The Educational Experience by Donald Barthelme
"The Educational Experience" by Donald Barthelme presents a critical examination of contemporary education and its relationship with history. The narrative highlights a fragmented and disjointed educational system that presents information as random facts lacking coherence. Barthelme suggests that this reflects a deeper commentary on the value of human history, proposing that the past consists of disconnected pieces that do not form a meaningful whole. Through various cultural references, from mythological characters to classical music, the work illustrates how historical narratives have been trivialized and transformed, ultimately questioning the authenticity of both students' and educators' engagement with their education.
The portrayal of students reveals their apathy and desire to escape the learning environment, while educators appear equally lost, uncertain about how to address the disconnect. This mutual disinterest emphasizes a broader critique of the educational experience, suggesting that both parties are trapped in a performative cycle of pretending to value the content being presented. Barthelme's exploration raises important questions about the purpose and effectiveness of education, highlighting the challenges of reconnecting with the complexities of Western civilization's history in a meaningful way. Overall, the work serves as a thought-provoking commentary on the state of education and its implications for understanding our collective past.
The Educational Experience by Donald Barthelme
Excerpted from an article in Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition
First published: 1973 (collected in Forty Stories, 1987)
Type of work: Short story
The Work
“The Educational Experience” offers Barthelme’s view not only of what current education consists—random facts with no coherence—but perhaps also of the worth of the entire sum of humankind’s history: nothing. Barthelme’s theory of history is contained in a fractured quotation from Wittgenstein that is offered by the “group leader” toward the end of the story: “The world is everything that was formerly the case.” People are nothing but the bodies of their predecessors, which do not form into a coherent whole, as the chunks of citation and reference remain undigested. This past ranges from the Fisher King of the Holy Grail quest legends (whom T. S. Eliot claimed to have included in The Waste Land) to the television character Sergeant Preston of the Yukon.
Time has itself changed all those things from the past of which education consists. Another of the grail motifs that Eliot appropriated, the Chapel Perilous, has been turned into a bomb farm, and Antonio Vivaldi’s concerto The Four Seasons has become The Semesters. Education is clearly no fun. The students are not allowed to smoke, but the narrator reflects that this is undoubtedly “necessary to the preservation of our fundamental ideas.” Both the pretensions of the educators and the disinterest of the students are criticized: The students are told that they will be both more beautiful and more employable, but they are only in a hurry to get back on the bus that has brought them to this exposition. Those doing the educating are similarly in the dark: Several of the students are “off in a corner, playing with the animals,” and the professors are unsure whether to “tell them to stop, or urge them to continue.” As the narrator concedes, “perplexities of this kind are not infrequent, in our business.”
Neither the students nor the teachers believe what is being said, but both groups bravely play along as if they do. Both, it is clear, have lost touch with the real history of Western civilization, given that it has to be visited on a whirlwind tour. At the same time, however, this history has become both more trivial and more threatening, so that recovering it may not be as simple a thing as merely a change of method.
Bibliography
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