"Because We Are Human." Trading Assessment For an Irrational Education

What we can gain by pulling back on all the measuring

I’ve decided to run a short series of essays inspired by Lionel Trilling, this being the second. Like the first, it is adapted from a talk I gave a few years ago. I know I risk testing your patience with this project, but I’m increasingly mortified by the mechanization of all human life, so I do hope you’ll forgive me.

Photo by Tengyart on Unsplash

In 1967, Lionel Trilling published a textbook called The Experience of Literature. In the introduction, Trilling tackled the pressing questions “why we read literature,” and “what use it is in our lives” (vii). To answer the question, he ran through the standard metrics of his day: from behavioral science assertions about “escape,” and exploring “unlicensed hidden impulses” to humanistic, ethical arguments for developing empathy and heightening sensibilities.

Yet for Trilling, the measurements we use to calculate the effectiveness of reading literature have their limits. He writes, “in the end the sum of all reasons that might be adduced does not really give us an entire explanation (viii).

The best guess he can arrive at is “because we are human.” And I would argue that being human is an immeasurably complicated matter.

Lionel Trilling was one the last century’s most prominent literary critics and scholars and he represents the heyday of the Public Intellectual. The first Jew admitted to the faculty of Columbia University, Trilling was a trailblazer and became a universally recognized authority on culture, politics, and art in America, selling many books of essays and even making television appearances.

That a scholar such as this even felt the need to defend the spiritual, humanistic work of literature in 1967 illustrates the crisis higher education was already facing. Times were different then, and yet very much the same.

In the late Sixties, ivory towers were being stormed with pitchforks and torches, now they are assaulted with databases and spreadsheets. And if the tea leaves were indicating a revolution in Trilling’s day, we have certainly seen the fruition of another radical change brought on by the bureaucratization of the university.

This essay will not spend much time arguing that we are in the state we are obviously in; it will assume the reality of our situation and suggest a pedagogical approach to make the best of it.

If you are interested in learning about the historical development of these events, I recommend reading Bill Readings book The University in Ruins. Readings narrates the shift from the university of Trilling’s era, which he describes as the “historical university,” to the “posthistorical” university of our time. Quite simply, the difference between the two is the masters they serve.

Readings writes that the University “no longer participates in the historical project for humanity that was the legacy of the Enlightenment: the historical project of culture” (5). In other words, forging ethical, reasonable citizens of the nation-state was a goal for a bygone day. The University has given way to the “process of economic globalization” (3) and been transformed by those material conditions. The same economic forces that mechanized other forms of labor and shifted emphasis and ownership of production from craftsman to manager similarly mechanized academic labor, resulting in the dominance of administrators in the institution.

An excellent account of these social changes in work can be found in Matthew B. Crawford’s Shop Class as SoulCraft, and David Harvey’s A Brief History of Neoliberalism argues that global economic entities have used governmental institutions to further their profit-making ends - a related topic given the influence of education policy at the national level on the work we do in our classrooms. At any rate, Readings convincingly argues that “The University is becoming a transnational bureaucratic corporation…” (3). Citing a UNESCO publication by Alfonso Borrero Cabal, Readings identifies “the administrator rather than the professor as the central figure of the University” which redefines the institutions “tasks in terms of a generalized logic of ‘accountability’ in which the University must pursue ‘excellence’ in all aspects of its functioning” (3).

This is the space into which the technocracy enters to measure education with the efficiency models of the corporation in order to achieve that accountability. 

But True Education is Madness

Sadly, education is not by its nature efficient. It is unpredictable and irrational.

A quick thought-experiment. Think back to a philosophical insight that came to you from seemingly nowhere, while thinking of nothing in particular. Or the solution to that math equation that came to you during the pastor’s sermon at church. Or that concept from Lacanian Psychology that finally made sense two years later. These are the leaps that measuring cannot account for or predict, and if given too much influence in the classroom, might even prohibit.

Readings describes the effect on managerial education as follows: “The administration of knowledge is, of course, the only point at which anything like a question of content enters: the question of what knowledge is to be managed by teachers and administered to students. But the question of content is short-lived, since in order to be administered to students, knowledge has to be made into manageable doses. Thus the texbook takes on a new form in the University of Excellence. It tends to become shorter and require less of the student….Teaching administers students. It accredits students as administrators, and it trains them in the handling of information. It probably does all these things rather successfully” (152). And thus the rational system reproduces itself. 

