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TTeaching as a Subversive Activity

 

From Pretenses to Real Meaning: 
A Book Review of Teaching as a Subversive Activity 
January 29, 1998 
by Robin Martin

 

Almost 30 years ago, Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner wrote a book called Teaching as a Subversive Activity. This book has played a significant role in helping teachers across the years to question the traditional wisdom of the school system. As the title implies, it is a book is about: subversive teaching.

What is subversive teaching? For Postman & Weingartner (1969), subversive teaching is the conscious act of teaching with the "inquiry method" and in doing so, realizing that this changes everything. They pull heavily from Marshall McCluhan’s work around the idea that the medium is the message, and that merely labeling ideas ("Oh, this is just the discovery method") diverts our attention from the complex processes that are at work.

They explain:

"The inquiry method is not designed to do better what older environments try to do. It works you over in entirely different ways. It activates different senses, attitudes, and perceptions; it generates a different, bolder, and more potent kind of intelligence. Thus, it will cause teachers and their tests, and their grading systems, and their curriculum to change. It will cause college admissions requirements to change. It will cause everything to change." (1969, p. 27)

Looking back, we must now question: Was this inquiry method ever fully integrated into our schools, or was it merely assimilated into the existing structures so that the change of which Postman & Weingartner spoke was never fully realized? Is it an approach to education that we might want to revisit, as we continuously search for "reforms" that are more in harmony with our visions for what we want our community and educational system to be.

In contrast to a "production" approach to teaching, the inquiry method focuses on the process, rather than the product. Thus, a good teacher is one who realizes the "answers" are not in the books, but within the learners themselves. Doing and experiencing are the key ingredients to real learning, and how and what we learn does not happen sequentially and especially does not happen for all learners in the same way at the same time.

A subversive teacher, then, is one who firmly realizes these "truths" about learning. Despite the system’s focus on product (predetermined curriculum and test scores), the subversive teacher actively attempts to redesign the structure of the classroom to focus instead on process. Some of the attitudinal characteristics of such "teachers in action" as listed by Postman & Weingartner include:

Postman & Weingartner give much attention to challenging the traditional methods of teaching quite directly, as well as suggesting alternative approaches.

In criticizing the traditional approaches to schooling, they describe school as a place where real issues are not dealt with. They even attack the supposedly "progressive" types of essay questions and collaborative work assignments which are highly rated by most people, especially the defenders of "high standards," & makers of standardized tests. As educational critics, they write: "…we can be sure their approval rests largely on a carefully cultivated schizophrenia that is necessary, in present circumstances, to their academic survival" (p. 49). Thus, this is not a book to read if you are rigidly attached to even some innovative school methods or tests, as the authors are both critical and harsh toward much of the system as we know it. Rather, it is for teachers and parents who are ready to question everything about the traditional structures of teaching and wanting to challenge your assumptions of what schools are about and what they perhaps could be about, if we are willing to move beyond our past and envision something different.

Continuing on this topic of dealing with pre-defined curricula such as essay questions, Postman & Weingartner write:

"The children know that none of these questions has anything to do with them, and the game that is being played does not require that the questions do. The game is called ‘Let’s Pretend,’ and if its name were chiseled into the front of every school building in America, we would at least have an honest announcement of what takes place there. The game is based on a series of pretenses which include: Let’s pretend that you are not what you are and that this sort of work makes a difference to your lives; let’s pretend that what bores you is important, and that the more you are bored, the more important it is; let’s pretend that there are certain things everyone must know, and that both the questions and answers about them have been fixed for all time; let’s pretend that your intellectual competence can be judged on the basis of how well you can play Let’s Pretend." (p. 49)

In a later chapter Postman & Weingartner begin to discuss establishing environments for learning that are not based on teaching children "trivia," but instead based on helping children to create their own meanings. They write:

"As soon as students realize that their lessons are about their meanings, then the entire psychological context of schools is different. Learning is no longer a contest between them and something outside of them, whether the problem be a poem, a historical conclusion, a scientific theory, or anything else. There is, then, no need for the kinds of "motivation" found in the conventional Trivia content. There are few occasions for feelings of inadequacy, few threats to their sense of dignity, less reason to resist changing perspectives. In short, the meaning-maker metaphor puts the student at the center of the learning process. It makes both possible and acceptable a plurality of meanings, for the environment does not exist only to impose standardized meanings but rather to help students improve their unique meaning-making capabilities. And this is the basis of the process of learning how to learn, how to deal with the otherwise ‘meaningless,’ how to cope with change that requires new meanings to be made." (p. 97)

Postman, N. & Weingartner, C. (1969). Teaching as a Subversive Activity. New York, NY: Dell Publishing Company, Inc.

To locate a current copy of this book, you can try: any local used-book store, or the local library.