not a love scene) from Gilgamesh, along with laughs, I hope, about trying to teach it to today’s teens, in today’s classrooms. But first, an interlude:

When “Corrupting the Youth” is Good

“Good people” can be dangerous.

Socrates and Jesus, for example, in the eyes of the “good people” of their times,  were both criminals. ² They were criminals because they challenged those good people’s conventional views of religion, of the sacred, of moral right and wrong.

They both attacked the gods of their day. Socrates questioned both the truth and the righteousness of the Olympians; and Jesus (though less consistently) similarly questioned the teachings and the righteousness of the Hebrew priests and the “good” church mosque temple-going Christians Muslims Jews around him.  Both were reviled by the good people back then, and both paid with their lives for the same “sin”: critical thinking. The good Athenians killed Socrates with poison, the good Hebrews - the Romans, actually - killed Jesus on the cross.

(Since this crucifixion episode, by the way, has been used to justify Christian Antisemitism and the slaughter of Jews for over a thousand years, I have to add this point to keep my conscience clean: Jesus may not have been crucified at all; he may not, in fact, have ever lived at all, according to many serious scholars.³  It’s a fascinating question for those who care to think critically about important things. If it’s true, after all, that means the Jews were framed and persecuted by the Christians for an execution that never happened, and that American voters today are electing leaders on the basis of faith in a phantom.)

Today, we do well to revere Socrates and Jesus for pushing human thought forward.  We would also do well, though, to see their examples as reminders of something else we tend to forget: namely, that good people of any age often appear, in historical hindsight, to be the opposite of good. Again, good people - pious people - killed these two men.

Socrates today is held up to students as the model of that practice called “critical thinking.”  But in his own day, that very act, critical thinking, led to criminal charges against him for this :  “Corrupting the young by teaching new gods.”

Look at that. Socrates was killed why?  Because the adults in his society didn’t like the questions he was entertaining with their kids - about religion.  He was killed for asking, around young people, what we all see as a common sense question today - “Why do we believe in Zeus?”⁴

As a teacher who loves common sense, finds it less common than we think, and loves the idea of giving more of it than of grammar to the young in my classrooms, that story has always made me nervous.

I love critical thinking for many reasons, but the biggest one is this: it requires, always, an honest awareness in the thinker that he or she may be wrong.  Socrates, while less a hero of mine due to recent readings I’ve done about his politics, still wins my respect with this classic one-liner:

I only know that I know nothing.

Scientists understand the wisdom of that statement, and so do philosophers.  Priests and their “good people” followers, though, show no understanding of this wisdom. They assert truth-claims without evidence, and worse, they attack modern-day versions of Socrates and Jesus for thinking critically about their beliefs.

Schools are very bad places for a teacher to promote critical thinking about anything important.  The cliché “critical thinking” in schools is only allowed for safe subjects - an oxymoron I’ve mentioned many times in these pages.  Touch a subject that will offend a single parent or student, and your job is at stake.  That’s why so many classes are so boring.  They refuse to acknowledge the many elephants in the room, or to state that the emperor is wearing no clothes - especially when it comes to whichever god and flag are flying above your country.

And that’s why so many types of hugely influential beliefs that make no sense persist today.  Kids go through twelve years of school without those beliefs ever being touched by a serious question, they graduate, and bam: the beliefs live on for yet another generation: Bush really is communicating with God, while in the same universe, Bin Laden, in another country’s school system, really is obeying the Word and will of Allah.  McCain and Obama consent to be interviewed on national TV with Rick Warren, and thus legitimize a man whose ministry supported a “Left Behind” video game in which post-Rapture Christians kill non-Christians on the streets of New York - and they’re the good guys.  To question these things is not important?

I say it is. We see the Crusades of the first and second millennia being re-played now in the third.  Maybe questioning will reduce their chances of continuing into the fourth, if we make it that far.

*    *    *

Critical Thinking as a Litmus Test

Reading the comments on my last post (the first Gilgamesh essay), and of the people who also commented on it on StumbleUpon,⁵ it occurs to me that critical thinkers serve as litmus tests for the people who disagree with them.  They fall into two categories:  those who challenge the thinking, and thus pass the test and prove themselves fellow critical thinkers; and those who attack the thinker instead of the ideas, and thus fail the test and show themselves to be non-critical thinkers, like the poisoners and crucifiers of old. Thank goodness free speech is now protected by law.

