This article is so brilliant that it needs no further comments from me.
http://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2014/02/22/the-war-against-the-imagination/
The War Against the Imagination: How to Teach in a System Designed to Fail
by Robert Guffey
(Note from Jon Rappoport: I had to print this article about education
by Robert Guffey, who teaches at Long Beach State University, and is
the author of a brilliant, challenging book,
Cryptoscatology: Conspiracy Theory as Art Form.
I had to print this article because it’s so important to the future of
what we call education, and because it’s so important to the future of
freedom and human consciousness. That’s all I’ll say. I’ll leave the
rest to Robert.)
Part I: The War Against Education
There has been much talk lately about the worthless quagmire into
which the American educational system has hopelessly sunk. I’ve been
teaching English composition at CSU Long Beach for over ten years, and
have never seen more hostility directed towards the field of education
than now. A recent documentary,
The War on Kids directed by
Cevin Soling, takes the American educational system to task for all its
numerous failings and compares public schools to prisons. This attitude
reflects the feelings of many students, and not just high school
students. I see a great deal of resistance to learning even at the
college level. If students truly believe they’re stuck in a prison,
then such resistance is understandable—indeed, maybe even inevitable.
One of the major problems any teacher has to face is resistance from
his students. Resistance is a natural response from someone who’s been
forced to sit through hours and hours of useless factoids in high school
with little reward except smiley faces and various letters of the
alphabet. Though it can be frustrating to the teacher, resistance is
actually a healthy attitude that indicates students aren’t quite as
somnambulant as many people seem to think they are. A beginning teacher
would be advised to nurture that resistance (rather than stamp it out),
and then channel it into more positive areas, areas that encompass such
shopworn concepts as….
Wonder.
Enthusiasm.
The imagination.
Why are these words used so rarely in classrooms these days? It’s as
if most teachers have forgotten what inspired their own love of
reading. Whether in an English 100 college classroom or a freshman
English class on a high school campus, students will inevitably resist
studying topics they’re convinced are transient and/or ephemeral. Does
this mean they’ve all been brainwashed by far too many zeros and ones,
their medullae warped and atrophied due to overdosing on ungrammatical
rap music? No, I don’t think so. I think it’s a natural reaction to
curricula that have come to represent a world with which they have no
connection, a world populated by instructors whose major concerns are
encapsulated within a solipsistic quantum bubble of their own devising, a
world in which the only legitimate reading material consists of staid
essays about events that seem to have no relevance to their daily
lives. William Burroughs once said, “Language is a virus,” and he was
right. The Word is infectious, an insidious virus that goes by many
names.
Wonder. Enthusiasm. The imagination.
Are these considered dirty words these days? If so, the universities
are no doubt to blame. Of course, academia is an easy whipping boy, a
target for politicos on both the left and the right. Right-wingers are
constantly accusing the universities of being controlled by a secret
cabal of Marxists intent on brainwashing our precious young chil’un into
becoming dope-smoking lesbian slaves for (gasp) the Democratic Party—or
worse yet, Ralph Nader. On the other hand, left-wingers live in
constant fear of right-wingers somehow subverting the true purpose of
the university through corporate underwriting and undue political
influence. Both are missing the point. The true purpose of the
university system is to bland out the culture to such a degree that
there will no longer be any extremes on either side,—left or right—just
the perpetual drone of academic discourse in which nothing important
ever gets said because the entire content is taken up by preparations to
say something important.
The perpetrators of this discourse of meaninglessness are the very
people in charge of teaching our children today; their essays are the
literary equivalent of feather-bedding in the work world. Imagine an
incompetent baker desperately attempting to dress up a silver platter
full of Twinkies to look like fine French pastry. This is what
“academic discourse” has become in America. Students resist taking part
in it for the same reason they don’t want to read Jacques Derrida.
