Working Backwards: PTA and Pragmatist Pedagogy (or, Why School is Shit)

I recently stumbled upon this clip of Paul Thomas Anderson explaining why he didn’t go to film school. PTA was part of the so-called ‘video store’ generation of filmmakers, which also includes such luminaries as Quentin Tarantino, David Fincher, and Steven Soderburgh, who learnt their craft by, well, watching lots and lots of VCR films. He attended NYU’s film programme for two days before dropping out, using the reimbursed tuition to make his short feature, Cigarettes and Coffee (1993). “The mentality of film school”, he laments to Charlie Rose, “is we’ll start out with Potemkin. First day in class: Here’s Potemkin. Every kid in the class is gonna fall down!” Instead, he argues, the teaching should be done backwards; with the glint of a maverick, “start with Terminator 2, and work backwards, trace the heritage.” Substitute Potemkin for Scorcese and everyone becomes energised; only then do you go backwards, explore “who he was riffing off, what patterns he built upon.”

I think PTA hits on something important here. It’s a type of pedagogy that actually conforms to the dynamic of learning, of inquiry. You can think of generalising this across subjects: I know, for instance, that if physics began by interrogating the explosivity of fossil fuel combustion, or the mystery of an iPhone’s internal workings, I’d be more willing to sit through the mind-numbingly dull expositions of a circuit’s internal workings. And the reason for this is because it, first, bears immediate, pragmatic connection to the world before us, and, second, because it treats such a world as an assemblage of problems to be solved.

Traditional education is often derided for being useless. The practical import of what we learn is never communicated, with the result being we come to relate to the knowledge as various different kinds of catechisms, existing only to further one’s place within the game of schooling itself, with little or no connection to the real world. It’s make-work; jumping through hoops; teaching to the test, etc etc. The fundamental pragmatism of learning, of orienting us in an increasingly complex world, is replaced with disciplinary rote-learning. The historic function of this system was to turn unruly peasants into passive and punctual wage-labourers; this function still remains. The Brazillian educator Paolo Freire calls the kind of pedagogy employed the ‘banking method’: students are positioned as empty vessels to be filled with information from the pre-ordained ‘knowers’. A deeply authoritarian relation between these two roles prevails: the teacher acts, the student receives. Filing and regurgitating the knowledge imposed are the only actions expected of the latter. And one of the central mechanisms through which this banking method operates is through the strict standardisation and silo-isation of learning. Which is to say: you start with a curriculum that is frozen, that consists in a number of boxes you must tick, that doesn’t allow for growth or exploration — those two defining features of learning — and instead takes you through the greatest hits of intelligent people that came before, from bottom to top.

The problem with this is that this is not how people learn. The American philosopher John Dewey believed that the open-ended, fallibilistic, problem-solving orientation of the scientific method serves as the loose format for a general praxis of human inquiry. Humans in fact relate to the world through this method: we approach problems that exist out there, like how to put food on our table or warm our houses, and develop systems of thought and practice as instruments in solving it. When these no longer serve their function, and the problem they were designed to overcome proves more difficult than thought, we discard them and develop new ones. This is, of course, idealised: a number of irrationalities can and do arise that block this learning-process. But it remains the case that this is a powerful part, if not the most powerful part, of our practical relation to ourselves and nature. In this case, then, the two elements mentioned above — of a certain practical immediacy, and a problem-solving orientation — are two moments in the same general praxis form, that of pragmatic inquiry. A pedagogy that conforms to this thus conforms to how learning is actually conducted in the real world, and how learning is integral to any kind of minimally rational action.

