IMPRO - Dullness and Education

From the cover of Johnstone’s biography by Theresa Robbins Dudeck

Keith Johnstone was a British theater director and improvisation guru who died just two years ago. His book about improvisation technique in the theater, Impro, ends up chock full of startling observations about education and pedagogical tactics. Perhaps because it is not conceived of or presented as a book about education, I was surprised by the educational focus of what I found interspersed through its pages. Because it’s off the beaten path for many folks who think about education, classical education, and pedagogy in the age of mass culture, I thought I would present some of Johnstone’s observations here so anyone who’s interest is piqued might read the book for himself. What follows are selections and quotations from Impro with a few observations of my own where they might be helpful.

Education and Contact with Reality

In my case it was largely my interest in art that had destroyed any life in the world around me. I’d learned perspective, and about balance, and composition. It was as if I’d learned to redesign everything, to reshape it so that I saw what ought to be there, which of course is much inferior to what is there. The dullness was not an inevitable consequence of age, but of education. (14)

Education vs. Miseducation

Education as Substance: People think of good and bad teachers as engaged in the same activity, as if education was a substance, and that bad teachers supply a little of the substance, and good teachers supply a lot. This makes it difficult to understand that education can be a destructive process, and that bad teachers are wrecking talent, and that good and bad teachers are engaged in opposite activities. (16)

This is so true. And as with the teacher, so with the school. A bad school is not simply engaged in the good of education less well than a good school. A bad school, like a bad teacher, engages in malformation and miseducation. A bad doctor damages one’s health. A bad workout results in injury.

My breathing was inhibited, my voice and posture were wrecked, something was seriously wrong with my imagination—it was becoming difficult actually to get ideas. How could this have happened when the state had spent so much money educating me?

…All my teachers cared about was whether I was a winner….I’d left school with worse posture, and a worse voice, with worse movement and far less spontaneity than when I’d entered it. Could teaching have had a negative effect?

One day when I was eighteen, I was reading a book and I began to weep. I was astounded. I’d had no idea that literature could affect me in such a way. If’ I’d have wept over a poem in class the teacher would have been appalled. I realised that my school had been teaching me not to respond.

(In some universities students unconsciously learn to copy the physical attitudes of their professors, leaning back away from the play or film they’re watching, and crossing their arms tightly, and tilting their heads back. Such postures help them to feel less “involved”, less “subjective”. The response of untutored people is infinitely superior. (16-17)

Because of his focus on theater, Johnstone attends to the physical meanings in situations. Of course, posture and tone signify as much, probably more, than words in many cases, but more often than not, we tend to focus on words. Observing students parroting the physical attitude of the professor—often one of detached superiority to the text—suggests that the rituals necessary to obtain a Ph.D. might actually be disabling for excellent teaching. Surely this depends on what you think the object of teaching is.

Creativity

I tried to resist my schooling but I accepted the idea that my intelligence was the most important part of me. I tried to be clever in everything I did. The damage was greatest in areas where my interests and the school’s seemed to coincide: in writing, for example. I forgot that inspiration isn’t intellectual, that you don’t have to be perfect. In the end I was reluctant to attempt anything for fear of failure, and my first thoughts never seemed good enough. Everything had to be corrected and brought into line.

….In one moment I knew that the valuing of men by their intelligence is crazy, that the peasants watching the night sky might feel more than I feel, that the man who dances might be superior to myself—word-bound and unable to dance. From then on I noticed how warped many people of great intelligence are, and I began to value people for their actions, rather than their thoughts. (17-18)

Teachers in Society

I’d believed that teachers were respected figures, but in Battersea they were likely to be feared or hated. I liked my colleagues, but they had a colonist’s attitude to the children; they referred to them as “poor stock”, and they disliked exactly those children I found most inventive. If a child is creative he’s likely to be more difficult to control, but that isn’t a reason for disliking him. My colleagues had a poor view of themselves….I came to see that their unhappiness, and lack of acceptance in the community, came from a feeling that they were irrelevant, imposed on to the working-class culture. Everyone seemed to accept that if you could educate one of these children you’d remove him away from his parents (which is what my education had done for me). Educated people were snobs, and many parents didn’t want their children alienated from them. (20-21)

