Stealing Fire

HONORING THE GODS, STEALING THEIR FIRE: IMAGINING A WAY BETWEEN BANKING AND PROBLEM-SOLVING EDUCATION

1992

In his essay, “The ‘Banking’ Concept of Education,” Paolo Freire describes two methods of teaching that to him have conflicting goals. The “banking” style attempts to groom students for strict roles in society by instructing them in the mores and history of their culture. By nature authoritarian, this method expects students to passively and obediently store the facts they are presented. Richard Rodriguez’s essay “The Achievement of Desire” is an obvious inheritor of the banking style. Freire proposes an antithesis to this banking style in what he calls the “problem-solving” style. This method invests students with the creative power to challenge any authority which has no greater end than its own propitiation.

As opposed as these teaching styles appear, we will find they are much in need of each other in the actual process of learning. In fact, the dynamic tension that exists between them is the very ground of learning. Both ways are proper only when used conjunctively.

Having established what I believe to be the essential dialectic of Freire’s argument, I’ll not quote from his essay. Mine is a broader exegesis that will pull sources from myth, history and literature — the stuff of culture — to help illustrate how the two styles came about and what their common ground might be.

ETIOLOGY, ETYMOLOGY

The banking style has always been associated with a ruling center, and acts to preserve the stability of the culture. In primitive societies, the primary social unit was the tribe. All had a place and function in it. Individual consciousness was limited and easily submerged into the participation mystique of the group.

Formal entry into the tribe was ritually enacted at the outset of puberty by a physical separation of the sexes. Girls went into “menstrual huts” with the women. The transition for them was natural, their womanhood a biological continuity. For the males however, a more brutal procedure was needed; the maternal umbilicus roots deeply into the male psyche, and uprooting it was critical for their transformation into hunters and fighters. Accordingly, boys were taken to a remote location by the older males where they were forced to submit to an initiatory rite that included mutilation (such as circumcision), instruction in tribal lore and formal a invocation of manhood where they swore to maintain the sanctity of the puberty rite and protect the tribe. They returned to the village as adults. The group was served by these rites by channeling the waking sexuality and aggression of the males into positive roles of father and warrior. Society could continue as it had for hundreds, even thousands of generations.

Change came slowly because the civilizing impetus lay not in the collective but the individual. Here we find the origins of the problem-solving approach. In hunting societies the shaman was the real source of tribal power; he or she could heal sickness, draw animals to the hunt, and confer the skills of the warrior. But they paid dearly for their powers. The ordeal of their initiation, a form of psychosis brought on by extreme physical deprivation, was nearly fatal. They obeyed their own inner law, mocked the society of the sane, and generally chose to live alone in the wilderness. But their healing and magical powers made them indispensable. It was the shaman who brought fire back from the gods, who wrestled the spirits of fever, who knew the origin of the sacred pipe which brought accord into the world.

In Primitive Mythology, Joseph Campbell compares the dynamic and necessary tension between the collective of the hunters and the individual shaman, and shows in his own terms how the banking and problem-solving styles are interdependent:

The two types of mind, thus, are complementary: the tough-minded, representing the inert, reactionary; and the tender, the living progressive impulse — retrospectively, attachment to the local and timely and the impulse to the timeless universal. In human history the two have faced each other in dialogue since the beginning, and the effect has been that actual progress and process from lesser to greater horizons, simple to complex organizations, slight to rich patterns of the artwork which is civilization in its flowering nature.

“Banking” education, then, represents culture — the stored experience of a group that is imprinted in its young through a scarring process that both molds their psyches into collective roles and toughens them for adult survival; “problem-solving” education represents the forward-moving impetus of civilization derived from individuals outside the collective whose personal experiences challenge society to move forward.