(Personally, I try to avoid Derrida, as I’m lactose intolerant.) If
you’re going to waste your time, you might as well have
fun while you’re doing it. So they go to Palm Springs and drink beer and take E and have sex instead. Who can blame them?
The disaffected student has merely fallen for the lie of the Hegelian
dialectic process, a systematic method of control in which the status
quo is granted perpetual renewal via a delicate balancing act, a global
shadow play in which binary opposites are carefully maintained to create
a false dichotomy in world consciousness, a dichotomy consisting of
left and right, black and white, good and evil, cop and criminal,
Communist and Capitalist, Republican and Democrat, Crip and Blood, Staff
and Faculty, student and teacher. These divisions, mere illusions,
manifest themselves on both the macrocosmic and microcosmic scale.
Including the classroom.
The reason most students reject the values of the university is
because they don’t believe there’s any alternative to the newspeak of
academic discourse. Most of them have bought Hegel’s lie (without even
knowing who he is or what his theories are). One must, they believe,
either learn to speak meaningless gibberish, or reject the university
system outright. Many erudite scholars consciously decide to opt out of
the system for this very reason.
For the vast majority of students, this decision will be an
unconscious (and unnecessary) one. Their resistance is a false
dichotomy. If we encourage our students to think “out of the box” (or,
better yet, “out of the tetrahedron”), to go beyond the false
dichotomies that have been shoved down their throat since they were in
kindergarten, then they just might embrace the learning experience a
high school or university can offer them; they might very well
appropriate the notion of academic discourse and warp it to fit their
own aesthetics. Plenty of other “outsiders” have done so in the past,
composition instructors like Victor Villanueva being a prime example.
It
can be done. Sometimes it happens almost by accident, by
stumbling upon a sudden epiphany: that the status quo is not
inviolate; it can, and
will, bend if you push hard enough.
Listen to these words by Victor Villanueva:
For all the wonders I had found in
literature—and still find—literature seemed to me self-enveloping. What
I would do is read and enjoy. And, when it was time to write, what I
would write about would be an explanation of what I had enjoyed […]
essentially saying “this is what I saw” or “this is how what I read took
on a special meaning for me” (sometimes being told that what I had seen
or experienced was nonsense). I could imagine teaching literature—and
often I do, within the context of composition—but I knew that at best
I’d be imparting or imposing one view: the what I saw or the meaning
for me. […] But it did not seem to me that I could somehow make
someone enjoy. Enjoyment would be a personal matter: from the self,
for the self.
How do we encourage the potential iconoclasts now entering our
classrooms to take the lance in hand and start out on their quixotic
quest to battle every windmill the system throws at them, to allow their
writing to flow
from the self, for the self? The first step is a
simple one, often overlooked, the successful completion of which
requires the use of three basic tools. Perhaps you’ve heard of them.
Wonder. Enthusiasm. The imagination.
In his 1989 book
Zen in the Art of Writing, Ray Bradbury writes:
[…] if you are writing without zest,
without gusto, without love, without fun, you are only half a writer.
It means you are so busy keeping one eye on the commercial market, or
one ear peeled for the avant-garde coterie, that you are not being
yourself. You don’t even know yourself. For the first thing a writer
should be is—excited. He should be a thing of fevers and enthusiasms.
Without such vigor, he might as well be out picking peaches or digging
ditches; God knows it’d be better for his health.
How long has it been since you wrote […]
your real love or your real hatred […] onto the paper? When was the
last time you dared release a cherished prejudice so it slammed the page
like a lightning bolt? What are the best things and the worst things
in your life, and when are you going to get around to whispering or
shouting them?
Unfortunately, students aren’t encouraged to either shout or whisper
anything. No, that would be considered “extreme” and might unbalance
the Hegelian status quo. They’re asked to fill out Scan-Tron sheets
instead—imprisoning their individual personalities within those tiny
lead-filled bubbles. The Scam-Tron is one of the most basic examples of
behavioral programming one can find in the school system. Its intent
is to instill in the student the idea that there exists only a limited
number of answers for any given question—a closed universe of
possibilities.
