Miseducation (i)

There will be more on this, no doubt. But briefly,

I've been reading Aristotle's Poetics and the experience has been most frustrating; not the text so much (I've not finished it yet), but the process of reading it. What's bugging me is the fact that Aristotle's 'views' about Tragedy are talked about all over the place (well, not normally in the canned veg isle of the supermarket*, but you know what I mean), incorrectly. I don't mean incorrectly in the sense of 'there are lots of interpretations and this is the one I choose'; incorrectly like 'I don't know there are any interpretations. This is what it means.'

Probably annoyed about this because I thought I vaguely understood the basic concepts behind Aristotelian tragedy, but quite evidently that's not true. What seems to have happened is that I was taught about "Aristotle" at skool by people who almost certainly hadn't read Poetics, and they were probably taught by people who hadn't read it either, and so on. So there was me thinking I had a clue, but I don't: what I 'know' is at best an offensively over-simplified and at worst totally WRONG version of a Chinese Whisper that may once have been about Aristotle. Which is very annoying. So far, every 'standard' piece of tragic terminology (mimesis, hamartia, katharsis, pathos, praxis, etc.) I've come across in this text (and its comprehensive introduction by Malcom Heath) has meant either something different to that I was taught, or something so ambiguous or fluid or contextually-dependent that my 'definition' of it is absurdly out of whack. Bummer. My own fault - should have read the text itself long ago.

But it is very annoying that, at skool, kids are taught a weird mixture of lies and semi-truths, and almost always second-hand. Either give them the original texts (or scientific experiments, or whatever medium we're dealing with) and help them draw their own conclusions about stuff (if they're way-out, well, that's what Teacher's for); or only 'teach' them things they're actually capable of understanding (and it's not for some ludicrously out-of-touch government department run by an economist of all people to state what exactly it is kids of different ages might or might not be capable of understanding). It's irritating that 16-yr olds are told that electrons do one thing, and then when they start their AS Levels at 17 they are told almost the opposite; by the time they get to A Level, electrons probably don't exist, or something. Okay, so sometimes stuff has to be simplified - but at least tell them that what they're being taught is more an analogy than fact. And when it comes to literature/texts, doesn't it make more sense to avoid imposing complicated theoretical theories (i.e. Aristotle's, in this case) if it's deemed that the theories proper are way above the students' abilities? Why pay lip service to it at all?

Pah. Excuse the grousing, but I've got to go and figure out Aristotle. Again. Properly, this time.

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*ISLE?! What kind of word is isle?! It should be pronounced 'eyes-ull' or 'eyes-lee'. The more I look at it the weirder it is, and I'm not sure any more if it's the right word at all. Isle. The OED doesn't mention anything about supermarkets.**

**Yes, um...aisle. THAT would explain why it looked wrong! Duh.