From Obscurantism to Oversimplification in Education: A Dialogue with Saeed Ghapanvari, Distinguished Scholar

Chahardoli:
For some time now, Einstein's words have been occupying my mind: "You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother." But until today, I hadn't had the courage to really think it through. Now, taking advantage of the privilege of working with you at Hamidi High School, I'd like to start a dialogue with you to learn more and deepen my understanding of this issue. Often in school classrooms (and even at university), at parties, and in other gatherings, people demand that discussions be presented in simple terms. The root of such requests (especially in schools) lies in an avoidance of direct and intense engagement with serious texts. We know well that literature, science, and philosophy are all difficult to understand and require effort and perseverance to be comprehended. The pitfalls here are many, and the paths are exhausting.

How much society influences students' thinking, creating an atmosphere devoid of seriousness and fostering a desire for easily accessible things, is itself a topic for debate. But I see the two extremes of the educational spectrum, both prone to excess, as obscurantism on the one hand and extreme oversimplification on the other. We have often heard in intellectual circles that anyone whose speech is not easily understood by others is considered learned. There is a tendency toward obscurantism—presenting concepts in a complex and obscure manner that makes them difficult for the audience to grasp. And on the other side, extreme oversimplification (the main focus of this discussion), which means the unwarranted and distorting reduction of a complex subject to an overly simple form, stripping away its necessary depth, nuance, and complexity. Both ends of this spectrum can provide fertile ground for distortion and damage to education, the teacher, and the learner.

The harms of obscurantism in schools can range from creating a fear of asking questions and stifling students' critical thinking, to passivity and fostering a negative sense of lacking the necessary capability. Likewise, extreme oversimplification keeps students from genuinely confronting complex material, and propagates the dangerous notion that the world is inherently easy to understand and devoid of any complexity. Ultimately, learning becomes a trivial activity for which the student feels no sense of serious effort toward understanding.

Ghapanvari:
Yes, you are right. Wrapping meaning in verbiage to the point where meaning entirely evades linguistic economy is, in a sense, making others share in one's own complexes. This is something practiced by sixth-century [AH] writers like Onsor al-Ma'ali and others, and their successors in the Qajar, Afsharid, and Safavid eras. But let us not forget that whenever we have engaged with complex thoughts, a complex language, necessarily emerging to express them, has followed. There is perhaps no great thinker who, at critical junctures and without prior deliberation, has not seen his language veer towards ambiguity, especially in philosophy and literature. For after Foucault—and later Roland Barthes—declared the death of the subject, or the author, historicity was removed from the text and multiplicities of meaning took its place. This very point laid the foundation for the enigmatic nature of ambiguity in many texts, which the Formalists interpreted as form.

Chahardoli:
Very well. Yes, as I mentioned earlier, what we recognize as literature in the humanities is often elusive and hard-won. Engaging with it must be done with the utmost concern and intensity; otherwise, a person either falls into misunderstanding or, in a merciless self-critique, finds themselves lacking the necessary capacity to comprehend. What matters in this context is the utmost effort of the thinker, scientist, or writer to present clear and understandable expression, whether in creating works or in teaching and conveying concepts in the classroom. However, the inherent stubbornness and resistance of certain concepts to simplification is nobody's fault. Yet one need not reduce the complexity itself; rather, one can smooth the path to understanding it.

I return to the opening sentence and examine it: "You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother." If we critique this sentence fairly, we might interpret it as saying: if you have truly grasped a concept in its depth, you should be able to explain it in the simplest possible language; in other words, the ability to restate complex concepts in simple language is the ultimate touchstone of real understanding. Nevertheless, I still cannot fully empathize with this proposition, and to critique it, I will cite the words of a scientist and a philosopher.

Richard Phillips Feynman, one of the most influential physicists of the twentieth century, upon receiving the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965, responded to a journalist who asked him to explain in about two sentences why he had won the prize, by saying: "If I could explain my work in two sentences, it wouldn't be worth a Nobel Prize." The other sentence I quote from Mohammad Mehdi Ardabili, a contemporary philosopher, who points to one of the familiar irritations for those in the humanities—the repeated demand to simplify concepts and ideas. He notes: why does no one ask a NASA engineer to explain the process of designing, building, and launching a space rocket—right here and now—in a short, concise, and very simple way?

With all this, I see the solution not in denying complexity, but in teaching the courage to face complexity. A good teacher is not someone who simplifies everything, but someone who enables the student to tolerate the various dimensions of a complex problem, to live with ambiguity, and step by step, to construct the tools for understanding it themselves.

We do not ask the NASA engineer to explain the rocket in two sentences because we respect technology. But we do not hold this respect for thought. It is as if society has arrived at the dangerous belief that deep ideas are more trivial than complex technologies and must be delivered instantly and simply. The ultimate goal, perhaps, is to find that delicate balance: clarity while preserving authenticity. That is, without betraying the depth of a concept, to illuminate the path to its understanding in such a way that the student neither drowns in oversimplification nor gets lost in pseudo-complexity. Perhaps this art is one of the highest skills of an educator.

Ghapanvari:
Education is a labyrinth of speech and writing. No exactly equal or balanced path has been charted for it, but one can say that language—or, as Saussure would say, langue (the language system)—can exert greater force. The share of the conscious and the unconscious in the capacity of language can create a starting point for ambiguity at a high frequency of language use, where language becomes absolute; this share becomes langage in both the conscious and unconscious, and convolution arises again. Perhaps the subjects of literature, philosophy, and sociology employ the most devices in this regard. The student repeatedly declares the difficulty of the lesson from the perspective of this fusion of langage, and continuously announces their inability to those in charge of learning. Both "yes" and "no" is the answer that overflows in their ears. Education cannot be ranked down to the point of triviality; instead, expectations must be raised so that the student immerses themselves in the depths of language. This point results from the bitterest moments for the learner and places them in a state of general failure. Now the question is: to what extent can language fill its capacities so as to make the ear and eye of learning dynamic, moving beyond cliché and repetition toward the stripping away of habits and familiarity? As the poet says: "Certainty makes a person see." In what achievement is the fulcrum of certainty hidden, and which progressive thought can drive this process dynamically? Changing many of the elements in what has been sketched out here could be crucial.