Of Gods and Educable Subjects

• In Event: More Than/Other Than Human Educations: Mentors, Hormone Monsters, Elves, Androids, Gods, and Us

Abstract

Knowledge is power. Education is change. Curriculum is about progress. These are all pillars of how modern schooling is understood. The process of going through school and thus acquiring an education is the process of being changed by the power gained in knowing, through the progress designed by a good curriculum. This in itself is not a polemic set of statements: it is the way in which modern societies have come to define education as schooling (Dewey, 1916; Tyler, 1949).

But what if you start with all the knowledge in the universe? What if there is no more progress to be made? If you are something more than/other than human? In the recently completed t.v. shows The Good Place and Watchmen, we meet two such characters. In The Good Place, Janet is a not-a-robot and not-a-girl who pops up in the afterlife to answer any question the characters might have, and fulfill any desires they express. She is, at first, a kind of walking/teleporting database/genie of all the knowledge in the universe. In HBO’s Watchmen, Dr. Manhattan is a god-like being who not only knows all, but can control matter and exists across time and space.

If knowledge is power and education is about pursuing knowledge, Janet and Dr. Manhattan do not require an education. They arrive fully formed, educated to a surfeit. As such, they seem to provide no possibilities for a narrative arc. All knowledge, no progress, no change. Yet, as with Russell’s paradox (expressed as the “Catalogue that lists all catalogues that don’t list themselves”), these beings know that by knowing everything, there is one thing they cannot know: what it means to be human, or to be educable. Their narrative arcs then begin when they move from more than/other than humans, to nothing but humans.

Is the impossibility of imagining an education in terms that escape humanity/humanism a limitation (by writers, creators, etc) on how we are able to imagine these beings, or is it something about how we conceptualize and imagine the possibilities of education? Why do we feel the need to return to particular conceptions of humanity, growth, progress, and change when attempting to expand how something other than human can exist? Why is love (and specifically, love for a human being) the catalyst for this desire to be educable?

Our essay will take on these questions by engaging in the narrative arcs of Janet and Dr. Manhattan, exploring ideas of education and learning for those who are doubly marked as more than/other than human and, through education, grapple with becoming nothing but humans. Echoing Snaza and Weaver’s (2014) critique, we suggest that education is not an exclusively human thing. A central question here is thus what becomes of education when there is nothing left to learn, no knowledge left to gain; and concurrently, why does our imagination fail us at conceptualizing education in terms other than progress and change?

Authors

• Daniel Friedrich, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Jordan Corson, Stockton University