Zest? Gusto? Bradbury has sound advice for would-be writers in his
essays, all of it ignored by the majority of high school and college
English instructors. Imagine a high school teacher encouraging his
students to write about their most deeply-held prejudices in an open and
honest manner. Either some kid’s left-wing parent would complain about
fostering racism in a state-funded institution, or some right-wing
parent would complain about indoctrinating their Precious One with kooky
liberal values about “tolerance.” And instead of protecting the
instructor’s right to teach composition in any damn way he pleases, the
Principal or the Department Chair or the Dean would no doubt burn the
Constitution and sweep the ashy fragments underneath the fax machine for
fear of incurring a lawsuit that might attract media attention to the
school—not just “unfavorable” media attention, mind you, but any media
attention at all.
As any bureaucrat will tell you (if you catch them in an honest
and/or inebriated mood), the very last thing they want is to see their
name in the newspaper. As proof of this, please note the fact that the
only time you ever notice a politician’s name in the newspaper is if
they’ve screwed up. All bureaucrats, whether they be Senators or school
administrators, live in fear of the day their existence is discovered
by the outside world. They’re rather like Bigfoot, truth to tell,
constantly hiding behind rocks when civilization encroaches too near
their isolated abode. University Deans fear lawsuits as much as Bigfoot
fears stoned hikers and forest fires. Which is why so many high school
and college teachers are left out to dry when legal action is a
possibility; it doesn’t even have to be a real threat, just a
possibility.
The result? The students learn nothing, and the First Amendment is
driven one step further toward extinction (yes, kind of like Bigfoot).
If not for Political Correctness and the nightmare that has grown
into state-funded, compulsory education, universities wouldn’t need to
foot the bill for so many of these basic composition courses that
fruitlessly attempt to make up for twelve years worth of apathy and
neglect in a single semester. At the college level, English teachers
are just playing catch-up. The best they can do is sew up the bodies
and send them back into the battlefield to get shot up some more. This
metaphor, of wartime Emergency Rooms and patchwork surgery, is more
appropriate than you might imagine, for many instructors perceive their
work with remedial students from a rigid, medico-militaristic
perspective: as babysitting doomed patients trapped on a terminal ward.
Listen to these words from Mike Rose’s article entitled “
The Language of Exclusion“:
Such talk reveals an atomistic,
mechanistic-medical model of language that few contemporary students of
the use of language, from educators to literary theorists, would
support. Furthermore, the notion of remediation, carrying with it as it
does the etymological wisps and traces of disease, serves to exclude
from the academic community those who are so labeled. They sit in
scholastic quarantine until their disease can be diagnosed and remedied.
The long-term solution to this problem is to fire everybody in the
first and second grades and replace them with teachers who know the
meaning of the words zest and gusto, who possess the innate ability to
impart wonder and enthusiasm—and above all a love of the imagination—in
even the dullest of their students.
But what about the present? What about the barely literate teenagers
who are filling up our high schools now, who will soon be sitting in
entry level English classes in colleges all across this nation, fully
expecting to be passed on to the next level even if they don’t do any
work at all—a reasonable expectation given their past experience with
social promotion (another insidious phenomenon inspired by the
unreasonable fear of lawsuits)? What, you may ask, do we do about these
“lost kids” who have fallen between the cracks?
We do the only thing we can do. We assault them with our
enthusiasm. We attack them with wonder. We pelt them with a fusillade
of bullets packed with enough imaginative power to knock their brains
out of their skulls and leave them bleeding and dying on the
Pepsi-stained tiled floors of our classrooms. Of course, their death
will be a metaphorical one. (Any student of the Tarot knows that death
is merely another word for “transformation.”)
In order to accomplish this transformation, the first thing that has
to go is Political Correctness. Next, the fear of lawsuits. And
finally the Hegelian notion of dialectics.
