Game Playing Education at Harvard

BY THE normally accepted criteria of this society, Harvard people have made it. For that reason many would consider the issue of educational reform here as either merely "academic," or in a way irrelevant to the problems facing our society. It is neither. Do Harvard grads really have it made? And if so, what is it that they have? Economic success? A bolstered ago? That there is widespread malaise at this university is apparent to anyone with any contact with the students. This malaise is unnecessary. Education can become a self-fulfilling activity, liberating in and of itself.

We are here because we are better game players than others our age. We may even be more competent than others our age. But facile game playing (learning to "fake it") and competence do not imply personal fulfillment any more than rationality presumes goodness. As Herbert Gintis says, "We must define the individual not by what he has -in the form of individual commodities-but by what he is and what he does -by his ability to undertake self-fulfilling activities."

Education, more than anything, is training for the industrial system: the same traits which make you a successful student make for your economic success: accepting discipline (e. g. being punctual), subordinancy, cognitive over affective thinking (emotions and full personal involvement are systematically excluded), and motivation for external rewards (e. g. grades, honors) rather than for the intrinsic qualities of the activity itself. None of these values make for personal fulfillment; none of these values challenge the basic precepts of our society: education conceived exclusively as work merely perpetuates the production of what Erich From calls the "eternal suckling"-people sapped of their inner motivation, dependent upon external stimuli to keep them moving.

The fundamental educational question is whether you conceive of education as work or as play (in their broadest sense). Work is that which you dislike doing, but perform for the sake of external rewards. At school this takes the form of grades. In society it means money, status, privilege. Play is that which you do out of a joy for the activity itself. Discipline, external motivation and all of the above elicited values become unnecessary, indeed, destructive to education as play. Education conceived wholly as work, and all of the coercive measures which accompany that assumption, clearly make for the malaise of this place. And end to the false dichotomy of work/play must come about. It has profound implications for our economy and society.

The system breeds obedience, frustration, dependence and fear: a kind of gentle violence that is usually turned against oneself, one that is sorrowful and full of guilt, but a violence nevertheless, and one realizes that what is done in the schools is deeply connected to what we are doing now in Vietnam. That is: we don't teach hate in the schools, or murder, but we do isolate the individual; we empty him of life by ignoring or suppressing his impulse toward life; we breed in him a lack of respect for it, a loss of love-and thus we produce gently "good" but threatened men, men who can kill without passion, out of duty and obedience, men who have in themselves little sense of the vivid life being lost or the moral strength to refuse.

So said Peter Marin in his classic, "The Fiery Vchemence." With the 17 proposals for educational innovation in the open letter below, we are asking you, Faculty and students, to have "the moral strength to refuse." to refuse to perpetuate any longer a hierarchical system which dispenses its elite distinctions according to how thoroughly you suppress your emotional life, how competitively hostile you can be, how completely dependent on, and disciplined by, the system you are. We ask that you refuse to continue repressing your frustrations with this place while waiting for that ultimate consumer good: the Harvard degree. It is absolutely vital that we realize that, while the issue of the persistence of inequality in the educational system, and the society at large, is an important one, we the elite, are as alienated from products of our labors, from our bodies and our senses, as anyone else. The difference is that we supply brain labor, others, physical labor, and that brain laborers earn more money than physical laborers. That is all: for we all remain in a state of enforced passivity fully dependent on the system, adjusted, as we are, to the "real competitive world." (Why that "real world" is always competitive, and why it necessarily has to be that way, is never adequately explained.)

To adjust well to the world of reality means a splitting of the person. It means that the person turns his back on much of himself because it is dangerous. But it is now clear that by so doing, he loses a great deal too, for these depths are also the source of all his joys, his ability to love, to laugh, and, most important for us, to be creative. By protecting himself against the hell within himself, he also cuts, himself off from the heaven within. In the extreme instance, we have the obsessional person, flat, tight, rigid, frozen, controlled, cautious, who can't laugh or play or love, or be silly or trusting or childish. His imagination, his intuitions, his softness, his emotionality tend to strangulated or distorted.