Saturday, September 29, 2012

Neomastadonianism


Which can be read as a call to a radical new political philosophy or as a bunch of aphorisms:

Knowledge matters and some knowledge is more important than other knowledge.

Mullets, goatees, scruffiness, and other hirsute affectations are pronouncements of self-importance and should be avoided

It is wiser, healthier, and happier to believe in something far more powerful and far better than oneself.

We are all flawed and suffering and deserve compassion; and we are all obliged to live up to the highest moral principles and deserve the consequences when we do not

All institutions --- political, religious, and academic --- exist for the betterment of people, not to achieve, maintain, and increase their own power.

Having a rich mental library which allows one to make and to understand a variety of appropriate cultural allusions is much better than not having one

Precise vocabulary, correct grammar, syntactical clarity, and logical thinking are personal and social goods, not arbitrary impositions

Freedom is neither license nor conformity; it is a burden and must be chosen

Much in the natural world is beautiful and can be inspiring; but much is cold, implacable, uncaring, and violently hierarchical, which we should not emulate

Marriage is a social contract, not an individual choice, with obligations to the community, especially to one's children, that take precedence over personal preference

We owe kindness, generosity, and patience to one another; and we have the right to defend ourselves against physical, psychological, and emotional abuse

Not all that is wrong is illegal

It is possible and preferable to have a principled aesthetic; Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms are superior to Chuck Berry and the Beatles, and the reasons can be known and articulated; we are not limited to liking and not liking

The deepest wisdom about the human condition is expressed within the great traditions from around the world and we ignore them at our peril

Trustworthiness is a far more effective social bond than the law

Technology is always and everywhere a means, not an end; a neutral; a tool the uses of which must be chosen

Judgments of other should be based on competence and character, neither of which is predetermined by race, ethnicity, or cultural background

Loyalty to the right thing is a virtue; courage in the service of the right thing is a virtue

Any speech or action which is meant to call attention to oneself or to claim superiority to others should be avoided



Friday, September 28, 2012

Content and Character

I teach a class for undergraduates who are on their way to teach in public elementary schools. Last week, the Director of Curriculum and Instruction for LAUSD came to talk to the class about the new Core Content Standards, an attempt to create --- against all odds --- a set of national standards. She gave an excellent presentation which was well-received by the students. It was, obviously, all about the content --- the what --- of teaching.

This week, I spent the first half of class going over the 10 most important points that I took from her presentation: backward-design, text-based interpretation of literature (rather than reader response), evidence-based writing with a purpose (rather than merely responding to prompts), teaching clusters of standards within a subject and clusters of standards across subjects, and so on.

In other words, my students had experienced a full class-and-a-half of presentation and discussion about the importance of content, how to think about it, how to plan for the presentation of it, and how to help students learn how to grapple with ideas rather than just taking in information.

After the break, we turned to a discussion of the reading which led, in a not entirely linear way, to my asking them about the teacher(s) that they really remembered. Several volunteered stories about those teachers they remembered, all of them with a kind of enthusiastic fondness. Then I asked them what characteristics seemed to be common in all these stories; the answers came quickly; about this they didn't have to think: warm, caring, happy, enthusiastic, energetic. In other words, all strictly personal characteristics.

Not a word about mastery of subject or skill in the techniques of delivery; nothing about either content or method.

What they cared about had nothing to do with content and everything to do with character.

Those who do not live in the world of public schools and who don't pay much attention to public schooling as a political issue will not be aware that ever since the publication of the federal pamphlet "A Nation at Risk" in 1983, the several states and later the federal government have devoted tremendous amounts of time, money, and human capital to the process of defining what the content should be. First the individual states defined their own academic content standards and now, with the new Core Content Standards, there is something very close to a set of national academic content standards.

How to reconcile this very focused emphasis by all those responsible for creating legislation regarding public schooling with the very real life-experience of my students?

How to reconcile my own stated and oft-argued position that not only content but a very specific version of content is necessary for the development of good individuals and good citizens with my students' implicit position that what matters is the person of the teacher?

Mostly I'm going to leave this as a question, but I will say this. I think my students may be in tune with a deep truth: that elementary schools teach reading, writing, and computing, at various levels for various students; and that secondary schools provide a place for individual development by providing reasonable safety, by providing opportunities for participation in academic and other activities, and by otherwise staying out of the way. Outside of that we may have far less control than we like to think we do.

