Learn How To Learn

Bruce Bassi
English 110-39
Percy Formal Paper
November 19, 2002

Learn how to Learn

The stubborn individual is remarkably open-minded. He may seem close-minded but he is in fact influenced by a variety of external stimuli. For this person to be called stubborn, he must choose a side depending on what he has observed (if he has not observed anything, there would not be a side to choose from). Whether stubborn or open-minded, everyone makes a decision based upon past experiences. A “decision” must not be a clear, well-defined statement, but an overall emotion about the topic presented. Even those who are indecisive still have a general feeling or concern about the topic. This feeling comes from a collaboration of sensual stimuli: sight, sound, smell, and touch. All of which may have such a profound effect, that a person makes a decision (an emotion) and never changes it. If one can change the past, one can change the mind of a stubborn individual. Only the rarest, most neutral minded person will recognize the discrepancy between what he has learned and what is real. A major theme of Walker Percy’s essay, “The Loss of the Creature,” is that we must salvage that which we have learned in schooling from that which occurs in its natural state outside the school building (596). He with an education may earn a Master’s, but may not master life.
To succeed in school is an entirely different process than succeeding in life. Let’s limit the definition of “success” to recognition for the mastery of all aspects of a particular area. What we learn in school is such a small portion of what there is to be learned in life, that we most often learn what we do not need to know in our career. Mastery of a career is only achieved through experience of that career, not through the mastery of unrelated ideas which only help us earn a material possession: a diploma. School curriculum is only a portion of what we must know in our future. When an instructor mentions that what he is teaching is “a classical example of” then “we begin to suspect that something is being left out” (597). Percy proclaims that the phrases “specimen of” and “classical example of” label teaching material as divided, processed, sorted and organized into a new package to be presented to students. The way I am interpreting only the important ideas from Percy’s essay is a “classical example of” how teachers translate important information without letting the students know it has been translated, or what its original state once was.

Conventionally, an educator finds interesting material which exists naturally outside the school building and brings it inside the building to be taught. Bringing the material inside the class is much easier than bringing the students to the material. The transition of this “worthy” information is often mutilated into a textbook or some form of media, and becomes an element of the “educational experience.” When a student learns a concept in school, he is not only learning an idea, but he is absorbing the air in which it is presented. When a teacher presents a new idea, the environment in which it is presented is equally important. Any teacher, such as Miss Hawkins, may think she is teaching a sonnet for example, but in fact they are teaching the sonnet in context of “The new textbook, the type, the smell of the page, the classroom, the aluminum windows, and the winter sky, the personality of Miss Hawkins – these media which are supposed to transmit the sonnet may only succeed in transmitting themselves (596).” The sonnet which once existed naturally outside the school has now become the curricula of the teacher, Miss Hawkins. Miss Hawkins’ lesson plans probably only suggested teaching a sonnet—she had not wanted to teach a sonnet obscured by the sky, the textbook, the windows and the classroom. Miss Hawkins, the typical educator, believes of these elements “for some reason to be transparent” (596). The sonnet has been “obscured by the symbolic package” which “is the air in which it is presented” (596). The package is not the sonnet, “but the media through which the sonnet is transmitted” (596). The package deserves more attention from educators because the package can leave a deeper impression in the students’ minds than the sonnet can ever leave.

Many people will not remember what they learned, but they will remember that which was not taught. Former students will remember names, and personalities of the people in the class, “but what does he recall if he should happen to read a Shakespeare sonnet twenty years later? Does he recall the smell of the page and the smell of Miss Hawkins?” (596). Percy rhetorically asks and suggests that the graduated alum will more likely remember the smell of Miss Hawkins than the Shakespearian sonnet. The air of the symbolic package is more imprinted in the student’s mind than the material which is meant to be taught. The student inevitably associates the enclosed classroom with material which exists outside of class. Ironically, the media supplementing the important material is timeless and that which is to be learned is not. Educators know that we will not remember specific lines to a sonnet, but they is taught anyway. Perhaps the essence of school is to learn how to learn. Educators know that we will not remember the memorized sonnet, but we will understand how to interpret a sonnet for ourselves when we encounter one outside of the school building. Percy is focused on one idea that we must learn real material as it exists outside the class, but this is just not rational.

