In spite of all the mean things I said about e-commerce in my last post, there is a notable exception to the Internet-as-giant-money-machine routine. Wikipedia is a free website, a vast and successful experiment in crowd-sourcing, and a remarkable human accomplishment. While the site still requires money to run, it is the rare enormous non-profit enterprise run truly for the good of mankind, and not for the good of some one man.
Wikipedia is the height of information on the Internet, but it is not the hub, nor is it perfect. Like any source of information, it is constantly in flux, a battleground for ideology and interpretation. That scholars often scoff Wikipedia does not make it less valuable, but it does indicate that, especially when highly specialized knowledge is involved, the site might be just as guilty of perpetuating myths or, at least, subtly flawed characterizations of information as it is deserving of praise for striving to make anything and everything available to the curious. Of course, while the debate continues over Wikipedia's overall fidelity compared to traditional encyclopedias, there is no question that it is more comprehensive and more-userfriendly. The "wiki" has spread far beyond wikipedia.org, and for good reason: behind the specific information presented on the site, there's a process for how to present information that has proven extremely effective.
As I said above, however, Wikipedia is not the hub of information on the Internet, because Google is. Whereas Wikipedia is a non-profit organization dedicated primarily to providing articles on any and every piece of information available, Google is a for-profit, publicly traded search engine that, some time ago, began to reach far beyond search. Google's success in part owes to the fact that, when the search engine battleground was still densely populated, Google chose to separate out "sponsored results" from organic ones, giving users the opportunity to make their own decision, rather than being forced towards some marketing campaign by a page worth of disguised but paid-for search results. Google, internally, put this kind of decision under a broader heading: "don't be evil."
I won't venture into the question of whether Google has become evil, whether it has maintained it's plucky start-up idealism as it has become a publicly traded corporation, slowly but surely taking its place as one of the most successful companies - and certainly the most successful brand - in the world. Rather, I want wrap up this post by talking about where information fits in the picture of the Internet, in light of the two organizations discussed here.
Can information ever be unbiased? Probably not. Any historical event, for example, will have dozens of different interpretations, even at the time that it occurred. How much more so twenty years later, or a hundred, or a thousand? What, then, can a provider of information do? Wikipedia strives for an unbiased account, where possible, but its crowd-sourced mechanism for doing so is susceptible to the tyranny of the masses. On the other hand, the expert - who pens the Brittanica entry, for example - is liable to skew information in favor of his own perspective, ignoring competing theories or interpretations, even if he does so subconsciously. Especially troubling is not just interpretation, but hierarchy: not just what happened, but how important any given event - or other piece of information - is might also be debatable, and the cause or result of bias.
The Internet does nothing to change the conundrums of information, it merely makes them more pronounced. Wikipedia, to my mind, has as good an approach as can be expected: tap into the knowledge of the masses, edit carefully and vigilantly, strive for a lack of bias even when impossible. As a source for answers to factual questions, there is no better resource in the history of mankind.
Google's approach, meanwhile, is more complex. As a search engine, it is not actually designed to provide the user information. Rather, Google connects users with websites, websites which may contain information, but may (and usually do) also contain advertisements, interpretations, arguments, and other kinds of networks. Google takes minimal responsibility for what you find on the other end of your search, and rightfully so, but it bears remembering that the output part of the search enginge experience is not merely fallible, but often malicious as well.
We might say the same about Wikipedia, of course, if in a different way, because we might say the same about information as a whole. What the Internet does, I would argue, is that it elevates information by making it so sublimely accessible. That we can answer almost any question about history, etymology, science, mathematics, sports, weather, or just about anything else almost instantly has made us almost too comfortable with information. So much of our web-based learning, thanks to Wikipedia and Google, is the transmission and acquisition of information that we might not be doing so well on the critical thinking, interpretation, and creativity side of the equation.
Not that those things don't exist. Indeed, I have no evidence to suggest that we, as a society or as a world, are any less creative or critical now than we ever have been. Rather, my point is that, from my own experience, easy availability of information can inspire a kind of intellectual laziness that is far from fatal, but is troubling nonetheless. Where we should see an opportunity to do more and better critical thinking thanks to the Internet, all-too-often we're satisfied merely to link from one piece of information to the next, as if connections alone comprised analysis. Society wide, it seems to me that we're more interested in saying what a text (for example) reminds us of or what it resembles than we are in what it means, as if meaning were just another piece of networked information.
What does the Internet do, then? It makes information readily available to anyone and everyone. What doesn't it do? It doesn't assess the validity and uncover the biases of that information, it doesn't interpret it, and it doesn't create meaning. None of that is troubling, in itself, because those tasks are - to some extend - the exclusive right of the mind. Rather, what is troubling is that it is so easy to believe that the Internet does assess validity and bias, does interpret, and does create meaning, and, indeed, that it does so better than we can. Combined, especially, with the obvious but secret fact that the Internet is moved by money, first and foremost, and there is a strong incentive for information to be a commodity, for interpretation and meaning to be bought and sold.
Showing posts with label critical thinking. Show all posts
Showing posts with label critical thinking. Show all posts
Thursday, May 5, 2011
Sunday, April 24, 2011
Rethinking the Great Books
Introduction
As a graduate of St. John's college, it's practically sacrilegious for me to suggest that there might be some flaw in the curriculum of the college. "The Program" may not be sacred, per se, but it is founded upon the thinking of philosophers that the modern world - though perhaps not philosophy departments - largely ignores, and therefore there's a kind of internal sanctity to the whole thing. You see, St. John's is an academic institution that shuns modern academia, a place where research - the modus operandi of every University in the world - is not frowned upon so much as regarded with a bemused detachment. That is, it's taken very seriously, in a certain sense, but also challenged on the grounds that it cannot answer all of the questions it asks. Where modern academia believes that the best questions are the ones that can be answered with rigorous experimental design and good implementation, St. John's rather tends towards the view that the best questions are the ones that cannot be answered, and, furthermore, that the process of dialogue around those questions might be more valuable to students - and to the world at large - than the more "practical" aims of research.
Perhaps "more valuable" is too much, there. I should say, instead, that we live in a world overrun by research, largely devoid of dialogue (in its root sense*). As Husserl might say - if he weren't such a terrible writer - we have plenty of answers, but we don't really know what any of them mean, or why they are important. Perhaps we can't know, but at least we can ask, and we rarely do that anymore, either.
* OK, a parenthetical isn't enough here. Dialogue comes from Greek, dia meaning through, logos meaning all kinds of stuff, such as language, words, logic, ratio, and so on. So dialogue is kind of talking through, but also thinking through, or logic-ing through. We do plenty of talking in the modern world, but how often do you see two (or more) people talk through the logic of a question, try to analyze it together and really build an answer, or at least a framework from which to understand that question? I certainly don't see it often.
Not surprisingly, given its anachronistic concern with meaning, St. John's has been largely misunderstood by most of the academics I have met since my graduation. Unfortunately, that misunderstanding has been for reasons I would never have guessed. Rather than objecting to its philosophical purposes, I've heard time and again that the problem with St. John's is the Great Books, the hegemonic, conservative, rich-white-maleyness of the whole endeavor. It matters not, it seems, what the books Johnnies read are about, or even the way in which those books are read, but rather what matters is who wrote the books in the first place. Context, to the modern researcher's mind, is more important - or at least easier to pin down - than meaning, so St. John's is attacked on the basis of context.
It would be foolish to discount the criticisms of the Great Books, however, simply because they misunderstand the purposes of the college. No, it is my belief that while St. John's itself may not be in need of any drastic reform, any program based on the principles of the college might benefit from an infusion of some of the modern research on learning, for one, and some of the great - or at least very good - works of the last hundred years. With that in mind, I want to discuss the two distinct parts of the St. John's program, including whether they are interdependent or not, and what might be done differently.
The Great Books
It is certainly true that there is a preponderance of work from white males in the traditional Great Books curriculum, but that owes more to the vagaries of history, I would argue, than an innate bias from the founders of the program or the current faculty and administration at the college. It is an unfortunate truth that, for much of the history of the western world, it has been only wealthy white males who have had access to the resources and means to print and distribute works widely and effectively enough that those works had a chance to survive to the modern day. It is inevitably true and extremely frustrating that there were great thinkers who never had an opportunity to write among the oppressed women of Europe or the many foreign cultures that the Europeans subjugated, from the Islamic Northern Africans to the Arabic civilizations of the middle east (who did, incidentally, produce plenty of writing, much of which was lost to marauding crusaders) to the various islanders and tribal societies crushed under foot during the age of imperialism.
