The Most Dangerous Table

Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel. – Socrates

Education, like religion, has always been tied to money. We learn without it and we have faith without it. But education and religion need money. The universal trick of the institutions of education and religion has been to cache the money behind noble words of sacrifice and community, then to turn the money into grand buildings and vestments of hierarchy. Teachers and preachers need to eat and pay mortgages like anyone else, so we need not abandon our ideals and tear down 4500 years of pay-to-be-educated. But we can not forget the connection.

One of the great strengths of American educational history – and also perhaps its greatest weakness – is that the earliest Anglo-Americans sought to break away from the educational-theological aristocracy that were Oxford and Cambridge Universities and the established Anglican church. So when Harvard, then Yale, were founded in the late seventeenth century, they were founded by a coterie of wealthy colonists who did not feel the need to launder their money through established religious institutions, nor did they have governments of any notable strength to maintain their fledgeling institutions. Instead, almost any young man with the attributes could matriculate and, with sufficient leisure and money for fees, earn a degree.

The non-Native American aspects of our culture were built, by definition, by those who were not connected, settled, established, in their homelands. They left with no, little, or lots of money but without the bonds of class or lineage that would have given them plenty of reason to stay where they were. They came to the United States to improve their opportunities and to get wealthy, not to bask in their successes in their Old World. They arrived with a healthy skepticism – if they thought of the institutions at all – towards the Oxford and Paris and Heidelberg Universities that perpetuated a hierarchy that had ruled over them. As many of them made their fortunes in the New World, they founded or endowed the schools that helped them out of youth and into adulthood. Not unlike the Earl of Pembroke at Oxford or Robert of Sorbon in Paris, they wanted their names attached to their institutions. More often than not, they had visions of helping a wide array of young white men move into positions of leadership in commerce, industry, or government.

But this nexus of wealth and power and education has existed since Plato had enough wealth from his estate, named Akademia, that he had the leisure to invite others of wealth and leisure to reflect upon the thoughts of the recently self-hemlocked Socrates.

Education is stunningly expensive and strikingly inefficient. Think of the books and the buildings and the tools that make up a school. Then consider the people needed to teach the books and take care of the buildings and maintain the tools, and perhaps teach those too. And while they are doing all that, a multitude more young people are doing nothing productive except reading and reconsidering and absorbing and rebelling and dozing and snapchating – nothing that, in the short term, will relieve suffering or extend knowledge. Which gets us back yet again to the wealth: only a society of affluence and stability can afford to tell most of its youth to relax, kick around some ideas with adults who are kicking around ideas, and then come be productive in another five to fifteen years. We have plenty of food and heat and shelter for everyone while these kids bandy about some Spanish and some Precalculus and some ancient History. As for the inefficiency, think of the advanced math you took in high school. How much have you used after graduating? Why did we waste all that time and effort on so many students, just so a fraction of a percent of high school graduates work on getting rockets to the moon and surgical nanobots to clogged arteries?

Because we can afford it. And if you need cash on the barrelhead, the thing in the barrel is not a right. Education has always been a privilege, probably a responsibility, but not a right.

Thankfully for the survival of the United States, for every Betsy DeVos, the we have had an Edward Harkness, a philanthropist who wanted to extend the privilege to those with the ambition but perhaps without the wealth to pursue education. His money largely made the modern incarnations of both Harvard and Yale, especially the latter’s student ‘colleges’ that were patterned on the Oxbridge Universities of ye merry olde Englande. He also gave not quite $6 million of 1930 US Dollars to Philips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, on the proviso that his friend and Exeter Principle Lewis Perry devise a way to use the money as a means to make changes “of a fundamental nature that were so sweeping and so different from methods prevailing here that one could see at a glance that were they adopted, the whole educational system in our secondary schools would not only be changed, but changed enormously for the better.” The ‘better’ is now called “The Harkness Method” though, true to the American Spirit, it is named after the money, not the minds, behind the innovation.

The Harkness Method was borne of an effort to realign the dynamics that dominated educational institutions since at least the eleventh-century, when teachers loitering around Paris coined the term ‘lectio’, meaning “reading.” Books, hand written on animal skins, were rare and expensive. No stream-of-conscious poems or Dan Brown tripe (more on him later) in a world in which copying a book was a months-long investment after one invested in the animals and expensive inks and years of training. So if a group of young men wanted to learn about the Bible, or – more dangerously – Plato, they went to the one lecturer who had access to the one copy, and he read it. They paid him for his troubles, and stayed as long as they were interested enough to listen, or pay for the privilege.