The contemporary controversy about social status and work relates to this point about education. In many schools in the USA, blue collar parents have accepted the humiliating ministrations of the academic guidance counsellors who preach to their children a new moralism focused on mandatory participation in higher education. I rather like the situation Johnstone describes in Battersea where if you’re engaged in alienating children from their parents, you are the one ostracized.

Motivation

One day I took my typewriter and my art books into the class, and said I’d type out anything they wanted to write about the pictures. As an afterthought, I said I’d also type out their dreams—and suddenly they were actually wanting to write. I typed out everything exactly as they wrote it, including the spelling mistakes, until they caught me. Typing out spelling mistakes was a weird idea in the early fifties (and probably now)—but it worked. The pressure to get things right was coming from the children, not the teacher. I was amazed at the intensity of feeling and outrage the children expressed, and their determination to be correct, because no one would have dreamed that they cared. Even the illiterates were getting their friends to spell out every word for them. I had to force them out of the classroom to take breaks. When I hear that children only have an attention span of ten minutes, or whatever, I’m amazed. Ten minutes is the attention span of bored children, which is what they usually are in school—hence the misbehavior. (22)

Discussion (or Meetings)

George thought a discussion group would correct this, and he chaired three meetings, which were so tedious that he handed the job over to William Gaskill….I said that if it continued as a talking shop, then everyone would abandon it, and that we should agree to discuss nothing that could be acted out.

My bias against discussion is something I’ve learned to see as very English. I’ve known political theater groups in Europe which would readily cancel a rehearsal, but never a discussion. My feeling is that the best argument may be a testimony to the skill of the presenter, rather than to the excellence of the solution advocated. Also the bulk of discussion time is visibly taken up with transactions of status which have nothing to do with the problem to be solved. My attitude is like Edison’s, who found a solvent for rubber by putting bits of rubber in every solution he could think of, and beat all those scientists who were approaching the problem theoretically. (25-26)

While Johnstone is speaking about adults working together here, there are profound educational implications for an educational approach, especially in the natural sciences, that is inductive rather than deductive.

The Art of Teaching

If you want to apply the methods I’m describing in this book, you may have to teach the way that I teach. When I give workshops, I see people frantically scribbling down the exercises, but not noticing what it is I actually do as a teacher. My feeling is that a good teacher can get results using any method, and that a bad teacher can wreck any method. (29)

Here Johnstone introduces his concept of status play as it relates to three different types of teachers.

I remember one teacher whom we liked but who couldn’t keep discipline. The headmaster made it obvious that he wanted to fire him, and we decided we’d better behave. Next lesson we sat in a spooky silence for about five minutes, and then one by one we began to fool about. Finally our teacher was given an excellent reference just to get rid of him….

Another teacher, who was generally disliked, never punished and yet exerted a ruthless discipline. In the street he walked with fixity of purpose, striding along and stabbing people with his eyes. Without punishing, or making threats, he filled us with terror. We discussed with awe how terrible life must be for his own children.

A third teacher, who was much loved, never punished but kept excellent discipline, while remaining very human. He would joke with us, and then impose a mysterious stillness. In the street he looked upright, but relaxed, and he smiled easily.

…the incompetent teacher was a low-status player: he twitched, made many unnecessary movements, he went red at the slightest annoyance, and he always seemed like an intruder in the classroom. The one who filled us with terror was a compulsive high-status player. The third was a status expert, raising and lowering his status with great skill. (35-36)

Of course, there’s much more, but for that, you’ll have to read the book.

Some of what you’ll read does not apply easily or directly to the classroom, but for a generous and integrating mind, there is much in Impro to challenge, inspire, and encourage.