(Note: Some might argue that this article
merely employs Hegelian dialectics in reverse. After all, I identify a
thesis (i.e., schools maintain the status quo), then work through
various antitheses that lead to some level of synthesis. This argument,
however, would be inaccurate. The problem with Hegelian dialectics is
its basic assumption that one can never know the whole truth. Within a
self-limiting system such as this, it’s impossible to solve any problem,
no matter how large or small. Why bother identifying the source of a
problem if the paradigm itself prevents it from being dealt with once
and for all? The process of Hegelian dialectics merely synthesizes
the problem into a strange new form—a mutant hybrid, so to speak. In
this article I’m not trying to create a new synthesis; instead, I’m
trying to say I know the nature of the game. The reason we
haven’t solved the problems facing the world today (including the
disintegrating educational system, the tensions in the Middle East, the
paucity of fossil fuels, and world hunger) is because everybody is
hypnotized by the notion that we can only know so much. That kind of
thinking got us into this mess in the first place. As Albert Einstein
once said, “Any problem cannot be solved at the same level at which it
was created.” I’m not advocating a synthesis of any kind; I’m
advocating knocking all the pieces off the game board and starting anew.
)
Human thought cannot be divided into thesis and anti-thesis. No
significant question has only three or four possible answers. Though
the universe might very well be contained within a grain of sand, it
cannot be contained within a Scan-Tron bubble. Similarly, the notion of
“Good” or “Bad”—“Appropriate” or “Inappropriate”—writing should be
tossed out the window along with good ol’ Hegel. Students should be
allowed to read whatever interests them. If the student doesn’t know
what interests him, the teacher has to take the time to find that out
and match him with a book that might appeal to him, that might stoke the
fires of his imagination.
I’ve had great success sparking a love of reading in culturally
impoverished students since 2002. Year after year students give my
English classes glowing reviews, mainly (I suspect) because I’m able to
impart to them my passion for the written word. In the past I’ve
accomplished this by assigning great works of literature: poems, short
stories, novels, even some graphic novels. And yet, despite this
consistent success, on April 20, 2012, the English Department at CSULB
banned all literature from its composition courses. I’ve been told, for
reasons that seem purposely opaque, that I’m threatening the security
of the entire English Department if I assign Aldous Huxley’s
Brave New World
(a novel I’ve used with undeniable success in the past). A colleague
of mine has been ordered to stop teaching George Orwell’s
1984. Perhaps most disturbing of all, I have another colleague who used to assign Ray Bradbury’s classic anti-censorship novel,
Fahrenheit 451,
but will now be prevented from doing so as of the Fall 2012 semester.
Many of my colleagues, in these difficult economic times, plan to
acquiesce to these demands for fear of losing their jobs; meanwhile,
classic works of literature are ripped out of the hands of students who
desperately need to understand how
joyful reading and writing can be.
It appears that the main reason the department heads are enforcing
this ban on literature is (simply) that they’re frightened. It’s been
reported in several newspapers that the CSU system has announced the
development of a 24th campus called “CSU Online” that will be entirely
virtual. Because of this, there are very real concerns that the CSU
system will convert the English Department at CSULB to an online
program, thus causing the loss of numerous teaching positions. What’s
the easiest and least imaginative way of proving to The Powers That Be
that one can make substantial and sweeping changes in a university
English Department? Why, get rid of all that “unnecessary stuff” like
poetry and novels and short stories.
But the fact is this: The only asset a human teacher has over an
online, virtual experience is the ability to transmit genuine
passion
to his or her students. What better way to share passion than through
great literature? Alas, it’s this essential element, this
passion, that’s being eliminated through
de facto
censorship. Without such passion, all need for a non-virtual teaching
experience vanishes. Therefore, the changes being implemented to save
the department are changes that will most likely lead to the total
destruction of the department. I needn’t tell you, of course, that this
is called
irony… a literary concept I myself learned about in an English class while studying literature.
