Who turned the Reith Lectures into "Any Answers"?

In Paris I decided to listen, on my lap-top, to the first of this year’s Reith Lectures: Jonathan Spence on Chinese Confucianism. I’ve obviously not been concentrating as much as I should on to these lectures for the last decade or so, because I was surprised to find that the ‘lecture’ itself amounted to a little less than 20 minutes. The rest of the 45 minute slot was 20 minutes of ‘question and answer’ with the studio audience and 5 minutes of polite fluff from Sue Lawley.

For bloggers outside the UK, let me explain that the Reith Lectures are supposed to be one of the jewels in the public broadcasting crown. They started off in 1948 in honour of the first Director General of the BBC – and in his style of broadcasting. The introduction to the first series of Reith lectures (given by Bertrand Russell) claimed that their aim was to be a ‘stimulus to thought and a contribution to knowledge’.

They continue to appoint excellent speakers: recently Marina Warner, Onora O’Neill, Wole Soyinka and this year Spence, who is a professor at Yale, on “Chinese Vistas”. The trouble is that, whereas Bertrand Russell had 54 minutes locked up in a studio to deliver 6 lectures on “Authority and the Individual”, Spence has 4 sessions of under 20 minutes, on location (first one in British Library, apparently because it owns the world’s first (Chinese) book), followed by a Q and A session.

What on earth is the point of  these “lectures lite”. The prospect of a 19 minute lecture on Confucianism is hardly like to attract more knife-carrying teenagers than a 40 minute version (“Come on, Wayne – let’s give them Reith lectures a try before we go out for some binge drinking and senseless violence.. it’s only 20 minutes….”). Meanwhile it leaves poor old Spence (who actually did a valiant job) struggling to tell his audience something about Confucianism and develop an interesting argument on it, in the flash of an eyelid.

Sometimes tough and interesting subjects need a bit of space to develop – as well as keep them really interesting. That’s where Russell scored, with wide ranging reflections on social groups, from insects through ancient Egypt and Sparta, to the present day. Likewise Nikolaus Pevsner whose Englishness of English Art started life as Reith Lectures. Besides, if millions can look for hours at the live web-cam in the Big Brother house, while the residents are asleep, might there not be a few hundred thousand who would listen to a good and lengthy lecture while doing the ironing?

But worse came when we had to listen to the question and answer session that followed the “lecture” – a kind of Any Answers merged with a celebrity Question Time.

Spence handled the questions with the usual style of a US professor. Unlike the UK, where we lecturers tend to say (even if we wrap it up a bit) when we think the question posed is stupid, our US counterparts adopt the reverse rhetoric: “what a good question”,  “thank you for raising that point”, “what a difficult question” --  before going on to demolish the questioner in elegant terms. That was Spence’s tactic – almost every intervention he greeted with some version of “why how difficult!” (at which the questioner, of course, purred).

Those questioners were all celebrities themselves (Lord Ashdown, the Archbishops of Westminster and Canterbury etc), but they shared the one defining characteristic of every caller-in to every phone-in programme you have ever heard. They all had their own agenda, which didn’t necessarily have much to do with what Spence had been talking about. His subject was the Confucian tradition, but this was open season for every rant about modern China that you could think of. Why, oh why, couldn’t we have let Spence just present his argument for another 10 minutes or so?

Lawley, meanwhile, adopted the slightly patronising tone of phone-in hosts. When the Archbishop of Canterbury made his point, she reminded us that he had recently been in China (as if we were talking about football hooliganism and this was Roy from Kensal Rise who had just returned from a football match). Lord Ashdown was introduced as someone who knew Mandarin Chinese . . .

It all seemed only a knife edge away from a phone-in vote (for whose absence, I suppose we have to thank the Blue Peter et al voting scandals).

If you want a final proof of the sad fate of these lectures, I suggest you compare the BBC website’s biography of Spence with his Wikipedia entry. Both include the slightly wonky and distinctive phrase that he was “named a Fellow at Clare College Cambridge” in 2006 (he was, in fact, made a Honorary Fellow of Clare in 2006 – and that “Honorary” is an important qualifier for anyone who knows what they are talking about  – and, to be strictly correct, he was “elected” not “named”). There are all kinds of possible explanations for this. Maybe Wiki has copied the BBC. But my guess is that the copying goes the other way.

(Since writing this someone has corrected the wiki entry!)

