Arts, literature integral to a child's development

The recent South African matric results are no cause for celebration — that much is clear. The question is: what should be done to improve them, assuming that this can be done without dropping intellectual standards so drastically that the description “improved results” would be meaningless.

An improvement in the quality of teaching would certainly help and to this end the education and training of prospective teachers is an objective that should always be pursued without relaxing one’s vigilance, but this is not a panacea. Just as important is the question, what subjects are given priority at primary as well as secondary-school level.

Cerebrally speaking, human beings are endowed with what neurologists call “bilateral specialisation”, that is, the left and right hemispheres of the brain have different functions. The left hemisphere is the seat of functions that involve quantification, abstraction and conceptualisation, including numerical calculation and writing (in a natural language such as English), while the right hemisphere is home to those cerebral capacities that involve imagination, affectivity (feeling), and the ability to appreciate music — in short, abilities which involve “concretely” qualitative knowledge.

This means, it seems to me, that unless an individual’s mind (which is the “function” of the brain) develops the aptitude of both hemispheres, she or he may be lacking in the performance linked to either one of them. Assuming, of course, that there is no neurological or cerebral shortcoming as far as one or both of the hemispheres are concerned. If a particular part of the right hemisphere does not function properly — such as, for example, the part that is the basis of one’s feelings directed at other people — it would predetermine what an individual is able to develop at all.

I say this because neurologists and neuro-surgeons know from experience that, if a part of the brain is damaged in an accident, a person may lose the ability which depends on that part to a lesser or a greater extent, although it is the case that the impaired function(s) could be taken over by other parts of the brain, especially with the help of occupational therapy.

One may wonder what this has to do with school education, although the direction I am going may be apparent to some, namely, that school education should, ideally, nourish the respective abilities of both hemispheres of the brain. How is this done? Primarily by engaging students at various levels relating to different abilities, namely those of numeracy (through arithmetic, among other disciplines) and literacy (through reading and writing), on the one hand, and imaginative invention and appreciation (through art and music, and by means of contact with nature), as well as the development, in various ways, of social or interpersonal affective capacities such as sympathy (and empathy), on the other.

I would imagine that the development of most, if not all of these abilities is represented in South African school syllabi, but I believe that there is a “disbalance” of some kind in the state of school education, as reflected in the poor matric results. If I am right about this, the “disbalance” in question concerns the teaching of something that depends on, and in turn affects, the functions of both hemispheres of the human brain. This “something” concerns language, specifically that I believe the teaching of language to be less prioritised at school than the teaching of the sciences and mathematics. (Not that the sciences should be neglected, far from it, but neither should language, especially literature, for reasons that should become clear below.) If I am wrong about this, I would appreciate it if teachers would correct me with evidence to the contrary. But even if I am wrong, what I am about to discuss still holds true.

Language — that is, so called natural languages like English, Xhosa, Afrikaans, German, and so on — is the most complex system of meaning that humans know. Just how complex ordinary language (which accommodates hundreds of what Wittgenstein called “language games”) is, is evident from the fact that (as Hubert Dreyfus has observed in his book, “What computers still can’t do”) programmers have not been able to teach computers to understand or make sense of children’s stories, although they (computers) can perform the most complicated computations at lightning speed.

I mention “children’s stories” advisedly here, because I believe there is a reason why this is the case. Computers work with binary code, and programmers have to use this as a basis for software programs, such as World of Warcraft, that incorporate narrative elements in a limiting pre-determined way. But it is one thing to do this, and quite another to programme the computer to show “insight’ into the complexities of narratives of human origin, the way children can when listening to a parent reading a story to them.

The point I am driving at is that NARRATIVE is probably the most universal (and at the same time, most particular, for every individual) linguistic form in the lives of individuals, as every psychoanalyst knows. In fact, from a psychoanalytical perspective, it would be a sign of psychic health for every individual to be able to “tell her or his own story”, instead of allowing it to be shaped exclusively by the social and cultural forces around us.

Add to this that — as Lyotard has shown so persuasively in his classic text, “The postmodern condition: A report on knowledge” — there is a fundamental distinction between “narrative knowledge” and scientific knowledge, and the implications for education may be seen as being far-reaching.

