Cutting to the Core

Some thoughts on Analysis and Synthesis

I have an ongoing argument with my friends in the Biology class.  It should be noted that I have earned my undergraduate minor by taking 27 hours of Biology classes, so I am not without some insight into how this subject is often taught.  My concern is with the common lab activity of dissection.  This is not an argument from ethos or pathos, but from logos.  Why would students who are studying life do so by cutting up dead animals?  But this article is not about that, so let me take the introduction it provides and move on without discussing all my arguments for that discussion.  Dissection, the art of cutting up dead things, is synonymous with analysis.  Analysis is literally to cut apart.  And we are really good at this in the West.

I do not wish to argue here against analysis.  It is a necessary part of knowing something.  If one cannot distinguish the parts of a given body of knowledge, they just don’t know their way around that subject.  What I do wish to argue is that analysis does not bring us complete knowledge.  Analysis without synthesis is dangerous for the well being of Truth, our souls, and education.  Before I argue this, let me give an analogy from my past so that I might use it throughout my argument.

I bought my first car when I was fourteen years of age.  Back in my day, in my home state of Kansas, one could drive at a fairly young age as families depended on such given the fact that many in that state live quite a ways from school, work, stores, etc.  I purchased from a local used car lot a ten year old car: a 1969 Chevy Impala.  It ran, but not as smoothly as my father wished.  I should mention that my father grew up on the farm, had worked in the Air Force as a jet engine mechanic, and after that had spent time as a mechanic at a local service station, so he knew his way around a car engine (back when such was a fairly simple forthright piece of machinery).  I came home from school on the day of this story to find my father in the back yard with my car’s engine scattered around on the lawn.  It was in an orderly fashion and he assured me that he would get it all back together, but he had to assure himself that all was in good working order if I was going to be driving it around central Kansas.  

NB: This is not my car, but one quite similar in appearance to what I owned.

I was impressed that he had got it apart, but I was nervous about him getting it all back together and the engine working as well as before, let alone better.  Over the weekend (this started on a Friday) he patiently cleaned, inspected, and then reassembled each piece laying on the lawn back into a working engine.  He also attempted to instruct me in what each part was, what it did, etc.  I was thrilled when we cranked the engine on Sunday and it successfully roared to life, actually running better than before.  To this day I have no hope of doing what he did, but that is beside my point.  My father demonstrated his knowledge of a car engine in two ways: he knew the parts, and he understood how they came together to form a whole engine.

With that story in mind, let me shift to my own work in the classroom.  Any given science (and remember that I distinguish arts and sciences in the very old way) or area of knowledge has its parts and its whole.  Both must be addressed for the “subject” to be learned. There are two ancient ways of doing this logically: inductive and deductive logic.  Inductive reasons from the parts to the whole, deriving an understanding by, let’s say, starting with the parts of an engine and coming to greater understanding by assembly.  Deductive is the opposite, starting with a concept or principle and through logical analysis, determining what the parts to that principle are.  The goal of such logic should be wisdom, which comes when the knowledge of specific facts or parts coalesces into a meaningful whole by the student’s understanding both the parts and the whole and then acts based on that understanding to live more closely aligned with the Created Order of the World.  Some exemplifications might help.

I don’t think a student really knows a story like Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe if he struggles with the who, what, and where of the story plot and details, the facts, if you will.  He should be able to recreate the story by stating the parts, making sure Tumnus takes his walk, Lucy gets lost, Edmund wants his Turkish Delight, Aslan dies, etc., etc.  But the student is lost as well if she cannot move beyond the parts.  Knowing the names of the Pevensies, or identifying the White Witch, etc. is nothing more than seeing all the engine parts laying about on the lawn.  

Even if there is a chronological or thematic organization to the parts, the student must press on from factual acumen to what is often called understanding.  Seeing that Lewis has arranged these parts in a way that elicits comparison with Christian teaching, or various moral implications behind the actions of the characters is the synthetic act toward this work that corresponds to the engine parts being placed onto the engine block in their proper place.  

She thus begins to understand the work as a work, not just show felicity with the parts.  I press further that Lewis’ story is still useless until it in some small or large ways leads the reader to live differently.  This knowledge leading to understanding resulting in wisdom arc is basic to my view of how a science needs both analysis and synthesis to truly amount to learning.

I return to my first example, that of dissection, to conclude these thoughts.  For thousands of years students have been taught to understand and admire the living organism by the cutting apart of a dead specimen to better understand the internal organs of the animal, which cannot be done to a living organism without killing it.  Setting aside the ethical arguments, and focusing simply on the educational goals, I am not opposed to this use of the dead to understand the living, I just have little experience to indicate that your average student is led from observing dead things to their living counterparts.  I understand a leaping frog better if I have seen his innards, but only if I then have observation of the jumping live frog and apply what I have seen as the parts to the whole.

Good teaching, whatever the subject, cannot neglect either the parts or the whole.  My final assertion would be that the reason we are so good at analysis is because it is the easier of the two modes.  Synthesis takes a lot more work and time.  In our pursuit of educational efficiency this is a problem.  And because we have the modern demand upon us to generate numerics for our reporting of a student’s progress, analysis assessment is also easier.  You can generate a test on the parts and grade it much more easily, quicker, and with a numeric result than you can assess a student’s synthesis of the lesson or subject into a meaningful whole.  

