COLUMN: We don't need no education

From Daniel Fienberg's, "The Fien Print: London Cast," Fall '98 From Daniel Fienberg's, "The Fien Print: London Cast," Fall '98Author's Note: This column will not be improved by the use of recreational drugs, and reading it while watching The Wizard of Oz will not provide any synchronicity. From Daniel Fienberg's, "The Fien Print: London Cast," Fall '98Author's Note: This column will not be improved by the use of recreational drugs, and reading it while watching The Wizard of Oz will not provide any synchronicity.To be frank, I came to England for my semester abroad because of a crucial moment in Alan Parker's film Pink Floyd's The Wall: A classroom of grotesque British school children are sitting at desks in a flashback and then, as a teacher lectures them, they all don horrible masks and become really scary looking. As they try to protest against the state of English education, they're methodically pushed into a giant meat grinder. Oh my! I wasn't sure that I wanted to learn via this unconventional method, but I was relieved to know that there would be a safe alternative to British beef. The little kids may have almost won on this one. The English university system does not thrive on long hours of intensive in class study. Here at King's College, we've been out of classes for almost a month. Before that moment, I averaged all of two hours of class a day, with no classes on Fridays -- and my schedule may have been heavier than most of my peers. Clearly, the British believe that there is something more important than hours of lecture and discussion. Instead, students are encouraged to get the most out of their education on their own. While assigned texts may be limited, optional study lists are long and it's impossible to get away with eschewing outside readings. Since lectures amount to little more than regurgitating introductions to Penguin editions of texts, any hope of intellectual salvation resides at the library. Penn students have certainly encountered similar dilemmas. Of course, in that situation, what do you do if your college library is hopelessly inadequate? The two major reference centers for King's students are more confusing that Van Pelt and have fewer than half the number of books. Not that the books are ever actually available, what with interlibrary loans circulating around all of London's students. Don't need no education? Hardly, but it requires a lot of luck to get your hands on it. We don't need no thought control. "At least we don't write papers like we did in college [high school]," said the smart girl in my 18th century lit class. "You know, where you'd come up with your own idea and just write about it." Oooops. The Americans in the room all sat silently and looked away. We thought this was a pretty fine way of writing papers. Creativity. Ingenuity. Bright minds, bright ideas. All that stuff. Nope. On one level it is tempting to view the papers we're all writing at King's as well-annotated plagiarism. Some of the words stuck in the middle, as well as the synthesis of ideas, are mine. The arguments all seem to have been made 50 years ago as answers to questions that the teacher gave me, questions geared toward the exact papers I'm going to cite and the exact arguments I'm going to make. Misused, this style of writing could be seen as the worst kind of thought control. But it isn't. The purpose is for the teachers to be aware that you know that somebody else has read the book before you. While this is not intended to forbid free thinking, it requires students to contribute their work as part of a body of critical thought, rather than as some kind of misimagined brilliance. The British students might not be as apt to make stunning observations, but they can sure quote lots of obscure journals. You make the call. No dark sarcasm in the classroom. Sarcasm? I'm still waiting for personality in several of my classrooms. The personality of the teacher gives direction to the class. No matter how well-focused the subject matter and texts are, teachers who refuse to connect with the students prevent the students from connecting to the material. This is true at Penn and King's and at Mount Wachusett Community College. But it goes the other way as well. In many ways, the cliche about British reserve is true. A high percentage of British students are content to sit in seminar and stare into the corner, or shy under desks. As one of my hallmates explained, that's just what they were raised to do and at no level do the teachers attempt to correct this failing. And so discussions don't really go anywhere and the students rarely get the chance to show off the quotes from footnotes in MLA publications that they have so eagerly researched. The education sits there, frowns and looks stoically British, but very little effort is made to bring it out. So instead, the American students, who made up roughly a third of each of my classes, did most of the talking. A British classmate told me that it made him more relaxed to see us talk, but I might just as well be at Georgetown or Davidson this semester. What actually comes out of this system, then? If you trust The Wall, which I would encourage everybody not to, we get a generation soulless rock musicians who shave their nipples, make frustrated phone calls to their adulterous wives, get annoyed with the partying groupies, all the while imagining really wacky animated birds and airplanes. If that's what I take out of this semester at school in London, so be it. After all, if you don't eat your meat, you can't have any pudding. Whatever that means.