Noise in the Classroom

Imagine that you are a lover of folk music and your friend prefers the music of the big bands. Imagine that each of you is trying to persuade the other of the high worth of what he loves the best. But let there be this stipulation: You must carry on the conversation at the top of your lungs, and there must be no pause between when you speak and when he speaks.

Do you not see right away that no true conversation can be conducted? Your mood will follow upon your lungs. You will get red in the face. The very noise of it — the noise you make, and the noise he makes at you — will stop up the ears of your mind. It will hardly matter what words you use at first, because they too will be charged with anger, and you will be lucky if you can get out of this shouting match with your friendship not bruised and beaten. You will take things personally. You must. (READ MORE by Anthony Esolen: Philistines à la Mode)

Now imagine the same conversation, with this stipulation instead  Each of you must wait a full 15 seconds before answering what the other has said. Fifteen seconds is not a long time, but in a conversation it will invite leisureliness, and a habit of considering, letting things sink in, not saying the first thing that flies into your head. You may even have an opportunity to see your friend’s face and to hear his tone of voice ringing in your mind.

Perhaps neither one of you has anything intelligent or well-informed to say. In that case, you may end up with a healthy experience of your own deficiency, which in itself can be a spur to learning. But if you do have something intelligent to say, you are far more likely to say it. You may even say something that never occurred to you before. Whatever happens, though, you and your friend are likelier to harbor warm feelings toward one another. You may even feel a kind of gratitude for a friend whose interests and knowledge are not the same as yours.

Politics In the Classroom Is Just Noise

Politics, in the classroom, brings noise. It takes skill and thought, and patience and taste, to sing a beautiful song as it ought to be sung. It takes neither skill nor thought nor patience nor taste to shout political slogans. Rather, such things are ham-fisted, they shut down thought, they set people on edge, and they are usually in abominable taste. They are rabble-rousers of a particularly pernicious sort: they aim to create the very rabble they aim to rouse.

An excellent teacher can bring a hushed and thoughtful silence to a class as he recites Tennyson’s Ulysses, and the imagination dreams of an Ithaca far away, and of a man who cannot remain there, not even in his old age, but must venture forth again upon the wide waters of the sea. Or I should say that such a teacher could once do that, but now all the habits of noise are against him, and it is not clear how many of his students have been drummed deaf with it so that their souls can no longer hear. But a poor teacher cannot do this, and sometimes it is because he does not understand what makes such a poem great. When you have no case, the lawyers say, you should shout, and the jury may take as an argument what is only noise. (READ MORE: Teaching the Constitution in a World Without Books)

When you cannot teach Ulysses, you shout — about imperialism or colonialism or something else that neither you nor your students really understand, but which will give you and them the impression that something important has gone on. Well, something important has gone on: a little more of their human spirit has been amputated, cauterized, and sealed with tar.

The essence of the good teacher, I have long believed, is that he can impart to others the wonder he feels in the presence of something beautiful or fascinating. “Come here and look at this!” he says, like a boy who has cracked open a piece of coal and found inside the imprint of a fern that lived and died 50,000 years ago, with its delicate veins still showing, and an odd gloss of muted color over the surface of the stone.

I remember when Halley’s Comet appeared in 1985, and I set my telescope out in the parking lot of the apartments where I lived, and I tracked that snowball in the sky, for no other purpose than to see what it was like; and when I wasn’t looking at the comet, I was looking at the moon or one of the planets, including Saturn with its thin and mysterious rings. These things, in the silence of the evening, tease the mind into questions. Why should the rock and the ice about Saturn take the form of rings, rather than a sort of shell or shield surrounding the planet in all directions? Why should the comet appear only once every 76 years, when it slingshots as close to the sun as it does?  Such questions tease the mind into a realm beyond questions — the realm of wonder.

None of that will happen if everyone is shouting.

Schools Should Be a Refuge From Politics and Shouting

Therefore schools should be havens set apart from noise. You should no more devise an English literature curriculum with politics in mind, than you should shout political slogans at people trying to pray in church, or than you should blare the news from a political convention at people trying to sing a Bach cantata, or even just at somebody in a hammock, trying to read a good book. In fact, all other things being equal, the less likely it is that a thing can be conscripted into a political squadron, the better you are in teaching it, and the healthier will your students be in learning to cherish it.

I do not mean, of course, that you should not teach history, which will involve politics. By all means, teach students about William Pitt the Younger and his great accomplishments, and when you do so, treat him as he deserves, because he was a human being and not a mere counter in some march of history towards its culmination in ourselves. As I mention Pitt, I am aware that I have given the good teacher an invitation and set the poor teacher a challenge and an implicit warning. (READ MORE: The National Security Risk at our Door)

To teach about that man and his times, with accuracy, fairness, and sensitivity to the differences between his age and ours, is to set current political noise aside. You may as well be discussing the mating habits of the white-tailed deer, or what makes Milton’s blank verse so mighty, or anything else that will get people not to shout about current madness, but to leave all that aside and begin to feel and to think as human beings.

So, in our schools, take down all the political signs, take down everything with a slogan on it, and put up works of timeless art instead. Let the children not turn themselves into billboards, but let them dress as boys and girls, young men and young women, characterized by the habit of listening, and letting other people listen, and not by shouting, mugging, posing, and in general making themselves obnoxious and encouraging others to become obnoxious in response. Turn off the noise, and let human sounds and silence emerge again.

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