bright and early

"If in fact the traditions of Western science and humanities mean what they say, modern universities are performing precisely the functions institutions of higher learning should perform: to stretch the boundaries of our understanding; to teach the young to value our intellectual heritage not by rote but through comprehension and examination; to continually and perpetually subject the 'wisdom' of our society to thorough and thoughtful scrutiny while making the 'wisdom' of other societies and other cultures accessible and subject to comparable scrutiny; to refuse to simplify our culture beyond recognition by limiting our focus to only one segment of American society and instead to open up the entire society to thoughtful examination."

Preach it, Lawrence W. Levine. This comes from page 21 of The Opening of the American Mind, a short book pretty well summed up in the paragraph here. He wrote it in response to a lot of conservative backlash in the 90's, when people were sure civilization itself was in decline becuase college freshmen no longer had to take Western Civ.

Levine's analysis has proved sound. The university has become increasingly diverse, the curriculum receptive of black studies, and the student population of black students. But multiculturalism of the kind he argues for convincingly in this book is, if anything, still too imperfectly borne out in our education system as a whole.

The books of, say, Jonathan Kozol, attest to this at some length and with some passion. A host of attempts are underway to address these savage inequalities: The Algebra Project, City Year, Teach for America, KIPP Schools, even a push by some student-leaders for a students' bill of rights. Even a thing called No Child Left Behind, if anyone takes that seriously (perhaps they would fund it if they did...)

Then there's the new school. When I talk about it, people assume it's going to be a private school for gifted students. I don't think that would do enough. It has to address the public. It has to address America, our historical uniqueness, our unfulfilled promise. To do less would be, yes, un-American.

The belief that all students can take on their history and their promise, can learn to read and discuss, to think critically--before college--can't be too foolhardy. It's predicated on all those humanist tendencies we prize in liberal education. For the sake of the kids--and the teachers-- whose lives are spent outside the academy, we ought to restore these ideals to the public school, making them the foundation for everything we do.

Jacques Barzun is a beast

To produce such grandiose terms is trouble, I know; let me back away genuflecting to Barzun...It seems clear that the new school will not be converting public education wholesale anytime soon. If it takes hold at all it will be in a limited sphere—likely it will be only one schoolhouse to begin with.

Now, Barzun has reminded me in no uncertain terms that the study of literature as we have it today did not always exist, and that in a sense it is precisely the attempt to analytically study literature and art that has so eroded the scope of true cultivation in our time. Whereat I nodded, a tad shaken up, I won’t lie, but at the same time glad of his advice and glad to be back around his rich definitions, his ‘mind-and-heart’ and ‘amateur,’ his culture and his wide perspective.

How to teach a book, how to make sure kids read it and talk about it without making it impossible for them to simply enjoy it? Perhaps it will be something like they used to teach the classics, and like that early Yale course on Shakespeare: using some books which exemplify techniques of clarity and rhetoric to teach clarity and rhetoric, using others which are highly imaginative and poetic to open the awareness of this other power of words, contextualizing them all in relation to one another and to the world they came out of—or rather, first emerged into, for we will always make it clear that no deterministic theory can account for the work of art; not bogging down the work itself in these explanations, but giving it room to breathe—and looking, of course, into the language and into the history to see the abiding truths, the truths still vital for us. We can call this last by its literary appellation—theme—or we can risk some high-horsing and say what properly understood is truer, that it is philosophy, and study it as such.

This study is not analysis, unless insofar as certain streams of thought are discerned and a necessary vocabulary is built up; rather, it is a dialogue, aware of its own clumsiness in trying to bring to the broad light of shared understanding what is properly expressed only in the very way its maker expressed it and properly appreciated only in the response of the individual encountering it honestly and openly, turning it in the inner light of experience, memory, wonder, which is no one else's and never can be. And yet this dialogue tries its best all the same, it can’t help it, it is the love of wisdom. (As Barzun knows, a definition and a little knowledge of history can go a long way to deepening our appreciation of culture.)

