Begin Here: The Forgotten Conditions of Teaching and Learning by Jacques Barzun

Begin Here: The Forgotten Conditions of Teaching and Learning Reviews

• 
  Mystie Winckler

  It is a collection of essays that are quite good, but depressing. They were written for major journals and newspapers in the forties, collected with additional comments added in the eighties, and yet no one heeded them and things are even worse now, the holes being dug then are even deeper now, and the likelihood that anything will change for the better even less.
  
  One of the blessings, if also difficulties, of homeschooling is that we, unlike national bureaucracies, can pivot, alter course, and apply new wisdom when we get it. Our nimbleness is our strength, and it’s a good reason to keep reading and thinking.
  
  The difference between a problem and a difficulty
  
  
  "We have all got into the habit of calling every purpose or difficulty a problem, to the point where some people on hearing “Thank you” no longer say “You’re welcome;” they say “No problem.” A problem is a definable difficulty; it falls within certain limits and the right answer gets rid of it. But the difficulty – not the problem – the difficulty of making a living, finding a mate, keeping a friend […] cannot be dealt with in the same way – it has no solution. It calls for endless improvisation, some would say 'creativity.'"
  
  A few years ago I started noticing how easily discouraged some of my children could become in the course of learning. So many of the early steps had come easily to them, that when they encountered something they had to work at, they immediately jumped to the conclusion that it was something they couldn’t – and therefore wouldn’t – do.
  
  It looked and sounded familiar, because I have the same tendencies.
  
  I realized that my tactic and my expressions had to change. We had to be able to encounter difficulty with grit, rubbing our hands together and getting down to business. Instead, difficulty was a problem – and the easiest solution is to give it a miss.
  
  So we come to the conclusion that the mind at its best thinks not like Dewey’s imaginary scientist, but like an artist. Art is achieved not by problem-solving, but by invention, trial and error, and compromise among desired ends.
  
  One thing I’ve seen as we’ve read about the history of chemistry this year is that knowledge does not come from neatly following the prescribed scientific method. Discoveries came accidentally, unexpectedly, and after long wrestling and trying this or that over and over again. Learning and knowledge do not happen by applying a formula, but by engagement.
  
  "There is no possibility of making schoolwork always easy and 'natural.' Much of it is hard and unnatural until it has become a habit. Effort is always needed."
  
  Homeschool moms, we are not failing if our kids cry over math or argue about revising a paragraph again. Learning is hard work, and we are our children’s support team as well as teacher. We need to let them know that there is nothing wrong with them when the work is difficult, and we need to know there is nothing wrong with us or the material when it is hard – at least, not necessarily.
  
  Oftentimes our hunt for a better curriculum is based on a desire to make things smooth and easy. But growth requires challenge.
  
  No one goes to a personal trainer to get into shape without expecting to be sore.
  
  No one starts a diet to lose weight and expects to eat cake all day.
  
  No one goes into the Marines and expects to be mollycoddled.
  
  We know that good results generally come from consistent, difficult effort. Let us give our children the benefit of learning the habit of effort during their childhood rather than having to learn it later in life, when consequences will be even greater. The habit of effort isn’t something that will take 21 days and then it’s all free and easy. Every growth spurt comes with growing pains.
  
  And, of course, we cannot give what we do not have. If we want to teach the habit of effort, we must be learning and applying it ourselves.
  
  Let us model and require and praise the effort, rather than seek easy “solutions.”
• 
  Jacob Aitken

  Barzun, Jacques. Begin Here: The Forgotten Conditions of Teaching and Learning. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.
  
  If Mortimer Adler is the greatest educationist of the 20th century, then Jacques Barzun comes close.
  
  Main Idea: Forget education..Let us talk instead of Teaching and Learning (Barzun 3).
  
  Teaching isn’t a complex series of problems, pace modern progressives and educationists; rather, it is a series of difficulties. There isn’t a formula for “how to teach.” It is an art (5). In other words, a good teacher knows more about his subject than about a strategy.
  
  What does Barzun mean that problems are solved, not difficulties? Problems come and go with education. Difficulties are deeper: it is difficult to get students to learn accurately, to develop virtue (14). For example, a problem for today is how to teach during Covid. A difficulty, as Plato noted in Meno, is how one immaterial mind can contact another mind and get that mind to make the proleptic leap to knowledge.
  
  While a common refrain is “get the parents involved,” Barzun gives an uncomfortable, yet frank reminder: the parents are already involved via the school board. I know what they mean. Get the parents to hold the students accountable. I think they should to an extent, but as we are seeing with wokist curricula today, the minute the parents start pushing back, the United States State Dept labels them as terrorists via the Patriot Act and facial recognition software.
  
  We can blame television for much of children’s short attention span, but Barzun goes deeper. The average social studies textbook has the same format and works against the student at a deeper level. Your average social studies textbook has some shiny pictures on a page and some text. The pictures are far more interesting and only the bored students ever flip through the text.
  
