The Secret History and the Philosophies of Education

This is not a book review.

Just like Julian Morrow in The Secret History, I wish every teacher would start their class by saying, ‘I hope we’re all ready to leave the phenomenal world and join the sublime?’.

Here, Julian hints at how a classroom should be: an experience.

It seems strange to me to consider my old classrooms as anything other than a hierarchical symbol, wherein existed an overpowering teacher, who was the giver of knowledge, and a room full of docile students, the recipients. As a child, that classroom experience was less sublime and more terrifying. The supposed giver of knowledge was a textbook version of what a teacher should be — strict, authoritative — and the recipients of this relationship taken from the same book — meek, attentive. There wasn’t any preamble like how Morrow does when a teacher entered a classroom. In fact, when they did, a cold and heavy silence usually followed.

The school system that I was a part of almost a decade ago, closely resembled an idealist philosophy of education. The teacher was the Guru, and hence they were required to exude authority. There was a differential/deferential position between teachers and students, along with a hierarchy among the knowledge that was made available to the latter. Mathematics and Science were top tier. Social Studies, ranked below. Accounts and Economics — words which meant little to me then — were the worst of the lot. These aspects of idealism are also seen in Morrow’s class. His few self-selected students study Greek Classics — one of the highly-revered courses still considered mandatory in many countries in the West. His students have to be “worthy”; he calls them “perfectionists’’. And he considers himself to be superior to them. (‘I am your teacher,’ he once said, ‘because I know more than you do’.) Morrow’s students consider him “divine”, use words such as “benevolent dictator” to describe him, which is in itself an oxymoron of sorts. In this world, a dictator could rule if he is benevolent.

Despite the idealist sentiments, I don’t think either Morrow or his students consider themselves idealists. In fact, they are more inclined to be pragmatists. The pragmatism in Morrow’s teaching method comes from how he believed a classroom experience should look and feel. Morrow’s classroom as described in the book is a “luxurious hothouse of a room, flowers everywhere in the dead of winter” because he believed his students would learn better in a “non-scholastic atmosphere”, which looks a bit incredulous in my imagination as it is in sharp contradiction to how my classroom looked like — an unenthusiastic structure of rows and rows of benches with students in their identical uniforms hunched over the furniture and writing away as though an invisible clock was running out of time. Morrow also considered the flow of knowledge from him — the repository — to his students — the empty vessels — as the opposite of work. In his own words, the transfer of knowledge was “the most glorious kind of play”.

Henry — one of Morrow’s six students and one of our six protagonists — perhaps calls himself more of a pragmatist than his peers. He takes a stance against standardized tests and is more inclined to experiment with the knowledge taught to him than others. Only Bunny, among the gang of six, could be argued to be a follower of idealism. His perception of women as someone who could only “treat the home” and who were not “designed as he himself was to study Philosophy, Art, or Higher Reasoning” alludes to the ancient thought when women were considered not worthy enough to gain higher knowledge.

Personally, I don’t think Henry and the gang are either idealists or pragmatists. I think they fall somewhere in the middle and could possibly pass off as realists. They want to experiment with the knowledge they are given but they still don’t consider adapting to the way the world works. They still have the attitude of having a religious idolization of Morrow and also know that there will come a day when they — the students — would have to “transcend” him — the teacher. Henry, like his peers, has also put Morrow at a higher pedestal so much so that he hangs on to words such as these: ‘Is death really so terrible a thing? It seems terrible to you because you are young, but who is to say he is not better off now than you are?’. Henry refuses to learn about the world in any way other than through his books and what is taught to him inside Morrow’s classroom. The anecdote about Henry not being aware of the moon landing is funny, but, as a twenty-first-century student, also very weird. His objection to SATs sounds superficial as it is just for “aesthetic” reasons. It is difficult to imagine how someone as rigid as him would go on to live in a world that shows a yearly progression of epic proportions. Perhaps, the text hints at privilege more than it speaks of it. Henry with his silver-spoon upbringing can afford to hide from the world and still continue to survive. But the world isn’t the same for Richard — the other of the six — who shivers to near-death in his cold room in the winter and doesn’t have a cushion of trust fund behind him. This variation in social and economic status also speaks to me about how different each of us inside our own classrooms was, not only in terms of money or social status, but also in relation to our minds, and our personalities. Our inherent sense of being. Yet, when confined to the four walls of classroom space, we found ways to be fairly inclusive to each other, regardless of the apparent and implicit differences.

And while we are on the topic, let’s talk about Richard.

Richard is an imperfect, morally gray character. On one hand, he is dishonest to the point of being untrustworthy, but on the other, if the gang had to put money on anyone to keep their circumstance a secret, they could, without hesitation, bet on him. Perhaps, it is his knack for being dishonest that makes him trustworthy. And this circle is as far as a paradox could go. Richard is also one character in the novel whose philosophical standpoint is unclear to the readers. He shows hints of being an idealist with the way he treats Morrow (benevolent dictator being his words). Richard genuinely believes that Morrow saw people for their “best qualities’’ but what he perhaps doesn’t see is that Morrow is only willing to look at those qualities that make them superior beings. In a way, a self-fulfilling prophecy is at play here — Morrow’s certain expectation of the standard of his students makes Richard behave in the way implicitly demanded by Morrow. But, the way Richard shows an adulation towards Morrow as his “protector” could speak less about his philosophical ideologies and more about the lack of a strong parental influence in his life. Richard also doesn’t show any hints of being a realist or a pragmatist — he doesn’t feel the need to experiment with the knowledge he is given, nor does he seem to adapt to the changing times. He is almost like a third party looking into the lives of the other five through a passive lens. And that makes the most prudent sense since he is the narrator of the story. The more neutral he is, the more immersive a reader can be in the plot.

Moving beyond our main characters and the setting that these six find themselves in — the classroom, their mansions, the forest — we find traces of a different educational philosophy in the campus of Hampden college itself. In sharp contrast to Morrow’s elite class, Hampden is more Existential, bordering on being Postmodernist. This education institution values “creative expression” and the ideology of “learning by doing”. Each student and each group are allowed ways to deal with achievement and grief — both unmistakably important parts of life. Hamden almost reads to me as a colorful background to Morrow’s dark classroom despite the flowers in winter and the flow of old, classical knowledge. It is indeed the vibrancy of Hamden that Richard leaves to join Morrow’s dark discussions.

All these nuances of an academic setting are extremely relatable to the students of a modern education system — which probably includes the majority of us. This also speaks highly of Donna Tartt’s writing. With lines such as ‘Beauty is terror. Whatever we call it, we quiver before it.’, I get a sense that there exists a sophistication in Donna Tartt’s writing which makes even the most terrifying events in the novel seem beautiful.

While Hampden plays in the background, I can clearly visualize my old school — the red, blue, and yellow of the house flags swaying along with the stale wind, and the green from the freshly-trimmed hedges giving a cheerful backdrop to an otherwise bleak environment. As a student, I was neither an idealist or a pragmatist. I didn’t even know the meanings of those words then. But, in hindsight, I was probably more of an ardent follower of a system that was, in ways more than one, idealistic. And as someone forced to follow an idealist system and hence asked to swallow the inherent need of any human to express their creative needs, I think it made me a follower of a dictatorial structure. But, perhaps, if the dictatorship was aligned for the betterment of the population and not against it, then I could have been able to give my all to the system itself. Alas, unlike the characters in the novel who, with a ghastly dose of foreshadowing in the first few pages of the novel, give their all to their divine teacher and the ideology that they so believed in, I cannot in any way condone what the system has made me become — a meek follower rather than a creative thinker.