The Owl of Athena

Education and Citizenship

2010-11-20T10:04:00.000-08:00

The arguments for smaller government that buoyed the ascendancy of tea-party conservatives in the midterm election can be very compelling. What is, after all, not to like about lower taxes? Why should the government be telling us how to live--by mandating warnings on cigarette packages, toying with restrictions on high fructose corn syrup, telling us what our kids need to eat at school, or insisting that everybody have health insurance whether they want it or not?

At the heart of the problem, however, is the fact that most of the public "argument" (such as it is) is based on faulty premises and a critical misunderstanding of history. Fueling the fight against the "socialistic" policies of the Obama administration is a badly painted picture of life at the birth of our republic, and the character of the (white, propertied) men who wrote the Constitution--and this dooms reason from the beginning.

No claim based on problematic reasons can ultimately succeed without rhetorical smoke-blowing and obscuring evidence to the contrary. Thus, many of the claims that opponents of "Obamacare" offer, for example, are supported by scary suggestions (not evidence) that health care reform will ultimately bankrupt our children, or that it will drive Granny to an early grave. Now, I'm more than willing to listen to your views, but only if you ground them in evidence; if the evidence is lacking, you can't just make stuff up. So if you're going to argue that "the Government" is violating the Constitution, be sure you've read it carefully, read commentary on what the articles mean (from more than one source), and pay some serious attention to the context in which it was written.

According to U. S. census figures for 1790, the first year a census was held, the population of the country in the year after the Constitution was ratified numbered around 4 million people. The figure for 2010 is upwards of 309 million. In 1790 there were no major roads, no electricity, no natural gas lines, no safe, reliable water supply--and thus no real upkeep or major infrastructure issues to fund. The U. S. Treasury fact sheet on the history of taxation notes that early taxes were raised from sources that varied widely from state to state:

Before the Revolutionary War, the colonial government had only a limited need for revenue, while each of the colonies had greater responsibilities and thus greater revenue needs, which they met with different types of taxes. For example, the southern colonies primarily taxed imports and exports, the middle colonies at times imposed a property tax and a 'head' or poll tax levied on each adult male, and the New England colonies raised revenue primarily through general real estate taxes, excises taxes, and taxes based on occupation.

One of the causes of that war, in fact, was the felt need of England to levy taxes on the colonies to pay for its wars abroad. The last straw was the tax levied on tea--and this seems to have also led to the future reluctance of American citizens to pay any taxes. The modern "Tea Party" seems to have forgotten that the battle cry of the tax protesters in 1773 was "Taxation without representation is tyranny." Like 'em or not, however, both houses of Congress are made up of elected representatives these days--so we're hardly being taxed without representation. If we don't like the results, we can throw the bums out. Which happens about every two years.

The point toward which I'm meandering is this: things are mighty different today than they were then. We no longer restrict the vote to propertied white males. There are gazillions more of us, a huge national transportation system that includes highways, railways, and airways, enormous electrical grids, gas pipelines, and all the other bits of technology that glue us together as a nation. And despite our overall wealth (even in these just-post-recession times), we do not have a measurably higher standard living than other developed countries that tax themselves silly.

Comparing the country now to the colonies in 1776 (or even the United States in 1790) is ridiculous. It's like comparing Adam Smith's idea of capitalism (kept in reign by the Invisible Hand) to the kind of capitalism that led to the recent depression. We're not even talking apples and oranges here; it's more like apples and lawn furniture.

The main purpose of government is to look after the public good by overseeing what can't be handled effectively by individuals or by individual states. And the first responsibility of governed citizens is to participate in their governance by electing representatives who have that good at heart. In order to do so, however, we have to be knowledgeable about processes and context; we can't just hop off and vote for any knucklehead who puts up a scary ad. The best defense against tyranny is an educated populace.

Now that the Supreme Court has declared that groups (corporations, unions, non-profits, and others) count the same as individual citizens, the job of educating ourselves becomes more difficult, because we have to be able to peel away all the subtexts that inform the ads that can be funded anonymously in favor of or against particular candidates. And because we've become not only less well-educated about but also less involved with national politics, we're much more susceptible to scare tactics and misinformation. On top of it all, we now get most of our news from commentators and pundits (whether Glen Beck or Kieth Olbermann) who specialize in verbal heat, rather than from reading newspapers and mulling over differing positions.

In the end, our value as citizens, and our ability to solve problems and insure the survival of the republic depends significantly on education. The more, the better, according to a 2005 report from the College Board. Participation in our own governance occurs in several ways, not the least important of which are through voting and paying taxes.

Now, I know the post-election mantra is all about reducing taxes. Some folks seem to think these are nothing but an imposition, and are used only to fund welfare queens and deadbeats. But in a country as large as ours, that depends so completely on the condition of its economic delivery systems (like transportation and other infrastructure), we cannot keep going without taxes. And the more prosperous we are, the more we seem to depend on these same systems--which means that our taxes need to be commensurate with our use of national facilities.

Remember that we all breathe the air, we all used the interstate highways, we share large public water sources, and so we do need oversight to keep individual states from deciding that they don't give a whiz about anybody else. (And if you think states don't do this, you don't live in Texas.) That means that in addition to paying taxes, we need to make sure the government regulates commerce to the extent that it affects individual citizens within the larger structure of the nation.

Education is about much more than just getting a job that pays well. A good education will provide us with worthwhile, interesting work that's more than just a paycheck. But it also helps us to fulfill our obligations as citizens by providing us with tools: critical thinking and mathematical skills (so we can evaluate arguments and understand statistics), historical perspective (so we remember what really happened in the founding years of our nation), and the general ability to articulate our positions and beliefs in order to make our voices heard.

It's extremely important to remember, in these almost radically anti-intellectual times, that our founding fathers were much better educated than most of us are today. Many of them read Greek and Latin, knew the classics, and were well-acquainted with the Enlightenment philosophies of their contemporaries: John Locke, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, George Berkeley, Adam Smith, Thomas Reid, Thomas Hobbes. Some of them, notably Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, and James Madison, occupy the same pantheon as the Enlightenment thinkers from Europe.

I doubt seriously that many of those touting their love of the Constitution as a reason for opposing the duly elected President and Congress could hold a conversation with any of these guys--much less really understand what they were espousing. This isn't just an indictment of the noisy Right, but also of an uncritical Left. The architects of our government disagreed on many issues, but they were united in their belief that they could build a solid, enduring alternative to colonial rule.

I really hope we don't prove their faith to be ill founded.

Image credit: Junius Brutus Stearns, Washington at Constitutional Convention of 1787, 1856. Via Wikimedia Commons.

The Gainful Employment Debate

2010-09-01T10:16:00.000-07:00

The current kerfuffle over the Education Department's efforts to make sure folks get what they pay for in higher education has, understandably, caused a bit of a stir in our hallowed halls.

Rather than offer my own view here, primarily because I'm still working through the arguments, I thought it might be helpful for my students and colleagues if I were to list some online sources that offer various perspectives.

The proposed legislation itself can be found here via the Federal Register, from the Department of Education: http://www2.ed.gov/legislation/FedRegister/proprule/2010-3/072610a.html

A Summary of the Advisory Committee's Hearing (Department of Education's Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance) includes testimony from interested parties.

The Chronicle of Higher Education weighed in with this article, Federal Proposal Could Jeopardize For-Profit Programs, Especially Bachelor's Degrees. Another article from the Chronicle offers another perspective: For-Profit Colleges Offer Another Way to Measure 'Gainful Employment.'

Inside Higher Ed pretty much defined the issue last December when it published its article on Defining Gainful Employment. A subsequent article from April was one of the first volleys fired in the most recent barrage of commentary. Going Ahead With Gainful Employment continues the discussion on the issue. Related articles are linked in the side bars.

The PBS program, Frontline, featured a segment called College, Inc., about the proliferation of for-profit colleges. The link is to the feature website, which includes teaching materials and student handouts with charts and statistics.

Greenwood and Hall, a consulting firm that focuses on relationships has published an interesting article that offers some solutions: Gainful Employment into Gainful Advantage: How Non-Profits and For-Profits Can Turn the Tables.

A Google search on "Gainful Employment Act" serves up a number of other sources, but those I've listed above provide fairly clear perspectives for those interested in constructing reasonable arguments and responding appropriately. Numerous proprietary schools have made public statements, and consumer groups and other interested parties are weighing in as well.

Stay tuned.

Image credit: The second panel from Louis Comfort Tiffany's Education, 1890, via Wikimedia Commons. This is the "science and religion" segment, situated between "art" on the left and "harmony" on the right.

Back to the Future

2010-05-29T10:57:00.000-07:00

Nincompoopery is still alive and well in Texas, no thanks to our current Board of Education and its insistence that Joe McCarthy be rehabilitated and considered in a more positive light than he had been previously in the state-wide social studies curriculum.

This is, of course, the same board responsible for wanting Thomas Jefferson omitted from discussions about the philosophical grounding of the nation, primarily because he advocated erecting a wall between church and state (designed, as I remember it, to keep the state out of the church's business). Jefferson (my father's favorite founding father, and to whom I was referred for sound political advice at my father's knee--as soon as I was old enough to ask questions) was eventually reinstated, but the denial associated with Sen. McCarthy stayed in.

No sooner have I begun to absorb this latest absurdity, when newly-crowned Kentucky Republican Senatorial candidate Rand Paul admits to Rachel Maddow, God, and everybody, that even though he abhors racial discrimination himself, people seem to have a basic right (in his view, anyway) to discriminate against anybody they please.

Remember that Santayana guy? You know, the one who told us that if we forget history, we're condemned to repeat its mistakes? Remember that Orwell guy, who showed us what it would be like if rewriting history were to become national policy?

Not that anybody seems to be reading much history these days anyway, but shouldn't we be able to look back and admit that we were once stupid, and we managed to fix things and become less stupid?

We once thought it was okay (or even a right) to think that folks of a different color or religion were somehow less than human, and therefore didn't need to be treated like one of "us." But, thanks to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, for which Rand Paul's now not sure he would have voted (because it infringes on white peoples' right to discriminate?), we're required by law to treat everyone as a fellow human being, at least in public facilities.

Some people once thought that it was okay to accuse people of treason on hearsay, and to put them in jail (or otherwise ruin their lives) if they didn't agree with a very particular political view. Socialism was at very least a thought crime in this perspective, and any opinion not deemed "American" or patriotic enough got a significant number of people fired, blacklisted, or worse.

As white as I am, and as secure in my Anglo-Saxon protestant heritage, I'd be in serious trouble today with my communitarian political pronouncements and my adopted Judaism. I could be blacklisted by McCarthy and/or refused service in a bar by Paul. Of course this is a silly notion as it stands, and makes light of serious problems since I'm not really a member of an oppressed group (unless you count women, but that's a whole other rant); the implicit danger is nonetheless disturbing.

The sheer absurdity of these actions is pale comfort in times when critical thinking has given way to emotional ranting, and my inadequately prepared students struggle to be able to support an opinion with evidence or reasons.

My forays into training students to conduct effective research over the last couple of weeks have discouraged me more than I thought possible. Not only is it difficult to make them understand that curiosity is an important aspect of creativity, but they can't seem to divorce themselves from the idea of doing research is inexorably connected with a plastic notion of "research papers" as taught in high school.

Gone is the idea of essaying into a topic, a la Montaigne, posing questions, meandering through discoveries unearthed in the process of answering them, and ending up somewhere unexpected. No, the idea of "doing a research paper" is confined to coming up with a thesis and proceeding to "prove" it. Students rarely use evidence against their basic notion in their papers--even if they do manage to configure a search that locates any. Instead, they home in on statements, frequently out of context, that support what they assume, use them (usually badly quoted), slap in a few in-line citations (if we're lucky), and turn in the result.

Although this is not what my assignments ask for (I want them to use research to inform their solutions to design problems, and then write essays that describe the process involved), it's what I all too often get.

Unless educators can figure out how to stem the tide of abject irrationality that threatens to overwhelm higher education once we start enrolling the products of the absurdist theater performance going on in Austin, our jobs are only going to get tougher and tougher.

And unless adult citizens in this country start thinking again, rather than yelling and waving badly-phrased slogans decorated with tea bags, the likes of Rand Paul are going to get into office and make it easier for closet racists to claim that their inalienable rights are being violated if they're told to serve that black guy who comes in and sits down at the counter. Rachel Maddow's tuning fork analogy reminds us that when some national figure is talking about an issue, he or she is likely voicing the views of many like-minded constituents.

If everyone really wants good government (even if what they mean by "good" is "less"), better policies, wiser spending, and other measures of a sound political economy, we have to start by allowing our students to engage in thoughtful research, critical evaluation of evidence, and cogent reasoning. This can't be done if we spend all of our time screaming at one another, ignoring bad mistakes, or burning books--even if the burning is only figurative.

Looking backward, acknowledging our mistakes, correcting them, and preventing similar mistakes in the future requires a rational and reflective turn of mind. Our students deserve to know how to do this, because they're the ones who are going to have to correct the mistakes we're making right this minute.

Image credits: the McCarthy photo is from Wikimedia Commons; I messed with it.

Lords of the Flies

2010-04-07T08:37:00.000-07:00

I know the title of this post repeats the observations of many people commenting on the current rash of bully-stories in various media. But it seems so utterly appropriate that I had to succumb.

The stories themselves are raw meat to the sensationalist television appetite currently in evidence. If a story isn't gross or gruesome or painful in some way, it's not worth reporting.

It shouldn't be surprising, then, that when a young Irish immigrant hangs herself after suffering severe bullying in a Massachusetts high school, the news shows and papers are full of it, and the pundits are after the story from all directions, left, right, and center.

What I don't understand is why anyone is surprised by any of this. We are allowing our children to raise one another, without much in the way of parental supervision or real guidance, and then we look for scapegoats (pardon me, causes) when they turn into monsters out of a George Orwell novel.

Don't get me wrong. I do not think the answer is helicopter parents who whirl around their kids and stuff their schedules with all manner of "activities" to keep them from becoming "bored" and then shower them with technological gizmos that remove the little darlings further and further from reality.

But children--even teen-aged children--should not be left unsupervised for long periods of time, encountering only their peers who don't know anything more than they do. In order to become responsible adults, children need to be educated, and they are quite simply not equipped to educate one another.

The roots of both "education" and "pedagogy" involve leading: leading out into the world, leading children. When we leave the process to the children themselves, we set up a situation in which the blind are leading the people who can't see very well. Some of these kids may have some experience of the world, but--in light of how we're raising them these days--that experience is highly restricted, mostly by technology.

I mentioned on the Farm the other day that one of my parents' most enduring gifts to me was the chance to live among Japanese and Chinese people, rather than Americans, when we were stationed in Japan and Taiwan. But another gift that I'm only now able to assess (because I thought I was terribly deprived at the time) was limited time with people my own age. Most of my life out of school was spent with adults: writers and reporters at the Foreign Correspondents Club and the Friends of China Club in Taipei, my father's fellow NCOs at his base, our "household staff" (a couple I regarded as my second parents, the "houseboy" and his wife, Lee and A-qui).

When I was with my friends, we were constrained by an invisible net of etiquette: the knowledge that our behavior reflected on the American community in Taipei, so that lapses in judgment or inappropriate displays in public were treated as major infractions and punished accordingly. We were trained to be little ambassadors, and most of us took this role seriously. There were the occasional goofballs who ended up embarrassing everyone, but I was fortunate not to encounter any of those--probably because they didn't attend the Catholic international school where Mother Superior reigned supreme and didn't put up with any crap from uppity children.

Eventually I came to value my close interaction with adults, and I think it provided me with terrific role models: successful writers and cartoonists, diplomats, nuns, priests, bishops, missionaries, translators, career military people, Taiwanese intellectuals, and a variety of European business folk.

Modern kids don't seem to have many opportunities like these; they not only don't have my weird and wonderful parents, but they also seem to be living in a different universe: one that values virtual reality over the real world, one that devalues intellectual pursuits, and one that worships youth and a comic-book concept of beauty.

I don't know what to do about bullies. We may already be too far down the line to do much but sit back and watch the coming apocalypse. But if we want to save the next generation, we almost certainly have to start spending our time with them, leading them away from the mob, containing some of their freedom with real education and companionship. How are they possibly going to learn to be responsible adults if their time with real role models is limited to a few hours with teachers every day, and a very few transient moments with parents?

If we bring children into the world, it really is our responsibility to lead them out into it--not to let them find their own way among their own kind, let loose to run around the island, deciding for themselves who should be "king" and who should be voted off.

Image credit: The Education of the Children of Clovis, by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, 1861, via Wikimedia Commons.

Educational Secession

2010-03-13T08:56:00.000-08:00

I am becoming increasingly grateful that I no longer have to deal with school-age children, and do not envy in any way the choices friends with kids are having to make these days.

Although I was all set to extol the virtues of the Dallas Independent School District's current attitude about the value of school gardens as teaching tools (after having posted on the demise of one such garden a couple of years ago), all optimism was immediately dashed when the news hit the fan about what the Texas Board of Education is planning to do to social studies across the state.

If I had ever harbored any doubt about what I would do if I had to do it all over again, I have now been completely won over to the home school camp. Not only would my kids have a garden from which to learn real science, but they wouldn't have doctrine of any sort (religious or economic) shoved down their little throats. Fortunately for us, the Texas State Board of Education (SBOE) wasn't full of ideologues when my children entered public schools, and they were pretty much allowed to study a large variety of viewpoints and to make their own intellectual decisions about the worth of various arguments. I saw little evidence of any particular bias in any of what they had to read, and since I made sure that they had access to primary sources to consult in order to get at the real meat (rather than the text-book pabulum most schools teach from) of important events, they could always follow through on questions that arose from various topics.

Long gone, however, are the days when eleventh graders are asked to write papers like the one I picked out of a hat for my Junior American History and English thesis: "An Examination of the Concept of Property Rights as Contrasted in the Writings of John Locke and Thomas Paine." To write the paper, I had to read Locke and Paine and to explicate their positions. I can't even imagine that this could happen today, because the students who show up in my own classes rarely even understand how to support an argument, and most don't seem to have heard of either Locke or Paine.

In Texas these days, Thomas Jefferson (my own father's hero) is a bad guy (for having coined the notion of the separation of church and state), and Phyllis Schlafley and the Eagle Forum have been elevated to the pantheon of historical importance once occupied by Jefferson himself. I suppose that I should be thankful that Sarah Palin's tweets haven't made it onto the list of required reading (yet).

At the same time that this silliness is taking place here, the rest of the country (with the notable exceptions of Texas and Alaska) is busy scrambling to come up with a uniform set of standards students will be expected to reach by the time the leave public schools. No Child Left Behind has resulted in the lowering of standards in some cases, so the latest effort seeks to raise the bar and expect more, rather than less, of our graduates. Alaska and Texas are the only states that declined to participate in the standards-writing effort, and according to the New York Times article by Sam Dillon, "In keeping his state out, Gov. Rick Perry argued that only Texans should decide what children there learn."

What Perry and his revisionist crew don't seem to understand is that our students are neither naive nor fundamentally stupid. Many of them graduate from high school without being fluent in English grammar, basic mathematics, or even general history and geography, but they do seem to know when they've been hoodwinked. My students, once given the opportunity to learn for themselves, seem to rise to the occasion quite well, despite the handicap of a mediocre public education. In some cases, it's as if the blinders are being removed from their eyes when I encourage them to answer their own questions. I can only hope that the new social studies requirements don't completely numb the inquisitive and make it that much harder for them to learn once they've been set free from what passes for education in this state.

In the quest for academic excellence, at least, Texas seems already to have seceded from the Union. One can only imagine what future graduates of Texas schools will have to overcome should they choose to seek jobs and/or further education outside of the state. But maybe the SBOE just wants all its graduates to stay in Texas. The Lone Star State will, of course remain totally unaffected by climate change, peak oil, or any of the other problems concocted, according to our esteemed politicians, by left-wing alarmists bent on destroying our free enterprise system. We can't even call it capitalism any more, because that's also been sullied by the left.

It's just as well, I guess, because the next generation of Texas graduates would have been taught that none of this will happen--or that if it does, it's all part of God's plan.

And if we're bent on purging figures the SBOE doesn't like from the ranks of historical importance, it probably wouldn't take too much work to alter the figure of Jefferson on Mt. Rushmore to make it look like Phyllis Schlaffey--if the gang of five on the Texas Board of Education could persuade South Dakota to go along.

