What Wittgenstein Learned from Teaching Elementary School
theparisreview.org
theparisreview.org
The quoted Wittgenstein biography of Monk (highly recommended!) actually has a comment on that:
>Another girl who was weak at mathematics remembers that one day Wittgenstein pulled her hair so hard that when she later combed it a lot of it fell out. [...] It was not that the villagers disapproved of corporal punishment, nor that such methods of discipline were at all unusual, despite Glöckel’s recommendations. However, though it was accepted that an unruly boy should have his ears boxed if he misbehaved, it was not expected that a girl who could not grasp algebra should receive the same treatment.
Location 419.4/1469 in my ebook copy
So, at least according to Monk, Wittgenstein's methods of corporal punishment were according to the times when it came to male students, but not according to the times when it came to female students, especially when it's about mathematics.
I think Monk's point wasn't just about gender, but also about whether the punishment was appropriate or proportionate in any case. Disrupting a class should be punishable regardless of gender, but struggling with a difficult lesson, especially one deemed unimportant for young girls at the time, is not a publishable fault. There was also the fact that Wittgenstein's corporal punishment was particularly harsh, and on one occasion fled town when even he realised that he went too far by basically hospitalising a young girl. In later life he eventually returned to apologise, but had his apology refused.
He wasn't teaching just for the sake of doing something good; he was using grade school students as test subjects (in a very benign way) for his own exploration of paradigms of human consciousness. I find this to be an interesting twist -- one might expect that a prominent philosopher hanging up the gloves to teach grade schoolers constituted an instance of the old "rapid burnout disguised as a moral epiphany". But no -- in fact, Wittgenstein realized that he could only learn what he wanted to learn by teaching grade school, and set about doing that without fully explaining his thought process to the rest of the world, who probably would not have understood anyway.
[Spoiler Alert]
abnegates his position as head of the world's leading (perhaps only) academy to seek a reification of philosophy (to "bring it into contact with the broader world"), in part through the tutoring of a childhood friend's young son.
I must at some point comb through the accounts of both attempts at this goal, to see if the resemblance is more than superficial.
I taught violin and music theory for a University prep program when I was in the later years of my undergrad.
A few things stuck out at me when I was doing this, and keep in mind--I had no classes on education theory at all at the time. I was just a good, gifted performer who had done some serious study of music theory. Music Theory emerges from the Philosophy of the time, so teaching about that is also teaching about the history of Western thought and also the social climate of the different periods of time that you are covering with music. Along with that comes the baggage of the Catholic church. The history of "Classical Music" is much aligned with the history of the Church.
So there's a lot to cover.
I learned a ton from this experience, and it was good for me, and -- I hope -- good for my students.
Some things I learned from this in no particular order:
In a one-to-one setting with a young student, as in really young, like 4-5 years old, where you are trying to teach difficult things, get down on your knees. That young kid is looking at an unfamiliar giant who is now telling them to do things they don't understand. They are still looking at you and wondering what the fuck is happening. Get to eye level with that kid. The kid will be far more focused than if they are looking at what they think of as a giant stranger.
Time yourself. If you are going to work on some really demanding physical and mental things with kids like learning to hear and play an instrument, give the kid a break every 10 minutes or so. The formula I ended up with at this gig was to do 10 minutes of supervised practice on instrument mechanics and then 5 minutes or so of theory.
Across a range of "talent" levels, I was able to produce pretty amazing progress with this method because you can keep a 5-year-old's interest for a lot longer if you are changing things up every so often.
I could do an hour or two with a young kid, where other teachers were losing steam and traction with the students after a half hour.
I never beat any kids, or hit them in any way. I grew up in that environment, and I thought it was awful as a kid. As an adult I find it even more repulsive. It's not, in my opinion, necessary for high achievement. And in my personal experience, it was detrimental.
In a classroom situation, I feel like you are sort of stuck. You have to present things as best you can and hope that everyone gets it. But you can have some creative control sometimes. I remember teaching one theory class to a wide range of kids. All of my students got locked into one history class at the prep school. So I had kids who were 5-6 years old and kids who were close to my own age at the time (I was 19, and the oldest students were 17).
That's tough, and I don't have anything to offer someone stuck in that situation. But it is possible to come up with a curriculum that can work for this assuming that everyone in the class in equally ignorant. It's just hard to do.
Don't be a male teaching any underage female past puberty one-on-one. Just don't do it. I never got into trouble, but I know many totally innocent people who have. I'm sure it works the other way. But there's a lot of emotion going on in pubescent kids, and they are likely to have confused romantic feelings about figures of authority who are not abusive. Just don't get close to that situation.
