Books: The Need for Laughter

A PERFECT EDUCATION by Kenneth E. Eble. 215 pages. Macmillan. $5.95.

Love, learning—and life—are what education is all about; yet somehow U.S. schools never quite get really involved in any of them. So says Kenneth Eble, 42, the ebullient chairman of the English department at the University of Utah, who takes whimsical yet passionate whacks at his own profession but never falls into the academic solemnities that riddle most books of this kind. “To learn,” writes Eble, “is to love.” Students ought to revel in discovery, he adds, but educators, from grade to grad school, have a knack for taking most of the joy out of learning.

This unhappy process, says Eble, begins with parents who fail to realize that “learning begins in delight and flourishes in wonder,” and who fret so much over their children’s education that they discourage a sense of curiosity about knowledge. Everyone jokes about pupils who fall in love with their teachers; but, to Eble, “it is no joke—it is the way of learning. That is the advantage of live teachers and live books. They can be fallen in love with, possessed.”

A Sense of Play. What is needed, he suggests, is more laughter among parents, children and teachers, since laughter “opens pathways to the discovering spirit,” produces “a shared understanding,” and “like love, it demands response.” He argues that in their obsession with work, Americans have lost their “sense of play”; yet “the children’s world must be our world, too. We may have to ask our way in, and we may be impolitely and properly asked out, but we must be there, if only to be looked at and puzzled over.” Eble regrets the stuffiness of teachers’ colleges that tend to stifle the one quality an elementary teacher needs most to deal with his young charges: “imagination—the kind of mind that is playful, fanciful, odd in the relationships it perceives.”

Eble also laments the low salaries and low prestige of teachers, which means that “if imagination is a conspicuous quality in an elementary teacher, surely its first use will be to consider employment elsewhere.” When Eble visits the classroom of a good teacher, he finds that”one begins to feel a visceral response that leads to lumps in the throat and tears in the eyes.”

When it comes to high schools, says Eble, a major aim should be to help students “see the world feelingly,” since at no other age are they so concerned with their emotions. But the schools manage even to take “the fantasy and romance from sex and make it part of a humdrum world of facts” in sex-education courses. More important, an adolescent’s feelings often focus on his teacher and depend more on what the teacher “is and does than on what he knows.” High schools thus “should worry less about the scarcity of well-trained graduates of certified teacher education courses and more about the scarcity of attractive personalities with developed sensibilities. The high turnover of attractive unmarried teachers is not so lamen table as the low turnover of those who are unattractive, in marriage or out.”

A Life of One’s Own. A basic thrust of a college education ought to be toward helping students to develop “a life of one’s own—a sense of self.” Instead, says Eble, “every major movement in higher education seems to be away from the kind of confrontation, contemplation and discipline necessary to help a student shape himself.” He sympathizes with students who react against the impersonal university by turning to social action but warns that “a commitment to self” must precede a “commitment that takes them to the barricades.” What students need are more free hours “for contemplation, for simply learning how to spend a quiet evening with oneself.”

In Eble’s view, the purpose of higher education should be to produce a lifetime “sense of style” involving “mastery over all one does, with simplicity, harmony and grace.” At the same time, it should develop a “sense of worth” based largely on “passionately held beliefs and passionately felt responses to experience.” Not at all incidentally, good schooling should also provide “an escape from boredom” and “lead us to laugh in the face of heaven or hell. Education should teach us to play the wise fool rather than turn us into the solemn ass.”