To preserve the integrity of the center, the banking style has an implicit violence. Authority is monocentric, jealous of other gods, greedy for empire, paranoid of rebellion. In Greek myth, the original god Uranus (representing brute animal nature) was castrated by his son Cronos. Fearful of the same fate, Cronos ate each of his children as they were born ( Cronos = Time, the Devourer). The only child to escape was Zeus, who eventually led the rebellion that dethroned his father. The point here is that culture resists change — even though it is fated to succumb to it.

Fire came to the primordial Greeks through a theft by the Titan Prometheus from the gods. Enraged, Zeus had him crucified on a rock where an eagle picked at his liver every day. His theft diminished the power of the gods because in it was secreted a prophecy. Prometheus’ name means “foreknowledge;” Prometheus knew who would overthrow Zeus. The theft of fire was the gift of knowledge to man, and such a challenge to the supreme god carried a dear price — the agony of knowledge. Prometheus knew that the rebellion that would overthrow Zeus would come not from one of the gods, but from the mind of man.

Note how rebellious son transforms into devouring father. Problem-solving rebels become banking autocrats in a hurry. (Ever wonder where all of the radicals of the 1960’s have gone?) Having dethroned the gods, the creative, problem-solving challenge of reason mushroomed into classical Greek culture. But the Golden Age didn’t last long; problem-solving eras never do. The brilliant light of reason became “banked” in a xenophobic national pride. The sole locus of light, according to the Greeks, was Greece.

So when the Dionysian cult crossed the Thracian border, the Apollonian order condemned the new faith as barbaric, ignoble and dangerous. Blinded by its light, the rational polis could not perceive the vitality contained in the shadow of Dionysian religion. Celebrants of this new faith — a politically dispossessed rabble of slaves, the poor and women — were like their god-patron, whose father was Zeus but wasn't recognized in the official Olympian pantheon. None had access to the elitist state Mysteries. Dionysos brought joyful release from life’s cruelties in his magic wine, inspiring joyful community and communion with nature. In Euripides’ The Bacchae, the despot Pentheus tried vainly to stop the spread of Dionysian religion among his people. The rational fetters in his mind prevented him from "seeing" the dark divinity of Dionysos. For this sacrilege Dionysos destroyed his city-state and led a bewitched Pentheus like a goat to sacrifice to the countryside. There he was torn to pieces by women maddened by the god; his own mother triumphantly ripped his head from his shoulders. Modern psychology affirms the truth of this story: the dark side of the mind will rebel if the other side grows too dominant, too fixed, too certain.

Pre-Christian Celtic society offers another perspective on the banking/problem-solving dynamus. The Welsh word ystyr or “meaning” is close to Latin historia, which gives our English language the words “story” and “history.” Having no written literature, the Celtic storyteller, much like the tribal elder of prehistory, was the primary transmitter of culture. They told their stories at crucial moments of life — wedding-night, house-warming, eve of battle, wake — ritual cusps in the life-cycle.

Yet these tales did not instruct how to live daily life. Gods and heroes lived beyond the social order; their magic came from gambols in a different realm. Everything in the Otherworld was topsy-turvy, a reversal of common experience. Alwyn Rees and Brinsley Rees comment in Celtic Heritage,

Outside the (storytelling ritual), the deeds of mythical heroes cannot be repeated by mortal men. As events in ordinary life they are, as often as not, fantastic, anti-social, immoral and catastrophic...Yet...it is one of the great paradoxes of human life that it derives its deepest meaning from a mythological realm the inhabitants of which conduct themselves in a way that is antithetical to what is normal in everyday behavior and experience.


Here we find a more intricate relation between banking and problem-solving approaches. Irish culture was "banked" in the collective body of the storyteller’s repitoire; but their tales had transformational power because they derived from that drowsy and sweet world “east of the wind and west of the moon.” Memory moves events into history; the banking style stores events into the vault of time. The storyteller’s account is a tale enriched by duration and repitition. On the other hand, the problem-solving style takes events from the woodpile of history and throws them into the fire, taking the ordinary dross of life (those common moments when the story-tellers art was called for) and transforming them into the eternal.

