PLATO: Yes.
BURNS: Yes. And then Aristotle in turn had a lifelong impact on no less a figure than Alexander the Great, if I remember correctly.
PLATO: You remember correctly.
BURNS: Okay! Boy, what a pedagogical lineage! Maybe, I know we have so much to discuss this evening, but maybe this extraordinary tradition of mentorship speaks to another subject much in the news these days. I mean whether online teaching could replace classroom teaching. Did you know, Plato, that elite universities like Harvard and M.I.T. and Stanford have decided to create massive online open courses that students can take for free? Tests and quizzes will be embedded in the online material, and at the end of the course the students will get a certificate—not real credit, mind you, just a certificate—showing they’ve passed?
PLATO: Yes, and these MOOCs will be taught by the regular faculty, which means that I am able to have Nobel laureates teaching me cosmology and particle physics.
BURNS: Which, as several publications have pointed out, could create a campus tsunami.6 Star professors, for which students—or rather their parents—shell out hundreds of thousand of dollars to sit at the feet of, will be accessible to anyone with Internet access.
PLATO: I love the Internet.
BURNS: Yes, I noticed. Do you always carry your Google Chromebook with you?
PLATO: Yes. Ever since I visited the Googleplex.
BURNS: Fascinating! Well, I wonder whether, despite your fondness for the Internet, you’d agree with me that massive online courses, even taught by the most famous professors of our day, being entirely impersonal, will never take the place of the intimate relationship between teacher and student—intimate, I mean, at least when the relationship is really working. I mean, maybe online courses are adequate when the subjects are practical—say, business courses—but what about your own field, philosophy? Even if they had you, Plato, delivering the online open-access lectures, I wonder if it would have the same impact as being in your presence.
PLATO: Of course it wouldn’t.
BURNS: You agree with me!
PLATO: I do. In a field like philosophy, where understanding involves not so much the reception of knowledge but rather a transformation of the receiver itself, so that the receiver, which is to say the student, can generate the knowledge for him- or herself, then the physical presence of the teacher is essential. This is the pedagogical paradox. The person of the teacher is required precisely because the knowledge itself is non-transferable from teacher to student.
BURNS: Absolutely fascinating. So you’re saying the teacher can’t transfer his knowledge into the student.
PLATO: Can’t transfer his or her knowledge into the student.
BURNS: And that makes his or her presence all the more essential.
PLATO: Exactly. The fire for the subject and the fire for the teacher are intermingled in the receptive student. It’s only by proximity to the beloved teacher, himself or herself on fire with love for the subject, that the fire can leap over and be kindled in the student in a self-generating blaze of understanding.7
BURNS: Or to put it another way, a brain isn’t a computer, and we’re not blank hard drives just waiting to be filled with data. People learn from people they love and remember the things that arouse emotion.8
PLATO: I agree with you.
BURNS: Well, I guess it stands to reason you’d agree with me, since I just realized that I got it from you! Every time I think I have an original thought I think a little more and realize I’ve gotten it from someone else, more often than not from you.
PLATO: There are no original thoughts. All knowledge is recollection.
BURNS: I’ve often thought that, too, and now I know where I got it! The Meno, right?9
PLATO: I think rather you must have recollected it for yourself.
BURNS: Thank you! That’s giving me a lot of credit! Well, I just can’t express adequately what a thrill it is to have you—all of you—here participating in this dialogue. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime privilege.
Okay, so let’s begin. I might as well inform the audience up front that there has been some controversy about the title of tonight’s discussion. In fact, one of our panelists was so dismayed that we called our event “How to Raise an Exceptional Child” that she was tempted to cancel, and we’re grateful that she overcame her deeply considered reservations and has joined us tonight. After all, it’s in the spirit of dialogue that the best way to deal with disagreements is to bring the disputants together and let them go at it. Isn’t that right, Plato?
PLATO: Just as thinking is the soul speaking to itself (Theaetetus 189e), forcing itself to articulate its reasons and exposing those reasons to evaluation as if to different aspects of its own self, so we enlarge our thinking by bringing others into the dialogue.
BURNS: Well, then, in the spirit of dialogue, which is nothing less, Plato has just told us, than the spirit of thinking itself, I’m going to begin by asking each of our panelists how they understand the title of tonight’s dialogue. Dr. Munitz, why don’t we start with you?
MUNITZ: How I understand this title is that it perpetrates and legitimates the most criminal of falsehoods, a falsehood not just of the mind but of the heart and of the soul, a falsehood that stands as the root cause of all the self-inflicted misery of humankind through the ages. How I understand this title is that it is premised upon a perversion.
BURNS: Strong words, Dr. Munitz. Could you say a bit more?
MUNITZ: I could say a great deal more. The desire to raise an exceptional child is a desire to sacrifice the integrity of the child, to nip the tender bud of the child’s own nature before it has had a chance to poke itself above the ground. And for whom is this child’s integrity sacrificed? Certainly not for the child itself, since nothing worse can befall a person than to be deprived of the possibility of ever becoming itself, that is, of coming into its rightful inheritance of autonomous personhood.