In the 8-6-08 edition of
The Long Beach Press-Telegram, Ray
Bradbury wrote a biting op-ed piece entitled “Is Long Beach At War With
Books?” in which he protested the forced closure of local bookstores and
the cutting of public library funds in Long Beach. When seen in
context, it’s clear that this ban on literature at CSULB is merely part
of a larger trend that’s been occurring in American cities for some time
now. The poet Diane Di Prima once wrote, “The only war that matters is
the war against the imagination.” Though I wish it weren’t so, that
war appears to be in full swing in the English Department at CSULB and
all across the nation, perhaps best represented by the forced adoption
of what is called the “Common Core State Standards Initiative” among
American public schools from sea to shining sea.
An editorial published in the 12-27-12 edition of the
Los Angeles Times warns:
[T]here’s no getting around it: The
curriculum plan […] looks almost certain to diminish exposure to works
of literature, from Seuss to Salinger. That goes too far.
The ruckus is over the new common core
standards—public school math and English curricula adopted by more than
45 states, including California—that are supposed to raise the level of
what students are being taught. In addition, the core standards are
intended to make it easier and less expensive for states to devise
better lesson plans, develop more meaningful standardized tests and
compare notes on how much students are learning.
Scheduled to take effect in the 2014-15
school year, the standards emphasize, as they should, plenty of diverse
reading material. But they have become controversial over the
requirement that the reading assigned to younger students should be half
fiction and half nonfiction, and that by high school the ratio should
be 30% fiction and 70% nonfiction. This has led to allegations that
T.S. Eliot will make way for Environmental Protection Agency reports and
that “Great Expectations” will be dumped in favor of, well, lower
expectations. (“What Students Read”)
Now listen to these wise words by educator Susan Ohanian, extracted
from her 6-19-12 article entitled “Business Week Revealed Why Common
Core Disdains Fiction in 2000”:
[e.e. cummings] is the kind of writing
primary graders savor. I speak from first-hand, on-the-spot observation
here. Of course, teacher experience, knowledge, and intuition count
for nothing. NCTE [National Council of Teachers of English], my
professional organization for decades, is deaf to my expertise […].
An oft-repeated assertion of
self-proclaimed Common Core architect David Coleman is that nonfiction
is where students get information about the world and that’s why schools
must stop teaching so much fiction. In this assertion, Coleman is
echoing the corporate world which he is hired to serve […].
Downgrading the importance of fiction in
our schools, saying that children gain information about the world only
through nonfiction, is the Common Core’s role in “educating students” to
fill […] in-demand jobs […].
In Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle
Chris Hedges points out that universities have already accepted their
corporate role, and “As universities become glorified vocational schools
for corporations they adopt values and operating techniques of the
corporations they serve” […].
Local newspapers are filled with stories
of teachers “getting ready for the Common Core.” What they mean is
teachers are using the summer break to prepare for visitation from
bloated, opportunistic blood-sucking Common Core vampire squad
inspectors… making sure there’s no fiction glut depriving youngsters of
their job skill opportunities […].
[…] NCTE, IRA [International Reading
Association], and NCTM [National Council of Teachers of Mathematics] are
too busy churning out […] books and teacher training videos on how to
use the Common Core. Yes, the complicity of our professional
organizations plus the complicity of the unions has made Common Core a
done deal. But if you believe in heaven and hell, you know where the
Standardistos who rob children of imagination and dreams will end up.
When a population becomes bullied or
intimidated out of exercising rights offered on paper, those rights
effectively cease to exist. This includes teachers. There are no
excuses left. Either you join the revolt against corporate power or you
lose your profession.
Part II: The War Against the Imagination
And after your profession, your imagination? Your independence? Your life?
