The Propaedeuticist

2012-01-21T14:03:00.000-08:00

In a recent article at Inside Higher Ed ("A Wall of Civility"), Mitch Smith identifies a sign of hope in the Sunshine State: the University of Florida is hosting a Knight Foundation-sponsored interactive display designed to encourage civil discourse on the issues of our day. The university’s Bob Graham Center for Public Service is addressing hot-button controversies, while enabling an ethos where cooler heads prevail.

Here’s how it works: Someone at the Gainesville campus' Pugh Hall goes up to one of the screens and replies either to another commenter’s post or the Wall’s current topic. A wall-mounted camera then takes a picture and posts the comment along with the person’s first name. Commenters can also log in through Facebook, and Henderson hopes to have a mobile app functioning in the next month. In time, she wants to connect all of Florida’s public universities with the Wall.

The goal is for young people to become more civically active while eschewing a tendency toward partisan nastiness.

That seems a worthy goal. So, keep tabs on www.civildebatewall.com, and let’s hope for a renewal of civility in the next generation.

What Johnny's Teacher Knows...

2012-01-17T18:22:00.000-08:00

As we continue to identify areas of our educational system that erode standards and devalue higher education, Larry Sand fingers one more culprit: colleges of education. In a recent essay posted at the Pope Center, Sand recounts his personal experiences in a graduate education program at Cal State in the 1980s, a program indicative of the ubiquitous Progressive approach to education central to training teachers for decades. As Sand recalls:

Rather than focusing on the best techniques for teaching students the skills and concepts they need, professors drummed into us that we should not “drill and kill,” nor be the “sage on the stage,” but instead be the “guide on the side” who “facilitates student discovery.” The children’s feelings were to be engaged first and foremost. Legions of students who have had teachers who were trained in these progressive techniques can barely add or read, but they probably have extremely high self-esteem.

From whole language instruction (a.k.a. “balanced literacy”), multiculturalism, “Culturally Responsive Education,” even “anti-racist math,” the panoply of progressive techniques is stranger than fiction. What’s more, those ideologically-oriented techniques usually replace content courses by more than 2:1—in some cases, as much as 16:1!

Nevertheless, Sand identifies a significant sign of hope coming out of Arizona State University and the Teacher Advancement Program, run by the National Institute for Excellence in Teaching. As Sand explains, “[r]ather than using the standard ‘touchy-feely’ methods, the program employs objective measures to evaluate teachers.” Sounds a lot like the developments in Teach For America (see Teaching as Leadership) and the most successful charter schools.

An Inside Job

2011-12-20T13:41:00.001-08:00

Responding to an Associated Press article on the decline of the humanities “amid tight budgets,” former deputy chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Thomas K. Lindsay identifies "The Humanities' Real Enemies" (National Review Online, December 16) from within the family.

Lindsay recounts the historical trajectory of the American university in the second half of the 20th century, offering his Ph.D. in the humanities in support of his claim that the corruption of the humane arts has been an inside job: “The humanities are indeed in mortal peril, if not dead already. But neither our governors nor our state legislators are the assassins. Our humanities professors are.”

Following the remarks of “FDR brain-truster” Adolph Berle, Lindsay believes that universities have failed to teach “how we’re supposed to live,” squandering the essential humanities core of a university education. Berle was concerned a half-century ago, and Lindsay—citing Academically Adrift and related NAS research—concludes that today the general public is growing restless, if not resentful. Effectively, Lindsay argues that the humanities have been denounced by their own scorn, undone by their own devices.

[After the professors’] decades-long assault on the humanities, our universities are surprised to find that students and state governments have finally learned their lesson of contempt, and are responding in perfectly logical fashion by declaring, “No need to spend much time and money studying this stuff.” My only surprise is that it didn’t happen sooner.

For the Common Good

2011-12-17T11:55:00.000-08:00

In an essay entitled "Civic Education and Western Civilization," the Honorable William H. Young explores the evolution of civic education from the founding of the American Republic to our current crop of progressive educators, who seek to construct, in the words of their progressive forefather, John Dewey, “a new social order…which would eventually bring into being a democratic socialist society.”

Young identifies the university’s turn from the traditional ideal of civic virtue, sometime after the Second World War (roughly following the chronology found in Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind). In the place of civic virtue, social justice and identity politics have come to serve as standards of righteousness, in the quest to eliminate systemic oppression. In the service of multiculturalism, Young claims that the universities have revised their reading of American history such that “[o]ur children are no longer taught the principles of the Constitution such as: popular sovereignty through representatives and institutions; control of factions and interests through deliberative processes; and actions based on reason, the common good, and majority rule. Most of our younger citizens no longer understand the civic virtue on which our nation was founded.”

In particular, Young considers a recent initiative with the U.S. Department of Education and the Association of American Colleges and Universities aimed at developing “a national action plan to increase the visibility and impact of higher education’s efforts to advance students’ civic learning and democratic engagement.” The rhetoric of the project promises that higher education should produce “responsible and responsive” citizens critical of “societal ills,” thus prepared for “democratic engagement…to fully repair the broken societal compacts that are weakening the contemporary social fabric.”

Young is not impressed by their rhetorical flourish and sees beneath the metaphoric veneer to an anti-republican vision of democracy:

In Part III, of his essay, “Domestic Faction in a Republic,” George Seaver explains that postmodern multiculturalism “found that civic virtue imposed unacceptable hierarchies, privilege and oppression in society.” Virtue became a construct of the individual or cultural group, “with no significance of one over the other. Hierarchy was abhorrent, and any attempt to impose one led to ‘privileging’ and oppressing the ‘Other’ in society.” The antidote for such privileging was “social justice,” for the group, not the individual.

As Young concludes, we must understand the intrinsic link between civic virtue and the strength of our nation. Thus, Young exhorts NAS to “continue to seek the return of our colleges and universities to teaching the civic virtue that formed the founding basis for our nation. We can only hope that we are not, as Dr. Seaver observed, ‘like Cicero, past our time.’”

Hope for the Intellectually Hungry

2011-11-10T16:18:00.000-08:00

In light of indefensible viewpoint discrimination, grade inflation, declining SAT scores, and the general malaise that besets the intellectual talent at today’s university, we should take comfort in knowing that there are always a few bright young people able and willing to pursue the life of the mind, in spite of the multitude of contemporary obstacles.

In a piece from the Hoover Institution’s Education Next entitled "High Schoolers in College," June Kronholz profiles one such bright student, Michael Jokl, who is dual-enrolled in at Indiana-Purdue University. Jokl began his semi-college career at 14 years of age, as an 8th-grade home schooler and has since earned 43 college credits, maintaining a 3.9 grade-point average at Purdue. However, Jokl is paying his own way, as he is ineligible for student loans, grants, and scholarships without a high school diploma.

Kronholz goes on to profile today’s recognition of the Talented Tenth, who seem to be “stuck in an academic rut.” That is, in spite of consistent evidence for the existence of a talented cohort, “federal and state policies [tend to] pressure schools to concentrate their resources on getting children to minimal math and reading competencies... mean[ing] high school is often a fairly dismal place for faster learners.”

But, Purdue U. is doing something innovative to fix the rut and direct the high achievers toward greater academic achievement. The university’s Special Programs for Academic Nurturing (SPAN) enrolls 300 students a year, mostly high school seniors, but a variety from the lower grades, including a 9-year old taking second-year physics. As Kronholz reports, these prodigies are found across the schooling spectrum, though with some interesting demographic trends: “Most are boys…Half are home schoolers; the other half come from 61 area private and public schools, mostly in the suburbs.”

Surely the most challenging problem for such programs is financing these opportunities for talented students.

The stickiest issue is who pays for the classes. A few states split their per-pupil funding between the high school and college. A Michigan college that enrolls a high schooler for two courses, for example, gets $2,279 of the youngster’s $6,875 foundation allowance; the high school keeps the rest, Michigan advises schools, using an online calculator to do the math. Other states lay the cost on the school district, college, or state board of education. In 22 states, it’s up to kids or their parents to pay for college courses.

If providing opportunities for each student to reach his or her potential is a worthy ambition, Kronholz asks the obvious question: “It’s our goal for low achievers, after all. Why not high achievers, too?”

An Incredibly Old-School Curriculum

2011-10-27T16:08:00.000-07:00

In the wonderfully un-PC script of Pixar’s animated film, The Incredibles, we find rich satirical resources for the present day. To begin, the super-heroes have gone underground, due to heavy cost incurred by the government, from various settlements for the collateral damages of heroic acts. (After all, stopping a speeding train to save the train from plummeting off the tracks can cause whiplash to those aboard the train.) Nevertheless, at the end of the film, the traditional super-heroes have been called out of retirement to save the world once again. At which point, a couple of old men offer the classic refrain: “That’s old school. There’s no school like the old school.”

Though it may seem like an act of derring-do in our day, the old-school curriculum still has its admirers. Most are familiar with the work of Robert Hutchins and Mortimer Adler, and the various Great Books programs that were spawned from their 20th century efforts. Yet, St. Johns College notwithstanding, such traditional curricula often have a strained reputation in an age of consumerism, where electives and choice are the watchwords of higher education.

Nevertheless, there are those who have chosen to counter the trend, reaching back into our educational history for the resources to prepare future generations for civic leadership. One such school is Belmont Abbey College in North Carolina. Belmont’s marketing director, Ed Jones, has an essay in this week’s Pope Center commentaries, outlining the strengths of Belmon’ts more traditional curriculum. The College’s core requirements include a robust offering that constitutes nearly half of the undergraduate degree.

First-Year Symposium
Rhetoric I & II
Introduction to Scripture
Introduction to Theology
Classic Texts in Political Philosophy I & II
Western Civilization I & II
Literary Classics of the Western Tradition I & II
The U. S. Constitution
Mathematics
Two science courses with labs
An introductory course in psychology, sociology, or economics
Fine Arts

Yet, the most remarkable aspect of this core is the classical rhetoric. As Jones explains, rhetoric is the “all-but-forgotten method of teaching writing.” Quoting the professor in charge of writing instruction:

Rhetoric formed the center of liberal education for two and a half millennia, and through the nineteenth century, it was regarded as one of the most important disciplines taught in college. With the advent of the twentieth century, however, the emphasis placed on rhetorical study diminished, and so, accordingly, did our ability to communicate well in both spoken and written discourse.

If Belmont portends any interest in a revitalization of the Great Tradition, perhaps there is hope for a heroic return of some old-fashioned rhetoric.

As Pixar reminds us, “There’s no school like the old school.”

Demanding Subtleties

2011-10-20T19:30:00.001-07:00

In this week’s Chronicle of Higher Education, staff writer Dan Barrett explores some of the intellectual influences that may be at work in the recent phenomena known as “Occupy Wall Street.” Barrett notes the various scholars who’ve addressed the crowd, including Cornel West (Princeton) and Frances Fox Piven (CUNY). Moreover, Barrett identifies other scholars who “have anticipated some of the central issues” in the movement’s critiques of capitalism and who have related U.S. domestic protests to other international incidents—e.g., Spain, Cairo, Athens.

But Occupy Wall Street's most defining characteristics—its decentralized nature and its intensive process of participatory, consensus-based decision-making—are rooted in other precincts of academe and activism: in the scholarship of anarchism and, specifically, in an ethnography of central Madagascar.

Drawing parallels from the “direct action” he observed in the Betafo community of Madagascar—e.g., when a group of villagers dig a well on their own initiative, rather than appeal for government assistance—anthropologist David Graeber (University of London) claims that this year’s protests represent the latest impulse to produce "democracy without a government." From an anarchist’s perspective this seems to be a healthy development in community formation.

Unfortunately, the Occupiers don’t seem all that eager to dig wells or build any sort of lasting infrastructure. But, they are angry.

Among the students present, the anger over mounting student-loan debt and bleak job prospects loom large. But, the protesters have saved their greatest outrage for that simple vice of greed. When Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz’s article in Vanity Fair “framed income inequality as a matter of a wealthy 1 percent versus the remaining 99 percent,” the movement discovered a trope to champion. To be among the 99 percent was the unimpressive but essential criteria for membership in the Occupation. And Occupiers are “fighting back against the corrosive power of major banks and multinational corporations over the democratic process, and the role of Wall Street in creating an economic collapse that has caused the greatest recession in generations.”

In fact, as some have observed, the celebrity appeal of this movement seems far more clear than its self-definition, for greed is notoriously difficult to locate, let alone remove from the human species. Moreover, scholars of anarchism have yet to produce a compelling, coherent explanation of the phenomena’s purpose, let alone its potential for genuine social change.

Ironically, Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs may have come closer to the truth than any of the other ‘scholars in residence.’ As a supporter of the movement and leading proponent of sustainability, Sachs claimed that “[e]ither our government is going to become completely shrunken and dysfunctional, or we're going to start paying for civilization again."

Stretching Sachs’s term, Western civilization would seem a fine place to start—beginning with the revitalization of citizens who understand their rights and duties, under the law and in pursuit of the Common Good. Yet, fighting greed does not build a civilization. On the contrary, combating greed constitutes a moral crusade, susceptible to the domination of moralists and pedants. As the great Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gassett reminds us, promoting the virtues of a just society and a thriving civilization will require “incalculably subtle powers.”

The Occupiers may be many things, but subtle they are not.

The Best of Bowdoin

2011-10-13T20:16:00.000-07:00

Two weeks ago, NAS President Peter Wood announced that his organization would undertake a research project to evaluate “the curriculum, student activities, and campus values of Bowdoin College,” with an eye on establishing what a contemporary liberal arts education looks like. The research project follows a simple question, "What Does Bowdoin Teach?"

NAS chose the liberal arts college of Bowdoin both for its outstanding reputation (ranked #6 by U.S. News & World Report) and the public exchange between Bowdoin President Barry Mills and Thomas Klingenstein. On a golf outing last year, Mills and Klingenstein apparently entered into a conversation that prompted Mills to “take seriously the conservative perspective,” as it related to the ethos at Bowdoin. Mills mentioned the thought-provoking exchange in his fall 2010 convocation address, suggesting that the Bowdoin community must be prepared to acknowledge a genuine “diversity of views.” In that speech, Mills went so far as to say that “creative tension is a positive force in a community committed to intellectual excellence and vitality. There should never be a time when we have a political litmus test for faculty or even inquire about political persuasion. In my view, this is simply not relevant to the intellectual enterprise of the College.”

Yet, Klingenstein was unsatisfied with Mills’s response and offered his own version of the story (“A Golf Story,” Claremont Review of Books, April 2011), along with some observations on Bowdoin’s history curriculum and faculty—and a sharp jab at Mills’s inability to address the root of the problem. In Klingenstien’s words:

Mr. Mills does not have the answers to the problem of liberal bias at Bowdoin because he's not really convinced there is a problem. When he summarily dismissed me, the Tea Party movement, and Larry Summers, or reflexively embraced Nussbaum, or grossly understated the number of liberal faculty at Bowdoin, he demonstrated an unwillingness to take seriously the conservative perspective. This, I propose, is why he was unable to see any way to address the problem that he posed.

The obvious disparity between the two men’s perceptions of their conversation on the links reveals a “diversity of views” (from a just-so anecdote) that bears witness to the ongoing challenge of political correctness, thus making Bowdoin an ideal candidate for NAS’s first-hand look at a contemporary liberal arts college in action.

Bowdoin College presents itself as an unusually good opportunity for the kind of inquiry we propose. The concern has been raised by its president in a college-wide forum that “diversity of views”—especially” conservative “views—is inadequately represented on campus. The Bowdoin community has responded to this challenge with interest. An outside critic has emerged whose assessments have sharpened the debate. Though there remain many in the Bowdoin community who appear untroubled by the quarrel, a substantial number seem willing to admit that the situation could be improved by fair-minded inquiry.

A subsequent article by KC Johnson at Minding the Campus (“Bowdoin’s History”) deepens Klingenstein’s brief analysis of the history faculty, providing the following observation:

Normally small and mid-size departments—at least in theory—look for scholars with a broad range of interests. In its U.S. history contingent, Bowdoin has taken the opposite approach; outside of the 19th century, the department’s preference has been for narrowness—ensuring that students won’t encounter any specialists in U.S. economic or business history, U.S. constitutional history, U.S. intellectual history, U.S. diplomatic history, and U.S. military history or U.S. political history outside of the 1830-1865 period.

Now we watch and wait, to see what comes of the NAS research project.

Online vs. On-Campus

2011-10-06T19:38:00.000-07:00

In today's Inside Higher Ed, two former governors, Jeb Bush and Jim Hunt, are strongly recommending that distance education become the means to systemic reform in higher education: “today—right now—college and universities must embrace new digital and online delivery tools to make educational content available to degree-seeking students wherever they are, whenever they need it.”

Bush's and Hunt's "New Higher Education Model" is premised on their personal experiences with state politics and higher education--both served multiple terms and attempted large-scale reforms of education in Florida and North Carolina, respectively.

Their arguments are supported by substantial evidence. First, they offer a report from the U.S. Department of Education entitled “Review of Online Learning Studies,” which found that students participating in online courses were, on average, performing better than traditional students who received face-to-face instructions. Then, they cite a 2010 study by Shacher and Neumann, which found that 70 percent of distance learning students outperformed their traditional counterparts.

In addition, the authors offered the University of Texas system as an example of “high-quality instruction” delivered through well-designed technologies that are produced by public/private partnerships. Bush and Hunt believe that “public universities must adopt a new business model that will allow them to return to sound financial footing while addressing the variety of other challenges they now face. Online education may not remedy all that ails the system, but we are convinced that a good dose of it would go a long way.”

A related but cautionary article entitled “Online Higher Education’s Individualist Fallacy,” was written by historian Johann N. Neem, who believes the online case is persuasive to a point. But, “[a] close reading of [the] arguments…makes clear that [they] share what might be called the ‘individualist fallacy,’ both in their understanding of how students learn and how professors teach.” While recognizing the American tradition of autodidacts like Ben Franklin, Neem believes that the college campus serves as more than just a meeting place--or, as economist Richard Vedder claims, a mere social venue for “making friends, partying, drinking, and having sex.”

Neem argues that the “institutional culture” of the campus is much more: fundamentally, it involves “developing an attitude toward knowledge.” Furthermore, Neem considers the college environment to be an essentially social experience akin to religion: “Conversion is social, and so is learning.”

If you accept Neem’s premises, his arguments make sense. And, given the extreme forms of personal autonomy that often dominate our civic discourse, perhaps the college campus—for all of its anomalous and deviant behaviors—may be one of the last public spaces where citizens have the opportunity to experience the value and benefit of genuine learning, becoming citizen-scholars, so to speak. Citing Arum and Roska’s Academically Adrift, Neem concurs that “students learn more on campuses where learning is valued and expectations are high. If anything, we need to pay more attention to institutional culture because it matters so much.”

Neem is no Luddite, and he recognizes the benefits of technologies in delivering certain instructional components. But, he argues, “technology is a tool, not an end in itself.” And, while the internet and first-rate delivery systems should be used to the full, the “star professors” and “great courses” delivered over the next wave of technology are often found on a campus of scholars. “In short, there would be no star professors absent an academy of scholars committed to research… Even as we expand online, therefore, we must deepen our commitment to those institutions that cultivate a love of learning in their students, focus on the liberal arts, and produce the knowledge that online and offline teaching requires.”

Historical Perspective

2011-09-29T15:23:00.000-07:00

In the wake of a recent volume of historical essays entitled Deep History: the Architecture of Past and Present (University of California, 2011), Peter Wood reflects on a surprising trend in historical scholarship, as it relates to today’s history curriculum: the study of “deep history” is moving beyond the “five-minutes-ago history” of popular culture and political hot-button topics into a vast world of archaeological data and historical inferences.
However, Wood observes a distinct challenge with this renewed interest in ancient scholarship: such research of distant times leaves today’s undergraduates befuddled about the nature and significance of history in their own intellectual development. Citing studies from NAS (The Vanishing West, 1964-2010, 2011) and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (Failing Our Students, Failing America, 2007), Wood worries that most undergraduates will leave higher education unfamiliar with “anything in the way of integrat[ed] historical knowledge over the wider arcs—human development, civilizations, or the American experiment.”

To study the ancient ruins of Crete can be a worthwhile exercise in developing the historical imagination, but one that makes all the more sense when a student realizes that Minoan ghosts haunt the ancient West like a specter of civilization before civilization. Without taking account of Homer, Ovid, and Pliny, the ruins of King Minos’s realm are little more than a darkened cryptogram. However, to the broadly educated person, deciphering such history promotes a more humane perspective, from which to compare each generation’s cultural innovations with the glory of Daedalus or the hubris of Icarus.

The Truth Told Slant

2011-09-22T19:23:00.000-07:00

For those who follow the Summer Reading Programs that populate American higher education, an essay provocatively entitled "Tolstoy in the Slaughterhouse" offers some intriguing thoughts. The author, Brendan Boyle, is an assistant professor of the classics at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. At UNC, Boyle has been a longstanding advocate for selecting Tolstoy (and, conceivably, great novels, in general) for UNC’s summer reading selection—but, to no avail.

The overwhelming selection of non-fiction for these summer readings gives Boyle pause, as he considers the value of having an incoming class encounter the work of a great novelist. Boyle notices a national trend, similar to some of the findings published by the National Association of Scholars (NAS): many of these books address politically-correct topics that are far too narrow. Boyle believes that such myopic selections are evidence of “something defective…precisely because it ignores the way an education must be about the disinterested pursuit of the permanently untimely. And that is what these books, and these first-year reading programs, miss so egregiously. College becomes a kind of intensified continuation of blog- or opinion-page reading. Worse, it becomes training for a life in thrall to the market.”

Up to that point in the essay (half-way through his musings), Boyle seems to side with the Great Tradition—though he is quick to criticize the traditional emphasis of NAS for having “no interest, so far as I can tell, in fiction as such.” (And, with that, we can assume he’s not a regular reader of NAS publications.)

But, then he agrees to lead a UNC reading group, in spite of his scruples, just to try out some of the politically-charged non-fiction. Apparently this experience worked its magic on Boyle, for the second half of his essay praises Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals and suggests that Foer deserves a seat at the table of great writers. Except that Foer’s work “seems not to have made much of an impact on the students”—at least not as much “impact” as it did on Boyle, who was prepared to give up his carnivorous ways.

This prompts Boyle to ask what went wrong. Why were student not transformed by compelling arguments that Boyle felt were worthy of serious consideration? His conclusion: “students simply aren’t very good readers.”

Finally, Boyle returns to his original claim that Tolstoy--that “famous Russian vegetarian”--might have been a better book selection than Jonathan Foer’s screed against meat-eaters. In fact, Boyle thinks Tolstoy would have given his students a chance to truly read for themselves.