Creation is a re-enactment of the Promethean theft of fire; sanskrit agni Latin ignis mean “fire”, and are the basis of Latin gigno, “I bear a child.” The Celtic festival of Hallowe'en is the eve of their new year, an in-between time, a door through which the Otherworld entered this world for a night. Every hearth-fire in Ireland was extinguished; only one ritual fire burned through night. The following day, every hearth-fire in Ireland was re-lit from it. The new year was mid-wifed by a spreading fire.

There's another Latin word that traces back to the Indo-European root agni: cognoso, “I know.” Cognition is an act of ignition, a fire impregnating darkness, the radical flame of the new order. When its work is completed, only cinders remain of the former dispensation. There is no going back.

CULTURE AND REVOLUTION

A culture dies when the center has grown too bloated with imperial aims, when its spiritual core deteriorates into the vapid pursuit of pleasures, and when it too-successfully quells the creative impetus. Rome fell victim to all of these entropies. When Visigoths ravaged the city in 410 A.D., there was no earthly power left within its gates to protest. But out of the vacuum of that anarchy a new authority asserted itself. Pax Romana eventually became the 800-year City of God, the spiritual empire of the Church. The age was dark because all light had been invested in heaven; longing for heaven and terror of eternal damnation became the carrot and whip of culture. Only at the fringes of rural districts and in the hinterlands beyond were other beliefs practiced.

As before, it was from those fringes that the central authority was challenged. In the twelfth century the erotic literature of the Orient brought back by Crusaders cross-fertilized with pagan Celtic romances popularized in the Arthurian cycle. A new secular mythology grew whose blossom was the primacy of individual experience. The popularity of the song-cycles of the trouveres and minnesingers was responded to by the Church with the construction of a phalanx of cathedrals.

To quote Campbell again, this time from Creative Mythology,

Of all the modes of experience by which the individual might be carried away from the safety of well-trodden grounds to the danger of the unknown, the mode of feeling, the erotic, was the first to waken Gothic man from his childhood slumber in authority.

We find a rich eros woven into the problem-solving approach; desire leads the mind outward to the trackless wood, and no noble heart can refuse to follow. Tristan betrayed the mores of his king and church for the love of Isolde, but was blameless because his feelings were pure (he had drunk unknowingly from a magic philtre meant for his king.) Love was his only law, and his ecstatic union with Isolde was a bold infidelity to the otherworldly marriage of Christ and Beloved, the Church. Many of the age experienced a similar possession by the Goddess Love: Petrarch and Dante, Abelard and Poliphilo. The Church responded by attacking woman: juana diaboli, the Devil’s Door. Hellish fires of burning witches ripped the night and the screams of tortured innocents issued from the sanctum of the Grand Inquisitor. But the bittersweet nocturnes of Amor were not silenced. Humanity crept back from Paradise for a tryst in the profane orchard.

As in the primitive puberty rites, the waking medieval body woke the modern mind, and the second assault upon medieval culture soon began in the university. Banking education favored the scholastic method’s tidy count of angels on the head of a pin, but problem-solving voices raised diabolic questions. Occam’s Razor sliced away the spiritual nature of thought with one phrase, irrevocably forking the paths of science and faith; the physical sciences heard dissonance in the music of the spheres; the translation of Plotinus that grew into neo-platonic humanism transmuted the ikon of imago dei to imago hominus. With no other defense than the authority of its ossified scriptures, the Church began to todder.

We may wonder by now if culture is ever anything but in decline. As much as culture supports orderly society, cultural disorder is always the affliction of the present. The cultural bank seems perpetually overdrawn, stressed to meet the challenge of doubt-stricken depositors. The nervous history of our past four centuries is one of constant cultural formulation, disintegration and re-integration. New ideas culminated in social forces to challenge a reigning power, became dominant, fossilized into mere institutionalism, then fell to a challenge from the fringe. The Holy Roman Empire fell in the Reformation split over dogma, and the absolute monarchies that followed buckled at Locke’s declaration that society is no more than a collective of self-serving individuals. Soon the elitist philosophes of the Enlightenment who had served the causes of the Glorious Revolution and help write the English Bill of Rights were in the crosshairs of Rousseau, who proposed that the wisdom of man ran counter to the divine laws of Nature.