According to the ancient teachings of Zen Buddhism, love and fear are
the two primary emotions that motivate the daily actions of human
beings. My personal teaching style is motivated by an intense love of
the imagination and the freedom of both speech and thought. The emotion
that motivates the “Standardistos” is fear and fear alone: the fear of
taking a stand, the fear of losing their precarious positions in a
crumbling system, the fear of teachers losing control of their students’
souls, the fear of students becoming independent and self-sufficient at
long last.
I myself first learned independent thought from Lewis Carroll and
Alice, from Kenneth Graham and Mr. Toad, from L. Frank Baum and Dorothy
Gale, from Edgar Rice Burroughs and John Carter, from Sir Arthur Conan
Doyle and Sherlock Holmes, from Edgar Allan Poe and C. Auguste Dupin.
So many children first learn to interact with the world around them—
in a questioning way—at
the inception of an imagination in their developing brains, an
imagination most often introduced to them through the endless worlds of
fiction and poetry and song.
I recently heard a radio interview with the actor/musician Ice T (whose best album, appropriately enough, is called
Freedom of Speech—Just Watch What You Say)
in which he talked about his love of reading fiction as a boy. Though
he grew up in a poverty-stricken environment in which reading was not
encouraged (not by his school teachers, not by his parents, and
certainly not by his friends), he somehow managed to stumble across a
series of urban novels by a black writer named Iceberg Slim. The first
novel he discovered was called
Pimp. Slim is a well-known writer
in some circles. His novels are violent, racist, and unapologetically
realistic. He writes about what he knows and he does it well. This
gritty mimeticism struck a chord in the young Ice T. He proceeded to
read all of Slim’s novel at a fast clip, and went on from there to
discover an even broader world of literature. But he wouldn’t have been
able to do so if he hadn’t been inspired by the in-your-face realistic
novels of Iceberg Slim.
Are Iceberg Slim’s novels “literature”? Are they “appropriate”
reading material for high school kids? Who cares? Many of these same
high school kids are shooting each other with automatic rifles. Is that
appropriate? Why aren’t Iceberg Slim’s novels made available to high
school students? Why not allow them to read literature they can
identify with instead of the mawkish sentimentalism of staid essays
extracted from the
Reader’s Digest? If the purpose of school was
really to teach, this (or something like it) would already have
happened. The fact that it hasn’t happened can mean only one thing:
The purpose of school is not to teach; the purpose of school is to
maintain the status quo.
Listen to the words of Antony Sutton, a former economics professor at California State University, Los Angeles:
A tragic failure of American education in
this century has been a failure to teach children how to read and write
and how to express themselves in a literary form. For the educational
system this may not be too distressing. As we shall see later, their
prime purpose is not to teach subject matter but to condition children
to live as socially integrated citizen units in an organic society—a
real life enactment of the Hegelian absolute State. In this State the
individual finds freedom only in obedience to the State, consequently
the function of education is to prepare the individual citizen unit for
smooth entry into the organic whole.
However, it is puzzling that the
educational system allowed reading to deteriorate so markedly. It could
be that [they want] the citizen components of the organic State to be
little more than automated order takers; after all a citizen who cannot
read and write is not going to challenge The Order […]. This author
spent five years teaching at a State University in the early 1960s and
was appalled by the general inability to write coherent English, yet
gratified that some students had not only evaded the system, acquired
vocabulary and writing skills, but these exceptions had the most
skepticism about The Establishment.
This is no coincidence. Any child or adult whose consciousness has
been forged by media imagery, who has no experience with literacy
whatsoever, will inevitably begin to mimic the cliches of popular
entertainment. Their vision of the world and the people in it will be
filtered through the Seurat-like pointillist dots of a television
screen. Their goals will be based on a corporate-owned nightmare
manufactured in a Hollywood studio or an office on Madison Avenue or a
think tank in Washington, D.C.