The last thing I want to say from my experience is that kids like to be treated with respect. That's part of the getting down on your knees thing. Another part of respect is to just assume that they will behave well and create an environment in which it makes sense for them to behave well. Talk to them like adults. Give them the freedom to fail and make mistakes.
They usually will not fail. They will usually step up to the challenge and do some amazing things.
I would like to point out that my observations as a music teacher are not limited to that one experience of teaching the children of upper middle class white Texans.
I've been involved with the El Systeme projects in South America and co-founded a Systeme project in the Philippines a few years ago with my brother.
These projects target the poorest of the poor in these countries--the same people that drug cartels and criminal gangs recruit from.
We offer an alternative to that life. And we take it not to people who can afford things like music lessons for their kids, but rather to families who have no other options.
We set up a safe building where kids can go for their music lessons, and we treat them with respect. We learn their language. We expect them to practice and get better, but we are not mean to them if they don't.
It's service to the world that gave me and my brother the talent and opportunities that we have.
Those things I mentioned in my post are things that cut across cultural and class boundaries. Those are things that bring children--who have every opportunity to go join a gang or deal drugs or go do whatever--back to the music program time and again.
It's completely anecdotal information, and I'm aware of that. But it's working in a small number of cases. Next year, we'll have a first generation of these students getting visas to come to the U.S. to study music at one of our universities.
Some of them won't just study music. Some of them are intrigued by computers, and I've been teaching some comp sci at these programs as just an aside thing.
The U.S. is going to have a few more highly motivated, extremely talented, hard working, legal immigrants next year.
I guess, if I can stop rambling for a moment, what I mean to say is this:
A lot of education isn't really about what you study or where you learn. It's about training your brain to think about things in a certain way. I think that's what Wittgenstein was getting at, in his own way.
I didn't get to be a software developer the normal way. But I learned to solve problems through the lens of being a musician, which is all about solving real problems.
I don't know what these kids will do with their lives. These ones that I've only ever taught music to. But I know that some of the ones I taught when I was 19 have already grown up to be really competent physicists, computer scientists, and psychologists, and athletes.
Maybe they would have done that anyway. It's true. We don't know.
But we know that the poor kids from the countries I'm working in right now in my spare time will not have had that opportunity. So we'll see.
In university I followed courses in Computing, Psychology, Law and Theology. All had different ways of learning, approaching the subject. Psychology was (for me) all about questioning: you can never be 100% sure and should always be aware of another possible explanation. This has stuck with me, and I'm champion finding alternative explanations.
One of my fellow students changed to medicine, and he told me that it was the complete opposite. If you questioned a method or theory (as first year student), you were completely out of line. These methods were tested thousands of times, and no stupid first year student could think of a better way, so don't even try. I guess this changes over time because you have to change methods to make progress, but it makes clear how different cultures can be.
Music is one of the traditional 'learning to think' disciplines, along with grammar, logic, mathematics, and has a lot to offer in this regard.
And I wish you success with your personal mission.
Fortunately for us, that teacher left the school next year and from what I have heard he have gone to US. (God save the kids in the US)
I was saying that if you are a lot taller than a student, and you are in a one-on-one situation, it can be beneficial for the teacher to get down on the knees, so that you are looking the student right in the face as you are talking.
Philosophers manipulate concepts. This means that they create, destroy, morph, change, add to, take away from, and so on. They put concepts into certain sorts of relationships with other concepts. If it is true in Ruby that _everything_ is an object, I think it is a fair analogy to say that in philosophy everything is a concept. Concepts may be anonymous, like anonymous functions, but also concepts are labelled, and concepts have descriptions.
Philosophy has both a _what_ and a _how_. This is the same as any discipline. There is the subject matter of the discipline and also the methods (or if you want to be fancy, the methodologies) of the discipline. The difference between philosophy and other disciplines is mainly the subject matter. In philosophy the concepts are of a certain sort, abstract rather than concrete, though no-one knows as yet how to draw that distinction, some even disagree that there is the possibility of drawing a clear distinction.
[A side note. Even though humans are pretty adaptable, because humans have spent 99.99% of our evolutionary existence not being philosophers, we have a lot of systems in place that make us ill-suited for philosophizing. What I am trying to say is that learning _how_ to do philosophy (for a human being) is as much about learning how to overcome human fallibility and bias and prejudice as it is about learning how to think logically (this is overrated) and learning how to manipulate concepts like a boss (this is underrated).]
Concepts are conveyed from person to person using language. When one starts thinking about thinking you end up having to try to understand how it is that we are able to manipulate concepts in the first place and also how it is we come to acquire language. It is this conceptual and linguistic process that Wittgenstein could observe first-hand while teaching kids.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Wittgenstein-Reader-Anthony-Kenny/...