The fact of oppression, however, does not mean that we ought to ignore the works that are available to us, written by the oppressors though they may be. Indeed, it is among what we now consider the "Great Books" that the most vocal opposition to said oppression can be found, where writers like Montaigne dare to suggest that the "savages" of the New World might be just as civilized - or moreso - than their European counterparts. That, I know, does not excuse Europe any more than, say, American citizens who objected to Japanese internment camps during World War Two, but that's not the point.
No, the point is that history is valuable, and not just history as a retelling of the past. The history of ideas is important, the history of science and philosophy and art and music and literature. I, because I have read the Great Books, because I am white and male, have been accused of being a part of the hegemonic, oppressive culture that is still, in many ways, at work in the modern world. But I would argue the opposite. Because I have read Aristotle, Plato, Descartes, Aquinas, Kant, Hegel, Hume, and so on (and so on), I actually know that "oppressive" world from the inside out, and I can tell you that despite the context, the meaning was, more often than not, valuable. Tracing the philosophical history of a patriarchal and oppressive West may come across as a worthless (at best) or even evil (at worst) project to the staunch multi-culturalist, but in fact it is remarkable and too easily overlooked how deeply, and often subtly, influenced by the authors and thinkers that comprise the Great Books curriculum our modern world is.*
* I don't have anything to add, here. This is just a ploy to get you to re-read that sentence, especially the final clause.
The real distinction here, then, is the same as I mentioned above. As a reader of the Great Books, I may have all kinds of hidden (or not so hidden, but potentially "dead white male" inspired) biases - like my insistence that meaning matters - but as a St. John's student I was never asked to read books from the perspective of a dead white male, or a European conquistador, or, for that matter, from any subaltern perspective either. No, I was asked to read the works sans context, sometimes to the point of absurdity (ignoring, for example, collecting knowledge or interpretation of American colonial history while reading the Federalist Papers). We were never asked to think about how Aristotle wrote, about what the condition of his Athens was, about who was oppressed and who wasn't, about his place in history. While some of these things inevitably would come up, from time to time (and depending on the author), they were never the focus. No, instead we were asked to think about what Aristotle was saying, why he was saying it, and why it mattered (or didn't).
Now there is a legitimate argument to be made that what St. John's tries to do is flawed, that meaning cannot be separated from context. But I guess my argument is that context cannot be separated from meaning either, and that in a world where we are much better trained to think about context, thinking about meaning is more valuable precisely because it is rare. To talk about context alone is to talk about nothing, and while I am amenable to discussing the flaws in the Great Books curriculum as a list of books worth reading, the perspective that something is wrong with the inherent process behind the way those books are read and discussed is, to me, a deeply flawed argument.
Unfortunately, the arguments I have heard against the Great Books do exactly that: they throw the whole thing out simply because it challenges the context-centric thinking that dominates modern academia, refusing to acknowledge that there might be something to be gained in such an education, at least for some students. Without a hint of irony, the modern academic does to the Great Books curriculum exactly what they accuse the European authors of the Great Books of doing to other cultures throughout history. I know, not a fair comparison, but worth pointing out because it underlines the main point: the kind of thinking that the St. John's curriculum is after is the kind of thinking that sees and understands how and why we think about questions and problems in the ways that we do.
The question is, where does that thinking really come from? The Great Books themselves - the vast reading list - is only a part of the story. Perhaps more important is the approach, which is much more than just the focus on meaning over context discussed above. No, in spite of what is perceived as an anachronistic, conservative, and just generally stuffy curriculum, there's a pedagogy at St. John's so radical that it inspires the most progressive of educators.
A Dialogic Pedagogy
In the St. John's classroom there is no Professor. Each class is led by a Tutor, a faculty member who is responsible for guiding and facilitating a conversation, but not for having mastery over the material or the ability to answer difficult questions about the reading in question. Students and Tutors, in fact, use the same naming conventions, calling each other by "Mr." or "Ms." even when the Tutor holds a Doctorate. Whereas the modern academic environment in the broader world, then, is extremely hierarchical, St. John's is not.
In addition to the somewhat superficial - but very telling - nomenclature of the college, there are other pedagogical policies that truly make St. John's radical. For example:
- Instead of hiring experts in various fields and assigning them to Professorships in those fields, every St. John's Tutor is made to teach classes in every subject. A Tutor with a PhD in Political Science will, in time, lead courses in Ancient Greek, Music, Science, and Math. The result is that Tutors are often learning as much (or more) than the students in their classes, operating functionally as another member of the class - "model learners" - instead of teachers.
- All classes are discussion based. There are no - or at least only very rarely - lectures at St. John's. There is also, however, no hand raising. The Tutor does not call on students, either. "Discussion based" classes at St. John's are different from discussion based classes everywhere else I have been in this regard, because they depend upon the focus and listening of the members of the class, the experience that makes it possible to hold a dialogue with over a dozen people without some artificially imposed system to stop everyone from talking all at once. While this may seem crazy in our modern world (on a political television show it's a miracle if three people can have a conversation without constantly interrupting each other), after the Freshman year actual interruption is fairly rare. As much as Johnnies are learning to think about meaning, they are also learning to listen.
- There are no tests, no worksheets, few papers, and only superficial grades at St. John's. Assessment remains the job of the Tutor, but only as a way of helping the student to learn to assess his or her own learning. Tests would serve no purpose in a college where the effort to understand the material is more important than the material itself. Moreover, tests notoriously do a better job assessing student ability in taking tests more than content knowledge anyway. Instead, St. John's assesses based upon classroom participation and by means of the occasional writing assignments, which emphasize good ideas over good writing. In the end, grades are awarded, but only because graduate schools demand that they be. Philosophically, St. John's would not award grades if it did not have to.
- The classroom is only the beginning of the conversation. While there is no requirement that Johnnies carry their philosophical musings outside the classroom, in inevitably happens. In a small academic community where every single student shares the same reading list, the same pedagogical style in their classes, and many of the same questions about what the books they are reading mean, it is only natural that the conversations permeate throughout the life of the student. Oh, college students are still college students, but there's something to be said for the drunk 21 year old who's arguing about Kant at a party. Even conversations about things that are not on the reading list take on characteristics of the classroom conversation, and ideas are put through the same intellectual ringers. In short, St. John's is a community of learning, a place where thinking, reading, and conversation happen constantly. I have heard it compared to a military academy in terms of the level of discipline and the amount of single-minded focus on the curriculum that the students generally have. The difference is, at St. John's that happens without students being required to have that discipline and focus.
The pedagogy of St. John's is unlike the pedagogy of any other school, university, or academic program I have encountered.* Obviously there are a great many preconditions to creating such a culture: it has to be institution wide, it helps that students are old enough to take responsibility for their own learning, etc. Nevertheless, the unique approach of the college towards how learning ought to happen contains lessons that are more widely applicable. Particularly, it turns out, in multi-cultural, progressive classrooms. Indeed, I was stunned to read Paolo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, only to discover that, ironically enough, the pedagogy he describes as being ideal is almost exactly what St. John's does.
* The closest thing, strangely enough, is the d.school at Stanford, which holds many of the same philosophies about academic hierarchy, group participation, and learning assessment, despite the very different end-goal of producing things.
Curriculum and Pedagogy in the 21st Century
As much as I love the St. John's curriculum and its attendant pedagogy, I feel as though there is room for improvement. Two areas, in particular, afford a great deal of potential for the college's approach to education, namely 1) a re-imaging of the curriculum with an eye towards incorporating more works from the last eighty or so years, and 2) incorporating appropriate technologies, where appropriate, to enhance what is already going on in the classroom.
A Multi-Cultural Great Books Curriculum
The first of these two possibilities is almost too obvious. Of course St. John's should incorporate more works from the last eighty years! How could they not? Because the still in-use Great Books curriculum was founded and shaped around the 1930s, it has changed little since that time. At its inception, then, it was modern, including works that were then contemporary and influential. The core of the program has always been historical, but the finishing touches, I believe, were never meant to stagnate in the way they have. The Great Books, in any time, ought to span from the earliest available writings to the most recently available, as long as those works are, by some measure, great. That's a sticky distinction, of course, and difficult decisions have to be made at every turn (for example, focusing on the West in the core program of St. John's means that the great works of China, India, and Japan are largely ignored, though the college also offers an Eastern Classics Master's program).
