Gödel, Escher, Bach, and Handel

The King's song is kinging along, I love when you go in after you've written something and find all of the little bits that can be rearranged into more cohesive and/or more communicative patterns, in fact I may just show you the first draft of this song compared to the current draft because it's amazing what adding an eighth rest can do, in terms of shifting a syllable towards a beat on which it can be more clearly understood –

but first –

("butts first," as Larry and I say whenever we say that – )

I have to tell you that I was wrong about something.

Look, the Taking Children Seriously idea is an intriguing idea, in the sense that I do believe people should be allowed to explore their own interests as thoroughly as they might like, and I don't believe people should be forced into activities they hate, and I do believe that people can solve problems together and that the solutions can be preferable to either of the original ideas on each side of the disagreement.

And I love the idea of taking yourself seriously, because you can't take anyone else seriously unless you take yourself seriously first, which is to say that you can't love anyone else effectively until you effectively love yourself, but it's also to say that sometimes you love yourself by learning how to love someone else, and all of this is to say that problems are ultimately solved by love and penultimately solved by the process of going from guessing to knowing, I've written this over and over and over and over again and I will neither be the first nor the last person to figure this out.

And I think that much of what goes on in schools and colleges is a waste of everyone's time and/or money, and you don't need me to tell you why that's the case, it's one of those things that everyone just knows, it's an enormous problem that we haven't yet solved.

And I thought, for about a week or two, that the whole Taking Children Seriously/Unschooling thing might have something to it. I went and read John Holt, and I told my piano students that I would help them learn any music they wanted to learn, all they had to do was ask, and I got to watch them play through a melody that they had chosen, something that was already in their heads, and watch their absolute delight when they realized they could reproduce it on the piano.

SOOOOOO FAR SOOOOOOOOOO GOOD RIGHT?

And then I went to my voice lesson.

The thing is that my voice teacher has been having me sing a bunch of French art songs, some of which are fine-I-guess and others which are, like, um, I only speak a little French but I know enough to know that Fauré's scansion is off, his melodies ramble, the best thing Fauré ever did was teach Ravel (REMEMBER THAT FOR LATER), and obviously I am going to do the thing where you put in the minimal amount of work, generally the night before the lesson, to achieve the goal of singing the piece well enough to never have to sing it again.

Meanwhile I am secretly singing – let us pause here to note the words secretly singing – a bunch of stuff I would like to perform someday, this is where I'm working out problems and seeing what my voice can do and applying both the time and the technique that I'm supposed to be applying to this other music.

And the Unschoolers would shout "HOORAY!"

Except I went to my voice lesson and I was assigned a piece of music I loved, immediately, that I had never heard before, that was full of problems I had never tried to solve before, that I very very very much wanted to puzzle out.

And you're going to ask me what the piece was, which means I'm going to have to tell you that it was Handel's "O Sleep, Why Dost Thou Leave Me."

Which probably wouldn't ever have come up in my own, unschooled exploration of vocal repertoire.

The Unschoolers will say "well, something else might have come up instead," but let's be honest, I was secretly singing a bunch of Bolcom and Bernstein, the kind of music that blends the theatrical with the classical, and it never would have occurred to me to consider Handel, even though that is also exactly what he is doing.

And now I get to learn all of the ideas in this piece, and I get to use them to generate new ideas, and all of this delights me in a way that is completely different than the delight you get from replicating a melody you already know.

When I went to college my faculty advisor told me that I would find 80 percent of it boring (her exact words were "you probably won't learn anything until grad school") and in many ways she was correct. Much of college was boring, particularly the gen-ed requirements, and the first thing anyone says when they talk about reforming college is that you have to get rid of Rocks for Jocks and Physics for Poets.

I used to argue that colleges should get rid of any class that attempts to teach a student about something instead of teaching them something. Everyone who sat through Introductory Chemistry for Non-Majors knew full well that they weren't going to learn anything worthwhile about chemistry. They were going to learn that chemistry, as an academic subject, was something that other people studied, and then they were going to put on a pair of safety goggles to dip a piece of special chemistry paper into a flask and watch it turn blue, and then they were going to write two pages on the scientific method based on the hypothesis that the paper would turn blue, and then they were going to be told that other people did this for real and it was way more interesting for them.

It was the academic equivalent of an Epcot ride.

Except –

Except –

Except –

I needed a math credit to graduate and I realized I could take a linguistics course to fulfill the requirement and that class literally changed my life.

Not just because the professor began the class by giving us a piece of paper with a paragraph of non-English-language, non-English-alphabet text on it and telling us we had two weeks to translate it, using any and all resources in the known universe including each other.

(We figured it out, by the way.)