Just in case someone wants to take this as a rejection of the importance of the academic and the intellectual, I will make clear that it is not. By temperament and training, my interest is in helping students to think for themselves which requires real knowledge, not just information but deep understanding. I'd like to see much more of this than there is currently.

But imagining that we can define curriculum and then get certain predictable results --- a la the industrial model --- is, I have come to think, foolish.

But being the kind of person who touches the hearts and minds of young people, touches them with warmth and kindness and caring and enthusiastic participation in their lives at school, is not only wise but priceless.


Wednesday, September 26, 2012

Humiliation and Humility

I belong to a group of professional and semi-professional philosophers who meet every 6 weeks or so to discuss something read in common. The last time we met, we had read an article by a political philosopher who was arguing for more and better social democracy. As part of his argument he contended that a guaranteed income would be better than the current system of social services because of the "humiliation" suffered by those who depend on various versions of the dole.

This was one of those statements that was made with such rhetorical smoothness and such a strong sense of authority that the tendency was to accept it and go right on. But there was something about it that caught my attention. Because we didn't discuss it at the meeting, there was no chance for me to pursue whatever this brief flash was, but I think I now know what it was.

There is something intuitively obvious in a claim that those who are dependent on services provided by the state would inevitably feel humiliated. And yet my experience undermines this contention. Ever since having been "downsized" out of regular work, I have been to some significant extent dependent on a variety of services provided by what Peter Sagal wryly refers to as "the great socialist paradise": Social Security, unemployment insurance, Medicare, and a more-or-less union-guaranteed teaching job at a local university.

There is much about this situation that I don't like. I have never been good at following orders and have spent most of my life, sometimes successfully and sometimes not, trying to be embraced and affirmed by the institution without ever really buying into the conformity that is always and inevitably demanded by institutions. The services I refer to are provided by huge, faceless bureaucracies, in which nothing really matters except the rules, the forms that demonstrate that the rules have been followed, and the schedule which has to be met in submitting those forms. For someone with my temperament, this is difficult.

And yet the reality is that I have never felt humiliated. Annoyed, certainly; put out that I have to fill out another one of these damn forms, absolutely. But never humiliated; not even embarrassed or patronized. In fact, the few times that I have dealt with an actual person, either face-to-face or on the phone, the transaction has been pleasant and efficient.

I think that to some extent the reason for this is that I have achieved, here in my dotage, a measure of humility. I am righteously angry about what was done to me but I also know, in some deep and meaningful sense, that bad things happen, many of them much worse than what happened to me. So I don't feel much temptation to throw a tantrum, stamp my feet, and hold my breath 'til I turn purple. For this I am grateful.

But there's something else to be found in the un-packing of this situation. In some very real way, all these services are the modern, mass society version of our providing for one another in times of need. We don't live in villages anymore or even in small towns. We don't all know one another and aren't in the habit of caring for one another in the way that small, intimate groups used to do. Instead, we have organized and rationalized the mechanics of care: people need money or food or medical care, we have created institutions to provide what is needed. We all contribute through taxes and we all can draw on these services.

A faceless bureaucracy, yes, and an imperfect one. But when one stops taking it for granted, or focusing on its imperfections, and thinks about what a remarkable, unlikely thing it is, gratitude is the only appropriate response.

One of the opening bits at the recent Democratic convention infamously said that "government is the only thing we all belong to." If the people who see the world that way are ever able to put it into effect in practical ways, we are in terrible trouble. But it is also true that in a country with a population of over 300 million people, most of them concentrated in huge urban centers and participants in an economic system which is dependent on dynamism and its inevitable disruptions, only government could provide the services that our local, state, and federal governments do. And for this we should all be grateful.

Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Tolerating Intolerance

I have been teaching college undergraduates since 1997. Almost all of them have been nice people and many of them worked hard, but not very many of them were interested in what these days we call "critical thinking." The ones who were willing to work hard did the assigned work and expected that that would be the end of it. When asked to consider opposing ideas, or to make an argument for one position or another, or to evaluate either the validity or the truth of a logical proposition, more often than not they were surprised and sometimes even offended. There was a rule, a common understanding, that I had broken. I think you could even say that, in their eyes, I had broken faith with them. My understanding of what education should be and theirs were very different.

