Immeasurable Outcomes And The Humanity Of Education

The subheading of Gayle Greene’s new book Immeasurable Outcomes: Teaching Shakespeare in the Age of the Algorithm may leave readers with the impression that this is a very niche work; instead, they’ll fine a spirited work in defense of a heartfelt humanist approach to teaching and learning. Rather than a guide for teaching Shakespeare, Greene looks at questions about the larger purpose of education itself and how the answers to those questions play out in the day to day life in the classroom.

“The impetus for this book was anger,” Greene opens, “but that turned to something sadder as I saw how much ground the liberal arts have lost, what a beating we’ve taken.” Greene has spent more than fifty years teaching, much of it at Scripps College, a women’s liberal arts college that is part of the Claremont College consortium in California, and she makes a case for the liberal arts in a world that increasing devalues them.

In a phone interview, she expressed concern over the “crisis of humanities” being fed by high-stakes standardized testing in K-12 schools. Students have become trained to follow algorithms and rubrics “that spell it all out for them,” leading to “blighted imaginations.” Education, she said, “is about human development, not workforce preparation,” and this book argues for the human touch in education rather than ”decontextualized math and reading skills devoid of any purpose other than passing the test.”

Teaching and learning are things done with people, by people, for people, dependent on the trust and goodwill, presence, participation, responsiveness of human beings.

The book lays out the forces that Greene sees arrayed against the human heart of education, the blunt and brutal reductive nature of trying to cram the complex processes of human thought and growth into numbers and ratings. She champions reading, and talks about things like “joyful enlightenment through engagement with a text” even as she acknowledges that “technocrats hate it when we talk like this.”

Greene carefully and with well-chosen detail shows how this works out in her classroom, how teaching can be “an art, not an algorithm.” Her chosen subject is Shakespeare, so we get plenty of that in the book, though not necessarily for the usual classics-oriented reasons (”He makes us feel good about being human”).

Greene shows, as clearly as any writer, the many balls that a teacher juggles as she teaches. Greene walks us through some of her class sessions, taking us both through the ideas she is trying to explore with her students even as she tracks the reactions and interactions of the students themselves. It’s a tour de force in terms of capturing a hugely complicated process on the page.

Greene calls the book “so old-fashioned,” and in its view of teaching as a human interaction that needs only “a teacher, tables, chairs, and students in a room,” she may be correct. But she makes a compelling case for finding the heart of education not in spreadsheets or data points, but in the hearts and minds of the human beings in that room.