Comments

[David Derrick]

Following my last comment, I also refer to a view of Bertrand Russell that Tony Francis might share.

http://davidderrick.wordpress.com/2008/06/06/reith-lectures-2/

[David Derrick]

I agree! I make some of these points as well:

http://davidderrick.wordpress.com/2008/06/06/reith-lectures-2/

[Tony Francis]

Dearest Foska: Thank you for your question. It is an excellent one, which, I was hoping you (or someone would ask). It sheds a new light on the subject. I can tell you are very young because of your nubile and nimble mind, which is constantly in search of fresh, new knowledge. In this way, you are not only Abelard, but Heloise, combined, shown here in perpetual, supine prayer in Pere Lachaise:
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:AbelardHeloiseTomb.jpg
I might note that while I missed the Chinese expert's lecture, I did hear the Cambridge Professor's comparison of Catiline and Cicero to the Red Scare. It is fair to note that the Chinese expert is so into his subject that he appears to have shed his first wife in favor of a second, younger, Asian one. Abelard lives (if only in the Orient, no wait, Far East - of Asia). Once again, Foska, thank you for your continued and razor-like input. We are all the more enlighted because you have shared with us.

[Xjy]

Sorry to be back again, but Foxy more or less fired a direct gauntlet at me.

Teaching, learning, lecturing, Socratic dialogue - whatever - is all a bit like a dance. Rhythm, costume, movement, body, attitude, interaction, expression, reciprocity. SEXY IS AS SEXY DOES! Even an unprepossessing balding old guy can make some hearts beat faster if he can walk the walk as well as talk the talk. Flashing eyes and a voice with life in it - bingo!

But in the present socio-sexual climate it can be unwise for said old guy (or gal) to get too animated with a group of impressionable nubiles.

One of the great things about learning living languages, and if you're lucky, dead ones too, is that bed (or to euphemize, the dance floor) is the best place to do it. As the Greeks well knew. One on one teacher-student relations, so to speak.

Teaching a Czech friend some elementary Swedish once, we had the glorious experience of missing a bus (one an hour) that pulled up at the bus-stop we were "dancing" at, and then pulled away again...

I spit in the milk of the mother who cut off the learning experience of Abelard and Heloise - the repercussions are still shackling the physicality of the learning process to this day.

So in one way SW is right, but I wish he wouldn't fetishize the sexiness into a property of the authority figure (god/ father-figure/ juju) "on stage", thereby emptying his own qualities out of himself into the ostensible focus of the ritual. That turns "sexy" into a superstitious, superficial, supernumerary scarecrow togged out in mitre, crook and chasuble.

Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum...

Takes two to tango...

[SW Foska]

Thanks Tony, I'm glad we agree, as in so many other matters. But how do you know how old I am?

[Tony Francis]

Dearest Foska: In answer to your questions: 1.) Your observations were most superior. 2.) Yes he is a guy I fancy. I could stare at his photo for hours. 3.) No, I did not hear the lectures. But I wish I had. 4.) Yes, his voice is sexy. It just has to be. 5.) On a relevance scale, his lecture is near or at the top. 6.) Your observations and questions are well-designed and probing, knowledgeable and show an advanced insight for someone of your age. You have brought us to a new understanding of the subject. Thank you for sharing with us, and participating. The fact that this speaker refers to "Mao tse tung" as "Mao zedong" and "Peking" as "Bejing" demonstrate that he is on the cutting edge of modern thinking and learning. I doubt he ever uses the dreaded "O" word ... as in Latin east.

[SW Foska]

XJY's pedagogico-autobiographical meditations are nice, but I do think I made way the most important point on this comments page and am simply stunned that apparently self-respecting (even if self-appointed) learning experts have not taken it up in a meaningful way. Does anybody else fancy this guy? For those of you who heard the lecture, does he have a sexy voice? How would you evaluate this in terms of its overall impact on the learning experience?

[Xjy]

Thank you Richard!!

The reason I could have my head is the old Swedish comprehensive (from the 60s ;-) set-up with its tenure for teachers and plenty of professional respect and good pay and (often) excellent academic training (compared to comparable English Gradgrinds). A much better deal when I got into the career than teaching at university, with limited untenured employment except for professors (hi Mary!! :-), not too brilliant pay, the usual petty in-fighting squared, pig-ignorant teachers, no original texts (in theoretical contexts) in sight till pre-research (sorry, pre-graduate) level, a supermarket approach to subjects, courses, and credits (literature? points allotted per page devoured...). And a personal insult deeply felt - a Cambridge degree or two pissed on as irrelevant to getting a) academic equivalence, and b) entry to teachers training god help us all.