Any re-imaging of the St. John's curriculum, then, would require sacrifices and compromises, which is unlikely to occur as long as faculty and staff each have their own and separate favorites. When arguments for staying the same and for changing are equally valid, we tend to resist change, and so St. John's is slow to adapt to the modern world because there is - as seen above - a compelling case for the status quo. Nevertheless, I do believe there are things which could be cut which would not ruin the curriculum or rob it of its heart, and which would allow for the inclusion of more modern works. I won't bore you with details, especially because any one personal opinion need not be decisive in reforming or recreating the St. John's curriculum.
Instead, I see a new Great Books curriculum as a backwards design challenge. If the ultimate core goal of St. John's is to produce critical thinkers, and the secondary goals are to acquaint students with the history of Western thought, to encourage students to learn to dialogue, and to ensure participation in a community of learning, then there are many legitimate curricular choices that might lead to those end goals. Indeed, my argument boils down to this: I believe St. John's could actually do a better job acquainting students with the history of Western thought.
The danger of making the Great Books curriculum more multi-cultural is, of course, tokenism. When you add, for example, a book by Toni Morrison, are you adding it because it's great, or because it was written by a black woman? Even if the answer is the former, the problem remains in the perception of people looking at the program. So it is even now, as when I tell people we do, in fact, read W.E.B DuBois and Virginia Woolf (among a few other non-white men) at St. John's I'm told that we're just engaging in tokenism, and not really taking seriously the subaltern viewpoint.
What's more, in the multi-cultural world there are a preponderance of cultures and sub-cultures, so much so that the very notion of greatness has lost its perceived legitimacy, or at least its practicality. It is simply impossible to read the seminal works of every single sub-culture of American society (much less world society), because there are just way too many sub-cultures with way too many seminal works. To me, however, this is a challenge that a modern Great Books curriculum ought to rise to, rather than ignore. If it is impossible to read the great Japanese-American, Korean-American, Chinese-American, Phillipino, Hawaiian, American Indian, African-American, Afro-European, Polish-American, Czech-American, Arab-American and so on and so on (and so on) great works, at least we can raise the question by picking those particularly influential academic works like the famous Can the Subaltern Speak? or by choosing (and even rotating?) important literary works like The Woman Warrior or Their Eyes Were Watching God (or so many others) from among the many wonderful options.
The explosion of excellent, provocative, and maybe even great writing in the modern world is not something that the Great Books should ignore. There's an opportunity to shape an even better curriculum, here, if only the few people who are shaping such curricula would rise to the challenge.
Dialogic Pedagogy in the Digital Age
Perhaps even a bigger opportunity than reshaping the Great Books curriculum, however, is the chance to use technology to further the goals of the dialogic pedagogy of St. John's. I do not believe that technology can significantly improve the classroom experience and discussion at the college - though certainly there are times when a quick Wikipedia check for factual information would be beneficial - but that does not mean that there's no place for it in the Great Books education. Even when I was a student, the Internet had already become a source not just of news, but of contextual or biographical information.
"Now wait," you're saying. "Didn't you say that you're not supposed to talk about context at St. John's?" I did say that, but only because I was contrasting a focus on context with a focus on meaning. Inevitably questions about context do arise, not as a central talking point, but as aids to understanding meaning. Sometimes it is useful to know context not because it can explain, and not because we want to hide behind contextual connections between texts as a way to ignore talking about more difficult and more profound matters. Rather, the value of context is in coloring meaning, in resolving a dispute about who came first, or who studied with whom. The easy availability of something as simple as a timeline can radically transform a conversation not because era and meaning are innately interconnected, but simply because era does sometimes explain away things like simple lexicographical differences.
Beyond merely making more information available, however, I think there's another dimension to what St. John's could do with the Internet. As social media have become increasingly prominent on the web - with Facebook (a social site) occasionally outranking Google (an information site) - it has become clear that we, as a society, need to understand how human interaction translates to the web. Unfortunately, it seems to translate fairly directly; that is, where most person-to-person interactions are rife with people refusing to listen to each other, willfully misunderstanding, and generally being pigheaded and closed-minded, the same is doubly true on the Internet thanks to the added veil of anonymity and the security that affords. It's all too easy to come to an Internet forum (whether a literal forum or a networking site like Facebook or Twitter) with an agenda and an opinion that never gets revised. True, the availability of information means that opinions based upon faulty factual information can be easily proven wrong, but even then the pigheaded will not change their minds.
Now, obviously not all denizens of the net are guilty of closed-mindedness. Like in the real, material world, there's a range, and some people use the Internet precisely because it's a way to expand one's exposure to ideas and cultures and ways of thinking. I just think that's relatively rare, because it's much easier to use the Internet for pleasure of various kinds, whether carnal, social, or intellectual. Technology easily fools us into thinking that everything should be easy and fun. But good thinking is still hard, even with technology to help (though perhaps it is more fun), and doing things that are hard requires a certain discipline of mind.
So where does St. John's - or some other dialogic Great Books-y curriculum - fit in this picture? Well, I believe that it can shape - perhaps only for its students, but perhaps more broadly - a more dialogic mode of digital interaction. Perhaps true dialogue is impossible on the web (perhaps it's impossible, period), but a place as committed to dialogue as St. John's ought to at least explore the possibility that some of the ways of communicating that it holds dear might be transferable to an online space.
What does that look like? That's a difficult question, the answer to which would require a careful effort to understand what good dialogue really is, and how it might be recreated in a web space. Maybe, in the end, that looks like Twitter or a Facebook wall? Maybe - and this is what I would guess, but can't know - it looks unlike anything currently available on the web. The thing is, in order to get there someone needs to make the effort to design and create a real web (or other technology) based tool for real dialogue.
If such a thing existed, in whatever form it might take, the role in a modernized St. John's is at least partially obvious. The classroom could be supplemented, yes, but the more valuable use would be in reaching beyond the 800 or so enrolled students at the college. If the world desperately needs to learn to dialogue, why not make it possible to learn - at least in part - with technology
Conclusion
Not surprisingly, my suggestions and analysis here are based upon processes and not outcomes. If I were tos summarize this essay, I'd say that the St. John's (or any other program with similar goals) could stand to reevaluate not what they do, but the way they do it. How might St. John's better fit itself into the modern world, keeping its fundamental strengths intact? How might St. John's reshape its curriculum to encompass Western thought not just from 1000 BC to 1935, but to 2011? How might St. John's use technology to support its dialogic goals, both in the classroom and beyond? Given that St. John's does do a good job - in my opinion - preparing it's students for life, how might St. John's do an even better job preparing its students for the modern, networked, distributed, changing, technological world? In the end, the answer might be "stay the same," but it's a question worth asking, nonetheless.
As a graduate of St. John's college, it's practically sacrilegious for me to suggest that there might be some flaw in the curriculum of the college. "The Program" may not be sacred, per se, but it is founded upon the thinking of philosophers that the modern world - though perhaps not philosophy departments - largely ignores, and therefore there's a kind of internal sanctity to the whole thing. You see, St. John's is an academic institution that shuns modern academia, a place where research - the modus operandi of every University in the world - is not frowned upon so much as regarded with a bemused detachment. That is, it's taken very seriously, in a certain sense, but also challenged on the grounds that it cannot answer all of the questions it asks. Where modern academia believes that the best questions are the ones that can be answered with rigorous experimental design and good implementation, St. John's rather tends towards the view that the best questions are the ones that cannot be answered, and, furthermore, that the process of dialogue around those questions might be more valuable to students - and to the world at large - than the more "practical" aims of research.
Perhaps "more valuable" is too much, there. I should say, instead, that we live in a world overrun by research, largely devoid of dialogue (in its root sense*). As Husserl might say - if he weren't such a terrible writer - we have plenty of answers, but we don't really know what any of them mean, or why they are important. Perhaps we can't know, but at least we can ask, and we rarely do that anymore, either.
* OK, a parenthetical isn't enough here. Dialogue comes from Greek, dia meaning through, logos meaning all kinds of stuff, such as language, words, logic, ratio, and so on. So dialogue is kind of talking through, but also thinking through, or logic-ing through. We do plenty of talking in the modern world, but how often do you see two (or more) people talk through the logic of a question, try to analyze it together and really build an answer, or at least a framework from which to understand that question? I certainly don't see it often.
Not surprisingly, given its anachronistic concern with meaning, St. John's has been largely misunderstood by most of the academics I have met since my graduation. Unfortunately, that misunderstanding has been for reasons I would never have guessed. Rather than objecting to its philosophical purposes, I've heard time and again that the problem with St. John's is the Great Books, the hegemonic, conservative, rich-white-maleyness of the whole endeavor. It matters not, it seems, what the books Johnnies read are about, or even the way in which those books are read, but rather what matters is who wrote the books in the first place. Context, to the modern researcher's mind, is more important - or at least easier to pin down - than meaning, so St. John's is attacked on the basis of context.