Percy has a stubborn complex that we must learn material as it exists naturally outside of the school building. One reason the “field trip” was implemented was to supplement class instruction, and let students see how this class instruction may exist outside of class. Constant class trips are not economical, nor efficient. Percy understands that there is much more to learn in life, because school is merely a specimen, or a portion of life. How can a student constantly search and rescue the real specimen from the educational package? School can still be successful in teaching the process of learning, rather than teaching the real specimen. Yet Percy is focused that “the student should know what a fight he has on his hands to rescue the specimen from the educational package” (600). Percy must have had an experience where he saw a specific contrast between what was presented to him and what he realized is the “true specimen” to give him this stubbornness. Percy fails to recognize that a student can benefit from the educational package, and that the material being taught is not as harmless as he suspects.

Evidently, the act of teaching is more influential than the material taught. For biology students, to cope with dissecting a filthy animal with guts spewed on the dissecting tray is more important than learning that the small intestine is the one which is now staining the biology textbook. One day, my biology teacher had announced that today we would be dissecting rats, an idea that had been looming in our minds for weeks. Finally, the time had arrived when we must face our biggest fear, the highest on our list of disgusting animals. That which we had always tried to kill with a shovel had now become our topic of interest for the next week. The teacher had uncapped the bucket of rats and proceeded to pull them out by their tails and splat them on the dissecting tray, still dripping with liquids which preserved the bodies. To overcome our fears, the teacher had shown us how to snip the tail near the buttocks with a stainless steel pair of surgeon’s clippers. That was all we needed to see—we were then scalping the soft, white, furry skin off from the mandibles to the sharp nails on its bony feet. We students had to psychologically defend ourselves from the harsh reality that we were handling a rat. Seeing the rat as an object rather than a once-living creature helped us to cope. The rat was no longer our greatest fear, but simply a supplement to the pictures and definitions in our biology textbook. Matching one word in the text to the “real” body part on the rat was supposed to let us truly see the rat. But we began to make jokes about the rat, viewing the rat not as our study, but a “specimen” for our entertainment. We named our rats, mine was Bat-Rat. He had worn a mask with wings which imaginatively allowed it to fly around the room, not even scaring the girls who were initially terrified of the rat. Since we had not been the ones who found the rat in its original state, the rat was only a specimen pulled out of a bucket of preservative.

I still remember the saturated white fur, and the beady, red eyes of the rat, but I can more distinctly remember my friend pretending to tickle Wilbur, her rat. The bucket, the dissecting trays, the surgeon’s clippers, the laughter, and the smell of preservative have become elements of the symbolic package in the educational experience. I do not remember, however, what we were supposed to learn – the list of muscles we were asked to identify on a sheet of paper. As a quiz, my teacher would point to a muscle and we had to name it. I did adequately on the quiz, but if I was to take it again a year later, I would certainly fail.

Because the rat has been misplaced in an unnatural environment, we students remember not the rat, but the feeling we had when we learned about the rat. We were psychologically altered to believe that the rat was merely part of new curricula with concepts and theories. Percy would interpret our behavior as “the mistake of an idea, a principle, an abstraction, for the real” (597). The rat which should have existed in a wooden crevice had been placed on a dissecting tray, illustrating the idea of “misplaced concreteness.” The rat does not belong in a bucket of preservative; it does not live in the bucket. The rat exists naturally outside of the classroom, but it has been put here by our educators to make our education more efficient. The concrete rat has been misplaced in a wrong environment. When anything, any concept, is taken from its norm and projected in an educational environment so we can learn about it, we do not learn it, but the media in which it is portrayed. There is no possibility of me remembering the name of each muscle of the rat when I see one in a filthy alley even months later.