If the first Gilgamesh “lecture” had happened in a classroom instead of here, those non-critical thinkers would have been demanding my resignation - because they don’t want their children to think beyond what they, the parents, believe. ⁶ It’s funny how parents don’t care if their kid goes more deeply into, say, math than them; that’s fine. But have my kid go more deeply - and more critically - into religion than I ever did?  Into politics and my country’s history?  That’s a different beast altogether.  As a rule, parents aren’t okay with that at all.

So that’s the challenge to critical thinking in so many of our classrooms today, and a reason for its boredom-inducing absence. If only teachers felt secure in speaking their minds, there could be incredible discussions in classrooms.

And for the record: I share my questions about sacred cows not because I delight in doing “ee-vil.”  We may as well accuse Socrates, Jesus, Buddha, Martin Luther, Copernicus, Voltaire, Darwin, Ghandi, Martin Luther King, and millions of other reformists dead and alive of “loving evil” for imagining - and speaking of - better visions of the Good or more sensible versions of the True.

I share these questions because first, I love asking them; second, it’s my way of supporting others who are asking them; and third, imperfect as all of us are, I believe these questions have vital value for happiness, intelligence, well-being, and, um, education. In my eyes, as much as your preachers or your parents, I am trying to do good. I’m just doing it by my own lights, instead of by the teachings of childhood.  I left those teachings long ago, by reading more than the preachers showed me. (I also discovered, in the cult of the early Christian leader Valentinus, an extinct version of Christianity I actually admire. It’s almost Buddhist. See Princeton religious historian Elaine Pagels’ eye-opening, and very readable, Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas for more.)

And then there’s the issue of fairness. Millions of preachers clog the airwaves daily with their claims. Creationists attack science and infest science classrooms and textbooks.  It’s only fair that equal time is given to those of us who want to challenge them with critical thinking.

My last point:  Critical thinking can “corrupt the youth” on one condition: that youth fail to think critically themselves, as they read.  As long as the young think - chew - before swallowing this, or any, adult’s words, they’re not “corrupted” at all. No matter what those adults say.

I don’t know if any of this helped “stain the waters clear.”  I hope it did.

*    *    *

Now on to more fun with Gilgamesh, one of the wisest and - in the “sacred sex” scene that is the next post’s topic, also one of the most beautiful - books I’ve ever read.

Wait a minute. It just hit me.  My god, I’m about to discuss the oldest sex scene in the history of mankind.  Not a bad way to spend an evening.

It should be up in a day or two.

Please keep the comments critical, and thanks for doing that in such a friendly way in the first post.  And sorry for the length.  This was no fun to write, but I had to get it out.

–

Photo credits: Human Questions by AmberflyKezzie ; Creation Museum by rauchdickson

If you like this post, please spread it: (But don't tag it "education." That will bury it.)

1. See the word as an adverb modifying “stained.” [↩]
2. They were both considered something like “bums” by the good people too - Socrates wore tatty clothes, Jesus was a homeless guy - but that’s a different story. [↩]
3. A comprehensive discussion of the evidence is laid out, among many other places, in a long chapter of The Pagan Christ: Is Blind Faith Killing Christianity?, by ex-minister and professor of New Testament Greek Tom Harpur, who seems to want to radically reform Christianity the way Jesus, if he did exist, wanted to radically reform Judaism. [↩]
4. It goes deeper than this, really, since many used it as a pretext for other grudges. But the interesting thing is that this pretext still held in a court of law, and it’s what he was convicted and killed for: teaching common sense. [↩]
5. and for the record, as I’ve already said, I agree that the tone in that post is lame at times, and will work on that, and find such feedback helpful, when polite [↩]
6. My own resignation was demanded once by a pair of parents - from a long line of preachers - for including the ideas of Bishop Spong as a contemporary descendant of Martin Luther in a history unit about the Reformation. Maybe I’ll tell that full story one day. Right now, I’ll just say that my assistant principal at the time commendably held firm and told them they were free to leave. Instead, they pulled their son from my class and put him with another teacher.  No chance he think beyond his parents’ beliefs that way. [↩]

