The Dead Agent

You are not inept because your school failed you. You are inept precisely because your school succeeded

When people say “Why don’t they teach this in schools?” I see now that their problem is not that they were not well taught but that they were taught too well. That question or phrasing often indicates the death of agency. If not, I ask, what stops you from proceeding to learn it by yourself? Only a dead agent expects that everything should be given to him.

A dead agent is like a young bird that never grows up. It feeds off its mother’s beak and believes that there is no other way to feed save by his mother’s beak. He never learns to hunt for food outside the nest. That way, it remains captive and inept, yet well-fed. Consider then, as far as learning is concerned, that you are not inept because your school failed you. You are inept precisely because your school succeeded — succeeded by making you think you cannot feed except from its beak. It is learned helplessness.

If what makes the dead agent dead is the fact that he has become helpless, one can see why I believe fiction is supreme. Fiction invites you to share perspectives, rather than simply tell you what it is. It allows you to weigh and judge. Less catering to, more exercising. You cannot possibly enjoy the best poets to come from your country without reading, rereading, thinking, and contemplating their words. It demands something of you — you are expected to exercise your agency. To steal from Simon Sarris, “The knowledge of a carpenter is in his hands. The apprentice must work with his own to discover it.”

Fiction employs themes to pass a lesson. It is oblique and more ambiguous than non-fiction which presents the facts and the case straightforwardly. Ambiguity is an educational need. Whatever allows the reader, student, or pupil to try his hand at digging to reach the root of the matter; whatever allows the learner to be actively involved in the knowledge mining business; whatever allows the learner to tinker and innovate, is better than tablets of knowledge which may be given apothecary-style. Pharmacy-style learning — as seen in mass lecturing and mass broadcasting — allows the pupil to suspend his ability to execute long-distance thinking, leaving him somewhat handicapped.

When people say “Google is free,” they are assenting to the subject of agency. They tacitly agree that at some point, you are expected to make a move on your own will to make your findings. It burdens us, even when we love people so much, to realise that without our help, they are totally helpless. One sure sign of human activity is an attempt at self-direction and self-determination. Where these are missing, everyone ought to be concerned.

In my country Nigeria, we made the blunder of voting a one-time military dictator, now retired, as a democratically elected president. When he turned out to be a disaster as some folks predicted based on his woeful record as military head of state, his loudest supporters in the events leading to the election — some who said “I don’t care if he jailed my father, I will vote for him” (a real quote) — asked “why didn’t we know this? Why weren’t we told?” Then they concluded thus: “This must be why history was removed from our curriculum.” Learned helplessness has consequences.

Essentially, the dead agent lives without his curiosity. If things don’t find him, he believes they don’t exist. And if by chance he stumbles on it late, he believes there has been a conspiracy to keep such information away from him. How many times have we seen someone bemoan how they keep us from learning personal finance in school? Pro-tip: Search Twitter using some keywords like “why don’t they teach in schools'' and you will see someone lament how we were not taught to do taxes but we were taught fractions. The comment goes that where taxes are relevant in everyday life, fractions are not.

In case you cannot identify the dead agent, I can. The dead agent measures knowledge by their immediate use, benefit, and yield. He assumes an oversimplified view of things. Like the case of fractions and taxes. He misses the connection between doing fractions and doing taxes. As it is, you go from fractions to percentages and from percentages to taxes — this is an abridged version. Simply put, fraction is abstract whereas taxes are concrete. But not seeing the immediate implication of the abstract, the dead agent is inclined to dismiss and seek something instant and concrete. Nowhere is this indicative of a great mind or an active agent. Nowhere.

And just in case you think this is a statement against schools, teaching, and all forms of socialisation in education, it is not. In fact, teachers, instructors, and tutors are ever more pleased with the student who uses his initiative — who rides out to find more possibilities than are made available by his teachers. Teachers pour their best into vessels that don’t mind going to the river by themselves. But as Nicholas Nassim Taleb has said, “Only the autodidacts are free.” Only the autodidacts are free.

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Thank you to Ca Green, Kath Mora, Jordan Blackwell, and Cam Houser for their generous feedback while writing this essay. I appreciate it.