Poems, stories and living thought

Abstract

In a chapter titled “Learning from history?” Jón Torfi Jónasson reflects on why dialogue as a didactic device always seems to be pushed to the margins of school practices despite being at the core of various school improvement initiatives, from the times of Plato and into modern times. In this paper I argue that one reason for the marginal role of dialogue is that textbooks tend to be so thoroughly closed, dead and boring that they can by no means ignite discussion and keep it alive. Textbooks are usually written with the aim of providing students with facts and knowledge so that they can leave the world of ignorance and move into the world of knowledge. Such textbooks may be well-intended, but the result is often texts that are utterly lifeless. Authors sometimes try to respond to this problem by relating the text to the daily world of the students, such as when a textbook in mathematics discusses payslips and interest mortgage in order to be more practical. Such a response is misguided, as the problem was not that the text dealt with some farfetched things – such texts are sometimes the most exciting – but that it was utterly lifeless. A dead text does not come alive by discussing boring, commonplace things. Facing the problem of lifeless teaching materials, one may learn a great deal from poems and novels; they help us connect to the world, perceive the world, understand the world, whether the so called dead world or the part of it that is thriving with life and populated by people and other creatures.

The problem with textbooks is that the text is often what I refer to as “closed”. It is selfcontained and any question that they pose is answered within the text itself. Many good poems are, on the contrary, open. They offer the reader an invitation to explore a world that lies outside the poem itself. Poems also often speak simultaniously to the intellect and the emotions, thus addressing the whole person and not a mere part. The person is addressed as a unified whole and as a member of a dynamic and mysterious world. It is an invitation to think and imagine, not a mere text that speaks to intellect alone and appears to be little more than something to remember.

Textbook authors are, however, not the only people that could benefit from learning from literature; the scientists themselves might also do so. Despite many of the greatest scientists having emphasised the affective and emotional aspect of their studies, such recognition remains a marginal quality in contemporary science. In a recent essay, the scholar and author Bergsveinn Birgisson complains about the demand in science and scholarship for people to divide themselves into distinct parts and present themselves as some sort of pure intellect while suppressing emotions and affection for whatever they are studying. I briefly discuss a noteworthy exception from this: Aldo Leopold’s work and his metaphor of thinking like a mountain.

Returning to the point made by Jón Torfi Jónasson about the absence of dialogue as an educational device, I argue that this is not surprising, given that the texts that students are allocated at school are without any qualities that are likely to spark an interest that might get a discussion going.