However, impressed by the brilliance of the English educational record (irony) the powers that be removed all the benefits of the teaching profession while maintaining the precarious insecurity of a university career. So after running into a brick wall and burning out trying to resist the Herostratic vandalism of the municipal authorities and their tools in school management while doing a useful job with the kids, I shifted to my present occupation as a translator doing the no-brainer (well, not quite) task (for me with my training, at any rate) of rendering jobsworthy Swedish into its equivalent in English.

Basically I suppose you could say I love teaching and learning, but hate schools. I'm beginning to realize more and more how lucky I was to get the ride (horrific as it was in many ways) of studying where I did in the way I did.

So lectures are only a minor sherd in the mosaic of a decent education. The real thing is reading the original guys and engaging with them and sharp living minds over the questions at issue.

[Richard]

Bravo to XJY - sounds a fantastic class... A good reminder why it's a good idea for teachers to be allowed to have their head, not stuck to an hour-by-hour curriculum all the time.
All best,
R

[Tony Francis]

In "A History of Western Philosophy", B. Russell gives praise to Aquinas. He says Summa Contra Gentiles is superior to Summa Theologica. This is an odd conclusion. He asserts that Aquinas should be considered a "minor" philosopher because he "does not go where the truth leads him." But this all misses the point. Aquinas should never be considered a philosopher. He was a theologian who relied on revelation. Without revelation, there can be no Christianity. B. R. ignores the existentialism of Aquinas. What is more relevant is the myth that we should strive to create an atheistic-Christian society all around the world. Everyone will live in justice and peace and plenty. All will be happy, when the past is discarded. But here is the point: If there is no God, I don't really care whether they have indoor plumbing in Albania, or whether kids in the middle east go to school. I certainly am not interested in working more than half my life to pay taxes for hare-brained political fantasies that make me feel guilty because "I don't care enough". That is to say, I am a follower of Aquinas' existentialism, which has been described as the most vacant of all philosophies.

[anthony alcock]

Russell says of Aquinas, in the only book of Russell's I have read and am likely to read, that he, Aquinas, simply could not get past revelation, which Russell believed to be an obstacle to the philosophic search for truth. He calls Aquinas a scholastic philosopher, an explicit acknowledgement of his status as theologian-philosopher.

[Michael Bulley]

Odd how trivial things stick in the mind more easily (if only we could go back to earlier English grammar and say easierly) than serious ones. If you say "Bertrand Russell" to me, I am most likely to think first of the story that, when asked, just after the birth of his first child, whether it was a boy or a girl, he paused for a moment and then, with logical exactitude, said "Yes."

[Xjy]

Hi FG,
What I described was definitely not a language learning session. Latin is a rare bird in Swedish schools. It took place during a double period of Swedish. If I'd had to justify its inclusion I would have invoked the literary-historical aspect (classical poetry, a classical poet, love poetry, metre/rhythm/oral performance and the role of long and short syllables in poetry, the Western tradition etc), the linguistic aspect (history of language, Indo-European relationships, Latin to Spanish development and the historical reasons for this, varieties of pronunciation, etc), the educational/pedagogical aspect (student activity - copying exactly what I wrote on the board, leaving lines for the interlinear translation we produced and the more idiomatic Swedish we turned this into, the sight of the Latino kids recognizing old old Latin words, shared activities involving chorus reading with a swing - ie motor skills and oral skills, etc) and the cross-disciplinary aspect (all the above plus integrating immigrant kids and their knowledge into a Swedish and literature lesson).

In addition, far from "pooling our collective ignorance" we pulled a Socratic maieutic stunt by pooling knowledge they already had. The Latino kids about the language and everyone about thousands of kisses and wanting more, ignoring old kill-joy fogies, the sun rising and setting, envy, the evil eye, etc.

All in all not a bad "lecture" ie learning opportunity for 8th and 9th grade students in an ordinary comprehensive co-ed lower secondary school in the second poorest area of Sweden.