Photo Credit: Mt. Rushmore, Thomas Jefferson Up Close, by Scott Catron, via Wikimedia Commons.

Long-term Problems; Short-term Brains

2010-02-18T07:00:00.000-08:00

Tom Friedman has a way with words, choosing pithy combinations to describes equally pithy phenomena. Not only is the world as he describes it hot, flat, and crowded, but we're now suffering from the best possible term for our current climate situation: Global Weirding.

In his column in yesterday's New York Times (reprinted today in the Daily Poop), Friedman describes the logical dysfunction attached to "discussions" about climate change (the current record snowfalls prove that we're being hoodwinked by scientists and their political hacks about global warming) as one of the "festivals of nonsense that periodically overtake American politics."

Amen, Brother.

America's greatest failing, despite its self-description as a visionary country that sees its future wrapped in manifest destiny, is that we are, as a population, the most myopic nation in the modern world. And it's getting worse, because once upon a time our collective brain operated on a four-year cycle; now, however, it's turned into a two-year cycle and is grounded not in carefully thought-through policy, but turn-on-a-dime popular sentiment as measure in polls.

Whereas climatic cycles work on a very long, intricate global scale, American "thinking" about important issues that affect everyone on the planet operates on a short-attention span that's often only as large as one's household, and seldom larger than one's state. If it's snowing outside my front door (or in my town, or somewhere else in Texas), the world's temperature can't possibly be rising, and we need to harvest the oil in the Barnett Shale or we're all gonna die next week, or the economy is going to collapse, or (around here, anyway) the Second Coming is nigh.

At the same time, we're mired in an educational system that talks a great deal about improving science education while harping about how Intelligent Design needs to be taught in our public schools because "Darwinism" (apparently a religion that worships evolution) is "only a theory"--and thus only as stable as any opinion. Don't teach kids anything scientific about sex, either, because sex education is the purview of parents. Schools need to teach them to wait until marriage, but that's it--and, of course, Texas ends up at the top of teen pregnancy rates and toward the bottom of SAT scores.

I know that this amounts to a very simplistic analysis, but given what my students know about science (very little) and how many of them already have children (no, I haven't polled them, but the most common excuse for missing class is child-related), I'm thinking that science and sex ed are bound together in Texas in some significant manner. Wouldn't good, comprehensive biology programs, for example, clue the kids in that 1 + 1 often equals more than two?

What I love best about Friedman's article is his call for a colloquium of climate scientists (although, one letter-writer to the Daily Poop a while back claimed that there's no such thing as "climate science") that would produce a simple paper describing "What We Know." His coining of "Global Weirding" is particularly apropos, because "what actually happens as global temperatures rise and the climate changes. The weather gets weird. The hots are expected to get hotter, the wets wetter, the dries drier and the most violent storms more numerous." And it snows for two days in north Texas, causing the fossil fuel lobby to jump up and shout that we need to dig that shale or carve up Alaska or else.

The saddest thing about this whole mess is that our students--the very ones we're failing to educate on how to solve scientific problems--are the ones who will begin to suffer most from our lack of foresight. I'll be long gone before the worst of it all begins to manifest itself, but my children's cohort and their offspring, and all those babies our kids are popping out in Texas will have to figure out how to live on an increasingly weird planet.

Image credits: NASA Arctic Temperature Change 1981-2007; Thomas Friedman in 2003 by Charles Haynes. Both from Wikimedia Commons.

Hooked Into Machine

2010-01-31T11:45:00.000-08:00

I'm not terrifically fond of popular music, but I do rather like Regina Spektor, the irreverant young songwriter/singer/pianist whose latest album, Far, has helped me get to work lately. Her stuff is witty and melodic, with odd jazzy/bluesy vocal riffs, and some amusing social commentary.

One of the songs gives this post its title, and my riff is on the currently popular propensity to stay constantly plugged in to one machine or another--and sometimes many. In many ways this phenomenon is connected to some of my remarks in The Multitasking Myth from some weeks back. It's undoubtedly also connected to the huge (and growing) number of ADHD diagnoses being thrown around, but that's for another day, and another rant.

In "Eet," Spektor touches another of my nerves with the lines,

you spent half of your life
trying to fall behind
your ears in your headphones, to drown out your mind

--yet she's far more sanguine than I, as she notes at the end of "Machine":

and you live in the future
and the future
it's here, it's bright, it's now

Of course, I live in the future of which I was terribly afraid as a child. I am, after all, part of that post-war generation that practiced "duck and cover" and (because I lived in Japan in the early fifties) air raid drills. When we lived on base we kept a packed suitcase under each bed, and when the sirens went off, we grabbed them and headed down to the basement of the concrete GI housing complex ("Green Park" it was called, rather ironically).

This probably accounts for my chronic suspicion in regard to technology in general, even though I haven't always been quite so reluctant to adopt new gadgets. My aunt bought me a little turquoise transistor radio for $5.99 in 1964, and I still have it. It was my lifeline to California during my first Texas exile; occasionally, late at night, I could get KRLA if the bounce was right; if not, KOMA, from Oklahoma City played much the same kind of music. I wasn't nearly as much of a music snob then as I am now, and the surfer rock played continuously, ever reminding me that I was really far from any ocean. I did not, however, own a set of headphones.

We also didn't watch much TV when I was growing up, even when there was one in the house. And my daughter was a year old before I bought my first color television set, all 13 inches of it, in 1980, so I could watch Cosmos and she could watch Sesame Street in color. I'm pretty sure we had a computer (a Commodore 64 first, and then an IBM clone, called a Clone) before we ever got a bigger TV. I was only peripherally aware of the possibilities offered by computers, but my first gig as a teaching assistant was in the microcomputer center at UTD, tending to early PCs and Mac SEs. Even my first teaching job at the Art Institute was using Apple 2Es to teach computer literacy.

What being around my children taught me, however, was to be selective about my technologies, because I saw how fast kids latch on to things, without questioning their real necessity or even utility. Children are little information siphons, and anything new that feeds them data (no matter what kind) is on that year's birthday or Christmas wish list. I am to this moment grateful beyond measure for the fact that cellular phones were not widely available in this country while my children were growing up.

These days I have to practically beg my students to disconnect for an hour and a half. Despite the fact that electronic devices of any sort are prohibited in the classroom, I constantly catch them sneaking peeks at their phones or even texting under the desk, oblivious to the fact that their very body language gives them away. Occasionally I'll make fun of them for trying to pull one over on me, but usually I just let it go. The real problem isn't just the lack of social graces and courtesy these little acts of rebellion demonstrate; it's the sense of quiet desperation reflected in the fact that they just can't turn the damned things off for even a few minutes.

It really is almost as though they're afraid to listen to themselves think.

Plugged relentlessly into headphones attached to their iPods or iPhones, they don't seem to be able to live without a soundtrack. Silence seems to scare the crap out of them. And why shouldn't it? They probably grew up with TVs on all the time, or tape players and radios and CDs in the car, computer games going night and day, Muzak in every store. I wonder how many members of generation X or Y have actually ever heard silence.

Even now, sitting at my desk on a Sunday afternoon in a quiet house, the furnace is going, the cars drive by, the ridiculous recorded church bells from nearly a mile away are tolling. The one truly pleasant sound is the occasional snore from one of the dogs.

This morning I was reading a book I bought yesterday, Land Arts of the American West by Chris Taylor and Bill Gilbert. It's a compendium of images and text resulting from a project involving the College of Fine Arts at the University of New Mexico. It's designed, according to the Introduction, to "explore the large array of human responses to a specific landscape over an extended period of time." Some of what it features are works by people I've lectured on in the past--Robert Smithson, James Turrell, Nancy Holt, Michael Heizer, Lucy Lewis's daughters--as well as landscapes of which I am particularly fond--Chaco Canyon, Wupatki, Sunset Crater, and a big chunk of Western desert. The book is stunning and inspiring, and as I was writing this essay I remembered one of the things I love best about these spaces: their silence.

Except for wind and birdsong, there is little in the way of noise out in the middle of nowhere. Sometimes it's so quiet, one can hear the sound of a bug walking across sand, or a lizard skittering across a rock. Sand itself seems, despite the hard surfaces of the grains, to absorb sound into its interstices, muffling the world around it. A thumping great wind can blow up out of nowhere and change all that, but in the end everything goes back to silence.

Yesterday I thought the battery in my iPhone was shot, and I played around with the idea of upgrading to a 3GS (mine is a first-generation 2G). I even mooned around on the Apple website lusting after a MacBook Pro (one of my students let me play with his the other night and I was smitten). In the end, though, the problem turned out to be my car charger, and the battery is working just fine now. So I get to put off the decision a bit longer--like I did with getting the phone in the first place. I've only had it for two years, and I only got it because nobody could reach me when my daughter had to have an emergency appendectomy. So I ended up with a phone not for myself, but to put my family at ease.

Now, of course, I depend on the bloody thing far too much; but it helps me keep in touch, even though I don't really use it all that frequently. I read the New York Times on it more often than I phone anyone; I've never listened to music on it; I'm not even sure how to use some of the basic apps. So no, I won't be getting an iPad any time soon.

I am, however, still daydreaming about the MacBook Pro.

Image credit: Ghengiskanhg, "Artificial Fiction Brain" via Wikimedia Commons.

The Case Against Textbooks

2010-01-09T13:47:00.000-08:00

As more and more colleges agonize over the rising cost of textbooks, I would like to don my Swiftian hat here and make a modest proposal.

And, no, it has nothing to do with creating baby-skin lampshades.

Rather, I would suggest that institutions of higher learning get smart, talk back, and tell the textbook companies where to shove it.

I can say this because I never once used a "textbook," either as an undergraduate or a graduate student, at any of four major universities I attended: the University of California at Riverside, the University of Pennsylvania, the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and the University of Texas at Dallas. This represents a fairly wide geographical range, and both private (Ivy League) and public institutions. I also have to admit that I'm excluding Greek and Latin grammars from the category of textbook. In the interest of full disclosure, I must also confess that I suggest to my History of Art and Design students that they buy a comprehensive art history survey, much as I suggest that they also have a copy of a good dictionary; I refer to both, but teach from neither.

In fact, I probably need to clarify what I mean by "textbooks" (as opposed to "texts," which, as all good postmodernists know, include anything that can be interpreted): books intended to teach a subject in broad introductory terms, in schools or colleges. They typically do not contain much in the way of original research or interpretation, but rather categorize and summarize information. They may offer a broad perspective on a topic, provide condensed historical or practical information, and are supposed to represent a kind of state-of-the-subject picture, especially in fields commonly taught in liberal arts institutions: history, the sciences, maths, and the humanities. I contrast these with the monographs that made up my education: books by the likes of Homer, Joyce, Swift, Goethe, Morris, and even the four evangelists and the writers of the Pentateuch.

Textbooks also tend to be written by committee (not necessarily a bad thing), profusely illustrated (also not necessarily a bad thing), and usually very expensive (in part because the aforesaid profuse illustrations and committees cost a great deal of money). They're also ubiquitous, and some colleges seem to be having fits about the cost of these books to students, and whether they should require them as actual or digital books. The proliferation of e-books and digital downloads makes it increasingly more likely that textbooks will become a permanent fixture in virtual reality, thus reducing the number of trees killed for spurious reasons--but the textbooks themselves will remain.

In addition, these books (especially the computer programming textbooks I used to illustrate the post) tend to contain material that becomes dated the minute new scholarship or new technologies emerge, so that they constantly need to be updated, new editions produced, and their prices increased, thus further exacerbating the problem. Since most software programs come with tutorials, why do instructors even need to assign textbooks in the first place?

So here's my solution. Nix 'em. Teach what you know, and write and develop your own materials. If you don't know the stuff, you shouldn't be in the classroom.

I saw one argument once that beginning teachers don't have enough experience to write their own curricula, and therefore absolutely must use a textbook written by an expert. If this is the case, what is it that they were learning in college or teacher-training programs?

I was told in a faculty development meeting just this week that I'm an expert. I sure as hell should be, after 190 graduate hours acquired during 15 years of full- and part-time schooling, not counting eight years of undergraduate education at top-notch schools. But what the facilitator meant is that we who teach are assumed to be experts in our fields. We've all got, at the very least, Master's degrees, and most of us have real-world experience related to what we teach. We all presumably spend many hours each year keeping up with current developments and advances in our subject areas, attend conferences, write peer-reviewed papers (or, in my case, blogs open to the scrutiny of any peers who happen by), participate in workshops, read monographs, subscribe to journals, and employ myriad other means to help us keep abreast and learn new stuff.

In addition to all these traditional resources, there's now the Worldwide Web, with online material that expands daily, the quality of which seems to improving all the time. Thanks to my laptop, the internet, and my college's library, I can now access millions of peer-reviewed articles, read major world newspapers, subscribe to the Chronicle of Higher Education, and commune with scholars and creative people all over the world. I can participate in virtual digs (I started out life as an archaeologist), read field reports, enjoy scholarly blogs, and take advantage of the TED lecture series. One of the most promising aspects of all this is the technology that allows me to read books online that I would never be able to even see in person except under glass or with hard-to-acquire special permissions: the Kelmscott Chaucer, Darwin's notebooks, Leonardo's sketchbooks. The means for perpetual learning are now quite literally at our fingertips.

So why are so many people so bent out of shape about spending preposterous amounts of money on textbooks good teachers don't really need? If we are indeed well-prepared enough to be "experts," why can't we be trusted to gather the material we need to teach our students what they need to know or, better yet, to provide them with the tools that make it possible for them to participate energetically in their own learning?

I suspect that there are several answers to these questions. Some beginning college instructors don't feel confident enough to strike out on their own, preparing their own lessons and assigning their own choices of primary texts and secondary works that could generate questions they might not be able to answer. If we're assumed to be experts, after all, we can't not know the answers. Although I'm not sure why the notion of "expert" implies "omniscient," this does seem to be a prevailing sentiment. And it creates a problematic model in the mind of the student: there is an answer; once we know it, we don't have go any further.

Another reason, I hesitate to mention for fear that I might sound accusatory, is intellectual laziness, which seems to be endemic in some schools these days. It's too much trouble to do all that work analyzing and collecting suitable readings. Why not order a textbook, where somebody's already done all that work for you? It's much more time consuming to select works and readings by great writers and thinkers, to locate ancillary materials, to search for appropriate websites in the growing pantheon of content-loaded interactive pages.

Oddly enough, though, it's considerably cheaper. A few paperback copies of significant works and PowerPoint slides built from images freely available on the web or through one's college library might well provide the basis for a top-notch humanities class. Surely the original works, some commentary, and some explication on the teacher's part, and a lot of healthy discussion and research would be far more interesting than slogging through chapter upon chapter of textbook condensations or pre-selected readings.

Still another explanation is the problem of suspicion or ignorance on the part of authorities--those in charge of running the show. An administration may have hired us, but because few of those who hire know what we know, they may not trust us enough to afford the kind of academic freedom that allowed us to become the well-trained, academically qualified, committed teachers that we are in the first place.

I fully realize that the academic world in which we now live is not the one in which I was educated. My teachers all knew well of what they spoke; they lectured, we took notes, asked questions, conducted research, wrote papers, discussed those papers, responded to critical assessments, and graduated from college and graduate school having learned the way people have learned ever since the idea of the university began in the Middle Ages.

That model is increasingly under attack in a world that demands interactivity, instant gratification, and entertainment--as well as "accountability" (which I suspect is engendered by our also increasingly litigious society). I quail to think of what high school is like these days after having read a feature essay in today's Daily Poop by a high-school Junior who likes the idea that libraries are now noisy, because it means that people have finally learned how to mix education with entertainment. I'm not sure how forty years of Sesame Street fits into her world. Maybe she missed it.

Ye gods and little fishes! What brave new world is this that has such people in it?!

For the moment, I'm out of steam. But I'll return for another chapter soon, perhaps with some suggestions for how to do what I say we should be doing.

Image credits: A row of computer textbooks uploaded by K.Lee; A detail from Jan van Eyck's The Madonna and the Canon Georg van der Paele, 1436; and Carl Spitzweg's wonderful The Bookworm, 1850 (I have a print in my study). All from Wikimedia Commons.

Bread and Circuses

2009-12-01T07:07:00.000-08:00

The conflict between privacy and celebrity has finally reached the point of pure idiocy. Actually, it already had, but the recent flap concerning Tiger Woods (who has actually earned his fame) points to the absurdity with which modern media attend to matters that would once have been purely private.

I don't know why Woods slammed into a tree in the middle of the night. And unless it somehow affects national security (as the also-recent flap concerning party crashers at the White House might), I'm content to keep my nose where it belongs. In my own business.

But prurient interest in what goes on in other people's houses seems to have become an international pastime. Witness the tragicomic antics of the "new" royal family in Britain, where the intensity of this kind of curiosity seems to have ramped up, and of which I was reminded last night as we watched Helen Mirren's performance as Elizabeth II in Stephen Frears's film The Queen. Never having met QEII herself, I can only judge the acting job superficially, but I was completely taken in by the compelling portrayal of a woman caught between the worlds of restrained tradition and media frenzy.

Queen Elizabeth's initial reaction to Princess Diana's death seems to have been that even though Diana was a public figure, her funeral should be private (there were, after all, children involved here). But nobody in the public eye--especially anyone who has played the public for sympathy (whether deserved or not)--gets privacy any more. The outpouring of grief over Diana's death fueled tabloid hysteria almost to the point of conflagration, as if the papers and television realized that they were losing a cash cow and had to wring out every byline and lurid headline before the furor itself died out.

Nowadays, celebrity is being sought for its own sake. Andy Warhole's fifteen minutes of fame idea has become a life-goal for some people. Substance and accomplishment are no longer criteria of fame. Instead, publicity seems to be the sole measure: whoever can garner the most coverage becomes the news item du jour.

All this is one more indication of the shallowing (probably not a word) of the cultural pool of metaphor. No longer deepening through shared experience, interesting connections, or intellectual freshness, the pool of which I frequently speak is just plain drying up. Metaphors are becoming predictable and stale (like the fifteen minutes of fame quip itself), and even the word "like" (which used to signal an upcoming comparison) has become a vocal mannerism equivalent to "uh" or "you know."

The only still-rich sources of metaphor seem to be science and technology, but even these are turning out tropes based on the rampant growth of social media. So "tweet" and "twitter" no longer refer to sounds made by birds, but rather to noises made by people seeking fame in cyberspace. Science contributes to new words that refer to increasingly short attention spans: nanosecond and (frequently used inappropriately) quantum leap. A quantum is actually really tiny ("quantum theory deals with the tiniest things we know, the particles that atoms are made of"), rather like the brains of those who seem to be operating the news media these days. Ahem.

I don't really want to belabor my point (because, as you know, I tend to go on and on about things), but I do so miss the days when I didn't really know anything about the lives of those making the news. In fact, all I really care about Tiger Woods is how he plays golf. Although I appreciate the example he has been setting for young people, I'm not going to be using any sports figure as an example when it comes to raising children--unless, of course, that sports figure also turns out to be a Rhodes Scholar or a brilliant scientist or an inspiring teacher as well.

Metaphor is about complexity; the more we know, the more creative the connections we can make. Perhaps now is the time for us to turn off our television sets and bake our own bread. Who knows what would happen if we taught our kids to notice what happens when raisin bread rises, rather than what the latest talentless nincompoop is doing in the latest media circus.

Image credit: Henryk Siemiradzki, A Christian Dirce, nineteenth century. The painting depicts Nero with an executed Christian woman in his circus (Wikimedia Commons). Comparisons of current cultural events and those of imperial Rome are commonplace these days, but not inappropriate. For more on this topic, see Cullen Murphy's recent book, Are We Rome?

Songs of a Distant Earth

2009-11-23T10:40:00.000-08:00

Last week I worked for two hours on a post (using Wordpad, which doesn’t have an automatic backup) before being thwarted by one of Microsoft’s incessant updates to Vista. I was using Wordpad in the first place because I often spend several hours on a post so I don't tend to do it online. But Word embeds so much code that it screws with Blogger’s layouts, so I compose in Wordpad. At any rate, I lost it, and haven’t been back since. But my purpose remained intact, even though I lost steam along with my prose.