Abelard & Heloise dispute the impact of his castration.

The earliest known reporter, and challenger, of this world of “sage on the stage” was Peter Abelard, a feisty student from the sticks of Normandy who moved to the royal capital early in the eleventh century to get his learn on. His first lecturer in Paris, William of Champeaux, turns from being an inspirational thinker to a petty old man harassing the cool kids in about two sentences:

[In Paris] did I meet William of Champeaux, my teacher, a man most distinguished in his science both by his renown and by his true merit. With him I remained for some time, at first indeed well liked of him; but later I brought him great grief, because I undertook to refute certain of his opinions, not infrequently attacking him in disputation, and now and then in these debates I was adjudged victor. Now this, to those among my fellow students who were ranked foremost, seemed all the more insufferable because of my youth and the brief duration of my studies.

William will bring real trouble to Peter Abelard later, but what Peter was hinting at here is a shift in the dynamics, and thus the economics, of education. Whereas William expected his lectio to be listened to, Peter wanted disputatio. To dispute, Peter must have had some knowledge to bring to the subject already, and the implication in his next chapter is that the dispute is over the existence of universal concepts. We need not dive into the philosophical weeds at this point, but the founders of the debate over the existence of perfect universal forms of such concepts as ‘love’ or ‘justice’ or ‘house’ were Socrates and Plato, with Plato’s student, Aristotle, debating and trying to debunk his teachers’ arguments for these universals. If Peter could even have had that argument, he must have had access to at least parts of the arguments made by Aristotle, which suggests he has access to some of Aristotle’s writings, which suggests books were becoming more accessible. Simply getting read to did not appeal to the upstart.

Nor did it appeal to Edward Harkness, who was a self-described shy boy of moderate to lesser academic achievements. Much of his philanthropic ethic was based on a strikingly self-aware understanding that he, a younger son of a man of moderate means who struck it rich by making a loan on a whim to an oil-prospecting John Rockefeller, got his money by others’ work and the untimely death of his older brother. He also had no offspring of his own, so he sought to shake up the elite academic world that dad’s money granted him contact with but in which he enjoyed little success.

The teachers of Philips Exeter Academy devised a curriculum based on a community of students and teacher who were to wrestle alone with a reading or a problem or an idea, then bring their efforts together to hash out, sometimes jettison, their efforts around an oval or round table that granted no a priori position of authority. Harkness provided the money so that the lecture halls of some thirty dutiful listeners could be rebuilt into classrooms for some dozen students to gather around a table and exercise their ideas together. The foundation of this self-proclaimed revolution was the none-too-cheap purpose-built Harkness Table at the best endowed high school in the United States. Unsurprisingly, the various furniture makers around southern Vermont fought for the commissions to build the needed peculiarities (now costing between $35 and $50k). Pretty much every classroom at Philips Exeter Academy has had such a table since the early 1930s.

Philips Exeter Academy, like Yale University, enjoys a striking architectural uniformity at its core because much of it was built by real wealth of the 1920s that got to pay sorely depressed prices and wages in the 1930s. Stone and stone cutters, brick and brick layers were cheap in the Depression, so buildings could go up quickly with older money. PEA looks far more Harvard Square than Yale Common, but it went up almost as quickly as the latter and for the same reason: to give students a space to live and study and meet with, rather than get talked at by, teachers. The still newer buildings, mostly across the old boundary streets of Court and Elm Streets, are for the athletics of the twenty-first century, endeavors that PEA only occasionally excels in, though the equipment available to the athletic students – as for the student-athletes – is first rate in every category. The squash courts, hockey rinks, and co-ed locker rooms (admittedly, still under debate and under construction when I visited) were the few spaces that did not have The Table in their midst.