It would be foolish to discount the criticisms of the Great Books, however, simply because they misunderstand the purposes of the college. No, it is my belief that while St. John's itself may not be in need of any drastic reform, any program based on the principles of the college might benefit from an infusion of some of the modern research on learning, for one, and some of the great - or at least very good - works of the last hundred years. With that in mind, I want to discuss the two distinct parts of the St. John's program, including whether they are interdependent or not, and what might be done differently.
The Great Books
It is certainly true that there is a preponderance of work from white males in the traditional Great Books curriculum, but that owes more to the vagaries of history, I would argue, than an innate bias from the founders of the program or the current faculty and administration at the college. It is an unfortunate truth that, for much of the history of the western world, it has been only wealthy white males who have had access to the resources and means to print and distribute works widely and effectively enough that those works had a chance to survive to the modern day. It is inevitably true and extremely frustrating that there were great thinkers who never had an opportunity to write among the oppressed women of Europe or the many foreign cultures that the Europeans subjugated, from the Islamic Northern Africans to the Arabic civilizations of the middle east (who did, incidentally, produce plenty of writing, much of which was lost to marauding crusaders) to the various islanders and tribal societies crushed under foot during the age of imperialism.
The fact of oppression, however, does not mean that we ought to ignore the works that are available to us, written by the oppressors though they may be. Indeed, it is among what we now consider the "Great Books" that the most vocal opposition to said oppression can be found, where writers like Montaigne dare to suggest that the "savages" of the New World might be just as civilized - or moreso - than their European counterparts. That, I know, does not excuse Europe any more than, say, American citizens who objected to Japanese internment camps during World War Two, but that's not the point.
No, the point is that history is valuable, and not just history as a retelling of the past. The history of ideas is important, the history of science and philosophy and art and music and literature. I, because I have read the Great Books, because I am white and male, have been accused of being a part of the hegemonic, oppressive culture that is still, in many ways, at work in the modern world. But I would argue the opposite. Because I have read Aristotle, Plato, Descartes, Aquinas, Kant, Hegel, Hume, and so on (and so on), I actually know that "oppressive" world from the inside out, and I can tell you that despite the context, the meaning was, more often than not, valuable. Tracing the philosophical history of a patriarchal and oppressive West may come across as a worthless (at best) or even evil (at worst) project to the staunch multi-culturalist, but in fact it is remarkable and too easily overlooked how deeply, and often subtly, influenced by the authors and thinkers that comprise the Great Books curriculum our modern world is.*
* I don't have anything to add, here. This is just a ploy to get you to re-read that sentence, especially the final clause.
The real distinction here, then, is the same as I mentioned above. As a reader of the Great Books, I may have all kinds of hidden (or not so hidden, but potentially "dead white male" inspired) biases - like my insistence that meaning matters - but as a St. John's student I was never asked to read books from the perspective of a dead white male, or a European conquistador, or, for that matter, from any subaltern perspective either. No, I was asked to read the works sans context, sometimes to the point of absurdity (ignoring, for example, collecting knowledge or interpretation of American colonial history while reading the Federalist Papers). We were never asked to think about how Aristotle wrote, about what the condition of his Athens was, about who was oppressed and who wasn't, about his place in history. While some of these things inevitably would come up, from time to time (and depending on the author), they were never the focus. No, instead we were asked to think about what Aristotle was saying, why he was saying it, and why it mattered (or didn't).
Now there is a legitimate argument to be made that what St. John's tries to do is flawed, that meaning cannot be separated from context. But I guess my argument is that context cannot be separated from meaning either, and that in a world where we are much better trained to think about context, thinking about meaning is more valuable precisely because it is rare. To talk about context alone is to talk about nothing, and while I am amenable to discussing the flaws in the Great Books curriculum as a list of books worth reading, the perspective that something is wrong with the inherent process behind the way those books are read and discussed is, to me, a deeply flawed argument.
Unfortunately, the arguments I have heard against the Great Books do exactly that: they throw the whole thing out simply because it challenges the context-centric thinking that dominates modern academia, refusing to acknowledge that there might be something to be gained in such an education, at least for some students. Without a hint of irony, the modern academic does to the Great Books curriculum exactly what they accuse the European authors of the Great Books of doing to other cultures throughout history. I know, not a fair comparison, but worth pointing out because it underlines the main point: the kind of thinking that the St. John's curriculum is after is the kind of thinking that sees and understands how and why we think about questions and problems in the ways that we do.
The question is, where does that thinking really come from? The Great Books themselves - the vast reading list - is only a part of the story. Perhaps more important is the approach, which is much more than just the focus on meaning over context discussed above. No, in spite of what is perceived as an anachronistic, conservative, and just generally stuffy curriculum, there's a pedagogy at St. John's so radical that it inspires the most progressive of educators.
A Dialogic Pedagogy
In the St. John's classroom there is no Professor. Each class is led by a Tutor, a faculty member who is responsible for guiding and facilitating a conversation, but not for having mastery over the material or the ability to answer difficult questions about the reading in question. Students and Tutors, in fact, use the same naming conventions, calling each other by "Mr." or "Ms." even when the Tutor holds a Doctorate. Whereas the modern academic environment in the broader world, then, is extremely hierarchical, St. John's is not.
In addition to the somewhat superficial - but very telling - nomenclature of the college, there are other pedagogical policies that truly make St. John's radical. For example:
- Instead of hiring experts in various fields and assigning them to Professorships in those fields, every St. John's Tutor is made to teach classes in every subject. A Tutor with a PhD in Political Science will, in time, lead courses in Ancient Greek, Music, Science, and Math. The result is that Tutors are often learning as much (or more) than the students in their classes, operating functionally as another member of the class - "model learners" - instead of teachers.
- All classes are discussion based. There are no - or at least only very rarely - lectures at St. John's. There is also, however, no hand raising. The Tutor does not call on students, either. "Discussion based" classes at St. John's are different from discussion based classes everywhere else I have been in this regard, because they depend upon the focus and listening of the members of the class, the experience that makes it possible to hold a dialogue with over a dozen people without some artificially imposed system to stop everyone from talking all at once. While this may seem crazy in our modern world (on a political television show it's a miracle if three people can have a conversation without constantly interrupting each other), after the Freshman year actual interruption is fairly rare. As much as Johnnies are learning to think about meaning, they are also learning to listen.
- There are no tests, no worksheets, few papers, and only superficial grades at St. John's. Assessment remains the job of the Tutor, but only as a way of helping the student to learn to assess his or her own learning. Tests would serve no purpose in a college where the effort to understand the material is more important than the material itself. Moreover, tests notoriously do a better job assessing student ability in taking tests more than content knowledge anyway. Instead, St. John's assesses based upon classroom participation and by means of the occasional writing assignments, which emphasize good ideas over good writing. In the end, grades are awarded, but only because graduate schools demand that they be. Philosophically, St. John's would not award grades if it did not have to.
- The classroom is only the beginning of the conversation. While there is no requirement that Johnnies carry their philosophical musings outside the classroom, in inevitably happens. In a small academic community where every single student shares the same reading list, the same pedagogical style in their classes, and many of the same questions about what the books they are reading mean, it is only natural that the conversations permeate throughout the life of the student. Oh, college students are still college students, but there's something to be said for the drunk 21 year old who's arguing about Kant at a party. Even conversations about things that are not on the reading list take on characteristics of the classroom conversation, and ideas are put through the same intellectual ringers. In short, St. John's is a community of learning, a place where thinking, reading, and conversation happen constantly. I have heard it compared to a military academy in terms of the level of discipline and the amount of single-minded focus on the curriculum that the students generally have. The difference is, at St. John's that happens without students being required to have that discipline and focus.
The pedagogy of St. John's is unlike the pedagogy of any other school, university, or academic program I have encountered.* Obviously there are a great many preconditions to creating such a culture: it has to be institution wide, it helps that students are old enough to take responsibility for their own learning, etc. Nevertheless, the unique approach of the college towards how learning ought to happen contains lessons that are more widely applicable. Particularly, it turns out, in multi-cultural, progressive classrooms. Indeed, I was stunned to read Paolo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, only to discover that, ironically enough, the pedagogy he describes as being ideal is almost exactly what St. John's does.
* The closest thing, strangely enough, is the d.school at Stanford, which holds many of the same philosophies about academic hierarchy, group participation, and learning assessment, despite the very different end-goal of producing things.