I do want to pause for a moment and make something clear. It is extremely important for teachers to assess the quality of their work. Using the craftsman metaphor, a blacksmith who makes terrible horseshoes can ruin a lot of horses. Similarly, teaching is a craft to be honed and perfected over time. There are many important ways we can keep improving as teachers, and we have a moral obligation to do so. Arranging observations from colleagues, reading regularly, and attending conferences are some ways in which we can check ourselves.

Keeping track of student success in our classes is a “measurable” way to evaluate the success of our work. But if the horse, with those well-made horseshoes, gets before the cart, if measuring becomes the ends and not the means, the result is systemic failure to educate and our institutions become hollow credentialing centers in the global profit machine. 

Now a quick parable from Kafka: “Leopards in the Temple.”

“Leopards break into the temple and drink to the dregs what is in the sacrificial pitchers; this is repeated over and over again; finally it can be calculated in advance, and it becomes part of the ceremony” (93).

One lesson Kafka teaches us here has to do with the nature of institutions. They can be overtaken and fundamentally changed over time without really changing their structures. Over time, the sacrilege of the Leopards here becomes the object of worship in the very same temple. Profane becomes sacred. This is how I choose to think about the transition our educational institutions have undergone. But what if it might also be a model for how to proceed?

Perhaps we can become the Leopards. 

And here I return to Trilling. In 1943, he published in Partisan Review his most famous work of fiction, the short story “Of This Time, Of That Place.” A campus fiction, the story follows new professor Joseph Howe as he begins his academic career at little Dwight College. Howe is also a modernist poet, whose difficult body of work is highly criticized by an influential trustee of the college, who prefers rather didactic poetry that conveys clear moral lessons for the reader. Howe thus occupies two positions simultaneously on campus: respected young English professor and dangerous subversive.

Lionel Trilling by Hadley Hooper. https://magazine.columbia.edu/article/trillings-journey-resumed

This tension hangs over his head throughout the story. The plot puts two very different students in Howe’s classroom. One is Theodore Blackburn a sycophant who has mastered navigating the social world. Of mediocre intelligence, he has nonetheless been groomed for success and will succeed on breeding and connections alone, destined to be a prized alumnus of Dwight College.

The other student is Ferdinand Tertan, an explosively intelligent student who is, as the story puts it, “mad.” (Most of my students identify him as neurodivergent, using a common contemporary term). He is enthusiastic about learning and comes to insights that dazzle Howe, but in a wild and untamed (one might say immeasurable) manner that the institution simply cannot process or manage. 

As the year develops, Howe works through the dilemmas these students present. Blackburn has all the manners of a genteel, educated person, but little intellectual capacity. When he receives poor marks for his work, he first appeals to flattery, then threatens to appeal to the trustee who dislikes Howe’s work. Howe stands his ground, causing Blackburn to break down in panicked tears, begging for his grade. The administrator in Howe has stood firm and Blackburn must improve his work or face the consequences.

Tertan, conversely, appeals to the poet in Howe and the two have a special, almost spiritual connection. The mad student is often described with language applied to the daemon-poet from “Kubla Khan,” and this madness is exactly what the institution cannot contain or discipline.

Howe eventually reports Tertan’s mental condition to administration, thus choosing his managerial role over the values of his poetic soul. The story ends with Blackburn graduating and Tertan being exiled, with Howe left to mourn his acceptance into the academic machinery of Dwight College. In essence, he has sacrificed his poetic self for the success of his managerial self.

On the surface, it’s easy to read the story strictly as a tragedy in which institutional demands overwhelm human connection. One prominent symbol captures his mechanization.

The story begins with the first day of school and Howe immediately encounters a young neighbor girl, Hilda, who is clumsily taking photographs with a new camera. Howe watches the amateurish display and not wanting to spoil her artistic work, “waited for her to finish and called good morning” (72). It’s a very sweet and human scene. The story ends by mirroring this scene, but with a darker, much more mechanistic tone, and this time Howe is dragged into the picture at the campus graduation. Trilling writes, “Nothing could have told him more forcibly that a year had passed than the development of Hilda’s photographic possessions from the box camera of the previous fall” (111-12). After this observation, Howe is literally forced into taking a picture with Blackburn, and a coldly efficient Hilda directs her subjects sternly and without grace or humor. The subjects of her art, both teacher and student, are now treated as pieces of equipment to manage. This mechanization is noted by Tertan, who in his mad way, shouts “Instruments of precision” three times at the group, which Howe suspects, “might not be referring to Hilda’s equipment” (115).

