Category Archives: education

Will a Fish Ever Learn To See Water?

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David Foster Wallace was a noted novelist of the late 20th,  early 21st  century who delivered a commencement address at Kenyon College in 2005 entitled, “This is Water.”  The title was a reference to the famous quip, “To ask someone to see reality is like asking a fish to see water.”  Wallace used this address to explore the way in which education is usually designed only to reinforce the prevailing reality, i.e. “world order,” and not so much about teaching a young person to think. Wallace encouraged his audience to consider the value of “thinking about one’s thinking” and that failure to do so would be risking spending one’s life as a cog in the machine-like grid-work of a pre-existing socio-cultural matrix.

Wallace knew that meta-cognition was a necessary dimension of human consciousness without which one would be subject to manipulation by the whims and fancies of everyday human discourse, in modern times certainly including the media.  Without maturity in thought one is inclined to be readily influenced by manipulation, susceptible to a demagogue who knows that many people will believe anything if they hear it frequently enough. The demagogue does not to need intrinsic value to what he is purveying in his speeches, he only needs to have some lesser-value…maybe only a self-serving one…as he realizes it will find currency in many minds if they hear it repeatedly and with great fervor.

To state an obvious truth, thinking is a good thing.  To be “human” we must be capable of at least a rudimentary capacity to think and therefore engage in the world.  Without critical thinking to some minimal degree, we will be in the position that Emily Dickinson described as, “a mind to near itself to see distinctly.”  In that event, we will not be actually thinking but will be passively “thought” by a prevailing vein of thought we have found comfortable, living out the prediction of W. H. Auden, “We are lived by powers we pretend to understand.”

Here is an excerpt from the Wallace address:

Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute centre of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centredness because it’s so socially repulsive. But it’s pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute centre of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people’s thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.

Rambling Thoughts Re Blogging, Mortality, & Even Baseball!

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I have not been blogging much lately and I’m sure it is because of a lingering “writer’s block” that I’ve suffered for three decades plus, a malady that prevented me from ever finishing my history thesis back in the 80’s.  But, also, I know that I often “shut down” when under great stress such as now, with a pending move to another state when I’m too old to do something so foolish!  But it is interesting that my “shut down” comes in the form of stopping blogging when I know, that clinically speaking, a “shut down” often comes in a more dramatic form of “vegetative depression” in which one can’t even get out of the bed in the morning.  This form of depression is merely a visceral statement to God that, “Hey!  This is too much.  I quit.”  It is also true that there are times when the “shut down” takes a more drastic, fatal step and a person will tell God, “Hey, I want outa here!  Beam me on up.  There is nothing here for me.”  Or as Hamlet put it when beset by his tragic melancholy, “O God! God!  How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable, seem to me all the uses of this world. Things rank and gross in nature possess it merely.”  To paraphrase an earlier thought of his, he was saying “Why put up with all of this when I could ‘my quietus make with a bare bodkin’”?

Now, I’m amazed that I’ve never been THAT shut down!  Sure, I go on strike against life…and its responsibilities…from time to time, but I appear to be blessed with Hope, that deep-seated knowledge that “this too shall pass.”  And, very relevant to that is the knowledge that I, too, “shall pass” and that puts everything in perspective.  And, rather than let that knowledge of my finitude overwhelm and crush me, I seem to have the Grace to get off my backside…most of the time…and continue to “chop wood, carry water.”  And I take comfort that some of my “chopping wood, carrying water” will make the world a little better for those that I leave behind.  But I must confess that my “chopping wood, carrying water” is not “up to snuff” as much as I’d like it to be.  But I’m making progress at times!

And I think as a culture, and even as a species, we need this grasp of our finitude, this understanding that collectively “I, too, shall pass” and that it is important to leave our world a better place for our children, especially for those most recent “crops” that have come along.  On this note, I’m made to think of the Atlanta Braves baseball team’s recent decision to raze its 17 year old stadium to build a new “modern” stadium with more of the “bells and whistles” of those built in recent years. Turner Field, its present stadium, cost 209 million dollars in 1997 to build and in 2017 it will be razed as a new 672 million dollar facility that will be constructed.  Wouldn’t it be lovely if we lived in a world where the city fathers who are making this decision would suddenly have a change of heart and say, “Hey, we can continue to ‘slum along’ in this present stadium and instead invest this 672 million into education for our children?”   Why not?  Turner Field is still beautiful, a true work of art.  I know.  I’ve been there!  But this decision is illustrative of values decisions which are made routinely made in our culture and in our world.   We spend our money on things that have no lasting value whereas money invested in our citizenry…especially our children…would be to invest in something of lasting value.

And, this issue always make me think of my favorite Shakespearean sonnet where he lamented our tendency to emphasize the trivial and let the essential go unattended:

Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth,
Thralled to these rebel powers that thee array
Why dost thou pine within and suffer dearth,
Painting thy outward walls so costly gay?
Why so large cost, having so short a lease,
Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend?
Shall worms, inheritors of this excess,
Eat up thy charge? Is this thy body’s end?
Then soul, live thou upon thy servant’s loss,
And let that pine to aggravate thy store;
Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross;
Within be fed, without be rich no more:
So shall thou feed on Death, that feeds on men,
And Death once dead, there’s no more dying then.

Steven Pinker and Human Opportunity in Science

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Steven Pinker is a psychologist and linguist who I feel is one of the best thinkers present in American culture today. In a recent edition of The New Republic, he argues that science has given us an opportunity to totally change the world for the better and that in spite of how it often appears, great strides are being taken toward that end.