Curriculum and Pedagogy in the 21st Century
As much as I love the St. John's curriculum and its attendant pedagogy, I feel as though there is room for improvement. Two areas, in particular, afford a great deal of potential for the college's approach to education, namely 1) a re-imaging of the curriculum with an eye towards incorporating more works from the last eighty or so years, and 2) incorporating appropriate technologies, where appropriate, to enhance what is already going on in the classroom.
A Multi-Cultural Great Books Curriculum
The first of these two possibilities is almost too obvious. Of course St. John's should incorporate more works from the last eighty years! How could they not? Because the still in-use Great Books curriculum was founded and shaped around the 1930s, it has changed little since that time. At its inception, then, it was modern, including works that were then contemporary and influential. The core of the program has always been historical, but the finishing touches, I believe, were never meant to stagnate in the way they have. The Great Books, in any time, ought to span from the earliest available writings to the most recently available, as long as those works are, by some measure, great. That's a sticky distinction, of course, and difficult decisions have to be made at every turn (for example, focusing on the West in the core program of St. John's means that the great works of China, India, and Japan are largely ignored, though the college also offers an Eastern Classics Master's program).
Any re-imaging of the St. John's curriculum, then, would require sacrifices and compromises, which is unlikely to occur as long as faculty and staff each have their own and separate favorites. When arguments for staying the same and for changing are equally valid, we tend to resist change, and so St. John's is slow to adapt to the modern world because there is - as seen above - a compelling case for the status quo. Nevertheless, I do believe there are things which could be cut which would not ruin the curriculum or rob it of its heart, and which would allow for the inclusion of more modern works. I won't bore you with details, especially because any one personal opinion need not be decisive in reforming or recreating the St. John's curriculum.
Instead, I see a new Great Books curriculum as a backwards design challenge. If the ultimate core goal of St. John's is to produce critical thinkers, and the secondary goals are to acquaint students with the history of Western thought, to encourage students to learn to dialogue, and to ensure participation in a community of learning, then there are many legitimate curricular choices that might lead to those end goals. Indeed, my argument boils down to this: I believe St. John's could actually do a better job acquainting students with the history of Western thought.
The danger of making the Great Books curriculum more multi-cultural is, of course, tokenism. When you add, for example, a book by Toni Morrison, are you adding it because it's great, or because it was written by a black woman? Even if the answer is the former, the problem remains in the perception of people looking at the program. So it is even now, as when I tell people we do, in fact, read W.E.B DuBois and Virginia Woolf (among a few other non-white men) at St. John's I'm told that we're just engaging in tokenism, and not really taking seriously the subaltern viewpoint.
What's more, in the multi-cultural world there are a preponderance of cultures and sub-cultures, so much so that the very notion of greatness has lost its perceived legitimacy, or at least its practicality. It is simply impossible to read the seminal works of every single sub-culture of American society (much less world society), because there are just way too many sub-cultures with way too many seminal works. To me, however, this is a challenge that a modern Great Books curriculum ought to rise to, rather than ignore. If it is impossible to read the great Japanese-American, Korean-American, Chinese-American, Phillipino, Hawaiian, American Indian, African-American, Afro-European, Polish-American, Czech-American, Arab-American and so on and so on (and so on) great works, at least we can raise the question by picking those particularly influential academic works like the famous Can the Subaltern Speak? or by choosing (and even rotating?) important literary works like The Woman Warrior or Their Eyes Were Watching God (or so many others) from among the many wonderful options.
The explosion of excellent, provocative, and maybe even great writing in the modern world is not something that the Great Books should ignore. There's an opportunity to shape an even better curriculum, here, if only the few people who are shaping such curricula would rise to the challenge.
Dialogic Pedagogy in the Digital Age
Perhaps even a bigger opportunity than reshaping the Great Books curriculum, however, is the chance to use technology to further the goals of the dialogic pedagogy of St. John's. I do not believe that technology can significantly improve the classroom experience and discussion at the college - though certainly there are times when a quick Wikipedia check for factual information would be beneficial - but that does not mean that there's no place for it in the Great Books education. Even when I was a student, the Internet had already become a source not just of news, but of contextual or biographical information.
"Now wait," you're saying. "Didn't you say that you're not supposed to talk about context at St. John's?" I did say that, but only because I was contrasting a focus on context with a focus on meaning. Inevitably questions about context do arise, not as a central talking point, but as aids to understanding meaning. Sometimes it is useful to know context not because it can explain, and not because we want to hide behind contextual connections between texts as a way to ignore talking about more difficult and more profound matters. Rather, the value of context is in coloring meaning, in resolving a dispute about who came first, or who studied with whom. The easy availability of something as simple as a timeline can radically transform a conversation not because era and meaning are innately interconnected, but simply because era does sometimes explain away things like simple lexicographical differences.
Beyond merely making more information available, however, I think there's another dimension to what St. John's could do with the Internet. As social media have become increasingly prominent on the web - with Facebook (a social site) occasionally outranking Google (an information site) - it has become clear that we, as a society, need to understand how human interaction translates to the web. Unfortunately, it seems to translate fairly directly; that is, where most person-to-person interactions are rife with people refusing to listen to each other, willfully misunderstanding, and generally being pigheaded and closed-minded, the same is doubly true on the Internet thanks to the added veil of anonymity and the security that affords. It's all too easy to come to an Internet forum (whether a literal forum or a networking site like Facebook or Twitter) with an agenda and an opinion that never gets revised. True, the availability of information means that opinions based upon faulty factual information can be easily proven wrong, but even then the pigheaded will not change their minds.
Now, obviously not all denizens of the net are guilty of closed-mindedness. Like in the real, material world, there's a range, and some people use the Internet precisely because it's a way to expand one's exposure to ideas and cultures and ways of thinking. I just think that's relatively rare, because it's much easier to use the Internet for pleasure of various kinds, whether carnal, social, or intellectual. Technology easily fools us into thinking that everything should be easy and fun. But good thinking is still hard, even with technology to help (though perhaps it is more fun), and doing things that are hard requires a certain discipline of mind.
So where does St. John's - or some other dialogic Great Books-y curriculum - fit in this picture? Well, I believe that it can shape - perhaps only for its students, but perhaps more broadly - a more dialogic mode of digital interaction. Perhaps true dialogue is impossible on the web (perhaps it's impossible, period), but a place as committed to dialogue as St. John's ought to at least explore the possibility that some of the ways of communicating that it holds dear might be transferable to an online space.
What does that look like? That's a difficult question, the answer to which would require a careful effort to understand what good dialogue really is, and how it might be recreated in a web space. Maybe, in the end, that looks like Twitter or a Facebook wall? Maybe - and this is what I would guess, but can't know - it looks unlike anything currently available on the web. The thing is, in order to get there someone needs to make the effort to design and create a real web (or other technology) based tool for real dialogue.
If such a thing existed, in whatever form it might take, the role in a modernized St. John's is at least partially obvious. The classroom could be supplemented, yes, but the more valuable use would be in reaching beyond the 800 or so enrolled students at the college. If the world desperately needs to learn to dialogue, why not make it possible to learn - at least in part - with technology
Conclusion
Not surprisingly, my suggestions and analysis here are based upon processes and not outcomes. If I were tos summarize this essay, I'd say that the St. John's (or any other program with similar goals) could stand to reevaluate not what they do, but the way they do it. How might St. John's better fit itself into the modern world, keeping its fundamental strengths intact? How might St. John's reshape its curriculum to encompass Western thought not just from 1000 BC to 1935, but to 2011? How might St. John's use technology to support its dialogic goals, both in the classroom and beyond? Given that St. John's does do a good job - in my opinion - preparing it's students for life, how might St. John's do an even better job preparing its students for the modern, networked, distributed, changing, technological world? In the end, the answer might be "stay the same," but it's a question worth asking, nonetheless.
Friday, October 29, 2010
On Science Education
I am not a science teacher by trade, but I have found myself teaching science more than any other subject area. Perhaps this is in part a result of my upbringing - my mother is a science teacher - and perhaps a result of pure chance. Regardless of why science has found me and I have found science, my background as a graduate of St. John's has followed close at hand, with the result that I think about science a little differently than many people do, a fact that has helped me to understand science myself, but has not always been to my advantage.
What do I mean by that? Well, one of the most fundamental but unarticulated problems in science education is a failure among the important people in the process to agree on what science really is. That's not to say they should agree, or that agreement is even possible, but rather to say that the lack of a clear definition of science has led to a hodge-podge of curricular methodologies and pedagogies that are non-complementary, and which do more to alienate and confuse students than to empower or interest them.
