What's The Point?

What’s the Point?

I’ve been thinking about this question for a while. It is a question so prevalent in the schools, where I have spent most of my adult life, though the question has different manifestations over the course of the days. “Is this going to be on the test?” “What does this book mean?” “Why are we learning this?” “Why are you teaching this?” “Do you have specific objectives.” “Am I ever going to need this?” Just today I was given a directive that requires that every course proposal we present for professional development “include detailed descriptions of each topic including theories & major points discussed in the module.” Detailed descriptions including theories and major points? My goodness, people write whole books on various theories, and they (who are ‘they’ exactly?) require now that each course proposal include ‘detailed descriptions’ of every theory and every major point to be discussed in the course. ‘They’ must be kidding! If a new theory or major point arises during the semester or year or decade, well, what then? I keep thinking of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Butch turns around and checks on the posse following him and Sundance. “Who are those guys?” he asks. “They’re good!” Soon, ‘they’ will kill Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

What is the point of this question ‘what is the point?’ I think it may be an attempt to control and delimit experience. “What is the point?” is an instrumentalist question, and it means that unless the answer to the question is sufficiently clear and the point clearly evident from the outset, then the whole activity is meaningless. I think the question has something to do with economy: the question announces the unwillingness to devote any energies to an activity whose aim is not explicitly clear from the outset so that the participant knows exactly when the activity might be declared ‘finished.’ There must be no extraneous, unplanned for events or ideas. Second, I think the question demands that each road taken be a straight, clearly defined and eminently public one so that no one can or need deviate a step off the defined direction. Nothing need be gained but what is explicitly, publicly, pre-established as a legitimate end, and nothing need be ventured but what is carefully circumscribed. Certainly, the question renders contingency non-existent, if not impossible. Yet, I think, it is contingency that makes creativity possible.

We’re reading a text in my class, and students are struggling to discover ‘what’s the point?’ They want to easily find some connection between the manifest content and their lives, and they don’t want to interrogate some latent content. What is not manifest has no existence. They want the book to teach a direct lesson. Without the lesson, ‘what’s the point?’

I think I am weary of lessons and points.