The purpose of the original post was to assure anyone who happens upon this blog that, contrary to current popular silliness, the absolutely only thing of any importance scheduled to occur on December 21, 2012, is my sixty-fifth birthday. No, the world is not going to end—not even according to the Maya, misconceptions about whose calendar are at the source of popular culture’s latest charlatan show.

It’s actually a good thing that I didn’t post on this last week for a couple of reasons. The first is that I finally caught up with the November 8 edition of the New York Times’s entertainment section, in which Tyler Gray notes that Roland Emmerich’s film, 2012 (now enjoying huge monetary success and making my job measurably more difficult) isn’t the least bit interested in knowing why the Maya calendar “ends” on this particular date. Gray did the smart thing and interviewed David Stuart (who won a MacArthur “genius” grant when he was eighteen for his already significant work on Mayan language). Stuart points out that December 21, 2012 is simply the end of the latest Baktun and the beginning of the next.

The Maya were, in fact, pretty scientific (rather than prophetic) about their calendrical system, drawing on previous historical patterns to suggest what might happen next. I was amused at Stuart’s expectation that he’d be “dealing with Mr. Emmerich’s misuse of Maya history for his whole career.” I just hope he’s right, however, in thinking that nobody will really take the movie seriously.

But there’s such a raft of idiocy plying the waves of the internet these days that I’m not all that sanguine; maybe folks won’t believe the movie, but they certainly seem to be tuning into the noise. I urge anyone who’s the least bit interested in the whole 2012 mishegoss to pick up the latest issue of Skeptic magazine (or the National Geographic page linked below), which does a good job of poking holes in twenty differently spurious claims about a variety of catastrophes supposed to occur three years from now.

My main beef with all this rigmarole is that it pokes two of my “buttons”: the demise of intelligent thought and the growing lack of understanding—especially among the American populace—of how science works.

What I don’t understand is why people are so gullible, and why Americans in particular seem to have chosen to be believers rather than scientists. American exceptionalism (the view that we’re special, not only politically and economically, but in the eyes of god) may be at the root of it. After all, the United States exists primarily because it was founded by colonists who wanted to practice religions opposed to or by established churches in the countries from whence they came, and since then politics and religion (though officially separated by a Constitutional clause meant to forestall the establishment of a state religion) have mixed pretty freely. If you're not a professed believer, and preferably a Christian believer, good luck being elected to public office.

But religion doesn’t automatically make one susceptible to goofy claims. The nuns responsible for my early education planted in my nascent brain a love of learning that especially loved learning science. Unfortunately, the more damaging aspect of American-style religion is its tendency to instill doubt in science, unlike mainstream religion in Europe. Recent polls are full of statistics showing that nearly half of Americans think that human beings were created within the last 10,000 years, and claim not to believe in evolution.

The number of people who “believe” in evolution rises significantly as the level of education increases, but asking people if they “believe” in evolution in the first place betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of how science works.

In terms of logic, the problem lies in the fallacy of equivocation: equating two words that mean different things in different contexts. The classic example is the word theory, which to most people represents an idea or even a guess; in science, however, a theory is a coherent explanation for observable evidence. Although there’s always room for falsification in science, theory “behaves” like law, in that experiments and practice are grounded in it.

So gravity is, in fact, “only” a theory, but we behave as though it’s a law, even though our ideas about what it entails have changed somewhat since the time of Newton (largely because of Albert Einstein’s work). So yes, evolution is a theory; but despite a few gaps here and there, by far the preponderance of evidence leads us to the conclusion that Darwin pretty much had it right when he published Origin of Species 150 years ago tomorrow.

Scientists even use the word belief differently than most folks do—in the sense of expectation rather than pure faith. Astronomers, for example, expect there to be life on other planets based on current evidence.

The existence of extraterrestrial planets leads them to suspect with some statistical probability that some planets with some form of life do exist. Ideas like these are hard to disprove, because our galaxy alone contains so many stars that not finding the evidence we need to confirm alien life isn’t going to disprove it. But evidence could emerge that strongly suggests life somewhere else. Unless ET comes calling, though (which physics as we currently understand it pretty much precludes), we’re never going to know for sure. So scientific belief really describes a reason-based expectation, perhaps mixed with hope that discovery will occur in our lifetime—but it’s not blind faith.

Quite by coincidence I picked up Arthur Clarke’s Songs of A Distant Earth last Saturday (in part about what it would really take to travel to other planets if we had to; a rather serendipitous event that gave me the title for the post), and a few hours later snagged a copy of the December 2009 National Geographic, with its article, “Seeking New Earths,” by Timothy Ferris. The article talks about efforts to locate earth-like planets in orbit around sun-like stars, because they’re the most likely to have developed the kind of life that evolved here. The statistical likelihood of life seems to be pretty high, but life as we know it not so much. As Ferris points out, “Biological evolution is so inherently unpredictable that even if life originated on a planet identical to Earth at the same time it did here, life on that planet today would almost certainly be very different from terrestrial life.” (93)

The issue also conveniently includes a fine debunking of the 2012 myths: a fitting way to celebrate the publication of Origin of Species, I think, and a reminder that it might be possible to emerge from our quagmire of silliness and start to better use the brains we’ve got, god-given or not. However much I would like there to be extra-terrestrial life, unless somebody discovers an error in Einstein's cosmic speed limit, our fine, big brains will have to depend on what Timothy Ferris calls “the richness of the human imagination” to discover new planets—to articulate new theories to explain what's happening to our home planet, and suggest how we might fix it before we're forced to go looking for a new one.

Whether or not we believe in a god, our future depends on embracing science not as a substitute for religion, but as a means to understanding the world. Such understanding does not omit the possibility of faith—as many established religions have shown. Science and religion are not incompatible, unless one seeks absolute certainty (which science does not afford), or reads scripture literally. Even as a child, when I actually did believe in several deities in sequence, I couldn't help but marvel at the genius of any being who could have invented the complex and labyrinthine process that produced us all. Both our origins and our fate are far more interesting and astounding when seen through a microscope or a telescope, than when viewed through a veil of ignorance and wishful thinking.

Image credits: Nick Risinger's conception of the Milky Way galaxy, from Wikimedia Commons, where you can also find an annotated version that shows where we live. The painting of Darwin (also from the Commons) is by George Richmond; Darwin sat for the portrait not long before he sailed on the Beagle.

The Multitasking Myth

2009-11-04T08:15:00.000-08:00

I am not generally fond of using "myth" in the sense of "lie" or "untruth widely accepted as truth." (I much prefer the notion of myth as cultural storytelling and as a means of preserving cultural identity.) But since this particularly negative sense of the word is being applied to a phenomenon I find extremely deleterious to learning, I'm ready to go along on this one.

So here's the big question. Is it possible for people in general (and young people in particular) to engage in two or more activities at the same time and do any of them well enough to accomplish the purposes attached to each?

The answer seems to be, according to a resounding majority of researchers, "no."

My General Studies colleagues and I have been saved from some measure of dispute by the fact that our department has banned the use of extraneous technologies in the classroom: no laptops, no iPods, no mobile phones, no recording devices--at least without documents supporting ADA accommodation.

Students occasionally try to circumvent the policy by texting under the desk, but their demeanor is so obvious that I usually catch them and suggest strongly that they put the damned phone away and pay attention. As you can imagine, I'm very well loved for this. But it does make me wonder about students' priorities when they can't shut the "communication" devices off for an hour and a half.

I recently came across Rebecca Clay's article for the APA's online journal, Monitor on Psychology, "Mini-multitaskers." Her thesis is pointed, and reveals the fallacy inherent in the notion that young folk can work effectively on several assignments or tasks at a time.

Multitasking may seem modern and efficient, but research suggests that it slows children's productivity, changes the way they learn and may even render social relationships more superficial.

She provides evidence from recent studies that multitaskers do not save time, but actually take longer to accomplish individual efforts because they're not really doing them simultaneously; they're switching back and forth, and the switching adds time to the job rather than reducing it. And the more complex the job, the more time is lost.

As for my favorite in-class bit of naughty behavior, Clay notes that

Text messaging during class isn't just a high-tech version of passing notes. Because of its demands on attention, multitasking also may impair young people's ability to learn.

This is because, as research out of UCLA indicates, information is processed differently and less effectively when multitasking than it is when one devotes one's full attention to an activity. This may, in turn, exacerbate the problem already bequeathed us by the current emphasis in elementary and high school on rote learning. Dividing attention seems to make it harder for students to truly understand what is being taught; instead, they're more likely to respond by rote, able only to barf back what they've been told without digesting it. Sorry for the ugly analogy, but it's apt.

So, if we combine the short attention spans instilled in our kids by Sesame Street (90 seconds) and television commercials (30 seconds), with the superficiality of rote learning and a constant barrage of digital media (cell phones, iPods, Twitter, Facebook), why doesn't every student have ADHD?

According to Tamara Waters-Wheeler, a North Dakota school psychologist quoted in the article, attention problems are increasing and even if students aren't diagnosed with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, they're nonetheless exhibiting symptoms because they've grown up multitasking.

The evidence also suggests that the communities established by text-messaging and social networking may be much more superficial than face-to-face friendship. This is particularly important because as media-mediated friendships increase, the quality of these relationships will change the way we look at community, friendship, and other human interactions. The implications for cultural change are manifold. Clay quotes a developmental psychologist, Patricia Greenfield, who finds this multitasking version of friendship troubling:

We evolved as human beings for face-to-face interaction. As more and more interaction becomes virtual, we could lose qualities like empathy that are probably stimulated by face-to-face interaction.

Clay's is only one of myriad articles and blogs devoted to the emerging problems associated with short attention spans and media addiction. One of the best is from Blogger in Middle Earth, Ken Allen, a New Zealand educator whose post on "Binge Thinking" gets at the meat of the matter, which he describes as "cognitive overload."

In order to deal with this phenomenon, it's probably time to start rethinking how we present material to our students. Even in a fast-paced program like ours (cramming a semester's worth of information and learning into eleven weeks), and even in the face of ever more intense scrutiny by the assessment regime, we've simply got to figure out how to slow things down enough to help students change habits that they've acquired over the last twenty years.

Some of what I've read has inspired me to reduce the amount of information and increase the depth to which we explore it each quarter. This is a tough slog for fact- and information-based courses like art history, but in order to address problems associated with superficial learning (and its potential effect on creativity, which I'll address in a later post), some sort of new approach seems necessary. My students are already hinting at a solution: more workshops. My course-evaluation comments are rife with requests for more hands-on activities to connect theory and practice.

I can assure you, however, that I will address the issues one at a time, and use one medium at a time in order to develop some useful strategies. No multitasking will be employed in pursuit of solutions.

As they say in the funnies, "Stay 'tooned."

Image credit: Printed books will always be my medium of choice, but the updated British Museum Reading Room combines the old and the new so beautifully that I thought I'd encourage readers to check it out. The full resolution photo is available here. It was taken in February, 2006, by Diliff and uploaded in its present form to Wikimedia Commons in November 2008. When I mentioned the British Library last week, and wondered what the new library looked like, I hadn't realized that the old reading room still existed at its original site. Because of its marriage of printed codex and digital technology, this seemed like an appropriate illustration for this post. No short attention spans allowed in this place!

Technology and Education--Really Cool Toys

2009-10-25T12:14:00.000-07:00

This will probably be an ongoing feature of the Owl of Athena, because I keep happening on items that encourage optimism about the future of education. Such encounters are not as frequent as I'd like in order for me to become generally more sanguine about where we're going, but they do help make up for all the rain we've been having lately, which has damaged some books I had stupidly stored in my garage.

The British Library has applied digital page-turning software to a selection of books in its collection, and the results are stunning: The Luttrell Psalter, the Lindisfarne Gospel (with its bejewelled cover in exquisite detail), one of Leonardo's notebooks, Jane Austen's History of England (written by hand when she was thirteen years old)--and more.

The technology, which allows readers to use a mouse to "turn" the pages, makes it almost like actually performing the act of page-turning, except for the texture of the page itself (which you wouldn't be able to feel anyway, because you'd be wearing cotton gloves if you had the text in front of you). The pages aren't merely visible, either; rotate, magnify, zoom, or move the pages about on the screen, and listen to or read commentary on them. For my History of Art & Design I students, this may well prove a valuable resource, when it comes time to solve the final design problem--creating an illuminated manuscript of your own.

The technology serves not only codices (both right- and left-reading), but volumes, like the Dering Roll, a three-meter long scroll of heraldic devices (featured on the Turning the Pages website). If you can't figure out how to use the icons, the "get help" link supplies clear instructions, and you can minimize the tool bar and otherwise "personalise" your experience as well. Unfortunately, only select pages are featured from the books featured on the British Library site, twenty three at the moment, but each one includes rich examples of what the book contains.

Some aspects seem a little silly--like the 3D option on the menu, which is otherwise helpful because it offers a choice of categories: in case, for example, you're interested in Science and Nature but not in Religious texts. Some of the categories are empty, but provide an idea of what will eventually be available.

Alas, the program currently (in its TTP 2.0 form) only works on PCs running XP or Vista. Some small recompense, perhaps, for those who haven't been completely converted to the Mac cosmos.

The same browser application powers the "Explore the Manuscripts" segment of the English Heritage page on Charles Darwin's home, Down House. Five of Darwin's notebooks are available, and all but the Beagle Diary can be viewed in their entirety.

The folks who made this software possible, Armadillo Systems, have developed it (according to managing director Michael Stocking's blog) to "to help museums and libraries provide access and interpretation for their collections." Since many of us will probably never go abroad again, much less obtain access to the rare book collections of the British Library, I can't think of a more noble cause. I also love the emphasis on interpretation, because that's the engine that drives learning, and the broader our perspective (including encounters with primary texts in their original form), the more fluent the interpretation. Now I just have to drive more of my students toward learning Greek and/or Latin, and I can die happy. Some considerable time in the future, I hope.

Image credit: The first page of Matthew's Gospel, from the Lindisfarne Gospel. Wikimedia Commons. For a much more intimate and true-to-life encounter, go to the British Library link mentioned in the post.

Metaphors Be With You

2009-10-14T09:58:00.001-07:00

I usually start the quarter out talking about the necessity of metaphor in the learning process, but the manifold uses of metaphor and translation in everyday life have been popping up everywhere, prompting this post.

As some of you already know, I'm not an enormous fan of "self help" culture or new-agey spiritual quests, but every now and then I come across a book that falls into one or both of these categories and that proves both useful and interesting. One, Michael Gelb's How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci, is especially helpful in teaching my students about the importance of making connections (connessione) and embracing ambiguity (sfumato) in the development of creativity. It's so useful, in fact, that I carry it around on my cart (portable office) from class to class, and more than one student has been inspired to check it out of the library.

More recently I happened on Norman Fischer's Sailing Home: Using the Wisdom of Homer's Odyssey to Navigate Life's Perils and Pitfalls (New York: Free Press, 2008), which was on the cheap deal rack at Borders. Always on the lookout for material my students can use for research on their illuminated manuscript project (the "Lotus Eaters" episode in The Odyssey is one of their choices), I thumbed through it and what little I read I found rather engaging. Fischer is a Buddhist monk, and my long association with the East has made me more sympathetic to Buddhists than to most established religions (I've actually know some pretty cool Buddhists who used to hang out with the Benedictine priests we visited in mountain missions in Taiwan). So I bought it. At three bucks it was cheap at twice the price (as the old saw goes).

While reading through the first chapter, "The Sea of Stories," I found Fischer's treatment of metaphor and its value to storytelling insightful and potentially useful. As he points out, "Creating, processing, and interpreting stories is a major industry" (13), and my students are some of that industry's future purveyors. They're taking my classes in order to help them become better storytellers. In his introduction, Fischer notes that "metaphors condition, far more than we realize, the way we think about ourselves and our world, and therefore the way we are and act" (7), and thus significantly influence the kinds of stories we tell, and our ability to tell them creatively.

As I've mentioned elsewhere on this blog, I'm fond of Gerald Holton's concept of the "cultural pool of metaphor" from which we draw images and ideas that have collected through the cultural experiences of ourselves and our ancestors. And my students probably get tired of hearing me say that "the more you know, the more you can know," because the more you know, the more metaphors you absorb, and the more lenses you have through which to interpret the world. The lens Fischer offers in his book asks us to look at an odyssey as a journey--not a quest, but a journey home. Students who come to understand that metaphor not only know Homer's world better, but can in turn (in Fischer's view) apply that understanding to their own world.

Not long after I finished the first chapter of Sailing Home, and sat down to work, I remembered that I was supposed to look up the word that refers to the human tendency to see patterns where they don't necessarily exist. I found it in the Skeptic's Dictionary: pareidolia, from the Greek para (beside) and eidos (image). It's the phenomenon that encourages people to see faces on Mars and Jesus in tortillas, and has people running to see the Virgin's image in a tree trunk. It's actually an aspect of metaphorical thinking, at least in Gregory Bateson's sense of "seeing as." Since Bateson was a psychologist as well as an anthropologist, it makes sense that he would recognize metaphor as the basis of some psychological practices and processes--like using the Rorschach test.

Pareidolia may also be at the root of some cave paintings, like the "Wounded" or "Leaping" bison from Altamira Cave, where cracks and contours on the cave wall may have suggested the positions of some of the figures. When we look up at the clouds like Opal and Earl (in one of my favorite comic strips, Pickles) or the folks in Strange Brew or Red and Rover and imagine seeing images of animals or other miscellaneous items, we're engaging in metaphor-making on a very basic level.

Parody is another example of "seeing as" and also an example of Terry Barrett's adage that "All art is in part about other art." Being able to see Michelangelo's David in a pair of Calvin Klein Jeans is pretty silly--but it probably could sell the jeans because David is a pretty fair model of a man (another metaphorical construct), as any giggly high school girl in Florence can tell you. I used to have my students produce parodies of famous art works--that is, at least, until I got one too many "booty call" renditions of Ingres's Grande Odalisque. Various artists have created major works that parody those of others, such as Picasso's play on Velasquez's Las Meninas.

Metaphor is such a basic aspect of human intellectual experience that I can't imagine creativity operating without it. Unfortunately, reduced to its most banal, metaphor becomes cliché, and loses its instructive and inspirational energy. But as long as we keep encouraging our students to learn more for the sake of learning, and to expand their storytelling horizons by filling up that cultural pool with new, inventive, different, meaningful, and invigorating metaphors, we'll be doing them and ourselves an enormous favor.

Image Source: "Nausicaa Playing Ball with her Maidens," one of John Flaxman's illustrations for the 1810 edition of The Odyssey. I chose this one because it illustrates the moment when Odysseus begins the final leg of his journey home and entertains Nausicaa's parents with stories of his adventures. It's also the segment of the story that inspired the opening scene for More News From Nowhere. I cleaned the image up a little, but got it from Wikimedia Commons. Fittingly enough, Athena herself appears, floating behind the young women.

A note on the title of this post: I stole it from a bumper sticker.

A Confederacy of Nincompoops

2009-09-05T11:55:00.000-07:00

Since the decline of Western Civilization--at least as manifested in these United States--currently shows signs of accelerating rather than abating any time soon, I thought I'd post this both on Owl's Farm and here on the Owl of Athena because it relates both to political economy and to education.

I have, of course, stolen the title--cheesily altered--from John Kennedy Toole's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. His hero, Ignatius J. Reilly, was a fully-realized snark and I loved the book--but haven't read it in twenty years. If Toole had lived to see what happened to New Orleans a few years ago, he'd probably have written a sequel; but the world was already too much for him, and he died by his own hand over ten years before A Confederacy of Dunces was finally published.

Toole was a latter-day Jonathan Swift, critical of cultural excess and stupidity in the '80s, and he drew his title from Swift's own "Thoughts on Various Subjects": "When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign: that the dunces are all in confederacy against him."

Now, I'm not saying that Barack Obama is a "true genius," even though he well may be. He is, after all, a politician, and he seems poised to weasel out of a host of platform promises in some Quixotic quest of his own--bipartisanism. But for sure, the dunces and nincompoops have arisen, if not in actual hoards, at least in loud numbers that make the evening news every bloody night, and promise to make it more and more difficult for him to accomplish what he was elected to do.