Gangster movies have made me associate rats and filthy street alleys with big cities and subways. Therefore, when I received a recruitment letter from New York University’s track coach, I was not too thrilled. I did not want to deny the school without seeing it, so I accepted the offer to embark on a tour of the college. My best friend and dissecting partner, Khushi, had once lived in New York City, so I invited her to join me on the tour. As the tour proceeded, Khushi expressed her desire to once again live in the city and I expressed my wariness of the homeless sleeping in Cooper Park and the filthy street alleys. I was growing disappointed on the tour, mainly because the cloudy, damp day did not match the bright blue sky and gothic-looking building portrayed by New York University’s brochure. As soon as I saw a shadow scurry into a dumpster, my feeling of dissatisfaction for city life had been confirmed: New York was not the right place for me, a feeling I had from the moment the tour started. Only if the university had been better than the brochure would I have been happy, but what was the shadow that scurried into the dumpster? I tried to repress the gruesome idea but I had concluded that the shadow was a rat. The rat in the dissecting tray had not swiftly moved around; was this really a rat? I must overcome my naive disposition that rats truly existed outside the classroom. Since I had been able to recognize the rat, I was able to recover the rat: “The thing is recovered from familiarity by means of an exercise in familiarity” (590). I had no longer associated the word “rat” with “thing in dissecting tray” but now it was a being with a home in a dumpster; knowing this allowed me to recover the rat. The surreal, suffocated rat designed for biology students had become an inauthentic beast, the rat in its real home was the authentic rat. I had now “recovered” the fake teaching tool in biology from the separate true, lively rat by means of my familiarity with the rat. When I had seen the deep shadow, the real rat, I had no biology teacher lecturing which muscles are required to jump into a dumpster. I had been independent and free from this external authority of a teacher: my freedom of thought reigned over the material which I was required to learn.
One may gather from reading Percy’s essay that a student does not learn anything applicable to the real world. I agree that I had not learned what a rat looks like in its true environment, it had made me stubborn and slightly naive to think that rats were normally so clean from disease. Percy would say that I will only remember more of the smell, and the feeling of the classroom dissecting a rat than what I was supposed to memorize. This is true, but Percy neglects the possibility that I had learned to deal with my preformed complex concerning the rat’s cleanliness. I had learned to accept the rat as a specimen in order to perform the dissection. Essentially, I learned how to picture the rat so when I see it in real life, I will be able to see it as a specimen, and perform my duty, had I been required to dissect the rat on the street. Even though the dissection was a process made by an educator, I was allowed to think on my own, and teach myself how to learn about the rat without breaking down psychologically.

When one is allowed to think freely, one exists in a state of sovereignty. There exits a hierarchy of knowledge and when an expert feeds information to a novice, sovereignty is not present. In order for one to have sovereignty, one must first recognize that there is a difference between what is systematically, formulaically taught in a class and what there is to learn outside the class. Secondly, one must justify authenticity and create his own ideas, any ideas from another source would exhibit a loss of sovereignty in this person. According to Percy, the reader parallels the consumer, “The reader may surrender sovereignty over that which has been written about, just as a consumer may surrender sovereignty over that which has been theorized about” (594). As a biology student, I represented the consumer who thoughtlessly accepted the dead rat and tried to learn the already defined muscle names. My loss of sovereignty had not halted just in the biology classroom; it had prolonged into New York City.

Seeing the rat crawl into a dumpster had not let me theorize more on the rat. I had thought that I had already learned everything about the rat, so I must not learn more. My loss of sovereignty with the rat had not started and stopped in just one day, it had remained with me for months after. Once sovereignty is lost, sovereignty is gradually disintegrating, “The loss of sovereignty is not a marginal process […] It is a generalized surrender of the horizon to those experts within whose competence is a particular segment is thought to lie” (595). As I had relinquished all free thought on my dissecting rat, I had later refused to think independently about the dumpster rat. Even though I had seen “it” in its original state, since I already learned about the rat, I refused to learn more about it. I inevitably compared my previous knowledge with what I had observed in the present. The filthy dumpster rat had not matched the clean white rat I was once used to, and I was distraught and surprised.

The rats did not match, and neither did my impression of New York University with what the university’s brochure told me to think. The brochure did not have a picture of a dumpster on the front cover, but beautiful architecture surrounded by a bright blue sky. I had developed a symbolic complex of the university, to always look attractive. I, as Percy had expected, measured my satisfaction to how it compared with my “preformed complex” (589). If the university’s brochure had included criminal statistics and the homeless percentage, I probably would not have gone initially, but I would not have been so dissatisfied at the end.

My friend Khushi had enjoyed the tour so much that she now attends New York University. Khushi had lived in a city for most of her childhood so she had felt a longing to return. I, exhibiting my stubbornness, had been raised in the rural countryside and was unwilling to accept the radical change. I must not feel ashamed of this, and you must not feel unaccepting of my stubbornness (assuming you are) because everyone, even Walker Percy can be stubborn.