Unfortunately, Russian vegetarians are not in season, this year...

In Season and Out

2011-09-15T15:14:00.000-07:00

As depicted in Robert Bolt’s classic “A Man For All Seasons,” we are reminded that oratory, prudence, and diligence are all required by one who aspires to be a statesman like Sir Thomas More. In a brief essay "On the Square" (First Things) by Andrew Haines, we are also reminded that More was a staunch defender of free speech. Twelve years before his execution, More courageously requested that Henry VIII offer clemency for opinions that might offend the monarch. As Speaker of the House of Commons, More urged the king: “give to all your Commons here assembled your most gracious licence and pardon, freely, without doubt of your dreadful displeasure, every man to discharge his conscience, and boldly in everything incident among us to declare his advice.”

As Haines explains, for those who admire More’s courage, it is most fitting to remember that the Man For All Seasons was deeply committed to the free expression of individual conscience.

Conscientious objection is nothing without a firm grounding in free and truthful speech. In his petition before Parliament, More understood his duty as the “Common Mouth” to be one not of lip service, but of fair estimation, judgment, and public assessment. In short, he realized his indispensible role in the well-being of the realm as one founded upon honesty and fortitude—and not, contrarily, upon relativism or passivity. Moreover, the values to which he held were evident not only in his silence—an easily romanticized feature of his character—but even to some greater degree in his voiced and public sentiments. After all, lest we forget, More’s trip to the executioner’s block was no mournful dirge, but a march peppered with accounts of his mundane pronouncements, wit, and wisdom.

And, upon entering the academic year, that’s a good word for this present season.

Know What You Believe

2011-09-09T10:46:00.000-07:00

At a time when the results of science education in America cannot make the International Top 10 (see Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study 2007), some have noticed that certain scientific topics are hermetically-sealed specimens. According to Russell Nieli's article, "Global Warming: the Campus Non-Debate," such is the state of climate science when it comes to global warming. As Nieli points out, the reigning paradigm greeting many college students does not encourage the lively, ongoing debate that lies at the heart of genuine science--and the liberal arts that should rightfully subsume the scientific project (i.e., science is but one of the humanizing disciplines in the Tradition).

Unfortunately, lively debate is not often entertained in certain precincts, according to Nieli.

[Climate science questions] are rarely asked today on college campuses due to what can only be described as the stifling dominance of a smug orthodoxy that is so cocksure of itself -- and of the general ignorance and malevolence of its critics -- that genuine debate and interchange between divergent viewpoints rarely takes place. So dominant is this orthodoxy that many college students today have never heard the case made by a responsible scientist against what we might call the dominant Gore-Hansen Model of anthropogenic global warming.

Nieli amasses the evidence for a legitimate challenge to this “smug orthodoxy,” in hopes of correcting the political correctness that has metastasized to the natural sciences. And, inasmuch as scientists of goodwill are interested in keeping the scientific spirit alive, Nieli hopes for a revitalized debate that would restore the rational discourse of science.

Grading on the (Japanese) Curve

2011-09-02T12:37:00.000-07:00

The trend among schools of education is not impressive: declining grading standards have been the norm for a half century! George Leef revisits this discouraging phenomenon in his recent essay posted at The Pope Center (popecenter.org). The title is certainly provocative: "Yes, Mostly 'A's, but That's Not the Worst of It." And, the evidence is compelling.
Leef starts with a recent paper by the economist Cory Koedel, who offers quantitative measures of the dramatic grade inflation that permeats education schools. Kodel then makes the utopian suggestion that “administrators should step in and impose stringent grading standards on education departments.” Though Leef would probably impose the same standards, were he the nation’s education emperor for a day, he also acknowledges that it wouldn’t make much difference: “That is because much of what is taught in the ed schools is intellectual mush based on nothing more than feelings and tendentious theories.” Leef then explains the immense popularity of such theorists like Paolo Freire in educational circles—where social activism has replaced the substance and rigor of the traditional curriculum.

As Leef concludes, if we wish to recover the scope and sequence of the liberal arts, we must look across the Pacific to Japan, where teachers are required to master the content of a specific academic field before participating in an essential apprenticeship within the teaching guild.

Even as our Pacific allies taught us something about the auto industry, perhaps they can help us retool our schools.

NAS President's Three-peat

2011-08-25T13:54:00.000-07:00

This past week, the president of NAS, Peter Wood, took the first steps to establishing a legacy on the “Innovations” page of The Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE): Wood posted three articles within one week, potentially placing him among the most widely read, non-staff authors at CHE. At the very least, Wood can claim the title of a CHE major leaguer whose three-peat (three-Pete?) was accomplished with the aid of an ideational troika that included diversity, sex, and ‘discalculia’—topics that definitely have some sex appeal in today’s university.

Wood’s first posting, “Do College Administrator’s Misappropriate ‘Diversity’?" (August 18), revisited themes which he had previously entertained in his 2004 book, Diversity: the Invention of a Concept. His CHE essay entails a review of a new book by a Johns Hopkins political science professor, Benjamin Ginsberg, The Fall of the Faculty: the Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters (Oxford, 2011). Ginsberg offers a critique of the administrative bloat in today’s university, much as you might find in the page of Academic Questions, but the political scientist prefers to depict the faculty as victims, rather than co-conspirators who have been undone by their own duplicity.

Ginsberg looks upon the professoriate as benign in outlook, put-upon by administrators who are often ignorant of and indifferent to the higher calling of the university, and far more sinned against than sinning. This is, in my view, a considerable simplification of reality in both directions.
[…]
Notably absent from the equation is any meaningful number of faculty members who could present a cogent critique of the administrators’ PC premises. Ginsberg brushes this possibility aside with the observation, “Faculty generally explain the academy’s ideological imbalance, especially at elite universities, as a natural consequence of the fact that liberals are smarter than conservatives.”

Yes, many do say things like that. It’s arrogant. It’s false. And there is a consequence: The mono-ideological faculty find themselves defenseless against administrators who appropriate the rhetoric of diversity, social justice, sustainability, etc. as a rationale for diverting the lion’s share of university resources to non-academic and sub-intellectual enterprises. If the university had a few more conservative voices, perhaps those administrators would at least have to defend their actions rather than wave the bloody shirt of racism or sexism every time some asks for a bit of accountability.

* * * * *
On Wednesday, Wood explored the inherent contradictions of recent Department of Education regulations concerning a new, much lower standard of evidence to be used in sexual harassment complaints: 50.01% of the evidence should support a winning complaint. As Wood explains in his essay [“Higher Sex Ed” (August 23)], FIRE, the AAUP, and NAS all spoke against this new measure of sufficient proof of such harassment. At the same time, the libertine attitude that pervades American campuses sends a very mixed message to would-be assailants. Without belaboring the evidence, surely it is stating the obvious to claim that “students entering college today arrive from a culture that is already drenched in cheap eroticism.” At the same time, “character education” occasionally gets referenced as a necessary element in the formation of young people. As Wood points out, there are, in fact, sound secular reasons to promote a genuine academic discourse concerning human sexuality and its effects on society—if the academy was earnest about real diversity of opinion.

[I]f we were really serious about helping our students attain good character, we would surely have to find some way to reintroduce into college life some serious interest in concepts like sexual modesty and self-restraint. To the extent that these ideas currently have any play, they are to be found in sectarian colleges and universities—which tends to make them even less attractive to secular institutions. But there are solid secular reasons for providing students with some ideas about how and why they might seek alternatives to the ethic of self-gratification as their main guide to sexuality. Rochelle Gurstein’s The Repeal of Reticence: America’s Cultural and Legal Struggles Over Free Speech, Obscenity, Sexual Liberation, and Modern Art (1999) is one place to start. Wendy Shalit’s A Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue (2000) is another.

Drawing counsel from the Bard of Avon, Wood believes moderation would be a more appropriate response to the current fetishes of the undergraduate curricula.

Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure is ultimately about moderation. We do not want to live in a society of either complete license or grim-minded enforcement of rules... [but] if we really want to foster better attitudes towards sexuality, we might begin by being a little less eager to mainstream The Jill Kelly Poems, or confer a share of a public university’s prestige on the Adam & Eve sex toy company, or offer lewd public performances as part of an academic class. Eros, who is after all a god, is profaned by such stuff.

* * * * *
Then, yesterday, Wood tackled the often nonsensical efforts of educators to teach the disciplines of science and math, without requiring knowledge of either subject. In his essay entitled “Unnumbered” (August 24), Wood explains how science and math “appreciation” are now deemed sufficient. Wood’s review covers a lot of ground, including: a July 19 report by the National Research Council, Framework for K-12 Science Education; a discussion of the recent Common Core standards; last month’s New York Times coverage of the disheartening results on New York state math exams, with reference to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (2009); the diagnosis of a novel “neurocognitive disorder” that hinders a student from learning mathematical concepts; and a number of other references. But, for all of these signs of the times, Wood offers a prophetically clear way forward—one of the most innovative, albeit fanciful, suggestions yet to be considered by the educational establishment.

Congress [could] pass and the President sign a bill declaring that in 2020, nine years from now, no student who scores less than “proficient” on the mathematics portion of the National Assessment of Education Progress will be eligible for a federal student grant or loan.

This would leave plenty of time for students who are now in school to work up to that standard. We might make provision for those who get test jitters—say, three chances to pass. Those who don’t meet the standard would, of course, be perfectly eligible to attend college, but without federal assistance.

My thought experiment comes with predictions:
1. The rate of math “proficiency” would zoom, well before 2020.
2. Educrats would do all in their power to dumb down the test and hollow out the meaning of “proficient.”
3. Schools would declare the standard onerous and destructive; and then miraculously make it work.
4. Colleges would find a large new source of students both capable of and eager to study the sciences.
5. The incidence of “dyscalculia” would drop precipitously
There could be other consequences that I suspect might happen but that I’d predict with less confidence:
6. The racial achievement gap might narrow.
7. The movement towards separating academically-oriented programs from career-oriented training might accelerate.

Perhaps he’s outnumbered, but Wood has the right idea, if “standards and accountability” are ever to mean anything more than maintenance of the status quo.

Hucksterism in Higher Education

2011-08-18T14:37:00.000-07:00

Beginning with an account of his recent subway ride through Manhattan, Peter Wood (the president of the National Association of Scholars) reflects on the intense advertising efforts of many lower-tier institutions of higher education, detecting what he thinks might be “the scent of hucksterism.”

It was striking to see these ads lined up one next to another, and a number of thoughts whisked by: We are indeed a land of unparalleled educational opportunity … So many beckoning paths to success … Colleges like street vendors hawking their wares … Vendors of ice cream, designer knock-offs, books culled from trash bins, college degrees … Vendors of ethnic-themed everything … Start here, go anywhere, but more likely nowhere … The express train to student debt … Need quick cash?

Following his subway observations, Wood recounts reading a book by “Professor X” entitled In the Basement of the Ivory Tower (Viking, 2011). Wood explains that Professor X “is uttering blasphemies,” by acknowledging the glut of ill-prepared students entering college under the banner of “American egalitarianism at its best.” Yet, as Professor X explains, “we believe that we can and should send everyone under the sun to college.” And, no one dares to question the wisdom of such a plan—unless they are writing under a pseudonym.

Freedom Writers

2011-08-12T13:26:00.000-07:00

In this week’s “Clarion Call,” Thomas Bertonneau argues that today’s research paper is a pastiche of the deeper levels of thought required by the traditional essay. In the era of easily googled sources, with cut and paste functions at hand, students are producing a glut of barely coherent research papers that lack the precision, logic, and discernment of their historical forbearers: the composed intellects of Plutarch, Montaigne, Thoreau, Chesterton et al.

The pre-Internet era research paper helped nourish intuition about sources. The Internet- era research paper, however, tends mainly to reinforce the already existing and intellectually debilitating notion that finding respectable material on a topic is something that digital devices are supposed to do. As the devices proliferate and the tasks become entirely digitized and non-subject-involving, the need for living, intuition-informed human judgment becomes all the more urgent and pressing.

The essay is the genre that answers to the emergency. The essay, not the research paper, best suits the desperate need of badly prepared students to come to terms with primary sources and to apply the wisdom of belles-lettres to the contemporary social, cultural, and political situation.

As Bertonneau explains, in the age of mass media, the intellectual capacity of the citizenry is greatly diminished. Though the premier essayists of history would disagree on most things, the later essayists were agreed on “the corrupting influence of journalism and political sloganeering on the collective mentality of the nations…[by which] gossip and exhortation, masquerading as discourse, would obscure the topics and discussions that were actually essential for the self-governing individual in a well-governed polity.” As such, the essay is an essential tool for arming the next generation to defend themselves against contemporary cant.

By liberating students from the present, and liberating them from the automated processes that now govern the generously named “research” that goes into the dubiously named “research paper,” instructors liberate students generally. They liberate them not into the pointless neutrality of a survey of contemporary opinions, and certainly not into any fixed position; but rather into that confrontation with reality, especially the human reality, whose ethos Heraclitus formulated twenty-five centuries ago. First one must see, and then one must say, “how each thing truly is.”

For Herclitus and our intellectual heritage: up with essays!

Deep Reading for the Rest of Us

2011-08-04T12:36:00.000-07:00

Professor of English Alan Jacobs considers the dramatic changes in American higher education over the past half century and wonders whether our expectations are realistic. Quoting a 2005 sociological study of long-form reading at the college level, Jacobs agrees with the authors’ conclusion: “[w]e are now seeing such [long-form] reading return to its former social base: a self-perpetuating minority that we shall call the reading class.” Jacobs argues that “a permanent expansion of ‘the reading class’” may simply exceed “natural limits.” If today’s collegians are largely unappreciative and unable to read deeply, then, Jacobs believes, we must rethink the activities of the Academy.

Perhaps it isn't anyone's fault. Steven Pinker once said that "Children are wired for sound, but print is an optional accessory that must be painstakingly bolted on." The key here is "painstakingly": There can be many pains, in multiple senses of the word, for all parties involved, and it cannot be surprising that many of the recipients of the bolting aren't overly appreciative, and that even those who are appreciative don't find the procedure notably pleasant. So it's important to dissociate reading from academic life, not just because teachers and professors make reading so much more dutiful and good-for-you than it ought to be, but also because the whole environment of school is simply alien to what long-form reading has been for almost all of its history.

Rarely has education been about teaching children, adolescents, or young adults how to read lengthy and complicated texts with sustained, deep, appreciative attention—at least, not since the invention of the printing press.

In the age of information overload and mass publications, culling through the glut of textual material can seem like a pilgrimage through the slough of despond. By contrast with earlier eras of limited texts (i.e., pre-Gutenberg), Jacobs argues that today’s liberal arts education is “devoted to providing students with navigational tools—with enough knowledge to find their way through situations that they might confront later in life.”

By contrast with these current educational norms, Jacobs believes that the passion for deep reading may simply be a matter of temperament, a minority disposition at best—not a teachable skill, or at least not something that can be taught in the usual manner.

There is a kind of attentiveness proper to school, to purposeful learning of all kinds, but in general it is closer to "hyper attention" than to "deep attention." I would argue that even reading for information—reading textbooks and the like—does not require extended unbroken focus. It requires discipline but not raptness, I think: The crammer chains himself to the textbook because of time pressures, not because the book itself requires unbroken concentration. Given world enough and time, the harried student could read for a while, do something else, come back and refresh his memory, take another break ... but the reader of even the most intellectually demanding work of literary art would lose a great deal by following such tactics. No novel or play or long poem will offer its full rewards to someone who consumes it in small chunks and crumbs. The attention it demands is the deep kind.

I am not at all sure that deep attention to anything in particular can be taught in a straightforward way: It may, perhaps, only arise from within, according to some inexplicable internal necessity of being.

But, that's deeper than most of us are ready to plunge--even on a good reading day. Nevertheless, vive la différence!

A More Excellent Way

2011-07-14T12:14:00.000-07:00

Perhaps academic writing for today’s undergraduates seems akin to a Herculean labor, but why should the Academy let difficulty stand in the way of a co-educational good time? Andy Nash, of insideacademia.tv, interviews Robert Young, professor of English at North Carolina State University, who explains that the traditional composition course has gone the way of the rotary-dial telephone. No one wants to work that hard--neither students nor faculty. In the course of the interview, Young explains the differences between college composition courses, then and now.

[In times past] The regimen of extensively reading many classic works combined with literature professors laboriously critiquing and grading composition papers provided for and necessitated deeper and more quality thought by the student, allowing for better writing both in substance and in form. But with research faculty taking over and managing composition programs that are made compulsory for the masses of new college students – many of whom hail from grade and high schools that also experienced lowering standards - the demand has been to produce new theories on social science and education, not instill the rigors of the same old method and canon of education. Ironically, the “new theory” de jure on education has become just as fashionable as what is popular amidst the contemporary culture of the post-adolescent, pre-adult college underclassmen age group.

In Young’s related essay, a sample of today’s ‘innovative pedagogy’ includes a provocative textbook entitled Composition, Sexuality, Pedagogy. Young provides numerous examples of the author-professor's application of “sexual literacy” in practice, but concludes that any offensive content is far outweighed by the sheer banality and pedagogical vacuity of the project:

[T]he specific content of indoctrination displayed in Jonathan Alexander’s composition classes is probably their least pernicious aspect. The truly destructive element in his “compositionist pedagogy” is that it denies the students the knowledge and intellectual tools to resist the blandishments of the merely sensational and ephemeral, the means to raise “the mind above,” in [John Henry] Newman’s words, “the influences of chance and necessity, above anxiety, suspense, unsettlement, and superstition, which is the lot of the many.” Classic works of literature, history, philosophy, and the like have been disdained, deconstructed, and dismissed from the composition curriculum. Students have instead been immersed in a commercialized popular culture of unprecedented depravity and then invited to proffer any random notions that creep into their heads as “critical” insights, with no attention to the subtleties of style that provide writing with precision and profundity.

The gravitational pull of such nonsense seems stronger each day, as mass culture continues to devour the signs and symbols of the West's rich intellectual heritage. Our escape from such a black-hole of cultural decay must be found in the larger, brighter presences of the cultural heavens, whose eloquence will defend humane learning and draw us back into the orbit of Excellence, for which we were created.

Haunting Words

2011-07-12T12:06:00.000-07:00

David Clemens, coordinator of a Great Books program at Monterey Peninsula College, spies hope for the humanities in the most unlikely of places: an extended quotation of Kafka, tattooed on one of his former students ("The Girl with the Kafka Tattoo"). Following George Steiner and Susan Sontag, Clemens’s description of ‘deep reading’ reminds us:

Deep reading differs fundamentally from “reading for information.” Deep reading produces an experience from the interaction between the author’s words and the reader’s imagination. In the theater of the mind, the reader can have powerful experiences without being exposed to physical harm, experiences so powerful that George Steiner even warned that they may “come to possess you more than any other order of experience.” In Against Interpretation, Susan Sontag called deep reading “something like an excitation, a phenomenon of commitment, judgment in a state of thralldom or captivation.” But the crumbling of the humanities suggests that we are entering a “No Thralldom” zone. Pausing, reflecting, contemplating, and being enthralled are relics of the pre-accelerated past.

Accepting John Ellis’s appraisal, Clemens agrees that declining enrollments in the humanities may have more to do with an intuitively knowing public that won’t tolerate the trivialization of great literature in the service of identity politics, etc.

Give the people thralldom. As Emily Dickinson once said, ““If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that is poetry…”

2011-03-26T19:01:00.000-07:00

The final days of the NCAA Basketball Championship seem a fitting moment for a scholar to revisit the mega-industry of so-called amateur collegiate sports. And, such has been the project of Duke University economist, Charles T. Clotfelter—with a sizeable data sample evaluating the symbiotic relationship between sports and academics. The scope of his new book is said to provide “ample evidence for fanatics and haters of big-time sports alike.”

In Big-Time Sports in American Universities (Cambridge University Press), Clotfelter, the Z. Smith Reynolds Professor of Public Policy Studies and Professor of Economics and Law at Duke University, seeks to remedy the scholarly inattention to athletics. Clotfelter sets himself an ambitious goal: using an analytical, data-rich approach to the questions of why many leading American universities embrace big-time, commercial athletics (while failing to fully acknowledge the size of its footprint), and whether the marriage is a good one for institutions and society as a whole.
[…]
"It would be more in keeping with the intellectual traditions of the academy to acknowledge the rather unshakable hold that commercial sports has over the universities that engage in it," he continues. "Besides clearing the air of this kind of polite deception, such an acknowledgment would allow for an open discussion about the potentially important spillover benefits generated by big-time college sports, as well as its more obvious costs. Accepting the potent devotion to college sports also makes it easier to understand why the presidents and trustees of such universities have been unable to accomplish meaningful reform."

So, perhaps we can think more clearly the next time we play ball.

2011-03-24T13:44:00.000-07:00

Though today’s students may be learning less from the typical college curriculum, there are those few who will seek out the path to understanding, in spite of the ideological bent of American universities. Sometimes non-traditional students, with their pre-collegiate experience and serious intention, offer a better example of how a liberal education can be acquired by way of fortuitous discovery. David Clemens recounts the story of one such student.

My former student Joshua, now ambivalently quartered at UC Santa Cruz (home of the fightin’ Banana Slugs and currently under Federal investigation for systemic anti-Semitism), has an article in Literary Matters about cheating. Not students cheating; students who feel cheated. He’s found a couple of excellent literature classes (Cervantes) but most just use books as a vector for stone-cold political ideology.

When he was at Monterey Peninsula College, Josh was the midwife who helped deliver a great books program to a college that had been out to axe all its literature courses. In my Intro. to Lit., class he heard me refer to Robert Hutchins’s metaphor for Western literature as a “Great Conversation,” and in Literary Matters he writes:

“Within weeks other members of the class and I were meeting on our own time to discuss the Great Books. We read Aristophanes’ Lysistrata. We read Sappho. We felt and spoke as if we had rediscovered some long-forgotten treasure abandoned by the generation before.”

Now that sounds like an intellectual coup. Perhaps a few more veterans and other non-traditional or atypical students (like those not coming to college for the Hookup Scene) could produce a reversal of the many radical protests against Western Civ, in favor of revitalized Great Conversation.

Who knows what divine encounters might still occur in the Groves of Academe?

Outrageous Claims Lead to Critical Thinking

2011-03-18T19:04:00.000-07:00

Given the ubiquity of academic platitudes on “critical thinking,” perhaps it’s time to make the most of an opportunity. If critical thinking is what they want, then let them have it. Such is David Clemens’s rationale, when he invites students to depart from the usual topics of academic orthodoxy to engage in a serious, critical appraisal of various authors who deny the Holocaust. In the best spirit of the Western rational tradition, Clemens equips students to weigh the evidence and contrast various arguments for and against the academic presentation of theorists who refute one of the most horrific episodes in 20th century history.