The exiled, yet still dazzling Tertan shames Howe for his willingness to be drawn into Dwight College’s machinery, becoming a kind of machine himself. This strongly recalls Readings’ claims about professorial labor in the university - it is mechanized and accountable. Trilling notes the “sense of the thrice-woven circle of the boy’s loneliness smote him fiercely” (115). This second reference to the Daemon-Poet of “Kubla Khan” illustrates the distance between Howe and his poetic muse, and it would appear that Howe has failed to resist the machinery of education. 

But What if There’s a Bright Side?

The full scope of the story’s implications are complicated, however, and there is a way to see Howe as triumphantly, if subtly, subverting institutional machinery. Furthermore, as teachers inhabiting Readings’ Ruined University, we might take his example as a potential way to similarly smuggle values from the lost Historical University into the one dominated by bean-counters.

Recall that Blackburn is a kind of ideal student at Dwight; destined for success in business, socially polished, yet intellectually vacant. His is the kind of intellect that provides the knowledge managers with a manageable subject. He’s good at taking and passing tests with their ready-made measurability, and his inability to think with originality, creativity, or inventiveness is not a problem for system that doesn’t value those intangible, immeasurable things anyway.

He is the antithesis of Tertan who’s intelligence doesn’t even measure on a standard grade scale. When evaluating his work, Howe holds it against the college’s ABCDF scale, finding all of them to be inadequate to judge Tertan’s work, leaving him to suggest that “really only a mark of M. For Mad would serve” (101). 

It is ultimately Tertan’s madness, or if you rather, irrationality, that Howe instills in Blackburn; and this is his pedagogical method.

If the cold, rational logic of capitalism is what has eroded the foundations of liberal education, then perhaps subversive irrationality is the solution.

Howe begins the work of irrationalizing Blackburn when he assigns a grade of C- to the model student who had never received less than a B before (106). Blackburn complains, relying on the logic of objectivity to make his case: “That might be a matter of opinion, sir” (107). Opinion is, of course, not fact and is therefore not precisely measurable - a feature which has defined education for Blackburn so far.

This observation, meant to intimidate Howe, only reveals his instinctive belief in irrationality. Howe replies, “It is a matter of opinion. Of my opinion” (107).

(Who among us hasn’t deeply longed to say something like that to an irritating student, by the way?).

Blackburn responds to this challenge by threatening to go up the organizational chain of command (as any good technocrat would) and appeal to the Dean. Howe, now swept up in the ecstasy of subversive irrationality then takes Blackburn’s paper and changes the grade from a C- to an F (108). “Now you may take the paper to the Dean...You may tell him that after reconsidering it, I lowered the grade” (108). None of Howe’s actions, of course, make any sense to Blackburn who has had his brain systematically eroded by the logic of the rational, measurable University. He breaks down in tears and begs Howe on his hands and knees. Howe’s response? “The boy is mad” (109). 

At the end of the story, after Hilda’s graduation photo is taken, Howe tells Blackburn that he only passed him to be rid of him and that his paper was bad. But privately, as if to deny Blackburn the satisfaction, Howe recalls the truth: “The paper had been fantastic. The paper had been, if he wished to see it so, mad” (114).

In this ruined educational environment, successful teaching required irrationality and madness. 

In closing, the regime of measurable assessment has over time demonstrated that Readings’ warnings about knowledge management in the service of accountability should have been heeded. In nearly two decades since No Child Left Behind slouched its way to Bethlehem, secondary education has mechanized to a nearly totalizing degree.

And what have been the results? Standardized Test scores have dropped, along with student engagement. Students are not only learning less; they are more bored while doing it.

Measurable, surveillance education has not been better education. 

Yet this is our reality, and we must find a way to educate our students under the nose of neoliberal ideology. Trilling’s story shows us one way to do this and reveals an advantage we have: we have the students in front of us and we can find ways to shake them, if only momentarily, from the dehumanizing grip of standardized education.

Creative projects in analytic courses, essay exams with no objectively correct answers, marching the class down the hall to the Chapel for class one day, essays with, God forbid, no prompt or rubric!

These are activities that will befuddle students, make them uncomfortable, fill them with uncertainty, and yes, perhaps drive them a bit mad, but the experience will stretch them in much the way that Howe stretched Blackburn to his pathetic limits. 

For those of you who teach, I would love to hear some of the ways you unsettle your students.