The sacrifice is therefore performed not for the sake of the child but for the sake of the parent. It is a criminal act of brutality, and what makes it even more criminally brutal is that it is brutally experienced by the child, who registers it in her psyche as an assault, and as such it is stored in the child’s body for a lifetime, as all trauma is somatically stored, even if the memories are so repressed as to be irretrievable. The unknowing parent, who is operating without integrity of her own, having been subjected to precisely the same evisceration of autonomous selfhood, has, little wonder, no insight into the interior of her child, does not have a clue that such an interiority even exists, for she herself can retrieve no memories of what it was like to be a child. So she is fancy-free to regard the child not as a person but as a project, her project, to produce, to quote the title of this book I have not read, “an off-the-charts child” whom she can flaunt as a sign of her own superiority, since flaunting superiority is all that she knows how to do in order to assure herself that she herself exists, the legacy of her own brutal rearing. And so it persists, from generation to generation. The produced child, the project of its parent, is deprived of what ought to be its own project of self-actualization and autonomy, from which, in the healthy state of affairs, proceeds the stable assurance of its integral existence and inalienable individual worth.
BURNS: So if you were to modify the title of tonight’s event, it would be …?
MUNITZ: “How to Raise Your Child So That It Will Realize Its Own Personhood and Have the Strength to Resist the Criminal Authoritarianism of Others.”
BURNS: Okay, well, I think we can see the outlines of a difference of opinion emerging here.
MUNITZ: This is not opinion, Mr. Moderator, but established scientific fact, and those who continue to deny it demonstrate, by their very denial, how deeply stored within their bodies is the abuse they cannot access. My conclusions are scientifically established from decades working with my clients, tracking their neuroses back to their childhoods, as well as my research into the childhood experiences of some
of the most exceptional of people, the famous and the infamous, from the greatest artists to the greatest thinkers to the greatest criminals. And by the way, all such people can rightly be called “exceptional,” which again exposes the fatal errors in the title of tonight’s event.
BURNS: So it sounds as if you’re almost suggesting that greatness is itself a symptom of a disorder, something we should cure rather than cultivate.
MUNITZ: Greatness is, by definition, an abnormality. The normal state of affairs is demonstrably not to be great. So the production of this abnormality demands that extreme measures be taken. In this regard I concur with the purely factual presupposition underlying the title of this book which I have not read. It does indeed take the brutal intervention of a warrior mother to produce off-the-charts children, though quite often their off-the-chartness will duplicate the brutality of the parenting and take on a monstrous form. But even when it does not, even when the greatness is of a non-monstrous nature, it is the moral presupposition of tonight’s event, as opposed to its merely factual presupposition, which I am here to protest.
BURNS: And could you spell out what this moral presupposition is?
MUNITZ: That the raising of the—may the good Lord help us—exceptional child is something that a parent ought to want. This is a normative proposition, signaled by the word ought, and thrusts us into the moral dimension, a dimension of which warrior mothers are devastatingly oblivious.
BURNS: Well, on that minor note of agreement—right, there was some agreement in there, wasn’t there?—why don’t we turn to Professor Zee, and ask her what she makes of the title of tonight’s event? I imagine you don’t have the same difficulties with it that Dr. Munitz does.
ZEE: Well, actually I agree with just about everything that Dr. Munitz has said.
BURNS: You do?
MUNITZ: No, you don’t. You can’t possibly!
ZEE, turning to face Munitz: Yes, I do! I really do! I agree with you one hundred percent that it’s the parents’ obligation to see that their children’s best potential is realized, so that the children can become the super-best people they can be, to realize their very own personhood!
MUNITZ: And what do you mean by “best” potential? Who decides what this “best” potential is? You, no doubt.
ZEE: Well, of course, at least when the child is very young, the parent has to be the authority on what’s best. I mean, let’s face it, a child is in no position to consider the choice between, say, playing video games for hours on end or, instead, memorizing her boring multiplication tables. I mean, what child is going to willingly stop playing video games and open up her arithmetic book? So of course a parent has to set the agenda. A child doesn’t have the experience or knowledge to know what’s best. She can’t look ahead. She’s thinking only of immediate satisfaction, of instant gratification, and can’t see beyond the drudgery of memorizing her multiplication tables or practicing her scales on the piano or violin. She can’t possibly see the benefits of the drudgery and boredom and can’t imagine what mastery is going to feel like, how much pleasure it will eventually give her! How can she imagine that when she hasn’t even experienced it yet? So this particular pleasure is just unimaginable to her.
MUNITZ: It will give her such pleasure because it will win for her the withholding love and approval of her parents, who have made this mastery the condition of bestowing any positive feedback.
ZEE: Well, maybe, at least partly, but that’s not such a bad thing, since that’s going to motivate her to do what she has to do. Since a child can’t see the benefits for herself, her parents have to provide the motivation, get her to stop playing her fun video games and go memorize her multiplication tables, and part of the motivation is going to be the approval and disapproval that the parents hand out. And a little disapproval is not going to scar a child for life. I think it’s a big mistake to think our children are little breakable porcelain dolls who will shatter to smithereens if we exert a bit of pressure on them, or show them disapproval when they’re not living up to the standards that they can’t possibly understand the importance of for themselves.