Scientific knowledge, Lyotard points out, is denotative or “constative” in form — that is, scientific statements are formulated as descriptions of some kind, and may be judged true or false on condition that what they refer to must be repeatedly accessible, and that they be formulated in the language relevant to the field in question. The latter condition is always decided on by the scientific authorities or “experts” concerned.

Knowledge is not restricted to scientific knowledge, however, Lyotard is careful to point out. It is a matter of “competence” that pertains to “knowing how to live”, “know-how”, “how to speak”, “how to listen”, and so on. It also operates in a multitude of so-called “language games” (a term borrowed from Wittgenstein), from descriptive utterances (“this is a frog”) to performative (“I hereby declare you man and wife”) and prescriptive (“open the door!”) ones. One might say that, the more “knowledgeable” a person is, the more “competences” she or he displays in pragmatic terms.

Among these “language games” Lyotard singles out (the varieties of) “narrative” — referred to earlier — as the linguistic form employed for transmitting “traditional” knowledge. These include popular stories such as myths or legends, which confer legitimacy on social practices and institutions, in so far as they provide the criteria used by a society to judge and evaluate certain competences on the part of individuals.

Importantly, Lyotard remarks on just how accommodating the narrative form is as far as other language games are concerned — they “easily slip into” narration. For example, in any story, one probably finds denotative (descriptive) statements about the surroundings in which the action takes place, interrogative utterances and implications (direct questions, as well as implied responses to questions and challenges), “deontic” propositions (what the hero or heroine, or the listener, “should” do concerning friends, family, different sexes, children, and so on), as well as evaluative judgments of various kinds. All of these “language games” are governed by certain distinctive rules, without which they would not be recognisable as being different from others.

This brings me to the crux of my argument regarding narrative: as Lyotard has indicated, it is a receptacle for virtually every other kind of language game employed by people — even the language game of mathematics can feature in a narrative, where the heroine is confronted by the need, for instance, to perform an arithmetical calculation to be able to proceed with her actions. In other words, narrative, in whatever form — myth, legend, novel, novella, short story, epic, film narrative — constitutes the linguistic form with the greatest capacity for introducing individuals, including students at school and at university, to a large, potentially unlimited variety of language games (or uses of language).

What should be kept in mind here, is that all disciplines or so-called (school) subjects are instances of “language games”, from mathematics through literature, history and home economics to computer science, chemistry, biology and physics. In other words, students have to master the rules of these to be able to perform adequately in them. Recall, too, that I have referred to what I believe to be a teaching “disbalance” at South African schools (about which I could be wrong). This disbalance consists, as far as I can judge, in the neglect of the kind of teaching that has narratives of various kinds — but especially in literature, which itself includes a variety of narrative and other language games, such as drama — as its subject.

While it is understandable that a country like South Africa would be seen, at this time in its history, by any incumbent government as having to prioritise technological and (related to this) informational, as well as natural scientific education, what the relevant authorities do not seem to realise is that the exposure of students to as many (and as varied) narratives as possible, is the best way for them to learn, not only one language game, but many language games in what Lyotard calls a “tightly woven … web”. Not only does it give them access to many different uses of language (in one narrative context), each governed by a different set of rules, but it also provides the opportunity to learn to be flexible in their use of language (and therefore in their thinking).

One should add to this that, in neurological terms, it is a way of engaging both hemispheres of the human brain — those that enable abstract, conceptual functions, as well as those that involve more concrete ways of imagining and (very importantly) occasions for identifying sympathetically with certain characters in narratives (for example a tragic heroine like Antigone or Iphigenia).

The discussion of Lyotard’s work should explain why I said, earlier, that language is the most complex meaning-system available to humans — I should really have said: the most complex concatenation of “systems” of meaning, considering that it consists of a multitude of “language games”, or discourses. To neglect the most accommodating of linguistic forms, namely narrative in all its variety, is therefore to deprive students at school of the opportunity to learn how to understand the interplay between a variety of such language games in ONE linguistic form. The moral of the story: teach school kids as much language (especially in the form of literature) as possible, without neglecting the sciences, but remembering that the sciences, too, would benefit from what they will learn through narrative.