In The Imagined Classroom: Lanterns

The new HBO series Lanterns plainly has a lot of twists and turns ahead, since it is built as a mystery series. (For what it’s worth, I liked the first episode a lot—I think it’s the best work to come out of James Gunn’s tenure so far as the executive producer of the latest version of the DC Comics universe.)

I could say a fair amount about how pedagogy works in the long history of Green Lantern as a character. Going all the way back to the Golden Age Green Lantern, Alan Scott, who was not a space cop who reported to the alien Guardians of the Universe but just a guy who found a magical ring and a lantern that powered it, one of the ways that Green Lanterns of all kinds learn to use their exceptionally powerful rings is autodidactical. They find a ring, a ring finds them. Maybe they get a quick word from a dying alien about being chosen. And then they have to figure it out all by themselves, sometimes under life-or-death circumstances.

Autodidacticism is a pedagogy, one that teachers and professors don’t talk about enough. Perhaps because if it actually happens or it is working, of necessity that means a teacher is not needed. Often we think of autodidactical learning as a thing that happens before students come into our classrooms or as the thing we are training students to become after they leave. That’s another of the cliches of liberal education, in fact, along with “critical thinking”: that we are training people to think for themselves.

But many of us have had autodidactical experiences and many of us have forced others into autodidacticism under pressure, believing that to be the best way to learn. The proverbial example is “throwing children into the deep end of the pond” so they learn to swim. I was profoundly surprised a few years back to run into an actual example of this practice when I heard someone describe how they and other children learned to swim exactly that way.

Which brings me back to Lanterns, whose first episode has exactly this kind of forced autodidacticism in it early in the episode. In a scene that was highlighted in the first teaser trailer for the show, the trainee Green Lantern, John Stewart, tells the established Green Lantern Hal Jordan that they’ve been training for two months but that he hasn’t even put the ring on yet. Jordan dismissively tells Stewart that he’s nothing but a substitute teacher, that he’s not ready, but he then puts the ring on the dashboard of the car that Jordan is driving and flings himself out the car door just as the car goes over a cliff.

Meaning, “get the ring on and save yourself with it or you die”.

It’s rather similar to the pedagogy of the Jedi Council, where a Jedi Knight and their padawan learn to wield the Force in real-life situations that are unplanned and beyond the control of the teacher. But it goes a step beyond by having the teacher purposefully put the student in a situation where a failure by the student means death and where the student has no instructions about what to do or warning that such a lesson is imminent. (Jordan goes out of his way to imply that Stewart is never going to get his chance to wear the ring right up to the moment where he drives the car over the cliff.)

That is, of course, a well-established trope in many kinds of fiction. Robert Heinlein’s juvenile novel Tunnel in the Sky is only one of many examples; another is Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game. It’s extremely common in particular in stories of military training and police training, so it’s apt for Lanterns.

In both our fictions and our lives, we don’t talk enough about what happens when you just have to figure it out yourself and you can’t. Because if the situation is life-or-death, then you’re dead. The reason we don’t have fictions where forced learning fails is because that’s the end of the story. It can only fail with minor characters around the edges of the narrative. The reason we don’t talk about failures of forced learning in real life is because we tend to reclassify them as something else: negligence, violence, criminality, misconduct.

So how to assess Jordan’s teaching strategy with Stewart? Breaking the episode down (spoilers if you haven’t seen it and plan to watch it), there’s the following to consider.

1. They have been training for “two months”, so at least Stewart has some operational idea about how the ring works.

2. More importantly, what we learn in the opening scene of the episode is that John Stewart’s father had a terrifying obsession with preparing his son to be Green Lantern and shot a gun just above his child’s head for much of his life in order to cultivate Stewart’s capacity to be fearless, which the wider public is given to understand is the main qualification to be a Green Lantern. (Via statements by Hal Jordan to the media.)

3. Without going too much into the details of the rest of the episode or the suspicions I’ve derived from a long life of reading Green Lantern comics, let us say that this makes John Stewart’s candidacy for Green Lantern-hood the possible outcome of an attempt to infiltrate the Green Lantern Corps, “Manchurian Candidate”-style.

4. Meaning Jordan’s wariness to let Stewart put on the ring might be more than just him not wanting to retire.

Which is an interesting backdrop for a life-threatening use of a pedagogy that forces a learner to show life-saving competence with something he’s never tried before in a less dangerous situation. This is also something of a trope in speculative fictions and stories of deception and infiltration. You throw a student into the deep end sometimes because you think it’s the fastest way to learn, which might be especially important for a prodigy whose outer horizon of potential is so far away that they need to move towards it as quickly as possible. But in fictions, sometimes you do it to expose that a student is not a novice but is instead far more experienced and prepared than they have any right to be.

It’s not clear yet what was really happening in that teaching moment. Was Jordan just doing something routine in bringing a new Lantern up to speed, with danger looming on the horizon? Was he testing a suspicion he had about his student? Or is he just a sadistic asshole venting his resentment, a superheroic version of the teacher played by J.K. Simmons in the film Whiplash?

Time will tell. In real-world education, there are versions of “deep end” pedagogy where there are lifeguards ready to throw a floatation device into the water. And sometimes students throw themselves in, occasionally without telling anybody they’ve done so, and nearly drown (metaphorically) as a result. I don’t think any of us ever face the kind of danger that justifies a deliberate risk of dying, nor are we ever trying to expose an infiltrator. So it’s hard to credit it as a pedagogy, even in a fiction, not the least because it can’t fail in a story whereas it can fail very badly in the real world.

One thing I am sure of is that even when it works, in stories or in life, it leaves a mark on both teacher and student. You might learn to swim by being thrown in the deep end, but you might also learn to mistrust and resent the person who threw you. There has got to be a better way to learn how to guard the universe from harm effectively than to be flung off a cliff in a runaway car. I suspect that’s a point that Lanterns is going to make: Jordan’s car is its Chekov’s gun. (Well, that and the literal guns that John Stewart’s father fired at his child’s head.)