Shape

381 Latin and Greek, and Mathematics
While objective thought translates everything into results and helps all mankind to cheat, by
copying these off and reciting them by rote, subjective thought puts everything in process and
omits the results.
It’s the same problem for everyone when what’s taught and what’s learned are translated
into objective results that can be recited by rote. What are schools for and why
bother to go if teachers cheat and kids follow their example? Without subjective
thought, everything in process is another arrangement of given units—the only task
is to combine them and count the results. It’s the same both to teach and to learn.
Schooling is senseless—there’s little to say when there’s nothing new to see and do.
But what does Kierkegaard know about education today? He lived in nineteenthcentury
Denmark and was mostly ignored. Miss H—— didn’t think drawing (subjective
thought) belonged in the classroom and neither do the citizens of twenty-first-century
Massachusetts. It’s the law—good schools mean hard work and the chance to fail on
objective tests. It’s tough, it’s fair, and it’s a huge success. Everyone is asked the same
questions and trained to give the same answers. There’s no ambiguity. Everyone is
prepared for the same future that’s been decided in advance by someone else, and
everyone is held accountable in the same way. It’s simple enough: everyone is the
same and sees the same things. Of course, 1870 was different—it was another time
and another law. The decision was easy. Massachusetts hired Smith. He had a plan, he
put it in place, and he made it work.
I find that not only does every person when he is taught rationally, and intelligently in the same
way that he is taught Latin, and Greek, and mathematics, learn to draw well, but also to paint
well, and to design well.
Then, as it does now, design mattered. It was drawing, and Smith wanted to
teach drawing in the classroom along with language and mathematics. His teaching
methods relied heavily on copying figures drawn on the blackboard, memorizing forms
of objects and arrangements of them—was this vocabulary and syntax?—and repetition
and practice. It was drill, drill, drill. Smith justified this in two ways: (1) copying
was the only rational way to learn because drawing was essentially copying, and (2) it
was the only practical way to teach to large classes that met just for short periods. This
sounds pretty grim and horrible, and it goes hard against the emphasis on creative
activity and open-ended experiment that’s standard today in most design education.
That’s why there are studios instead of classrooms. And that’s why students want
them. But perhaps there’s something to Smith’s pedagogy. Copying needn’t be as
empty as it seems at first nor always produce rote results—combining predefined units
in the way Kierkegaard scorns. Look again. Copying may hold something creative and
original.
With shapes and rules, things change. That’s been an important lesson throughout
this book, and it’s still the same. So it should come as no surprise that copying is in
many ways at the root of calculating. When I apply a rule A fi B, I find a copy of A and
replace it with a copy of B. An identity in the schema