when nintendo games are antiques

I have theorized at some length about the school; I would turn just for fun to some practical questions. Nothing serious and hopeless as how to get the school up and running, but some imaginary scenarios, things teachers might say, ways students might respond—a window onto the curriculum rolling along.

Maybe there will be special sessions once a week or so on obscenely important subjects such as technological and environmental ethics. And if to that end I get to teach on the interesting subject of videogames, I had better offer some cautionary advice, something like,

‘When you play a game, what kinds of things are you thinking about? You’re concentrating on what you’re doing, right? If it’s a sport that means seeing how you can get open for the ball; if it’s tag it means watching out for who’s it; if it’s a videogame, how to get to the next level. It’s like when you’re reading a book, right, in some ways; it’s somewhere between reading a book and watching TV, maybe—when you watch TV you don’t have to think as hard because you aren’t participating, and when you’re reading you have to think harder because it’s just words, no images, that you are looking at; your mind has to do the work of seeing what they describe.

‘Oddly enough, the less you’re thinking, the further you get from the outside world. Have you ever looked at someone who’s watching TV? What do they look like? [makes a face] Like a zombie, like a vegetable. And it’s hard to get their attention, right? It’s like they’re asleep, except watching TV just makes you sleepier. Now it can also be hard to get someone’s attention who’s playing a videogame or a sport or who’s reading or having a conversation—but for the opposite reason, because they’re engaged in the activity, not disengaged from all activity.

‘Is this making sense so far? We have our two basic situations: watching TV, which requires very little thought, and playing a videogame, which requires concentration and reaction to what’s happening in the game.

‘Why do we do these things, by the way? Because they’re fun, basically. But now I’m going to suggest that this is not a good enough reason; I’m going to suggest that you think about that question why as you play today, and let me know what you come up with. Don’t just have fun—think about why it’s fun, why it’s more fun to do it this way than some other way; how could it be even more fun? And think, is there something more than just enjoyment here—are you feeling anything else?’

[so we play Mario 3 for awhile and then reconvene] ‘I felt confused, mostly.’

‘Yeah, I wasn’t sure what we were supposed to do.’

‘I don’t know why I like playing, it’s just fun.’

‘I think it’s fun because you can jump and fly.’

‘So you do things you can’t do in real life?’

‘Yeah.’

‘How could it be more fun?’

‘If you could go more places.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Like if you could go back there, where those things are.’

‘Into the background, in new directions. Good. Did anyone come up with anything else. Anything, Roger?’

‘I don’t get how the blocks can float in the air. I never noticed it before. And after you break them, where do they go? I mean, the pieces disappear.’

‘What else could you do with them?’

‘Touch them at least. Pick them up and throw them.’

‘That’s it. I’m glad you were seeing some new things, or noticing things you never noticed. Even if you were a little bit confused, that’s something, isn’t it, that’s a new way of looking at the game. We’ll try this again sometime, but for right now there’s one more thing I want to focus on, and then we’ll move on to history.

‘Did anyone think about how the game works? Not like within the game, the rules and why you jump on the goombas and over the pits—but how the physical game, when you turn it on, produces those images and responds when you push buttons? It’s all wires and electricity, right? Although you’re participating in one sense, within the game, you’re doing nothing to make the game work after you’ve flipped it on—with or without you, it will sit there working patiently.

‘In that respect it’s like so many other machines we use every day without really noticing them—watches, phones, lights, air-conditioners. These things all exist for a purpose, they perform their function and no more—of course you could play with the lights, but that is wasteful, right; you could play with the phone, but what if you happen to dial the number of someone who’s sleeping or having a really bad day, or what if you dial 911—and again, if you’re just playing with it, you’re wasting electricity and time.

‘So what is it about games that makes it okay to play with them? Is it that we could say their purpose is to let us have fun, where the other things had their different purposes? Is it any more fun than flicking on and off the lights and making prank calls—especially when you consider that doing something you’re not supposed to can provide an added element of fun? And is it any less of a waste of electricity and time to sit there and play videogames?

‘Just let these kinds of questions, and the question about what makes it fun, and is it anything more than fun, sink in, keep them in the back of your mind, because we’ll look at this again another day.

‘Also, you might consider that there was a time—before my time, but not by much—when there were no videogames. A little before that, there were no personal computers, no cell phones; a little before that, no TV. People always say it’s annoying when older people say, “in my day, we didn’t have such and such, it was much harder, but things were better,” but I never thought it was annoying. It puts things in perspective, and makes you appreciate what you have; maybe it even reminds you that in most of the rest of the world, people still don’t have access to computers and TVs and all that; maybe it makes you realize, maybe things were better then, without all this unnecessary stuff and all the hassles that come with it. And then there’s the basic attraction to what is different, different ways of life, because if they didn’t have these things to occupy them, they must have had something else, and it’s interesting to see what that might have been like.

‘So just as an aside, there: I always felt like people who stopped listening as soon as someone older started to say, “in my day,” they were cutting themselves off from a lot of interesting and probably instructive experience. After a while, people would start to say “back in my day” with a certain mocking tone, like that, like self-mocking, because they knew no one would take it seriously. And maybe it is impossible, ultimately, to get people to listen to what is said for their benefit, and what will do them good and keep them from certain mistakes, because sometimes you can’t really understand something without doing it first yourself, and sometimes even things that are true don’t take on much weight until they are true, are important, for you.

‘Ah, what am I saying? I had a nice transition to history lined up, talking about the time when there were no videogames, and then I go off on this tangent. Oh well, something else to think about. So, where were we last time? Belle?’

‘Alexander the Great.’

‘Right, right. And who was his teacher?...’

There you go, a lesson on videogames for fourth- or fifth-graders, perilously verbose, probably, and not leaving enough room for student discussion, but delineating some ideas, making some connections and leaving some others for another time, or never to be said, and even repeating a few basic ideas so as to make sure that the kids are not totally lost, and might remember a little bit at the end of the day.

warm up

1. Mr. Spoon livedinavery dingy house.

2. He went on a perilous adventure to save the world.

3. Lucy kicked John in the face.

4. She loved her red rose garden

5. When she indiscretely Jumped offaclif, she died

6. She hid under the bed.

7. She never found love and died alone

8. “What?!” she abruptly inturupted.

Just a work of found art from a public school classroom, he replied.

Does it hint at the unsuspecting absurdity of education by way of warm-ups and worksheets, units and grades?

Coy and offhandedly poetic non sequitur, she quipped.

And the inherent funny life that goes on under a distracted teacher's nose; kids, teachers, and staff each in their own way hardly aware it's not words and paper, but youth and promise we're meant to deal with?

(Putting their heads down to sleep, talking about a fight, asking to go to the bathroom.)

And despite everything, so much of it's wasted. Like explaining a joke. Still.

It made me laugh.

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.