Ralph Slayton

Truth, Beauty, and the Good: Our Role in the Quest

Over the years, Howard Gardner has given us who do drama with children and make theatre for them some intriguing ideas to think about, from his work as director of Project Zero,

which has as a central tenet exploring how to teach for understanding, through his theory that we possess at least seven or at eight biopsychological potentialities for knowing, each of us in varying degrees, each of which will be developed to a greater or lesser degree depending upon the person´s experiences, none of them in itself an aesthetic faculty but all of which might be „mobilized artistically,“ to his advocacy of an education that has as its most important mission to develop disciplinary understanding--the capacity to use current knowledge, concepts, and skills to respond to new or unanticipated issues or problems, to his suggestion, in The Disciplined Mind, published in 1999, that schools derive their entire curriculum from a pursuit of notions of Truth, Beauty, and the Good, with suggested possible entry points in Darwin´s Theory of Evolution, Mozartœ The Marriage of Figaro, and the Holocaust.

I ask myself what it might it mean for us who do drama with children and make theater for them if schools were to adopt such a proposal.  My first response must be that I think we have always been concerned with helping the child through theater and drama to come to his or her own idea of what a good life might be and to decide for himself and herself what truth and beauty might be, and so there would be no reason to make any essential change. Certainly a narrow focus on any of these concepts as the object of drama or theatre could be stultifying.   But Gardner´s proposal, if adopted, might encourage us to make more of doing philosophy with children, especially in helping them to discover for themselves what each of them might want these three words to mean, and that we might have greater confidence in them than we perhaps now have to ask and answer philosophical questions that arise in drama and theatre.  But more important and valuable would be that we would all now be working within a framework for education the ultimate goals of which are always present as objectives of aesthetic education and as aspects of art and are perhaps to be admired more than some others in current educational debate, such as „keeping the nation competitive.“

Of course, Truth, Beauty, and the Good are philosophically problematic, and the teacher who would explore with the children what each might mean would be helped by an awareness of the various ways that that is so.  It would be helpful to her or him to know that there is a theory which claims that something is true if it correponds to the facts, except that we might disagree on the truth of the so-called „fact;“ and a theory which claims that this or that is true if we can find enough people who agree with us, except that our fellow-believers might be just as wrong as we are; and a theory which encourages us to call something true if we find it useful, but that usefulness can often obscure our vision.  The children should probably be reminded, too, that an honest pursuit of truth can often lead to results that are harmful to ourselves.  Perhaps the teacher will want to suggest to the children an idea that has been with us since the Sophists—that it makes little difference if a belief is true or false so long as it contributes to our happiness and well-being.  Maybe the teacher will want to suggest to the children this from Wallace Stevens:  „The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else.  The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and you believe in it willingly.“ Many would claim that Beauty is simply undefinable.  Some say that since it´s so problematic we´d probably be better off not using the term at all.  But perhaps it´s the best way to speak about aesthetic value, while at the same time acknowledging that aesthetic value also has to do with the integrity of the work and whether the work presents a view of the world that we can regard as „honest or enlightening.“  Others claim that it is a power that we recognize as being aesthetic and that whatever we take beauty to be is no more than a function of that power. The Good is problematic in that we must determine what the word „good“ means as well as what things are good and how we know them to be good.  The best we can do as well as the only right thing we can do, it seems to me, is to help each child to work toward her and his own notion of these concepts—a concept that each child can feel satisfied with--a concept that will need rethinking again and again, with our help and the help of their peers, beginning with the youngest children in our educational care, and neverendingly.

When engaging notions of the Good with children, the teacher will undoubtedly have in mind some stage theory of moral development, probably Kohlberg´s.  I think it will be helpful to that teacher to have in mind, too, this that Gareth Matthews says in his Philosophy of Childhood, which Harvard published in 1995:  „Theories of cognitive and moral development often encourage us to distance ourselves from children—both from the children around us and from our own childhood selves.  Such distancing sometimes produces a new respect for children.  After all, it warns us against faulting children for shortcomings that express, according to the theories, immature cognitive and moral structures that are entirely normal for children of the given age range.

„Yet such distancing can also encourage condescension.  If we suppose that children live in conceptual worlds that are structurally different from ours, but that will naturally evolve into ours, how can we fail to be condescending  toward children as moral agents?“ (Matthews, p.66)  That condescension, Matthews tells us,  „though understandable, is unwarranted,“ for „later structures are not entirely unquestionable accomplishments,“ and because children, „in their simple directness, often bring us adults back to basics.  Any developmental theory that rules out, on purely theoretical grounds, even the possibility that we adults may occasionally have something to learn, morally, from a child is, for that reason, defective; it is also morally offensive.“ (Matthews, p.67)