  The following would get Barzun brought up on charges of hate crimes today. He notes several major problems with teaching “multicultural classics.” 1) the linguistic barrier; mastering these stories requires familiarity at some level with Eastern languages. Your average teacher will have no such ability. 2) If Plato’s Republic is a dialogue on the difficulties of truth and government, many of these Eastern stories are creation stories or moral platitudes. If teaching the Bible is illegal, then it’s hard to imagine why teaching Hindu theology is okay. 3) If modern teachers lack the capacity to teach something as straightforward as the Western classics, they won’t have a chance of teaching Hindu metaphysics.
  
  Barzun exposes the fallacy that teaching other customs will increase tolerance. It does no such thing. In Beirut Christians are killing Christians, and Muslims, Muslims. They are already well-aware of each others’ customs (131).
  
  Furthermore, the West isn’t provincial. The West, not the East, penetrated the whole globe. It was Western scholars who gathered Arabian and Persian religious texts and preserved them from destruction at the hands of the Wahabbis.
  
  I don’t want to belabor the need to teach Western classics. Barzun has a chapter on it that is well worth your time. He notes that the average fifteen year old, much to the dismay of the educational expert, would be enthralled with Augustine’s Confessions. Indeed, simply introduce them to the chapter where Augustine comes to that “sizzling” place, Carthage. Every teenager knows what Augustine means when he says “I was in love with love.” When he writes, “a cauldron of unholy loves was sizzling and crackling around me,” every teenager knows exactly what he is talking about.
  
  The real value in Barzun’s works is that while he criticizes the silly theories abounding today in education, he doesn’t let the critics off so easily. It’s even to make fun of modern pedagogical theories. The problem is that such criticisms rarely go to the root. Indeed, if they did then other ideas might have to be abandoned. We all know that “publish or perish” is pointless. Indeed, it has a negative value on knowledge. No one questions, though, whether the young scholar actually has any knowledge to give us. He almost certainly doesn’t–but you don’t say such things. Even worse, few question whether a PhD = good teaching. If it doesn’t, then why do most universities insist on hiring only PhDs?
  
  Nota Bene:
  * People demand excellence, but as soon as it happens they cry, “Elitism!” Standing out is undemocratic (3).
  * “The announced ‘introductory course’ did not introduce the subject but tried to make recruits for advanced work in the field” (10).
  * The goal of secondary and higher education today: “instead of trying to develop native intelligence and give it good techniques in the basic arts of man, we professed to make ideal citizens, supertolerant neighbors, agents of world peace, and happy family folk, at once sexually adept and flawless drivers of cars” (13).
  * “In the instant of acquiring knowledge, the mind is most vulnerable to distraction” (21).
  * “The students who handle multiple choices best are not the best, but the second-best” (37).
  * “Nor should that cowardly evasion, teamwork in the classroom, be allowed. Arithmetic is a private affair in which the opinion of others is useless” (82).
  * “Good pedagogy says: to show the connections is the best teaching, and connections imply something already present with which to link the new” (90).
• 
  Marilyn

  I really loved this. He's a Columbia prof and a promoter of a classical liberal arts type of education. His opener is "Forget education. Let's talk about teaching and learning." (that's a rough approximate--can't find my copy right now). Great ideas!
• 
  Sarah

  Dated, tendentious, and frankly wrong in spots, this nonetheless has some intriguing observations and recommendations. You wouldn't think that the association of reading with education (self- or otherwise) needed apology, but Barzun offers it nonetheless.
• 
  David Withun

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• 
  Steve

  Barzun's amazing insight is revealed in these essays. Some were written decades ago, but they still maintain the same level of relevance today. I could hardly believe what I was reading at times, especially the last two chapters; they summed up my experience so well. Classic.
• 
  Melanie

  Read most of this for a summer class. Excellent.
• 
  Steve

  This is a selection of 15 of Barzun's pieces on education. barzun crashes through the sepulchre of modern educational pieties, over turning the tables and driving out the money-changers as he goes. Look-say, trendy education theory, TV, entertainment, the flight from the classics, all suffer at his hand.
  
  As education is a result and teaching is the process towards the formation of an educated person, the book is about teaching and how we teach. Home educating parents will find a great deal to restore sanity and balance in what they do.
  
  In short, education now focuses on the "self" rather than the subject, the current rather than the permenant. The real value of classics, according to Barzun is that they are difficult. They are difficult because they expose us to the minds of those who havbe thought and written ina different context and in a different age. "The great works do not yeild their cargo on demand. But if one reads them with concentration..., the feccte gives us possession of a vast store of vicarious experience.."
• 
  Susan

  Although it was first published in the 70's and updated in the 90's, it's still perceptive with good prescriptions for education.
• 
  Dakota

  MR+
• 
  Scott Harris

  Especially if you teach high school, forget all the nonsense they taught you in educational school and read this instead.