They were also convinced that a kind of soft moral relativism was the proper attitude to have; that making judgments about the beliefs or practices of other people was not nice, and that niceness was a kind of ultimate moral standard. (I remember a bumper sticker from several years ago that read "Mean People Suck": it seemed obvious to me that "mean people" meant those who made judgments about other people. My sense was that all moral categories had been reduced to "nice" and "mean.")

And yet they were doctrinaire about one thing. They had been convinced that the proper moral position was not just to be tolerant of difference, not even just accepting of it, but to be affirming and celebrating of difference. In the otherwise secular and value-neutral university, this was doctrinal orthodoxy. Questioning it was beyond the pale and meant that you did not have the proper "dispositions" to be in the community; even bringing it up in a purely theoretical and hypothetical way ran the risk of one's being branded a racist. Faculty could not be hired, or once hired could be denied tenure; students could be denied entrance to programs or be denied the license or credential they were pursuing.

I describe this not to address the basic issue of whether this is a good thing for the university but, rather, to bring up a difficult philosophical and political question that is implied by this position.

Are all things to be tolerated? All those students who saw themselves as moral relativists quickly withdrew from that position when asked about murder and rape. These were wrong. Period. But the point is not that they were not really moral relativists; the point is that when asked about less obvious examples of questionable behavior, they were deeply conflicted.

I taught people who were on their way to be teachers so the examples we examined were examples from the classroom. "What would you do," I asked, "if you had students in your classroom who were verbally or even physically abusing other students because it was part of their cultural heritage? Boys from cultures where girls and women were inherently inferior? Members of opposing tribes or clans or ethnic groups whose parents had brought their feuds with them when they immigrated?"

Some students had no problem with this dilemma because their attitude was that if people chose to come here they should obey our rules, be the way that we believe people should be. This, of course, is as mindless a position as is absolute tolerance. The students who were willing to grapple with the question, on the other hand, were willing to admit that they were deeply conflicted: on the one hand, they had been taught that all differences were to be celebrated but on the other hand they intuitively realized that such behaviors were unacceptable in the classroom. How to reconcile this?

I raise this because this is a vital and reverberating question in our current politics. To some extent domestically but especially in foreign policy, what is the right position to take toward intolerance and how should that position be put into action?

To put it another way, if a person believes in tolerance toward others, does that rightly include being tolerant of those who are intolerant?

There is a current bumper sticker that says "Coexist" with a variety of religious symbols on it. I think it's accurate to say that most of us in the modern West believe in coexistence, believe in tolerating those whose beliefs and practices we disagree with in the interests of the greater good, the common good.

But what do when confronted by people whose most basic and profound belief is that they are not only right but that those who do not believe and practice the same things deserve to die?

We believe in tolerance, in coexistence. What do we do when we come face-to-face with those who do not?




Monday, September 24, 2012

Presidential Politics and Public Schools

Way back in the Summer and Fall of 2000, then-candidate George W. Bush campaigned on the importance of public schooling. Although he had not coined the phrase, he was quite forceful --- and quite right --- in calling public schooling the key civil rights issue of our time. Then two things happened which drastically changed the calculus: the first, of course, was 9/11; the second was No Child Left Behind.

The events of 9/11 removed any possibility of by-then President Bush's concentrating on domestic issues generally and public schooling in particular. Instead he successfully pushed for the Federal legislation that came to be called No Child Left Behind, a top-down, bureaucracy-laden, rewards-and-punishment program of tremendous pressure for public schools to conform to specific demands for content and for measures of accountability.

Rather than an on-going process of grappling with the difficult questions regarding the purposes of public schooling, how those purposes could best be achieved with a mass population in overly large schools and overly large classrooms, what the best content would be, what the best methods would be, and so on, NCLB was meant to be a kind of machine that, left on its own, would ensure better public schooling.

The result was that the "standards movement," which had great potential for improving teaching and learning, was hijacked for the narrow purposes of scoring at prescribed levels on standardized tests. Rather than encouraging their faculties to improve student learning, principals all over the country hectored their faculties to raise test scores. Those of you who are not teachers will have to take my word for it that the psychological, pedagogical, and epistemological differences between the two approaches are huge.

In short, the "standards movement" had resulted not in improvements in teaching and learning but in a kind of mindless passing of information to ensure better test scores. What had originally aimed at better teaching had succeeded in almost eliminating good teaching altogether.

