Humanities' Scales

At dinner the other night, a colleague across the table asked, “Did they cut the writing program because it’s a subject that you have to teach in small classes? No more than fifteen kids at a time.”

From the administrative perspective, an institution wants to teach as many students as possible in a single class. Small colleges emphasize that they have a high professor to student ration. Big universities prefer to change the subject by celebrating large-scale activities that encourage the students to participate as a mass.  The pedagogical function of football games is to teach the crowd how to enjoy an event with 90,000 other people participating.  All the auditorium filling rallies and charities that a big university sponsors reinforce the idea that individual students can have meaningful moral experiences as a crowd. 

The question remains how to balance complexity with scale.  Can you have a subtle, nuanced intellectual encounter with a performer or speaker who is addressing a vast audience?  Sure there is the thrill of being swept up in a vast movement—and no we are not just talking about Fascism—fashion, football, Facebook all reverberate with the excitement of participating in an activity that everyone else is doing, too.

Can students learn to think critically and independently if their schools address them as a crowd? Sure there will always be a certain backlash and alienation produced by stadium events, but the point of a large gathering is not to create a new punk scene.  Can the 95% in the auditorium also leave the building having learned a subtle new insight about themselves and their favorite subject?

How do you show the Mona Lisa to ten thousand people a day in a manner that allows them to respond to the painting’s details and not the fact that they are being herded around an ensemble of pigments covered in plexiglass?

In order to teach large numbers, it might help to scale down the size of the syllabus. We cannot assign a 150-pages of reading per week to 50 students and expect the majority of them to be inspired.  Only fear will make them digest that much information --and then fairly quickly, the fear wears off.

To teach complex questions to a large class, we might have to slow down and concentrate on a single object.  Walk our way through one maybe two Wordsworth poems.  Even a single book of the Prelude is too much.  So many American humanities classes attempt to match the scale of the classroom size with the breadth of historical coverage.  A big audience requires a sweeping lecture—if we want students to come away with a vague sense of the historical sublime, sure.  But in order to make a theoretical insight that will last, we might return to the old German approach of discussing a few, meaningful pages. That philosophy seminar in Göttingen in which the professor never advanced  beyond the first 90 pages of Hegel's Logik taught me more about Idealism than most everything else.

If we are going to teach computational topography of 100,000 novels, then we also might shift the scale to concentrate on a few intense pages.