Another of Swift's aphorisms (from the same source as Toole's title) speaks to the current phenomenon of loud-mouthed, ill-informed rantings that go on in the so-called "town meetings" and that may well signal the end of civil discourse in this country.

Few are qualified to shine in company; but it is in most men's power to be agreeable. The reason, therefore, why conversation runs so low at present, is not the defect of understanding, but pride, vanity, ill-nature, affectation, singularity, positiveness, or some other vice, the effect of a wrong education.

Or of no education at all, perhaps. Otherwise, why would any reasonable human being yank a kid out of class in fear of being "indoctrinated" by the duly elected President of the United States? The promised topic is a pep-talk on staying in school in order to excel in life. Objections to the address on the basis of some paranoid fear of subliminal persuasion to embrace Socialism sounds to me like these parents--who really don't want their kids in public school anyway, but can't "afford" to home school them, or sacrifice anything to send them to private parochial schools--just don't want their children educated at all, in any meaningful sense of the word.

They want the Bible taught in school, but they sure as hell don't want Biblical hermeneutics taught because that might cause kids to question particular interpretations of the book itself, or perhaps to insist that it be read in context. They want Creationism or Intelligent Design taught to "balance" the godlessness of "Darwinism," and they don't "believe" in the evidence emerging from science in regard to climate change. They want their kids to read "the classics," but only the ones they approve of. History has to tell it the way it was told when they were kids, despite any evidence that's emerged during the last hundred years or so that contradicts received views. And the United States must never, ever, be portrayed in a negative light. Art history can be taught, but parents want to be insured that little Chase won't see breasts on a Greek statue, or little Britney won't see the giant phallus on a Pacific Island totem, so don't take 'em to a museum.

I know that not all parents act this way, but the furor over President Obama's speech has brought back a flood of memories about recent skirmishes in local public schools, and the constant battles that go on over Texas textbook choices. I long for a new William F. Buckley to appear to bring intelligent voices back into Conservative conversations. David Brooks and Rod Dreher can only pull so much weight, and even they're drowned out when the screamers take the podium and start out-shouting reasonable discussion.

The truth is, if we keep on this path toward willful ignorance, afraid to let our children make up their own minds about issues, they'll never learn to think critically, and there won't be anyone around in the future to solve the problems we're not addressing today.

As I discussed the Norman Conquest in my art and design history classes this week, I was once again reminded that our children don't know much about the history of the world. Medieval life is a mystery to them (except the Disney or Monty Python versions), not because it's not especially interesting, but because some nincompoop school system doesn't think "ancient history" is very important. This despite the parallels between the Middle Ages and the present that keep popping up.

Around here it's because you'd have to talk about controversial religious matters, and point out conflicting ideas about the role of religion in the formation of the modern world. But modernity and change are issues that parents don't seem to want to deal with, and they don't seem to be particularly worried about being condemned to repeat what we've forgotten about history.

The focus on education is increasingly seen as "elitism," even as we're told to send everyone to college who can breathe, whether or not he or she is really interested in doings so, or prepared to work at it. Those of us who have gone beyond college are suspect, because so many of us favor thinking carefully instead of proceeding headlong into an argument with nothing but opinions as grounds.

Among Swift's other remarks (not all of which are particularly useful) is this: "Some people take more care to hide their wisdom than their folly."

Some people seem to be reveling in their folly, at the expense of ever attaining wisdom. The old guard--the politicians and commentators who could discuss issues rationally despite their differences, like Ted Kennedy and Bill Buckley--is gone, and I for one miss the folks who could keep us honest and reasonably well-informed. Their measured assessments of current issues are swiftly being replaced by squawking and flummery, and our country is intellectually poorer as a result.

Images: William Hogarth's Chairing the Member, from The Humours of an Election series, 1755. When considering how to "illuminate" this post, I immediately thought of Hogarth's rabble-rousers in this series on popular elections. New Orleans, Mardi Gras Day, 2006: Rex Parade float commemorating A Confederacy of Dunces on Canal Street near the corner of Charters. It's good to see that Toole's book is still celebrated in his home town. Photo by Infrogmation. Jonathan Swift, portrait by Charles Jervas, 1718. All from Wikimedia Commons.

Design Lessons

2009-07-25T08:09:00.000-07:00

The first two weeks of the summer quarter are now complete, and I thought I'd comment on the experience for those students who happen on the blog--whether on purpose, or because they accidentally poke a link somewhere on the course web page.

I'm trying a couple of newish things this quarter; I say new-ish because I've tried them before with varying levels of success. The first of these is the Protokoll, the old German-university tool taught me by one of my esteemed professors in grad school. The word means something like "minutes" (as in the minutes of a meeting), or "official record," although the English word "protocol" means something more akin to procedure (especially diplomatic) or a kind of etiquette.

My aim in this exercise is a bit of both, but its reinstatement is tied to our new lesson-planning effort in General Studies. While I originally balked at the idea of planning out my "lessons" several years ago when first told that I needed to do it, I've come to embrace the notion enthusiastically. Not only does a well-laid plan help me not forget stuff (which I'm wont to do in my state of advancing age and decrepitude, evoked nicely, I think, by the Per Lindroth caricature that illustrates the post), it also connects to the practice of good design. Since I've been lecturing about the relationship between art and design since week 1, it seems only appropriate that my lectures themselves be well designed.

The Protokoll helps me accomplish, with the aid of my students, the requirement that I bridge one week's topic to the next week's. Asking the students to take over the task accomplishes two further objectives: to engage them in the material, and to encourage participation and interaction among their fellows. So far this is all working fairly well. Most of the small groups assigned to deliver the first Protokoll in their sections have approached it enthusiastically enough, and have acquitted themselves nicely. Organization and logic aren't their strong suits, but I can stress these elements in future, and later efforts will probably be better. My colleague who teaches another section of the second-level course reports equal success with the assignment in his class.

Alas, I'm not faring as well with the other effort, which is to provoke more verbal interaction with the images I'm showing. I'm not as good at the Socratic thing as my philosophy-professor/tennis-coach husband is; but then he doesn't show slides. I'm trying, but the sheer volume of material I have to cover in 3.5 hours is daunting, and I'll have to reduce that if I'm going to get much more conversation. But that's a goal I can work on, and is part of the reason behind planning lessons in the first place.

At the moment I'm still working on a proto-technological model. Not all that long ago, I showed 35 mm slides (on a projector I called "Dead Bessie" in reference to an episode of Firefly)--before the advent of PowerPoint and the in-room technology kiosks now available. In the "olden days" I'd have to haul in whacking great huge television sets with VCRs attached, and I still use the cart that was once Dead Bessie's mode of transportation. PowerPoint provides a superb platform for image-delivery (although I steadfastly refuse to do bullet-pointed lectures that outline what I'm saying, and then hand them out to students; I'm pretty sure that's counter-productive if one is trying to get them to pay attention to what one is saying), and I love being able to show details of images I could once provide only if I had a slide of that detail. But an artifact of the old delivery system is that I'm still psychologically bound to the old images.

In some cases I've modified the sequence of slides, but I'll bet that if I went back and dug up a slide list for Romanticism from ten years ago, that it would contain substantially the same examples as this year's list does.

So my lesson planning over the next few quarters will involve going back over what I show, and perhaps coming up with better examples of what I'm trying to teach, and a better design for engaging students in the process of understanding. The ever-swelling popularity of the internet as an educational tool makes it easier to link materials from major museums, both local and international, and my aim is to focus on their collections--rather than on my own.

Stay tuned. Fewer but pithier slide examples, more evocative questions, and stunningly inventive assignments are just around the corner.

Image credit: "The Absent-minded Professor" by Per Lindroth (1878-1933) from the Runeberg Project (an effort to provide online editions of classic Scandinavian literature) via Wikimedia Commons.

Little Gray Cells

2009-06-30T09:05:00.000-07:00

One of the reasons I love mysteries—at least the classical, cerebral whodunits of writers like Agatha Christie and Rex Stout—is that they employ the intelligence not only of the detectives doing the sleuthing, but also that of the reader or viewer. Nero Wolfe, Hercule Poirot, and Miss Marple all solve mysteries using various kinds of intelligence and wisdom, and don’t depend so much on sensation as intrigue for plot lines. Good puzzles to be solved are their mainstays—not gruesomeness, or, when there is, it’s usually suggested rather than described in gory detail.

It was with some amusement, therefore that I watched the two most recent Hercule Poirot episodes Sunday night on Masterpiece Mystery—right after watching a silly and rather gratuitous story reported by Leslie Stahl on 60 Minutes about the latest "mind-reading" advances in neuroscience. The claim, according to the blurb on the program's website, is that "Neuroscience has learned so much about how we think and the brain activity linked to certain thoughts that it is now possible - on a very basic scale - to read a person's mind."

The research reported, on scanning brains to locate certain kinds of activities, is nothing new. But Stahl’s breathless and eager reportage implied that we’re essentially one step away from developing the ability to read people’s thoughts via MRIs and other technomarvels.

Baloney. What the report did show is that given choices between two different objects that activate different regions of the brain, the machine can tell which object is being thought about. Set up the experiment in a particular way, predispose the subject (and the machine) to think about or look at specific objects and Bingo! The stuff of science fiction becomes the stuff of reality. Only the media thirst for new and spectacular results of the hottest scientific “breakthroughs” would translate this information into something it’s not: not all that new, not all that interesting, and, ultimately, of questionable use. The researchers, drooling at the chance to keep their funds rolling in by hitting the big time on 60 minutes, play along gleefully. Yes! This is the first step toward . . . whatever.

By no means do I intend to condemn all of contemporary neuroscience with my snarky attitude toward this story. As anyone can see on the well-designed and interesting page, Brainbriefings, from The Society for Neuroscience, potentially useful and perhaps necessary research is going on all the time. And maybe it’s my own personal failing that sees the research featured on 60 Minutes as not only useless but bogus. It’s just that repeatedly hearing people refer to the brain as a machine makes my own gray matter cause me to see red.

The brain is not a machine. The brain is in some ways like a machine, but in other ways it’s dramatically different. At times seeing the brain as a computer can be useful, but the analogy breaks down very quickly. Until we have organic machines that evolve through physical experience and embody being not just in brains but throughout their biosystems, there won’t be anything like a "thinking" machine.

Computers are often referred to as mechanical (or digital or synthetic) "brains," and the most frequent metaphor employed is the same human brain/computer metaphor in reverse. The computer is like a brain. A brain is like a computer. Both are limited, and both exhaust their usefulness quickly.

A computer is not a brain. It’s programmed by human beings to collect and process various kinds of information. Thanks to rapidly evolving technologies, computers are now capable of completing more and more sophisticated tasks. That this evolution might bring us Cylons or Borg or Replicators is the stuff of a different, and equally well-loved literary genre—but we’re not there yet, and we’re actually limited by our own models (so far the only things we can imagine look like human beings and other organic life forms).

I have no doubt that without serious evaluation of emerging technologies we might eventually do ourselves in with our own cleverness. And although I’m not afraid that anybody’s going to come up with a Replicator of the sort featured on Stargate: SG1 (and Atlantis), nanotechnology does have the potential to be used badly and to cause problems we haven’t even thought of yet—precisely because we don’t take time to imagine what might come along.

Information, may I remind some of these people, is not knowledge. Knowledge grows out of experience (the broader the better), and if we limit the experiences of our kids to video games, television, personal technologies, and all things digital, I’m not sure what will emerge. It’s a mystery to me how anybody expects us to be able to develop mechanical brains when we no longer exercise the organic versions in ways that originally made all of our fancy technologies possible in the first place.

I doubt that any of the men and women who worked on ENIAC, the first general-purpose computer ever made (originally housed at the Moore School of Engineering at Penn, across the walk from where I lived on campus), could have imagined the emergence of the microchip when they were busy programming their room-sized machine. The trouble with technology, as I’ve most likely mentioned before, is that the human brains that produce it don’t often take the time to puzzle through to the consequences.

What we really need is to foster the kind of thinking and imagination employed by my favorite sleuths as they go about solving mysteries: the ability to see through the hype and sensation and get to the roots of the problems. Nero Wolfe did it by ruminating over literature and potting orchids, Miss Marple whilst at her knitting, and Poirot by employing his "little gray cells." Were we all to expand our avocations to include physical activities and a bit of reading, we might be less caught up in notions of “mind-reading” and better able to put our minds to better uses.

Image credits: The Epithalmus nicely illustrated, a low-res image from an MRI, and a detail of the back of a panel of ENIAC, showing vacuum tubes, all via Wikimedia Commons. What would I do without these people?

Shop Talk

2009-06-27T10:02:00.000-07:00

In previous posts on the Farm, I've outlined my fondness for William Morris's philosophy of work and the dichotomy he saw between useful work and useless toil. I'm also an advocate of experiential education, the education of the whole person (as opposed to the education of the intellect alone), and (again inspired by Morris), the education of desire--which lies at the very core of my views on the environment and sustainability.

Last week on the Colbert Report, one of the guests was Matthew Crawford, a contributing editor for The New Atlantis and author of a rather intriguing book, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work. I'm already thinking, without having actually read the book (it was preceded by an essay of the same name in The New Atlantis, which I have read), that Morris would love it. And its premise, that doing things is every bit as important intellectually as talking about them, is enough to make me a fan for life. After all, my own little-read tome, More News From Nowhere, describes a society built on both doing and thinking, and fosters a kind of organic education that involves both the concrete and the abstract.

Some of my students may recall our conversations about the Bauhaus, and my arguments against the separation of art and craft. The Bauhaus, after all, combined a Foundation Course in theory (including material on the study of nature and the study of materials) followed by workshops under the tutelage of craftsmen and artists that put theory into practice.

I was personally affected by the American predilection for "tracking" students in elementary and secondary schools when I returned to the States in time for high school. "Smart" kids were put onto a college prep track, and "the others" were channeled into vocational studies. What that meant for me was no home ec, no art classes, no shop classes. Only academic studies. The one time I managed to break out of the mold was when I was a Junior and talked somebody into letting me take a typing class because I argued that it would help me write papers in college.

As it was set up, tracking was overall a bad model and led to a system of inequality that still exists. What seems to have sprung up in its stead (probably in an effort to address issues of "classism" in the seventies) is another bastardization of educational management: the idea that everybody can and should go to college. Now, I'm all for equal opportunity, but what if somebody really wants to spend the rest of his or her life building cars or airplanes or houses? Of course, one can argue that educated citizens make better construction workers--but why do they have to go to college to "get educated"? Especially if these folks are going to sit and stare at their philosophy teacher with the standard "why the hell do I have to take this class" look on their faces.

Matthew Crawford points to the origins of the problem in his interview on the Colbert show, where he spoke of the "pernicious and long history of tracking into vocational and college prep" courses, based on the "dichotomy between mental vs. manual" education--which in turn is based on a perception that "knowledge work" is better than manual work. Somehow, along the line, vocational training got a bad rap, and "knowledge work" took on an elitist mantle.

The idea that four-year colleges are necessary for future success in any field is just bogus. Community colleges or technical schools that provide continuing education in basic subjects like writing, maths, and general science can foster cultural literacy, leaving more of the time students would need for practical education on how to fight fires, build homes, or arrest felons.

I'm actually a product of the basic prejudice, as the first member of my working-class family to finish college, and I've resented the fact that, as a "smart" kid, I was channeled along paths I might not have taken. Many of my generation (cousins and siblings) followed me along the college route, but ended up in rather more practical professions: nursing and civil engineering. I don't regret the emphasis on intellectual pursuits, nor even the "impracticality" of studying Classics, archaeology, and philosophy. But the emphasis on preparing myself for a purely intellectual career sidetracked me from art and design, and it was only jobs that involved developing design skills that provided the needed education. Tracking backfired and probably started me down the path toward my present anarchic stance on education.

Now, of course, I live in the best of both worlds--for me. I get to teach history and philosophy to design students, and am constantly learning to combine the intellectual with the practical. But the lingering effects of valorizing the former over the latter can be seen in recent debates among my colleagues about how we should teach our students. Some have been educated in environments that lack the structure vocational training maintains, and would prefer to inspire their students to creativity without the strictures of formal lesson plans--and the debate will continue as long as the dichotomy survives.

On the other hand, I've been inspired to focus more carefully on Morris and the Bauhaus in my history classes, in order to emphasize a different history: one in which "knowledge" isn't confined to an intellectual model, but pervades learning in both the physical and mental realms.

Since I frequently have to address the question, "what does this have to do with becoming a graphic designer?" (or a fashion designer or a filmmaker or a web guy), my response usually has something to do with "knowing what's in the box" (and I'm getting rather weary of my own version of the box cliche) I'm actually pretty good at convincing design students that knowing about art history is a valuable adjunct to creativity (if for no other reason than showing them what's been done before). But I'm not sure how we're going to keep educating people in the classics anyway, now that popular culture is hell-bent on denigrating intelligence and shortening attention spans.

As literature and the performing arts continue to lean toward the lowest common denominator, the endurance of any kind of canon is in question. We may need to turn to something like John Ruskin's Working Men's College (which still exists in London) to provide continuing education beyond the fulfillment of vocational requirements--were we to begin paying attention to the training needs of the people who do some of the most important work around. After all, where would most of the folks in Dallas be had there not been electricians to repair downed lines after the last whopping thunderstorm? I strongly suspect that the intellectual vacuum created by reality TV and inane movies will eventually drive at least some of our future plumbers and such to seek intellectual stimulation, on their own terms, just as the workers of nineteenth-century London eagerly took advantage of Ruskin's drawing classes.

I think this issue is well worth pursuing in later posts, so this is by no means my final take. For related earlier comments on Owl's Farm, see the links to the right, and stay tuned for further ruminations.

Image credits: "Workshop" by Felipe Micaroni Lalli; Bauhaus image by Jim Hood; John Ruskin, self portrait, watercolour touched with bodycolour over pencil, all from Wikimedia Commons.

Venus Revisited: Out of Africa?

2009-06-07T08:26:00.000-07:00

So busy was I protesting the innate sexism involved in interpreting Paleolithic art that I neglected yet another, and perhaps even more important intrinsic bias: racism. All too frequently this aspect of the Big Picture escapes my notice because I'm comfortably ensconced in my lily white skin. It's fortunate, therefore, that the likes of John McWhorter exist, and I do get reminded every now and then that my views are not the only ones--nor the only reasoned ones. McWhorter is a linguist and fellow of the Manhattan Institute, and one of the most eloquent and thoughtful conservative columnists around. I've started looking on him as the true heir of William F. Buckley, and he's given me a reason to start reading The National Review again.

At any rate, McWhorter's May 15 column for TNR, Big Bosoms and the Big Bang: Did the Human Condition Really Emerge in Europe?? (bowdlerized in the Dallas Morning News on Sunday, May 31, using the subtitle as the title) pointed out a glaring omission in my assessment of the Hohle Fels figure: the underlying assumption behind most descriptions of art from Pleistocene Europe. What McWhorter argues so elegantly against is the notion that some kind of mutation allowed us to become truly human--in Europe, about 30,000 years ago.

Now, as I always point out in my first History of Art & Design I lecture, fully modern human beings provided evidence of artistic inclinations in southern Africa at least 70,000 years ago, by incising designs into bars of ochre, and apparently decorating themselves with shell necklaces. Not only that, but aboriginal rock drawings in Australia date to as early as 40,000 years ago, and some specimens from the south Asia may be even older. (See, for evidence, articles at Aboriginal Art Online, and Robert G. Bednarik's 2007 paper, "Lower Paleolithic Rock Art in India and Its Global Context.")

Just as Martin Bernal alerted us to the Eurocentrism involved in our understanding of how the Classical tradition arose in Greece (although he overstated his case by insisting that the Greeks "stole" ideas from Africa and the Near East, and his assertions about the origins of Greek culture in general are highly controversial; see his book Black Athena: The Afro-Asiatic Roots of Classical Civilization), McWhorter does us a favor by noting that if we look at human origins through the polarized lenses of Anglo-American archaeological tradition, we end up ignoring very good evidence that if we "became human" at any specific moment, it probably took place in Africa, Asia, or Australia, (or all of the above) rather than in Europe.

Although all archaeological evidence is problematic because the record is, by nature, incomplete (rendering female impact sketchy at best, if we spent our early years weaving and gathering and tending babies), the idea of locating our humanity in one small region at one particular time is just silly--whether it's Germany or India or the northwest coast of Australia. So many factors seem to have gone into making us what we are, that a small female figure, a carved penis, a disemboweled Bison, a design scratched on a pigmented mineral, or a stone adze don't even begin to tell us who we are or how we got to be us in the first place.

