A pretty solid rant on the corporate program for destroying education by Chris Hedges:
http://truthout.org/why-united-states-destroying-its-education-system/1302418800
Monday, April 11, 2011
Sunday, April 3, 2011
Vernacular language in the Classroom
I'm intrigued by the conversation about professorial language on Dave Johnson's blog. Here are a few more thoughts:
1) Since college students are adults, the good paternalistic reason for a teacher not to use certain words in a classroom (that children require protection from certain of the world's harshnesses) is absent. In fact, continuing to protect them from legitimate, if harsh, modes of expression might itself constitute a sort of misplaced and invidious paternalism.
2) The item above of course begs the question of legitimacy. When might it be legitimate to use words like "damn" or "fuck" in a college classroom? I reject the idea that it could never be, since these are not only common words in the language, they are particularly expressive ones (if they were not, what would all the fuss be about?). Like all words, there will be better and worse moments to choose them; it seems unlikely that they would never be the best choice in a college classroom. To claim so would at least require a compelling argument that I have not yet seen.
3) I reject the popular idea that use of such words displays a lack of imagination or inarticulateness. Sometimes it does, presumably (unimaginative, ignorant people, and television, sometimes rely too heavily on such language), but ignorant people use lots of words. The flaw here is not use as such, but overuse, to the exclusion of variety and nuance.
4) The sort of class anxiety that motivates the "unimaginative" criticism seems to accept, uncritically, that there is something wrong with these words. But what? The prohibition on cursing, in particular, is rooted in the religious superstition that the invocation of certain words has magical power -- the biblical injunction against taking the Lord's name in vain is in fact an explicit prohibition of witchcraft. But when a modern, secular person says "God damn it!" she is not necessarily invoking either a supreme being or occult powers. More likely, she is just reaching for the strongest language culturally available after nailing her thumb with a hammer.
5) Taboos on certain words about bodily function and sexuality are similarly rooted in religious superstition. This may well have been functional in another era -- attaching ideological ickiness to icky things like manure by making "shit" a bad word might have helped remind people not to mess about with them in a crowded and unsanitary medieval urban world -- but with germ theory, sewage systems, and soap we have more effective tools, and no longer need to scare people off. In fact, these antisomatic (body-rejecting) ideologies, infecting early Christianity through Greco-Roman Stoicism, have done enormous damage.
6) Any prohibition on the use of harsh language in a college classroom will confront boundary problems. Which words, precisely, do we exclude (would "crap" be better than "shit"? Why or why not?)? Are euphemisms really better, or would resorting to them model for the students a kind of expressive disingenuity? No simple rule is likely to resolve such complexities.
7) The best reason I can think of for limiting use of profanity in any context is that certain words and expressions, for historical and cultural reasons, happen to be exceptionally forceful. As it is likely that too-frequent use will erode that force, it seems wise to save such terms so that we will have the resources to speak very harshly when we really feel the need to. It seems that we must be moderate with profanity to keep it profane.
1) Since college students are adults, the good paternalistic reason for a teacher not to use certain words in a classroom (that children require protection from certain of the world's harshnesses) is absent. In fact, continuing to protect them from legitimate, if harsh, modes of expression might itself constitute a sort of misplaced and invidious paternalism.
2) The item above of course begs the question of legitimacy. When might it be legitimate to use words like "damn" or "fuck" in a college classroom? I reject the idea that it could never be, since these are not only common words in the language, they are particularly expressive ones (if they were not, what would all the fuss be about?). Like all words, there will be better and worse moments to choose them; it seems unlikely that they would never be the best choice in a college classroom. To claim so would at least require a compelling argument that I have not yet seen.
3) I reject the popular idea that use of such words displays a lack of imagination or inarticulateness. Sometimes it does, presumably (unimaginative, ignorant people, and television, sometimes rely too heavily on such language), but ignorant people use lots of words. The flaw here is not use as such, but overuse, to the exclusion of variety and nuance.
4) The sort of class anxiety that motivates the "unimaginative" criticism seems to accept, uncritically, that there is something wrong with these words. But what? The prohibition on cursing, in particular, is rooted in the religious superstition that the invocation of certain words has magical power -- the biblical injunction against taking the Lord's name in vain is in fact an explicit prohibition of witchcraft. But when a modern, secular person says "God damn it!" she is not necessarily invoking either a supreme being or occult powers. More likely, she is just reaching for the strongest language culturally available after nailing her thumb with a hammer.
5) Taboos on certain words about bodily function and sexuality are similarly rooted in religious superstition. This may well have been functional in another era -- attaching ideological ickiness to icky things like manure by making "shit" a bad word might have helped remind people not to mess about with them in a crowded and unsanitary medieval urban world -- but with germ theory, sewage systems, and soap we have more effective tools, and no longer need to scare people off. In fact, these antisomatic (body-rejecting) ideologies, infecting early Christianity through Greco-Roman Stoicism, have done enormous damage.
6) Any prohibition on the use of harsh language in a college classroom will confront boundary problems. Which words, precisely, do we exclude (would "crap" be better than "shit"? Why or why not?)? Are euphemisms really better, or would resorting to them model for the students a kind of expressive disingenuity? No simple rule is likely to resolve such complexities.
7) The best reason I can think of for limiting use of profanity in any context is that certain words and expressions, for historical and cultural reasons, happen to be exceptionally forceful. As it is likely that too-frequent use will erode that force, it seems wise to save such terms so that we will have the resources to speak very harshly when we really feel the need to. It seems that we must be moderate with profanity to keep it profane.