[This post had major problems in its original draft. I heavily edited it for all you stumblers. Subsequent posts in this series: 2. The Day I Thought Gilgamesh Would Cost Me My Job, a serious farce ~ 3: Adam and Eve, Backwards]

To My Few Student Readers: Please Stay

I’m bored writing for adults these days, and most of my readers are adults. If you’re a student, can you send this link to your friends, put it on Facebook, etc? I want students as my audience for this series, because I want to share with you all a series of posts, beginning today and continuing for years, probably, about:

Why the Classics Only Seem to Suck

I don’t blame students who think classic literature sucks.¹

They have millions of good reasons to think that. They may, for example, have:

1. teachers who aren’t that great at reading, writing, or teaching, or
2. great teachers at not-so-great schools that are afraid to let them read the most controversial literature (almost all schools are really afraid of students and their parents), or
3. English worksheets that turn literature into anatomy tests (”Identify which phrase below is an example of onomatopoeia” and similar dentist drills), or
4. five-paragraph essays to write in which the teacher in #1 tells them that they “must not use ‘I’, must have a topic sentence in the first line of each paragraph,” and a million other rules that real writers (we just excluded most teachers there) ignore altogether, or
5. a lack of time to read the books assigned in English class, what with all the other homework (they want to have a little time of their own to just live their life, after all, to maybe read stuff they want to read - so why not just read the Sparknotes summaries?), or
6. over-their-head levels of language complexity or adult content that they really shouldn’t be expected to comprehend (language) or care about (a middle-aged housewife’s psychology) until they’re well out of high school, or
7. dry lists of words and terms to memorize for that most ultra-sucky thing of all - that thing which more and more schools and parents seem to think education is now - the S.A.T.

My Promises for This Series

I promise not to bore you with trivia or disgust you with showy diction - to use “use” instead of “utilize.”  And I promise to try to give you enjoyable ideas of why, despite the pain of many English classes, this thing called literature, played with naturally, gives pleasure.  Much classic literature is wonderful.  I get more pleasure out of a used one-dollar copy of a Shakespeare or Oscar Wilde play than I do out of my $5,000 home theater.  When I want a buzz, I choose books over booze and bongs. Good literature is the best drug out there.

Added Bonus: I’ll throw in a “big picture” tour of the history of literature from the earliest story ever told - today’s post - forward through the centuries to the Greeks, the Hebrews and their Bible, the Romans, the fascinatingly whacked Middle Ages and the lovely Renaissance, the supremely dangerous Shakespeare and the often-kinky Romantics, straight on up to a few choice books from our modern times. (That’s another thing that annoys me about so many English classes I’ve had to teach: they rip all books out of their historical context, and disconnect them from their times and each other. It’s like studying butterflies pinned under glass instead of watching them fly among the flowers.)

I’ll also avoid constipated scholar-talk in favor of the conversational, occasionally dangerous style of a teacher who can tell you the truth, as he sees it, about these books without fear of being fired for ruffling the feathers of the fearful “three P’s”: parents, principals, and preachers.

Great books are often door-openings to dangerous places, places polite society fears and deems off-limits.  When those doors open in a classroom, teachers often refuse to enter.  There’s always the student who can’t handle it, who complains to one of the three P’s, and forces the conversation to remain, safe and proper, in the well-lit hallway.

Not so here where, away from school, we can touch the taboos, and experience how literature can be a threat and a danger to who we are, to how we’ve been conditioned to see life, to our culture’s status quo.

Doris Lessing really nails the connection between schools and the status quo better than I could dream of doing, so I’ll close this section with her:²

“You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others, will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself - educating your own judgment. Those that stay must remember, always and all the time, that they are being molded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this society.” - Doris Lessing

Now here goes.

Starting at the beginning - literally: c. 3,000 BCE

Let’s start with the oldest story ever told (or at least that we have written down), the first story in the history of our species, the story whose title, tragically, will make your eyes roll and your feet head for the exit door the minute you hear it, because it’s associated with your lifetime of aversion to classroom classics.

I’m talking about Gilgamesh.

Don’t leave.