I’d like to return to PTA to ward off some potential misunderstandings. Treating films as problem’s to be solved, you might object, is quite an odd way of treating art. And isn’t it the case that this emphasis on practical import ends up justifying a vulgar economism or utilitarianism, where philosophy or, indeed, cinema, are considered superfluous, and only those subjects like engineering or biology are worth taking seriously? In the first instance, it is true that the aesthetic realm partakes of very different standards of action and purpose. To say that film or literature exist to solve a problem misses the point of films or literature. They are not there to ‘do’ so much as they are there to ‘think with’; to explore the realms of human experience in their entirety, at precisely those points when more ‘pragmatic’ pursuits drift off. But it is also the case that, when one is struck by a piece of art, or when one is in the process of generating a piece of art, it provokes some problem-solving questions: “How did she do that?!”; “What did he mean by that?”; “How can I communicate what I want to communicate?” If we think of problem-solving in this very formalistic way, in which the dynamic of end-goal, and the instrumental action one takes to get there, is prioritised over the specific content or nature of the end-goal, then that kind of thinking does in fact apply to the artistic realm. (It may be the case that one does not know what the end goal is before we get there, and that the means to do so are provisional and changing, but this is the case in lots of examples of complex problem-solving). When a painter paints, they are constantly thinking that, “this does not fit”, or “that does not work with that”; when they appreciate the work of another painter, they problematise it: they work backwards from the artifact they see before them, teasing out the meaning and methods and how they interact, to understand it, to grasp it, to metabolise it.

In the second instance, I would like to emphatically reject the reductive notion of ‘pragmatic’ often employed. To say something is more useful or more practical is often just to reproduce a set of ideological valuations; to say what is more useful for capital, or what will allow one to accumulate material objects faster and at a greater quantity than your neighbour. Some ‘usefulness’ is of course highly, non-ideologically useful: engineers are necessary and important, as are doctors and lawyers and so on. But they hardly exhaust what we consider worthwhile about the human condition. What use are engineers if there are no architects to design the Great Buildings? What use are firefighters if there are no books to save from burning? When COVID ground the world to a halt, the machine of commerce quieting to a slow murmur, it was art that made existence more than mere subsistence. To paraphrase the Situationist Raoul Vanegeim: I want nothing of a world in which the guarantee that we shall not die of starvation entails the risk of dying of boredom.

Hence, the premium put on pragmatism here does not mean that teachers belabour different commercial applications to the experiments one is doing in science, or crowbar in gestures to the advertising industry in graphic design. It means, in accordance with the philosophical use, assisting us in generating that existential mode of inquiry, of nurturing the curiosity and action-orientation that we all possess. To teach film backwards is to teach us the nature of cinematic practice: it’s to work as Scorcese worked, to apprehend an artistic object, to decode it, to unfurl its patterns, its genealogy.

There are places where such practice exists. Finland, who consistently ranks at the top of world education rankings, has pioneered what they call ‘phenomenon teaching.’ Here, students will work collaboratively around a real-world ‘phenomena’, like the EU, or renewable energy, or Modernism, and tease out holistically the interconnected elements present in it. One thus explores the whole constellation of the ‘European Union’ as a problem: the geography, the geo-politics, the language, the history, just as one would if you came to it in reality. With this, you institute both elements mentioned above — immediacy and problem-solving — as well as a third: breaking through arbitrary disciplinary specialisations, which falsely partitions knowledge into neat silo’s, with little to no overlap, and thus once again takes students further away from the connectedness and complexity of the world. We can affirm the tension between specialisation and generalisation at some level, without the pretense that the former is always superior, and always the default. Indeed, to know a variety is often to know better, since one can understand that one’s discipline is informed by all these factors outside of it. Even if one wishes to be strictly a doctor — and for the sake of modern medicine I hope this is very much the case — it does no good deluding them in their formative years that science has no relation to politics, or photography, or engineering, or urban design.

To put it bluntly: that the education system does delude people about such things — and, indeed, the whole nature of knowledge, replacing experimental and exploratory inquiry with pacified and detached clerical work — seems to me to defeat the whole point. Unless, of course, the whole point of education as it exists is not in generating a set of autonomous and reflective agents, but in reproducing the kind of pliant and disciplined subjectivity that capital requires — in which case, it seems we’re left with a bit of a problem to solve.