After weeks of reading books such as How to Think About Weird Things and Crimes Against Logic, and screenings of the films such as You Can’t Say That and Triumph of the Will, and lectures on historiography, logic, and semantics, I present the capstone essay question:

Professors and students have argued that history should be taught from as many points of view as possible. With that in mind, I would like you to decide whether Holocaust deniers should be invited to present their point of view when classes consider the Holocaust.

Having Holocaust deniers present their point of view is a complex question involving issues of historiography, free speech, academic freedom, evidence, effects of emotion and memory, confabulation, eyewitnessing and testimony, pedagogy, cultural positioning, infotainment and docudrama, relativism, postmodern epistemology, historical revision, and even aesthetics. I would like to see a deeply-considered, extensively informed opinion, demonstration of research, use of critical thinking principles explained in your texts and my lectures, and examples from your readings and films.

According to Clemens, when careful inquiry and methodical analysis is applied to such a high-stakes issue, critical thinking really happens—and it produces some of the best arguments that he has witnessed in the undergraduate classroom.

The reason for the capstone paper is to prepare students to recognize the methods employed by malicious or unhinged deceivers: 9/11 truthers, religious cultists, UFO abductees, and so on. I want them to learn to test claims with the use of logic and evidence rather than relying on their feelings. I want to erode the intellectual laziness that lets students adopt all-purpose answers they have been offered to the world’s problem, whether it’s “the patriarchy,” capitalism, or the Jews.

Sounds like the kind of thinking critically needed in the Academy today.

Economic (and Cultural) Limits of Higher Education

2011-03-12T08:29:00.000-08:00

When a Nobel Prize economist and recognized man of the Left, Paul Krugman argues that American higher education may have run its course, Peter Wood ponders whether reality has settled into the consciousness of our intellectual thought-leaders. Krugman--who suggests unions, collective bargaining, and guaranteed health care as the means for broadening American prosperity--begins his piece with an observation contrary to today’s received wisdom:

It is a truth universally acknowledged that education is the key to economic success. Everyone knows that the jobs of the future will require ever higher levels of skill. That’s why, in an appearance Friday with former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, President Obama declared that “If we want more good news on the jobs front then we’ve got to make more investments in education.”

But what everyone knows is wrong.

But, Wood argues, Krugman’s analysis lacks a careful reading of human nature, for it fails to understand that college education should be more than “a four (or more) year vacation from responsibility.” Wood sees our age of radical individualism encouraging students to reject the hard work and narrowing rigor of a prescriptive course of study—in favor of self-expression, and vague commitments to diversity and global citizenship. By contrast, Wood argues that to change student performance will require deeper springs of motivation.

What’s missing from [Krugman’s] picture, however, is a crowd of factors that bear on how young men and women approach and make use of the opportunities at hand. Why is it that so many students enroll in college only to treat it as a four (or more) year vacation from responsibility? A college degree in the right subject pursued with the right level of intensity can still open the door to a good and prosperous career. But a very large number—an actual preponderance—of college graduates de-select that approach to undergraduate education. Some do so because they lack the motivation to begin with, and it is a fair question to put to social scientists, “Why?” Patterns of motivation (or its lack) are not arbitrary. They have something to do with the family, and a great deal to do with matters like religion, culture, and emotional maturity.

Academic Climate Change

2011-03-07T15:12:00.000-08:00

Following the recent and dismal evidence of Arum & Roska’s Academically Adrift, the pseudonymous Thomas H. Benton speculates on various reasons for the depressed intellectual climate on today’s college campuses. His list of usual suspects includes: lack of student preparation, grade inflation, the overemphasis on student evaluations (‘keeping the customers happy’), lack of uniform expectations, curricular chaos, etc. His conclusion recounts the conclusion of Arum & Roska, while adding a provocative twist: the educational consumer is getting precisely what he asked for. Nothing much.

The authors write that they are "profoundly skeptical that students, in general, empowered as consumers or clients, will necessarily place much of an emphasis on this particular collegiate outcome."

If they are right about that—and I hope they are not—it means that our "failing" system of higher education actually is working the way it is supposed to, according to the dictates of the market. The patterns of selection and resource allocation—and the rising costs of college education—are not driven by educational needs so much as they are the result of competition for the most enjoyable and least difficult four-year experience, culminating in a credential that is mostly a signifier of existing class positions.

Benton will follow-up this essay with musings on why parents and students buy into this failing model of higher education. Stay tuned!

Bellow's Belles-Lettres

2011-03-05T15:17:00.000-08:00

Cynthia Ozick’s review of the collected letters of Saul Bellow (The New Republic, February 10, 2011) is a reminder of the mythic status of Saul Bellow, peering past the biographical interpreters into Saul’s soul, where we glimpse, as Ozick puts it, the writer’s “appetite and urgency, unmediated seizures of impulse and desire torn from the fraught and living moment.”

Historical moments seem magnified through the pen of Saul Bellow, as when he confronts William Faulkner and John Steinbeck (serving on a post-WW2 presidential committee “to promote pro-American values abroad”), who attempted to garner Bellow’s support recommending the release of Ezra Pound from the mental hospital where he had been incarcerated. Bellow flatly refused: “unimaginable murders, the destruction of the very image of man. And we—‘a representative group of American writers’—is this what we come out for, too?”

At the same time, sharp-eyed Ozick perceives Bellow’s deeper evasion of responsibility, when he claimed to have been “too busy becoming a novelist to take note of what was happening in the Forties” to have borne witness to the central event of 20th century Jewish history.

Hers is an insightful analysis of this man of letters, for she enables us to understand Bellow’s vision.

He revered—but not always—thought, civilization, and what he named “the very image of man,” all of which could be undone. He believed in outcry, and trusted the truth of his own. He was adept at witticism and outright laughter. He was serious in invoking whatever particle of eternity he meant by soul, that old, old inkling he was fearless in calling up from contemporary disgrace.

Freudian Slippage

2011-02-27T11:59:00.000-08:00

UCLA’s annual “American Freshmen” survey has provoked a variety of commentary, including that which concerns the emotional health of undergraduates. The report of higher levels of anxiety among collegians has provided the experts additional opportunity to point the finger at the flagging economy. But that doesn’t explain the 15% gender gap in anxiety levels. Naomi Riley provides a deeper explanation, probing hidden recesses of the undergraduate psyche:

One expert told the Chronicle [of Higher Education] that men are less likely to talk about how they feel. They're just pretending to be happy to keep up appearances (on an anonymous survey, even). And another told Inside Higher Ed that men spend more time playing video games and watching television, which reduces their stress and contributes to their emotional health.

The simpler explanation for the gender gap in emotional health is that girls experience life in high school and college differently.

Perhaps we have trouble making distinctions in our Age of Equity, but the only way to genuinely understand human diversity is by way of reality: sex (differences) matter, or, to borrow John Gray’s 1992 title, Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus. The simple fact is men and women do not view intimate relationships in the same way. Riley continues:

In their recent book, Premarital Sex in America, authors Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecker survey the literature and make an air-tight case that the sexual atmosphere faced by young women today (both on and off college campuses) has severely impacted their emotional health. The researchers conclude: "Having more numerous sexual partners is associated with poorer emotional states in women, but not men." Indeed, a number of studies have shown "a linear association between both lifetime and recent partners and indicators of poorer emotional health, and women who report the greatest number of partners display the clearest symptoms of depression." Men, meanwhile, exhibit no negative effects at all from a higher number of partners or a shorter duration of relationships.

This reality--that the "hook-up" scene on campus is bad for women--is almost never acknowledged by the administrators on college campuses. College administrators and parents may profess to be concerned about the emotional well-being of students, but when push comes to shove they are unwilling to change the things about the atmosphere on campus that would really improve student life. Instead they maintain the mindset that 17- and 18-year olds are adults who can monitor their own behavior, when time and again they have shown that they cannot.

This should give us pause in our diversity-promoting, tolerance-enforcing, co-educational institutions. Are we really meeting the needs of our students—or merely promoting a libertine atmosphere of radical experimentation? Student life (and all of the related bureaucracy of the American university) may be far more complicated than we realize, requiring a much greater appreciation of our society’s emotional and spiritual immaturity, as clearly demonstrated in 21st century campus mores.

For the Love of Humanity

2011-02-14T15:01:00.001-08:00

In a brief review of the late Joe Sobran’s out-of-print book, Single Issues, Thomas Shakely follows Sobran’s survey of C.S. Lewis, with his critique of “a ruthlessly egalitarian public education system” where, in Screwtape-like fashion, “the educators will be, in reality, the poultry-keepers, fattening up the young birds to be devoured.” By contrast, Lewis promoted an economically independent, “free-born mind”—in the spirit of Montaigne. Shakely continues with a comparison between Sobran and Lewis.

First, from Sobran: “The educators will be, in reality, poultry-keepers.” In a culture that has embraced the commodification of free men and women, treating graduates as “products” of a system, as “inputs” and “labor” for “industry,” can there be any doubt about educators as “poultry-keepers?”

Quaint as it may seem, I think there’s real danger — both for the health of our culture and for, truly, the salvation of our souls — to speak of man as anything other than man. We become what we believe. When our language, and the thinking that delivers its spirit, speaks of man in the same way it speaks of oil production or defense manufacture, we then have a basis for also treating man in that antiseptic spirit.

Then, from Lewis: Only “the free-born mind” allows one the perspicacity to “snap his fingers” at ideology, and at the tyrannies that seduce and pervert depth of thinking.

In other words, working in tandem, Sobran and Lewis remind us that ideology poisons free thinking, the principal thing with which an education is designed to equip young people. Our age brims with ideologues and lacks Montaignes.

Be careful what you wish for! Certainly, in an age devoted to egalitarian mediocrity, we should not be surprised that our educational systems have produced what Lewis termed "men without chests."

To produce a generation of mature, competent, humane men and women, we will have to recover the liberal (humanizing) arts. There we find, in our cultural heritage, human ideals worth living for--not dehumanizing ideologies. Then, for the love of humanity, we might discover the only freedom worth pursuing: the paradoxical Love of which John Donne spoke:

Take me to you, imprison me, for I,

Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,

Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

Daydreaming of Conservative Cuckoo Birds

2011-02-10T07:43:00.000-08:00

This week the New York Times ran an article entitled "Social Scientist Sees Bias Within," which outlined the recent findings of social psychologist Jonathan Haidt (UVA). Dr. Haidt surveyed his colleagues at this year's conference for the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. When the tallies were totaled, Haidt counted only three conservatives among the 1000 psychologists present. "This is a statistically impossible lack of diversity," Haidt concluded.

Such is the improbable narrowness of the Academy--particularly in the contemporary humanities.

As an educationist (a field derived from the modern social sciences), such findings make me, a conservative, feel like an endangered species.

Now that I think of it, I should self-identify as a Conservative Cuckoo Bird or Traditional (Going) Rogue Elephant, which would qualify me for federal protection under the Endangered Species Act of 1973. At that point, U.S. Fish and Wildlife would then have to provide me and my fellow conservative scholars with an appropriate habitat (a white-washed, picket-fenced, prefabricated neighborhood of Eisenhower vintage?!).

Just one problem: I couldn't receive such subsidies on conservative principle...

Oh, well, at least I can enjoy a delirious daydream.

A Non-Committal Classicist

2011-02-09T08:04:00.000-08:00

This week, a conversation with a new friend over a recent book prompted the following question: What ultimate reason is there for studying our cultural history?

In the context of our exchange, we were considering the arguments of Lee T. Pearcy, in The Grammar of Our Civility: Classical Education in America (Baylor, 2005). My friend observed that the author's history-telling was interesting and his observations insightful, but the final chapter turned toward a fairly pragmatic prescription for reading ancient languages and studying Great Books. As my friend put it:

[T]he wheels seem to come off in section four. Please correct me if I am missing something, but supporting classical studies by turning to Gadamer [on philosophical hermeneutics], then celebrating the classics because their "culture is indeterminate and negotiable," unstable and without definition (p. 141) seems to leave him in a strange place. He wants to share the post-modern vocabulary of education and culture, but then he caves in and joins them, it seems.

Only too true.

Behind Pearcy’s Grammar is a desire to join ranks with his post-modern colleagues, which propels him in the direction of Nietzsche—without the Nihilist’s striking aphorisms and radical commitment. Pearcy would have us embrace the Classics as a perpetual conversation arising from some imagined primordial humanism at the heart Western civility—but he warns us not to presume that we will find there some “unsurpassable beauty and eternal meaning” (132). It’s a similar line of reasoning among many from the neo-pragamatic school of philosophy (Rorty, Fish et al.): don’t look for eternal verities behind the curtain…this is just an ongoing conversation. The meaning is in the making, they tell us.

My friend’s intuition of Pearcy’s “strange place” was perceptive. It is strange to be defending a tradition that is ultimately premised on nothing more than itself. In other words, we’re just talking here and what you hear is what you get—nothing more, nothing less.

Pearcy’s misstep, in my estimation, belies his unwillingness to acknowledge the ‘in between period’ (i.e., the medieval era) which produced the most demanding, often idiosyncratic synthesis of philosophy and religion, effectively uniting intellectual speculation with metaphysical commitments.

The best of our medieval forebears (Isidore of Seville, Hugh of St. Victor, Duns Scotus, Aquinas) produced a grounded, unapologetic defense of philosophy from a distinctly religious point of view. They did not pursue the Classics as interdisciplinary studies, but as “a form of education…along with theology” (130). By the way, that reference to theology is as close as Pearcy gets to the medieval flame (for fear of getting burnt?). And, that theology gave warmth and life to the liberal arts for nearly 1500 years. Pearcy’s omission of that pre-modern history leaves him in a strange place, without any sure ontological footing. The modern classical movement owes its lifeblood to a received tradition and those ancient and medieval ghosts, to borrow a phrase from the 19th century philologist Wilamowitz, “demand the blood of our hearts” (qtd. on 38).

Pearcy is not ready for that kind of commitment.

A Call to Action

2011-02-07T13:02:00.000-08:00

The recent volume Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (U. Chicago Press, 2010) has higher education all shook up with the news that American undergraduates aren't learning much these days.

As Kevin Carey recently pointed out in his article for the Manhattan Institute:

[T]his learning-deficient ecosystem [identified in Academically Adrift] only persists because there is little or no outside pressure to become otherwise. Contrast this with the vigorous national conversation about elementary and secondary education. A whole constellation of organizations from across the ideological spectrum exist to analyze, criticize, and improve schooling for children. Many disagree, often stridently, about the necessary means, with perspectives ranging from big government regulation to wholesale privatization and many points in between. But they all begin from the same underlying premise: too many American K-12 students are failing to learn...There is no parallel dynamic in higher education.

Any students ready to stage a few Berkeley-style protests demanding more intellectual rigor on campus? How about a Free Speech Movement for the 21st century that begins with the demand for university administrators who must eloquently defend the liberal arts curriculum (i.e., without recourse to bureaucractic jabberwocky) as the heart and soul of American higher education.

Wishful thinking? Viva la Revolution!

Language Reclamation and Reform

2010-11-16T14:08:00.000-08:00

"Why all the poetry?" a typical student asks.

My stock teacher-answer has something to do with "purifying the language of the tribe" (Mallarme) or educating toward an oratorical ideal: the good person speaking well.

But, from the experience of generations, poetry contains a heavy dose of delight for those who encounter its powerful presence. In which case, my here's-why-it works, knee-jerk defense of poetry tends toward the utilitarian--What will it do for me?--not the deeper waters of being--What will it do to me?

Fortunately, contemporary poets like Scott Cairns have taken the time to explore the difference a poem makes. Some can even offer us a compelling vision of the good life with their good words.

On the Huffington Post, Cairns recently proposed a reclamation project of the "Lost Christian Language for Repairing the Person"--a much more eloquent answer to my students' query.

The Ethics of Building Soil

2010-11-15T07:47:00.000-08:00

From an observant student, who knows of my interest in a deeper intercultural dialogue, I learned that the philosopher Kwame Appiah has been exploring The Ethics of Identity for quite some time. Here's a sample, from his webpage's book-blurb:

Appiah develops an account of ethics, in [the] venerable sense [of political thinkers from Aristotle to Mill]--an account that connects moral obligations with collective allegiances, our individuality with our identities.

Sounds like one of those poetic paradoxes of Robert Frost:

There's no such thing as socialism pure--
Except as an abstraction of the mind.
There's only democratic socialism,
Monarchic socialism--oligarchic...
You often get it most in monarchy,
Least in democracy. In practice, pure,
I don't know what it would be. No one knows.
I have no doubt like all the loves when
Philosophized together into one--
One sickness of the body and the soul.
Thank God our practice holds the loves apart
Beyond embarrassing self-consciousness
Where natural friends are met, where dogs are kept,
Where women pray with priests. There is no love.
There's only love of men and women, love
Of children, love of friends, of men, of God,
Divine love, human love, parental love,
Roughly discriminated for the rough.
[from "Build Soil--A Political Pastoral," 1937]

Coincidentally, while looking for a hyperlink for the above poem, I stumbled upon a blog entitled "Build Soil" run by a young scholar, Anthony Sovak (ABD in English, SUNY Stony Brook), who enjoys Frost (obviously!), Eliot, and Chabon. Now, that's my kind of 'roughly discriminated' company!

the happy quarrel

2010-03-04T07:29:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, a student excitedly recommended Charles Murray's 2009 lecture on happiness. As the culmination of a career, discovering the roots of happiness is not a bad place to land. But, Murray's findings are anything but optimistic.

He argues that America is following its European ancestors in securing a socialized polity that seeks to anesthetize our human nature, somehow leading us beyond good and evil. The political therapy aimed at effecting this change follows two fundamental premises: the quest for equality (via identity politics) and the making of the New Man (via a malleable definition of human nature). Murray's description of our political trajectory sounds eerily like Huxley's Brave New World.

Murray's conclusion: there must be a political Great Awakening--and, yes, the social scientist chose the phrase with all of its intentional religious overtones. But, instead of reaching the masses with the good news of American exceptionalism, Murray believes the elites and the intelligentsia need an old-fashioned dose of patriotism:

What it comes down to is that America's elites must "once again fall in love with what makes America different."

Murray's prescription reminds me of the American poet, Robert Frost, who described his life's efforts as a "lover's quarrel with the world." Perhaps our happiness depends upon being devoted to a very few things in this world--and loving them enough to defend them, even in their imperfection.

race, sex, and the culture wars of healthcare reform

2009-11-22T15:59:00.000-08:00

While most Americans--myself included--would like the health-care debate to be focused on reforming "the medical-industrial complex" and limiting the role of government provision of medical assistance, the unfortunate reality is that health-care reform is political from start to finish. Consider the following evidence:

Exhibit A: "You can't vote against health-care and call yourself a black man" (Jesse Jackson, in November 18 speech at the Congressional Black Caucus).

Exhibit B: the Finance Committee-sponsored amendment to fund abstinence-based programs that augment "comprehensive" public-school sex education as proposed in Obama's proposed 2010 budget (Sen. Orrin Hatch R-Utah sponsored the amendment).

Exhibit C: the ongoing confusion over the health-care debate, as revealed by consistent public surveys where John Q. Public describes the debate as "confusing" (see the September 25 synopsis, "The Don't Knows," from the Public Agenda).

While this evidence doesn't convict one party for politicizing the issue, it seems obvious that health-care is a loaded weapon being used by both sides, in this most recent kulturkampf skirmish.

(B)CE and "the Year of Our Lord"

2009-11-17T13:50:00.000-08:00

There is something to be said for the cult (religion) at the center of culture--and it shows up more often than you might think.

In the modern era, we have come to style ourselves as cosmopolitan, multicultural persons, whose religious and ethnic commitments are subordinated to our pluralistic principles.

One example of the pluralistic approach: historical dating with reference to "the Common Era," instead of the traditional A.D.--from the Latin "Anno Domini," or the Year of our Lord. The latter (A.D.) is derived from a previous era, when the Christian faith was the dominant, unquestioned center of Western culture.

(See E.D. Hirsch, Jr.'s recent posting at the Core Knowledge Blog.)

So, is it even possible to recognize the historical Christian origins of our civilization, while pursuing a pluralistic, multicultural approach to education?

If the 2003 efforts to compose a constitution for the European Union are any indication, this is one tenebrous cultural thicket--without an obvious exit strategy... In the EU's constitution, "God" doesn't even get a passing mention.

The closer you look, the more intolerant our bourgeois values become. Human rights and personal dignity are fine aspirations, but what binds us to offer such respect to our fellow man, if not the common cult (i.e., what we believe to be true)? Can a Universal Declaration of Human Rights truly compel us to confer dignity on another person?

I'm skeptical. Following Wordsworth, "I'd rather be a pagan suckled in a creed outworn..." At least then I could mention the historic gods of our cultural past.

a poet's diagnosis of the economy

2009-08-05T09:04:00.000-07:00

As we continue to discuss possible remedies to the current economic influenza, I’m always listening for those willing to risk the politically imprudent yet realistic diagnosis that our present financial trauma is a natural virus present in our body politic. The internal logic of our free political and economic system produces both great wealth and real poverty, along with the viral counterpart to economic success: the corruption of greed (and related vices). Our potential for great gain inherently involves the prospect of genuine loss--both economic and moral.

But, most of our political rhetoric today offers only the solace of a cure that restricts the freedoms of our capitalist system, favoring more government-sponsored security.

Yet, the inherent risks of freedom—like the healthy person who risks bodily fitness in pursuit of greater fulfillment in mountain climbing or sliding into home base—are always present. Just as the limits of individual freedom are discovered through individual competition, so too, the limits of a free society are encountered in the inevitable outcome of natural distributionism. In other words, the talents and treasure of society are distributed unevenly for various reasons, including individual effort, family ambition, chance opportunities, institutional favors and favoritism, etc.

Having lived through the Great Depression and seen the development of the New Deal State, the poet Robert Frost—a lifelong member of the Democratic Party—maintained serious reservations about the limits of distributive justice via political means. In a passage from A Masque of Mercy (1947), one of Frost’s characters presents a fairly Frostian view of the inherent tensions of justice and mercy in society—

The rich in seeing nothing but injustice
In their impoverishment by revolution
Are right. But ‘twas intentional injustice.
It was their justice being mercy-crossed.
The revolution Keeper’s bringing on
Is nothing but an outbreak of mass mercy,
Too long pent up in rigorous convention—
A holy impulse towards redistribution.
To set out to homogenize mankind
So that the cream could never rise again,
Required someone who laughingly could play
With the idea of justice in the courts,
Could mock at riches in the right it claims
To count on justice to be merely just…
The Thing that really counts though is the form
Of outrage—violence—that breaks across it…
And if you’ve got to see your justice crossed
(And you’ve got to) which will you prefer
To see it, evil-crossed or mercy-crossed?

