October's Blog_Life-long Learners: The Degree of our Disquiet is the Measure of our Merit.

So what is the role and purpose of education? Why are our universities so all-fired committed to the liberal arts, which would have us, already through the diversity of our course subjects and readings, at least encounter if not “experience” the almost infinite layers of existential possibility reflected in the World of Storybook?

            The question is of interest, because journalists who specialize in education, and many times even the teachers themselves, often seem to miss the point of education in the democratic process. I recently slammed [25.09.13] an article that was trying to make the case that there is in America a toxic culture of testing; my criticism was that the writer entirely misses the point of education when she writes that, [Our] "ultimate goal is to help children live up to their potential to become happy adults who make positive contributions to society." Her point is of course all claptrap and nonsense... because while the discovery of "happiness" may be in fact the goal of the study of philosophy or perhaps even of religion, it is absolutely not the goal of education per se.

            It has been well said of education, and particularly in our undergraduate universities, that it is “the job of teachers to create productive discomfort—and to help young adults gain comfort with ambiguity.” This, I would contend, is the truest goal of the university education, both in the smaller as in the larger picture. Our education should in fact serve to alienate us from our foundational myths in the greater Culture that surrounds us, instead of trying to affirm our place in those myths in that Culture. This is the nature of fundamental ambiguity, of the equivocality that reaches through all the strata of our onion-layered self-life.

            This was also the conclusion yielded by some of the more perceptive analyses of the Canon Wars. On the one hand, the National Association of Scholars has made the case that the Western Canon of books was created to preserve “the Western intellectual heritage”; more thoughtful minds, however, such as Mark Lilla, historian of ideas at Columbia University, have made the better case that “‘the canon itself isn’t a case for book camp and becoming a citizen in the West […] Wrestling with difficult, often inaccessible works is ‘the most alienating experience possible. When you read Toni Morrison, there’s no alienation. It affirms your Americanism.’”

            On this reading, what makes “greatness” in a book, and what makes that particular book worth studying, is not that it reaffirms us in our narrative “being” (e.g., being-American, being-African American, being-Woman, etc.), but rather that such a book challenges the very parameters of our cultural being, thereby serving to alienate us from our mytho-cultural foundations, from the narrative “being/s” with which we identify. By alienating us, by making us the Outsiders or Strangers in our own cultural narrative, studying and learning works of greatness drives us forward on the path away from the psychological and intellectual comfort of our informing narrative, and toward more universal possibilities for expressing ourselves in the existentiality of our here-and-now. Learning and education are two prongs of a Sartrean “situation”; and we can rethink and continually rework both in order to make them more nearly correspond to our idea(l)s and needs.

Miscellaneous models of malaise with respect to the life of the mind. Perhaps the most disturbing model for intellectual malaise is the breakdown of the I-You relationship typified by the Cassandra Complex, a syndrome described by French philosopher Gaston Bachelard (1884-1962). If we recast the Cassandra story in terms of the classroom, the clear moral-of-the-story would be that Cassandra, the teacher, although speaking about things truthfully and relevantly, can no longer be “heard” by the audience (students). This model in education disturbs precisely because it describes the final worthlessness of speaking truthfully (about anything and everything) in our classrooms, thereby portending the death-through-irrelevance both of teaching, and of the greater life of the mind in general.

            Significant parts of Cassandra’s story are contained in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon (circa lines 1140). A priestess who was enabled to foretell the future through the prophetic gift, Cassandra scorned the advances made to her by the god of that gift, Apollo. It could have been well said that “hell hath no ‘fury like a god scorned,’” but Congreve (1670-1729) was otherwise inspired at the moment. According to Aeschylus the Olympian Apollo did not take the scorning very well, but apparently nor do women if Congreve be believed, so Apollo placed a curse on her: she keeps the power of foresight afforded by the prophetic gift, but no one believes her predictions—her audience cannot hear her.