MUNITZ: Now, some of what you’re saying right now sounds, on the face of it, reasonable to the point of utter vacuity. Obviously, a parent knows that there are certain skills that the child must master, such as multiplication, and so it’s the obligation of the parent to make sure that those skills are secured—with great sensitivity to the child’s own capacities and rate of learning and always, above all, a sense of the child’s personal dignity, which will prohibit the tactics of disparagement and belittlement which a combatant mother, a warrior mother, if you will, so aggressively employs. But I suspect that putting forth such trivial claims does not account for the international notoriety of your book, and I am very curious as to why you are trying to evade your own controversial claims. I suspect that you yourself, having been raised by the draconian methods you advocate, are driven by a desperate desire to please people, most especially mother figures, a role I am temporarily assuming for you, precisely because I am displaying my disapproval of you. The more I reprimand you, the more you will try to appease me, even to the point of disavowing your own published thesis, thus enacting before us a dramatic demonstration of the lifelong dependence on the psychological narcotic of approval that results from the parenting techniques you peddle.
In fact, I strongly suspect that when you published your views you had no idea they were even so controversial, since it seems axiomatic to you that all parents desire highly achieving offspring who will attest to their own superiority as parents. You never once, in all the pages of your book, think to examine the fundamental premise of whether it is in the child’s own interests, as opposed to the interests of the parents, to be “off the charts,” especially given the methods that are required to produce such a child. A child is not a breakable porcelain doll indeed!
ZEE: Excuse me, I don’t mean to be confrontational, but I have to ask you how you know that I never examine this premise if you haven’t read my book? Audience laughter. Zee smiles at the audience, and is answered with scattered applause. I mean, it’s been my experience that my most vociferous critics haven’t bothered to read my book, or if they have, they’ve misunderstood it because they haven’t gotten the context.
MUNITZ: In my line of work we learn to deduce a great deal. But it doesn’t take great exertions of my analytic powers to perceive that your title is meant to hook like-minded parents who will never question the highly questionable premise of the desirability of raising an off-the-charts child. In other words, your readership consists of parents who are not interested in raising a person at all, but rather an organ grinder’s little performing monkey that they can exhibit to win the clapping of hands and the tossing of coins.
ZEE: Not at all! Like any parent, I’m only interested in the future happiness of my children and, unlike so many parents today, I don’t think it’s in the interest of my children to have to win their approval and be their best friends. That’s taking the easy way out. That’s putting your own interests before those of the child. Turning to the audience. Isn’t that what we’re all interested in, the greatest future happiness of our children? Here’s the missing premise, as far as I’m concerned. There’s a deep happiness that comes from mastery and high achievement. Dr. Munitz says that greatness is an abnormality, and of course it is, at least in one sense, in the sense that it’s rare. But “abnormal” doesn’t mean “undesirable.” Many things that are rare are also desirable, and high achievement is an example. And I would go even further and say that one of the ways that we evaluate our achievement is by the approval and adulation that it garners, so there’s a deep happiness in the applause, too, and there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s really a form of humility—that we are not the proper judges of our own accomplishment, because of course we’re biased to think well of ourselves, but we seek objective standards set by others. When others approve of us, it means we have met those standards, that we’re n
ot just stroking our own egos. I mean, you, Dr. Munitz, are an off-the-charts achiever! Why did you tell us, and with such evident self-satisfaction—such justified self-satisfaction—that your book has sold a million copies? Why have you pushed yourself to achieve all that you have? Why did you get your advanced degrees and write all your many books, and face down your critics and do all the other unpleasant things that achievement requires, if you don’t yourself know the greater pleasure that comes from pushing yourself to your limits and doing something extraordinary and then having a million people buy your book in recognition that what you’ve done is extraordinary?
MUNITZ: I do all this because I believe in what I am saying, and believe that if I don’t say the truth then nobody will. It’s not for my own pathetic need to assert my own importance in the world, to demonstrate my own superiority and have my name on many flapping lips that I am writing, but rather because it is my firm conviction that I have something important to say.
ZEE: And if you didn’t have something important to say, then how would you feel about yourself? Would you feel as good about yourself?
BURNS: Why don’t we let Plato answer that question, since he certainly has had many important things to say, and on so many topics.
PLATO: The question seemed particularly directed to Dr. Munitz, and I would like to hear her answer. Then, if you like, I will try to answer it myself.
BURNS: Fair enough. Dr. Munitz?
MUNITZ: I prefer not to answer the question in the flagrantly personal terms in which it was posed. The question is not whether I, or even whether most of us—who have been subjected to the psychopathology of everyday parenting—have a driving need to achieve, as an alcoholic has a need for the bottle or an addict a need for the needle, in order to feel, at least temporarily, the high of believing ourselves the superior person our parents made us feel we were absolutely required to be in order to be loved. That is not the question. The question is whether that is how people ought to feel. Again, the normative, the moral question. And here I answer unequivocally that it is not.
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