As Frost scholar, Peter Stanlis, explains, Frost was an outspoken critic of the New Deal, believing that it would tend toward the “homogenization of mankind.” Nevertheless, “Frost believed that the duty of all good government was to foster the general welfare in a great many ways that the private interests of citizens could not…[such that] ‘socialism’ was a part of every government.” The question being how much socialism and what form it will take.

The following passage from the 1932 poem, “Build Soil,” specifically addresses the limits of socialism—

Is socialism needed, do you think?
We have it now. For socialism is
An element in any government.
There’s no such thing as socialism pure—
Except as an abstraction of the mind.
There’s only democratic socialism,
Monarchic socialism—oligarchic,
The last being what they seem to have in Russia.
You often get it most in monarchy,
Least in democracy. In practice, pure,
I don’t know what it would be. No one knows.

Frost also believed that natural (genuine) diversity of talent and resources was the strength of Jefferson’s party—not a homogenizing party-line.

With the Democratically-controlled Congress and White House, I hope that someone takes note of the Bard from Bread Loaf, a Democrat and a democrat, whose wisdom far exceeds our present-day prognosticators.

a democracy with intellectual integrity

2009-07-25T19:55:00.001-07:00

The July 16 arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Director of the W.E.B. DuBois Institute for African and African-American Research) has, by now, made all the major headlines, after President Obama—a personal friend of “Skip” Gates—mentioned the incident in a July 22 White House press conference. While Obama had intended to focus on national health care, the briefing caused such a stir that the news cycle sent health care to the waiting room, in lieu of the national trauma of racial profiling.

The $64,000 question: What happened between Gates and Crowley that resulted in Gates’ arrest? Obama surmised that racial profiling may have played a part, as “race remains a factor in the society.” And, in spite of the progress made, Obama said that race “still haunts us.”

Following the President's remarks describing the Cambridge police as having “acted stupidly” (by arresting Gates for disorderly conduct in his own home), law enforcement from around the country rallied to defend the arresting officer, Sergeant Crowley—his supporters included fellow officer and eye-witness, Sgt. Leon Lashley, an African-American.

Understandably irritable at being questioned in his own home, Gates became agitated and is reported to have begun angrily discoursing on issues of race, asking Crowley if his investigation of a reported break-in was because Gates was “a black man in America.” Gates later offered a statement suggesting that “the confrontation had inspired [him] to consider making a documentary about racial profiling.”

From a possible breaking & entering to the prospect of racial profiling, this has quickly become the media’s summer blockbuster.

A week after the arrest (and subsequent dismissal of charges by the Cambridge Police Department), Gates magnanimously offered to accept an apology from Crowley, stating that he was “willing to forgive [Crowley]. And if he admits his error, I am willing to educate him about the history of racism in America and the issue of racial profiling. . . . That’s what I do for a living.”

How’s that for Ivy League paternalism—not to mention some old-fashioned condescension?!

All this brought to mind a recent thought from the distinguished sociologist and social critic, the late Philip Reiff. In his description of the replacement of “second culture” with its traditional virtues by the nihilistic values of “third culture,” Reiff concludes that our contemporary society must continuously teach us how to interpret life: “The kulturkampf is being waged intellectually, and the third culture guiding elites are teaching us a certain blindness that must be reread and seen through. What is at stake is both democracy and the integrity of the intellect” (My Life Among the Deathworks, 175).

Is racism involved in the arrest of Prof. Gates? And, even if it could be demonstrated that Crowley behaved in a bigoted manner—highly unlikely, given his service record—what would be the appropriate response? Moreover, if Gates made a false (and highly damaging) accusation of racism in Crowley’s behavior, should Gates be held accountable?

Racism, hate crimes, tolerance, and sensitivity training are now essential categories in 21st century America. Yet, are we a stronger democracy for the inclusive god-terms (Rieff’s phrase) that have come to dominate our civic discourse?

How should a healthy democracy respond to such matters with intellectual integrity?

summer reading with Ravitch

2009-07-22T08:25:00.000-07:00

For years I've been closely following Diane Ravitch's books and articles. She is an outstanding scholar of educational history—and a vivid stylist who my students have consistently enjoyed reading.

Ravitch is an exceptional writer—and all the more so since vivid writing is not typical of education scholarship. Quite the contrary, the writing of many (most?) educationists is often characterized by abstract, obtuse theories of learning, usually accompanied by a powerful dose of progressive politics. But, Ravitch doesn’t bore her readers. If anything, she prompts the literate reader to go deeper in the analysis of her subjects. (I recall her footnotes for Left Back providing a wonderful bibliography for some of my research on early 20th century progressive education.)

So, what's Ravitch's secret? She knows where to go for the goods: literature.

In the closing salvo of her blog with Deborah Meiers, Ravitch recently explained that her summer reading was going to leave the educational bubble far behind. Her plans include returning to one of her favorite English authors, George Eliot—along with the poetry that Ravitch confesses to love. (I wonder who her favorites poets are...?)

Her love of literature (and its well-spring of poetry) explains a lot. Ravitch can write because she knows what to read—which will continue to shape her sensibilities and provide indirect insights on the nature of genuine education.

Surely Ravitch would whole-heartedly endorse Erasmus' contention that “a true ability to speak [and write] correctly is best fostered both by conversing and consorting with those who speak correctly and by the habitual reading of the best stylists” (“On the Method of Study”).

Sign me up for the Diane Ravitch Book-of-the-Month Club!

life-terms on the Supreme Court

2009-07-14T10:51:00.000-07:00

Regardless of the pollsters’ most recent survey-data or the political posturing of Right and Left, the decision of Roe v. Wade remains the most contentious, disputed, illiberal piece of Constitutional review in our national history.

If, as is likely, Judge Sotomayor ascends to the highest court in the land taking the position that abortion rights are “settled law” (under the Blackmun opinion that asserted a person’s “right to privacy”), the national discourse will be offered no more clarity or additional insight on the foundational disagreements beneath the 1973 decision.

The ubiquitous Wikipedia offers a telling summary of the liberal critique of Roe v. Wade, which has been taken up by leading liberal critics, including the late John Hart Ely and Archibald Cox, as well as Alan Dershowitz. The remarks of Edward Lazarus, Blackmun’s devoted former court clerk, put a fine enough point on the matter, making it particularly disturbing for even the most stalwart supporters of the radical decision:

As a matter of constitutional interpretation and judicial method, Roe borders on the indefensible....Justice Blackmun’s opinion provides essentially no reasoning in support of its holding. And in the almost 30 years since Roe’s announcement, no one has produced a convincing defense of Roe on its own terms.

I often return to the maxim of that most liberal philosophe, Voltaire: “If you wish to debate with me, you must define your terms.” By all means, let’s have a debate. But, the terms—right to privacy, due process, viability, federal jurisdiction, etc.—must be defined…not summarily dismissed as “settled law.”

contentious content and curricular cuisine

2009-07-06T06:28:00.001-07:00

Just as Alasdair MacIntyre described the virtual unintelligibility of competing epistemological modes of inquiry (see June 2 posting), so we continue to observe the philosophical conflict between educators committed to skills-oriented curricula versus those devoted to content-centered pedagogy. The former emphasize the process of constructing knowledge, while the latter presuppose the essential given-ness of knowledge—to be retained in the process of learning.

Robert Pondiscio’s recent posting at The Core Knowledge Blog (a group of proponents for the content-centered approach) reminds us that the advisors to the interstate collaboration on “common core standards”—including the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers—are essential to the discernment of what constitutes “core.”

The long-standing debate between skills and content rages on, often in what seems to be a rear-guard action of the more traditionalist emphasis on content—i.e., events, dates, names, etc. But, the presence of a few thoughtful, seasoned experts on the leading committees responsible for designing state standards offers a sign of hope.

In particular, Pondiscio mentions Emory University’s Mark Bauerlein and The Fordham Foundation’s Checker Finn, two experienced advocates for curricula that will acknowledge the methodological division, while promoting the essential substance of educational standards.

Bauerlein’s June 9 essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education bears witness to the stakes of this curricular contest and the rhetorical influence of the skills-based movements in education:

“What the skills emphasis does is neutralize the culture-wars conflicts inherent in any knowledge selections in a curriculum. It speaks about abstract cognitive abilities such as ‘critical thinking,’ ‘higher-order thinking skills,’ and ‘problem solving.’ No disturbing questions about representation of female authors on a syllabus or about Thomas Jefferson’s racial attitudes. Instead, the skills approach promises to empower students to handle those questions better later on — not here in the classroom, but after they have graduated from the skills curriculum.”

In effect, the emphasis on “skills” side-steps the thornier, essential questions of selecting content to be used in the “process” of learning. A deft move on the part of skills advocates, but the delay tactic fails to engage the traditional (and common sense) concern for what will be studied. Yet, the ingredients of content determine the flavors and texture of the educational experience—leaving the learner with a hunger for heartier fare or an instinctual distaste for the pablum of method. Other things being equal, a healthy diet is less the process of eating than the foods being digested.

As the grade-school adage reminds us, “You are what you eat”—not how you eat.

Bon appétit!

musing on MacIntyre

2009-07-02T07:06:00.001-07:00

As an advocate of the Great Books, I am reminded of the limitations of a Great Conversation in an age where a "common tongue" of rational thought has gone the way of Babel. So, what are we to do in this postmodern age of deconstructionists, neo-pragmatists, nihilists, existentialists, feminists, etc.?

Today a possible solution propitiously appeared, as I re-read the final chapter of Alasdair MacIntyre's Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry (from his 1988 Gifford Lectures):

"Such reformers as those who propose some version of a Great Books curriculum ignore the fundamental character of our present disagreements and conflicts, presupposing possibilities of agreement of a kind which do not at present exist. What then is possible? The answer is: the university as a place of constrained disagreement, of imposed participation in conflict, in which a central responsibility of higher education would be to initiate students into conflict" (230-231).

A place of constrained disagreement? That seems true to life, in our present situation. I guess I'm going to have to modify my mantra: rather than promoting "institutions engaged in the Great Conversation," I'll follow MacIntyre's lead and seek out "institutions ready and willing to host the Great Existential Debate."

Is such a thing even possible, in today’s higher education? Check out the freshman seminar at Princeton entitled “Great Books: Ideas and Arguments,” with co-instructors Robert George and Cornel West. With a modicum of respect and collegiality, it just might work.

Thank you, Mr. MacIntyre.

wireless math and the virtual exchange

2009-07-01T05:54:00.000-07:00

Having had my own frustrations with another wireless carrier, I was sympathetic to a blogger whose run-in with Verizon’s customer service led him to publicize his frustrations at verizonmath.blogspot.com.

The audio-recording captures what one representative described as a “difference of opinion.” But, opinion had nothing to do with it, unless you consider the internal logic of mathematics to be a branch of aesthetics or literary criticism. It was, quite simply, a computational error run amok.

Shockingly, several of the Verizon agents could not distinguish between two-thousandths of a dollar and two-thousandths of a cent. The result: a charge one-hundred times the rate originally quoted. Though the frustrated customer, Mr. Vacarro, patiently explained the difference, the service representatives could not recognize how the computer-generated computation differed from the quoted rate.

Over the course of several e-mail messages, Vacarro eventually got a refund, but only after having publically rebuked Verizon--via his blog--for its obvious failures of communication and computation.

I have three implicit criticisms from this exchange: (1) several customer service representatives had not progressed beyond elementary school math proficiency; (2) they were unable to “troubleshoot” a discrepancy between their automated accounting system (i.e., the billing computation presented at their service terminals) and the official documented rates, revealing the drone-like responses produced by such telephone service centers; and (3) the response of “customer relations” was similarly automated by the generic language of PR-speak, thus failing to remediate the problem until a supervisor from “Executive Relations” eventually got involved.

That being said, those who measure educational effectiveness by vocational preparedness should take note. Assuming the customer service representatives were at least high school educated, we can surmise that their educational experiences failed to adequately prepare them for the marketplace.

While it took some doing, Verizon finally admitted its error. Blogging his complaint certainly must have helped Mr. Vacarro’s case. The old adage about the squeaky wheel getting the grease seems to have come of age, with its 21st century variant: the visible blogger gets virtual results.

Perhaps those interested in educational reform should also take note. Compiling more such “case studies” from the “real world” would effectively demonstrate the need for less progressive process and more traditional pedagogy—beginning with ‘Rithmetic.

a different kind of university

2009-06-30T10:14:00.000-07:00

The opening scene features an attractive college lecture hall, with a portly, gray-bearded gentleman addressing a co-ed classroom with the sincere, measured words of a scholar: “The system has failed you. I have failed you.” Thus begins a polished ad-campaign for Kaplan University’s online curriculum—and an explicit rejection of traditional forms of higher education, “steeped in tradition and old ideas.”

Well, Kaplan U. is certainly developing its market niche—right alongside Apple’s iPhone and the host of applications for today’s handheld version of the good life. The message that college should be as accessible as your iTunes certainly resonates with a generation reared on Facebook, texting, and fingertip-access to the Internet.

But, technology doesn’t produce talent. It’s the other way around. Tools are designed by people who envision a better way, and such talent is developed by way of the tradition—i.e., learning from one’s predecessors and building on the cultural accumulation of previous achievements.

When the university “adapts to you [the student],” education fails to refashion the student’s understanding of the world through the methods of rational inquiry, sustained argument, and participation in that illustrious society of learned men and women. Membership in that august company involves an apprenticeship with contemporary mentors who reinvigorate the “old ideas” through present-day participation.

Indeed, “a different kind of university” would acknowledge that “the system has failed,” but not because of inadequate product placement. The university has failed by having lost sight of its higher purpose: the transformation of individuals through participation in the Great Conversation—including those much-maligned traditionalists of the past, those whom G.K. Chesterton called “the democracy of the dead.”

a singing rhodora

2009-04-16T10:16:00.000-07:00

A recent episode of “Britain’s Got Talent” (the UK’s version of “American Idol,” including Simon as one of the judges) spotlighted a surprise wonder in the singing voice of 47-year old Susan Boyle. Ms. Boyle’s rather frumpy figure belies an extraordinary soprano, whose rendition of “I Dreamed A Dream” from Les Miserables brought many in the audience to tears. As one of the judges said, “We were all being very cynical, and that’s the biggest wake-up call ever…”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lp0IWv8QZY

So, why the cynicism? Well, it may have something to do with the celebrity culture that has helped produce “American Idol” and its British cousin. We expect to see the pretty people on stage, showing off their musical talents. Ordinary, middle-aged commoners don’t belong in the spotlight reserved for our celebrity-idols, just as we don’t expect common faces to be commercially successful pop-performers. They just don’t have “the look.”

Our tastes in popular entertainment today require the combination of musical talent and physical beauty, and the physical aesthetic is even more important than any genuine musical gifts. In this way, our visually-saturated culture has made us devotees of eye candy, to the detriment of other, more discriminating tastes.

But, on April 11, 2009 on a British stage, the vocal flowering of Ms. Susan Boyle shocked an audience—and, from what I gather, has made quite an impression in cyberspace, via YouTube. Ms. Boyle’s performance has even caused the superficial celebrity culture to pause (if only for a moment) to consider what it might be missing. The unspoken questions multiply: Where did such a lovely voice come from? How did she escape notice before this? Well, to slightly revise some lines from Emerson, “Tell them, dear, that if ears were made for hearing, / Then Beauty is its own excuse…”

socratic dialogue vs. sophistic dogma

2009-03-22T11:11:00.000-07:00

To compare the ancient Sophists with the leadership of many Residence Life programs on American campuses seems uncharitable—to the Sophists. Those masterful rhetoricians effectively won arguments by superior technique, though they may have given little regard to objective truth. The doctrinaire activities of today’s Sophistic successors require little rhetorical skill, for their arguments supporting “social justice” simply go beyond the debate over good and evil. The dialogic approach of Socrates is no longer welcome in the American Academy.

Stranger than fiction, these less-than-sophisticated declarations of morality are appearing in new student orientation programs sponsored by Residence Life. With increasing frequency, they are replacing typical curricular and residential information sessions with “social justice initiatives,” which claim to promote “diversity, multiculturalism, and the eradication of oppression.” All in a day’s work for ResLife.

Watch these videos produced by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, and then begin your own moral inquiry. If ACTA’s claims stand up to scrutiny, “social justice” has become a sophistically-loaded term that obscures the pursuit of genuine justice.

leisurely considerations of culture

2009-03-20T08:42:00.000-07:00

Recognition must be given: for nearly two years, I have been inspired by the writings of Anthony Esolen—chiefly, in his role as one of the contributing editors of Touchstone Magazine. Then, at a conference sponsored by Intercollegiate Studies Institute this past November, I was able to meet Esolen, in person. He even seemed to appreciate my line of questions, following each of the speakers. And, my recent reading of Josef Pieper is the result of some of Esolen's conference comments on the causal link between leisure and culture--which Esolen acknowledged as largely derived from the inspiration of Pieper.

Earlier this week, a student in attendance at that conference spotted the text from Esolen's keynote lecture. She, too, was thoroughly impressed with Esolen and forwarded the link to Esolen's remarks, posted on ISI's web journal, First Principles. So, if you have any inclination to understand the nature of culture and its essential elements—many of which, Esolen argues, are fast disappearing in the West—then you should spend some time with this learned and winsome essayist.

Of course, if you disagree with Esolen's premises or evidence, please say so. Cultural health depends upon that "fund of knowledge shared among the audience," and I believe that conversation-starters like Esolen's essay might just contribute to replenishing the essential font of memory necessary for culture.

econ 101

2009-03-18T20:57:00.001-07:00

No matter which side of the political fence you prefer, economic literacy is essential for intelligent civic discourse on the current state of our union. Gone are the days of “It’s the economy, stupid.” They’ve been replaced by sheer economic stupidity, according to a recent essay published by Manhattan Institute authors, Maurice Black and Erin O’Connor (of the Critical Mass blog). The article, “Shouldn’t All Students Learn Economics?”, presents a devastating critique of economic literacy among college graduates: 84% of those surveyed could not “differentiate free markets from central government planning.” There’s a big difference—that makes all the difference how we frame the current debate over economic stimulus and government interventions.

How can we have an informed public conversation, without a basic understanding of economics?

courage under fire: Breitbart mauled by Maher

2009-03-17T07:43:00.001-07:00

Nationally prominent conservative talk show hosts—Limbaugh, Hannity, Levin—are often belittled by mainstream media outlets, dismissed out-of-hand as “right-wing” partisans whose “mean spirited” tactics are unhealthy for political discourse. And, it is tempting to accept such caricatures, since the “entertainment value” of your typical conservative host sometimes obscures the objective quality of his data. (Though Drudge seems to have done a great deal to disseminate plenty of raw data.) After all, conservative talk shows are looking to rouse the audience, to secure ratings and the advertising dollars which sustain them. No, theirs is not an academic discourse.

Nevertheless, I’ve recognized that the dominant reaction to those “right-wing types” implies a critical position embraced by the majority of television news outlets. The typical TV news offers a self-justifying pose, something like “we offer objective news, not provocative entertainment.” But, that was before Jon Stewart, Steven Colbert, and Bill Maher got into the act. Now it’s cool (and humorous) to vitiate those who question the wisdom of liberal politics. And, the left-wing has become just as vitriolic as the right—only more so. The moral of the story: it’s mean-spirited commentary when it froths from the right, but it’s sophisticated humor when it spews from the left.

And, where is the civility in all of this entertainment-based coverage of American public life?

For all of the rancor reportedly coming from the right, even the staunchest supporter of the left has to question the tactics of certain media celebrities, wondering whether the “entertainment quotient” of American news has simply eliminated genuine political debate. In yesterday’s Washington Times, the conservative Andrew Breitbart recounts his “lion’s den” experience on Bill Maher’s show. It’s quite a spectacle, with some bona fide “political hate speech” belying the liberal posture of “open mindedness.” I suppose it’s unfair to expect Maher to be moderate. That’s not his schtick.

Breitbart does have guts—and a plan to force rhetorical extremists to own up to their political biases. However, it would require the willingness to debate one’s opponents and embody the much-needed virtue of civil discourse, conceding the home field advantage and submitting to the slings and arrows of those partisan spectators.

Any takers?

professions of academic belief

2009-03-16T07:54:00.000-07:00

As higher education in America continues to quest after a curricular holy grail—some common purpose to unite the collective enterprise of academe—a handful of notions are generally regarded as worthy ends.

Some indication of these unifying ideas can be found in the data of UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute (HERI), with its triennial national survey of faculty. Inside Higher Ed recently profiled this year’s HERI survey, highlighting some of the dominant pedagogical values of today’s professorate, including: enhancement of “students’ knowledge of and appreciation for other racial/ethnic groups” (75%); development of “students’ self-understanding” (73%); encouragement of students’ “commitment to community service” (55%); and “provid[ing] for students’ emotional development” (48%), among other things. (The data comes from more than 22,000 full-time faculty members at 372 four-year colleges and universities.)

What’s more, the survey revealed a continuing political trend—consistent over the past decade—among full-time professors: a self-professing tilt toward the left-end of the political spectrum, with “Liberal” (47%) and “Far Left” (8%) comprising an obvious majority of academics. “Conservative” (15%) and “Far Right” (0.7%) professors present a relatively small dissenting voice on campus.

The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) picked up on the HERI data and offered its appraisal of the report’s significance. In particular, ACTA expressed deep concern that nearly two-thirds of the faculty considered “social change” an essential facet of their teaching, while only one-third acknowledged the classics of Western civilization as defining liberal arts instruction. In the words of the ACTA blog:

This finding is noteworthy for trustees for a number of reasons. While the goals of professors are important indeed, our institutions of higher education must answer ultimately to the public's need for informed citizens. And it is up to boards to make sure this public purpose is paramount. While meticulously respecting the academic freedom of professors to design and offer courses, trustees must ensure that students are given a strong liberal education that encourages them to think for themselves. The fact is, on too many campuses, students have reported feeling intimidated -- and actually been punished -- for questioning politically correct orthodoxies.

Producing “informed citizens” surely seems a worthy goal of the academy. But, the professorate is obviously divided on the very definition of good citizenship—not only because of the political skew of the American faculty but the ambiguous, unverifiable precepts of today’s academic liberalism: diversity, social change, tolerance, moral relativism, etc.