To my mind, if you're looking for Big Bangs, pick up Richard Wrangham's new book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. Now that language, tool-making, and even laughing seem to have been taken out of the list of possibilities of what makes us "uniquely unique," the remaining difference seems to be this: that we're the only species that cooks its food.

Image credit: A bar of incised ochre and other tools from Blombos Cave in South Africa, dated to about 70,000 years BP. Copyright held by Chris Henshilwood, photo from Wikimedia Commons.

Women, Sex, and Paleolithic Art

2009-05-25T10:13:00.000-07:00

This is a subject upon which I rant in class with measurable frequency (at least once per quarter, two classes, four times a year). Although my students have been spared this quarter because I've been on leave, I was reminded forcefully of the problem by recent headlines about a little carved ivory figurine found in Hohle Fels Cave in Germany. The tiny figure, possibly meant to be worn around the neck on a string, has been described as "Prehistoric Porn" and by University of Tübingen archaeologist Nicholas Conardas (who should know better) as being "sexually charged." A series of detailed photos are available at Spiegel Online, and it's pretty obvious that media hype took over on this one fairly quickly.

I've already mentioned this event (because the media silliness has overshadowed the discovery itself) on The Farm in the "Nature and/as Nurture" post. But it's time to inflict my angst on any hapless reader who finds this essay (and they well might if they're looking for prehistoric pornography, due to the tags I've chosen), because the story is really about ignorance and the need for enlightenment. I am bloody well sick and tired of bad interpretation in general and in particular the idiocy surrounding the steatopygous figures (so-called "Venuses" even though they have nothing to do with the Roman goddess of erotic love, who didn't come along until several thousand years later) found in prehistoric Europe and Asia Minor. It's another example of bad metaphor at work, and probably more evidence of the impact of what Elizabeth Fisher calls "the pernicious analogy."

Fisher's book, Woman's Creation: Sexual Evolution and the Shaping of Society, was published in 1979, but I knew nothing of it until I read Ursula K. Le Guin's essay, "The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction" (reprinted in 1996 in The Ecocriticism Reader, and available online through Google Books; I first read it in her essay anthology, Dancing at the Edge of the World, published in 1989). I located Woman's Creation at the university library, and later copied it in toto because it was already out of print. In her book, Fisher introduces an interesting hypothesis, which is probably even more convincing now that we know more about early technologies than we once did.

Here's the basic problem. When I first studied anthropology in the mid-sixties, the current notion of human nature was as homo faber: man the maker (emphasis on man, for my purposes). What made us human, and significantly different from other species, goes the idea, was that we made and used tools. Of course, later evidence emerged that smudged that theory pretty seriously, when other animals (primate and otherwise) were seen to engage in tool-making and -using. But the initial observation was based on a bogus idea in the first place--and one you can see working in the "Dawn of Man" sequence of the Clarke/Kubrick film, 2001: A Space Odyssey. What makes us human in that film is 1) influence of a higher intelligence that 2) teaches us how to whack each other over the head with "tools" made of animal bones. (If this sounds familiar to Farm readers, I've probably already held forth on a similar topic; while I was looking for such mention I discovered just how repetitive I tend to be.)

One of the problems with the archaeological record in the first place is that it's always incomplete. It consists only of artifacts that have managed to survive the millennia. This automatically precludes anything perishable: tissue and fiber especially (unless preserved in a medium like a peat bog or ice). So anything woven from plant materials is very likely to have been devoured by the same little beasties that make sure human flesh doesn't stay on buried bones. If, as Elizabeth Wayland Barber (in Women's Work: The First 20,000 Years) and Elizabeth Fisher both claim, women's technologies had to do with carrying babies and food (weaving, basket-making, etc.), little of that activity will be represented. All we find (even in my own limited experience as an archaeologist) are sturdier materials, such as the stuff of which tools are made. Hence the original assumption.

The neglect of women in early considerations of human nature is based on the absence of evidence, not its presence. It's also based on a notion of male prowess and sexual power that may have been entirely different during the late Pleistocene than it is today (with our current preoccupations with drugs to alleviate "diseases" such as "ED" and "Low T"). Elizabeth Fisher suggests that until human beings settled into more or less permanent agricultural communities with their recently domesticated animals, men may not have known that they had anything to do with "fathering" children at all. Sex and parenthood even in some extant small-scale societies are separate functions, because children are seen as gifts from spirits or gods. Fatherhood in such situations is a social role, rather than biological, because the "actual" father may be different (especially in cultures where young girls are married off to much older men). Women are the givers and nurturers of children, not men. The relationship between sex and procreation becomes clearer once the consequences are observable in animals with shorter gestation periods, and that's when any egalitarian relationship between men and women that may have existed before settled agriculture begins to erode.

The year I started college, 1966 marks a sea-change in the understanding of hunting and gathering cultures. As research by Richard Lee and Ervin DeVore among peoples like the !Kung San in southwestern Africa showed us, gathering was responsible for a substantial portion of any group's caloric intake. Not hunting: gathering, performed by women collecting food and carrying it home in baskets, nets, and other containers, also created by women.

Settled agriculture and the planting of seeds changed all that, as Fisher makes clear. Not only did men discover their role in making babies, but they began to imagine a connection between the planting and growing of seeds and the "planting" of "seeds" in the womb of the mother. Of course we know now that the analogy is faulty because a seed is itself a fertilized ovum; a man cannot "plant" a baby in its mother--he needs the mother's egg. But back on the early farmstead, one can imagine the scenario:

Women are powerful creatures. They bleed every month, have babies, give milk, gather and prepare food, weave clothing and containers. Men hunt occasionally, distribute the meat, make tools to hunt; later, they perhaps make the implements to cultivate crops, and they may plant the fields. Perhaps they harvest. And then one of them rises up, beats his chest and says to his buddies: We are the planters of the seed. The woman is only the dirt in which we plant the seed that makes the child. She is an empty vessel. We have the power of life.

Hence what Fisher calls the "pernicious analogy": semen = seed. So it shouldn't be surprising that when modern males (even some who are smart enough to know what the role of women was really like) uncover voluptuous-looking figures of women they're quite comfortable seeing these figures as the prehistoric equivalent of Playboy.

I always thought it odd that men might carry around miniature dollies to arouse their passions, and thought it far more likely that the shape of these figures might instead provide an inspiration for women. Since gatherers don't usually carry around a lot of body fat, if they fall below 10% their monthly menstrual/ovulatory cycles cease and they can't conceive. Women with a substantial amount of body fat, however, especially in the breasts, stomachs, hips, buttocks, and thighs, are surely fertile or have already borne children.

So before folks start going off on porn, perhaps they should consider the very real possibility that these examples of portable art were carried by women as fertility talismans. Men were undoubtedly too busy polishing their spears (ahem) and telling hunting yarns to play with dolls. In truth, the only thing it's really possible to know about these figures is where they were found, what they were made of, and about how old they are. The date might be interesting (we, homo sapiens sapiens, keep getting older and older with each new discovery), but more bad metaphors don't do anybody any good.

Addendum: A more recent article in the Huffington Post offers a different interpretation, and points to the existence of a goddess culture in Paleolithic Europe. As sympathetic as I am to ideas other than the notion of "Venuses" and pornography, the jury on the goddess culture is still out--for reasons that I address above: we can only be certain about the location, the material composition, and the date of these figures. The older they are, the harder it is for us to know anything else.

Image credits: I pinched the Hohle Fels figurine image from this excellent Science Daily article because it invited me to "enlarge" it. The Woman from Willendorf is from Wikimedia Commons and taken by Oke.

Losing Language, Losing Meaning

2009-04-30T08:45:00.000-07:00

In my first outing post-surgery (after being told by my surgeon that I was well on the mend and good to go for driving, fewer than three weeks from the day he cracked my chest), my daughter and I celebrated at Starbucks and then headed for Half Price Books. I always look in the nature writers and science fiction sections first, and was rewarded on both counts. The best find was Ursula LeGuin's Lavinia, a story based on the last part of Vergil's Aeneid, and on a woman (Aeneas's "native" wife) barely mentioned in the poem. But no one is better at imagining worlds not her own than Ursula K. LeGuin, and I snatched the book up in a nonce. Well, maybe two nonces (you'd have to be a fan of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum to get that one). Please note that the owl is only a coincidence.

LeGuin's opening remarks lament the loss of Latin, and the fact that it won't be long before nobody will be reading Vergil in the original. Already I have to explain to my students who Vergil was and why Dante would be following him around in the Divine Comedy. My own Latin is barely functional; I learnt what I know only because it was required of a Greek major at U.C. Riverside, but I can find my way through the geography of grammar and syntax with the help of a primer and a dictionary. But I know exactly what she means. These languages are on their way to the cultural dustbin and will soon become the sole purview of wizened scholars and other odd folk.

If only we knew what we were losing! If only today's students understood how much richer their own language and their lives would be were they supplemented by the words and wisdom of the ancient world (people who already made the mistakes we're in the process of making now). But even the basic etymologies of English words are becoming lost to them. They no longer care or are even vaguely interested in why our words are shaped the way they are. They not only don't know what "sanguine" means, but they're not even aware of its subtleties: it can mean both optimistic and bloody (as the character Zoe points out in an episode of Firefly; but that show was canceled, so there goes another ed-op).

Speaking of blood, which is actually where all this is headed, I'm now a member of a very large community of people dependent on the drug Coumadin (generic name Warfarin), an anticoagulant that will keep my blood flowing freely through my shiny new mechanical aortic valve. Unfortunately, these drugs also suffer from lost language and bad metaphor, because they are commonly known as "blood thinners." But they don't thin the blood at all; that's simply somebody's lame attempt at helping the dumb and dumberer understand what "anticoagulation" means, without simply pointing out the etymology of the term: "anti" = "against"; "coagulate" (from the Latin coagulare, to curdle) = clot; hence a usable definition as "prevention of clotting." It has nothing to do with the "thickness" of blood, but apparently people have less trouble with inappropriate metaphors (they can understand thick and thin better than clot-prevention for some reason) than they do with knowing that a word was derived from a more useful metaphor: the curdling process involved in cheese-making. (It occurs to me, as an afterthought, that most people know longer know much about how cheese is made, so perhaps that's the reason for the bad metaphor.)

So better metaphors are out there; after all, it would be quite simple to understand that you want the consistency of your blood to be like single curds flowing freely in whey than like mozzarella! Or, for that matter, to keep the consistency balanced so that it isn't entirely whey and certainly doesn't become even as dense as ricotta. The "whey" would represent the condition (not thickness) that might generate free bleeding (the absence of clotting), and the flow of curds through whey as having the potential to clot when necessary (so you don't bleed to death), but not clot so easily that the offending conglomerations would jam up and cause a stroke. "Thick" vs. "thin" is not only simple, it's simplistic; it doesn't even come close to describing the process.

In the world of tweets and twitters and twits, there's no room for the subtle--especially if it takes up more characters (anticoagulation =15; "blood thinning" = 13, not counting the space). Also, if you don't know anything about language, you have to look the word up in a good dictionary. How many folks even own one any more?

Where does this leave us? Not in a happy place, I think. Several years ago I began to notice that students were becoming less and less able to identify where artists were from by looking at their names. They can no longer tell that Leonardo or Michelangelo are Italian, that Chardin and Watteau are French, that van der Weyden is Dutch, and that Turner is English. They can't identify a Russian or a Greek name without being told where the artist is from. They're better at Spanish names, and Arabic, which makes sense, but they've lost everything else unless they've studied a language in high school (no longer a requirement for graduation, or if it is, they just take Spanish by default) or have parents or relatives from other parts of the world. Asian names seem to be recognizable in general, but not those from specific countries (they can't tell Korean from Japanese from Chinese). I attribute this vague familiarity to manga, anime, and video games, which tend to be only vaguely Asian and not ethnically specific.

While I was still in hospital, the fulcrum of multiculturalism in otherwise xenophobic America, I played a game, at which I ended up batting about .850: guessing staff-members' nationalities by their names. I missed one, because his surname (Tan) was a remnant of the Chinese in his ancestry, but all of his immediate family were Philippino. I guessed Chinese, of course--even though he didn't look it (the Philippines have a more varied ethnic background, including European and native islander, than most Chinese do, and it shows in their physiognomy). I also spent three of five years in Taiwan being educated by Philippina nuns, so I've had a lot of experience with both. At any rate, I caught the Thais, the Vietnamese, the Chinese, and even (sort of) the Danish Colombian gas-passer who ministered to me during surgery. I guessed Swedish, but he forgave me.

Video games and anime have done their part in spurring some students to learn some Japanese, and sometimes Chinese, but there's less of an interest in European languages, seemingly because "they all speak English." Meanwhile, the State Department, the armed forces, and the CIA are on constant vigil for speakers of Arabic, Farsi, African dialects, and even French, German, and Russian--but I'm pretty sure they end up having to train most of their promising candidates in specific languages.

The only spark of hope in the current situation is the increasing evidence on language and aging. Studies indicate that acquiring a second or third language engages one's brain and helps to sustain cognitive function. This doesn't make much sense to a twenty-year old, but if you're my age (and in danger of stroking out if you don't take your meds properly), any such news is good news.

Now, where did I shelve that Latin grammar?

Image credits: Æneas lands on the shores of Latium with his son Ascanius behind him; on the left, a sow tells him where to found his city. (Lavinia's father was the king of Latium.) British Museum. Roman marble relief, CE 140-150. Copyright Marie-Lan Nguyen/Wikimedia Commons.

Blogging, the Bauhaus, and Short Attention Spans

2009-03-02T13:01:00.000-08:00

Last week I walked into my Friday afternoon section of History of Art and Design II to find a number of students busily engaged in reading--or trying to read--my blog. Specifically, they were trying to fathom my latest post on Owl's Farm, Gardeners and Cobblers and Tailors, Oh My. Of all the posts they could have been reading, that might have been a good one (I do have fashion design and fashion merchandising students in the class), but I heard a sigh as I walked into the room: "But she writes so much!"

I recommended to this sweet person (she really is charming, and tries very hard to keep up with what I dish out) that she read my obituary for Biscuit instead, but by that time we needed to get started on a film about the Bauhaus and on talking about final design projects. But the episode made me wonder about how much shared information and background is required for students and their teachers to be able to communicate ideas within the blogosphere.

One thing I decided before I even began writing on The Farm was that my posts would consist of well-considered essays rather than blurby little snippets of opinion. I would only post if I wanted to articulate some idea, or to express a view on those situations that seemed worth comment; I would think them through carefully and research them if necessary before I opened my mouth, as it were, online. I also vowed never to dumb down my vocabulary or message in order to draw more readers. At the same time I knew that I wanted to offer a tempered viewpoint that might resonate with people who otherwise might not always agree with me. My blog was, then, going to appeal to readers like me, with varied interests and fairly open minds.

Some of my first readers were students who had suffered through more than one class with me, and with whom I had already established frequent e-mail correspondence. Most were upper-classmen and women or those who had already graduated and were out pursuing the careers I hope I helped them prepare for. I also attracted a few Canadians and Australians, with whom I seem to have more in common than Texans, as well as fellow skeptics and even some more religious folk who appreciated my not running roughshod over their beliefs (at least most of the time). Some commented on the blog, some e-mailed me, some discussed the posts with me in person. Conversations ensued, which is what I wanted in the first place.

But the inability of many of my students to stay with a long (or long-winded) essay is somewhat disappointing. It's also evidence of an increase of shorter attention spans (which I blame, in part, on their having been raised on Sesame Street and commercials), and a decrease in the number of words in standard twenty-something vocabularies.

And things will only get worse if we keep partitioning our students' brains into compartments that look like multimedia screens or CNN broadcasts. If fads like Twitter (no I will not post a link; I'm trying to forget that it exists) persist, attention spans will ultimately be truncated into 140 character bursts, just as Sesame Street trained millions of two-year-olds to pay attention for 1.5 minutes, and commercials narrowed that down to 30 seconds.

I've even found myself affected by this modern urge to get to the point immediately, with no rumination, no thinking-through: the need to come up with an answer in a "blink." Not long ago, I picked up George Eliot's Middlemarch, one of my favorite books ever, and snuggled down for a good long read. I knew that the novel takes some 250 pages to begin to come together, and for Eliot to start spinning her tale. But this time I wasn't really ready. I kept reading ahead, looking into later chapters, and essentially spoiling it for myself. Even though I already knew the outcome, I was impatient to get on with it. I can't even imagine a single one of my students who would be willing to work his or her way through this novel for the first time--at least not when they can go to NetFlix for a video version that cuts out all the "unnecessary description," as I've heard them say even about Tolkien.

My reluctance to buy into the latest techno-gizmo or web-sensation isn't helping. Even though I'm having some fun with the new apps I've added to my iPhone (now nearly a year into its two-year contract), I can't play a game (I only have two) for more than a minute or two. It's just a silly way to spend time. The light saber sound effects are cute, but now that every Star Wars fan with an iPhone has it, about the only thing we can do with it is have silly duels in the hallway. I do belong to a couple of online forums (properly termed fora, but I've learned how to choose my battles), but I will not, under any circumstances open a Facebook or MySpace account, won't go anywhere near Twitter (I only like tweets from birds, and quite frankly don't care to know when my congressman plans to scratch). I haven't joined LinkdIn despite numerous invitations (all from people I'm already "linked in" with in some way, and who have my e-mail address). I'm happy to take advantage of Google's many free services (like Blogger and the aforementioned e-mail account), but I have to draw the line somewhere.

When so-called social-networking and communication websites start taking the place of real conversation, and when sound bites substitute for substance, we're in trouble. When the trivial and banal take the place of real information, we're laying the ground for a future characterized by mindless, contextless blips of miscellaneous data. Reality TV and Twitter both seem to be the products of the same alien plot to disintegrate human minds.

And so a plea to my impatient students: take the five minutes or so required to slog through one of my posts, if only occasionally. You might learn something interesting, but if nothing else it will show you how to express a sustained train of thought, how to explore a path arising from curiosity, or just how to spend a few quiet moments reflecting on something that we will then have in common.

The students of the Bauhaus, about which my own students learned last week, had none of the electronic gadgets we now take for granted. Shunted from one city to another as the Nazis became more and more afraid of what imagination and creativity might mean to the future of the Third Reich, the students and instructors made do with what they had, and created the modern design school. Without them, our school wouldn't even exist. What made the enterprise successful, however, was the marriage of physical expertise and creative thinking--talents we're in danger of losing if we spend too much of our time plugged into our iPods and too little time just letting ourselves be curious.

Teaching Teaching vs. Doing Teaching

2009-02-11T08:51:00.000-08:00

A debate of sorts (mostly one-sided, with me on the one side) has recently arisen on campus about the distinction between "professional development" and "faculty development," because our particular corporate culture thinks that college teachers constantly have to be taught how to teach, no matter how long they've been at it.

A few years ago, I wrote a rather infamous letter to our then-HR person when the faculty development (they weren't making much of a distinction then) requirement went up from twelve hours per academic year to eighteen--because we had been so good at meeting the twelve-hour requirement. I can still remember the opening line of the letter: "I don't know how you spent your summer vacation, but here's what I did"--and proceeded to recount everything I'd done on my two-week break between the spring and summer quarters. These included museum visits on the drive between Dallas and eastern California, visits to national parks, archaeological site-visits to photograph stuff I talked about in class, all in the ten days it took to drive there and back again. I even got in a couple of days' visit with my folks.

I returned to a notice during our "in-service" period (it's called Twelfth Week, but I don't think any connection with Shakespeare was intended), that we needed to jack up the hours we spent learning how to teach (or what to teach). Never mind that we almost never don't teach. This is a proprietary four-year college, in session forty four weeks per year, and full-time faculty are on campus thirty hours per week, teaching a required load of five four-hour classes (or combinations of course loads that add up to at least twenty hours). Comparable community college instructors teach five three-hour classes per semester (fifteen weeks), for two semesters, with extra pay for teaching summer classes. And although they are expected to show evidence of professional development and academic citizenship during their annual performance reviews, there is no "clock-hour" requirement and no distinction between "how" and "what" they teach when it comes to doing so (they can publish, go to meetings, participate in symposia, etc.). The semi-annual all-college gathering usually features a speaker who talks about new educational trends, but there are no required "PowerPoint and the Future of Education" lessons.

