Monthly Archives: August 2006

a cautionary tale

John Dewey and his contemporaries in the Progressive Era invented many of the standard forms of civic education, including social studies courses, student governments, service clubs, scholastic newspapers, and 4-H. Dewey rightly argued that “Formal instruction … easily becomes remote and dead–abstract and bookish, to use the ordinary words of depreciation.” He favored experiential education for democracy and tried to “reorganize” American education “so that learning takes place in connection with the intelligent carrying forward of purposeful activities.” A good example would be a school newspaper, which requires sustained, cooperative work, promotes deliberation, and depends upon perennial values such as freedom of the press.

As Diane Ravitch writes in The Troubled Crusade (1983), Dewey saw educational reform as a “vital part” of a broader “social and political reform movement” that aimed at richer and more equitable political participation. Thus Dewey and his fellow progressives sought better civic education while they also battled corruption, pursued women’s suffrage and civil rights, and launched independent political journals for adults. They saw civic experiences in school as means to help students begin participating in the serious business of democracy, which also needed to be reformed.

Unfortunately, the specific innovations that the progressives introduced into schools–scholastic newspapers, debate clubs, social studies courses, and the like–could easily lose their original connection to democracy. When that purpose was forgotten or ignored, extracurricular activities and social studies classes became means to impart good behavior, academic skills, or “social hygiene”–not ways to begin changing society.

Soon, Ravitch writes, “the progressive education movement became institutionalized and professionalized, and its major themes accordingly changed. Shorn of its roots in politics and society, pedagogical progressivism came to be identified with the child-centered school; with a pretentious scientism; with social efficiency and social utility rather than social reform; and with a vigorous suspicion of ‘bookish’ learning.”

Today, there is a serious risk that we could repeat the same pattern. For example, excellent service-learning programs enhance students’ civic capacity: they increase skills and motivations for self-government. The best programs allow students to tackle problems that really matter, sometimes provoking controversy. But service-learning is being widely advocated as a way to reduce teen pregnancy or drug abuse and as an alternative to “bookish” academic curricula for students who are not succeeding in school. There is merit in both rationales, but there is also the danger that service-learning will be watered down and depoliticized. To use Ravitch’s terms, service-learning can be shorn of its connection to politics, made overly “child-centered” (instead of academically challenging), and used to enhance “social efficiency” (e.g., to lower rates of delinquency) as recommended by behavioral scientists.

The alternative is to recall that schools are public spaces in which young people begin the serious business of self-government and have early opportunities to pursue social change. Although it is helpful to consult scientific studies, students and other community members must decide for themselves what social causes they favor. (No “pretentious scientism”!) Service-learning, civics courses, and extracurricular activities are useful means for democratic education, but they are not ends in themselves. The point of the whole business is democracy, which begins in school and not after graduation.

a new survey of youth entertainment culture

An interesting LA Times poll of American kids (age 12-24) finds them bored despite a plethora of electronic entertainment devices. “‘I feel bored like all the time, ’cause there is like nothing to do,’ said Shannon Carlson, 13, of Warren, Ohio, a respondent who has an array of gadgets, equipment and entertainment options at her disposal but can’t ward off ennui.”

I like Reed Larson’s idea that adolescents lack opportunities for “initiative,” which he defines as voluntarily choosing a task and then planning and sustaining it over time. Kids choose their entertainment, but needn’t plan or sustain it. They are supposed to sustain interest in their school projects, but they don’t choose them. For Larson (a pyschologist), the lack of opportunities for “initiative” explains frequent reports of boredom. Service projects and other forms of civic engagement are important alternatives.

The LA Times poll also challenges some myths about young Americans. For example, more than twice as many said that they had voted in a real election as said they had voted for an American Idol candidate. Even accounting for some “response bias” (i.e., kids may feel that they ought to say they voted in a real election), that’s still a refutation of the cliche that youth are only interested in pop culture.

listening to Kansas

In today’s New York Times, the author of What’s the Matter with Kansas? Thomas Frank, decries the right-wing revolt against expertise:

To the faithful, theirs is a war against ‘elites,’ and, with striking regularity, that means a war against the professions. The anti-abortion movement, for example, dwells obsessively on the villainy of the medical establishment. The uproar over the liberal media, a popular delusion going on 40, is a veiled reaction to the professionalization of journalism. The war on judges, now enjoying a new vogue, is a response to an imagined ‘grab for legislative power’ (as one current Kansas campaign mailing puts it) by unelected representatives in the legal profession. And the attack on evolution, the most ill-conceived thrust of them all, is a direct shot at the authority of science and, by extension, at the education systen, the very foundation of professional expertise.

Frank finds all this very distressing, because he believes that the “populist” activists of Kansas are undermining their own self-interests by voting against professionals–thereby achieving “distinctly unpopulist results.”

The question turns on whether professionals are actually worthy of trust and support. If Kansans are furious at “education insiders” and other experts, is that because they have been deluded by conservative rabble-raisers? Or could they have a point about professionals’ arrogance?

Consider that Americans (parents and other non-professionals) play a dramatically reduced role in public education. In the 1970s, more than 40 percent said that they worked on community projects–which often involved education–but that percentage is now down to the 20s. PTA membership rose to 45 per 100 families in 1960, but then fell to less than half of that in the last twenty years. Under No Child Left Behind, very little about schools can be influenced or debated except evolution and sex ed: two hot-button issues that mobilize ideologues. The core curriculum, which is loaded with value-judgments that deserve public debate, has been decided by the people who write tests–pyschometricians and other experts far from Kansas (but close to Princeton, NJ). Meanwhile, the general atmosphere of schools seems commercialized, sexualized, and otherwise reflective of bad values.