            Cassandra prophetically foresees the destruction of Troy, even announcing the equine gift of the Greeks (the famous Trojan Horse); she foresees the death of her brother, the Trojan Hector; and, taken captive at war’s end by Agamemnon, great king of the Greeks, and led back to his home, she informs Agamemnon –but to no avail, that his wife has been preparing a rather pointed welcome for his return (remember that Clytemnestra, together with her lover, Aegisthus, slays Agamemnon with a knife in his bath). Everyone eventually dies miserably. Ouf—and welcome to the world of Greek tragedy.

Other models for malaise in thinking and perceiving might be derived from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This lovely comedy is woven through and through with farcical threads, of course, but the framework for the comedic action is composed of the classic elements of mis-take, mis-information, and mis-identification. If we transfer the Titania (Queen of the Fairies) “situation” to the classroom, for example, we discover a situation in which the student, in this metaphor Titania, is deliberately tricked/deceived by Oberon (King of the Fairies), i.e., the teacher. Is it possible, following out the implications of this metaphor, that We the People, in the form of students in public education, are being deceived by our schools? To what end? And, what exactly would be the form of the deception being practiced, and what the content of the deceit?

            In the original Shakespeare telling there is Titania, Oberon’s queen, who is deliberately deceived by her Lord…  Oberon explains his purpose and plan in soliloquy:

OBERON

Having once this juice,
I'll watch Titania when she is asleep,
And drop the liquor of it in her eyes.
The next thing then she waking looks upon,
Be it on lion, bear, or wolf, or bull,
On meddling monkey, or on busy ape,
She shall pursue it with the soul of love:
And ere I take this charm from off her sight,
As I can take it with another herb,
I'll make her render up her page to me.

Another instance of con- & per-ceptual malaise in the play comes about when Puck, who understands Oberon’s purpose, actually mis-takes the players and thus anoints the wrong set of eyes.

OBERON

What hast thou done? thou hast mistaken quite
And laid the love-juice on some true-love's sight:
Of thy misprision must perforce ensue
Some true love turn'd and not a false turn'd true.

PUCK

Then fate o'er-rules, that, one man holding troth,
A million fail, confounding oath on oath.

And this first mis-take yields a second mis-take and malaise… where Oberon, when he does not see the expected results of his planned trumpery, believes Puck has been negligent or deliberately wayward.

OBERON

This is thy negligence: still thou mistakest,
Or else committ'st thy knaveries wilfully.

PUCK

Believe me, king of shadows, I mistook.
Did not you tell me I should know the man
By the Athenian garment be had on?
And so far blameless proves my enterprise,
That I have 'nointed an Athenian's eyes;

Yet another model for malaise associated with knowledge or understanding might be derived from Shakespeare’s King Lear. Lear’s malaise is that of a man, a king, who has had all the advantages of being a good king through long years; who has successfully raised up and married off two of his three daughters; but then, in the winter of his life, Lear does something irredeemably stupid—he asks a type of question that most children already know is laden with foolishness, which is to ask his daughters how much they love their father. The first two daughters answer with exaggeration because they stand to inherit great wealth and lands; the youngest, Cordelia, refuses hyperbole and answers the naked truth:

CORDELIA

Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave
My heart into my mouth: I love your majesty
According to my bond; nor more nor less.

It would seem, however, that this once worthy man and king is no longer in the way to understand correctly anything of his situation – either to appreciate that his question to his daughters is inappropriate, because it is not “meet” or fitting to ask such questions publically when there is the possibility of great advantage in the balance, or to recognize that the “bond” of the daughter to love her father is entirely “meet,” which a father must not then tempt into public transgression by invitation to hyperbole.

            In this metaphor of malaise, Lear represents the individual or citizen who has had all the benefits that accrue to one through life-long participation in one’s society, but who, moved by some fatal impulse of whimsicality and irrationality, decides to reject and then to act despite every bit of collective wisdom and interpersonal insight accumulated through a long experience of the world.