Okay, so we're different. Our faculty members are, for the most part, artists and design professionals who have not necessarily been mentored into teaching like most college teachers. New instructors (no tenure system here, so we're all "instructors") are required to attend faculty orientation sessions which include training in how to teach, the concept of a learning-centered environment (as opposed to a teaching-centered environment), and if, during their first few quarters they run into problems, they're provided with tools and training to help them get over the hump. The requirements are the same for both program and general studies instructors, even though gen ed graduates have almost always spent time teaching under the supervision of their professors.

Lately, however, the Powers That Be have decided to increase the faculty development quotient; we're now responsible for twenty four "clock hours" of training on how to teach what we teach. This is in addition to a less well-defined component of professional development, which encompasses fields of expertise. Because we are accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS), our instructors are now required to earn master's level advanced degrees (with corporate pressure to make these terminal degrees, such as MFAs and PhDs). This very fact makes professional development a no-brainer for people in grad school.

But here's my problem: why do we have to distinguish how we teach from what we teach in the first place? Socrates would most certainly be rolling around in his grave, since teaching and doing philosophy were, to him and to most of us who have adopted him as a model, the same thing. You are, as I keep harping, what you do. This is how philosophers see the world; one can't even really do philosophy without teaching it, because that's what writing and interpretation is all about. Some colleges, like Kent State, seem to make little distinction between the two, and I'm sure they're not alone.

I'm not saying that how-to-teach seminars can't be useful. A couple of years after my post-summer break tantrum, we had a workshop on how to create rubrics that describe what each grade we post actually means. What constitutes an A or B? What distinguishes a B from a C? This turned out to be such a successful strategy (because it solves the "numbers" problem for those of us who find it difficult to quantify learning) that I immediately went through my courses and objectives and made beautiful charts to help me determine how well my students were achieving the objectives. These are now tied to evaluation sheets that accompany every graded project my students submit.

I also balked at the idea of lesson plans (that's so high school, I smugly complained), but after laying out week by week and topic by topic what I wanted to cover over the quarter, and how I wanted to assess my students' accomplishment of goals, I was hooked. These plans have changed over the years as I modify content and approach (after using my reflective assessment process to figure out what's working and what's not), but they're also coming in really handy as I prepare to take a quarter off to get my heart working properly again--so I can go on teaching for as long as anybody can stand me. Sessions on how to construct good lesson plans would, therefore, be useful, especially for general studies types like me who are more used to seminars where everyone reads the same stuff and then discusses, interprets, and writes about it.

Art and design history courses, like those I mostly teach, require careful planning to make sure students are exposed over and over again to images, their context, and their history. They require critical analysis as well, which is difficult to accomplish in a school (and a world) where students just don't read. I can assign readings until I turn purple, but unless I test them on the content, they won't even click on the link that takes them directly to the pages I want them to consider, much less read and take notes on the content. I don't give true/false, multiple-choice, scanable exams, so students have to spend most of their time creating workbooks that contain images and notes based on the lectures. Nobody else I know of does this, and so over the years I've flown by the seat of my pants. I have to learn by doing, as I have this quarter, that just assigning the stuff isn't working. I'm going to have to develop activities for the workbooks that take them beyond the lectures (where they're often quite engaged and even curious), and more deeply into representative artists, works, and movements. I have to work even harder at finding ways to encourage them to actually think about what they're seeing.

In order to do this, I read books, scour the internet, read the Chronicle of Higher Education, and pore over popularized treatments of art history like Ross King's books (Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling, Brunelleschi's Dome, The Judgment of Paris, etc.) and Margaret Wertheim's wonderful explorations of the junctures of art, science, and technology (The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace). In fact, I read about thirty books a year on science, culture, art, and history--and I'm not sure why that doesn't count, even though these books--in teaching me about stuff I don't know and making me think--are teaching me how to teach. I also blog my brains out, which requires me to explore topics I might never have even thought of considering, as I respond to what others are teaching me.

The upshot is this: I cannot separate how I teach from what I teach. They are forged continuously together like the shards of Narsil into a complete sword, or knitting into a sweater, or layers in Photoshop into a finished image. Of course, nothing is ever finished, because everything flows--as the early philosopher Heraclitus famously noted. You may never be able to step into the same river twice, but if you attend to what you're doing, you'll notice how the stream changes, and detect patterns that might help keep you from falling in and drowning.

Enough with the bad metaphors. But my plea is that education, even in a corporate setting, be more accommodating to innovation and accident--and to process. Three hours spent sitting through a "stress management" session amounts to three hours I can't be reading a good book that will help me become a better teacher because it engages my little gray cells and causes me to make useful connections. If you want to manage my stress, get me a massage (we did that once; it was wonderful!).

Or, offer more of what a colleague and I did before this quarter began. One of our chef instructors and I discovered that we have a common interest in the history of food and how cultures develop their distinctive cuisines. So we put together a presentation on Egyptian food and culture (called, rather absurdly, "A Taste of Tut") that showed how the humanities and the culinary arts interact. In order to get it accepted as a suitable topic for faculty development training, we had to stress the interdisciplinarity of the project, and the co-operative aspect of the "teaching." But we had a great time, attendees learned some things they didn't already know, and the chefs made some great beer.

Now that's faculty development. But it's also professional development. So maybe we should re-think the distinction and become more generally interdisciplinary in our approach to how we teach what we do. I can almost guarantee that the faculty will be more content, less cantankerous, and more engaged--which, I suspect, would be good for us all.

Image apologies: Hendrick ter Brugghen's Heraclitus, at the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam. The Naples Socrates, by Domenico Anderson, in the Museo Nazionale di Napoli. Both via Wikimedia Commons. Heraclitus's tattoo is courtesy P22 Fonts (Acropolis Now) and one of Patrick Lynch's heart diagrams (see the Cabinet for more). I stole the idea for Socrates's mustache, of course, from Marcel Duchamp.

Reflective Assessment

2009-01-02T10:20:00.001-08:00

A great deal of criticism is being leveled at the current vogue of high-stakes testing in elementary and secondary schools. And rightly so. I've actually blathered on about this issue on the Farm, but I've also been trying to figure out how to measure student learning without falling into the quagmire in which public primary and secondary schools find themselves. The push for numbers that reflect how students learn has produced an education system (if we can call it a "system" at all) that favors quantity over quality, and that makes good on its promise that no child left behind only by leaving them all behind together. Teachers, quaking in their boots over the possibility of being fired if their students perform poorly on poorly designed exams, teach only what the test requires, and the little automatons march out of school in tidy rows, knowing a few facts but having no idea of how to think.

And then they march on into college having also been sold on touchy-feely visions of their own worth as persons, given prizes for being there, and patted on the back and awarded a medal when they "try." To do otherwise smacks of elitism, and violates some bizarre notion of egalitarianism that equates existence with excellence.

And then we get 'em. What's a college teacher to do, when faced with a classroom full of shining faces that expect to be given grades, and rewarded with advancement simply for showing up?

A competitive classroom also can provide a rude awakening to the pampered, who tend to be ill prepared to fight their own battles or account for how they arrived at a particular solution. "I like the feel of it," they say, unable to explain why. Or even what "feel" means in this context.

So we deal with the situation however we can. We start them over, in essence, in order to give them some idea of how things will be when the enter the "real world" of the marketplace, using every tool at our disposal to help them learn how to take constructive criticism, analyze and solve design problems, or even help them overcome twelve years worth of not learning how to learn.

Every five years or so, along come the accreditation folks, to assess how we assess our students. Show me the numbers that indicate that you're constantly improving. Show me the tests, the charts, the rubrics, the data. But those of us who don't collect "data," who follow a more evolutionary process in our teaching, are left with a conundrum. Do we fall into the trap, contriving tests to "measure" what our students learn? Or do we continue to follow our teacherly instincts and use our training to understand what's going on in our classrooms, and try to address issues as they arise, term by term?

In wrestling with the fact that accreditation is here to stay, and that it does serve a purpose (it keeps some of the really shoddy operations at bay, and maintains basic standards that offer students assurance of at least a measure of quality), I've spent a long time thinking about how to assess the progress students actually make in my classes, but in an authentic, meaningful way. I can't really do it with numbers, other than by keeping track of grades, so there has to be a way to account for what goes on that doesn't rely solely on instruments like Scantronable tests.

As I looked back on how I grade and how I prepare for classes each quarter, I noticed a pattern. At about week 7 (of 11) I invariably start making notes about what's working and what isn't. One measure is to look at how students perform on particular exam questions at midterm. If a large proportion don't "get it" I examine my presentation of the material, the wording of the question, and even the classroom environment: the dynamics of a particular group, the performance of the technology I'm using, whether or not students are using computers to take notes, etc. Sometimes I can quickly determine the source of the problem and address it. I always go over the questions after the exam to obtain the students' perspectives, and then make note of the need for change the following quarter, or even on the final exam.

This had never been a particularly organized or formal process--just something I've done as a matter of course. And then I realized that the narrative I write every year for my performance review, about the year's successes and failures, reflected what I had learned from this informal process.

With these two basic elements in mind, I set out to create a template for a more structured process, and I came up with the following elements. I call it "Reflective Assessment" because it's based on the process of thinking back, and then thinking forward. It's probably something we all do, and it's a perfectly natural and certainly more "authentic" way to ascertain how well our students are learning than simply charting numbers based on tests that can't really measure thinking in the first place. As thought-provoking as I try to make my exam questions, they're never going measure much more than how well students have taken notes and paid attention.

The first step is to maintain a notebook in which to jot down issues that arise during the quarter. Sometimes these notes show up on sticky-pads and such, but these can be pasted into the notebook, along with miscellaneous scraps of paper we happen to have on hand while watching a film or during a lecture. The idea is to divide the notebook according to the courses we teach--one section for every preparation--as a way of centralizing what comes out of the everyday activity of lecturing, demonstrating, discussing, and whatever else we do as teachers.

The notebook then becomes the basis for a more formal reflection and assessment at the end of the quarter. I tend to do this anyway, as I update each syllabus, schedule, and (because I have internet pages for each course I teach) website, but the notebook now makes it much simpler to remember what needed changing, and often contains suggestions for how to make the changes.

In order to tie the assessment into the objectives of the course, a copy of the course rubric is should be included, along with the stated outcome objectives and exit competencies.

Before my annual performance evaluation, I now use the notebook, where I also record the changes I've made, to describe what has occurred in each of my courses over the year. In future, I can see the notebook's becoming a tool for developing new courses as well, and I'm planning to add a "curriculum development" section--at least until those ideas overflow the space allowed them and need a notebook of their own. I'm starting to write a quarterly assessment for each class, based on the notebook, with plans to consult it before I create my midterm exams, in order to make sure I'm attending to previous issues.

The main problem I've encountered with this system so far is that the notebook isn't always handy, which is why I like to have sticky-notepads among the materials I take to class, on my desk at school, and at home. I have one nearby when I'm grading exams and essays, too. The pads are getting bigger (the little square ones aren't all that useful), but it's rather entertaining to have a bunch of colorful bits stuck higgledy piggledy in the notebook--where they can be re-arranged as necessary. Different colored pads for different classes might be a good idea, too, but I'm not that organized yet. Mostly I use the free ones I get from publishers.

Since the process is fundamentally dialectical, the final step should involve discussing the results of each course assessment with the program or department Director, perhaps in conjunction with the year-end review. His or her comments could be added to one's teaching portfolio (I keep my narratives in mine), and the results of these conversations would provide an overview of the instructor's ongoing assessment process over the years.

The only drawback I can see to formalizing the process is that SACS evaluators might look askance at having to read through the notebooks, or even the performance narratives. But if they're really interested in transforming the quality of education by finding meaningful ways of improving instruction, reflective assessment will almost certainly give them a better picture of what's going on than a few pie charts would.

And then, of course, we could still illustrate each year's assessments with beautifully-designed charts and graphs that mark the rise and fall of grades and the vicissitudes of teaching in a world that doesn't really seem to want to learn. But that's another problem, for another day.

Image credit: Wall painting portraying a scholar, from Herculaneum, first century CE. Wikimedia Commons.

Trouble in the Garden

2008-10-20T10:25:00.000-07:00

Back when I used to live in East Dallas, I'd often drive by Stonewall Jackson Elementary school on Mockingbird Lane. It's a fairly nondescript little school, but it sports a terrific garden that's visible from the street. I'd often see folks from the community, as well as the children, puttering around, and I was always amazed at how lovely, inviting, and verdant it looked.

Recently, however, the Dallas Independent School District--in response to its own idiocy concerning budget mismanagement--has decided to curtail this highly successful outdoor learning program despite clear evidence of its success.

Although Mark Painter will still try to maintain the garden after school hours (being paid by the PTA instead of the district) the overall stupidity of this move is indicative of how shallow our current approach to education has become. Experiential learning has been shown to enhance the learning process, especially in science and maths, by connecting students with real-world problems to which they can apply principles and concepts. Despite the fact that American students, especially those in urban areas, are scoring lower than ever on high-stakes exams in the sciences, this seems like the dumbest possible move any school district could make.

For examples of how programs like this work, I suggest looking at the University of California at Davis's Science, Technology and Environmental Literacy Workgroup, or at the Wildercom website developed by James T. Neill, a psychologist and environmental educator from Perth, Australia.

American students continue to be outscored by their counterparts in other countries, as shown in a recent Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) exam in science, and they trailed even further in mathematics. For details on the data, see the PowerPoint presentation by Andreas Schleicher, who analyzes the 2006 data in excrutiating--but rather interesting--detail, available on the Alliance for Excellent Education website. Schleicher is the director of PISA and head of the Indicators and Analysis Division of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) Directorate for Education. Further resources are available on the link.

I am certainly in no position to offer a great deal of advice about science teaching, except that I spent years working with kids at the Heard Museum and with the Plano ISD outdoor education effort. But I also love science, and I know how eager children are to understand the natural world. Our inability as a nation to inspire our children to understand scientific principles and seek careers in science will ultimately lead to our own intellectual poverty.

Ill-advised cost-cutting measures like closing down the garden program at Stonewall Jackson are simply going to turn around and bite us in the backside unless the educational bureaucracy starts paying attention to what really works.

Photo: a kitchen garden not unlike the one at Stonewall Jackson, by Jean-Noël Lafargue, via Wikimedia Commons.

Some Thoughts on Plagiarism . . . and how to avoid the problem in the first place

2008-10-03T09:09:00.000-07:00

We live in an age of instant information accessibility. “Answers”—that is, facts, data, information—are only a Google search away. Almost inevitably, most commonly-used search terms lead directly to Wikipedia which, for all its democratic possibilities, is still only an encyclopedia. And encyclopedias are for high school, not for college.

The consequences of instant accessibility include impatience when it comes to refining searches, developing meaningful search strategies, and varying resource use. We’ve imbedded short attention spans into our children, and they are becoming increasingly impatient with research that takes “too long.”

I’m pretty sure that further consequences to the instant access phenomenon include a diminishing of wonder; many of our student lack the basic curiosity that leads to truly creative thinking, and because their reading is restricted primarily to popular culture, they lack the breadth of knowledge that used to lead to innovative connections. Couple this with impatience, and the result is a reduction in critical thinking and the acceptance of the “easy way out.”

Imagine this scenario: A student is given a standard paper topic, such as “Discuss the use of irony in Huckleberry Finn.” The student’s first impulse is to plug “irony” and “Huckleberry Finn” into a search engine and the results appear within nanoseconds. What happens next is the root cause of plagiarism. Not fundamental dishonesty, or profound laziness (although these certainly can be factors), but the sheer ease of cutting and pasting, and the perception that recombining the material from the internet magically makes it somehow original and acceptable.

For reasons that are much more complex than I want to go into, our students have been brought up to believe that learning should be fun—or, worse, entertaining. If they’re not having fun, and the task is taking too long, it’s just annoying. “This is boring,” I hear my students say, more often than I care to.

What these kids don’t understand is that, in the words of the American Arts & Crafts designer Dard Hunter, “Boredom is a matter of choice, not circumstance.” In fact, the choices that students are allowed to make often engender boredom, and initiate a cascade of problems that all too frequently lead to plagiarism.

So much for theory. How about solutions?

I would like to propose the possibility that the more innovative the assignment, the less likely plagiarism is to occur. For example, instead of assigning a hackneyed writing topic like “Discuss the use of irony in Huckleberry Finn,” how about asking students to pose questions that arise from their reading of the story? Why did something happen the way it did? Why were certain conditions present in the story? What makes Huck such an interesting character in the first place? Or instead of assigning a research paper on a general topic like “decorative glass” or “the history of the A-line dress,” find out if students are at all curious about anything related to the range of topics under discussion in the course. If they aren’t curious, perhaps the instructor could suggest questions that he or she has always wondered about.

A general rule to consider is that if the instructor finds grading the paper boring, the student certainly didn’t have much fun writing it—and probably didn’t learn much in the process. I have made it a commandment never to assign a topic that my students have not generated themselves, or that I’m not interested in enough to guide them toward looking for meaningful answers.

Another strategy involves asking students to evaluate all sources included in their bibliographies. I usually ask for general bibliographies (which students annotate to show me how they used each source) rather than works cited pages because they give me a better idea of the range of sources the student has consulted in the process of conducting research. In writing classes, for final research papers, I ask for both. I restrict the number of web sources in most cases, and usually require that they use a variety of media: films, print articles, books, interactive media (CD ROMs and DVDs). I hold research workshops where we discuss strategies for locating information and using the results. For material located on the internet, I require website evaluations to determine the quality of information presented: who wrote the article? What are his or her credentials? What is the source of the webpage—Personal? Educational? Business? Commercial? The annotations provide this information for other media—who wrote the book or directed the film? How is this material relevant to the research problem?

Ours is an institution that fosters creativity. We should therefore make a concerted effort to avoid assigning work that encourages students to think in clichés. Meaningful research, and original projects and writing, can only arise from engagement with the material. Our challenge as educators, therefore, is to provide good examples for our students. Initiate more creative projects that call for non-standard solutions; pose challenging questions that require students to break out of their “comfort zones” and into the real world of uncomfortable questions. A great deal of what I learned about teaching came from being an Olympics of the Mind coach, and having to guide seventh-graders through a series of problems without suggesting what they should do. They had to solve the problems themselves; all I could do was ask questions. My team members didn’t ever win the competition, but they did get creativity awards because their ideas were often both strange and beautiful.

One of the most useful assignments I ever undertook as a college student in philosophy was to argue a statement from a viewpoint opposite to that I held. Doing so forced me to see the other side of the question, and made me aware of the perils of faulty reasoning. But it was also extremely difficult because I wasn’t at all comfortable looking through someone else’s eyes (or thinking through someone else’s brain). If we want our students to understand the use of irony in Huckleberry Finn, we need to get them to think about what’s ironic in their world first, but then to wonder what Huck would do in a situation similar to ours. Or, the student might wonder how he or she would react given technological limitations of Huck’s historical moment. The idea is to get them to think about irony not just as an important literary trope used in this one work, but also as a source of humor, drama, and satire in the world as a whole.

The main reason I’m seldom confronted with plagiarism is that my students have to write about how they solved the problems I pose. Occasionally I get someone who tries to turn the assignment into a research paper by cutting and pasting information out of Wikipedia or a website, but that’s not the assignment, so the student fails that segment of it. But if they follow the guidelines and write about what they did and why, I generally get a higher level of writing, and the results are frequently rewarding, both for them and for me.

If, as I suspect, students tend to plagiarize out of laziness rather than larceny, we can go a long way toward nipping it in the bud by simply making it unlikely. Truly original assignments and questions that tap into our students’ innate curiosity might very well minimize the problem. If our students have to account for their thinking process, by always showing thumbnails, storyboards, process drawings, outlines, notes, and other preliminary efforts, they won’t copy other people’s material because it won’t fit into the process. This approach requires more grading, because instructors have to be involved throughout the process, but it’s a lot better than having to take the time to hunt down the sources of suspected plagiarism. It’s also a more positive approach, because it doesn’t ask us to view every student as a potential thief!