Anyone who has tried to participate in educational issues, whether at the national level or in one’s local school, knows that jargon, turf, and bureaucracy are the order of the day. This would be fine if school systems produced excellent results.

I have dwelled on the case of education, but it would not be difficult to develop similar arguments about professional journalism and medical care. (Anyone who has wrestled with the medical bureaucracy during a health emergency will recognize an arrogance, a status-consciousness, a worship of machines and chemicals, and a lack of concern for the whole patient that cannot be attributed to insurance issues alone.) I know it is more controversial, but I tend to believe that judges have overstepped their bounds as well, particularly in cases where they have made live public debates moot by handing down decisions not clearly based in the Constitution.

In short, I think Frank very acutely diagnoses a revolt against the professional elites. But suppressing the revolt will not make the problem go away. Professionals must change their behavior in order to merit public respect.

“slave trader … patriot”

I’m in Providence, RI. Walking past a fine eighteenth century house, I spotted a plaque with these words:

John Brown House

The home of John Brown reflecting the wealth and position gained from his lucrative career as slave trader, privateer, China trade merchant and patriot.

A project of the Rhode Island Black Heritage Society

Also shown on the plaque is the seal representing a soldier of The First Rhode Island Regiment (1778)–“The Black Regiment.”

It’s a striking juxtaposition. The house of slave trader is decorated or even honored with a plaque purchased by an African American heritage society. John Brown’s “position” is attributed to the money he made from the transatlantic slave trade. But he is also called a “patriot.”

As a member of the Continental Congress and early House of Representatives, Brown was a founder of the United States. He was also a founder of Brown University. The source of his funds–hence his “position” in society, which made him a leader–was deeply immoral. Yet the United States Government and Brown University benefit all Americans. Of course, that’s easy for me to say, because I have had access to such institutions all my life and have benefited from them. (I’ve never had anything to do with Brown–but other private universities have given me various advantages.) Most people are born in positions from which it is very hard if not impossible to reach the Ivy League. It’s always worth asking whether, from behind a veil of ignorance, one would choose to have institutions like Brown University. Brown’s particular moral origin prompts that question but does not settle it. Perhaps the source of the funds is irrelevant. Or perhaps dirty money is mixed with good in all great institutions.

I had some of these thoughts as I sat, a few minutes later, in the pure interior of Roger Williams’ First Baptist Church (actually built 150 years after his time, in 1774-5). Williams denied the English King’s right to appropriate American land and carefully bought Providence from the native Narragansetts. It was a promising start and it led to a beautiful and dignified city–but one in which men had “lucrative careers” selling other people’s lives.

Calvino’s free hyper-indirect discourse

I recently finished Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, in William Weaver’s translation. It’s a novel about trying to read a novel of that name by Italo Calvino–a difficult and even perilous task, since the book is constantly being mixed up with others, stolen, or fraudulantly exchanged. Ten of the chapters are the beginnings of novels that the protagonist (“you”) try to read, hoping that they are continuations of what you have read so far. Each is a parody of a particular type of literature and a genuinely suspenseful story that breaks off just when your interest is most aroused.

Calvino’s writing has an aspect that I have never seen before, although it could be viewed as a radical extension of “free indirect discourse.” That is the technique of describing something in the omniscient third person, but in such a way that it seems to take on the perspective and language of a character within the book. A famous example from Austen’s Emma:

She had ventured once alone to Randalls, but it was not pleasant; and a Harriet Smith, therefore, one whom she could summon at any time to a walk, would be a valuable addition to her privileges. But in every respect as she saw more of her, she approved of her, and was confirmed in all her kind designs.

Harriet certainly was not clever, but she had a sweet, docile, graceful disposition; was totally free from conceit; and only desiring to be guided by anyone she looked up to. Her early attachment to herself was very amiable; and her inclination for good company and power of appreciating what was elegant and clever, shewed that there was no want of taste, though strength of understanding must not be expected. Altogether she was quite convinced of Harriet Smith’s being exactly the young friend she wanted — exactly the something which her home required.

Literally, that is the narrator’s description of Harriet Smith mixed with some of Emma’s thoughts–but the two are inseparable. The whole narration is suffused with Emma’s voice. It is Emma, for example, who sees Harriet as “not clever.” Emma’s patronizing attitude is presented with delicious irony.

Calvino takes this technique a step further. He describes what books would be like if they told particular stories. He uses such descriptions of imaginary texts as a means of story-telling. Examples:

A fight scene from the chapter entitled “Outside the Town of Malbork (p. 39): “The page you’re reading should convey this violent contact of dull and painful blows, of fierce and lacerating responses; this bodiliness of using one’s own body against another body …” As you read about the description of a fight, you visualize the actual struggle–but through the eyes of a book that Calvino regards with irony.

From Calvino’s parody of Magical Realism entitled “Around and Empty Grave”: p. 225: “I pass through a series of places that ought to be more and more interior, whereas instead I find myself more and more outside; from one courtyard I move to another courtyard, as if in this palace all the doors served only for leaving and never for entering. The story should give the sense of disorientation in places that I am seeing for the first time but also places that have left in my memory not a recollection but a void.”

Calvino flagrantly violates the rule that writers should show and not tell. He tells us what the story is about and thereby narrates it.