BEYOND ACTIVISTS AND RESISTERS: STUDENTS AS FUTURE INTELLECTUALS- A RESPONSE TO HOLTZ AND WRIGHT MARTHA E. GIMENEZ University of Colorado, Boulder Originally published in _Teaching Sociology_, 1989, Vol. 17 (April: 197-199) Reprinted with permission. I appreciate Professors Holtz and Wright's willingness to respond to my essay. I found their responses a little disappointing, however, because they did not really address the main issues raised in "Silence in the Classroom." The "silent classroom," I argued, reflects 1) institutional and social structural constraints which produce students who lack, on the average, the opportunity, motivation, and basic intellectual skills necessary to engage in university-level learning; and 2) my reliance on a teaching method centered (but not based exclusively) on lectures which assumed that upper-division students had cognitive skills above the level of comprehension and recall. I acknowledged the limitations of my approach to teaching and the need to explore new teaching techniques. I argued, however, that techniques were not sufficient to overcome the problems underlying the "silent classroom." The proliferation of games and "nontraditional" teaching techniques may objectively reflect teachers' adaptation to structural conditions which, for all practical purposes, are turning colleges into high schools and postponing the start of university education to the graduate level. Professors Holtz and Wright omitted any consideration of the assumptions underlying my approach to teaching and teaching practice, and dismissed the question of the nature of university-level teaching and learning. Instead both professors reduced what I do in the classroom to lecturing and proceeded to attack lectures (and lecturers), positing alternative teaching techniques as more conducive to successful teaching. What follows is an examination of their assumptions, with the goal of clarifying the differences between their standpoint and mine. STUDENTS AS ACTIVISTS Holtz's ideas for successful teaching combine classroom techniques with students' involve- ment in "changing the world" through "action projects" intended to turn students into "active participants in social change" (e.g., creating a coffeehouse and organizing groups that deal with students' current political concerns). Given the voluntaristic and individualistic approach to social change implicit in his advice (I should start a movement to change the entire educational system) and in his admonition ("We are here to change the world, not to study it" -a paraphrase of Marx's eleventh thesis on Feuerbach), his students probably did think that they were engaged in actual social change. Such projects cannot be interpreted as sources of social change without weakening the meaning of the concept. They do, however, create preconditions for learning, and the substance of what is learned depends on the theoretical perspectives used to evaluate them. Activism does not inherently produce gains in critical thinking skills, moving beyond issues (e.g., racism) to theoretical analysis (e.g., ability to understand political and social theories, to identify assumptions and arguments, to make inferences, and to arrive at well-supported conclusions). The acquisition of those skills is not always easy or pleasant; it cannot take place primarily on the basis of praxis but requires long hours of hard work. As a guide to teaching, Holtz's version of Marx's thesis reduces the critical perspective to praxis devoid of theory. Marx, who wrote, "The philosophers have only interpreted the world differently, the point is, to change it" (Marx and Engels 1947, p. 189), came to that conclusion through the theoretical analysis of political practice and spent most of his life doing intellectual work, developing the theories necessary to understand the dynamics of social change. He also wrote something less often cited but worth keeping in mind in these days of instant "social change," instant "community," "personal politics," and learning by doing: "There is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance to gain its luminous summits" (Marx 1972, p. 21). University-level learning does include a fair amount of "fatiguing climbs"; it may or may not be a matter of concern that many students do not seem ready for the undertaking, depending on one's view of university-level education. Holtz considers the goal of a university education more important. In my view, whatever the goal, the question of what university education is or should be cannot be set aside lightly. Concern with what one perceives as a gap between university-level expectations and students' skills is not equivalent to interest in the production of bureaucrats; both bureaucrats and creative individuals deserve a good education. STUDENTS AS RESISTERS Wright believes that successful teaching depends on using teaching techniques to change social relations in the classroom. Professors who lecture victimize students and are responsible for student apathy; they can choose to give up their power and to use techniques designed to transform students into "resisters," able to participate in dialogues in which social science discourse and students'views have an "interdependent and equal" epistemological status. These models of professor-student interaction rest on a theoretical analysis that combines voluntaristic and deterministic sociological perspectives in a mechanical fashion. This analysis leads to "voluntaristic idealism" in the understanding of social structure (i.e., professors can change at will the structure of the classroom) and to "mechanistic determinism" in the understanding of people (i.e., classroom structure determines the behavior and consciousness of the "bearers" of classroom relations so that, depending on the structure, students will be victims or resisters, while professors are always agents). (See Bhaskar 1979, pp. 111-121, for further elaboration of these theoretical issues.) People do not create structure; they can only transform it within the conditions they encounter (see Marx 1969, p. 15). From this standpoint, teaching techniques can change only the surface of classroom relations, while leaving the underlying structure and distribution of power unchanged. A professor's decision to offer students the opportunity to become "resisters" is itself an act of power; most students can see through it. It is debatable whether students prefer professors who do not apologize for the power they possess objectively (so they know exactly where they stand) to working in a pseudo-gemeinschaft that can be seen as demeaning, manipulative, or a source of unnecessary uncertainty. Besides, as I know through my own experience, professors cannot change classroom interaction unilaterally; I do not engage in "monologues" in my classes and I have tried, without appreciable success, most of the strategies that Wright suggests to involve students in a dialogue. It must be acknowledged that students must do their share to take advantage of professors' eagerness to engage in dialogue. That step requires trust, motivation, skills, and willingness to do the work and to use their minds in class. Structures reproduce the "silent classroom" by (among other ways) encouraging students to behave as "free riders," on the assumption that they need not exert themselves much to get out of the class whatever they want. Dialectically, teachers and students are responsible for what goes on in the classroom; the lecturer as "murderer" and the student as "victim" or "resister" are stereotypes that obscure the complexity of classroom interaction and inhibit a thorough analysis of the preconditions for good teaching. STUDENTS AS FUTURE INTELLECTUALS My approach to teaching rests on different assumptions. I envision students as future intellectuals; ideally, they should have acquired in high school the knowledge and the skills required to be treated as such once they enter the university. At this time, when theory is suspect, "practice" is glorified, and education is reduced to a job credential, it is revolutionary to insist that undergraduate teaching should aim to develop in students the capacity to become intellectuals. This goal is tantamount not to producing a mandarin class, but to the mass education of citizens who can think critically and intelligently. Critics of this viewpoint should remember Gramsci's critique of vocational schools and the subordination of education to economic concerns: "Democracy, by definition, cannot mean merely that an unskilled worker can become skilled. It must mean that every 'citizen' can 'govern' and that society places him, if only abstractly, in a general condition to achieve this" (Gramsci 1978, p. 56). Writing about my experience has led me to reconsider the adequacy of my expectations; given the level of knowledge and skills of most undergraduate students, they are unrealistic. It is not necessary to share Holtz's and Wright's models of classroom interaction to realize the potential usefulness of the strate gies they propose as remedies for the "silent classroom." Techniques, however, are inherently contradictory; subjectively they represent teachers' efforts to enhance learning; objectively, on the other hand, they reflect teachers' adaptation to students' structurally produced needs, level of skills and knowledge, and behavior. If one believes, as I do, that university-level teaching and learning presuppose "inner-directed" students with considerable writing and reasoning skills, so that they do not have to be enticed to learn through unusual techniques usually associated with less mature students, the need to resort to such techniques signals the existence of serious problems in the educational system. REFERENCES Bhaskar, Roy. 1979. "On the Possibility of Social Scientific Knowledge and the Limits of Naturalism." Pp. 107-139 in Issues in Marxist Philosophy, Vol. 3, edited by John Mepham and David-Hillel Ruben. Brighton, UK: Harvester Press. Gramsci, Antonio. 1978. "In Search of the Educational Principle." Pp. 51-59 in Studies in Socialist Peda- gogy, edited by T. Mills Norton and B. Ollman. New York: Monthly Review Press. Marx, Karl. [1852] 1969. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. New York: International Publishers. ----. [18671 1972. Capital. New York: International Publishers. ----, and Frederick Engels. [19321 1947. The German Ideology. New York: International Publishers.