However we go about it, the challenge is not to make the effort punitive. Students need to understand why plagiarism is a bad idea; they need to be shown how it hurts creativity; they need to respect the work of others in the same way they expect other designers to respect theirs. We’re faced with a generation that’s grown up sharing information and networking in numerous ways. The democratization of communication will continue to open up challenges to our notions of intellectual property. But students need to know that it’s beneficial for all concerned to acknowledge the role of other people’s creativity. Nobody says they shouldn’t make connections; but they need to understand that by giving credit where it’s due, they’re contributing to the transformation of information into true knowledge.

Photo credit: Old books from the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, by Gnosus; The Bookworm, by Carl Spitzweg, 1850. Both via Wikimedia Commons.

The End of Metaphor?

2008-10-02T12:14:00.000-07:00

Before tonight's debate, which I probably won't watch (it's really hard on my blood pressure; instead, I read transcripts the next day. I do, however, occasionally watch with the sound off to see what body language looks like), I decided to get something off my chest. So far I've hesitated to blog roughshod into politics because some of my best and most beloved friends and family espouse views that differ significantly from mine. In truth, despite my often apparent "leftiness," I'm a fairly conservative person--in terms of family values, hearth, home, all that stuff. And despite my fairly radical anti-capitalism (at least capitalism as it has emerged since the Industrial Revolution), I have a lot of views that folks might think of as pretty conservative.

One of these concerns the idea of democracy. I think, in essence, that Socrates and Plato were right. Democracy doesn't work unless the populace that practices it is educated; otherwise you get mob rule. A person can't get a whole lot more conservative than siding with an ancient Greek dead white guy.

Today, of course, participation in governance is the birthright of every citizen in this country and in other modern democracies and social democracies. Citizenship entails responsibilities as well as rights--which is as it should be--although many seem to forget the responsibility part in the heat of political campaigns.

At any rate, at the risk of offending all sorts of people, I'm going to go out on a limb here and tell you why I think John McCain and (even more so) Sarah Palin are not good prospects for leaders in a modern democracy--especially one trying to maintain a place of power and prominence in an increasingly global economy.

It has to do with metaphor. Human beings, whom I like to refer to (as a species) as homo translator (man the translator, or metaphor-maker), rely on metaphorical thinking. As I've noted previously, there are two basic ways human beings learn stuff: by hearsay and by experience (Socrates develops these two varieties of education in The Republic). We learn when people tell us stories about what they and our ancestors have done, and we learn by doing things ourselves (remember chemistry lab?). Both of these ways of learning provide us with examples from which we can extrapolate ideas and apply them to new situations. Both similarities to and differences from other situations (ones we're more familiar with) help us to understand what's going on.

The value of formal education is that it expands our repertoir of examples by encouraging us to learn many more stories than we get locally (from family and friends, and in our own time). These stories add to our "cultural pool of metaphor" (the term comes from Gerald Holton) by including information from a much vaster range of people and from a much broader temporal spectrum than we could ever actually experience. We couple those stories with our own "local" learning and experience to gain a more broadly-based, richer education. I won't go as far as Plato and Socrates in saying that popular knowledge doesn't really count; but I will say that book-learning and wider exposure to the world prepare leaders better than does hanging around at the local saloon, drinking a Bud Light. Not that pub-crawling isn't good for philosophy; without the taverns in Edinburgh, the Scottish Enlightenment might never have happened, and Adam Smith might never have written The Wealth of Nations.

As I was saying, these combined modes of learning form the foundation for the kind of education needed to run a democracy. If some people have vastly diminished learning resources, they can't participate as completely or as well. And this is one of the abiding difficulties facing modern democracy: making sure every citizen has the opportunity to become well educated and to participate in governing his or her country.

The word "populist" has recently exploded into our common vocabulary to describe a particular kind of political candidate. It's gone beyond an earlier description of someone who rises from the working or middle classes and represents the concerns of most citizens. Very recently it has come to refer to someone who's not only not a political insider, but also not an "elitist." Populists of this description don't necessarily have much of an education, but can draw on even fairly restricted experience because they "know what it's like" to be an average Joe, to be like "everyman" (or "everywoman"). They don't have to know about tough subjects like economics, because they'll have people to advise them.

So a few questions begin to emerge: if you don't know much about a subject like economics, how are you going to evaluate the advice you're given? If you have no grounding in international relations and understand little about other cultures, how are you going to know if somebody's selling you a bill of goods when his or her advice is to wage war? If you're not conversant with the fundamentals of capitalism, how are you going to negotiate the nuances of the horrifically complex system that has emerged in the last century, and is now compounded by the reality of globalization? If you don't understand basic environmental science, how can you govern in a time of climatic crisis?

As I listen to Sarah Palin stumble around questions in interviews, it becomes clear that she is just not very well educated. She does seem to have plenty of street smarts, and good local political instincts (because she is just like the people she governs in Alaska). Her pool of metaphor is adequate for people who have a passel of kids, drive snow mobiles, work on pipelines, play hockey, and shoot moose (or wolves). But most of the world shares only one or two of these experiences; it's clear, for example, that aside from child-rearing she shares little enough with me. Palin's metaphors are primarily local and extremely hackneyed. She lacks the historical and cultural background that true world leaders need simply to hold a conversation with one another for longer than a brief introduction at the UN. Her entire candidacy is based on strongly held, inflexible religious and political views, and severely limited experience of the world.

John McCain, on the other hand, has both education and experience on his side. Being a graduate of Annapolis ensures a young Naval officer of a solid academic background, albeit one focused on what makes a good military man (and although he graduated near the bottom of his class). A significant chunk of his experience, however, comes from his incarceration in Vietnam, and very few of the rest of us share anything like it. We have no way of knowing how it colored his understanding of the world. His time in prison also looms so large in his life that it seems to have become the central defining metaphor for every other experience. And when I listen to him debate and participate in interviews, seldom do I not hear a reference, either open or oblique, to what he endured and what it taught him. As horrific and impossible for the rest of us to truly understand as it was, it happened half a lifetime ago. His experiences since that time, however, take a back seat to that single, all-consuming narrative.

Because of his less-then-stellar academic record, McCain's educational credentials don't make him susceptible to complaints about elitism. He doesn't have to apologize for an Ivy League education or for a reputation as a thinker. In that, he and Palin share a populist pulpit from which they can make fun of deliberation and intellectualism, and brag about making decisions with their guts or without blinking. And this is precisely where I have a problem.

The careful thinking-through of problems that comes with broad experience is a quality I would like to see in someone who works next to a red telephone and has a button within reach. I do not want somebody who reacts with his or her guts rather than his or her brains. And I want as leaders people who have enough cultural experience to include books like John Hersey's Hiroshima, Herman Wouk's The Winds of War, and films like Seven Days In May and Dr. Strangelove in their library of metaphors.

When we begin to denigrate our public intellectuals and to decry intellectualism as elitism, we are also sending a message that does every child in this country a disservice. When we make fun of smart people, but make our kids suffer the indignities of today's public schools--and then tell them that they have to go to college--we're sending them a very mixed message.

Unless we start electing people with the intellectual substance to solve our economic problems and rebuild our reputation among other world leaders and their constituencies, and until we have a president who's smart enough to evaluate evidence carefully and honestly, we'll continue on the path laid down over the last eight years. And without fresh, complex, vibrant metaphors and examples on which to model an alternative future, there's little hope that things will get better any time soon.

On a conciliatory note, if anyone's still with me after this rant, I'll end with a apt quotation from Editorial Anonymous (a blog on publishing children's books), which sums up my view of party politics:

. . . I don't mind what party people align themselves with. The nice thing about book people is that they're thinking people, and as long as you're thinking, you get to vote however you want. The people who drive me crazy are the ones who vote "from their gut". . . . Thinking people like to talk civilly and intelligently about issues, and as long as you're ready to do that, you're in the club.

A post-debate update, 3 October: I did watch it. And I haven't changed my mind. The main difficulty as I see it is that Palin didn't answer the questions posed; she gave speeches. She also winked and looked cute and tried hard to be folksy. She even asked if she could call Senator Biden "Joe" (he referred to her throughout as "Governor Palin" or "the governor"), so although the exchange was civil and even friendly, it lacked decorum. I'm glad she didn't embarrass herself, and it's clear that she's a quick study. But I'm still convinced that her time has not yet come.

Image credits: Manuscript of Sughrat (Socrates) from a 13th century Seljuk illustrator. Currently kept at Topkapi Palace Library, Istanbul, Turkey; Socrates lecturing, from Raphael's School of Athens, Stanza dei Conservatori, Vatican. Both from Wikimedia Commons.

Slouching toward Revolution

2008-09-25T08:47:00.000-07:00

I’ve probably mentioned environmentalist and educator David Orr in other posts on another blog, but as I was scooting though my bookmarks looking for something else, I happened on an essay he wrote in 1991 for a special issue of In Context, A Quarterly of Humane Sustainable Culture, and reprinted online in 1996. Orr's article called "What is Education For? Six myths about the foundations of modern education and six new principles to replace them," and it appears in the the issue on The Learning Revolution: Education Innovations for Global Citizens. Although I don't agree with every author of every article, the issue provides interesting insights into the educational climate of the emerging global economy at the turn of the twenty-first century.

This is the situation the editors described seventeen years ago:

It takes only a glance at the newsstands to know that education is in deep trouble. In France, 250,000 students recently took to the streets to protest unsafe conditions and reduced education budgets. In the U.S., public schools in some parts of the country are being all but abandoned by those who can afford private alternatives. And around the world, education - preparing the next generation to lead productive and fulfilling lives - too often suffers from being on the short end of a dwindling resource stream.

Sound familiar? The editors then envisioned a revolution in learning that could meet the demands of a changing world; it wouldn't necessarily involve a huge economic investment in technology, but rather "a shift in the way we understand what it means to learn and to teach" and changes in "our ideas about learning."

The hope reflected in these articles, including Orr's, is palpable, and is grounded in a move away from long-held beliefs not only about education, but about economy in general. Education becomes not merely a means to becoming rich and famous, but toward something much more important and (the essays suggest) fulfilling.

But learning for what? We are already far too skilled in exploiting the Earth for human ends, yet we are still terribly ignorant about the real basics of life - how to live sustainably on this planet, and in peace with each other. So whether you consider yourself an educator, a learner, or a concerned citizen, this issue is for you; for if the insights and technologies gathered here were put to the service of healing our societies and the planet's life systems, they would spark a revolution of enormous - and beautiful - proportions. We hope you'll participate in making that vision a reality.

Needless to say, the revolution never seems to have arrived. What Alan AtKisson describes in his introductory essay is still very much the case:

We are in a time when the destructive power of our ignorance is casting cold shadows across our knowledge - and the integrity of many species, cultures, and natural systems is being eclipsed in the process.

David Orr's response (from a commencement address he delivered in 1990) remains current, and his observations could have been taken from this morning's headlines:

The truth is that many things on which your future health and prosperity depend are in dire jeopardy: climate stability, the resilience and productivity of natural systems, the beauty of the natural world, and biological diversity.

Add to this a rapidly failing economy here in the United States (which promises to engulf much of the rest of the world unless it's properly addressed), and then make note, as Orr does, of the fact that these crises were not effected by uneducated people. The environmental and economic "challenges" (to use a word popular in educational circles today) have been wrought by a particular kind of ignorance against which our current forms of education do not insulate us.

People actually seem to be twigging to the idea that book-learning is not in itself the sole source of experience and wisdom. I can't help but blame the popularity of self-proclaimed populists like John McCain and Sarah Palin (and even George Bush) on the perception that those ivory-tower elites have gotten us into this mess (even if they were Conservative elites, they were still from Yale and Harvard). Never mind that we've had eight years of folksy leadership from a guy who was elected in part because he was the kind of fella you'd like to have a beer with, and we're considerably worse off as a result. It's the perception that counts, and it dogs candidates like Harvard-grad Barack Obama, who gets advice from pundits to "dumb it down." (I actually heard a commentator suggest this on Hardball the other night.)

It is rather ironic that some of our problems are actually grounded in knowledge, or at least in our tendency to read philosophy uncritically. Orr points to Francis Bacon, Galileo, and Descartes as sources for our traditional separation of human beings from the natural world--and notes that these are the foundations of modern educational theory, "foundations now enshrined in myths we have come to accept without question." He goes on to discuss six: Ignorance is a solvable problem; with enough knowledge and technology we can manage planet Earth; knowledge is increasing and by implication human goodness; we can adequately restore that which we have dismantled; the purpose of education is that of giving you the means for upward mobility and success; and our culture represents the pinnacle of human achievement. His careful explication of each of these presumptions is worth reading and considering.

Even though the revolution he was advocating in the '90s still hasn't occurred nearly twenty years later doesn't mean that the solutions he poses aren't still possible or necessary. The six principles he considers as solutions include these: All education is environmental education; the goal of education is not mastery of subject matter, but of one's person (from the Greek notion of paideia); knowledge carries with it the responsibility to see that it is well used in the world; we cannot say that we know something until we understand the effects of this knowledge on real people and their communities; "minute particulars" and the power of examples over words are important (my variation on this principle is "you are what you do," and because we are by nature metaphor makers, example carries enormous weight); and the way learning occurs is as important as the content of particular courses.

I'm doing Orr an injustice by simply listing his problems and solutions. But I hope that by doing so, I will pique my readers' interest strongly enough for them to engage in a careful reading of his essay. And then, for homework, go on to read his book The Nature of Design: Ecology, Culture, and Human Intention. It's an education in itself.

Photo credit: The abandoned Granger elementary school in Tucumcari, New Mexico, by Wordbuilder. Wikimedia Commons.

Education in the Kitchen

2008-09-18T08:56:00.000-07:00

Sometimes parents seem to abandon common sense when it comes to feeding their children. In this country, for example, and in a growing number of developing countries throughout the world, breastfeeding is sadly not necessarily the first choice for feeding infants. In China, the increasing number of babies fed with formula has led to yet another food-contamination crisis--this time over formula tainted with melamine.

The inability to nurse a newborn is rare in cultures where breastfeeding is seen as appropriate, natural, and preferred, and where mothers have the unstinting support of their physicians, nurses, families, and communities. And while it's true that breastfeeding is on the rise in the United States, mothers still only nurse for a few months and are then anxious to wean their kids to solid foods, usually those promoted most heavily by Big Baby Food--even though breastfeeding exclusively for five months or so, and then very gradually introducing other foods, helps curb obesity and food allergies. (Statistics on the advantages, prevalence, and duration of breastfeeding in the U. S. are available through the Centers for Disease Control and through La Leche League International.)

What brought all this to mind, in addition to the increasingly alarming news from China, was an article in last Sunday's New York Times: Six Food Mistakes that Parents Make, by Tara Parker-Pope. In it she tells of a child whose preschool diet consisted of chocolate-laced "meals" of all varieties (just as some friends of ours once fed their daughter pizza almost exclusively)--because that's all he would eat. It turns out to be easier to feed your kids whatever they want in the interest of feeding them something rather than nothing.

Having picky eaters at all is, of course, a reflection of an affluent society with an overabundance of choices. Starving children eat anything they can; only the rich have children who demand chocolate for breakfast. But almost every parent experiences some degree of food-fussiness, and Parker-Hope's article is full of great suggestions on how to avoid conflicts.

Most of the advice is common sense, however, and if we were less concerned with just getting our kids to eat, and more concerned about what we're teaching them about the role of food in their lives, we'd probably have healthier, less demanding children. Of course, they'd have less fun manipulating their parents, too--but I think it would be far more enjoyable to interact with kids by teaching them how to choose and prepare foods wisely than by trying to force them into patterns that can lead to decidedly unhealthful ways of viewing food in general.

For example, kids--like all human beings--are metaphor makers. If we tell them to eat one way, but eat another ourselves, they arrive at an inevitable conclusion: my mother's a liar. By following the diet du jour, but insisting that our children eat something different (a more "balanced" meal while we have at the Atkins packaged dinners), we're falling into the old "do what I say, not what I do" trap, which has no consequence other than to make parents look as if they have no control over themselves.

My own biggest mistake was not being more generous in the kitchen; I tended to see it as my own domain, and seldom encouraged my kids to cook with me. Another was to follow a highly restricted diet, albeit for ethical and religious reasons. While my children were growing up I was a vegetarian; not only that, I kept a Kosher home, which further restricted the types of cheese and other products I bought for home consumption. I did have the good sense to pretty much let the children eat whatever they wanted outside of the house, but I knew the jig was up when they started hanging over the meat counter at the grocery store, drooling longingly over the steaks.

The compromise was happy chickens. I had abstained from meat not because I thought there was something morally wrong with eating it, but because I couldn't take the responsibility for killing it myself and therefore thought I had no right to eat it. The Kosher part was for community; I wanted any friends of any degree of Jewishness (or Gentility, as it were) to be able to eat at my table. Eventually, however, I realized that I could serve cold vegetable meals on glass plates to my Orthodox friends, and buy organic, free-range meat without suffering too much guilt. By that time, however, my children's habits were firmly in place, and I'll have to wait for grandchildren in order to do it right.

But anyone with small children can use mealtime as a teaching and learning experience, and not just about food. Maths can be taught through baking; history and geography can sneak into a meal based on a particular ethnic cuisine; even films and literature can provide foundations for a meal--through books like The Joyce of Cooking, the Nero Wolfe Cookbook, and It Came From the Kitchen. Art history's a natural: try constructing a meal based on a painting, or dive into recipes from one of the many artists who loved food: Vincent van Gogh, Frida Kahlo, Claude Monet.

Common-sense eating can easily become part of a natural education: from the growing of food to understanding its history and culture. For background, parents can consult websites like The Food Timeline, Betty Fussel's, The Story of Corn, H. E. Jacob's Six Thousand Years of Bread. And then there are the likes of The Philosopher's Kitchen (Recipes from Ancient Greece and Rome for the Modern Cook) by Francine Segan (who also wrote Movie Menus and Shakespeare's Kitchen), Jean Bottéro's The Oldest Cuisine in the World: Cooking in Mesopotamia, and James Davidson's Courtesans and Fishcakes: The Consuming Passions of Classical Athens (the link to the latter is to its first chapter). Simply having books like these on the shelves of one's house can prompt discussions about food, history, nutrition, culture, science, and any number of topics among parents and children.

Parker-Pope notes in her article that the more kids are involved in food preparation, the more likely they are to eat what they make, not only at home, but elsewhere. I can't think of a more powerful schoolroom, in fact, than a kitchen in which children are welcome, and a garden in which children help to grow what they eat. Home-schoolers have a wonderful opportunity to integrate all manner of learning while simply caring for home and hearth; but even kids in traditional schools can reap enormous benefits from being included in meal-planning and preparation, and from accompanying their parents to grocery stores and/or farmer's markets to help select the food they'll eventually eat.

As it turns out, cooking and eating provide not only the basic framework for survival in the world, but for learning about it as well. Think of how much smarter we'd all be if we actually mastered the skills necessary to plant, harvest, prepare, and cook most of what we eat--just like our pioneer ancestors had to. Sharing food among family and friends grounds community, and offers a deeply resonant metaphor for living, teaching, and learning well.

Images: A Helping Hand, by Eugen von Blaas, 1884; Mary Cassatt, Maternité, 1890. Both from Wikimedia Commons.

Learning Posts from Owl's Farm

2008-09-15T10:31:00.000-07:00

Before I decided that I needed a separate blog on teaching and learning, I posted frequently on education at my first blog, Owl's Farm. Since its inception a little over a year ago, its focus has shifted from being primarily on William Morris, to being primarily on the ideas associated with what geographer Yi-Fu Tuan calls topophilia, or love of place, and on philosophical considerations regarding place and home. And although my interest in education is tangentially related to where I was born and how I was brought up, I finally decided to create a blog devoted entirely to the process of learning in and about the world.

And so, in order to avoid repeating myself too much (a tendency toward repetition is an unfortunate consequence of aging), I thought it might be helpful to post links to my educational remarks from the Farm, with small glosses on what they were about. In that way, both I and my readers can refer back to them if necessary, and they're all tidy and handily available, in chronological order.

Dismantling the Boy Farms (26 June 2007): a riff on William Morris's philosophy of education, grounded in his own experience at Marlborough.

Paying Attention (15 September 2007): something of a rant on the inappropriate and/or expedient use of technology in the classroom.