It’s one of the coolest books you’ll ever read.  It comes from one of the earliest cities, literally, on Earth - but it’s so alien to everything we Judeo-Christian types have been conditioned to think of as “good and evil,” “right and wrong,” that it seems a work of science fiction or fantasy more than anything else.

Really, don’t leave. You’ll miss the part about a religion that sees sex as a good and holy thing.

I’m not making this up.  Here’s the background:

Gilgamesh is the story of a Sumerian king who actually lived and ruled around 2,700 BCE. That’s almost 5,000 years ago. The city itself was a thousand years old when the story was written, so we’re talking a story from a civilization 6,000 years ago.

Stop and let that sink in.  The Bible is only half that old, with the “Old Testament” reaching its final form around 400 BCE, and the “New Testament” not being slapped together until around 330 CE (or A.D., if you’re out of touch with proper scholarly conventions).  So Gilgamesh is more than twice as old as the Bible. The Bible’s a pup compared to this story, and as I’ll argue, the Bible is less wise, in many deep and fundamental ways, than this Sumerian book as well.

Moving on:  The king’s city, Uruk, was such a walled and templed and terraced wonder that the citizens themselves were blown away by it.  Since the story is from an age close to the agricultural revolution, when we stopped wandering around as nomads and living more like herd animals than humans, we get a sense, when we read this story, that the people who wrote it are totally aware of what a cool thing they’ve accomplished by making one of the world’s first grand cities - first, do you hear?

Looking out from Uruk’s walls across the sandy plains of what is today Iraq (Uruk was not far from later Babylon and today’s Baghdad³ ), you would have seen no other cities.  Cities, to repeat, were new, and Uruk was one of the first.  When you read this story, it’s like the story-teller remembers the days before the city was invented, the days of wearing animal skins and being goat-herders or hunter-gatherers.  And you can clearly tell he loves his city all the more for the different kind of life it makes possible - the civilized life.

It’s a story, then, of humanity basically crowing its pride over creating civilization by creating that Most Needful Thing for civilization to exist at all: a city.  If someone were to have written a blurb on the back of the book back then (which he couldn’t have done because the “pages” were actually baked clay tablets stacked like bricks in the library, all covered in reed-imprinted cuneiform), he would have written something like,

Unlike our neighbors in every direction, we aren’t hunter-gatherers, goat-herding nomads, or farmers in country villages.  We’re civilized. We built a city.  And we’re damned proud of that.

Luckily, since Uruk was civilized, it had court poets instead of flag-waving idiots to tell the story a bit more gracefully, and to tweak it and revise it over a couple thousand years to make it just so.

On Sex, Good and Bad

I have to be careful about sex here, because the story itself is.

On the one hand, the city had temples (like the ziggurat pictured right) dedicated to the goddess Ishtar, the goddess of love, fertility, procreation, and - strangely - war. (Aphrodite is basically the Greek version of the much older Ishtar, and Venus the Roman version. You knew that.)

We’re so blind today to the seeming magic through which sexual intercourse leads to pregnancy, and pregnancy to the creation of life from the womb of woman, that it takes a bit of imagination-work for us to appreciate how much sense it would make to pre-civilized and first-civilized humans to consider sex, pregnancy and birth, and above all women, as magical, sacred things.

That the Sumerians did consider sex sacred is clearly shown by this fact:  the temples of Ishtar were staffed with priestesses whose role was to have sex there, in the temple - whether only with the king or other elites, or with everyone, I don’t know.  These temple prostitutes were not “sinners,” were not “immoral”; they were respected every bit as much as Pastor Teds and Imam Abdullahs in churches and mosques around the world today.

And sex was not a “sin.”  It was a holy thing.  Check out “heiros gamos” on Wikipedia for the juicy (but deep) details.  (And stay tuned for my own theory, when we get to the Bible one of these days in this series, of how Ishtar and the Sumerians influenced the Jewish priests who wrote the Bible’s Genesis to make Eve such a bad character in the story, and sex - everybody’s favorite hobby, to riff off Woody Allen - such a bad, guilty act.)

So in Uruk, it may have been your duty as a good, gods-fearing citizen, to go to “church” occasionally to have sex with a temple prostitute.