Until they are encouraged to challenge such cherished precepts, educators professing the liberal ideal (more than political affiliation) will simply be confessors of the Academy’s contemporary orthodoxy.

As University of Chicago ethicist Jean Bethke Elshtain recently argued in an essay entitled “While Europe Slept,” modern Western thought has been sustained by “a complex dialectic and dialogue between belief and unbelief,” resulting in a dynamic and creative academic culture. However, Elshtain warns, if one of the dialogic poles gives way, the meaningful dialectic falters and fails.

What happens when, unlike Camus, Europe loses—abandons or forgets—one side of the dialectic? She winds up with a monologue, and the unbelief side becomes exaggerated and distorted into an ideology of secularism fueled by subjectivism, with the results we have seen.

Following in the footsteps of our European predecessors, the American professorate may well have embraced a dogma of unbelief. In which case, a few good “heretics for belief” might help the Academy find its way, once again.

testing the limits of community organizing

2009-03-13T18:57:00.001-07:00

Though we tend to think in binary terms--either public or private--there have been successful community-based programs like Geoffrey Canada's Harlem Children's Zone, which integrate charter schools with family programs, foster care, and community centers in a "holistic system of education."

A witty little blog entitled "The Quick and the Ed" recently profiled a D.C. program that goes by the name of The Town Hall Education, Arts & Recreation Campus. Perhaps it's not much of an acronym, but THEARC seems to be getting the job done.

The lesson is simple: children's development happens within a larger social context—one that is organic and must be cultivated, if we desire to see authentic educational growth. In particular, kids being raised in impoverished social settings need "environmental conservation" of that endangered species known as "traditional family values": health care, parenting, discipline, etc. There might be reason for hope, if our Chief Executive—a former community organizer—were to promote hybrid programs that encourage public and private investment for genuine cultural renewal. These would be programs where private philanthropy is not discriminated against, based on race, creed, or political philosophy. (See Heather MacDonald’s “Never Enough Beauty, Never Enough Truth” for a startling discussion of the unfortunate realities of contemporary American philanthropy.)

But, we must wait to see if such non-partisan programs will exceed the political limits of the current administration.

terminable terminology

2009-02-19T18:18:00.001-08:00

I think that my excuse for failing to blog over the past two weeks will suffice: the arrival of our fourth child, Gabriel Lee Jackson.

And, with our baby’s birth comes a renewed interest in the zeitgeist of Gabriel’s generation. In particular, what kind of cultural milieu will Gabriel experience in his formative years? Given the current state of America’s “culture wars,” it is likely that our son will be exposed to an increasingly polarized public square, where ideology often replaces rational and civil discourse, all in the name of “sensitivity,” “tolerance,” “social justice,” or other popular notions that often mask pluralistic arguments supporting moral equivalence—i.e., the position that all ethical systems are equally valid (with the exception of traditional moral belief systems like Judaism or Christianity).

In a recent essay at NAS, Peter Wood showcases a 2009 study published in the Teachers College Record which ostensibly sought to explore the question “Is Teaching for Social Justice a ‘Liberal Bias’?” Wood appraises the study as yet another case of a pedagogical ideology cloaking itself in garments of “social justice,” precluding a genuine dialectic by assuming that “social justice education” is, by definition, “advocacy without imposition” (the words of the study's authors). That highly questionable claim should be challenged, argues Wood, given the history of social justice movements and their consistent alignment with one end of the political spectrum.

While we ought to seek fair treatment for every member of society, Lady Justice cannot and dare not be subjected to the whims of a particular political agenda. As Alisdair McIntyre has persuasively written, when it comes to philosophical basics—like epistemology—terms such as justice and rationality inherently beg the questions Whose Justice? Which Rationality?

Attention must be paid to the popular slogans of education, to get at the truth (or falsehood) beneath rhetorical posturing and avoid being hoodwinked by the political manipulation of language—see George Orwell’s 1946 essay on “Politics and the English Language,” with its pointed denunciation of meaningless words.

In the future, I will advise Gabriel to keep Voltaire’s pithy preamble ready at hand: “If you wish to converse with me, define your terms.”

the probabilities of risky reforms

2009-02-04T18:12:00.001-08:00

Wait a minute! We may have evidence of another educational Confidence Man (or Woman) at work, right in the heartland of America. This afternoon, the blog of the Fordham Institute highlighted a thread from the Common Core blog, where they are closely scrutinizing the proposed educational reforms of Ohio Governor Ted Strickland. He has apparently become enamored with the smooth-sounding sense of “21st century skills”—skills being a curricular abstraction that has become all things to all educators. So, who convinced Strickland to combine content and “skills”?

The history of such academic argot is unimpressive, reminding us that educational reform requires a lot more than good intentions and inflated rhetoric. Indeed, to evaluate such diction—e.g., skills, competencies, critical thinking—requires a certain linguistic calculus involving the derivatives of educational jargon: as the variety of contexts where the term is used approaches infinity, the denotation-to-variation ratio fast approaches nonsense.

So, when it comes to 21st century pedagogical rhetoric, if it sounds too good to be true…

what's in that bottle?

2009-02-04T12:53:00.000-08:00

In an era when pedagogical expertise is often presented as the result of “the latest findings from educational research,” we must be vigilant to identify so-called experts peddling 21st century snake oil. (See Robert Pondiscio’s entry at the Core Knowledge Blog, with its “Cultural Literacy Bonus.”) New-and-improved pedagogical methods typically involve progressive bromides—e.g., critical thinking, collaborative experiences, self-esteem enhancement, etc.—all dressed up in this year’s fashion. (Pondiscio points to Jay Greene’s blog for details on increased snake-oil sales in the Fayetteville Public Schools of northwest Arkansas.)

That is why prudent educators perennially seek to inspire students with content whose half-life outlasts John Dewey’s “sound philosophy of experience.”

Rehearsing the elementary pedagogies of antiquity, we find that music and poetry were central features of a durable curriculum. As H.I. Marrou explains in A History of Education in Antiquity (1956), the Greek palestra (a sporting grounds and preparation for the adult gymnasium) was dominated by physical education, where games served as preparation for military service; music, where spiritual and aesthetic sensibilities were performed in the Greek chorus; poetry that embodied moral virtues and cultural values, in narrative and lyric forms; and literacy, a relative late-comer to traditional Greek education.

It should be understood that the centrality of music and poetry reflected Greek culture and its men’s-club centerpiece: the symposion or “banquet,” a drinking party where etiquette required every guest to participate in song or lyric recitation. So, the music and poetry of classical education prepared the young to participate in civic dinners where individuals could distinguish themselves in the arts of convivial entertainment. Surely no boring lectures or story-tellers were welcomed to such jovial gatherings.

Yet, even amid such raucous festivities, the essential poetic forms reinforced Hellenistic cultural values. Inasmuch as Homeric poetry emphasized courage, valor, piety, cleverness, etc., the canonization of the blind Bard institutionalized the culture’s commitment to a knight-like ideal—an ideal that would eventually be baptized by the Carolingian renaissance, prompting such cultural masterpieces as The Song of Roland and Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain (with its abundant Arthurian legends and Trojan ancestry).
But, if it had been up to Plato, the poets would have been banished from the polis, leaving posterity without the literary treasures of the Thracian peninsula. Plato feared that poetic myths and legends would mislead the young, for he viewed education as a quest for definitive answers to philosophical speculation. And, while the Academy’s founder had good reason to suspect Sophistic rhetoric as a mask for manipulation, his contemporary Isocrates argued persuasively for rhetorical eloquence that was ethically elevated and nobly executed: “True words, words in conformity with law and justice, are images of a good and trustworthy soul.”

Where Plato imposed categorical clarity upon the world, bringing order to the material realm with reference to philosophical forms—for which we are forever thankful—Isocrates sought eloquent elaboration on the deep mysteries which surround us, using the accumulated words of civilization’s greatest poetry. Within the rhythmic lines of poetic diction, Isocrates found epic narration of human existence, in all of its complexities and conundrums, for he believed that the truly educated must understand reality—not merely categorize it. As Marrou makes clear, Isocrates believed in “the ‘genuinely cultivated’ man…the kind of person who has a gift for ‘hitting upon’ the right solution…or at least the solution that is most nearly right, the best in the circumstances: and this is because he has the right ‘opinion.’”

Following the logic of the oratorical approach, poetry shapes sentiments which, in turn, produce trustworthy opinions. In other words, great literature fashions souls who know and desire the good, the true, and the beautiful. It’s a compelling argument for old-fashioned literacy.

As Marrou explains, there is a marvelous paradox that results from such poetic pedagogy—
“[T]here are things that a poet feels and makes you feel at once, and which no amount of science can ever fathom. The result is that an ‘oratorical’ kind of education, which in appearance is entirely a matter of aesthetics, whose one aim is to create ‘wizards with words,’ is in fact the most effective way of developing subtlety of thought” (90).

So, the next time you hear someone pitch an educational method involving more critical thinking (especially at those educational seminars), ask them to critically think and comment upon one of the magisterial poets (pick your favorite) for 10 minutes straight. Then you can determine the true efficacy of their pedagogical elixir…

hoping for fair and balanced educational discourse

2009-02-02T09:42:00.000-08:00

With just two weeks beneath Obama’s belt as our Chief Executive, we may have some truly hopeful signs in American education, based on the selection of some key personnel. Beginning with the appointment of Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, there’s reason to believe that reform-minded educators will at least receive a fair hearing from the new secretary, for Duncan ably demonstrates a genuine interest in the essentially human task of running the Washington bureaucracy.

Mike Petrilli, a self-professing “Bushie” at the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, recognizes the importance of working within the constraints of a civil service department, and he has openly acknowledged that the former secretary (Margaret Spellings) treated staffers “as if they were the enemy, assuming they would oppose [conservative] policies or were incompetent.” By contrast, the rank-and-file of the DOE perceive that Duncan really “wants to know the truth, whether it fits his agenda or not.”

This simple changing of the guard offers everyone in education—and particularly those of us with philosophically conservative bone marrow—an opportunity to exercise some ideological self-scrutiny. Consider asking these questions to the Educator in the Mirror: “Have I gone too far in pursuing my understanding of the right way to improve education? Am I listening to all those concerned with educational excellence, particularly those with whom I disagree?” The increase of this virtue, which our ancestors called “humility,” would certainly improve the overall civility of our cultural discourse—and our educational debates, in particular.

But, there are real obstacles to civil discourse in contemporary American society, even in the ostensibly objective realm of academic scholarship. Today’s Chronicle of Higher Education had an article concerning the mud-slinging, free-for-all which often characterizes the discourse of academically-oriented websites—e.g., The Chronicle, Inside Higher Education, etc. Rachel Toor, an assistant professor of creative writing at Eastern Washington University, laments the “carping” tone of anonymous responses to articles on The Chronicle, noting that Internet forums could be “great venues for the exchange of ideas,” but instead they “often turn into mudslinging of the most petty and mean-spirited kind.” This would be a case in point for the return to old-fashioned humilitas. (In that spirit, let me recognize my debt to Erin O’Connor’s blog, “Critical Mass,” who brought Toor’s article to my attention—along with a regular dose of careful analysis on educational trends.)
And, since I mentioned Petrilli’s true-life confession, let me suggest that you take a look at his Education Reform-o-Meter and place your vote to determine if Obama’s administration will serve the larger interests of reforming American public education. I’ll keep an eye out for the administrators and policy wonks being appointed to the new administration—with the tireless help of Fordham, Hoover, Brookings et al. And you decide if reform is right around the corner.

As Murdock’s network likes to say, “We report. You decide.”

postmodern dogmatics

2009-01-28T11:09:00.001-08:00

On Monday, the new president of the National Association of Scholars, Peter Wood, posted an article on the NAS website concerning a disturbing development in Wood’s academic specialty: anthropology. His observations were prompted by an ostensibly anthropological essay concerning “sustainability in higher education,” which touches on the current academic focus of university programs (academic and extra-curricular) that promote social activism. As Wood points out, such “social justice” movements typically encourage an emotional response to social questions, often implicitly repudiating the need for deeper rational reflection on complex social issues. After all, the just response seems obvious to the leaders of the movement.

There is a form of demagoguery at work when intellectual inquiry is suppressed in the name of some greater social good. What truly dismayed Wood was the appearance of such cant in an otherwise stalwart scholarly journal, Current Anthropology.

Reading Wood’s article, I was reminded of a book review-essay from last summer. In an open appraisal of the scientific discourse concerning global warming, world-renowned physicist Freeman Dyson demonstrated the influence of moral and religious sentiments beneath much of today’s supposedly scientific discourse. I believe that Wood and Dyson are witnesses to the romantic seduction of rationality in the Academy, where many intellectuals have stopped questioning reality, having succumb to the zeitgeist of their cultural moment.

Here is my posted comment to the NAS website.

“Reenchantment” does come at a price. When the Romantic passions of a culture overcome its moorings in rationality, intellectual dissent must be silenced—one way or another.
This past June, in an essay in The New York Review of Books, the world-class physicist Freeman Dyson commented on the academic discourse surrounding the question of global warming. Dyson’s analysis of the finer points of climate change helped many in the lay-audience (myself included) to make sense of the often sensational proposals advanced by the academic community—where “sustainability” is an implicit concern of the economic, atmospheric, and political analyses to which Dyson attends.

While most scientists recognize evidence of a warming trend around the globe, there is not a consensus on the catastrophic effects of global warming among the relevant scientific disciplines. Unfortunately, as Dyson explains, a majority of scientists believe dogmatically that global warming is a “grave danger,” And, the ruling class of true believers now responds to their dissenting colleagues (like Richard Lindzen, professor of atmospheric sciences at MIT) with “open contempt.”

In his concluding remarks, Dyson explores the impulses beneath the current obsession with “the science and economics of global warming”—and, by implication, sustainability. He argues that the discourse is no longer a truly scientific question, open to rational inquiry. As Dyson explains, “The main point is religious rather than scientific. There is a worldwide secular religion which we may call environmentalism, holding that we are stewards of the earth, that despoiling the planet with waste products of our luxurious living is a sin, and that the path of righteousness is to live as frugally as possible. The ethics of environmentalism are being taught to children in kindergarten, schools, and colleges all over the world…[replacing] socialism as the leading secular religion.”

The moral questions surrounding material stewardship are not new, having been addressed by various world religions throughout the ages, under the aegis of human accountability to divine authority. What is new is a re-definition of man’s responsibility in terms of one supreme good: addressing global warming. To question that priority or dissent from the scientific majority is the 21st century’s equivalent to the sin against the Holy Spirit.

Today, questioning the “environmental consensus” could earn one the curse of heresy: anathema...or simply a place in the lowest circle of Hell.

a spare symbolism

2009-01-26T08:57:00.000-08:00

On the Core Knowledge Blog—an electronic arm of educational reformer E.D. Hirsch, Jr.—you’ll regularly see the call to arms for greater Cultural Literacy (the title of Hirsch’s most popular work), in the fight to save the next generation from civilizational ignorance. CKB’s recent posting by Robert Pondiscio, an experienced communications director cum educator (read his fascinating story in a December 2007 Business Week article), caught my eye. Pondiscio opines that far too many who witnessed Obama’s speech were oblivious to the numerous cultural and historic allusions made by the 44th President of the United States. As Pondiscio observes:

“It in no way diminishes the significance of this day to observe with a touch of sadness that too many of our nation’s children — especially those who look with pride at this President who looks like them — were able to appreciate this day only on a superficial level. Too many can appreciate the symbolism of the moment, but no more. Some saw history. Others, poorer by far, saw a symbolic ‘first.’”

While this presidency is a historic first based on the race of the occupant of the Oval Office, it remains to be seen if this administration can revitalize the deprivations that have been visited upon elementary and secondary subjects like history, the sciences, and the essential language arts (including the classical trivium and its implied literary canon).

That’s a tall order for the new chief executive, but the solution may be easier—though politically more volatile—than one might think: break up the monopoly on public education (with its oligarchy of unions and government bureaucrats) and allow charter schools to demonstrate the efficacy of content-rich curricula and first-class teaching, wherever they exist. (For current information on state-of-the-art chartering, check out the Hoover Institute’s Education Next: on the political quagmires of charter schools, see the spring 2008 article, “Charter Politics”; and, for a detailed sampling of charter schools in the Big Apple, see Hoxby & Muraka’s summer 2008 article, “New York City Charter Schools.”)

Such executive action would truly demonstrate “a new era of responsibility” for American public education. And, by holding chartered institutions to the highest academic standards—and shuttering them if they do not meet their specific goals—this country’s entrepreneurial genius could be harnessed to, in the words of President Obama, “begin again the work of remaking America.”

global positioning speeches (GPS)

2009-01-23T13:41:00.000-08:00

As I prepared for classes on Tuesday, I didn’t take time to view Obama’s inaugural address live, though I had some students and a stepbrother (Marine Captain Jason Moore—see fuzzy picture) present at the Mall for the historic event. When the 44th president of the United States addressed the American people, the emotional electricity was palpable for many of the electorate. And “electricity” is an appropriate metaphor for Obama’s emotional appeal, when national journalists can gush with remarks like those of Chris Matthews:

“[I]t’s part of reporting this case, this election, the feeling most people get when they hear Barack Obama's speech. My, I felt this thrill going up my leg. I mean, I don't have that too often.”

Surely the hysteric elements of this national enthusiasm will subside, after the American people and their elected officials return to the hard work of getting their bearings in this present crisis. Suffice to say, from my residence in the Northeast, there was a definite emotional charge on Tuesday for the millions who thrilled to hear the inaugural words of the first nonwhite president in U.S. history.

More than 72 hours later, I’m taking some time to let the speech sink in. Of course, the trick in evaluating any speech is to take a second (or third) look at the rhetoric beneath it—usually with a little historical context in mind. Which is precisely what I have required some of my students to do: evaluate Obama’s use of metaphor, narrative, and abstractions; along with his invocation of the founders’ authority (ethos), his appeal to the passions of his audience (pathos), and his arguments for how to bring beneficial change to America (logos), and so on. I suppose this truly is a momentous occasion for a teacher of rhetoric. So why not take advantage?

In the process of analyzing the President’s rhetorical skill, I’ve discovered an intriguing historical essay on the topic of inaugural speeches: Jill Lepore’s “The Speech,” in the January edition of The New Yorker. Lepore’s analysis concludes that presidential inaugurals have, over two centuries, shifted their emphasis from promoting the constitutional form of government entrusted to America’s leaders to making emotional appeals for more popular government derived from the will of the people:

“The nation’s first century of inaugural speeches, even when they were addressed to the people, served to mark an incoming President’s covenant with the Constitution… Nineteenth-century Presidents pledged themselves to the Constitution; twentieth-century Presidents courted the American people. We now not only accept that our Presidents will speak to us, directly, and ask for our support, plebiscitarily; we expect it, even though the founders not only didn’t expect it, they feared it.”

Now there’s a rhetorical shift prompted by a people’s changing attitude toward government.

Other reviews of the event that I distributed to my classes came from experienced speakers and writers whose civic presence has been felt through their public words: Peter Robinson, whose article for Forbes.com critically examines the memorability and graciousness of the speech (both lacking for Robinson); and an adulatory Garrison Keillor (of Lake Wobegon fame), writing for Salon.com, could barely contain his feelings over the emergence of “A new America,” though he only described the inaugural speech as “good enough.” From diametric political positions, Robinson and Keillor provide analyses that were at least entertaining—and occasionally insightful.

So, what does all this mean for a teacher of rhetoric? Obama’s speech provides one of the most recent opportunities to demonstrate how public words embody the sway and surge of a cultural movement, whatever its ethical and political positioning in the complex realities of the globe. Rhetoric can move people, though it typically nudges them down the path they have already chosen. It serves more as a global positioning device—“you are here”—rather than a navigational course for the future.

We would do well to attend to the words of our leaders, for they tell us more than we care to know, revealing where we are in the world—our hopes and dreams, and how those aspirations match up with reality. The surge of hopeful emotions and the populist sentiments of Obama’s first presidential words offer telling signals of the American experiment at the beginning of a new era. Which begs the question: will new necessarily be better?

Parents for the Ethical Treatment of Anarchists (PETA)

2009-01-19T09:10:00.000-08:00

On the car ride home from a recent overnight Scouting event, I got into a conversation with a friend concerning how we handle our children’s experience of American society’s “tolerant” definitions of the family. As we both acknowledged, today’s world presents a variety of “alternative arrangements” to the traditional marriage-with-children design: blended husband-and-wife families, where remarriage follows divorce; men and women living together with the additional bond of siring children; and homoerotic couplings that adopt or find sperm/egg donors to conceive. Obviously, at some point our children are going to observe and question the traditional model of their experience, and what will they make of the various “options” presented to them?

While many of our everyday conversations consider such matters in theory, the discussion in my friend’s car was based on real-life events, for he and his wife had decided to invite a co-worker and gay lover to dinner. Bringing the homoerotic couple into his house, my friend was concerned with the implicit message being offered to his two children (elementary school age), and he wondered how to maintain their innocence while preparing for the possibility of specific questions.

I reminded my friend of our shared belief in the ancient Mosaic Law that explicitly denounces adultery: “Thou shall not…” And, I suggested that he could take the traditional moral approach by explaining to his children that the Creator designed human beings to partner in covenant relationships (marriages), where one woman and one man would spend a lifetime, usually becoming mothers and fathers to the children that are “a gift from the LORD” (Psalm 127). He could then elaborate by explaining that, as with every other rule from God, people break faith with their Maker and try “alternative arrangements”: contrary to the prohibition against idolatry, people worship other gods; in spite of the command against murder, human history is filled with homicide. And similarly, though God has commanded the race to “be fruitful and multiply” by participating in faithful marriages and families, there will always be the sinful impulse to disobey the commandment. So, we should not be surprised when some, who may or may not know, disobey God’s rule.

As we discussed the topic during midday traffic, I began musing on how to present the traditional moral understanding of marriage in a compelling fashion, to a society that has lost much of its religious heritage and may no longer recognize the root causes of its political distemper.

Propitiously, I recently read Mary Eberstadt’s article “The Will to Disbelieve,” in the February 2009 issue of First Things. Working from an analogy of disbelief, Eberstadt reminds us that many Western intellectuals of the Cold War period simply would not acknowledge the moral bankruptcy of the Marxist Soviet Empire, in spite of evidence to the contrary. Similarly, Eberstadt argues today’s sexual liberationists continue to deny the empirical evidence in support of the traditional family, claiming no harm, no foul, as long as two consenting adults are involved. All the while, empirical data continues to accumulate, demonstrating the psychological and sociological damage done by “the moral core of the sexual revolution: the abundant evidence that its fruits have been worst for women and children.”