And again, this is not bad in my mind.  Analysis must be done and must be assessed.  But don’t stop there.  Don’t make that the sum total of learning.  The harder part must also be done or the engine is still laying about the yard and the fourteen year old is frustrated with an unmoving car, regardless of how many practical benefits the adults tell him there are to his experience.

Never Enough Time… (or, “Come on Ring those Bells…)

Several aspects of my intellectual activity have come together again in that whirling finger-paint I call thought.  I am working on some research related to Charlotte Mason, I have been reading posts from folks who attended Circe’s Summer Retreat (which was five days of discussing The Odyssey), and several of the books I am reading have spent extended passages on the idea of time (its passing, its use, its measurement, and how schooling tends to chop it up too much).

As this is a blog on education, I choose that last idea for my basis of meditation here.  So why are a bunch of people waxing eloquent about having spent five days talking about Homer?  Perhaps the libations were flowing and they just chose to blog while inebriated?  No, don’t think so.  I think there is something powerful in the extended or elongated thought.  Far too much of modern schooling is paced by the bell.  If you teach, you know what I mean:  every 48 to 57 minutes, depending on how crammed the school’s curriculum has become, there is a dismissal bell.  This is one of the more destructive elements I know of in schooling.  I understand that with specialization, and the sharing of students thereby (another words, Johnny has six or seven or eight teachers; not one), that we have to have a set schedule and dismiss on time, start on time, march to the beat of the second hand.  But this does not promote good learning.  Several collected missives on this issue:

1. Not all aspects of education need or deserve the same amount of time.  And they certainly do not all fit within the same time framework.  Math and Language acquisition should receive shorter, regular (meaning daily) instruction with allotted time for coaching and peer interaction (what we often send them home with for homework).  I suppose you could limit this to 50 minute daily increments, but see #2 for why even this is potentially harmful.  But before I get to that, let me develop this.  While some disciplines can follow this daily “dose” regime, others need more time.  50 minutes for observation of natural science, whether in a lab or out of doors, is laughable.  You will barely get going.  You can have everything all “set up” beforehand, but now you are robbing kids the lesson of what is needed, how it is set up, and instead implying that most of life is served up on a pre-planned platter.  It becomes a museum visit, not a lab experiment.

And then there are the humanities.  I believe a good lesson from literature or history must include some prolonged reading from a text (together), no small amount of open discussion, with real questions being given time to bring about several thoughtful responses, and if possible some quiet time for reflection, journaling, writing.  However, if you only have 50 minutes, you are reduced to either trying to do all three in very short bursts, or splitting up what should be one experience over three days.  There is something here in what happened with the Circe bunch.  There was time, there was space for exploration and discussion.  Even with 5 days, 24 books of Homer is a challenge, but less so with the large blocks of time.  My point is rather basic: not all studies require the same 50 minute slice of time; some can use this well, some would waste part of it, and many need much longer blocks than this.

2. Once we see #1, just as simple time allotment, then we come to the second major issue I have with bells ringing all the time: it is disruptive.  You have that beautiful and fragile thing called truth building in your student’s minds and then the bell just obliterates it.  Nasty bells.  Ring, ring, ring, rush, rush, rush, all decent thoughts just fly right out of the mind.  I worked for years to build the culture in my classroom that I, not the bell, dismiss, but it was futile.  As soon as their brains received that stimulus, they could hold on, stare at me, not budge, but their little brains were at their lockers talking with Susie already.  Bells break thoughts.

3. My last major issue (though I could go on for some time with minor issues) is that of waste.  Part of the bell fallacy is that all students should learn everything in roughly the same amount of time.  But they don’t.  So some “get it” (the point of the lesson for the day) within minutes and tune out or cause trouble or in some other way go “away” for the rest of the lesson.  Others are perhaps only a few more minutes from the light coming on, but that d___ bell just rang and all hope of them getting to “it” at home, alone or with a parent, is well nigh hopeless.  So what some kids could “get” in four hours, and others would need eight for, we all get seven and hope for the best. Waste.

I understand such things as efficiency, order, sharing, and the like.  I am simply pointing out that if we continue to think in Ford terms (that of the interchangeable parts and factory fame), then we will continue to fight against these roadblocks to learning.  Those who know me know I homeschool, so it will be assumed I take this tack due to my own free circumstances.  But even those in the home can impose these issues on themselves if they do not think carefully about it.

Charlotte Mason was clear that the student’s predilections should rule much more than the clock.  If there is true engagement with what she called “living books” then the clock should be hidden in a cupboard.  Be engaged until the engagement is done, not till the “time” is up.  Now if you are “engaging” with modern textbooks, then by all means set a timer (it is the salvation of the child to be limited when reading such things), but set it short and have cake when it’s over, or steak.  Whatever keeps the student salivating.  Ringing bells then, and only then, make sense.  Sorry, you knew the Pavlov joke would come at some point.