In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, William Blake picked up on Rousseau and glorified the natural, rebellious impulse of the problem solver. According to Blake, energy is the prime motivator; the only true life is one inflamed and regulated by “satanic” desire. Reason is the faculty for resisting desire, and the banking order of culture is an attempt to shackle eros, much as Zeus nailed Prometheus to the rock:

The Giants who formed this world into its sensual existence, and now seem to live in it in chains, are in truth the causes of its life and the sources of all activity; but the chains are the cunning of weak and tame minds which have the power to resist energy...Thus one portion of being is the Prolific, the other the Devouring; to the Devourer it seems as if the producer was in his chains, but it is not so, he only takes portions of existence and fancies that to be the whole.

However, the revolutions of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries have showed that the satanic energy of rebellion is potentially as maleficent as the reactionary fetters of authority, if not more so. Radical ideas in the mind of the mass quickly deteriorate into frenzied violence. During the Reformation, rebellious Huguenots strung the ears of their victims on a wire and hung it around their necks, and in the Russian Revolution, "liberated" masses in St. Petersburg dragged Jews out of their homes to beat them beyond recognition. Desire into bloodlust: the fire contained in radical ideas grow too hot in the collective, like the rages of the Titan Typhon. Old hatreds boil over, the disruption of order opens an avenue for brutalities repressed for millennia. Typically a revolutionary regime finds themselves desperately trying to restore order, and will employ means more reactionary than their former oppressors to do so.

Henry Ottinger’s essay, “Why Did the Class Fail?” is a good example of the inherent contradiction in collective problem-solving approaches in education. During the confrontation between bankers and problem solvers in the 1960’s, revolutionary rhetoric assailed the university. Professors were characterized as puppets of the power elite and whose sole purpose was to "educate" cannon fodder for the military-industrial complex. Sensitive humanist as Ottinger must have been, he responded to the revolutionary critique by asking students in one of his classes to try a problem-solving approach. “I suggested that we try to break the mold, that we could write papers on any subject we wanted, that we could spend class time discussing things...”

But the results were abysmal. Freed to decide their own course, the students hadn’t the faintest idea where they wanted to go. And learning, it seemed, was the least of their concerns. “Gosh,” the one student complained, “college is no fun.” The experience radicalized Ottinger the other way:

If you don’t believe that knowledge for its own sake is a valid and valuable goal, then you are in the wrong place, and you’d do much better in a vocational school, studying how to be a plumber or a beautician. And if you don’t believe, along with Ezra Pound, that ‘real education must ultimately be limited to men who INSIST on knowing,’ you are definitely in the wrong place. You are much clutter.





MICHAEL AND LUCIFER: TOWARD A FIENDISH FRIENDSHIP

There’s a painting by William Blake of the Archangel Michael and Lucifer locked in combat, and it’s a good way of imaging the conflict between the banking and problem-solving styles. Being ordained from God, the banker Michael has the upper position and nobly struggles to suppress the usurper Lucifer rising up from the chthonic abyss. Angel of light, angel of darkness, world without end: war for eternity. Education is one of their battlefields — others include politics and the arts. These killing fields share a bleak humor. A professor once remarked to a disillusioned student, “here we throw artificial pearls before real swine. “ The statement easily fits the other arenas too.

Perhaps the way out of the conflict is to see through our conception of it. As Northrop Frye writes in The Archetypes of Literature,

Antitheses are usually resolved, not by picking one side and refuting the other, or by making eclectic choices between them, but by trying to get past the antithetical way of stating the problem.