Eberstadt’s survey of the empirical research is impressive, including W. Bradford Wilcox, Maggie Gallagher, Sara McLanahan, Elizabeth Marquardt, David Blankenhorn, and others—and her conclusion is that only “the will to disbelieve” can keep our contemporaries from facing the fact that the traditional family is healthier and more beneficial to society than any ‘alternative lifestyle.’

And, what are we to do with such knowledge, in an age resistant to the truth—where liberationists aggressively oppose (in the name of “tolerance”) those who promote such traditional ideals? “One guideline might be, the same way renegade thinkers did during the Cold War—by never giving up on patiently discussing the actual record of the world as it is, no matter how resolutely the other side ignores or disdains you.” In other words, appeal to reality, for it will ultimately prevail. Though it may take several generations, the popular sociological models akin to geocentric astronomy will eventually be overshadowed by the heliocentric, mom-and-pop family.

In the meantime, Eberstadt warns that we should not “treat opponent as they will habitually treat you—as if the merest contact…requires a giant pair of barbecue tongs.” Instead, she recommends finding common ground, by locating the morally-freighted language of our generation—e.g., animal rights, vegetarian/veganism. Thus, by finding the moral language of a group, you can begin a traditional conversation from within their contemporary discourse. Perhaps traditional parents could modify the familiar PETA acronym to express their purposes in working with today's moral pluralism. The trick is to find the mot juste for that last letter: Parents for the Ethical Treatment of _______.

In the spirit of promoting dialogue with one’s moral opponents, I was browsing W.H. Auden’s “Collected Poems,” where I got the distinct impression that Auden understood how to address morality without moralizing—how to use the contemporary idiom to get at eternal verities. In “The Hidden Law,” Auden offers a succinct statement of Eberstadt’s thesis, in the opening stanza—

The Hidden Law does not deny
Our laws of probability
But takes the atom and the star
And human beings as they are,
And answers nothing when we lie.

For “human beings as they are” will continue to prove the given-ness of reality, our defiant efforts to the contrary.

So, my friend and his wife have their work cut out, but such is the nature of traditional parenting in an age of philosophical disorientation. They will need the courage of Copernicus to contend with the flat-earth sexual speculations of this generation. But, in the end, the atom and the star will tell the truth. And everyday moral challenges will provide all of us—parents and children—with the opportunity to rediscover the Hidden Law, where life is truly lived under the sun.

panegyric for a priest

2009-01-14T13:05:00.000-08:00

In an age awash with the pluralistic pablum that deep down everyone is as good as everyone else, the ancient rhetorical form known as the panegyric or funeral oration celebrates the extraordinary men and women who have lived among us. Such contemporary heroes teach us, by example, that good can triumph over evil.

One of my triumphant heroes, Father Richard John Neuhaus, died last week, and the world is diminished by the absence of his mortal light. However, writers of much greater ability (and personal relationship to RJN) have presented written panegyrics in memory of Fr. Neuhaus, so I will simply suggest browsing some of them.

Colleague and fellow-editor, Joseph Bottum, First Things

Conservative journalist, Ross Douthat, The Atlantic Monthly

President of The Acton Institute, Rev. Robert Sirico

Tom McFeely’s blog, The National Catholic Register

And, keep your eyes open for more remembrances of the man who urged us to lay hold of first principles. He demonstrated that policy debates over the City of Man were elevated by contemplation of the City of God--a much needed reminder in this age of scorched-earth culture wars.

commodification of the classroom and bona disciplina

2009-01-13T08:41:00.000-08:00

So, what constitutes a good teacher? Socrates impressed his hearers with a method of questioning that led to the truth via a dialectical path. Aristotle argued for inductive analyses of the world’s empirical data, in order to produce categories of genus and species—mental hooks upon which to hang our rational hats. Quntilian required his students to be familiar with the poetry, history, and ethics of the Hellenistic world—and to see their interrelated natures. But these pedagogues are rather, well…ancient.

And, perhaps the antique world placed too much emphasis on the abstract. What about hairstyle and cheekbones, sharp blouses and natty loafers? Does a good teacher need to be a good looker, too—a sort of intellectual celebrity, possessing academic prowess while being easy on the eyes? (You may recall that Socrates would not have fared well by such measures.)

Today, ratemyprofessors.com provides instant access to a contemporary list of what students consider the essential characteristics of a good college instructor, including easiness, helpfulness, clarity, and hotness. Relative difficulty seems to be something that students avoid, while “hotness” (with its corresponding chili pepper icon) serves as a metric of good looks, the presence of which apparently encourages higher ratings—no surprise there.

If such ratings seem only the province of students’ cyber-lives, think again: the January 11 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education reported that Texas A&M University is considering professorial bonuses of up to $10,000, based on student evaluations. The chancellor of A&M offered a simple explanation: “This is customer satisfaction.”

In the age of consumer-driven marketing and a period of stiff competition for diminishing college dollars, should we be surprised that good teaching will be defined by satisfied customers? And, if consumer amusement is an essential feature of instructional evaluation, should we expect more personality training and cosmetic makeovers in the professorate? As eduwonkette remarked, “profs might do better with improv training and Botox.”

Well, I’m afraid I’m not going to receive any chili peppers or awards for easy courses. And, while I hope that I can be helpful and clear in my classes, I’ve never been a contender in a popularity contest. What’s next, a spring fashion show entitled “The College Catwalk: Professors in Pumps”?

a mid-life crisis with unpredictable results

2009-01-12T09:26:00.000-08:00

Perhaps it’s the much-feared midlife crisis, but it shouldn’t do too much harm to family or friends…

Over the past couple of years, I’ve become strangely attracted to the smooth curves and sultry figures of the Poetic Muse. At times she can, in the words of Dickinson, produce physical feeling, “as if the top of my head were taken off”—which certainly competes with the elation of a new convertible (for a pittance of the price). And, I’m constantly collecting scraps of her work—evidence my Amazon Wish List—like a crazed fan preparing to stalk his celebrity-victim. (Now I’m starting to sound like Edward Hirsch.)

I can’t foresee any criminal charges for my misbehavior, but I should avoid the accusation of negligence, spending spare moments searching out glimpses of various tropes and metaphoric poses.

Here’s my latest discovery, from a source I wasn’t expecting: a few lines from Sylvia Plath’s “All the Dead Dears”—

This antique museum-cased lady
Lies, companioned by the gimcrack
Relics of a mouse and a shrew
That battened for a day on her ankle bone.

These three, unmasked now, bear
Dry witness
To the gross eating game
We’d wink at if we didn’t hear
Stars grinding, crumb by crumb,
Our own grist down to its bony face.

Having not read enough Plath, I was deeply surprised to see her turning over some of the same soil as another poet of my acquaintance: Seamus Heaney. With Plath’s meditation on “Dead Dears,” I instantly thought of images from Heaney’s “Kinship,” with its Irish bog people and their secret habitation preserved inches beneath the topsoil, a reminder of history’s haunting presence and our eventual destiny.

Among the stones
Under a bearded cairn
A love-nest is disturbed,
Catkin and bog-cotton tremble
As they raise up
The cloven oak-limb.
I stand at the edge of centuries
Facing a goddess.

…
I grew out of all this
Like a weeping willow
Inclined to
The appetites of gravity.

The goddess of an earlier pagan period presented Heaney’s ancestors with the great mysteries of human existence, as they tried, in their way, to make sense of the life-cycle. Before the Christian message permeated the Emerald Isle birth, coming of age, work, marriage, and death were all veiled with inexplicable Mystery, gods that were to be feared and appeased—hence the human sacrifice.

Though Mystery still surrounds us, we moderns have come to view life as manageable and predictable—until something slips from our grasp or overflows the tidy bins that we’ve constructed to contain life.

Plath and Heaney recognize the greater, fearful reality of our desperate mortality and the smell of death which surrounds us. And, as Pascal reminded us nearly 400 years ago, “The grandeur of man is great in that he knows himself to be miserable…” Perhaps that is what attracts me to such macabre poets. For, indeed, there is a noble sentiment in the poignant precision of their imagery. As Pascal explained: “Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed” (quotations from Pensées).

And, again, there goes the top of my head…

Deborah Meier meets Charles Murray

2009-01-09T13:07:00.001-08:00

The arguments of Charles Murray have often been publicly castigated as thinly-veiled racism--recall The Bell Curve (1994), with its explicit analysis of genetically predetermined intelligence, which--for Murray's critics--implicitly embraced a racist explanation for group differences (in spite of Murray's specific caveats to the contrary!).

But, more recently, Murray has argued for what ought to be an uncontroversial position; he says that fewer high school graduates need college to prepare for the workforce. And, he argues that alternative routes should be encouraged, taking the social pressure off of non-academic students. He asks why students should be forced to attend college simply for the purpose of obtaining that job-preparing diploma, when they could train as journeymen (and women) for the trades of their own choosing and be granted admission to the guild of their choice, after completing the necessary certification--think computer and health care technicians, retailers, civil servants, etc.

Though Murray is often blacklisted for his research , I recently noticed that one of Murray's editorials (New York Times, December 27, 2008) prompted the progressive educator Deborah Meier to entertain some alternative hypotheses on the future of post-secondary education. Take a look at Meier's open letter/blog with education historian Diane Ravitch, Bridging Differences, and notice that Meier acknowledges an age-old conundrum: the democratic ideal of universal education (equal access) is not matched by the egalitarian utopia of a universally intellectual society. People choose various pathways in life, and typically there have only been a few who sought to pursue the intellectual life--i.e., post-secondary liberal arts studies.

a possible paradox in educational spending

2009-01-08T10:48:00.000-08:00

On a related note to the economic analysis below, three education policy analysts teamed up to compose an NRO editorial suggesting that cuts in federal spending could serve to prod public schools into greater accountability--namely, closer scrutiny of each dollar spent on public education.

The authors propose three goals for the Obama administration: "provide targeted aid to taxpayers and families in the short term, make a tangible difference in student learning, and avoid imposing long-term cost burdens that will tie reformers’ hands down the road."

It's not going to be a popular argument with advocates of the educational mainstream, but there is something to be said for downsizing government (educational) bureaucracy in the name of more effective schools.

oil changes and economic engines

2009-01-08T08:14:00.000-08:00

Reading the December issue of The Atlantic Monthly while waiting for my car's oil change at Wal-Mart, I read the article entitled "Why Wall Street Always Blows It," an analysis of the economic woes of 2008. Given my aversion to the attention-seeking news cycle--and its often facile analysis of current events--it seemed about time to start reviewing some informed commentary on today's economic reality. Like my quarterly oil change, three months or 3000 miles seems sufficient distance to begin taking stock of this contemporary problem.

The article's author, Henry Blodget, was a rising star in the 1990s world of high-tech investment. Blodget had ridden the profitable wave of internet investment, then warned others of a looming collapse produced by hyper-inflated internet-based stocks that crested in early 2000. Duly chastened by that market correction, Blodget anticipated signs of the most recent bubble: a real-estate craze that had Wall Street scrambling to profit from the unprecedented volume of low-interest home loans.

Perhaps unjustly, Mr. Blodget ended up on the wrong side of the law, when then-New York Attorney General, Eliot Spitzer, accused the investment guru of conflicts of interest (fraud) that forced him out of the securities business for life--a settlement in which Blodget neither admitted or denied the charges.

But, Mr. Blodget has taken the turning wheel of Fortune in stride, returning to his first career as a journalist, writing from his wealth of experience in the world of high-stakes investment and offering some stoic wisdom that views today’s financial difficulties in light of their larger historical context.

What caught my attention was the article's ability to relate economic cycles to the fundamental agency within markets: people. Explaining investment bubbles as a product of human self-interest, Blodget explains that "the interaction of human psychology with a market economy practically ensures that [bubbles] will form." That sounds a lot like the 3000-year old wisdom of Ecclesiastes: "For everything there is a season...a time to keep [buy?], and a time to cast away [sell?]..."

Blodget's explanation of the inevitability of economic boom-and-bust seems true of human nature, and we do well to remember that though "[t]echnology and circumstances change, the human animal doesn't [for] markets are ultimately about people." Good economic theory and planning are valuable, but they can't replace an accurate appraisal of human nature.

Given man's nature, a little 'market maintenance' seems the order of the day. The market corrections of the past several months are something like an economic oil change that helps to keep the engine of economic growth running, even as we hope to see a healthier, albeit chastened society in the driver’s seat.

epiphanies and wise men

2009-01-06T14:35:00.001-08:00

Today marks the Christian holy day of the Epiphany of our Lord (or in Eastern Christendom, Holy Theophany), which remembers the appearance of wise men from the East—likely of Persian origin. Legend names three Magi or Kings from the East—Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar—who, according to the Gospel of Matthew, located the Christ child by following prophetic words and stellar signs that eventually led them to Bethlehem.

The wise men came bearing gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh, which can be seen as ordinary offerings to a king, as well as prophetic signs of the Christ’s essence and purpose. The value of gold and the sweet smells of fragrances were certainly common gifts for a king, but the gold of kingship was augmented by the priestly aroma of frankincense (used in incense) and myrrh, which was used as an embalming spice. The Christian legend and its interpretation would grow and spread under the influence of leading personalities, including the ascetic sensibilities of John Chrysostom (Eastern, ca. 400 A.D.) and the aesthetic temperament of Gregory the Great (Western, ca. 600 A.D.).

While the introduction of Gentile wise men at the appearance of the Jewish Messiah suggests fulfillment of the Hebrew Scriptures’ oft-repeated prophecy that the kings of the earth will someday revere the God of Israel (cf. Psalm 2; 102; 148), it also presents a scandal that Gentile kings were offered knowledge (an epiphany) that eluded many Jewish leaders, including the unseemly King Herod. Within Christendom the tale of the Three Kings presents a double-edged reminder: God’s special revelation to the people of Abraham—and the Scripture of Moses and the prophets—is now made accessible to the peoples of the earth through Jesus Christ; at the same time, God’s capacity for surprise revelation (epiphany) is not constrained by man-made calculations, religious or otherwise, including those of the Christian church. Such interpretation of the Magi’s visit reveals that God exceeds human imagination, for God cannot be limited by human notions of what is ‘appropriate behavior’ for the divine. Cultural preconceptions of the Almighty, whether Jewish or Christian, are thus held up to implicit criticism. What the prophet announced to Israel pertains to all believers: “‘My ways are not your ways,’ says the Lord” (Isaiah 55).

Yet, paradoxically, the epiphanies that transcend human intuitions lead to greater productivity for the human imagination.

In the largely Gentile culture of Christendom, the brief mention of the Magi in St. Matthew’s Gospel afforded the West an open vein from which to mine imaginative legends that have enriched our culture for generations. Certainly the Middle Ages was the most fecund with various poems and portraits taking up the theme of the wise men, in the East and the West—e.g., Prudentius’s 4th century “Hymn for the Epiphany”; Byzantine relics (a golden case) dating from the 4th century in the Great Palace of Constantinople; Fra Angelico’s 15th century painting, “Adoration of the Magi”; etc. Yet, some well-known modern English-language examples come quickly to mind:
· John Henry Hopkins’s carol, “We Three Kings” (1863)
· T.S. Eliot’s poem, “The Journey of the Magi” (1927)
· Gian Carlo Menotti’s libretto, “Amahl and the Night Visitors” (1951)

Suffice to say, the authority of holy writ and the tradition emanating from the Christian experience have provided the Western imagination with a wealth of material, to which only the pedant and the stanch unbeliever are insensitive. Even the agnostic Thomas Hardy could sense the intrinsic value of Christian legends, like that of “The Oxen” at the manger. In the closing stanza, harkening back to his childhood, Hardy responds to an imagined invitation to “see the oxen kneel.” With his characteristic poetic longing he calls out: “I should go with him in the gloom, / Hoping it might be so.”

Surely the hope of wise men everywhere has been translated into some of our greatest art—which should inspire us, believers and agnostics alike, to reclaim some of the lost treasures of our religious past, in spite of anti-Western ‘social justice campaigns’ (e.g., La Raza Studies) throughout the humanities. Perhaps attending to a simple religious holiday could serve to reinvigorate a sense of our cultural past—and possibly inspire the next generation to recover the wisdom of our ancestors.

Now that’s worth a little celebration of three ancient star-seeking magi…

resolutions worth my time

2009-01-05T07:10:00.000-08:00

The arrival of 2009 provides a few moments for reflection on one's priorities, and I am no exception. Life is composed of moral and aesthetic choices that, over time, become repeated refrains of ethical pitch and emotional timbre, eventually producing various motifs in response to life-experience. In the dynamic counterpoint of human life, personal character (substance) and experiences (accidents) are eventually transposed into the music of life, be it tragic or comic, vicious or virtuous. So, what music will result my choices to this year's opportunities?

With that question in mind, I have identified a list of priorities to frame my thoughts in the New Year. These categories matter, and they deserve my continued attention.
1. Theological-philosophical inquiry (including history, politics, economics, sociology, etc.) that generates word-centered, tradition-focused thought (logos): truth.
2. Exercise and diet, with various activities such as hiking, skiing, etc.
3. Literature, music, and art (in my case, art appreciation) that presents the aesthetic proportions and balance, supplementing the sheer logic of rational thought through imaginative realization and emotional attachments (pathos): beauty.
4. Domestic chores, including clean-up and maintenance at home, whereby the family becomes an operational community, the most elementary and sacred unit within society.
5. Friendship and collegial relationships that produce an esprit de corps of voluntary relationships with a common sense of purpose (ethos): goodness.

As I shared with my two older children (7 and 8 years old) this morning, given the philosophical presupposition that "the earth is the LORD's and the fullness thereof" (Psalm 24), we are living in a world of Another's making, One to whom we are accountable for our tenancy. The psalmist questions who is worthy to approach the Creator's holy hill, and the answer includes the man of clean hands (no unjust works) and a pure heart (virtue at the core). While I recognize that the premises of an Ultimate Judge with Unquestionable Standards is unfashionable (with its implicit verdict on fallen human nature), it must be acknowledged that those first principles indisputedly guided Western civilization for nearly 1500 years--which, to my way of thinking ("tradition focused"), is a strong argument in favor of their serious consideration. And so, I ask, "How am I to respond to this moral challenge to become a man of virtue?"

Beyond merely moralizing, I wish for my children (and myself) the capacity to imagine a life that is attractive in its virtue and wholeness. But, how do I instill that desire, or how do I fan into flame that delight?

Poetry seems a good place to start, so we read Shakespeare's "Dirge" that begins with the calming assurance that death offers a peace from the strivings of life: "Fear no more the heat o' the sun...Golden lads and girls all must / As chimney-sweepers, come to dust." Reading those stanzas, we are reminded that political mischief, material cares, social classes, natural disasters, and supernatural fears all disappear with the "quiet consummation" of the grave. So, what is the point, if all "come to dust"?

The reference to human life returning to dust, apart from the Biblical allusion, reminded me of a Herbert poem put to memory: "Virtue." In it, the English divine expresses in four succinct stanzas that "all must die" save the virtuous soul. Beautiful days (1st stanza), lovely roses (2nd), and pleasant seasons (3rd) will all pass away, leaving only the eternal soul, sweet and virtuous, to live on, even after "the whole world [has] turn[ed] to coal." Or, as Boethius comments on the nature of “True Nobility” in The Consolation of Philosophy (525 A.D.):

Why boast ye, then, so loud of race and high ancestral line?
If ye behold your being's source, and God's supreme design,
None is degenerate, none base, unless by taint of sin
And cherished vice he foully stain his heavenly origin.

In such noble efforts, each of the above five categories has a part to play in the production of virtue, for as embodied beings our tripartite souls need the rationality of logos, the emotions of pathos, and the ethos of trustworthy informants, even as we live among family and friends with their relational influences on our social essence.

That should get me started right. Now, let the conversation continue...

poesis and apologia

2008-12-10T08:39:00.001-08:00

Out of touch with my readers? Mea culpa. Those few, proud, marine-like soldiers of the Erasmus-inspired educational resistance are fierce defenders of academic excellence, and I must practice what I preach by maintaining the currency of this blog: at least twice a week, which is nearly an epoch in the era of nanosecond technology.

Semper fidelis…to septem artes liberales.

As those required to read this page know, I’ve been dabbling with composing some memorial sonnets: 14-liners dedicated to our pedagogical forbearers. The first was on the prime mover of educational theory, Quintilian. So, in an effort to listen to the Muse—not merely discuss her various projects—I have leaned in to listen (however imperfectly) to her ministrations, and this poem is the result.

A SONNET FOR THE TEACHER
At century’s close, as emperors failed to hold
the grip of Pax Romana in their vice,
a man who taught the craft, whose tongue was gold,
made Institutes a Western way precise.
Beginning with the nature of a child,
both capable and culpable at heart,
this master taught restraint upon the wild
animal that must be tamed by art.
Unlike the beast, whose instinct secures life,
man’s sole hope survives within the term
defined—precise and perspicacious knife
whose eloquence divides us from the worm.
Through imitation, noble and sublime,
Quintilian serves as Mentor for our time.

mea culpa

2008-12-10T08:39:00.000-08:00

Out of touch with my readers? Mea culpa. Those few, proud, marine-like soldiers of the Erasmus-inspired educational resistance are fierce defenders of academic excellence, and I must practice what I preach, even if the blogosphere doesn’t give a damn.

Semper fidelis…to septem artes liberales.

As those required to read this page know, I’ve been dabbling with composing some memorial sonnets: 14-liners dedicated to our pedagogical forbearers. The first was on the prime mover of educational theory, Quintilian. So, in an effort to listen to the Muse—not merely discuss her various projects—I have leaned in to listen (however imperfectly) to her ministrations, and this poem is the result.

A SONNET FOR THE TEACHER
At century’s close, as emperors failed to hold
the grip of Pax Romana in their vice,
a man who taught the craft, whose tongue was gold,
made Institutes a Western way precise.
Beginning with the nature of a child,
both capable and culpable at heart,
this master taught restraint upon the wild
animal that must be tamed by art.
Unlike the beast, whose instinct secures life,
man’s sole hope survives within the term
defined—precise and perspicacious knife
whose eloquence divides us from the worm.
Through imitation, noble and sublime,
Quintilian serves as Mentor for our time.

community organizing and the soul writ large

2008-11-22T05:13:00.000-08:00

As we await the the much-promised Change of the new administration, many are preparing their arguments for specific actions in education. Commentator Paul Gasbarra from Public Agenda (a non-partisan group committed to disseminating essential information on public opinion and policy making) penned an open letter to President-elect Obama. His remarks are steeped in the research program of Public Agenda, covering opinion and perception of American education from various constituencies--e.g., teachers, parents, administrators. The data and recommendations are compelling, and his conclusion, based on a 2007 summer consortium of philanthropists and community-based organizations (Obama's long suit), was a particularly cogent summary of the current state of affairs: "[It] would be difficult for a school to remain unhealthy in a healthy community and likewise a healthy school would not last long in an unhealthy community."