            Lear’s situation could also perhaps be considered a type of Ted Cruz moment, manifest in the spiteful hypocrisy so apparent in one who has had all the advantages a society can offer, has arrived at a certain level of affluence, but who then actively works to keep others from accessing similar advantages. Nevertheless, the model of malaise suggested by Shakespeare’s Lear is a little more challenging for me to understand and to accept than the straightforward hypocrisy of a Ted Cruz; for short of explaining the actions of this king through some type of mental illness, which makes it simpler to interpret the play in and to the modern reader, this interpretation clearly detracts from the tragic action of the drama, and renders the play entirely less dramatic in the sense of men acting in their world. Shakespeare’s Lear seems to represent the thoroughly Modern Everyman in the irrationality of his approach to his existential “situation.”

KING LEAR

Doth any here know me? This is not Lear:
Doth Lear walk thus? speak thus? Where are his eyes?
Either his notion weakens, his discernings
Are lethargied--Ha! waking? 'tis not so.
Who is it that can tell me who I am?

A final interpretative difficulty in this most modern of Shakespeare’s plays is that Lear seems to be less motivated by some comprehensible and realistic ideology or design, with which I may disagree although I can understand it, than simply by a meanness of spirit, which I neither understand nor sanction. It is in this respect that Lear most seems to be the precursor or archetype for our modern Ted Cruz (different article).

There are yet two nobler examples of intellectual malaise in King Lear, the first of which is represented by the Fool, and the second, by Edgar disguised as a mad man, Tom o’Bedlam, who will take on a second fool’s roll, the Cassandra roll, in an attempt to counter Lear’s folly, to reason the old king back onto more sensible thoroughfares.  This mad man plays the roll of a modern Socrates – the “noble philosopher” who continues to speak the truth to the foolhardy Lear who, although still careening along the byways of his folly, is yet beginning to slow down and to re(dis)cover his senses.

KING LEAR

Dost thou call me fool, boy?

Fool

All thy other titles thou hast given away; that
thou wast born with.

When we rub up against greatness in the course of our education, the friction from that encounter should make of us Outsiders to our thought-world, the Rejected, the Alienated, Strangers. As we have seen, such Strangers are known to us from our readings in literature and philosophy, and even the New Testament writer of the Letter to the Hebrews (Ch.13:2) encourages his readers not to neglect “to show hospitality to Strangers, for by this some have entertained angels without knowing it.” In our current lived-world, one variation of these Strangers would perhaps be translated by the modern Truth-tellers and Whistle-blowers, by those “Fools” who tell truths some do not wish to be trafficked in the public arena.

In his novel Creole Belle, James Lee Burke (pp. 524-525) was kind enough to provide the summary of our reflection:

Is there any worse curse than approval? Have you ever learned anything new from people who accept the world as it is? The bravest individuals I have ever known appear out of nowhere and perform heroic deeds we normally associate with paratroopers, but they’re so nondescript that we can’t remember what they look like after they have left the room. […] Regardless, it’s a fine thing to belong to a private club based on rejection and difference. I’ll go a step further. I believe excoriation is the true measure of our merit.

What if this is true, that excoriation is the real measure of merit for the thoughtful mind –the educated mind? It would sure explain why there are so many unworthy, “Cruz-ean”-type voices screeching against our tympana, while so many excellent voices, abraded and discarded, go unattended.

Mid-May Post_On Education and Dismay;The Death of Thinking in the Learning Process

Excuse me...?!  Dismay entered my universe yesterday morning when I read the following headline: 'Slumdog Millionaire' Professor, Sugata Mitra, Fixing Education By Bringing iPads Into Exams. Ok, he seems like a nice guy because he wants to buy iPads for disadvantaged Indian kids. Ok again, because he is a Professor of Educational Technology in the UK who has bothered to have the staggering insight that some subjects prioritized in education are no longer entirely relevant to the work-a-day world—this is certainly no “hang on, Dorothy; Kansas is going by-by” moment. Also not terribly insightful that, when you give kids new stuff, like iPads, they figure out how to make it work—then they break it. It’s one of those limited attention span things that parents and teachers learn about…  

            My dismay comes from the idea that this Professor of Educational Technology clearly seems to believe that education is a skills-based process—a kid first learns how to do a thing, then either gets about doing it, or moves on to the next skill. What, though, if Education is not really just about Learning or skills Acquisition?