Sunday, March 6, 2011
Accountability and Higher Education
An open letter to the Massachusetts Department of Education, regarding its "Vision Project" for higher education.
An attorney friend of mine used to work in real estate law, which she found unpleasant and unproductive because she had to account for every six minutes of her eight hour workday in such a way that it could be billed to one of the firm's accounts. This was accountability gone mad, since it made her work intensely stressful and time-conscious, and in so doing undermined both efficiency and creativity -- not to mention making her life miserable. She quit that hellish job many years ago to work for the EPA, helping to hold polluters accountable for their violations. Though the salary was exactly half of her old one, she was good at it, effective in research, legal writing, and litigation, and got considerable satisfaction from helping make the country a cleaner and safer place by enforcing the law.
The principal difference between those two jobs was the nature of her accountability. In the first, the mindless, mechanical notion of accountability that was operative systematically undermined both the quality of her work and her quality of her life. In the second, she was a member of a legal team that held itself internally accountable through its working relationships, and was effectively and respectfully overseen by professional administrators with well articulated expectations and a clearly shared purpose with the team.
'Accountability' is the buzzword of the hour in education, and it has the dangerous quality of being connotatively positive -- no one can be against it, any more than one can oppose 'improvement' or 'health.' As my lawyer friend's story demonstrates, however, not all regimes of accountability are healthy or improving. In particular, external oversight by those disconnected from the complex process of learning and teaching, especially when such oversight demands quantitative evidence of inherently qualitative pedagogical relationships, is a sure recipe for a destructive, unhealthy sort of accountability. We are witnessing such destructiveness in the demands for high-stakes testing in primary and secondary education, and I very much hope that the Vision Project envisions something radically distinct from that. If it does, it needs to articulate clearly and precisely in what its proposed regime of accountability consists.
Teaching/learning is not mechanical but organic, involving multiple complex interactive systems, and concretely respecting that fact is the first task of any organization concerned with education. Mechanical, reductively quantitative assessment might be appropriate for a machine, but it would be a very bad physician indeed who ignored the qualitative fact of a human patient's life and consciousness. I would humbly suggest that the orientation needs to be not "show us that you are doing a good job," but "help us understand what you are doing, and how we can support you in doing it better."
An attorney friend of mine used to work in real estate law, which she found unpleasant and unproductive because she had to account for every six minutes of her eight hour workday in such a way that it could be billed to one of the firm's accounts. This was accountability gone mad, since it made her work intensely stressful and time-conscious, and in so doing undermined both efficiency and creativity -- not to mention making her life miserable. She quit that hellish job many years ago to work for the EPA, helping to hold polluters accountable for their violations. Though the salary was exactly half of her old one, she was good at it, effective in research, legal writing, and litigation, and got considerable satisfaction from helping make the country a cleaner and safer place by enforcing the law.
The principal difference between those two jobs was the nature of her accountability. In the first, the mindless, mechanical notion of accountability that was operative systematically undermined both the quality of her work and her quality of her life. In the second, she was a member of a legal team that held itself internally accountable through its working relationships, and was effectively and respectfully overseen by professional administrators with well articulated expectations and a clearly shared purpose with the team.
'Accountability' is the buzzword of the hour in education, and it has the dangerous quality of being connotatively positive -- no one can be against it, any more than one can oppose 'improvement' or 'health.' As my lawyer friend's story demonstrates, however, not all regimes of accountability are healthy or improving. In particular, external oversight by those disconnected from the complex process of learning and teaching, especially when such oversight demands quantitative evidence of inherently qualitative pedagogical relationships, is a sure recipe for a destructive, unhealthy sort of accountability. We are witnessing such destructiveness in the demands for high-stakes testing in primary and secondary education, and I very much hope that the Vision Project envisions something radically distinct from that. If it does, it needs to articulate clearly and precisely in what its proposed regime of accountability consists.
Teaching/learning is not mechanical but organic, involving multiple complex interactive systems, and concretely respecting that fact is the first task of any organization concerned with education. Mechanical, reductively quantitative assessment might be appropriate for a machine, but it would be a very bad physician indeed who ignored the qualitative fact of a human patient's life and consciousness. I would humbly suggest that the orientation needs to be not "show us that you are doing a good job," but "help us understand what you are doing, and how we can support you in doing it better."
Monday, February 14, 2011
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
Bureaucratic Threats to Higher Education
Simon Head here details the disaster wrought by an industrial-production mindset, imported from the U.S., on the system of higher education in the U.K., with some observations about analogous developments here at home.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/jan/13/grim-threat-british-universities/
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/jan/13/grim-threat-british-universities/
Wednesday, December 29, 2010
A Fool's Paradise
I just saw Helen Mirren in Shakespeare's The Tempest -- highly recommended -- and was reminded of a great line from the loutish Stephano. It makes a telling comment on the popular notion that thanks to the internet we no longer need to pay musicians:
STEPHANO: "This will prove a brave kingdom to me, where I shall have my music for nothing."
I can't say it worked out so well form him, either.
STEPHANO: "This will prove a brave kingdom to me, where I shall have my music for nothing."
I can't say it worked out so well form him, either.
Saturday, December 25, 2010
Interesting News Story
Professor Michael Taber and his class make the Post...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/23/AR2010122301922.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/23/AR2010122301922.html
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