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COPYRIGHT 2005 Caddo Gap Press
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At the end of each semester, my dear friend and colleague, Cowboy Mitch, (1) offers his class a choice. Standing before the classroom, he lifts his arms and opens his hands, palms up, and assumes the image of a balance scale. Bending to one side and raising one palm he queries: "Final exam?" and then lowering the raised palm and elevating the other, he offers, "Pizza party?" After a slight pause, he repeats the choice with identical movements: "Final exam? Pizza Party?" And again: "Final exam? Pizza Party?"
Among the many things that intrigue me about Mitch's choice is the opposition he makes between food and learning. In Mitchell's formulation, the two, eating and learning, are mutually exclusive: we may partake of one or the other. Of course, this may be only Cowboy Mitch's distinction, but we know that classrooms are for the most part, except on rare occasions--usually holiday or birthday parties--completely void of food, save, of course, for the mounds of gum furtively stuck on the bottom of seats and desks. At the River Heights Elementary School in Menomonie, classrooms sometimes maintain snack food for children to partake, though not necessarily when need arises, but rather, at pre-established times. Morning and afternoon milk is also made available. During these meal-time breaks, books and classroom materials are usually put aside, presumably to avoid spillage and property spoilage. Older students--middle and high schoolers--sometimes bring their book bags into the lunchroom-my daughter tells me this is rare--but the converse is not also true--that lunch is carried into the classroom. Gum, candies, beverages, all are usually forbidden in the classroom. The guiding wisdom suggests that there is a safety factor implied in the prohibition, but the separation has a long history in the schools that precedes much of the modern technology which is food phobic. Certainly, the sizes of student desks do not afford space for anything other than the traditional text and notebook that often consume the entire working space. Thus, Mitch's suggestion that one can either engage in education or in eating, but that somehow the two are mutually exclusive, suggests something about more than a particularity of Mitch's classroom.
Here, I want to consider the idea of eating in the classroom. More specifically, I want to consider a connection between consumption and working in the classroom and between eating and learning in the classroom in the light of a similar discussion among the Rabbis of the Talmud, who, too, were concerned about a certain relationship between eating and working. For some years now education has been understood from a constructivist perspective. According to this ideology, knowledge is constructed, and our students, like Levi-Strauss' bricoleurs, take building blocks from various and sundry locations and construct their worlds: that construction was deemed education. American schooling (a process quite separate from education) was the attempt to determine and organize the means and matter of that construction. To ensure a certain shape and integrity to the edifice, specific bricks were provided, and certain techniques were valorized--hence, curriculum was invented. To validate learning, testing was implemented ensuring an element of measurement and accountability to students' learning. Each brick could now be identified, counted, and measured and assessed.
I would like to offer another metaphor for education today. I would like to suggest that education might also be understood as a consumption. My Webster's Unabridged Dictionary says that 'to consume' means 'to devour' or 'to use up;' and that 'consumption' is a consuming, a wasting away, or a using up [of goods], as compared, say, to the production of same. My OED suggests that 'to consume' and 'consumption' carry destructive connotations: to consume is to use up, to destroy, to burn up or reduce something to invisible products. Consumption is the act of consuming 'or destroying.' We know that consumption is the dreaded wasting disease, so-named because its effects on the body is similar to what happens to food when ingested: it is broken down, and acted upon and reduced to invisible products. Indeed, in the process of food consumption the food is broken down--and acted upon so that it might be used to build us up (a type of constructivism, I suppose). We have learned: matter cannot be created or destroyed, but rather, matter is turned into energy in the process of consumption.
Eating is, of course, absolutely essential to our continued existence. Eating leads to consumption. Education, too, as Dewey (1916/1966) argued, might be thought of as very much essential to our continued existence and may be identified with ingestion and consumption. We take in, act upon, use up and, 'reduce something to invisible products,' utilize these acted-upon products consciously and unconsciously in the development of and evocation of self. Christopher Bollas (1992) offers the concept of 'reception' for the idea I am presently groping. Bollas argues that we all maintain certain 'genera.' He defines these 'genera' as the "psychic incubation of libidinal cathexes of the object world' (68). We experience, or receive, objects from the world, take in, attach and act upon those objects; we develop our attachment to those objects that we might, in Bollas' concept, use them "to be a character." Genera, then, are the locus where tiny grains of sand are transformed into the pearls of our being. Thus, in Bollas' definition there is a sense of the word genera as a form of action-a verb. Bollas says, "I think it is within the spirit of the original hidden base of this word (gignere: to give birth, to reproduce) to use 'genera' as both a singular and plural noun, simply because the word 'genus'--its theoretically proper singular form--now definitely refers to a single class or species, and does not contain in English a sensible verbal noun meaning" (1992, 67n). We are each born with our individual idiom--our particular predilection for object choice--"an implicate logic of form, partly inherited, partly acquired"(Bollas, 1992, 74). Through this idiom, which is elaborated through "parental provision, the individual develops a belief in psychic dissemination, which leads him [sic] to assume that he can articulate his idiom through the psychic freedom of object representation and the liberty of choice" (1992, 74). As our idioms predelict each to a choice of particular objects, so the environment must facilitate that freedom of choice. The freer we are to express our genera, the greater possibilities we have to express our selves and be a character. "The contents of the received are then the nuclei of genera which,...
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