We never learn only one thing.
A friend of mine told me once that his sister was known in Japan for her piano playing.
“What about you?” I asked. “Did you take lessons?”
“Oh yes. For years.” he replied.
“He’s very good,” his wife chimed in.
“Wanna play something?” I asked, indicating our nearby piano.
“No.” He looked down and away, scratching the back of his head. “No,” he repeated. “I don’t even like to sit down at the piano. I get anxious.”
So here he’s got this skill, acquired through years of dedicated practice. And it’s useless. He’s not comfortable, can’t play. He wasn’t born feeling anxious about sitting down at the instrument. The piano doesn’t have to be an instrument of torture. But it can be. Like anything else, what a piano becomes in a person’s experience is largely dependent on local culture. Sometimes the culture is as local as a single teacher, but that’ll do it, if the teacher looms large in a given child’s experience.
Again: We never learn only one thing.
In this example, my friend didn’t just learn how to play the piano, he also learned to be anxious about it. At considerable expense, most likely. And associated with that may have been feelings of guilt or shame, maybe fear of disappointing his teacher or parents, or of not measuring up to other students’ skills. Pretty soon this can show up as a physical reaction to the instrument itself.
Perhaps without knowing it, my friend’s parents had transposed the ‘i’ and the ‘a’ in ‘piano’ and paid for “paino lessons”.
He was a good student. I could still see the pain.
So, whenever we learn something, we also learn the emotional context of the thing. Further, we tend to absorb the social consensus about the nature and purpose of what we’re learning, what it means, and what its value is. And when we add all this together, it means we are learning, on a very basic level, what things are. The piano I saw against the wall in my home was in some very important ways not the same thing that my friend saw.
Personally, I spend most of my time in a different area of the arts. I have been involved with helping others learn to read and write better for a long time, working with people ages 12 and up. Anxiety about writing often follows a pattern similar to my friend and his piano lessons.
Here’s something to imagine: Suppose your third-grade child did a drawing in school and it came back from the teacher all marked up and drawn-over and smothered with corrections in red ink. How would you respond to that? Most of us would probably be appalled.
Yet for generations it was considered acceptable to do that to children’s written creations. Why? The good news is, I know that this is changing in many classrooms now, but it also persists.
I was fortunate that by the time I started teaching, the K-12 reading and writing curriculum had been through a revisioning process and come out with a new title: “Language Arts.” My sense from what I was finding in the professional literature at the time was that the rebranding of “English” as “Language Arts” was at least in part a reminder that we needed to approach this thing a little differently than previous generations of teachers. For example, it was broadly understood in the late 1980s and early 1990s that it was imperative to help students connect with their own innate need to communicate, the same motivator at work when very young children are first learning to talk. Also like toddlers learning to speak, learning to read and write is helped along by a supportive social context for skill acquisition. Part of that means, yes, building a positive teacher-student relationship. But ideally it also means fostering a classroom culture where children feel safe to express, safe to make mistakes, safe to ask for help, safe to take risks. The term “classroom culture” started to gain traction. It’s an incredibly useful concept. Of course, somewhere along the way, the wag-the-dog standardized test people were subsidized to mess everything up again, apparently on purpose.
Now, is it possible to build such a high level of trust and rapport with your students that they don’t mind you writing all over their work, or might even thank you for it? Could a classroom culture recontextualize that so it’s not destructive? Yes, absolutely. At some point it sort of has to happen, and if the classroom culture supports that with the right context in terms of relationships and feeling tone, fine. That said, my observation is that in the absence of that kind of mutual respect and trust, scribbling in red across a student’s work generally does more harm than good. I mean, consider what happens to any student who does the same to the teacher’s work. And yes, it really is as simple as that.
When I was teaching in secondary school settings I discovered that for most of my high-school age students their relationship with writing and written language had already been damaged by their experiences in school.
“I suck at writing,” somebody would almost always tell me.
Finally I started asking, “Where did you learn that?”