Though it has been in development for two thirds of a century now, the “Harkness Method” is currently one of those buzz phrases that educational administrators seem inexorably drawn to. Like moths to bulbs, academic thinkers can really only flitter excitedly around one idea at a time, which means “grit” and “project-based learning” and “child-centered learning” have to take a back seat for those who are enamored with the table. These concepts are not mutually exclusive, but to consider them as many important cogs in a complex machine trying to prepare our youth for the The Future just seems a bit too taxing, so let’s concentrate on Harkness. If we have to pick one to entice the donors, this one seems like the best bet for The Future.

Students in full flight around a Harkness Table are a joy to behold for anyone who is brave enough to allow a clash of ideas (a dwindling number, alas, as we drift toward the neo-fascism of antagonistic indifference). I visited two upper-level History classes, a Classical Philosophy class for freshmen (called Preps), a Chemistry class, and an English class for Seniors while there. The last was so inspiring I had to keep my hands over my mouth so as not to jump in the discussion – something teachers are encouraged to avoid unless really necessary. I remembered just enough about balancing equations to follow the Chemistry students as they explained their various ways to deal with the problems they had from the previous class. Only the Philosophy class endured some dead zones, but plenty of allowance is given for first-year students getting to grips with the tables they surround.

The overall scheme is to meet with students three to four times a week for an academic hour, at the end of which, the teacher gives a new set of readings or problems or ideas or materials that will be the groundwork for the next class’s discussion/debate. Students are given free time and space to explore the materials before the class next meets, and students are expected to launch the discussion and, as much as possible, keep it going for the rest of the academic hour (which lasts 50 minutes by the way, academia being infamously independent and counterintuitive). The teachers I met with had syllabi for their semesters, but those syllabi are constantly being tweaked and stretched and compacted as they respond to students’ interests and needs. Philips Exeter, unlike most high schools of any ilk, keeps its teachers with their packs for only a trimester, even if the class is required and lasts the full year. Thus a student taking the necessary English 11 her Junior year will have three teachers who have loosely coordinated syllabi, but exact matchups are not expected or encouraged. If a student is taking any elective, it probably only lasts a trimester.

In the English class I praised a moment ago, entitled “Creative Nonfiction,” the students were carefully analyzing Gay Talese’s striking portrait of Frank Sinatra in Esquire, published in 1966. The most obvious reason the portrait is striking is that Frank Sinatra had a cold, and Talese was never allowed to meet him personally, though the author met some of his posse and got to watch him perform from backstage. Talese presents the fading of an American entertainment icon as the counter-culture of drugs, sex, and rock-and-roll pull away from the crooner in his early-50s—having been the most influential entertainer of the previous two decades.

I did dip a toe into the discussion by asking the students to consider the scene in which Talese first saw the reclusive singer: a private club in Beverly Hills, smoke and semidarkness, and a bar around which “couples sat huddled around small tables or twisted in the center of the floor to the clamorous clang of folk-rock music blaring from the stereo.” Every word used to paint that picture is antithetical to what made Sinatra a global superstar, and he is a god fading—cold or no cold. A couple of the students note examples in which Talese moves between the past tense and the present, though any English teacher would frown upon such indecisiveness. This English teacher asked them how the changes of tense encourage us to make comparisons without the author asking us to judge, and again the students are racing along, inspiring each other to run a bit faster. The fifty minutes gallop by before we get to the end of the essay, and two other readings were supposed to be added to the mix. Alas, another day of this and I would perforce return to students who don’t know what Esquire is, perhaps can’t name a singer older than Snoop Dog, and certainly are unsure what the point of verb tenses is.

The Chemistry students were balancing various reactions based on converting between molecules and moles (I needed a definition, and found this one, well, comprehensible: “6.022140857 × 10²³, which is the number of atoms determined experimentally to be found in 12 grams of carbon-12.”). Three groups tackled three problems that the teacher said should have been fairly easy for high-school juniors, save for the fact that he was conflating the units in the problems. Each of the three groups had spent some amount of time outside class figuring out their problem, then they were to demonstrate their efforts to the table. Three problems inspired three means to get to the three answers. Only the second group really fumbled their attempt, but with questions from their peers, they saw the error, backtracked, and recalculated their way to success within their allotted time. Only then did the teacher step in to ask questions about conversions and patterns of solving chemical calculations. The students seemed specifically empowered to take on other such problems (and more were assigned at the end), but their sense of empowerment clearly predates the teacher’s arrival at this particular table three months ago – testament both to the high expectations of the the academy and to the teacher’s ability to slip into the machinery without grinding the gears.

