A Thinking Man

There is a slightly amusing discussion going on - I am reluctant to call it a debate - in the responses being made to a Times Online article by Sarah Ebner about whether or not magic should be taught in schools.

The article briefly describes the career of Brad Ross who started learning magic at the age of 5 and is now a self-employed magician.  The case for magic is made by implication - it helps you with dexterity, stimulates the brain, improves memory, increases confidence, develops social interaction skills.  

In my view, anything that helps any one of those things in children can’t be bad.  However, I wouldn’t want to advocate magic as being an essential part of the curriculum - a separate subject alongside Maths and French - there just isn’t the space in an already over-crowded and tightly controlled menu.  

On the other hand, if magic were to be introduced as part of a teacher’s chest of pedagogical tools - a teaching method - in order to keep attention, stimulate interest, increase participation in the learning, then let it happen.  Most good teachers bring their own magic and creativity to classrooms anyway.  
This would just formalize the work in a small way.

What really interested me was not so much the article per se, but the notion that magic isn’t already being taught in schools.

If magic is about encouraging people to think that natural laws have been suspended on a unique occasion for a moment or two, the magic abounds in school.  It is called Religious Education.  Children frequently finish learning about empirically verifiable laws in double science and move down the corridor to learn that god came to earth, stopped the sun moving, opened up graves, impregnated a virgin, healed people instantly, and came back to life.  They are certainly magical claims, even if their immediate force has been largely lost to a lot of people.

I think Virginia is missing the point somewhat when she wrote:

There is no such thing as magic! Only magic TRICKS. Now do you feel tricked? God’s miracles are a different thing altogether. They are real and are not tricks.

If only that last statement were true, Viriginia, if only that were true.  

I have seen a magician saw a woman in half, and I knew, and the magician knew, and the rest of the audience knew that it was a trick, despite pretentions otherwise about suspending the laws of the universe.  The dangerous thing about religious believers is that despite the lack of evidence (Why does god never heal amputees?) they actually believe that the laws of the universe have been (and are regularly) suspended in response to practitioners of faith.

However entertaining it might be to introduce magic into the curriculum, it will never happen.  It is at best a peripheral activity.  Society doesn’t have a big demand for magicians, especially since reality TV has taken over the programme schedules.  Any serious suggestion that it should happen would be dismissed with quaint looks and suggestions that there were other more important demands on precious curriculum time.  

And of course, there is at least a superficial case that similar arguments could be made against the accepted, continued usage of curriculum time by the established perveyours of the unscientific supernatural.

Tags: Brad Ross, curriculum, magic, magician, pedagogy, Sarah Ebner