The first few times I thought to ask that question, I was surprised by how often a student could answer it, quite precisely. They knew what happened. They could describe incidents. They could name names.
So first, in my own teaching, to the extent possible, I sought to do no further harm. And then I did what I could to generate a culture that would provide an appropriate context for the learning to take place. I spent the majority of my full-time teaching career working with incarcerated, adjudicated, at-risk and disaffected youth. So, I mean, seriously, enough already. Enough paino lessons.
But this essay isn’t really about learning piano or writing. These are just examples. Main point is, we learn everything in a context, and that context has enormous influence on learning outcomes because, again: we never learn only one thing, so we’re not fully aware of what we’re learning as it happens.
Yesterday was Valentine’s Day. We learn about love in specific contexts – family, friends, lovers, broader social influences like movies – and these likewise shape our ideas of what love is, what it means, and even, like the piano my friend wouldn’t sit at, whether it seems possible or is even worth doing.
Similarly, we learn about the nature of being in a physical body in a context, and about what’s a meaningful way to spend our time. We observe others, we unconsciously model ourselves after them in many ways. And then we tend to take our often unconsciously adopted patterns for granted. So if everyone else treats and talks about their body as a thing, as an accident-prone “it,” as a machine that constantly needs fixing, and treats us the same, well, that shapes our experience. Likewise, it might start to seem that looking at a phone or a TV screen is a meaningful activity. We grow up with it. it’s what we see. We tacitly accept these things as being worthwhile.
In the field of education, there’s a concept called “the hidden curriculum”. It’s how we learned things like, teachers get red pens, their words count more, their writing is permitted to scrawl across lines while students’ words have to stay within those lines, and, perhaps most dangerously: writing is a thing that people do mainly as a requirement of an authority figure in a school setting. Yep, we learn all that.
But the “hidden curriculum principle” really applies everywhere, including the broader cultural classroom. And since we are often absorbing things in a less-than-fully-conscious way, this hidden cultural curriculum results in a host of shared but often unexamined assumptions. That’s part of the reason why culture itself sometimes resembles an hypnotic trance state: since so much of our learning is unconscious, when we act upon our unconscious conditioning and assumptions, those actions are also at least partly unconscious, too.
So, dancing in the grocery store produce aisle is likely to be frowned upon. There aren’t any signs posted saying: “no dancing in the produce aisle,” but somewhere along the line, most of us learned not to do that. This, despite the sometimes compelling song emanating from the grapefruits and the colorful poetry of juxtaposed beets and artichokes that might sometimes motivate a healthy 2-year-old to do so. They are new to this culture. But please don’t tell me they are wrong to dance in response to the beauty they see in their world or feel in themselves.
“But-but-but,” says the slighted dazed, cart-pushing shopper in all off us. “I’m not in a trance state!”
Right. We’re just doing things we don’t fully realize we’re doing in a world we typically don’t think much about and don’t question because everybody else does pretty much the same.
This is why I suggest that it is impossible to wake up while operating entirely within the context and lessons of our local culture or personal histories. Even waking up, the very possibility, if it becomes a thing associated in a given culture with status, with our sense of belonging or group affiliation, and then gets tagged with linguistic tropes and slogans, and then run through the tired old treadmill of social censure, social praise and social division …ugh… that will not most likely result not in awakening but instead in a deepening of the social trance. My observation is that almost invariably, as grownups, any big awakening, when it happens, happens because we are unlearning lessons we have already learned. I know I’m not alone in making the observation, because it’s part of every spiritual path I’ve ever heard of. Still, I think it bears repeating.
Not that this kind of unlearning is easy, though. Far from it. Usually it’s some of the hardest work we can do. But the beautiful thing is, it’s quite possible to do that kind of unlearning — including all the dysfunctional stuff we pick up from our local cultures and even our personal “paino lessons” — and still remember how to play. 🎵🎶
And after such unlearning, we might even remember how to speak. Or write. And at that point, who knows what we’ll say?