If opposition is true friendship, as Blake believed, perhaps the styles may really serve each other. Rather than see the ground between them as one of battle, let’s invert the image and call it one of parley: weary of their wounds, the two sides approach each other bearing the white flag which permits them at last to listen.

The split, as I see it, is in mind itself. The great divide is between "portions of being," as Blake put it. One side is inert, material and cumulative; the other side mobile, spiritual and innovative. Backward-looking culture stands one side and forward-seeking civilization on the other. One sits at the right hand of God and hold the mace of moral right; the left-handed (“sinister”) other threatens from the border with a powerful and dangerous eros.

However, when the two come closer in parley, the effect is similar to that of the two-faced Roman god Janus: looking both ways at once. Janus was the god of doors, of endings and beginnings. His month was January, the month between old and new year. Backward and forward at once: dichotomies linked at the seam of their split. (Heraclitus wrote, “joints: whole and not-whole, connected-separate, consonant-dissonant.”) Culture and civilization, God and Devil, banking and problem-solving styles, all can speak to each other along a network of associative fibers. The conjunctive “and” creates a shared turf: a tao.

When we say the banking educator assimilates the individual into culture and the problem-solving educator is the individual who challenges culture, a mutual assent offers the best solution of preserving tradition while allowing new and creative tributaries to sustain it. The healthiest approach to education would help foster this sensibility. Robert Pinsky states it succinctly in his essay, “The Responsibilities of the Poet:”

To put it simply, and only a little fancifully, we have in our care and for our use and pleasure a valuable gift, and we must answer both for preserving it and for changing it. And the second we fail to make good answer on either score, the gift stops giving pleasure, and makes us feel bad instead.

We can take a rhythmic approach to the common ground shared by the two styles. Each works on the other to form an equilibrium. The problem-solving style is a natural corrective for the banking style’s fat-cat, “capitalist” attitudes of moral and rational supremacy. The mind showers light on the mountain-top cidatel — science and technology is our inheritance from Apollo — but the brilliance of that light invokes the powerful and dangerous shadow of Dionysos. Apollo and Dionysos were brothers united by the All-Father Zeus. Objectivity — the gift and curse of the god who comes from afar — allows us to stand apart and discern reality; subjectivity — the gift and curse of the god who rises from within — leads us back into the world. The two are bevels of the same mind: logos and eros, cognition and ignition, sober appraisal and intoxicated enthusiasm, banking style and problem-solving style. Each pair work together both in tandem and opposition.

We might learn to see the two styles as appropriate at different stages of education. The banking style is important for laying the foundation, but reaches a threshold where the problem-solving style is needed leap into a greater order. We should be trained like the old Irish poets who were not allowed to write a line of their own until after many years they learned the entire oral literature; for how can one challenge what one does not know? (The reedy voice of our contemporary literature may be due to there being far more writers than readers.) But then the time comes to turn learning on its ass. Books become a tyranny, their voices grow hoarse with dust. The university darkens into a necropolis. The old gods aren't big enough. As Norman O. Brown said at his 1960 Columbia University commencement address, mind reaches the end of its tether. Culture can grow no further on its accretions.

. . .There comes a time — I believe we are in such a time — when civilization has to be renewed by the discovery of new mysteries, by the undemocratic but sovereign power of the imagination, by the undemocratic power which makes poets the unacknowledged legislators of mankind, the power which makes all things new. . .

. . .In the fire of the holy madness even books lose their gravity, and let themselves go into the flame. “Properly,” says Ezra Pound, “we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one’s hand.”

The question isn’t which approach is correct, but rather what is the correct balance. The old alchemists knew that the retort had to be cooked at the right temperature — not too hot, not too cold. Or as Goethe put it, festina lente, make haste slowly. Just how do we slow the dizzy pace of these days? Freire says we suffer from narration-sickness; our century's impersonal, hard facts whiz by and we haven’t a clue what they mean. For our age, restoring balance is in part a process of slowing-down, of cooking raw events, digesting them slowly; to paraphrase world in our own words. For this effort we require both the banker's patience for investments and the problem-solver’s germinating cognition.