In class, this point would get giggles from the immature or freak-outs from the ever-present class prudes, and the following idea would never sink in - which is sad, because it could lead to possibly deep and beautiful ideas such as this:

Think of how different it must have been, as a young person entering puberty, not to be shamed for suddenly discovering sexuality, but to instead, I imagine, be congratulated by family and society, maybe brought to “church” - the temple - to have that sexual awakening honored and instructed through some religious initiation.  To be welcomed into this magical new stage, rather than met with the silence and denial puberty is usually met with in our own culture.  “Abstinence-only” sex education would be laughed at in Sumer, and priests, parents, and schools would be comfortable with this natural thing.  There were far fewer locked doors, hidden materials, and guilt-burdened consciences for boys and girls back then, I suspect.

But it could also lead to less “beautiful” but still “deep” questions like this: For the “prostitute,” how was “temple prostitution” then different from prostitution now? Since sex wasn’t shameful then, was prostitution also not shameful?  Were the temple prostitutes abused and frowned upon the way many prostitutes are today?⁴  Or were they protected from abuse by the temple, and by the reverent treatment of those they served there - treated less like today’s “whores,” in other words, than like today’s preachers?   Since they surely thought of sex differently than we in the West do in the Judeo-Christian framework - and we inherited much of that framework whether we’re religious or not - it’s not an easy question to answer.⁵

(Do you see the “science fiction” side yet?)

But on the other hand, there was such a thing as “bad sex” in this story - and it’s what gets the plot rolling.

King Gilgamesh was a bit of a jerk when it came to sex.  Because he was king, and above the law, he had more choices than his wives or the temple prostitutes.  And the choice he made struck everyone involved - even the gods, who looked on from heaven - as really, really wrong: Gilgamesh chose to treat himself to the bed of every new bride on her wedding day - before her husband did.

So the people of the kingdom get understandably offended by this cocky king, and their complaints finally make it to the ears of the gods: the big-daddy god in particular, Anu (think Zeus and you’re close enough).

And here’s another place I think it gets deep and beautiful - but first let me take a detour to mention a couple of important things that connect to the beliefs of Jews and Christians and Muslims today.  The “deep and beautiful” stuff won’t work unless you know this.

On God, His Leadership Style, and His Fore-Fathers

First, the Gilgamesh epic is from a culture⁶ that spoke a Semitic language related to Hebrew and Arabic, and that dominated the Middle East for thousands of years before Judaism, the religion of the Bible and of Jesus, even existed.

Second, the Hebrews who first settled Israel over a thousand years after the Gilgamesh story knew this dominant culture, and included many Sumerian myths in the Bible; two well-known examples are the Six-Days’ Creation and Noah and the Flood in Genesis (the Sumerian Noah, Utnapishtim, will be a major character by this story’s end, by the way - and will tell the original and much older Sumerian version of the Flood later adapted in Genesis). You can read the Sumerian creation myth, the Enuma Elish, yourself to see the similarities.  It’s only a few pages long.

But the differences between the Sumerian and Judeo-Christian gods are even more interesting.

The most interesting difference to me is that the Sumerian religion had male and female gods and, more importantly, that the main Sumerian “god the father” type was, like most fathers, married. It’s always seemed weird to me that the Judeo-Christian-Islamic god is alone, unmarried.  Zeus had Hera, the Sumerian Anu had Aruru, but Yahweh, the “God” of the Bible?⁷  No female for him.  You have to wonder why the Hebrews took the female from heaven, who did it, when, and how.  I do, anyway. But I’ll share those thoughts down the road.

The other interesting difference is in the morality - I almost want to say “leadership style” - of the two father gods. To see the difference, let’s do a thought experiment:  pretend Gilgamesh did his wife-stealing stunt in Jerusalem, that Gilgamesh was a Hebrew and his god was not Anu but Yahweh, the god of the Jews and Christians.

When that God hears that Gilgamesh is deflowering all the wives of all “His people” - “coveting” more than his neighbors’ (and subjects’) “asses” and therefore breaking one of the Ten Commandments - how do you think that God would react?