If, as the Philosopher has said, the community (polis) is the soul writ large, then we must pay heed to the civic virtues that would produce these much-needed healthy communities.

the eXperts have been X’d

2008-11-16T13:33:00.000-08:00

For those who have ever witnessed WB’s “The Jamie Kennedy Experiment” (2002-2004)—or its predecessor Allen Funt’s “Candid Camera”—it will come as no surprise that being pranked or “punk’d” is, for some, a most provocative form of entertainment. This week a string of nationally-broadcast hoaxes were perpetrated on two of the country’s largest media outlets.

First, MSNBC got pranked when someone claiming to be a John McCain advisor (a.k.a. Martin Eisenstadt at The Harding Institute for Freedom and Democracy) informed the cable network that Sarah Palin mistakenly thought Africa was a country, not a continent. The November 13th story from the Associated Press (David Bauder) has made the web-circuit and caused more than a little embarrassment to the news network that claims to be “The Place for Politics.” And, according to a New York Times story, MSNBC isn’t the first to fall for Eisenstadt’s ruses. (Note: the Harding Institute is an elaborate brain-child, not an actual think-tank.)

Then, the Grey Lady was caught with her skirts all aflutter when a 14-page “special edition” mimicry of The New York Times (complete with a corresponding webpage) was offered to Wednesday morning commuters in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, and D.C. 1.2 million of these punk’d papers were distributed, free of charge—a publicity stunt designed, John Lennon-style, to imagine a better world under Obama. This utopian glimpse into the future (the issue was dated July 4, 2009) included headlines from “Iraq War Ends” to “National Health Insurance Act Passes” to “Court Indicts Bush on High Treason Charge.” According to the Times, a group known as the “Yes Men” have taken credit for the hijinks.

Roll over Sir Thomas More, the next generation of Utopian dreamers have just gone to press—and pranked the big boys at their own game.

an ethically-challenged professorate

2008-11-07T08:36:00.000-08:00

The other article I alluded to earlier this week is located in FIRST THINGS, that journal which unabashedly explores the intersection of religion and public life. The author, Gilbert Meilaender, is a professor of Christian ethics at Valparaiso, and his essay is a review of Stanley Fish’s most recent book, entitled Save the World on Your Own Time (Oxford, 2008).

The review essay is available online: http://www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=6383.

As one of the most distinguished Milton scholars and legal theorists of our age, Fish’s interest in the politics of campus is nothing new, and his topic de jure is the increasingly shameless partisanship of the college classroom. In an effort to ameliorate the sometimes rancorous politicization of the university, Fish argues that higher education must refocus its essential mission: the dissemination of knowledge and the transmission of intellectual skills of inquiry. That’s all, nothing more or less.

Meilaender, who has been serving on the President’s Council on Bioethics since 2002, has a few thoughts of his own concerning ethical questions that serve as means to political ends. Surely the debates over stem-cell research and end-of-life issues have prompted much thought from the professor turned policy analyst, but there are orders of magnitude between a president’s advisory counsel of experts and an undergraduate classroom. And, Meilaender shows us that “the big issues” dare not be presented simplistically (and answered conclusively) in the undergraduate classroom, for that would preclude the essential exploration of the historic debates of philosophy, science, the humanities, etc., all of which offer context and precedents for today’s most pressing concerns.

Following Fish, Meilaender argues that we must reappraise our understanding of the college curriculum, in order to successfully limit our scope to teaching about moral knowledge—i.e., good and evil—not attempting to conform our student’s moral lives to the zeitgeist of 21st century Academe. Whatever the shelf-life of today’s (often utopian) academic vision of the good life, it does not provide students with the essential intellectual skills of analysis and discernment. In effect, Fish and Meilaender are claiming that ideologically-driven scholars who use their disciplinary expertise as bully pulpits are in breech of contract, violating their own professional ethics.

Perhaps law schools nationwide should consider this trend among college professors as a case study at the intersection of corporate law and professional ethics. Surely Stanley Fish is right to encourage the professorate to distinguish between professional and amateur interests. Saving the world is a marvelous occupation, if you can manage it. But, most inhabitants of the ivory tower don’t have the requisite omniscience for the job.

decision 2008 dissidents

2008-11-05T10:39:00.000-08:00

In the wake of the presidential decision of 2008, many of my conservative friends have taken to quoting Caesar (via Plutarch), claiming that “The die has been cast” and the future of America is ultimately imperiled.

I tend to resist that form of hyperbole, hoping that a slower-moving government of checks and balances will frustrate any grand schemes by an Obama administration to import a socialist agenda of federal bureaucrats—though I worry about the prospect of adding more social engineers to the federal bench, as far up as the Supreme Court.

However, I take offense at the right-end of the spectrum when they start singing that refrain borrowed from the disenchanted Left, following G.W. Bush’s ascendency to the Oval Office in 2000: “I’m leaving America and immigrating to _______!” (Fill in the blank with the progressive European state of your choice.) When I hear people from the right exclaiming that they are so upset with Obama’s election that they’re going to leave the country (e.g., Stephen Baldwin), I want to strongly denounce them as hypocrites who have, in many cases, criticized the Susan Sarandons and Alec Baldwins of the world. What’s more, they fail to properly conceive of our democratic republic, with its ebb and flow of a political dialectic, and they perpetuate the cultural warring of sound bytes and stereotyping rather than advancing helpful suggestions for prudently responding to the new political reality: Democratic-controlled executive and legislative branches—for at least two years.

By contrast, Michael Novak, writing for National Review Online, has a more measured, winsome approach to accepting the new administration’s election within the broader scheme of American government. (See "We Have a New President," NRO, November 5, 2008.)

Mr. Novak is quick to explore a few essential (philosophical) differences with Obama, but he does not come off sounding like so many sour grapes. And, I sense that such a reasoned and rhetorically sensitive approach is far more persuasive in the long run.

compassionately concerned

2008-11-04T09:14:00.000-08:00

I’ve run across two article of significance, in the past two weeks. (Clearly I’m not keeping up with this blog, or I’d have posted them sooner.) The first is a historical inquiry on the notion of “compassion.” The author, Clifford Orwin, is a professor of political science from the University of Toronto and a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution (Stanford).

In the article, entitled "How an Emotion Became a Virtue," Orwin outlines the transformation (transmogrification?) of a natural emotion into a secular virtue, locating the central figures of this revolution as Montesquieu and Rousseau. With succinct erudition, Orwin’s history provides a disturbing diagnosis of our contemporary fascination with compassion, in that we have displaced the traditional religious virtue of charity in favor of a secular, naturalistic (animal) emotion subject to the whims and distortions of an effusive culture.

As we become more emotional and less rational in our public discourse, we should not be surprised to see notions such as compassion, tolerance, and sensitivity rise to the level of dogmatic assertions in public life. Who can counter an appeal to compassion?

Orwin offers a compelling answer to the question—and one that will help recover a healthier civic order based on the command of first principles.

Myrdal's morality

2008-10-17T09:46:00.000-07:00

Three years before America entered World War II, a world-renowned Swedish economist, Gunnar Myrdal, accepted the invitation of the Carnegie Foundation to conduct a large-scale study of race relations in America. The result was a 1500-page volume entitled An American Dilemma, published in 1944 to the acclaim of most members of the Academy. The study's greatest influence would be felt in political efforts to desegregate--e.g., Myrdal's report was the primary sociological data offered in support of Brown v. Board of Education (1954).

Myrdal's "dilemma" juxtaposed the American creed of equality and justice with the reality of racial segregation and bigotry, while calling for the dramatic exercise of social planning that would bring an end to the "conspicuous scandal" of American segregation. Myrdal's optimistic outlook explored the economic and social causes of racism from a multitude of perspectives, while emphasizing the underlying moral questions that had been carefully avoided in previous sociological research. Myrdal claimed that sociology could not be value-free but was, by definition, a morally-charged exploration of society's values and principles.

For twenty years, Myrdal's report dominated the discourse on race relations in the American political process, until the more radical elements of the 1960s civil rights movement began favoring Black Power over Myrdal's description of "a white pathology." The difference between the Dilemma hypothesis and the empowerment project were diametric positions on the locus of political power presupposed as the remedy to a cultural disease: Myrdal argued that white Americans must be persuaded to overcome their moral apathy by offering African-Americans a rightful seat at the political table; whereas, Black Power advocates claimed that African-American rights would only be obtained by political force.

While Myrdal argued for reinstating moral questions at the heart of sociological research, he was unable to reinvigorate the tradition of moral philosophy, for the modern university had long since forsaken the central purpose of humanistic inquiry: the moral development and flourishing of mankind. By mid-century, there were few if any intellectual resources available to the social sciences to explore and explain the moral difficulties of a society that had strayed from its highest ideals. Racism was wrong, but who could say why with reference to some universal principle or transcendent ideal?

Today, as concerned citizens like Bill Cosby argue for the moral reclamation of inner city neighborhoods--where violence, substance abuse, and broken families are the order of the day--we are again faced with moral statements concerning reality. Cosby calls for a renewed form of black empowerment, where African-Americans take ownership for their neighborhoods and the culture of the street, re-energizing the individual and community by denouncing moral failure and proclaiming the inherent goodness of moral virtue.

Mr. Myrdal's invocation of a morally-weighted sociology continues to demand redress, for it is insufficient to describe economic and political causes without an understanding of the deeper moral violations of our society. Unless we consider the moral philosophy beneath our political decisions, we will be tempted to repeat our mistakes in some other time and place, against some other scapegoat. Myrdal was right in noting The American Dilemma. Yet, he may have been unable to see the human condition that produced that dilemma.

democracy and demagoguery (or truisms and tyrants)

2008-10-07T11:24:00.000-07:00

Some of my closest friends and family have been complaining that the media is politically biased in their coverage of the presidential campaign. At first, I yawned at the generic accusation that seems such a conservative cliché—i.e., America’s mass media leans to the left.

Then I began “viewing the game tapes,” as Gibson, Couric, and the ladies from The View got in on the action. Eventually, I started to understand how the stilted sound bytes could grate on conservative nerves, as probing questions quickly shifted to political posturing, whereby interviewers feigned journalistic neutrality while hoping to elicit an unscripted moment that would effectively undermine the Republican ticket.

So, I’m beginning to understand why my conservative friends are becoming so enraged. They are concerned that the media bias will swing the election toward a Democratically-controlled Congress and White House.

At this point, I’m taking a more Stoic stance to the media’s coverage of the presidential race: demagoguery is now the rule in 21st century American politics. There is little that can be done to change the more overt liberal bias of the major networks. Catering to the least common intellectual denominator in the electorate, candidates have succumbed to the media’s format and protocols for discussing public policy matters, as they transform their political platforms into tasty byte-sized morsels that whet the appetite without nourishing the mind—let alone the soul.

Today’s Top Ten Truisms--

Democrats
1. Bush did it—i.e., eight years is enough.
2. Bush lied and McCain believed him—e.g., WMDs in Iraq.
3. The rich keep getting richer, and it’s time to share the wealth—i.e., redistribution through taxation.
4. Universal medical coverage and social security must be offered to every American.
5. The current economic crisis is the result of unchecked greed on Wall Street (read: Republicans like Cheney).
6. We must improve public education through expanded offerings, from pre-school to college, for every American.
7. Climate change is “one of the greatest moral challenges of our generation.”
8. Cut the pork.
9. Discrimination and civil rights issues (like hate crimes) are ongoing—i.e., “we have more work to do.”
10. We must end the war in Iraq.

Republicans
1. “Reform Washington to regain the trust of taxpayers” and balance the budget by 2013.
2. The Petraeus Surge worked.
3. Support small businesses and reduce taxes, especially on gas—e.g., imported sugar-based ethanol.
4. Reform health care to lower costs.
5. Job growth will revitalize the economy.
6. Americans should be “pro-choice” in deciding where to send their children to public school—i.e., vouchers, charters, etc.
7. Drill, baby, drill.
8. Cut the pork.
9. Home ownership means investment in the neighborhood.
10. We must win the war in Iraq.

The challenge, as I see it, is to produce more than presidential debates. We need to produce various public venues—from schools and civic organizations to churches and town-halls—where vigorous, civil, neighborhood debates begin to compete with TV and the movies: a revitalization of old-fashioned entertainment á la the public forum. These ‘debating places’ would need a code of conduct that included civil forms of discourse, detailed presentation of the evidence (with full disclosure), essential representation of opposing points of view (the dialectic), and the underlying notion that political life requires compromise, not a winner-takes-all mentality. If such discourse entered into the life of our neighborhoods and towns, with an increasing commitment to civic literacy—i.e., knowing something of the central issues and various perspectives—Americans might have a chance at reversing the trend toward demagoguery.

Otherwise, I fear we are on the political path to what Plato deemed democracy’s natural successor: tyranny.

a post-mortem on public oratory

2008-09-26T19:41:00.000-07:00

In this presidential election season, we are once again invited to pay close attention to the rhetorical skill of the candidates who seek to lead the free world into the next decade. McCain’s appeal to a valiant service record and his “Country First” motto lean heavily on the patriotic inclination of prospective voters, while Obama strives to rally his base and the undecided middle with the claim that a “Vote for Change” is essential for Americans to experience economic recovery through liberal political acumen. Yet, both candidates are constrained by one ultimate limitation: the media sound byte.

Whereas in years past extended oratorical arguments were expected as the candidates’ essential credential (not to mention a popular form of entertainment), today we prefer our news-cycle to provide us up-to-the-minute coverage of the race with snippets of speeches that "capture the candidate's essence." While our predecessors seemed to take pleasure in lengthy political discourse—consider the 3 hours devoted to the Lincoln-Douglass senatorial race of 1858—today’s adult audience is understood to be intellectually hyperactive and suffering from a political pathology: Attention Deficit for Honest Debate (ADHD).

When an “in-depth” portion of the nightly news lasts a mere 120 seconds, we should not expect the viewing audience to possess any more than a cursory understanding of the topic de jour. Such abridgment leads TV viewers and web surfers to know just enough to leave them dangerously uninformed. And, if that is true of the major networks’ synopsis of JAMA’s latest findings on cell phone usage and brain tumors (don’t worry, the research is still indeterminate!), then we can guess how sketchy the electorate’s understanding of presidential platforms, where complex foreign and domestic policies are distilled into eight-second sound bytes and pithy mantras!
And, that leads me to mention an interesting scholarly tome from Oxford University Press, Elvin T. Lim’s The Anti-Intellectual Presidency: the Decline of Presidential Rhetoric from George Washington to George W. Bush (2008). A review by John McWhorter of the Manhattan Institute outlines the salience of Lim’s analysis of presidential rhetoric: America’s chief executives have been losing intellectual gravitas for generations. As Lim surveys presidential public speech from the founding to the contemporary moment, he identifies a gradual and definitive departure from logical argument, in favor of pathos (emotional appeals). Comparing 19th and early 20th century presidential oratory (e.g., Lincoln, Wilson) with the register of speech adopted by post-WW2 presidents, Lim clearly demonstrates a dumbing-down of the language, “the increasing substitution of arguments with applause-rendering platitudes, partisan punch lines and emotional and human interest appeals.” Today’s candidates are appealing to a less attentive, more sentimental audience. In effect, Americans are demanding plain-spoken, heart-warming presentations from prospective commanders-in-chief. “Tell us a story and make it good, because we want to be moved. And, if you can’t compete with the movies, then why should we bother…?”

Such is the all-too-common attitude toward public speech. So, what does such decay in political rhetoric mean to this year’s election, let alone our country’s future? Surely a reinvigoration of American public life requires the renewal of a civic grammar which enables us to discuss matters of substance with insight and eloquence.

But, who has time for that in the age of the Network Minute?

classical intuitions and contemporary exhaustion

2008-09-23T11:57:00.000-07:00

The precision, vision, and beauty of excellent writing far exceeds the "output" of the average journalist or academic (this author included). What's more, there is something intrinsically attractive to the works of outstanding authors. Whatever the Academy says in its efforts to deconstruct "the Canon," great works last for a reason--even if we are no longer able to articulate the reason.

That reminds me of an incredible essay for City Journal by Jonathan Rose: "The Classics in the Slums" (Autumn 2004). Rose makes a truly democratic argument for the Great Books, which is seldom mentioned today: the people clamored for them! Rose presents a myriad of evidence for 19th century demand from common, blue-collar workers, who promoted public and guild-sponsored libraries or purchased inexpensive "Everyman" copies of classic novels, just to have access to the wider world of the imagination. These commoners wanted the best books because they recognized the soul-nurturing properties of such literature.

Today presents a different problem: the common man is too distracted watching TV or surfing the web (with occasional reading of hypertext) to participate in a sustained encounter with literature. (To explore this phenomena, see the 2004 and 2007 "reading reports" of the National Endowment for the Arts.) Our age has, perhaps, a more difficult challenge than the poverty of 19th century slums, where at least they knew what was needed to enrich their lives.

Paradoxically, today's developed world bears witness to unprecedented wealth and the largest middle class in history, while the members of that class often fail to recognize the value of their historic opportunity for leisure. The consumerism and entertainment culture that have arisen from America's middle class have cheapened the historical understanding of leisure, which was seen as a form of 'restful productivity' aimed at bettering society.

The bourgeoisie notion of 'leisure' for personal growth and thoughtful civic engagement has fallen on hard times, though such a Victorian understanding still seems a worthy end. Surely our ancestors understood the value of something we have since lost. Put another way, our materially-impoverished forbearers possessed more humane intuitions than their middle class progeny can even imagine.

writing for (a) living

2008-09-23T11:08:00.000-07:00

My apologies, students. 'Tis true: I have not posted anything for more than 10 days, and that is an oversight on my part. Getting busy with the beginning of the term, I have let the Blog slip, leaving you (my dedicated student-readers) with nothing on which to comment... For shame!

Ironically, yesterday's Chronicle of Higher Education contained an article concerning the professorate's challenge: to publish in the competitive marketplace of the academic press.

The article detailed a budding new cottage industry of lay-therapists, whose purpose is to coach struggling professors into becoming prolific writers, one day at a time. One of the coaches interviewed sang a clear, albeit gentle refrain: "Write something every day." That's an appropriate reminder for this professor and his students, even as we continue to explore the Hellenistic tradition of 'regular writers' and pedagogues, from Isocrates through Quintillian.

In the spirit of the antique tradition, let's remember that good writing is derived from mimesis (imitation). In other words, we must read well in order to acquire the style necessary to write well.

Ask yourself, "What have I read lately that poses insightful thoughts on ordinary topics?" You'll probably discover, in time, that you lean on a dozen or more consistent informants whose writing inspires you to write--see my "bibliogravitas" list, and suggest a few "weighty books" from your own experience. The more you read, the more you will intuitively grasp the truth of Quintilian's tripartite characterization of good writing as correct, perspicacious, and eloquent.

remembering the mourning

2008-09-12T12:22:00.000-07:00

On the seventh anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, we are reminded of the courage and self-sacrifice that Americans are capable of, in times of crisis. The New York Times has a webpage dedicated to "Portraits of Grief" that commemorates the ordinary lives of extraodinary people:

http://www.nytimes.com/pages/national/portraits/index.html

A few glimpses of such portraits remind us that in moments of national catastrophe, heroism surfaces--in spite of educational efforts that often render the past irrelevant and heroes obsolete. After the Towers fell, I recall the service and dedication of many of my good neighbors: New Yorkers, their fellow Americans, and even international relief workers who stood in solidarity with the people of New York City. But, I also recall the difficulty with which people sought to honor the dead with words—at least with public words to comfort survivors and console the nation.

In the antique world, a central feature of educating the young was the remembrance of past heroes. The panegyric offered a public model of the best language used to praise the best citizens at the hour of death—eulogies which served as both a formal rhetorical exercise and a reminder of society's great ones. The Gettysburg Address might be the closest we have to an American panegyric, one which still speaks the language of heroism and identifies the transcendent reach of human effort.

So, when we consider the fallen comrades of FDNY or NYPD (and several other agencies of public service), why do we find it difficult to produce extended rhetorical encomiums in honor of our heroes? On the first anniversary of 9/11, periods of silence were observed to remember the horrors of the attack and the loss of life, each person observing a hallowed moment, in his or her own way. In some cases, the Gettysburg Address was recited, in lieu of a contemporary panegyric. But, Bush and Giuliani did not attempt to hallow the ground with their words, as Lincoln had done at the battlefield in Pennsylvania.

Sure, it’s a different time and place, but what is lost when we no longer promote heroes with our words? If we are more interested in exhuming sordid details from the lives of founding fathers and secular saints than erecting civic pedestals to American heroes, we should not be surprised when the next generation cynically avoids public service—the natural consequence of society's deficient imagination, a loss of vision.

I remember that bright fall Tuesday, September 11, 2001. And, I recall the sense that we were united in purpose and committed to serving one another in the hour of need.

What I need now, what we all need are the words to express the loss of our loved ones and the purpose derived from fire that turned commoners into heroes.

in whom do we trust?

2008-09-09T09:01:00.000-07:00

Following the work of Michael Polanyi and others, I acknowledge that anytime we seek knowledge we are involved in the act of believing. That is, to acquire knowledge requires that we first trust certain sources of information and those providing the skill of interpretation of information. As I recently heard a philosopher opine, "There is no such place as an epistemological Switzerland." In other words, everyone must stand somewhere, to begin the process of knowing.

In that process, the educational enterprise typically assumes the trustworthiness of the teacher and his sources, though that assumption can be spurious (e.g., Mao's re-education camps). Thus, by definition education involves belief that precedes knowledge, an act of cognitive faith leading to the exercise of the intellect. Even so, as knowledge increases the learner is enabled to critique his prior beliefs (e.g., mastering teacher-chosen definitions of vocabulary leads to understanding the multiple connotations of words) and thus advance knowledge--moving beyond the teacher's conception of reality.

But, to begin, no one stands apart from the received tradition of knowledge as transmitted through language, history, and culture. We stand atop the shoulders of giants.

In that spirit, I was busily identifying additional blogs and organizations worth my readers' attention. Of course, by recommending these sites, I am offering them to you as trustworthy (some more than others), significant sources of information on education, reporting, and religion. In nearly every case, the sources in the far right column have offered me insight, at some point in my inquiries with education, public policy, research, the liberal arts, poetry, etc.

