Pedagogy of Perplexity: Reimagining the Role of the Poetic in Education

Abstract

Lack one lacks both, and the unseen is proved by the seen, Till that becomes unseen and receives its proof in turn.-Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass If we are to imagine education as the practice of turning the soul, we must have some point of orientation in mind: it cannot be merely a turn for turning's sake. For Socrates, this point is the form of the good, which "gives truth to the things known and the power to know to the knower." 1 It is for this reason, perhaps, that Socrates found himself compelled (if begrudgingly) to banish poetry from the kallipolis: our engagement with the poetic rarely yields the kind of propositional knowledge that might be attained via the exercise of the faculty of reason through the practice of dialectic. This project, following humbly in the footsteps of Eduardo Duarte's Being and Learning, is an attempt to resist that compulsion by thinking about the role of the poetic in education, specifically in terms of its capacity to orient the soul in a different direction. I will argue that an encounter with the poetic can both incite and sustain an experience of puzzlement, which might engender a state of waiting, and can cultivate the practice of meditative thought. In doing so, I hope to free the poetic from the demands of reason and open up an educational space, external to the sphere of "truth-as-certainty," in which the poetic might dwell. In other words, it is an attempt to imagine what it might be like (and perhaps even suggest that, in our commodity-oriented world, increasingly fraught with a pervasive and pernicious anthropocentrism, it might indeed be time) to expand the purview of education such that it encompasses not only the practice of calculative thinking, but also the practice of meditative thinking as well. It is an attempt to welcome poetry back into the kallipolis with open arms.