The Philosophy class was tackling a truncated passage from Plato’s ‘allegory of the cave,’ in which a group of imaginary prisoners have been trained to believe that the shadows cast on the wall by fire are the true forms of humans and animals because that is all the information their senses have received. One of those prisoners escapes and struggles to understand the universe outside the cave, where he grows to realize that his senses have misled him. The shadows were just one aspect of reality and the fire too was but a ‘shadow’ of the light of the sun. Then the prisoner uses his reason to envision still more real forms behind the humans and trees and sun that his senses now experience.

Having tried to teach this allegory myself, I can say that the allegory’s story is pretty easy to grasp. But how far one can push the allegory for meaning depends on the students (or, one might say, on the students imprisoned in the room, forced to keep their senses attentive to whatever the teacher is blathering on about, as if that were the be-all of reality). This particular class of Preps did not push the allegory far, though they all were expected to contribute a statement or idea about what they took from the allegory on first reading. An uncharitable grader would point out the unevenness of the students’ first insights, but each student said something different and at least in touching distance of Plato’s passage. Their contributions were noted by the teacher on his diagram, but none were particularly pushed or questioned. Surely these students will contribute far more to each other’s ideas as they mature and experience more of the method and more of the materials and skills required to master it.

For the many praises to be lavished on the method, it is not without its pitfalls.

Few things a teacher finds more unsettling, especially a teacher of the humanities, than having another teacher visit the class. If thinkers have been struggling with Plato’s allegory since, well, Plato, how can an outsider nit-pick at what high schoolers can do with it in fifty minutes? Unlike a chemical equation, the humanities are an open system that opens still more each time a human pops into the world. So my particular beef with the History class for Sophomores and Juniors, “The World Since 1945” can readily, but I’m not sure fairly, be dismissed as the pedantic commentary for which academia is so maligned outside the academies.

Students in this class were working on the Six-Day War between Israel and every one else the Middle East in June 1967. The discussion on the war itself, and the article about it they had read, did not last long when the teacher asked them to draw up a time-line on the honest-to-God slate blackboard (Confession of a history geek: that was my favorite bit of technology of the whole visit.). They started with the war before a couple of smarties pointed out that they should start in 70AD when the Romans sacked Jerusalem and launched the second Jewish diaspora. The students then noted the crusades as a couple of centuries bracketed before noting the First Zionist Congress of 1897 and the wave of Jews who moved into Palestine in the months following World War One. Then the Holocaust/Shoah and the establishment of Israel in 1948. The Six-Day War then got us back to the day’s discussion, when the teacher showed gripping footage of the PLO’s attack on the Israeli Olympic Team at the summer games in Munich in 1972. Nineteen hundred years in fifteen minutes.

And yet the Declaration of Alfred Balfour to the British Jew Lord Rothschild – proclaiming the British government’s support to establish a Jewish nation in the remnants of the Ottoman Empire, if the British Jewish community continued to support the war and would encourage their Jewish counterparts in the empire to rebel – was left un-noted. The Jews of both empires did as they were told, and hundreds of thousands went to Palestine in 1919, a migration the students noted without comment. But the British government then reneged on the effort and the Jews were left to battle, often literally, with the Palestinians who were also told by the same British government that their claims of independence from the Ottoman Empire would be heard. No one could expect a class at any academic level to cover every moment of Jewish history and Semitic conflicts, but not to mention the Balfour Declaration, especially as many this year are warily marking the centenary of the statement, seems dangerously negligent. To be fair, the students might have dealt with it in the next class, or the next trimester, though the closing directions suggested not.

The book whose cover is shown above is a compendium of praises for the method and its student-centered discussions. A fair number of the contributors point out that certain aspects of a topic might be missed around a Harkness table, but such lacunae would be true in a series of lectures as well. Better that the students grapple with the material as they can, than to have the teacher impose the material she knows, with most of it drifting harmlessly from one ear to the next. Fair enough, but what a well-trained and experienced practitioner of a topic leaves out and what a student leaves out should not be considered intellectual equivalents.