Now, your job is to investigate these sources for yourself, to determine if my appraisal merits your attention. Then, inasmuch as you and I continue the Great Conversation, we must participate in the dialectic formulation of knowledge (being) in order to present an eloquent vision for the future (becoming). Philosophers and orators are thus united, just as Martianus Capella (5th century A.D.) wed Mercury to Philology, their offspring being the Seven Liberal Arts.

academic junkets and endangered species

2008-09-02T13:37:00.000-07:00

As a faculty member of a small liberal arts college, I have witnessed the ebb and flow of institutional life: leadership transitions, financial crises, and other forms of academic upheaval. As I reflect upon these all-too-ordinary undulations of college life, I firmly believe that the institutional success of the American academy depends upon charting a course of genuine excellence on a sea of academic mediocrity and social anti-intellectualism. Our endeavor requires the utmost attention to the intellectual arts and sciences, that we might skillfully navigate today’s challenges by drawing upon the time-tested wisdom of our intellectual predecessors.

Today higher education is increasingly beleaguered by a tempest of activity, ostensibly designed to make the college experience more accessible to students. I question the wisdom of such changes inasmuch as they obscure the view of our destination: a liberally educated person steeped in the historic traditions of philosophy, literature, science, and art (cf. John Henry Newman’s The Idea of a University).

Recognizing that deeper social currents have produced institutional drift throughout higher education, I would resist the various tendencies to dilute the traditional strengths of the academy—e.g., increased emphasis on extra-curricular activities at the expense of the central disciplines; the politicization of the faculty whereby the college classroom becomes just another venue for political speech, rather than rigorous scholarship; the ever-present temptation to advance celebrity causes in search of (much needed) endowments, at the expense of the overall liberal arts project.

Though perhaps a quixotic desire to see the Academy do that which she was commissioned to do, I believe that the “wisdom of many counselors” and a determined search for truth in the spirit of the medieval schoolman (whatever their faults) would offer us the best hope for higher education. When ideas are once again recognized as the transcendent reality beyond nature, against which our best approximations must be evaluated, it will then be possible to recover the search for knowledge that leads to wisdom.

By contrast, the radical changes that have altered the American university over the past half century are producing destructive results: the price for the philosophical turn of our forbearers (cf. Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind). To recover our purpose, we must return to the essential disciplines of scholarship—i.e., collegial deliberation, rigorous self-criticism, humility, the search for truth, etc.

If a penetrating reassessment is not made, it is likely that the excellence of our enterprise will be lost by the slow drift of its intellectual purpose. Students will begin to recognize the lowering (or absence) of academic standards, and our reputation will receive its just reward: infamy. In the midst of such change, it will become increasingly difficult to interest the brightest young people, as an academic career becomes ever less attractive to the truly intellectual minds of the next generation.

As with religious faith, the intellectual enterprise is always but one generation from extinction. If the legacy of civilization is not passed to the next generation, it will be lost forever.

God have mercy on us.

good eats for a space odyssey

2008-08-29T12:25:00.000-07:00

As the college semester gets underway, I am reminded of the ideal to which I aspire: to develop students' fluency in the Great Conversation. And, I recognize my own deficiencies even as I strive to introduce students to the Empyrean of great orators and philosophers.

To prepare students with adequate provisions for the journey, I select trusted textual sources, choose effective classroom exercises, and compile (and polish!) lecture notes--all essential ingredients. But, there’s also need of a little spice and an occasional innovation, which is where this blog gets folded into my pedagogical recipe.

In hopes of eliciting some thoughtful conversations with my students, I have begun musing on various topics under the massive banner of liberal arts education. Though I will require comments and postings from my students initially, I hope that this blog will eventually become a way-station of interest and a source of inspiration for those who have embarked on the educational voyage which began with those early travelers of antiquity. Their quest--to know the world and their place in it--launched more ships than Helen's visage.

So, purpose: "beginning with the end in mind." Just as modern business planners sell it (cf. Stephen Covey) and ancient philosophers debate it (cf. Aristotle’s telos), educators promote a philosophical business by creatively transmitting the “best that has been thought and said” from the Tradition to the contemporary generation, thus furthering a cultural legacy.

But, how can I responsibly impart that vast treasury of civilizational wealth?

As a professor of education and English, I spend hours preparing lectures on the historical and philosophical tributaries that have shaped our educational courses. But then, as is so often the case, a poet will capture the essence of my prosaic efforts with just the right metaphor—one that seems to hold both here and there, avoiding the either/or conundrum—for the poet seems far more capable of maintaining the balance of reality, sustaining the dynamic tension between the One and the many, being and becoming, knowing and believing, etc. As literary critic Cleanth Brooks has pointed out, “paradoxes spring from the very nature of the poet’s language: it is a language in which the connotations play as great a part as the denotations” (The Well Wrought Urn 8).

I recently discovered Seamus Heaney’s “Alphabets” (from The Haw Lantern, 1987), a poetic work which distills the reality of pedagogy in a lively liquor far more potent than my best brew. As the poem’s narrator concludes his educational journey--from home through a classical education into the wider world--he obtains the vantage of an astronaut propelled to the heavens by careful language that has produced philosophical mastery:

Yet shape-note language, absolute on air
As Constantine’s sky-lettered IN HOC SIGNO
Can still command him; or the necromancer

Who would hang from the domed ceiling of his house
A figure of the world with colours in it
So that the figure of the universe
And ‘not just single things’ would meet his sight

When he walked abroad…

Now, those are the provisions I’m striving to make for my students, as they prepare for life's odyssey.

NYC hosts Hirsch

2008-08-26T13:21:00.000-07:00

For those interested in measuring the efficacy of specific, systematic curricula in public schools, there's good news in Gotham: Chancellor Joel Klein has launched the Core Knowledge curriculum--designed by E.D. Hirsch, Jr. of Cultural Literacy fame--in 10 NYC public schools.

Check out the specifics in The New York Times article.

And, don't forget to stick with Flypaper updates from the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, if you're interested in education reform.

circus rhetoric

2008-08-26T08:46:00.000-07:00

The September issue of The Atlantic Monthly contains an article by James Fallows entitled "Rhetorical Questions." Of course, given my penchant for rhetoric, I had to investigate the observations and thoughts of an experienced politico (Fallows served as Jimmy Carter’s speech-writer) and seasoned journalist. (Check out Fallows’s Atlantic blog for DNC convention coverage—and much more.)

Fallows observes that this year’s national televised debates between the candidates (of both parties) have a “carnival” atmosphere, with questions and exercises aimed at producing sensational coverage—e.g., “Raise your hand if you’ve owned a gun.” As the liberally-disposed Fallows sees it, the media’s objective is obvious: catch the candidates’ gaffes to get a network's sound bytes replayed on its competitors' news-feed—a blog-style game between the major news outlets, where the score is kept in terms of an organization’s number of “hits.” A quote from Todd Gitlin of Columbia’s school of journalism (see Gitlin’s posts on TPMCafe) underscores this media tendency: “The goal is to have clips on other people’s shows.”

Having watched the entire series of presidential debates (26 Democratic, 21 Republican), Fallows notes that the line of questioning was consistently veering into sensational territory, seeking more to embarrass the candidates than to discern their suitability for the Oval Office. Fallows’s list of “the Five Questions that Should Never Be Asked” includes:
1. The will you pledge tonight question, which forces candidates to make promises that no one is capable of fulfilling—e.g., guarantee that Iran will not develop a nuclear bomb
2. The gotcha question, involving changes of policy—i.e., flip-flopping.
3. The loaded hypothetical question, where an imagined catastrophe involves the deepest level of thought, to be compressed into a 30-second response—e.g., “If Israel concluded that Iran’s nuclear capability threatened Israel’s security, would Israel be justified in launching an attack on Iran?”
4. The raise your hand question—see the gun question above
5. The lightning round, which involves concentrating deep analysis in an itty-bitty sound byte

In each case, Fallows roundly rebukes the debate moderators for stooping to this level of rhetorical praxis. By painting candidates into a corner with over-simplified questions and scenarios, video journalism presents an abridged version of the much deeper political reality, compressed into marketable clips for dissemination “on the wire.”

Writing more than 50 years ago, Richard Weaver critiqued the influence of mass media in a chapter from Ideas Have Consequences. Weaver expressed deep concern over what he termed “The Great Stereopticon,” by which modern journalism tends to corrupt the essential discourse of a healthy nation, as it “minimizes discussion…to evoke stock responses of approbation or disapprobation.” Furthermore, argued Weaver, there is a “strong pressure to distort in the interest of holding attention…to exaggerate and to color beyond necessity.” While Weaver is certainly not the first to note the effect of such propaganda (he cites Socrates’ dialogue with Protagoras), he is prescient in identifying the language-corrupting influence of mass media, years before TV became the ubiquitous source of news for the American electorate.

For the sake of our democratic republic and the next generation, educators must develop a stronger critique of mass media and its destructive influences on the intellectual and emotional maturity of our people. Otherwise, as Plato predicted, democracy will devolve into tyranny—even as the tyranny presents itself as another form of entertainment.

Bread and circuses, anyone?

higher ends for higher education

2008-08-20T18:17:00.000-07:00

Higher education in America began (as it did in England, at Oxford and Cambridge) with an explicit mandate to train the next generation of society's most educated professional class: the clergy. Harvard (1636), Yale (1701), and Princeton (1746) were successively founded to revive the traditional principle of religious education that was believed to have been compromised by their predecessors.

(Note: along with the Latin "Light and Truth," the Yale shield above incorporates a Hebrew inscription concerning discernment of God's truth.)

Today those illustrious institutions no longer claim their divinity schools as their primary contribution to society, which reflects a sustained movement of America's common religious tradition (pan-Protestantism) to the margins.

In the September issue of First Things, editor Joseph Bottom outlines "The Death of Protestant America," rendering the century-long marginalization of the religious mainstream. Bottom's obituary for the Mainline denominations (Episcopalian, Methodist, Lutheran) concludes that the demise of a "common faith" has the additional effect of undermining our moral vocabulary.

A closer look at the sociological influences of religion helps to explain some of our deeper cultural differences--e.g., the Culture Wars--once we acknowledge the symbiotic relationship between religious practice and moral vocabulary, between cult and culture. Though Americans long to be "spiritual," moral theory and practice are not derived from generic abstractions (like much of academic discourse).

By their essence and status, our institutions of higher education are responsible for "purifying the words of the tribe," unless they fail to distinguish the existence of dross.

educational vision and metaphysics

2008-08-18T17:37:00.000-07:00

Two days ago, the New York Post ran an article from Charles Murray ("Leave This Child Behind"), in which he expounded on the need to renew vocational education, now Career and Technical Education (CTE), in an effort to reach disaffected students.

Murray defines his educational ideal as the point "when our children spend their working lives doing something that gives them satisfaction."

Point well taken. Human beings thrive when they sense their work has some deeper purpose, beyond playing the part of a trained monkey: "Will work for peanuts." Or, consider the plight of the prisoner forced to move piles of earth from one location to the next and back again. Truly, such a "life's work" seems pointless.

However, Murray confuses means with ends. For an individual to have purpose--to be satisfied with one's work--requires (with rare exception) society to recognize the intrinsic value of a vocation (literally, "calling"), to which an individual can respond. There is nothing low or demeaning about "blue-collar work," except as we (society) make it so, when we fail to dignify the essential efforts of plumbers, garbage collectors, mass transit conductors, etc.

On this topic, Richard Weaver has a remarkably prescient chapter in Ideas Have Consequences (U. Chicago, 1948), which outlines the decline of work's dignity in direct relation to our the increase of egotistic (selfish) ends. "Egotism and Art" surveys everything from the tradesman to the musician, demonstrating that most have lost their bearings, even as the center fails to hold...

A resurgence of "vocational training" will not save our educational establishment--that has been tried before, cf. David Snedden (ca. 1915). At the same time, I am a strong advocate for the renewal of guilds and craftsmanship--and any other form of redefining work in terms of transcendent purposes.

How does Consequential and Transcendent Education (CTE) sound?

Phelpsian feat

2008-08-16T20:22:00.000-07:00

On the other side of the world, Michael Phelps has just broken Mark Spitz's 1972 record of the most gold medals won in a single Olympic games (Spitz won 7). The "Phelpsian feat" claimed eight (8) gold medals in eight consecutive swimming events. His last medal was earned with the assistance of his teammates, in the men's 400 meter relay.

We certainly have no difficulty recognizing the excellence of an athlete whose talent and dedication result in a demonstration of genuine physical artistry. And, in the case of many Olympic events, the time, weight, or distance provide an absolute measure of achievement.

Regardless of our society's commitment to egalitarian principles, we are awed by the sheer physical superiority of Olympic athletes--they represent the pinnacle of human physical achievement. What, then, would it take for America to acknowledge and celebrate the existence of intellectual excellence--perhaps even award gold-medal recognition to our brightest academic athletes?

examination of Murray's model

2008-08-15T10:46:00.001-07:00

A colleague forwarded a Wall Street Journal opinion-piece from the well-known (and frequently maligned) public policy analyst Charles Murray, of Bell Curve fame.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121858688764535107.html

Murray argues for the replacement of our current model of higher education--one where everyone passes through the requirements of general education, only to complete a B.A. (in the liberal arts tradition) with few specific competencies to begin the inevitable apprenticeship of a real-world career.

To replace the current system, Murray proposes a nationally-recognized certification examination analogous to that given prospective Certified Public Accountants. With domain-specific tests of knowledge, Murray believes that college graduates (and their almae matres) could be measured by a common metric for each content area or major, be it social work, European history, microbiology, or economics.

While undergraduate studies and the public defense of a student's expertise emerged with the birth of the European university (ca. 12th century), the role of standardized examinations in liberal arts education is a relatively recent phenomena, dating back to the Georgian period of English history (18th century). However, standardized, mass-produced tests like those of ETS and the College Board are a 20th century invention, aimed at sorting the largest entering cohort of college students in world history: the federally-funded GIs returning from World War 2.

As we enter the 21st century, we must reassess our understanding of post-secondary education, if we are to design appropriate examinations that measure the "utility" of the liberal arts. Murray offers us some thoughtful suggestions to that end, without offering an essential definition of artes liberales.

Murray proposes a pragmatic approach, to be sure, but one that lacks the necessary dialectic concerning the essence of education. "Teaching to the test" comes to mind. And, I am unconvinced that today' most prestigious testing agencies could effectively produce the essential definition any more than Murray.

style and substance

2008-08-15T09:35:00.000-07:00

As the arrival date for a new batch of college freshmen approaches, I anticipate presenting “the rules of writing” to these eager novices. Truth be told, in many ways I am still an amateur—or at least I sense my inadequacy as a writer, let alone a teacher of writing. So, enumerating the rules evokes a certain appropriate fear and trembling in me. After all, I must learn to embody both the spirit and the letter of composition, if I hope to transform my linguistic apprentices into effective writers.

Beyond the elements of Strunk and White's 4th edition, with its pithy and pointed demands (e.g., “Use definite, specific, concrete language”), I must focus students’ attention on general principles of writing, even as I demonstrate their use and misuse. To present various skilled models and to extemporaneously produce high quality forms for emulation, I will need complete focus—in the classroom and in my communications (even as I type these lines). I should also expect to be occasionally embarrassed by my failure to practice what I preach…

Even so, I need a few “talking points” to build my case for effective, stylish writing. Browsing Jacques Barzun’s Simple and Direct: a Rhetoric for Writers (Quill, 2000) and Joseph M. Williams’s Style: Toward Clarity and Grace (U. Chicago, 1990), I’ve analyzed their respective rubrics, with an eye on my Top 5 writing essentials. My tentative index includes the following:

· Naming—using words clearly, esp. nouns and verbs
· Linking—constructing cohesive and topic-centered paragraphs
· Tuning—attending to the tone, intentions, emphases, and length of sentences
· Meaning—identifying the ideas and expressions that most eloquently suit the purpose
· Composing—generating a compelling form of writing that persuades with style.

“Style” serves as the title for Williams’s book, with its subtitled implication that stylish writing produces clarity and grace, the latter notion reaching toward a spiritual end for the craft. After nearly 200 pages of explanation, Williams chooses to give the spiritually-minded mathematician and philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead, the last word.

Finally, there should grow the most austere of all mental qualities; I mean the sense for style. It is an aesthetic sense, based on admiration for the direct attainment of a foreseen end, simply and without waste. Style in art, style in literature, style in science, style in logic, style in practical execution have fundamentally the same aesthetic qualities, namely, attainment and restraint. The love of a subject in itself and for itself, where it is not the sleepy pleasure of pacing a mental quarterdeck, is the love of style as manifested in that study. Here we are brought back to the position from which we started, the utility of education. Style, in its finest sense, is the last acquirement of the educated mind; it is also the most useful. It pervades the whole being. The administrator with a sense for style hates waste; the engineer with a sense for style economizes his material; the artisan with a sense for style prefers good work. Style is the ultimate morality of mind (“The Aims of Education,” 1929).

Whitehead’s synopsis deserves our attention, as we keep our eyes on the prize. The telos or end-goal of all our training and discipline in writing is to become eloquent artisans of the word who are morally responsible in our stewardship of the logos.

Whitehead’s “style” is akin to the “unsentimental sentiments” of a classical education, by which a student is trained under the tutelage of the “best that has been thought or said” (cf. Richard Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences and Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy). Exposure to the stylish eloquence of civilization’s greatest minds enables students, with much practice, to adopt a fitting style to any task at hand—a style that eventually becomes the possession of its practitioner.

the last of reading first

2008-08-14T11:40:00.000-07:00

In spite of the scarcity of George W. Bush's political capital, the administration can take consolation in having produced one of the most effective educational programs in decades: Reading First.

Reading First offered voluntary support for phonics-based reading instruction in the most needy elementary schools (K-3) nationwide. And, it was also one of the most sound policy initiatives of the past decade.

As a portion of No Child Left Behind, the U.S. Congress determined this summer to eliminate funding for the supplemental program, following a series of politically-motivated attacks over the past two years. As Shepard Barbash reports in the summer volume of Education Next:

Reading First is controversial because it is prescriptive. Simply put, it requires states and districts to follow the dictates of reason and science when spending taxpayers’ money on education and holds them accountable if they fail to do so. Navigating among conservatives who oppose intrusive government, liberals who oppose President Bush, educators who guard their independence, and commercial interests who guard their market share, the law’s framers and program leadership sought to leverage the power of the federal government to attack a complex pedagogical problem that the federal government was never designed to solve: illiteracy caused by faulty teaching.

For the detailed and compelling story of Reading First, check out Sol Stern's coverage for the Fordham Foundation, Too Good to Last (March 2008). Additional education stories can be located at Stern's City Journal website, for those wishing to explore the larger context of this failed program.

Though Congress has eliminated its funding, Reading First leaves behind a network of trained reading instructors and program administrators across the country. For the children's sake, let us hope that such research-based instruction will continue to influence the educational establishment in the years to come.

paradox over paraphrase

2008-08-12T09:49:00.000-07:00

One of the nation's great literary critics, Cleanth Brooks (1906-1994), was known for arguing that genuine poetry must involve the paradoxical forms of reality. Like Chesterton before him, he believed that reality (creation) was too diverse and too messy for neat parsing into human categories:

The sane person always cares more for truth than consistency. If he sees two truths that seem to contradict each other, he accepts both truths and the contradiction along with them. His intellectual sight is stereoscopic, like his physical sight: he sees two different pictures at once and yet sees all the better for that (Orthodoxy).

In a spirit of openness to the created order, Brooks promoted New Criticism alongside other great poet-critics like Robert Penn Warren and John Crowe Ransom. Together with the Southern Agrarian movement, they sought to restore a natural harmony between life and language, as they explored the human impulse to fashion art that reflected nature's paradoxical existence.

In The Well-Wrought Urn (1947), Brooks denounced "the heresy of paraphrase" when interpreting poetry, for he believed that poetry was simply irrreducible to this or that. No pithy phrasing captures the achievement of a true poem's form (style, structure, diction) and meaning, which together produce an artistic symmetry of paradoxical balance.

(If you're interested in investigating the paradoxes of poetry, I would recommend visiting poets.org, to peek at "A Brief Guide to the Fugitives." In Nashville, a community of Vanderbilt poet-critics from the 1920s launched a movement committed to formal technique and traditional values--with remarkable results.)

So, after reading Brooks, I was reminded of Robert Herrick's work (one of Brooks's chapters explores "Corrina Goes A-Maying"), which set me to memorizing Herrick's sonnet "The Argument of His Book." In it, Herrick exults in three distinct yet interwoven realities: of nature, of human civilization, and the confluence of the two. He sings of brooks and blossoms (nature), as well as May-poles and wakes (cultural forms). Then, he rationally inquires "how roses first came red and lilies white."

Across the 14 lines I detect a playful sobriety, as Herrick interweaves the stuff of nature and culture into a rich tapestry that presents the eternal destiny of man: "I write of Hell. I sing (and ever shall) / of Heaven, and hope to have it after all." Through paradoxical placement of the elements, Herricks' poem on poetry ("his argument") encourages me to think anew on education, imagination, and life. With Herrick et al. as mentors, my thoughts must be deeper, richer, and more complex, so that I may seek the truth, which embraces the wholeness of "all things visible and invisible."

Paradox, indeed!

a rebellious streak

2008-08-11T09:02:00.000-07:00

The charge of "Luddite" no longer stings, as it once did. For those who may recall, the origins of the moniker are to be found in an early 19th century social movement in Britain, one that violently protested the introduction of mass-production looms to replace the work of artisans. After two years of civil unrest, the war against the machine was lost, thanks to the power of the "textile-industrial complex."

It is tempting to dismiss the followers of Ned Ludd as mere fanatics. Unable to cope with the dramatic technological changes of the early 19th century, the Luddites lashed out at the new technology, destroying private property to avoid the radical social dislocation they believed was certain to follow.

Though I haven't resorted to beating on Blackberrys or pummeling iPods, I am resistant to the inhumane consequences of faceless electronic communication, for surely our various technological media have the power to transform messages, even before they are composed. Marshall McLuhan's famous phrase, "The medium is the message," is part maxim, part warning.

Nevertheless, I hope to avoid a diagnosis of "technologically phobic" by going public with some musings in the blogosphere. I will try to confine my thoughts to that area which concerns me the most: the rich and diverse history of education in the West and the more recent debates concerning America's educational future. For this is where my Luddite tendencies are most profoundly felt, as I ponder the effects of technology on the education of our children.

Machines can offer much relief from the painstaking work of the human condition, but they cannot do our most vital task of thinking deeply, notwithstanding the claims of Artificial Intelligence.

While I might prefer a face-to-face consortium for these comments (postings) and responses, this venue may serve to generate some introductions, which could then be followed by more traditional, humane forms of communication...