Call it a workshop or a class or an active lecture or what you like, however you look at it, it was enjoyable for me and a hell of a learning experience for all the kids and even more for those who were interested enough to think further on't.

Mind you it did last 80 minutes with a 5-minute break, which is cheating a bit compared with a 50 minute lecture. See, even room for self-criticism! ;-)

[Tony Francis]

I listened to the lecture of Bertrand Russell again. I think these are fair questions to ask: was B. R. ever that brilliant? And would he be considered all that knowing today? Here are some points: B. R. wrote: "Galaxies are randomonly distributed in the universe like raindrops on a window pane." - no they aren't. "Aquinas was a failure as a philosopher" - true enough, but then Aquinas was a theologian, not a philosopher. "Everything of Aristotle has been proven to be wrong." -really? B.R. set out to prove that a Cartsean or Hilbert space was the same as physical time and space - and totally failed to do so - because he ignored the "everywhere closely packed neighborhoods" problem which cannot be reconciled with reality. And in this lecture, he puts forth a vision that is "atheistic Christianity" -one world government will obviate the need for people to have enemies, and hence we will have peace, once that is achieved. Brilliant, or simply a hyped-up crack pot?

[Lina]

Similarly, the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures used to be an hour(?) of pure science, a lot of which went straight over my 9 year old head, but some of which instilled in me a fascination with science that meant I would continue in my art student-ish fashion to watch the lectures. The time never dragged. Now they have ad breaks, pointless demonstrations of explosions or trivial things to involve the children in the audience. I no longer bother to watch them.

In terms of lectures, it depends a great deal upon the calibre of the lecturer. Our lectures are 50 minutes in length and will fly by with a good lecturer, or last an eternity with a poor one, but I prefer even those to the one's where we are expected to pool our lack of knowledge about a subject, undirected by greater wisdom. A lecture should always contain some gleam of interest which a student will want to go away and read up on.

[anthony alcock]

You know perfectly well why these lectures have become what they have become. The person introducing the programme (or "show") is far more important than anyone in it. The programmes have become "shows". The guest is "presented". In the days of Bertrand Russell I am not sure that anyone would have had the idea of even trying to "present" him.

[Tony Francis]

If a student knows nothing of a subject, they might retain 3 or 4 words or phrases from a 50 minute lecture. Same thing reading a chapter of a textbook. Then, when they hear these again, they think, "That sounds familiar." This is the way learning has always seemed to me. I think memorization has a place, but I don't do it too much any more.

[FG]

XJY:
in speaking of "lumps/chunks of pure knowledge" Lucy was presumably giving her intuition of my rather schematic outline of a functional lecture -so perhaps I ought be the object of your wry humour.
In any case, the session which you go on to describe seems to have been more like a language-learning class than a lecture. But I'm in agreement with the rest of your post: people might approve of, but retain nothing, from a brilliant solo performance (but, as Lucy says, might find it inspiring) while they might be irked by a pragmatic manner yet may come to see the merits of it eventually.
Once again, maybe there's room for both kinds of approach.

[Xjy]

A useful aphorism I can actually remember from one of my supervisors (guess where ;-) ):

"Never overestimate the knowledge of your audience, but never underestimate their intelligence."

[Richard Baron]

Should not the starting point be the purpose of the exercise? When speaking to stimulate debate, I will happily talk for nearly an hour. What matters is that members of the audience should pick on a few points about which they have something to say. It does not matter if they miss half of the points made. When lecturing on Plato or Aristotle to students who need to get to grips with most of the material covered, I would not dream of talking for an hour at a stretch, because the students would miss too much. Instead I set out the line of argument in a chunk of text and then draw them into analysis of the text – a highly directed seminar more than a lecture, which we can keep up for 90 minutes at a stretch.

The higher up the academic scale one goes, the more likely it is that one’s purpose is to stimulate debate, making the continuous lecture or reading of a conference paper the appropriate style – preferably followed by plenty of time for debate, although sadly the lecturing timetable is not full of spare hours.

The BBC must be clear about what it wants the Reith Lectures to achieve, if it is to find the right format. I would vote for the stimulation of debate, and therefore for the old, long format. We can formulate our own questions and disagreements, without the assistance of an invited panel. And if we just want information about Confucius, we can go to Wikipedia.