We are encouraged in believing in the child´s ability to do philosophy by Matthews in his Philosophy and the Young Child and Dialogues with Children, as well as in The Philosophy of Childhood, in which he tells us that „not only do they do philosophy naturally, they do it with a freshness of perspective and a sensitivity to puzzlement and conceptual mismatch that are hard for adults to achieve.  The adult must cultivate the naivete that is required for doing philosophy well; to the child such naivete is entirely natural.“ (Matthews, p. 122)  If we believe that the child doing philosophy can achieve some of the same goals that we set for aesthetic education, then we must welcome, I would think, an infusion of philosophy into the curriculum through drama and theatre.  What Matthews has to say about philosophy in the schools leads me to think we almost have an obligation to do whatever we can to rescue the philosophical capacities of children from ossification in the schools:  „My informal reasearch suggest that…spontaneous excursions into philosophy are not at all unusual for children between the ages of three and seven; in somewhat older children, though, even eight- and nine-year-olds, they become rare, or at least rarely reported.  My hypothesis is that, once children become well settled into school, they learn that only questions that are ´useful´ are expected of them.  Philosophy then either goes underground, to be pursued privately, perhaps, and not shared with others, or else becomes totally dormant.“ (Matthews, p.5)

I would like to suggest  possibilities there might have been in two examples from my own praxis to encourage children to think about what they want these words to mean.  They are a production in theatre for children of Medea´s Children, a play developed by Suzanne Osten and her coworkers at Stockholm´s Unga Klara, which play I directed in a theatre in New York State, and the other a process drama that I did in the Czech Republic and which, coincidentally, had to do with the Holocaust.

Jason and Medea are on the verge of divorce.  Father attempts to console and reassure little Jason and Medea with the familiar manipulative lies that perhaps many divorcing parents tell their children—that henceforth they´ll have two families instead of only one, that he will come to see them on weekends and take them sailing on the Argo, and „so you see, children, that things really aren´t so bad after all!“  But they are, and they´re far, far worse for some children than many parents are able to understand and accept.  The children, left alone,  ponder five possible responses.  One of the options they consider for themselves is suicide.  (And if you think that this play was presented to audiences aged 7-9, you will understand that it caused controversy wherever it was played.)  But the play ends with a choice that had not presented itself to the children—a choice that is spontaneous and which declares the right of the child to control her own life and to take the necessary action to make what she considers to be the best possible solution to the problem:  when father comes to say goodbye and begins again to try to reassure the children, little Medea orders him out of the house.  „If you´re going, just go!“ she demands.  The play ends.  There is nothing more to be said or, if there is, it is better said in a discussion with children, teachers, and theatreworkers together.

 I think that a work like this can serve well to remind us that there is nothing in the child´s experience or in her imaginings that is not appropriate material for the theater we make for them, that we might have an obligation to always take the side of the child vis-a-vis the more powerful and sometimes manipulative world of adults, and that we should hopefully be willing and ready to risk controversy when we know we are doing our best to be honest with our audiences. And all of these considerations might serve as starting points in the philosophical quest in regard to all the theatre that we make for them.

Taking this play as material for philophical investigation, I might be inclined to explore Truth in the relation between the children and their father, Beauty in the timelessness of the theme suggested by locating a contemporary drama in the here and now and simultaneously in ancient Greece, and the Good in the play´s affirmation of a right of the child so often denied.  But there are countless entry points, and the children are apt to see those ways in better than I or you, as we all know.

In my work in a process drama to do with the Holocaust, twenty-five children, aged 11-18, worked together for several months exploring the Holocaust in Czech and English in a gymnazium in the Czech Republic.  I chose the Holocaust as a subject for drama because I had read that it was little taught in Czech schools and because I wondered if Czech people had ever come to terms with their own part in it, because I think that to do so might help them to overcome something of the racism that is so prominent in that society today.  We focused on Terezin (Theressienstadt), because it is closest to the Czech experience.  The questions I began with were what happened and why, as they concerned the victims, the victimizers, and the bystanders.  The process drama that we did made use of features which we might more readily find in child drama, such as objects, bits of costume, natural dance, statues, mobiles, drawing, painting, and creative writing, the kind of stmuli that can still be helpful within process drama, so long as the children can appreciate the ways in whcih they might encourage pretending as opposed to the belief we strive for elsewhere in the drama, or with those stimili serving as pre-pretexts to be further developed.  An example was the dance that they created in response to a bit of music from the Terezin opera Brundibar, which led us into work on the historical fact that almost every day another child member of the cast was transported to nearby Auschwitz and had to be replaced.  Pretexts were found in the historical record, in the well-known paintings and drawings and poems created by the children of Terezin, from the related issue of the murder by the Nazis at the same time of perhaps half a million Romany people, from our imaginings of the relation of the Holcaust to non-Jewish Czechs, and from our awareness of the Jewish communities in the Czech Republic today. Our research even included a visit to Terezin, a tour of the ghetto and the museum and a night spent at The Little Fortress, sleeping in the beds the SS guards had slept in. The major part of the work, though, involved research, improvisations and transformations on those improvisations, reflection, and planning.  In regard to transformation in drama, I want to suggest an analogy in the intertextuality that we almost inevitably create in drama and the literary theory set forth by Harold Bloom in his Anxiety of Influence, in which he told us back in 1973, that “the meaning of a poem can only be a poem, but another poem—a  poem not itself.“  Whether or not transformations of aspects of the narrative being created in the drama are located in the child´s reality, I think it´s important to have in mind always that there is in them the potential for helping the child in the construction of his and her own personal narrative. If we believe with the cultural psychologists that narrative is central to personhood—that narrative is, in Jerome Bruner´s words, „the mode of thinking and feeling that helps children (indeed, people generally) create a version of the world in which, psychologically, they can envision a place for themselves—a personal world“—then that, it seems to me must be one of the greatest values of drama. In The Culture of Education, Bruner reminds us that Kierkegaard said of narrative that „telling stories is no mere enrichment of the mind: without them we are, to use his phrase, reduced to ´fear and trembling´.“ (Bruner, p.90)