The table has no room for the lectoring teacher or the student unwilling to contribute, but the dynamics around the table can be allowed to take precedence over the topic on the table. That the English class did not really get to the other two readings for the day is easily solvable. That the Balfour Declaration did not get even a mention subverts a series of causes and effects that could lead students baffled if they later must explain the controversies of the founding of Israel. Of course, they may never be asked to explain these controversies any more than I have been asked to use my eleventh-grade Precalculus. But I do no harm by not exercising the advanced math. (Indeed, I probably save astronauts, users of bridges, and executives in skyscrapers much harm.) These students are statistically likely to go to an Ivy League school, to be politically engaged, to become leaders in The Future. If they are not making policy, they will be voting on it. And if they are not making it or voting on it, they might be asked to kill or be killed for it. Being at least aware of the Balfour Declaration might be worth having when they get entangled in The Future.

Even in its mostly positive guises, the Harkness Table still misses important pedagogical experiences, the most striking of which is modeling. Arguably, the most important things we learn (like using utensils and toilets) are from modeling. I never met Johann Cruyff or Neil Peart, but much of what I know about soccer and drumming I learned by trying to mimic these models. Students do not often see an impassioned teacher around a Harkness Table because the teacher is not supposed to be too involved in what the students are trying to work through. Such is not at all a comment on the teachers I met or their expertise or their passion, but is clearly a ‘feature’ of the method.

The method proclaims its Socratic roots, and rightly so if the only other pedagogical paradigm to consider is the droning lecture. But, for better and worse, the method might be thought of as Socratic without Socrates. The Table encourages, rather, expects student input and responsibility, which – for me – is reason enough to include it as a tool in the teacher’s box. But if the point of the diagramming of exchanges around the table is to ensure students don’t hide, how easy it could be for the teacher to hide! One could just survive a trimester with just enough knowledge in a topic to avoid catastrophe, with no ability to guide the students toward a definable and applicable truth. Perhaps the students would enjoy the sensation of pushing the teacher, but who would point out that the class is steering toward fascism or a bridge that can’t support trucks? Moreover, students could get through a discussion with a vague or well-endowed notion that they handled the material, without the teacher at least suggesting the myriad debates that are still held over specific points. For many, the ongoing challenge of improvement is part of the inspiration to return to a subject. If students around a table discuss a topic and move on in one day, might they not even realize the opportunity to push the ideas still further, test them still more severely? True, a dullard lecturer will not inspire any of these things either, but surely leaning one’s teaching career on one straw man or another leaves far too much out of the dynamics and possibilities of educational aspirations and methods.

Which easily steers us toward one of Philip Exeter’s most famous recent alums, Dan Brown, who is celebrated in the lobby of the school’s library—a building so stunning I hope to write a separate commentary on it. In an interview in The New York Times this past September to coincide with release of his eighth novel, Origin, Mr. Brown said “I feel like if I’m going to take time reading, I better be learning” and “This is the kind of fiction I would read if I read fiction.” Presumably, he takes time to read because the interviewer notes that Mr. Brown spent four years researching and writing the novel. But the giveaway of all of Brown’s novels is nicely noted in Ms Lyall’s aside: “As do all of Mr. Brown’s works, the new novel does not shy away from the big questions, but rather rushes headlong into them. Here [in Origin] the question is: Can science make religion obsolete?”

Rushing head into big questions is exactly what the Harkness Method encourages, and should be praised for it. But without some care, guidance, and wisdom, four years careening through the method could leave one with, well, another Dan Brown novel in which brave claims are made with just enough information to be considered insightful, until one despairs that a cautious reconsideration or a complex sentence is nowhere to be found. Intellectual calisthenics jump from symbology to Leonardo da Vinci to Mary Magdalen to IM Pei to Dante to apples with nary a moment allowed for characters or readers to ask what ‘causation’ might mean. It’s like, say, flying through 2000 years of Jewish history and not mentioning the Balfour Declaration.

The Harkness Method is complex and dangerous and wonderful, like all the best parts of Life. But it is not the sine qua non of Life, or even of education. Like any tool, left in the hands of naif or a malcontent, damage will be done. In the hands of a practitioner engaged in the craft working with similarly engaged students gathered around it, the tool builds wonders. It will inspire most and leave a few discontent and unsure. But that is what education is, no matter how it is attempted or in what space it is sought. The Harkness Method involves an oak table, not a silver bullet.