Roger Scruton in Utrecht on higher and lower art

Thursday the 15th of May Roger Scruton gave a lecture on higher and lower art at the Academy building in the centre of Utrecht. It was organised by studium generale.
I attended the lecture with two friends from my reading group. It was great to see Scruton in real life. Years back we read his book 'Modern Philosophy' and it was great to see him in action and hear more about his background and ideas.


Central to his ideas is in my opinion the preposition that there are a set of traditional morals and values everybody should aspire to. These morals are strongly rooted in the Christian tradition, with two central pillars: sacrifice and irony. Under irony he classes a broad concept: being able to stand back and view ones attitudes and behaviour with the view of the outsider. As an example he gave the story from the new testament: those who are without sin, throw the first stone.

The reason I am writing about him in this blog, is that he posed a number of very traditional ideas about teaching and learning. Teaching should be available to those that have the intelligence, a pupil is a black box that should be filled with knowledge, the teacher is holder of knowledge and should be respected. He did not support teaching models in which the student should collect information or learn independently. In his set of values a teacher is central to learning.

Truly understanding art requires being taught the information required to fully appreciate the story behind a work of art. Children should be taught to appreciate high art. Strangely enough he could not define what high art was, other than: what has proven to have survived the test of time. On the other hand: what the majority of people appreciate at present does certainly not have to be high art, it often is not. Relativism does not get his support.
Looking back on his lecture my general impression was that his view of the world is looking backward into a small scale, quaint countryside with traditional values. The community is very important. I have trouble applying his ideas to a global society in which various cultures have different morals, information is not strictly bound to persons and groups of people are packed together in geographical space.

Training teachers

In the Blackboard meeting we also discussed the training of teachers using Blackboard (although the findings were not strictly related to Blacboard. Willibrord Huisman gave a good presentation

on their experiences in training teachers. A number of things were quite recognizable and also worth repeating here.

• Just putting stuff on the web doesn' t work (naturally ;-)
• When a teacher comes with a question it is normally in the middle of a course and not in the design stage. This means that is not really worth pointing out the fact they should have thought of it earlier. You can better find some sort of solution to help them out.
• What is the primary background a teacher will use when starting to teach? Their own experiences as a student! This is rather like raising children. How you raise your children will always be based on your own upbringing, in one way or the other. This does pose the question how long it will take for the new teachers to adopt a new pedagogy for a new generation of students...
• Is there such a thing as Digital Pedagogy? In practice this is usually a phrase that is coined from later going backwards. From use in practice looking back on the design process. This was his opinion at least. I think he may be right in practice. I personally do not believe in a digital pedagogy even if you work in the correct order. It is very important to take digital opportunities into account when designing your course, but in the end it is humans taking your course with their specific learning styles. I argue that this even holds true if you are designing a course for the net-generation. Of course they will learn differently and be able to use digital tools much more effectively in their learning.
• Willibrord had made some very entertaining fact sheets and as a visual learning I was very charmed by the drawings. The drawing pictured here is describing the use of a discussion board as depating tool. I can advise you to have a look at the fact sheet (it is in Dutch).