If I were to go back to this drama of the Holocaust, having more in mind helping the children and myself to think about what we might mean when we say Truth, Beauty, and the Good, I think I might challenge them to an existentialist view presented in the trial in Jerusalem of Adolf Eichmann, when that court, in sentencing Eichmann said, effectively, that „you, Adolf Eichmann, chose not to live in the world with 6,000,000 Jews, and we choose not to live in the world with you, pointing out to the children that no appeal was made to any higher moral authority, about which it is invariably problematic to make truth claims.  Choosing, I would suggest to them, carries a personal responsibility with it, and sometimes a dreadful one. With respect to Beauty, I think I might ask the children  to think about their own artwork and literary work set alongside that produced by those children who later perished at Auschwitz or elsewhere, and look for what might connect them one with another. As for the Good, I think I might be inclined to ask them about that famous poem by Pavel Friedmann, in which he speaks of the last butterfly that he ever saw and how the mere sight of a butterfly—for the last time—might help us to begin to think about what constitutes a good life--a life well-lived.

 Gardner, whose work is rooted in the progressive tradition of John Dewey, believes that a strong currculum is one that is built from the first around challenging central questions or generative issues. So do we who do drama with children and make theater for them.  But we need to go beyond this, I think, and keep in mind his reminding us of the importance of teaching for "disciplinary understanding.“ The most valuable thing that happened in the course of this drama was that the students became a little more skillful at using the tools of at least one discipline, in this case history—not so much the learning of historical facts, though that also happened, not so much learning history as doing what historians do--of learning to pose the kinds of questions they pose and of working toward answering them from multiple perspectives, and in my checking on their understanding by frequently asking them to speak of it and helping them to discover what it really was they wanted to say..   In an essay written with Veronica Dyson, of Cal Berkeley, and published in the TC Record, Gardner writes that „unless the teacher has the opportunity to look carefully at student work, to probe for both understandings and nonunderstandings, it is just not possible to ascertain how succesful one´s teaching has actually been.“ (Gardner and Dyson, p. 7)  If we can believe that it is disciplinary thinking that is the most important thing we can help a child to in drama and theatre, then this is something we need to keep in mind every time we sit the children down to talk about the work from the outside.

 If I had it to do over and it were in a school that had taken up this quest, I think I´d feel comfortable knowing that everything that was done in that school was done within a framework that I, for one, could believe in, which is something we all need, whether this or something else. Charles Taylor, in his much-cited Sources of the Self: the Making of the Modern Identity tells us that frameworks are inescapable.  „Not to have a framework is to fall into a life which is spiritually senseless.  The quest is thus always a quest for sense.

„But the invocation of meaning also comes from our awareness of how much the search involves articulation.  We find the sense of life through articulating it.  And moderns have become increasingly aware of how much sense being there for us depends on our own powers of expression.  Discovering here depends on, is interwoven with, inventing.  Finding a sense to life depends on framing meaningful expressions which are adequate.“ (Taylor, p. 18)  This, to me, almost sounds like a set of guidelines for drama and theatre in education. The quest for sense and the articulation of the search for sense, the framing of expressions of our making of meaning that are coherent, adequate, and liveable are what the arts and aesthetic education do and have always done.  Howard Gardner has given us a suggestion of what the framework could be, and it is a suggestion which, it seems to me, lends itself well to our project in drama and theatre, in aesthetic education generally, and to what we believe to be best for children.

References

Bruner, Jerome.  The Culture of Education.  Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard Univrrsity Press, 1996.

Gardner, Howard and Dyson, Veronica.  „Teaching for Understanding in the Disciplines—and Beyond.“  Teachers College Record XCVI, 2, 1994.

Matthews, Gareth.  The Philosophy of Childhood.  Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1994.

Taylor, Charles.  Sources of the Self: the Making of the Modern Identity.  Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1989.

© Ralph Slayton, 2002