Scientists, ironically, are probably the most to blame for this situation. There is great lamentation in scientific world about how poorly students do in science. The solution, it seems to these people, is to make science more "real" for students. That is, to align science classes closer to their own experiences as scientists. The problem is, they perceive science to be, generally, a fairly static thing. The average scientists definition of science (and I don't have research to back this up, just my own experiences) seems to be something like this: Science is a set of well-established theories and facts about the natural world arrived by employing a fixed methodology to places where our knowledge is lacking, in order to expand our understanding.
Now there's nothing particularly wrong with this, except it's extremely boring and a waste of student's time. The idea that science is, at its heart, about theories and facts, and an easy-to-use scientific method, to me trivializes the real efforts of science. No, science is not just collecting data and analyzing ad infinitum, the real power of science to affect people's lives lies in something more fundamental to it. To me, science is about a process that is dynamic and contextual. Scientific knowledge is conditional and flexible. Being a scientist is about creativity, critical thinking, and learning.
How much more interesting is this perspective to students? Frankly, they probably don't care how we define science. More important is the result of this perspective on curriculum, on pedagogy, on what happens in the classroom. In the former, the scientist's classroom, students sit and listen to lectures, they engage in laboratory sessions with known answers, they are asked multiple choice questions, they fill in worksheets with word banks. Basically, they're miserable. Even a field trip, in the traditional science classroom, generally leads to little more than the dissemination of information, the collection of useless and meaningless data, or the acquisition of some boring science "skill" that is irrelevant to a student's life.
On the other hand, the latter classroom is organized around the concept of science as inquiry, meaning students are encouraged to develop a more sophisticated understanding of how science really works. That is, by giving students enough structure to keep them on task, but enough freedom to let them develop their own observations, questions, hypotheses, and even experiments and conclusions, students get to learn the real pitfalls of scientific work. What's more, they still learn the content. Perhaps not as much as if they were just lectured at for an hour straight, but what they do learn, they learn better. More importantly, memorizing facts, equations, theories, and methods is a waste of time in our modern world; better to learn how to synthesize, how to analyze, and how to ask good questions.
To illustrate: How many of you readers out there remember anything about how to calculate the effect of friction on a moving body from your high school physics class? For those of you who don't remember, how long do you think it would take you to look it up? I'll give you hint, type in "friction" in Google, and click on the Wikipedia page. There's your equation, plus explanations of how to use it. Good thing your science teachers wanted you to memorize all that.
Beyond acquiring facts, which is manifestly a waste of time, the other biggest problem with traditional science education is that it is built around collecting data. I certainly acknowledge that good data collection is important, but I will also say that data in itself is worthless unless there's some kind of analysis on the other end, not to mention some kind of purpose for collecting it on the front end. It's easy, in pre-made experiments, to point to the supposed "purpose" of certain data, but the whole point of good science education, to my mind, is to get students to make those decisions themselves. What data should they collect? Why? How will they use it?
Now an experienced educator will respond by saying that they need to see that process in action before they can do it themselves, and so we should provide them with situations where they are not designing experiments, where they are working with fake data, where they are performing analysis without doing the legwork to get there. That's fair, but only if we call attention to why we're doing that. Many teachers emphasize the importance of data analysis for its own sake, not as a part of a broader scientific process, and certainly not as a pathway towards meaning.
Ah, there's an interesting word. I suppose, if I had to summarize the two approaches to science education I've discussed here, I would say that the first is about information and the second is about meaning. The problem is, looking for meaning in science is not encouraged by scientists for reasons that are difficult to fathom (though the Freudian in me wants to suggest mean things about scientists being afraid of meaning because of the spiritual, emotional, and social emptiness of their own pursuit of information). The cries that students do poorly in science, to me, reverses the reality: science does poorly for students. Make science real, make it authentic, make is about ideas and not facts, make it about processes and not methods, make it about discussions and not dictation, and then you'll see students do well.
Science is a liberal art, in the root sense of the term. The study of science can help free you from other people's conclusions, from propaganda, from drug commercials that say "studies show..." Science, however, can also bind you and blind you. Unfortunately, the classroom (and, more importantly, the legislator's table and the teacher training program) is, in this discipline as in many others, a battlefield. A battlefield where the "fluffy," holistic, more authentic side is losing, not because it is actually worse, but because it's harder to do well, harder to assess, harder to standardize. Those are fair criticisms, but it might be that part of what's wrong in education, broadly, is that we shy away from what's better but harder too often.
What do I mean by that? Well, one of the most fundamental but unarticulated problems in science education is a failure among the important people in the process to agree on what science really is. That's not to say they should agree, or that agreement is even possible, but rather to say that the lack of a clear definition of science has led to a hodge-podge of curricular methodologies and pedagogies that are non-complementary, and which do more to alienate and confuse students than to empower or interest them.
Scientists, ironically, are probably the most to blame for this situation. There is great lamentation in scientific world about how poorly students do in science. The solution, it seems to these people, is to make science more "real" for students. That is, to align science classes closer to their own experiences as scientists. The problem is, they perceive science to be, generally, a fairly static thing. The average scientists definition of science (and I don't have research to back this up, just my own experiences) seems to be something like this: Science is a set of well-established theories and facts about the natural world arrived by employing a fixed methodology to places where our knowledge is lacking, in order to expand our understanding.
Now there's nothing particularly wrong with this, except it's extremely boring and a waste of student's time. The idea that science is, at its heart, about theories and facts, and an easy-to-use scientific method, to me trivializes the real efforts of science. No, science is not just collecting data and analyzing ad infinitum, the real power of science to affect people's lives lies in something more fundamental to it. To me, science is about a process that is dynamic and contextual. Scientific knowledge is conditional and flexible. Being a scientist is about creativity, critical thinking, and learning.
How much more interesting is this perspective to students? Frankly, they probably don't care how we define science. More important is the result of this perspective on curriculum, on pedagogy, on what happens in the classroom. In the former, the scientist's classroom, students sit and listen to lectures, they engage in laboratory sessions with known answers, they are asked multiple choice questions, they fill in worksheets with word banks. Basically, they're miserable. Even a field trip, in the traditional science classroom, generally leads to little more than the dissemination of information, the collection of useless and meaningless data, or the acquisition of some boring science "skill" that is irrelevant to a student's life.
On the other hand, the latter classroom is organized around the concept of science as inquiry, meaning students are encouraged to develop a more sophisticated understanding of how science really works. That is, by giving students enough structure to keep them on task, but enough freedom to let them develop their own observations, questions, hypotheses, and even experiments and conclusions, students get to learn the real pitfalls of scientific work. What's more, they still learn the content. Perhaps not as much as if they were just lectured at for an hour straight, but what they do learn, they learn better. More importantly, memorizing facts, equations, theories, and methods is a waste of time in our modern world; better to learn how to synthesize, how to analyze, and how to ask good questions.
To illustrate: How many of you readers out there remember anything about how to calculate the effect of friction on a moving body from your high school physics class? For those of you who don't remember, how long do you think it would take you to look it up? I'll give you hint, type in "friction" in Google, and click on the Wikipedia page. There's your equation, plus explanations of how to use it. Good thing your science teachers wanted you to memorize all that.
Beyond acquiring facts, which is manifestly a waste of time, the other biggest problem with traditional science education is that it is built around collecting data. I certainly acknowledge that good data collection is important, but I will also say that data in itself is worthless unless there's some kind of analysis on the other end, not to mention some kind of purpose for collecting it on the front end. It's easy, in pre-made experiments, to point to the supposed "purpose" of certain data, but the whole point of good science education, to my mind, is to get students to make those decisions themselves. What data should they collect? Why? How will they use it?
Now an experienced educator will respond by saying that they need to see that process in action before they can do it themselves, and so we should provide them with situations where they are not designing experiments, where they are working with fake data, where they are performing analysis without doing the legwork to get there. That's fair, but only if we call attention to why we're doing that. Many teachers emphasize the importance of data analysis for its own sake, not as a part of a broader scientific process, and certainly not as a pathway towards meaning.
Ah, there's an interesting word. I suppose, if I had to summarize the two approaches to science education I've discussed here, I would say that the first is about information and the second is about meaning. The problem is, looking for meaning in science is not encouraged by scientists for reasons that are difficult to fathom (though the Freudian in me wants to suggest mean things about scientists being afraid of meaning because of the spiritual, emotional, and social emptiness of their own pursuit of information). The cries that students do poorly in science, to me, reverses the reality: science does poorly for students. Make science real, make it authentic, make is about ideas and not facts, make it about processes and not methods, make it about discussions and not dictation, and then you'll see students do well.