It is a small step to propose from here not only to teach literature philosophically but to treat philosophy the same way, as having its place in humanity's life story, and not as being restricted to the attic of the abstruse and the hair-splitting. What is distinguished as philosophy is generally not taught at all in public school, skirting dangerously close to religion and proving on the whole far too confusing for students, who we'd prefer spend their mental energies on tests anyhow. But in the new school, philosophy will be essential, both in the underlying sense of love of wisdom and in the common sense of reading and discussing Heraclitus and the pre-Socratics, Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics and Epicureans, Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes, Hume, Hobbes, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre and other people whose names I can’t spell. When possible we will read the sources, but I will gladly acknowledge that to a degree the key thoughts will have to be rudely plucked from their nests of logic and discussed by way of simpler examples and comparisons, one to another.

As elsewhere the time will be devoted as well to the East as the West, not only because after all a thinker like Nietzsche was influenced by (people influenced by) Eastern thought and it is all intimately connected anyhow, with classical civilization being influenced by still more ancient ones and preserved as much by the Muslim scholars as by the Christian monks, etc, but because the writings of Lao-tzu and Buddhism, Confucian and Hindu texts each possess their own intrinsic merits, and Rumi, Gilgamesh, shamanism, Anansi.

misdirection miscarry

Public school: what is outwardly the education of all has in fact become the education of a very few, who must in part educate themselves working around the system and who are in part helped by the good teachers that may be found, and by the old spark in many mediocre teachers that is uncovered when they see a student who actually cares.

The majority are not educated but at best prepared, at worst processed. The clever learn to work within the system and stretch its bounds and creep into its blindnesses, they get the best grades possible while learning as little as possible, and this is all excellent preparation for the word of work, where results and not craftsmanship, and certainly not ethics, are what matter. The dull and unambitious and lazy soon discover that they can in fact go beyond the bounds of the rules and make not the least actual effort or even pretend to do their work, and they will still be shunted along to the next grade so as not to be left behind their peers and made to feel bad about themselves.

We are talking here about the express purpose of school—of course I do not mean that outside the classroom the academically unambitious might not be very socially ambitious, or that the clever liars might not be very trustworthy as well as interesting in their personal relationships, or that the educated few are in any necessary concatenation from that education made into good and interesting people, because they may know much of schoolwork and little of life, know much and be unable to apply it.

But even the express purpose of school seems to have shifted—in some ways it can perhaps even be said to be more honest now about what it has really been doing all along. Because if education was once the express ideal, few ever did live up to it. For this reason, and for the caveat mentioned, that education must go beyond books and be the improvement of life, it would make sense for people over time to become disillusioned with the ideal handed down to them.

So instead of education for a full, thoughtful and active, human life, a good life, the goal has become preparation for a job. Again, in some ways this is all it has ever really been, especially in America and in the public school. The goal of preparation is much more widely attained, and it benefits the interests of business and government in such a way that they will concern themselves with it rather than with the high old ideal; it has the further benefit that it may be tested, proved, and advertised, when the good life is as hard to recognize as it is to live, inconspicuous as it lets itself be. And it is not that the preparatory goal of schools precludes one from learn to live the good life, but it does constantly exert itself in trying to persuade one to give it up.

Nor does it deter one from seeking out greatness; indeed this may be said to be the new ideal it has substituted—the life of wealth, fame, danger, glamor. However, like the good life, but by definition now and not merely the difficulty involved, few at any given time may become great, so there is still an element of delusion in this more practical, honest school.

It must also confess, which it does, though somewhat like Phineas in A Separate Peace, who felt ‘everyone always won,’ that not everyone will be prepared for public service and private business, some will be simply floated along and come out unfit for any but the most menial jobs—and this is good, because those jobs after all have to be done; it makes sense for them to be done by those who by their own choice and aptitude have shown themselves undeserving of anything better. The new preparation-model has no problem with these jobs being predominately filled by minorities, because it has the statistics in its briefcase to show that is has done nothing unfair. That is not good enough for people, and it is just one way the preparation-model is failing, hemmed in by statistics showing other nations’ superior test scores and teaching to tests which its students still bungle. It can flail around and redefine its curriculum and tests and start to show progress and leave no child behind, but until the definition of education is brought back around to something like the old idea of real education, a new public school will never so much as be given a chance.