            Analogy Time: It’s like I tell my wife – Language is not about Words. Words are tools, just like lego building blocks; nothing more. The real challenge with Language is using the tools in such a way that you create Ideas, and, hopefully, even Ideas that are beautiful and moving, so that you can inspire and move People. Because, says the philosopher-husband to dutifully attentive wife (DAW), Language is about People.

            Likewise, Education is not about Learning, although Learning is indeed an integral part of the process. If my DAW fails to learn her French verb tables, then that language simply will not happen for her, and her personal relationships with those autochtones qui se servent de cette langue will tend to remain rather basic. So it is with our youth in the educational  process – if they do not learn to manipulate, and hopefully master, the tools our/their society values, then Education will not happen for them. But Learning is still not the Goal of Education.

            The Goal of Education is to use the building blocks of learning to create a THINKING HUMAN. Thinking is not a skills-based kind of thing one automatically "has" or "does" at the end of the Learning process. Thinking is when you actively 1) gather together all your building blocks of Learning; 2) shuffle them around together until they make some kind of meaningful Picture that helps you to make some sense of what is going on around you; and then you 3) decide how to act for the best in the situation the world has just handed you.

            Technology, pace our Professor of Educational Technology, is just another one of the many transient skills for students to learn, manipulate, and master on their path toward being educated citizens. But the goal at the end of the path is neither learning the specific skill, nor the Education in and of itself. Rather, the end product of learning and education is a Thinking, Reasoning Human. Thus, again, the importance of the Liberal Arts model in education, where the young mind is asked to learn the myriad and diverse building blocks of the world, then invited to reassemble those blocks into an understandable, workable, and beautiful vision of the World That Can Be.
            Krugman’s latest article: How the Case for Austerity Has Crumbled, is an excellent illustration of one such Thinking Citizen.
            A former student (thank you, Shyam), provides a further example of a Thinking Citizen--the philosopher Dennett, who suggests seven fine tools for good thinking.

On Teachers

There is much that has been said and written about teachers and teaching. And although much of it is complete rubbish, at least from my never modest point of view, it is certainly reasonable to argue that, despite the essential nature of the need to continue training our upcoming generations of citizens, there are still significant flaws of a systemic kind in the institution of School, which will ensure that folks will continue to hold forth, for the worse and, on the odd occasion, for the better, about teachers and teaching.

            No matter what anyone says, though, there are two things that remain absolutely bedrock true in my experience of the world: 1) Teachers are amazing people; and the village that raised me was populated by such as these; and 2) I was never a very good student, by everybody’s standards.

When I was growing up in the burbs of the US east coast, our next-door neighbors were the T… family, first generation immigrants from Greece who spoke English poorly, but who had a work ethic and a desire to succeed second to none. I remember that my parents left for work every morning around 6:30 or 7:00 am, so getting myself ready for school was typically given over to my own Self-motivation, which is even nowadays a somewhat dicey affair. It was predictable, then, that somewhere around the age of 10-11 a morning came where my own S-m (motivation of the self-starting sort) was not au rendezvous, and I decided in a moment of youthful existential enthusiasm that on that day I would not be going to school, which was about a 15-20 minute walk from the house. So, following an apparent (and certainly at that time unbeknownst to me) telephonic colloquium and collaboration between my stepmother and our neighbor, who was clearly ratting me out on the telephone behind my back, believe it or not, Mrs. T, the Greek immigrant neighbor with the poor English, came over to our house, came in the kitchen door, and threatened, in her version of English, to paddle me if I did not get my S-m into gear and hie my hinter hence (literally translated = get my butt on the road) to school! And then, in the face of my still struggling and clearly underwhelmed Self-motivation, she proceeded to provide the external power source for this wanna-be self-affirming 10 year-old—she grabbed me by the ear and marched me the entire way to school, by the ear, even sitting me down in my classroom chair!

            Now some folks might have some reservations about this manner of motivating young people to get their schooling, but I am still thankful to this simple immigrant lady, to Mrs. T, because she valued education enough to make us both get uncomfortably involved in mine that morning. She did not take any guff off of a snot-nosed 10 year-old throwing a temper tantrum. For my modestly educated immigrant neighbor it was education first, last, and always… tantrums, if tantrums there must be, come after school.