In light of the increasing amount of darkly surreal political
scandals emerging from the White House these days (i.e.,
“Benghazi-gate,” “AP-gate,” “IRS-gate”), one can’t help but wonder if
the real reason Those In Power wish to eradicate fiction from American
education is to make the next generation of voters unfamiliar with the
very concept of fiction itself, thus rendering the citizenry incapable
of recognizing pure fiction when it appears on the nightly news or—more
specifically—when it comes pouring out of the mouth of a duplicitous
President on a regular basis. Distinguishing between lies and truth
requires the skill to think independently, a skill best reinforced by
the imagination itself, the ability to consider
possibilities.
One day many years ago, back when I was in middle school, my Civics
teacher became ill all of a sudden. A substitute teacher came to take
his place. I think he was in his early to mid-twenties. He was a
handsome blond gentleman, fairly athletic looking. He didn’t seem like
your normal kind of teacher at all. He ignored the instructions our
regular teacher had left for him and instead launched into a monologue
that went something like this: “Everything you know is a lie.
Everything you’ve been taught is a lie. History? It’s just a pack of
fairy tales. Hey, you, kid!” He pointed at a popular boy sitting in
the front row. “Who’s George Washington?”
The boy laughed nervously, sensing a trick question in the air. “Uh… well, uh, the first President of America?”
“Wrong. The first President of the United States was a man named
John Hanson. So what’s George Washington most famous for? What’d he
do?”
“Uh… he… well, he chopped down a cherry tree, right?”
“Yeah? And then what he’d do?”
The kid couldn’t answer, so somebody else jumped in: “He told his mom about it, ‘cause he couldn’t tell a lie!”
The substitute replied, “Bullshit, man! Just more bullshit, never happened! None of this ever fucking happened!”
An uncomfortable silence fell upon the room. The most disruptive
class clowns weren’t even making funny noises with their armpits.
Nobody knew what to do. Abruptly, everybody had been teleported to an
alternate dimension where everything seemed a lot more uncertain—and a
lot more serious—than ever before.
He suggested to us that if we wanted to understand “true” history, we should read a novel entitled
Illuminatus!,
a three-volume work of psychedelic fabulism by Robert Shea and Robert
Anton Wilson. Needless to say, we never saw that particular teacher
again. I shouldn’t have been surprised.
Nor should I have been surprised when I discovered, ten years later,
while doing research among the stacks of the CSU Long Beach library,
that John Hanson was “elected President of the United States in Congress
Assembled on November 5, 1781, the first of seven such one-year termed
presidents,” whereas George Washington wasn’t elected President until
1789. My source for that little-known factoid is an obscure 1978 book
entitled
The Illuminoids. Is it possible that that weird substitute had read the same book? Maybe he’d even read the same exact
copy! I wish I could ask him. I often wonder if he’s still in the teaching biz. Somehow I doubt it.
By the way, I’ve since read almost every single book (fiction
and nonfiction) written by Robert Anton Wilson.
The reason students resist us is because they know, at some
subconscious level, that they’re not getting the whole story. They know
they’re being lied to. When they begin to hear even a small dollop of
the truth or at least some facsimile thereof—as I did that day in middle
school twenty-seven years ago—they’ll sit up and take notice. And
they’ll never forget the experience. They’ll hunger for more.
Why not combine creativity with honesty in our writing assignments?
Why not begin to teach critical thinking skills? This needn’t be done
in a boring, perfunctory manner. It can be fun. Indeed, how can it
not be fun? I suggest photocopying choice articles from the most recent
Fortean Times
(purveyor of such classic headlines as “POPOBAWA!: In Search of
Zanzibar’s Bat-winged Terror” or, a personal favorite, “HELL HOUND OF
THE TRENCHES: THE DEVIL DOG WITH A MADMAN’S BRAIN!”) and distributing
them to the class with the following directions: “Okay, ladies and
gentlemen, I want you to take this home, glance through it, read the
articles that interest you, then pick a particular article and write a
four-page essay explaining why you think it’s either true or not true.