Science is a liberal art, in the root sense of the term. The study of science can help free you from other people's conclusions, from propaganda, from drug commercials that say "studies show..." Science, however, can also bind you and blind you. Unfortunately, the classroom (and, more importantly, the legislator's table and the teacher training program) is, in this discipline as in many others, a battlefield. A battlefield where the "fluffy," holistic, more authentic side is losing, not because it is actually worse, but because it's harder to do well, harder to assess, harder to standardize. Those are fair criticisms, but it might be that part of what's wrong in education, broadly, is that we shy away from what's better but harder too often.
Thursday, August 19, 2010
Some Bertrand Russell Quotations
I'm vaguely in the process of reading Bertrand Russell's "Unpopular Essays," a series of essays so titled not because they are offensive - though some very well may be - but rather because Russell is unapologetically not writing for a popular audience. While still not his formal philosophy, per se, Russell makes frequent recourse to famous philosophers and ideas without fully explaining them, and uses language which may confuse, as he says, particularly dull children. The latter point made in response to some reviewers who had lambasted some of his "popular essays" for not being reader-friendly enough, as if it's the writer's job to write to the lowest common denominator.
Reading Russell is always enjoyable for me, because I find him so eminently reasonable. Of course, he get pinned into the "liberal socialist" camp, and is thus something of a polarizing figure in the history of both theoretical and popular philosophy, but no one would find that more absurd than Russell himself. In fact, he was very much a man who believed that dogma of any kind was dangerous; the idea that he represents any particular ideology - except perhaps the ideology of avoiding ideology - is a reach. Certainly he had a great many opinions which are classified in our modern era as liberal, but - and I would say the same about myself - those are, on the one hand, conditional ideas that don't represent "The Answer" to anything, and, on the other hand, are usually more nuanced than the expression of them as 'liberal' can possibly capture.
Russell was eminently quotable, as well, even though he is the kind of thinker who would resist the idea of summarizing someone's ideas with mere quotation. With that in mind, I want to share a couple quotations of his - not necessarily from "Unpopular Essays" - and explicate them a bit. Consider this the next post in the "More Interesting Than It Seems" series.
Philosophy
Russell is well known as a philosopher, as well as an historian of philosophy. Though he himself in fact pursued a great many philosophical thoughts, he was irreverent in his efforts.
"That Plato's Republic should have been admired, on its political side, by decent people is perhaps the most astonishing example of literary snobbery in all history."
I think he found, in the existing academic structures in the world of philosophy, the same deference and refusal to think that he so much despised in politics. It was too easy to simply believe that Plato, because he was Plato, was making a good point about how societies should be organized. Hence the dogmatism among philosophers that Plato is some kind of political all-father.
"I think we ought always to entertain our opinions with some measure of doubt. I shouldn't wish people dogmatically to believe any philosophy, not even mine."
One of the biggest critiques of Russell was that, while he was anti-dogmatic, he often spoke persuasively rather than inquiringly. He, in fact, came across as extremely dogmatic about his anti-dogmatism. That's a fair criticism, but I also think it does a bit of a disservice to Russell. Ultimately it's not that satisfying to read an essay that begins every sentence with "I might be wrong about this but..."
"The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way."
However much he was irreverent, Russell was also well-aware of the history of philosophy, though the above quotation could just as easily apply in politics or religion. Nevertheless, there's a Kantian notion* here. In his Critique of Pure Reason Kant comes to very much this conclusion, that some especially metaphysical questions are impossible to answer, and that those same questions are also likely to have vehement debates surrounding them.
* See what I did there?
"The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it."
Of course, this quotation could easily apply to Kant, as well as a great many other philosophers. For his own part, Russell was rarely taken seriously as a pure philosopher, probably because he found the pure, academic efforts of contemporaries like Husserl to be, shall we say, ridiculous. His moral, political, and social writings may not have been as academic, but were they less valuable?
Society
Russell was no apologist for the world in which he lived, however. Though he was certainly an idealist, who believed very much in the capacity of people to be good, he approached his political and social philosophy with a great deal of cynicism.
"If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we could have paradise in a few years."
While not an anthropologist, Russell certainly does strive to undermine existing paradigms. The above quotations tells a different story than the one we traditionally hear. Usually, the problem is that we're too caught up in ourselves, and that we should care more about the happiness of others, but I think he makes a good point: people who sacrifice their own happiness entirely make a grave mistake as well. We should, instead, find a better way to encourage individual happiness that comes not at the expense of others. Which is really just the other half of the golden rule, so often (and ironically) shortened to "do unto others." Let's not forget the "as you would have them do unto yourself."
"It is a waste of energy to be angry with a man who behaves badly, just as it is to be angry with a car that won't go."
Nevertheless, Russell did not blame people for their shortsightedness. The influence of culture, social norms, and political structures is extreme. While this quotation is a bit too behaviorist for my liking, I appreciate the point: it's silly to rage against the man who is merely a symptom of a bigger problem, and not the disease itself.
Work and Leisure
I've left out a number of good quotations that could go well here in favor of three particularly good ones. In short, Russell was very much of the opinion that entirely too much work gets done in the world, and that we, in general, spend far too little time and effort thinking about what we want and ought to do with our spare time.
"The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time."
Not being dogmatic, Russell lacks the moralizing that comes with our modern conceptions of leisure. Reading books is good, being on Facebook all the time is bad, we say. Writing essays is good, playing computer games is bad. I could go on. The point is, though, that maybe the time you enjoy wasting, well, yeah.
"Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth's surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid."
This quotation and the one after it are related. The above trivializes work by showing what it is, in its essence. While it is true that, in order to survive, we have to move matter at or near the earth's surface, it is also true that we get extremely caught up in how, why, where, and by whom all of that is done.
"One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important."
I suspect you know someone for whom this applies. You may even be someone for whom this applies. Regardless, I think the point is a good one; even the most serious work in the world should be taken with proper perspective, not just because it makes life a little better, but also because you might be more effective anyway if you're not having a nervous breakdown.
Thought
As an ardent thinker and believer in thinking, Russell has a lot to say about thought as such. In particular, Russell is frequently distraught by the surprisingly negative relationship the majority of the world has with the process of thinking.
"Many people would sooner die than think; In fact, they do so."
I don't think this quotation is meant to mean that people don't think during their lives and then die. Rather, I think it means that people, given the palpable choice between thinking and dieing, often actively choose death. Cynical? Extremely, but also likely true. For example, consider how many people consume vast quantities of high fructose corn syrup every day.
"Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth -- more than ruin -- more even than death.... Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man."
Of course, if the short form of the quotation isn't enough, the long form is here to spell it out. How ironic, in Russell's view, that the greatest accomplishment of mankind is also terrifying.
"Science may set limits to knowledge, but should not set limits to imagination."
Changing gears, this quotation makes me think of Einstein's famous sayings about imagination. In much the same vein, Russell speaks to the desirability of imagination, and I would say elevates it over knowledge in the process. Indeed, it may very well be that science is actually, at its core, about both.
Morality
Russell was raised in a Christian household, and actually did hold that most of the traditional Christian virtues were good ones (except, for example, sexual abstinence, which he found absurd). Even so, he was a staunch atheist - or at least a staunch agnostic, being generally undogmatic - and held that morality could be arrived at logically.
"The good life, as I conceive it, is a happy life. I do not mean that if you are good you will be happy - I mean that if you are happy you will be good."
Here is an example of a practical philosophy of morality, and also an example of a fantastic reversal of expectations. The opening of the quotation seems innocuous enough, but his conception is non-traditional. The point is well-taken, however. It may very well be that if we focused more on making people happy, then they would be good more easily, rather than trying to make people good and hoping they'll also be happy. The idea here is related to one authors and philosophers have been expressing for a long time: it's much rarer for wealthy - or at least comfortable - people to be thieves. If so much is true with money, why not with morals as well?
"The people who are regarded as moral luminaries are those who forego ordinary pleasures themselves and find compensation in interfering with the pleasures of others."
I think this is the most controversial quotation in the set, and I love it. It takes on both the "Great Man" theory of history - if tangentially - and the unchallenged (and, really, almost unchallengeable) notion that self-sacrifice is desirable. Moral luminaries are, as we often forget, people, and Russell sees in their willingness to give up their own pleasures a kind of sick desire to rob the same from others. He is, of course, mainly challenging Christianity here, but we could say the same about any number of areas of human experience. Consider the over-worked teacher who gives up everything so that her students might become stressed-out, over-worked adults themselves. Consider the monk who surrenders sexual company in the hope of motivating others to do the same. Consider the insurance executive who works 15 hours a day, so that he might better ensure that his profit margins are high (and therefore his coverage more scant).