People will argue with me here, but I don’t see how they can win: that God deals with sinners, rebels, and others who disobey him with this “leadership decision”: punishment.  He’s an “angry God,” as he says himself. ⁸ It’s hard to see that God doing much but using angry force to punish Gilgamesh and make him change his ways.  Human obedience is what matters to that God, as I read him; human wisdom comes a distant second.  You want evidence?  God’s instructions for dealing with people who disobey his laws, over and over (in Deuteronomy especially), is to simply kill them. And Adam and Eve received one hell of a punishment because of their disobedience, too.

Back to the Story: “What Would Jesus Anu Do?”

But the earlier Sumerian god, Anu?  His reaction to Gilgamesh’s adulterous outrage is totally intriguing, and in my view, totally cool.  I like this god.

He doesn’t say “Punish him.”  He doesn’t say “Kill him.”  Instead, he turns to Aruru, the goddess who the Sumerians believed created humanity from earthly clay, and tells her to do it one more time.

He tells her, more interesting still, not to create any old human, but instead a special type. “Now go and create,” he tells her,

“a double for Gilgamesh, his second self,
a man who equals his strength and courage,
a man who equals his stormy heart.
Create a new hero, let them balance each other
perfectly, so that Uruk has peace.”

And so she does.

I’m going to stop here for the moment, and just share why I think Anu is a god worthy of the title.  Because by creating a “double” for Gilgamesh instead of simply killing him on the spot, he shows that to him, “sin” is a lack of wisdom.  As you’ll see, he creates this double so that Gilgamesh may have the experiences he needs to grow wiser.  I also think he’s just plain smooth for not freaking out and throwing a temper tantrum, but instead coolly coming up with this mysterious idea:

“Make a double for him. That should do the trick.”

What a wtf plot twist. Love it. Suspense accomplished.

And it’s a wonderfully optimistic view of man for a God to have: not “fallen” and in need of salvation, not infantile and in need of a list of Commandments to unthinkingly obey, not tainted by any “original sin,” but instead: capable of growing through experience, of learning and finding his own way, of finding “balance” that brings “peace.”

That “double,” by the way?  His name is Enkidu - and he’s Gilgamesh’s double in a curious and fascinating way: Gilgamesh is two-thirds divine, one-third human; Enkidu, on the other hand, is - get this - two-thirds animal, one-third human. Gilgamesh is the king of civilization; Enkidu is a wild-man living naked in the wilderness, alone with no human companionship.  But this animal-man is actually innocent and good - shades of some pre-Biblical Darwinian understanding that, hello?, humans are indeed animals in the animal kingdom, and that that bit of natural obviousness is nothing to freak out about?

Before Closing:

Challenges, corrections, extensions, additions, and anything else are welcome. More on Gilgamesh soon.⁹

~     ~     ~

If you like this post, please spread it: (But don't tag it "education." That will bury it.)

1. thanks to Tom, by the way,  whose post partly inspired this and who turned me on to that article. [↩]
2. and thanks to R. Greco for this gem [↩]
3. that’s right: the US military is occupying and bombing the earliest civilization in the Middle East, and for any of you familiar with Mosul, that’s where the clay tablets holding the Gilgamesh story were uncovered, after two thousand years of sand-buried silence, by a British guy in the late 1800s [↩]
4. And - are there prostitutes today that don’t feel ashamed, aren’t abused or frowned upon, and actually find fulfillment in their profession?  Aren’t the questions endless? [↩]
5. Thanks to the Salon.com forum that mentions this post for pointing out this angle. [↩]
6. it’s complicated: the Sumerians were overthrown by other races, including the Akkadians and Babylonians, who spoke different langauges, but kept the story alive [↩]
7. Yahweh is a Hebrew name for what English-speaking Jews and Christians call “God” [↩]
8. And boy, I just opened the floodgates to a million evangelists to explain how Jesus marked a change in God’s law, a new covenant, with mercy replacing wrath, et cetera. But I’m going to side with the Jewish people on this one, for the sake of argument, and stick only to their original, non-Christian texts. The Torah above all.  I’m talking about that God as the literary character we read about in Jewish religious literature. [↩]
9. and if you decide to buy the book, be sure to buy the Mitchell translation pictured above. All the other ones are pretty crappy. This one’s fantastic. [↩]

[See here for Part 1: On the Death of Genius for the Sake of College]

The fact is that human beings come into the world with a passion for control, they go out of the world the same way, and research suggests that if they lost their ability to control things at any point between their entrance and their exit, they become unhappy, helpless, hopeless and depressed.
–Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness, p. 21

Psychologist Gilbert cites in this section an experiment in which two groups of seniors in a nursing home were given plants for their rooms.  The first group was given the responsibility for watering and keeping the plants alive; the second group was denied any control over the plants’ care, which was the responsibility of the nursing home’s staff.