But, in this article (http://www.newrepublic.com/article/114127/science-not-enemy-humanities), he commits the sin of irreligion, that being the sin of approaching reality with a perspective other than that of “literarylew.”! He argues that science is creating opportunities for us, opportunities that are often gravely hampered by childish, self-serving obscurantism often voiced most vehemently by the religious. He argues that this “dishonesty” is often present even in science itself when scientists are unwilling to be self-critical about their own pet theories. Here is one paragraph in which he makes this point:

The second ideal is that the acquisition of knowledge is hard. The world does not go out of its way to reveal its workings, and even if it did, our minds are prone to illusions, fallacies, and super- stitions. Most of the traditional causes of belief—faith, revelation, dogma, authority, charisma, conventional wisdom, the invigorating glow of subjective certainty—are generators of error and should be dismissed as sources of knowledge. To understand the world, we must cultivate work-arounds for our cognitive limitations, including skepticism, open debate, formal precision, and empirical tests, often requiring feats of ingenuity. Any movement that calls itself “scientific” but fails to nurture opportunities for the falsification of its own beliefs (most obviously when it murders or imprisons the people who disagree with it) is not a scientific movement.

The acquisition of knowledge is “hard.” I would attribute this to the phenomena of resistance, that tendency to not want to see things other than we see them already. And he clearly sees the relevance of this to science, the tendency for scientists to succumb to “subjective certainty” and fail to look critically at their own perspective.

And though he does not spell this out as pointedly as he could, the same could be said of religion and faith. Yes, spirituality also usually falls victim to this human need for “subjective certainty” and we end up believing only what we want to believe, not daring to consider what is obvious to everyone else—our faith is only a form of self-indulgence. And when faith devolves into that narcissistic morass, it fails to offer a redemptive influence in the culture. One writer, George Marsden, described this as the “cultural captivity” of religion. And, if one reads the gospels critically, one can see that Jesus saw this clearly about the religion of the day, calling them “hypocrites” which actually means “actors.” Those whose faith is wholly in the grip of contemporary culture can only be “actors”, having a “form of godliness but denying the power thereof.” Thus I close again with the pithy observation of Shakespeare on this note, “When love (or religion) begins to sicken and decay/It useth an enforced ceremony/There are no tricks in plain and simple faith/But hollow men, like horses hot at hand/Make gallant show and promise of their mettle.”

“Herding Cats” in the First Grade!

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In recent weeks I have made several references to my work as a substitute teacher with early elementary children. I deem this the most important work I have ever done in my life as it is helping shape young children in their early formative years when they are only beginning to make “sense” out of life. Several days ago I referred to “neurological plasticity” which describes their vulnerability in neuro-physiological terms, referring to the fact that what they are learning is very malleable at this point in their life though parts of it will soon be “set in stone. One specific part that will be “set in stone” is their basic self-percept, their basic approach to the world, the basic notion of their standing in the world and their sense of efficacy. This is the reason that early childhood education is so important and why good parenting is essential. Two verses from the Old Testament had this in mind, Psalms 127 telling us, “….”As arrows are in the hand of a mighty man; so are children of the youth,” and Proverbs 22 noting, “Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.” (Unfortunately, I fear these two verses are often used to justify some training that could only be described as abusive!)

By the time these children get into school, the subjective cauldron that is their identity has been largely stabilized so that they can “learn from experience” and can function, more or less, in a structured environment. Now this “cauldron” is still bubbling and one of the basic tasks of education at this level, as well as introducing the building blocks of a formal education, is teaching them to live in accordance with a social structure. And, it is fascinating to watch these lovely children as they seek to win affirmation by curtailing those teeming impulses though so often failing to do so and facing a firm but kindly “re-direction” by a teacher…or even substitute teacher. Some of them are still so “teeming” with emotion that the “re-direction” is very painful and they are sometimes crushed.

I often describe my work in the classroom as “herding cats.” These dear little children are just so full of intense emotion, desperate needs, insecurities, emotional hunger, and impulses that it is often almost impossible for them to remember the rules of the classroom. I so remember being part of a classroom like that in my youth and so often the “re-direction” was harsh and punitive, sometimes overtly shaming. I’m pleased now to work with teachers who are much more respective of the fragile world of their charges and will often merely present the miscreant with, “Johnny (or Susie), you are not making a good choice now.” And that intervention is very effective as the child wants to merit the description “good.”

Now let me get “anthropological on your ass.” Children coming into school are raw product who are beginning the process of being “milled” into a finished product who can take their place in the social body in a couple of decades. One could call it “brain washing” but that is not as bad as it sounds. The “brain washing” I observe now is merely the presenting of values and ideas of our culture and they are not presented in a manipulative or tyrannical manner. Education always involves “brain-washing” in some sense but in the modern schools in which I now work, even in conservative Arkansas, emphasizes critical thinking which will allow these children to make mature choices in their future about what values they wish to subscribe to. Some parents opt to avoid the “brain washing” of public schools and home-school their children, failing to realize that “brain washing” will take place nevertheless but the “brain” that will be doing the washing will be very narrow and often “private.” Though some parents who home-school do a very effective job, including addressing social needs, I fear many do not and their precious children are “brain-washed” into a very narrow, maladaptive worldview.

I’d like to close with a poem by Theodore Roethke which reminds me of a more conservative approach to education which prevailed during my youth, when regimentation of the “raw product” was more the goal of the educational system.

DOLOR
I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils,
Neat in their boxes, dolor of pad and paper weight,
All the misery of manila folders and mucilage,
Desolation in immaculate public places,
Lonely reception room, lavatory, switchboard,
The unalterable pathos of basin and pitcher,
Ritual of multigraph, paper-clip, comma,
Endless duplicaton of lives and objects.
And I have seen dust from the walls of institutions,
Finer than flour, alive, more dangerous than silica,
Sift, almost invisible, through long afternoons of tedium,
Dropping a fine film on nails and delicate eyebrows,
Glazing the pale hair, the duplicate grey standard faces.