[PL]

In my experience, students (some of them, anyway) are most stimulated when they see that you (a) are interested in the subject yourself and (b) are not talking down to them, but are treating them as equals who differ only in experience and the need to have some of the background knowledge which you have already absorbed spelled out. For the rest, length of lecture, inter-activity, question-periods, and all the other aspects of format count for very little.

[Michael Bulley]

To XJY: condensing Chomsky is easy, as his latest approach is called "the minimalist project". Anti-Chomskyans (on language, not politics) like me are waiting eagerly for the next stage.

[Lucy]

I suppose there is a problem in that most undergraduates are becoming more and more keen for their degrees to have obvious 'value' and for every element to be directly feeding in to that value, and maybe this affects that kind of lecture that is preferred.

A long lecture (and sorry, FG, but I really meant 50, not 40 mins!) has to be carried by a really good lecturer, or it fails. In the English faculty at Cam., lectures are not mandatory and, compared with many other subjects, are poorly attended. You can quickly see which ones are popular - people would get out of bed at 9am (students! 9am!) for a 'name' like Adrian Poole, Eric Griffiths, Colin Burrow, or Robin Kirkpatrick. All of these invariably spoke for the full time with possibly 5 minutes of questions (often not), and invariably parts of the lecture were - deliberately - pitched high. XJY is right that students' reactions to a lecture don't exactly correlate to how much of it they took in, but it was clear which lecturers were stimulating, and which ones made us go and get the books out to read up on their subjects. An interactive class, however good, pools the ignorance of its student participants. There's a place for that, but to my mind it's not a lecture. It's good for you, I think, NOT to be handed the answers, but to have to think them out for yourself. If something puzzles you, you carry it away. That's why I'm sad about what Mary's describing in the article.

In response (loosely) to 'what is learning', the single most annoying experience I had of a lecture was this: The lecturer, in my first year, lectured on an exam set text, and recommended many other texts that we should also read to illuminate it. I (because I was new to the process) asked him which we should prioritise, the primary or the secondary texts? He replied, with a patronising and avuncular smile, 'well, think why you are here?'. The answer, clearly, was meant to be 'for the love of English'. I saw his point, but later on I was increasingly annoyed: I was actually spending money on my degree in the hope of getting a job; I didn't need to be preached at about the love of scholarship while I did it.

I guess I see why people want accessible learning, but the trick isn't to dumb down, or to insist on the wonder of communing with the intellect, it's to make things really interesting in and of themselves.

[Xjy]

Lucy's notion of "a chunk of pure knowledge" made me smile. I've been a teacher and taught young teenage immigrants (in a class with no native Swedish kids)from about 18 countries with say 13 languages between them. Yet I happily spent a double period presenting Catullus's Lesbia to them in Latin, with them helping to translate it into Swedish (a few were Latinos) and a swinging session of "say after me" in Latin. So it depends on the context. Was it "pure"? It was pure education. Was it "knowledge" - you betcha! Was it dry? Nope.

However, Chomsky (on linguistics) or Aristotle (on anything) might be condensed enough to represent "pure knowledge" for a knowledgeable enough audience.

It is also well-known (or should be, especially to Uni lecturers and lecturettes) that an audience's reaction is not a reliable indication of learning on their part. Most people give more points to an "admirable" and "impressive" tour-de-force but they take away next to nothing from it. They are less than impressed by an interactive stint where they retain a lot more of the essentials, and some are even angered by this approach. Until perhaps they get hooked and infected by curiosity and the urge to explore is ignited.

So, is learning a matter of learning qua education and maeutics, or learning as scholastic acribiousness??

Discuss... ;-)

[Jeff Wasserstrom]

It would have made a wonderful link between past and present in your post if Bertrand Russell, who lectured in and wrote a book about China between the wars, had paid more than just the barest of passing attention to that country in his 1948 Reith Lectures. And he doesn't even seem, alas, to have mentioned Confucius, so we can't compare and contrast his and Spence's references to the sage.
Ironically, by the way, Russell remains well known in China, thanks to his visit at a time when few Western philosophers other than John Dewey had lectured in cities such as Beijing. And it is now much easier to find copies of the Chinese translation of Russell's History of Western Philosophy in any major bookstore in China than it is to find an English language edition in a U.S. branch of Borders or Barnes and Noble. But then again, for a time in the 1960s, it was probably much easier to find an English language translation of the best known book by Confucius in the U.S. or Britain than to find a Chinese language copy for sale in China.