Six months later, 30% of the seniors with no control over the plants had died; only 15% of the group with control died in the same period.

They did a follow-up study with the same “control” variable to study the roles of control and autonomy in fostering mental and physical health. In this study, youth volunteers began a weekly visitation program to seniors in two groups. The first group was given the autonomy to schedule the visits and decide their durations themselves; the second group had no choice: the young visitors came on a schedule prescribed by the nursing home administration (in cahoots with the experimenters).

Again, two months later, the group with control and autonomy was healthier, taking fewer medications, and showing various other symptoms of increased well-being compared to their state at the beginning of the experiment.

That’s interesting enough¹ - but the more interesting thing happened next, and was completely unexpected:  when the visitation experiment was over, the visits stopped - and so did the exercise of autonomy and control enjoyed by the “happier” seniors.  And within a few months, “a disproportionate number of [seniors] in the high-control group had died.”

Gilbert concludes:

Only in retrospect did the cause of this tragedy seem clear. The residents who had been given control, and who had benefited measurably from that control while they had it, were inadvertently robbed of control when the study ended. Apparently, gaining control can have a positive impact on one’s health and well-being, but losing control can be worse than never having had any control at all (21-2).

Implications for Schools

It should be obvious, but more and more I learn that the obvious should never be taken for granted.  So here goes:

1. Students given some control over the content and demonstration of their learning are happier.

This is an old saw in education, but it doesn’t hurt to support it with psychological research.

2. The basic structure of schools - prescribed course selection, prescribed schedules and durations, prescribed timetables for learning and moving on - are innately “depressing” for students.

In other words, even those students given the freedom, in this or that class, to choose their content and design their own projects to demonstrate learning, are still stuck within a larger system of no control.  For these students, the autonomous classroom is an anomalous blip on the screen of a much larger matrix of no choice, no autonomy, no “passionate control.”

3. If not the norm in schools, student experience of autonomous learning under one teacher may do more harm than good.

Graham Wegner and I touched on this in an exchange a while back², and it bears repeating here: Graham told of hallway talks with students to whom he had given this autonomy the previous year, students now back in the passive mode in their current classrooms. And the students were predictably uniform, if memory serves, in their doldrums. Like the seniors after the visitation scheduling was taken away from them, the students who had control and lost it may have been worse off for that brief moment of learners’ happiness.

The Law of the Fall

Let’s call it the Law of the Fall:  the higher you climb, the harder the fall - especially if you’re pushed from that height.  And the pushers here are the teachers who keep control of everything that happens in their students’ experiences in their classrooms.

The bigger pushers, though - aren’t they the administrators?  I don’t mean to admin-bash here, but only to ask the obvious question: if autonomous learning is the miniscule exception in a school instead of the norm, who is ultimately responsible for that, if not principals?

Conversely, if the loss of autonomy is more damaging than the benefits of its brief possession, might that not mean that administrators have to make a choice? Namely, the choice between requiring all teachers to provide autonomy, or else, paradoxically, requiring that no teachers do?

–

Photo: Waiting by RebelBlueAngel

Bonus: TED Talk with Daniel Gilbert

Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness is my kind of scholarship: witty, playful, devoid of the constipated, jargon-stuffed voice of most academics. Reading it, you laugh as you think along.  Here’s a TED talk for those of you interested in learning more about this guy:

If you like this post, please spread it: (But don't tag it "education." That will bury it.)

1. and you statisticians and scientists are welcome to weigh in with criticisms of the experiments, because I can only trust the authority of a Harvard professor’s citation of it here [↩]
2. and Graham, if you can give me the link to that, I’d appreciate. I searched but did not find [↩]