In all, it's a polarizing quotation, but the seeds are visible even in some of the more mundane thoughts about happiness. Of course, Russell would not be phased by the offense that many of his readers would take at such an idea, if only because he recognized that most popular opinions today were once extremely unpopular, to the point of being absurd. And, on the balance, it's not really worth it to get angry with a dead philosopher, is it? That sounds dangerously like wishing for the unhappiness of another more than wishing for the happiness of oneself. Or, worse yet, confusing the two.
Reading Russell is always enjoyable for me, because I find him so eminently reasonable. Of course, he get pinned into the "liberal socialist" camp, and is thus something of a polarizing figure in the history of both theoretical and popular philosophy, but no one would find that more absurd than Russell himself. In fact, he was very much a man who believed that dogma of any kind was dangerous; the idea that he represents any particular ideology - except perhaps the ideology of avoiding ideology - is a reach. Certainly he had a great many opinions which are classified in our modern era as liberal, but - and I would say the same about myself - those are, on the one hand, conditional ideas that don't represent "The Answer" to anything, and, on the other hand, are usually more nuanced than the expression of them as 'liberal' can possibly capture.
Russell was eminently quotable, as well, even though he is the kind of thinker who would resist the idea of summarizing someone's ideas with mere quotation. With that in mind, I want to share a couple quotations of his - not necessarily from "Unpopular Essays" - and explicate them a bit. Consider this the next post in the "More Interesting Than It Seems" series.
Philosophy
Russell is well known as a philosopher, as well as an historian of philosophy. Though he himself in fact pursued a great many philosophical thoughts, he was irreverent in his efforts.
"That Plato's Republic should have been admired, on its political side, by decent people is perhaps the most astonishing example of literary snobbery in all history."
I think he found, in the existing academic structures in the world of philosophy, the same deference and refusal to think that he so much despised in politics. It was too easy to simply believe that Plato, because he was Plato, was making a good point about how societies should be organized. Hence the dogmatism among philosophers that Plato is some kind of political all-father.
"I think we ought always to entertain our opinions with some measure of doubt. I shouldn't wish people dogmatically to believe any philosophy, not even mine."
One of the biggest critiques of Russell was that, while he was anti-dogmatic, he often spoke persuasively rather than inquiringly. He, in fact, came across as extremely dogmatic about his anti-dogmatism. That's a fair criticism, but I also think it does a bit of a disservice to Russell. Ultimately it's not that satisfying to read an essay that begins every sentence with "I might be wrong about this but..."
"The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way."
However much he was irreverent, Russell was also well-aware of the history of philosophy, though the above quotation could just as easily apply in politics or religion. Nevertheless, there's a Kantian notion* here. In his Critique of Pure Reason Kant comes to very much this conclusion, that some especially metaphysical questions are impossible to answer, and that those same questions are also likely to have vehement debates surrounding them.
* See what I did there?
"The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it."
Of course, this quotation could easily apply to Kant, as well as a great many other philosophers. For his own part, Russell was rarely taken seriously as a pure philosopher, probably because he found the pure, academic efforts of contemporaries like Husserl to be, shall we say, ridiculous. His moral, political, and social writings may not have been as academic, but were they less valuable?
Society
Russell was no apologist for the world in which he lived, however. Though he was certainly an idealist, who believed very much in the capacity of people to be good, he approached his political and social philosophy with a great deal of cynicism.
"If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we could have paradise in a few years."
While not an anthropologist, Russell certainly does strive to undermine existing paradigms. The above quotations tells a different story than the one we traditionally hear. Usually, the problem is that we're too caught up in ourselves, and that we should care more about the happiness of others, but I think he makes a good point: people who sacrifice their own happiness entirely make a grave mistake as well. We should, instead, find a better way to encourage individual happiness that comes not at the expense of others. Which is really just the other half of the golden rule, so often (and ironically) shortened to "do unto others." Let's not forget the "as you would have them do unto yourself."
"It is a waste of energy to be angry with a man who behaves badly, just as it is to be angry with a car that won't go."
Nevertheless, Russell did not blame people for their shortsightedness. The influence of culture, social norms, and political structures is extreme. While this quotation is a bit too behaviorist for my liking, I appreciate the point: it's silly to rage against the man who is merely a symptom of a bigger problem, and not the disease itself.
Work and Leisure
I've left out a number of good quotations that could go well here in favor of three particularly good ones. In short, Russell was very much of the opinion that entirely too much work gets done in the world, and that we, in general, spend far too little time and effort thinking about what we want and ought to do with our spare time.
"The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time."
Not being dogmatic, Russell lacks the moralizing that comes with our modern conceptions of leisure. Reading books is good, being on Facebook all the time is bad, we say. Writing essays is good, playing computer games is bad. I could go on. The point is, though, that maybe the time you enjoy wasting, well, yeah.
"Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth's surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid."
This quotation and the one after it are related. The above trivializes work by showing what it is, in its essence. While it is true that, in order to survive, we have to move matter at or near the earth's surface, it is also true that we get extremely caught up in how, why, where, and by whom all of that is done.
"One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important."
I suspect you know someone for whom this applies. You may even be someone for whom this applies. Regardless, I think the point is a good one; even the most serious work in the world should be taken with proper perspective, not just because it makes life a little better, but also because you might be more effective anyway if you're not having a nervous breakdown.
Thought
As an ardent thinker and believer in thinking, Russell has a lot to say about thought as such. In particular, Russell is frequently distraught by the surprisingly negative relationship the majority of the world has with the process of thinking.
"Many people would sooner die than think; In fact, they do so."
I don't think this quotation is meant to mean that people don't think during their lives and then die. Rather, I think it means that people, given the palpable choice between thinking and dieing, often actively choose death. Cynical? Extremely, but also likely true. For example, consider how many people consume vast quantities of high fructose corn syrup every day.
"Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth -- more than ruin -- more even than death.... Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man."
Of course, if the short form of the quotation isn't enough, the long form is here to spell it out. How ironic, in Russell's view, that the greatest accomplishment of mankind is also terrifying.
"Science may set limits to knowledge, but should not set limits to imagination."
Changing gears, this quotation makes me think of Einstein's famous sayings about imagination. In much the same vein, Russell speaks to the desirability of imagination, and I would say elevates it over knowledge in the process. Indeed, it may very well be that science is actually, at its core, about both.
Morality
Russell was raised in a Christian household, and actually did hold that most of the traditional Christian virtues were good ones (except, for example, sexual abstinence, which he found absurd). Even so, he was a staunch atheist - or at least a staunch agnostic, being generally undogmatic - and held that morality could be arrived at logically.
"The good life, as I conceive it, is a happy life. I do not mean that if you are good you will be happy - I mean that if you are happy you will be good."
Here is an example of a practical philosophy of morality, and also an example of a fantastic reversal of expectations. The opening of the quotation seems innocuous enough, but his conception is non-traditional. The point is well-taken, however. It may very well be that if we focused more on making people happy, then they would be good more easily, rather than trying to make people good and hoping they'll also be happy. The idea here is related to one authors and philosophers have been expressing for a long time: it's much rarer for wealthy - or at least comfortable - people to be thieves. If so much is true with money, why not with morals as well?
"The people who are regarded as moral luminaries are those who forego ordinary pleasures themselves and find compensation in interfering with the pleasures of others."
I think this is the most controversial quotation in the set, and I love it. It takes on both the "Great Man" theory of history - if tangentially - and the unchallenged (and, really, almost unchallengeable) notion that self-sacrifice is desirable. Moral luminaries are, as we often forget, people, and Russell sees in their willingness to give up their own pleasures a kind of sick desire to rob the same from others. He is, of course, mainly challenging Christianity here, but we could say the same about any number of areas of human experience. Consider the over-worked teacher who gives up everything so that her students might become stressed-out, over-worked adults themselves. Consider the monk who surrenders sexual company in the hope of motivating others to do the same. Consider the insurance executive who works 15 hours a day, so that he might better ensure that his profit margins are high (and therefore his coverage more scant).
In all, it's a polarizing quotation, but the seeds are visible even in some of the more mundane thoughts about happiness. Of course, Russell would not be phased by the offense that many of his readers would take at such an idea, if only because he recognized that most popular opinions today were once extremely unpopular, to the point of being absurd. And, on the balance, it's not really worth it to get angry with a dead philosopher, is it? That sounds dangerously like wishing for the unhappiness of another more than wishing for the happiness of oneself. Or, worse yet, confusing the two.
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