Our other neighbor, from across the street, was Mrs. B…, my English teacher in the 6^th grade. I remember to this day how her classroom was laid out – there was a blackboard to the front and to the side of the classroom, the opposite side was a bank of windows, and the cloakroom was at the back of the room. (The classroom geography is significant to this memory!). My desk was right at the front of the room, next to the teacher’s desk, so she could “keep an eye on me” (apparently I was a sometimes distracted kid…). Anyway… Mrs. B… was at the side board showing us how to diagram prepositional phrases (Really…!), and I obviously was not paying any attention whatsoever. In fact, I was actually looking, with my head resting on my hand (you know that ‘bored kid’ posture), in exactly the other direction, at two things: Inside there were Debbie’s 6^th grade legs; and framing those juvenile legs were the bank of windows, which were drawing me toward the Outside, where the bells of Freedom were busy ringing for the rest of the world. At some point during my grammar-hour musings, Mrs. B…, finally perceiving that I was (as usual) paying more attention to Debbie’s legs and beyond than to otherwise undoubtedly fascinating prepositional phrases and sentence diagrams, actually threw the rather compact grammar book at the back of my head from across the room. What really sticks in my mind, though, is that her aim was right on the money—she absolutely nailed me with that book on the first shot, then sent me off to stand in the cloak-room!

            I spent more time in Mrs. B…’s cloak-room (the old-school equivalent to modern time-out) than in her English classroom. Yet I have grown up to torture my own university students with disobliging reflections about dangling participles and split infinitives in their academic writing, and I know that several of my former students of ancient Greek have never fully recovered from being forced to diagram their sentences on the white board in Greek, in order to learn that Meaning derives from functions of language, which are not at all magical, but grammatical.

Several years after graduating high school I was very surprised to discover that one of my high school teachers, whom I had had for only one class—and that was a Typing class to boot (--how much interaction does a student actually have with the Typing teacher, after all?!), absolutely “got” me. He had written in my class evaluation that, while I was bright enough on the whole, in classes that did not interest me I would only do the barest minimum of work to get by with a passing grade. Somehow, magically, this one-time teacher of mine had seen the ‘pattern’ of student-me—that I only did well in classes that interested me. Frankly, that pattern has not changed a whit in all these years.

            My high school Typing teacher correctly (and very perceptively) saw that my pre-Nietzschean Will was at work in the process of my education; because although most of the classes in the curriculum I had to take were compulsory, I still refused to engage my full efforts in subjects that had no interest for me, compulsory or not. As I reconstruct through my adult eyes this teacher’s vision of younger-me, it seems that he must have seen a perfectly regulated hot or cold student – ‘A’s and ‘C’s… nothing in between. Judging myself by what I remember of my efforts and interests, I am of course interpreting my high school ‘B’s as simply ‘C’s gone wrong.

My high school PE teachers, who were also our athletic coaches, and most of whom were ex-US marine corps, really saved my hash in high school. I absolutely know this. I was not a punk or delinquent, nor a bad kid, just an unsupervised and therefore undirected source of vital energy. And my high school PE teachers took the initiative to direct that energy into sports—both in school and after school. But they also instilled in us the sense of an old-timey military code of honor… that we were to conduct ourselves well, honorably, because we had become role models for the younger ones. Not only were we scholar-athletes, but we were in training to become America’s future defenders… we were the next generation of the brave and the free. My high school PE teachers did not leave me the leisure, materially or morally, to go off and diffuse all my energy into ‘trouble’, which, as I look back, was actually quite a likely possibility.

These teachers of my memory were simply people; they had problems and private lives, just like everyone else. But these teaching-people were in our neighborhood, they were our neighbors, they were the guardian angels of our village who lived in our village; and, although most of them were not intimate friends of my family and never would become so, all of them watched over all of us. All of them were involved, day-by-day, every day, in the job of training up America’s next generations in the way they should go.