Why does this matter? And why is it important that no politician on any level that I know anything about is talking about the importance of public schooling during the campaign of 2012?

In a number of profound ways, public schools are public institutions: we all pay for public schools and --- all public budgets taken together --- we spend more on public schooling than on any other category; because the state requires that children be sent to school, and because in any given year, between 90% and 95% of all school-age children are in public schools, it is very close to a mandate that everyone goes to public school; and the policies and programs in place in public schools are defined by popularly elected legislators, at the state level and at the local level through school boards.

The point is that we are invested in public schooling whether we ever think about them or not. What do we want from them? And why? And how should that be achieved?

The answers to these questions are not obvious. As a profoundly public issue, it is inevitable that a pluralistic and diverse public will have differing, and sometimes opposed, views.

The problem --- at least I think it's a problem --- is that no one among our leaders and would-be leaders has anything to say about these questions or seems interested in addressing them now or in the near future.

Our children are --- in fact --- the future. And public schools have been seen as an essential foundation of a mass democracy since the early years of the 19th Century. As Thomas Jefferson famously said, "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."

Public discourse here in the early Fall of 2012 is dominated by talk of jobs, growth, entitlements, scandals, and accusations, while one of the truly important issues of our time goes ignored.

Sunday, September 23, 2012

"Look to yourself, Anthony"

Recently, I have been indulging a fairly severe case of weltschmerz. As is often the case, simply realizing what was going on was a big step toward getting out of it. In that odd way that things sometimes work, the diagnosis came from an unexpected source; not a spiritual director or a self-help guru but a physical therapist and her intern. I was complaining of fatigue, sluggishness, ennui, malaise --- a lot of who-cares-ness. My PT listened to this both sympathetically and empathetically and then called in the intern, who was passing by, briefly explained, then asked young Ashley what she thought was the problem. "The world," young Ashley said without hesitation.

It was so true, so clear, so wonderfully innocent that I almost laughed myself off the table. It was, indeed, as simple as that. Things are not right and the reminders of that are, if one is paying any attention, non-stop, in your face 24-7.

(By the way, the fact that "in your face 24-7" is now accepted as not only correct but as a fairly high level of discourse is itself a reminder that things are not right.)

What to do about it? The answer is, of course, obvious, although profoundly counter-intuitive: Stop paying attention to the world.

But for those of us who have grown up with a deep sense of responsibility to others, this feels not only practically impossible but morally reprehensible. One would have to choose consciously to avoid the political battles, the natural disasters, and all the silliness and heinousness that humans are prone to and that make such fascinating stories. This is so far from what we have been taught, so far from what we are used to, so far from what the engines of "the media" want us to do, that even imagining it is psychologically nearly impossible.

So let me help.

There is a story that the greatest of the Desert Fathers, St. Anthony of the Desert, told on himself and that I have always thought contained a profoundly important lesson for us all. Anthony had been looking around and had become ever more aware that the virtuous suffered and the vicious prospered. As the old hymn goes,

          Tempted and tried, we're oft made to wonder
          Why it should be thus, all the day long;
          While there are others living about us
          Never molested, though in the wrong.

Anthony was getting more and more angry and as he wandered and wondered he cried out to God something along the lines of "How can you let this happen?" One imagines that he ranted at some length, quite possibly becoming more and more self-righteously angry. Eventually, God spoke to Anthony saying "Look to yourself, Anthony. These things are not for you to know."

One doesn't have to be what we now refer to as a "control freak" to imagine one's response to that as some version of "But....but.....but....." We have been taught --- one might say conditioned --- to pay attention to everything, to have an opinion about everything, to do not only the right thing but the best thing. Ignorance may be bliss but should still be avoided at all costs.

But God's admonition to Anthony is not unique. Alcoholics Anonymous counsels its members not to concern oneself with anything outside one's own "hula hoop." Keeping it simple, as AA preaches, requires giving up control over the things one cannot control.

But this is a negative counsel; that is, it is advice about what not to do. What is the positive version? I believe that it is to pay attention to one's own being, whether that is through meditation or contemplative prayer or long walks or listening to Bach cantatas.

This has its own dangers, of course. Paying attention to oneself can slide into solipsism. But the dangers of being sucked into the world, into a maelstrom of imponderable and uncontrollable phenomena, is a sure path to world-weariness.