But also because the professor ended the class by hinting that, since I seemed to be interested in how language worked, I might want to read Douglas Hofstadter.

And what would the Unschoolers say to that? "Every smart kid discovers Gödel, Escher, Bach eventually, it's practically a cliché, you could have learned everything you learned in that class without going to college," blah blah blah????

First of all, the professor actually recommended Le Ton Beau De Marot, and second of all –

No, I couldn't have.

If we really are basing our problem-solving on the best of what everybody else has previously solved, then the most effective form of education isn't unschooling. The most effective form of education, as proven by the fact that it's what people choose as soon as they have the resources to choose it, is what Erik Hoel calls aristocratic tutoring, and what Larry and I just call "one-on-one teaching," and what Neal Stephenson implies will work for both elites and thētes as long as you have an attentive human on both sides of the Primer.

Remember, the thing I wanted most out of college wasn't four years of studying whatever interested me.

The thing I wanted most out of college was private musical-writing lessons.

So Larry and I were talking about all of this last night, for nearly two hours, and we agreed that there needs to be this balance between autodidactic education and biodidactic education (i.e. one-on-one tutoring) and the kind of education where people meet in groups to share what they know.

The student needs to learn that they can replicate their favorite melodies on their own; they also need to learn that there are wonderful melodies that they may never have heard before; they also need to meet with other students and play for each other and learn what their peers are doing.

And for some kids the group education will draw them towards the biodidactic and then the autodidactic, and other kids will start out autodidactic and learn the value of biodidactic and group.

(Larry was very much the former; I was very much the latter.)

(Also I need a word for "group" that can fit in front of "didactic." Omádadidactic?)

And we went to bed agreeing that this was, in fact, what the student needed, and I said I would probably be kept up all night wondering how the teacher provided this, and I kinda-maybe-sorta-definitely was, and then I remembered this bit in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which I had been thinking about recently because of my attempt to define Quality, which I will go ahead and recall for you:

quality in this case referring primarily to its ability to provide new information (longevity, which is correlated with quality, implies that new information will continue to be provided and/or extracted over time)

And then I proposed that the best of this new information will also be memetic, which we'll get to later, but back to ZAMM.

Sooooooooo basically Pirsig (or his autofictional representative) has this group of college students, and he understands that the standard Intro to Composition curriculum is boring and useless, so he tries Unschooling them (no grades, no requirements, follow your interests) and the students who already know something about writing have a great time and the rest of the class doesn't know what to do so they do nothing (which is perfectly fine under his class structure), and then the students who already know something about writing start asking Pirsig to help them make their writing even better, they're done playing, they're ready to learn.

And he writes:

What was Phædrus trying to do, anyway? This question became more and more imperative as he went on. The answer that had seemed right when he started now made less and less sense. He had wanted his students to become creative by deciding for themselves what was good writing instead of asking him all the time. The real purpose of withholding the grades was to force them to look within themselves, the only place they would ever get a really right answer.

But now this made no sense. If they already knew what was good and bad, there was no reason for them to take the course in the first place. The fact that they were there as students presumed they did not know what was good or bad. That was his job as instructor – to tell them what was good or bad. The whole idea of individual creativity and expression in the classroom was really basically opposed to the whole idea of the University.

For many of the students, this withholding created a Kafkaesque situation in which they saw they were to be punished for failure to do something but no one would tell them what they were supposed to do. They looked within themselves and saw nothing and looked at Phædrus and saw nothing and just sat there helpless, not knowing what to do. The vacuum was deadly. One girl suffered a nervous breakdown. You cannot withhold grades and sit there and create a goalless vacuum. You have to provide some goal for a class to work toward that will fill that vacuum. This he wasn't doing.

He couldn't. He could think of no possible way he could tell them what they should work toward without falling back into the trap of authoritarian, didactic teaching. But how can you put on the blackboard the mysterious internal goal of each creative person?

Look, I cannot possibly say that I have the answer to this, it would be like saying that I can write a musical that's better than Lin-Manuel Miranda's musical, but as I said before – I live in a world in which Robert Pirsig's writing exists, and therefore I can use his writing to improve my own ideas.

And my idea, right now, is that a Quality teacher is the same as a Quality work of art or a Quality meal.

In other words – in my words – every time you interact with a Quality teacher, it 1) teaches you something new and 2) you do not forget what you learn.

And you can do that even if you're a talented-but-not-quite-genius composer like Fauré, because Fauré taught Ravel.

Boy howdy do I have work to do. ❤️

(p.s. I probably mean dyad-didactic and not biodidactic, I was thinking "autobiography" and "biography" but you can see the error, BE WRONG FAST SO YOU CAN LEARN EVEN FASTER)