To me, Joyce’s Finnigan’s Wake is such an attempt. All of culture — not only the top-layer of everyday life and the mid-layer of Irish history Joyce nurtured from, but the deeper strata of the vast Indo-European complex as well — all were filtered through the sleeping mind of a fat and somewhat drunk hotelier one Saturday night in Dublin. To read the Wake over and again is to enter time: its tomb and womb, its continuity and futurity, the catalogue and catalyst of it. The work is both a great affirmation of culture and even stupefying challenge to it, a ball of dark fire in the hand never to be fully comprehended.

Another way to restore the balance is to re-learn how to experience our wounds. The battle rages because we don't know the toll. We no longer have the initiation ceremonies of the ancients, who knew the link between mutilation and transformation. The lack of these rituals may account for the adolescent violence sweeping the country and sexual pathologies racking up victims through incest, pornography and AIDS. We’ve pain aplenty, but it seems that screaming statistics just make us drowsier. The wounds are there but we don’t feel them, and without feeling them we can’t learn from them. Recovering addicts will tell you that pain is the great teacher, and like them, we’ve got to surrender our opiates, our quick fixes, our easy answers. To return to Ottinger, he eventually asked the question that formed the title of his essay: why did his class fail?

It failed because, as Dostoevski’s Underground Man pointed out, thinking causes pain. And, like good little utilitarians, you want to avoid pain. No, it’s much easier to come up with instant aesthetics, instant solutions, instant thoughts. After all, instant things, like breakfasts and TV dinners, are easily digestible — and easily regurgitated — and not terribly nourishing.

As the last strains of Reagan-era optimism fade away and there are no more fantasies of the good life to cloud our vision, perhaps pain will begin to seep into the wound — eventually not just revealing it, but ripping wide the stitches. The wound is a womb through which we may enter time. And such pain is the impetus for decisions. All of the real solutions are painful. If we take the easy and traditional way out, we will die of spiritual gangrene in front of our television sets.

Undigested pain is visited on the world, and these are truly violent times. But what’s more enraging, the violence or our increasingly anesthetized reaction to it? The cynical and sleepy bureaucrats of our banking education system need the soapbox rages of the problem-solver, the lion in Wallace Stevens’ poem who will “roar at the enraging desert.” Without that roar, institutions fall asleep too, and their students are schooled in emptiness and silence -- skills indeed for the century it bestows.

CONCLUSION

In the end result, it isn’t what we know that drives us onward but what we don’t. The void lures us; we inquire. When the future stops calling us, what then? I certainly don’t like what seems to be ahead for my daughter, who’s scraping by on bare-minimum grades in high school and whose aspirations dim each year — doctor to psychologist, nurse to social worker. Perhaps she'll finally settle for the sordid fantasy of many of her peers — wife of rich guy. And I wonder what sort of future I’ve planned for myself as a writer in an increasingly illiterate country. Perhaps our culture has already died, and we are next. “It is not merely the tradition that is lost when the voice of millennia elaborated over the millennia has been stilled,” Allen Bloom writes in The Closing of the American Mind. “It is being itself that vanishes beyond the dissolving horizon.”

Will we wake? Can we wake? As a parent, I must believe so and take solace from the German poet Holderlin:

Near is
And hard to grasp the God
But where there is danger,
Salvation is also on the increase.

And T.S. Eliot must have felt that way when as he wrote Four Quartets deep in the blackouts and blitzes of World War II. Even then — and perhaps because the time was so difficult — Eliot could affirm the unitary banking/problem-solving work of artist, educator, politician, all who commit to stand for and against culture, and play both Michael and Satan in the grand drama:

...each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling, undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate — but there is no competition —
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps there is neither
Gain nor loss. For us, there is only the trying.
The rest is not our business...