The Assessment Obsession (23 December 2007): the first of several ruminations on the current trend in education to teach to the test, focus on assessment rather than content, and related issues.

Surviving Plutopia (22 April 2008): an Earth Day reflection on current conditions. I go off on several points here--including Philip Pullman's view of education.

Building a Better Schoolhouse (2 May 2008): inspired by the community-based education movement in England, which provides a preferable alternative to "No Child Left Behind."

The Age of Endarkenment (2 June 2008): a lament about the lack of curiosity among our young, and the growing lack of interest in knowing much.

The next couple of months were taken up by house-recycling efforts, but during that time the idea for The Owl of Athena started brewing and I eventually began to channel my educational musings over here. So far the feedback has been helpful, but I do hope to get more students involved, and direct the conversation toward the comments section of the blog, rather than casual conversations in the hallways.

The educational world is changing, both locally and globally, and I'm looking forward (and not always quaking in my boots) to seeing what happens over the next few months. It should be, as they say in China, interesting.

Images: A Roman relief of a school, and a woodcut from the title page of Wenceslaus Brack: Vocabularius rerum, 1487. Both from Wikimedia Commons.

Telling and Doing

2008-09-08T10:25:00.000-07:00

While reading Gary Snyder's book of essays, A Place in Space: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Watersheds (1995), I happened on one called "Amazing Grace," in which he talks about two kinds of learning: hearsay and experience.

The essay was originally written as the preface for Donald Philippi's translation of Songs of Gods, Songs of Humans: The Epic Tradition of the Ainu (an aboriginal tribe in Japan). Snyder's primarily interested in the role of the oral tradition in preliterate societies, noting that it is "not memorized but remembered" (his emphasis) and thus that

. . . every telling is fresh and new, as the teller's mind's eye re-views the imagery of origins or journeys or loves or hunts. Themes and formulas are repeated as part of an ever-changing tapestry composed of both the familiar and the novel. Direct experience, generation by generation, feeds back into the tale told.

This "together hearing" partakes of both aspects of learning, bringing hearsay into the realm of experience, in the context of the group of listeners.

Of course, in many such societies, myth and "actuality" also meld, so that "myth" doesn't mean "lie" as it does in the technologized West. It's part of experience in that it helps a people understand who they are, how they became, and how they are related to the space they occupy. The process is, in fact, far more intellectually challenging, I think, than the kind of rote learning we teach our kids: memorize "facts" out of "textbooks" removed from history and experience and unrelated to what we do, except by some theoretical thread that asserts: "You'll need this in the real world."

In fact, mythically grounded people often seem to be much more learned about their environments and their traditions than we in the ultra-modern world are. I frequently ask my students how many of them could survive for two weeks in the wild, how many know anything about local flora, how many have ever seen the Milky Way or would recognize it if they did. Every time I ask, one or two answer positively, down from five or six a decade ago. While more of them seem to understand why we should recycle, and why fossil fuels are problematic, few of them understand the underlying problems themselves very deeply. Throwing plastic bottles into a recycle bin, and turning thermostats up in the summer and down in the winter are about as far as the real recognition goes.

Any education for the future must, therefore, involve re-familiarizing children (and all students) with the natural world. If we keep losing the connection--covering up experience with cloaks of synthetic fabrics or artificial heating and cooling--we lose one of our most important ways to learn. Not only that, but hearsay can't fill in the gaps, because the tellers have already removed themselves from first-hand experience. They've been driving cars and air conditioning their homes all their lives. One would hope that there have been a few camping experiences or walks on the beach, but in our increasingly urbanized and sub-urbanized environments, even those experiences are becoming less frequent.

One of my fondest memories when my son was young was a week-long stint as a counselor at an outdoor camp run by the school district. In order to make sure that he got to go, I volunteered to herd seven prepubescent boys through the week's activities, and to share a screened in cabin (open to all the elements but bugs) with them. For the entire time we walked everywhere, ate minimally prepared foods, picked apart owl pellets, swam in a lake, and learned about the prairie environment we all inhabit. There was more of it then, but the children came away with a much stronger physical sense of where they lived then. I hope it's still with them, as it is with me--but only a select few got to enjoy the experience, and I'm not sure it's still available to kids today.

Gas prices are currently limiting car travel, which in most cases is a good thing--but the situation is also driving more children into movie theaters and air-conditioned game rooms during the summers instead of allowing their parents to take them on camping trips or visits to national parks (like the one to Yellowstone I got to take with my grandparents when I was about seven). People's lives are now generally more crammed with work and scheduled activities as well, which diminishes the time kids can spend out of doors simply goofing off. And very few children have even the foggiest idea of where their food comes from, because they've never had a real garden--or if they did, it was filled with flowers and ornamental shrubs for reasons of property values.

I think this is why efforts like that of Alice Waters's Edible Schoolyard program are so encouraging. If more children are provided with opportunities for first-hand experience in learning vital skills and ways of living, they will encourage their parents to do so as well. Just as the neighborhood kids in my town are significantly responsible for increasing their folks' participation in local recycling efforts, kids who learn about food production and growing processes can help re-introduce their families to traditions and values that are falling by the way as we insulate ourselves more and more from the natural world.

There's even a neologism that covers the phenomenon: Nature Deficit Disorder. Gardening is a great remedy for the affliction, and I can't think of anywhere better to start than by looking into what Alice Waters is doing, and taking a look at the gardening-with-children segments of the Heirloom Gardner blog.

If our kids can gain experience in providing real basic needs, such as food, clothing, shelter, and community, they will learn more from acquiring the skills involved (such as soil preparation, cultivation, plant recognition, measuring and building, cooking, sewing) than they can from reading even the best textbooks in math and science. If they can learn to explore their own backyard environment, and spend some time looking at the night sky (both with the naked eye and with with tools such as binoculars and telescopes), they will be far richer than if some textbook author predigests the information for them and they have to spit facts back on a test.

Here's my homework assignment: invite Grandma or Grandpa or Great Aunt Matilda (or an elderly neighbor if you don't have grandparents handy) to dinner, and urge him or her to tell your children what it was like when they were little. Ask them what kinds of stories their parents told them, and what big events occurred when they were young. This probably won't work with your jaded teenagers, but the ten- and eleven-year-olds I shepherded through a week of outdoor learning were wide open for experiences and stories. There will never be a better time to start opening them up to different, more enriching possibilities.

And then, go out and plant a garden.

Image credits: John Everette Millais, The Boyhood of Raleigh, 1870 (Tate Museum). Raphael depiction of the original bard, Homer, from the Parnassus, in the Stanza della Segnatura in the Vatican. Both from Wikimedia Commons.

The Home School Alternative

2008-08-29T12:00:00.001-07:00

I've written a great deal over the years about education, and although I am by profession a college teacher, I am profoundly concerned about how young children are taught in this country. After having struggled through elementary and secondary schooling for my own children, and using band-aid solutions to the problems I didn't know enough to figure out how to solve then, I finally (in the '80s) discovered William Morris. I'd already encountered the legendary John Holt, and had suggested to my teenage daughter that she simply drop out of school and we'd get educated together, but she was already too well ensconced in the American high school experience to want to leave her friends "behind."

For the most part, though, she'd made her own way, even in high school. She didn't participate in any organized extra-curricular activities that I can remember, preferring instead to get a job and take responsibility for her own economic education. After a disastrous first semester in college, she quit to work at data entry and took courses part-time at a junior colleges until she had begun to build a career as a crackerjack administrative assistant for a home-building company's information technology division, and then decided to earn a BFA in interior design. I'm immeasurably proud of her, because her choices were all hers--not those of a system which seems to be designed to turn out mediocre workers in a consumer society.

If I had it to do all over again, I'd have schooled both of my kids at home. Although there are alternatives available (such as Montessori, and both of my children went to Montessori schools during their pre-public school days), they're usually very expensive and frequently have waiting lists. And as more and more wealthy parents discover the richness of these curricula, the population of these schools becomes more and more uniform: upper middle class and monochromatic.

Home-schooling has become the refuge of strongly religious parents who fear the corrupting influences of popular culture on their children, and I can't say that I blame them. I drove by a high school this week, where youngsters were gathering for orientation outside of a gym, and quite frankly it looked like a convention of underage hookers and their pimps. The girls were barely dressed (it is, after all, summer in Texas), and the boys were tricked out in very expensive jeans and rock-star shirts. A fleeting memory of school uniforms made me sigh, and I drove on.

But uniforms aren't the answer either. They offer an egalitarian solution to economic disparity in some school populations--but it didn't work in the Catholic school I went to. We purchased the material for our uniforms and had them made--and rich girls had deeper pleats (that didn't fall out and look scruffy halfway through the day) because their parents could afford extra fabric, or better tailors. Uniforms also promote a vaguely military sensibility, and perhaps they do limit the development of imagination. However, the girls I saw in front of the high school were each wearing slightly different versions of the same "uniform" anyway: tight jeans, skimpy baby-doll tops and multiple underwear straps, set off by a small variety of shoulder bag styles.

The United States seems to possess an almost schizophrenic notion of childhood. Young children need to be both over-stimulated and over-protected. "Young adults" need to be initiated into consumer culture and visually sexualized, but must also stay chaste until marriage. No wonder so many people want to pull the plug on public education and seek an alternative.

The good news is that with the development of the internet and the proliferation of excellent educational websites, coupled with growing educational opportunities in public institutions, parents have a raft of resources available to them. It's quite possible for well-educated parents to develop their own curricula and augment them with informal classes in art museums and nature centers. Many regional museums have also developed educational websites with suggested activities and, occasionally online courses. Universities like MIT are making college courseware available online, and bright kids everywhere seem to be taking advantage of it.

Parents who are less well-prepared to create their own lessons can now take advantage of a multitude of curricula available through growing home-school networks and websites. Some of these have a decidedly limited framework, but many encourage the kind of wide-ranging exploration that highly creative parents seek.

Children who stay home also have time to engage in the most educational activity of all: reading. Combined with regular physical activity out of doors, such as nature hikes and gardening, home-schoolers can learn the way our ancestors did. Not constrained by standardized tests that stifle creativity, home-schoolers have the opportunity to learn art and music, to explore the nature of mathematics instead of engaging in the rote memorization of formulas. If kids don't have to spend half their day going to and from school and to and from classes within the school building, they can read, or learn about germinating seeds, or create a blog (!), or practice the piano--or choose from any number of activities that will educate them far better than sitting in a classroom with thirty other children, preparing for a high-stakes exam that will teach them exactly nothing except how to memorize information without having digested it properly first.

One of the main arguments against home-schooling is that kids won't get properly socialized. My response to that is socialized into what? Early sexualization? Rabid consumerism? Classism? Racism? Bullying?

In the nineteenth century, William Morris decried the institutionalism of British public (i.e. private) education, and the degeneration of boarding schools into "boy farms." We haven't come much further than that in our public schools, where kids are squeezed into patterns of expectation, and are "educated" primarily by their peers. Do we really want our country to be led eventually by a generation who spent their school years penned into a room with a single adult as a model? Why not teach our children by example? They can surely be better socialized by spending high-quality time interacting with intelligent adults, rather than letting their chums "teach" them about birds, bees, life, the universe, and everything.

My own childhood was hardly idyllic, but my fondest memories involve large amounts of time spent with my parents and their friends. Being taken to the Foreign Correspondents Club in Taipei for lunch, or accompanying a group of adults to a local lake for a day of swimming and conversation were common occurrences, and taught me that adults really do enjoy conversing with children who have grown up being treated like reasonable human beings. And when we weren't interacting with adults, my brother and I had the opportunity to explore our surroundings on our own; when we were really stumped for something to do, we'd put on elaborate plays and pretend to be everything from Arthurian knights to samurais to children in Enid Blyton stories. Of course, we could only do these things because we'd read the books that gave us the ideas in the first place. Perhaps the best part of our growing up is that we didn't have access to television until we were teenagers. Now, there's an idea . . . .

And so, for my friends Sheryl and Jenny, who have been or are beginning to home-school their children, you have my deepest admiration for your imagination and your courage. You give me hope when there frequently seems little to be hopeful about. And for you I'll continue to post information and resources on home schooling when I find them in my own unending search for ways to develop a truly humane (and human) way to help our children survive difficult times and craft a better future.

Image credits: James Tissot, "A Little Nimrod," and a little girl reading by Jessie Wilcox Smith, both from Wikimedia Commons.

Assessing Assessment

2008-08-25T09:54:00.000-07:00

I was preoccupied last week with helping to fight fires at school, lit by the departure of not one but two academic directors, and the chaos of a fairly new phenomenon: what's called a "mid-quarter start," in which new students enter the program and take a couple of classes twice a week for five weeks. Two hundred newbies descended into our hallowed halls, causing overflows in the already-packed parking garage, as well as disconcerting room changes. In all fairness, I don't think anybody expected 200 people to take advantage of the opportunity to enter at mid-term. But the problem's exacerbated by the necessity of sharing our facilities with another college in the corporation's stable. Things should get better when they get their own building (Somewhere Else, we sigh, collectively). The new students, though, seem to be dealing well with the confusion, and the "old" ones have grumbled but gone on with their work. We are, on the whole, an adaptable lot.

In the meantime, we're halfway through the normal quarter, and chest-high in assessment activities, both institutional and pedagogical. The institutional part seems to be going along swimmingly, as we streamline our process and as the various components of the school get used to it and learn how to hold up their end. In the classroom, however, I'm in the midst of a struggle between numbers and ideas.

How do I determine if or how well my students are grasping the information and ideas I'm presenting in class? A few years ago, as my classes grew in size and my level-two students were clearly not absorbing the material we covered in the level-one class, I began (reluctantly) to test them. I'd much better ask for design projects that test their ability to apply principles to real-world problems, but they ended up only learning what they needed for a given project.

My initial exams were really tough, and resulted more in abject terror than in real learning (even though I weighed exam grades very lightly in the end). So I decided to couple my insistence that students maintain workbooks of images and notes with exams both at midterm and at the end of the quarter. Here the results were much more satisfactory, especially since I allowed them to use their workbooks to take exams and tied their scores together: what you get on the exam is what you get on the workbook, since the exam is only going to be as good as the workbook.

For a fair amount of time, this seemed to work. Students diligently inserted images into "image lists"--pre-printed forms that list basic information about each work we view, with space for a sketch or a picture of the object, and another space for notes. To help them out, I link every image I show in class to a source on the web. Try as I might, I can't get most of my students (who are already paying a premium to attend the school in the first place) to plunk down $130 for a survey textbook and another $90 on a history of graphic design. So I maintain a course website with resources to help them locate the images and additional information--and to show them what reliable information on the web looks like.

As I said, this worked for a while. But lately I've noticed that some students are blowing off completing the workbooks, imagining (on what evidence I can't imagine) that they'll remember all the images and information and be able to take the test without engaging in the process I designed to help them absorb what they need. No amount of describing my own experience in art history classes (or descriptions of having to walk to class nine miles uphill in the snow) seem to be persuasive enough to get them to accomplish the task independently.

And so I am instituting a separate workbook grade, based on completion of the slide lists, to be assessed after each exam, at least in the first-level course. I'm doing this in direct response to an observed phenomenon with clearly apparent impact on the quality of learning that takes place in my classroom.

Why am I telling you all this? Isn't this what we always do? My answer to both of these questions is that this is an example of the kind of assessment most teachers automatically do. We don't need statistics to tell us when things are going badly or well. But the Assessment Regime (I'm borrowing this term from a dean at a local community college) maintains that without numbers, we have no way of tracking whether or not our students attain measurable outcomes. This assumption is, of course, poppycock--except to those who seem to have spent so little time in the classroom that they really do not understand how it works, or who have focused almost exclusively on theory without much in the way of practice.

I'm not saying that all teachers, just by being teachers, are capable of this kind of reflective assessment (which is what I've begun to call it). It takes practice and experience--but it can be taught by example (and every teacher needs to spend time with a mentor, or have good models to emulate). But being able to realize when students are not learning as well as they should be is a basic qualification for teaching. Anyone who can't see or who ignores signs of trouble shouldn't be a teacher in the first place.

I'll continue this topic later, and pose some further questions about effective ways of gaging student success (another phrase that's become a buzzword) that don't involve their taking standardized, one-size-fits-all exams. But I wanted to inject this particular notion into the conversation: that good teaching requires a kind of internalized thermostat capable of setting off alarms when negative change occurs, and that alerts us when a particular stratagem works especially well. It may not be measurable in any quantitative way at all, except that it's grounded in carefully designed parameters of success and failure, such as in an outcome rubric that indicates expectations and outlines the means of accomplishing goals.

We are only wise, Plato taught, when we recognize the limits of our own understanding. Knowledge requires lifelong learning, the continuing use of what we learn at any given point. Assessment needs to be processual--not marking particular achievements at particular points, but rather establishing the ground for ongoing, complex learning. If my students leave my classes with a basic vocabulary and a foundational set of critical skills, I don't really care if they remember the exact date on which Pablo Picasso finished the Demoiselles d'Avignon. But they'd bloody well better remember how important that painting was to the future of art, and what made it possible for Picasso to paint it in the first place. How does one test something like that on a multiple choice or a true/false exam?

Image credit: Detail of Raphael's School of Athens in the Stanza della Segnatura of the papal apartments in the Vatican, featuring Plato (left) and Aristotle, two of the first educational theorists, both of whom were quite good at the practice of teaching as well--judging from their students. Wikimedia Commons.

Welcome!

2008-08-23T12:56:00.000-07:00

I know now why some people have more than one blog. I've had two going for a few months (one of which is a bit over a year old), but as we get used to writing down and organizing our thoughts (so as not to simply spout), it becomes apparent that these thoughts often occur in categories: life, the universe, everything, etc.

So I've decided to make a blog out of a third category: my working life. I am by vocation, if not simply by accident, a teacher. I once wanted to teach middle school earth and life sciences, but I realized early on that I would not be able to put up with public school bureaucracies, as much as I admired the possibilities and underlying purpose of public schools. In some of my graduate education classes I also ran into people who were entering my field (I was focusing on environmental science at the time) only because they needed to teach a class or two in order to coach. Now, I've got absolutely nothing against coaches, being married to someone who coaches part time because he loves tennis at least as much as he enjoys philosophy. But I am firmly convinced that truly good teachers teach what they know best and for which they harbor a genuine passion. Teaching history only to be able to coach football is, therefore, problematic; but most of us have grown up having been taught economics or biology or history by somebody who would really rather have been out at the pool blowing a whistle and training a future Michael Phelps. Perhaps this helps explain the gradual decline in interest in the liberal arts among today's young folk. At any rate, I ended up abandoning the idea of teaching pre-pubescent teenagers for a career in the education of their future selves.

And here I've been for the last twenty or so years. The experience has proven both rewarding and exasperating, and I currently share it with students and colleagues I admire and respect. So this blog is for them. In it I'll expound my pedagogical philosophy, my anxieties about the future of education and the future of the generation(s) I'm currently teaching. I'll probably even rant about the ambiguities of proprietary education, the politics of teaching in a troubled and changing world, the angst brought on by the current preoccupation with assessment. It will be unfailingly honest because I'm too old to be worried about ruffling anybody's feathers. But neither will I attack unfairly, accuse without reason, or complain without offering alternatives. Part of what I teach is logic, and I promise to present only cogent arguments.

I will herein share ideas about how to learn, think, and write well, the importance of curiosity to creativity, the necessity of knowing something about the past, and the joy of discovering the new and unexpected. I welcome comments and input from colleagues and students; perhaps in time we can expand the blog into a community of contributors.

I reserve the right to moderate comments and ask for revisions when I think an observation needs further reflection. I will not post comments that ignore grammar, syntax, or spelling conventions--although I'll be happy to help anyone compose a comment he or she would like to make. Please do not let my own vocabulary or writing style intimidate you (as has happened to some of my students who've wanted to respond to my other blogs). It's just that I've been writing for over fifty years, and grew up in a vastly different world than that of either my students or my own children--who are now older than most of my students and some of my colleagues.

Those of you who join the conversation are welcome to discuss any of this with me in person if you're located within the architectural framework of a certain more-or-less International Style building in north Dallas. But to everyone who happens upon The Owl of Athena, welcome.

Photo credit: The image began with a Flickr photo by Juicystyle of Cape Sounion in Greece, showing the temple of Poseidon at dusk.