Now let me warn you, this isn’t a straw man argument. Just because it’s
in
Fortean Times doesn’t mean it’s not true. That’s the beauty
of it all. There’s a clever mixture of truth and untruth in here. It’s
your job to separate the wheat from the chaff. Think you can do it?”
I guarantee you every single one of those students would find that
assignment a hell of a lot more intriguing than writing about the use of
the semi-colon in
Das Kapital. Not only will I be strengthening
my students’ skills in philosophy, logic, and composition, but I’ll
also be doing my basic civic duty; after all, the skills they’ll be
honing from this assignment will be the same ones they’ll need to
exercise during the next Presidential election. And no doubt the one
after that.
One of the most informative and entertaining writing assignments I
ever worked on in college was given to me not in an English class, oddly
enough, but in a logic class. We were asked to learn all the various
categories of fallacies, then—over the course of a month—comb through
books, magazines, newspapers, and TV shows to find examples of each. I
found ad hominem arguments in
The Memoirs of Richard Nixon, examples of reductio ad absurdum in
Awake (the newspaper published by the Jehovah’s Witness), and a panoply of red herrings in no less a scholarly source than
Alice in Wonderland.
I’ve never forgotten that assignment, and the knowledge I drew from it
has come in quite handy in my everyday life. Composition students could
benefit from writing projects such as this, assignments that blur the
distinctions between curricula. I’m convinced such distinctions will
become less and less tenable in the holistic world we now find ourselves
entering.
Just as the CIA never pulls off a covert operation unless it has a
good chance of scratching a number of itches at once, I would never
think of assigning an essay topic that wasn’t holistic to some degree.
As our post-quantum milieu grows more and more complex, people will be
forced to adopt a holistic perspective toward life out of pure
necessity, just to get through the day. It’s no longer sufficient to
become an expert in a single task, chained to an assembly line going
nowhere. As technology grows more and more baroque and bizarre, as
boundaries dissolve and paradigms shift, as old religions fade and new
ones rise to take their place, people must learn to become what Marshall
McLuhan called “Menippeans”: media ecologists who can slip in and out
of various artificial environments at will, as if said environments were
nothing more than cheap clothing.
The confusing advent of virtual reality and nanotechnology machines
will demand that people either learn to exercise skills of perception
and logic and discernment or be left out in the cold. If you can
change your bedroom into an African veldt and your gender twice before
lunch, you damn well better embrace a holistic approach to life. The
first years of the twenty-first century will be nothing like what’s gone
before, and by the time we reach 2050 we will have arrived in a world
wholly unrecognizable from the last decade of the 20
th
century. As with most change, people will resist it kicking and
screaming. There will be political coups, religious autos-da-fe, and
violence galore. Nonetheless, the old paradigm will inevitably wilt
away. It always does. If we as English teachers can use our influence
to help soften the transition by subtly encouraging a multidisciplinary
approach toward life via the essays (or “thought experiments”) we
assign, then so be it. If we’re going to have their porous little
brains in the palms of our hands anyway, why waste the opportunity?
In his 1985 article “Inventing the University,” David Bartholomae
presents a rather unelastic and rigid view of teaching language,
rhetoric, and art. He writes, “Teaching students to revise for
readers, then, will better prepare them to write initially with a reader
in mind. The success of this pedagogy depends on the degree to which a
writer can imagine and
conform [emphasis mine] to a reader’s
goals”. Bartholomae has everything ass-backwards. In order to make the
system succeed, the writer needn’t conform to the audience; the
audience must conform to the writer. Similarly, in the educational
system, the student needn’t conform to the teacher; the teacher needs to
conform to the student. Why teach if you’re not willing to adapt
yourself to the needs of the student?
Allow me to make myself clear: Finding out what the student needs
doesn’t necessarily mean giving the student what he wants. Indeed, the
answer will often be quite the opposite. When Marshall McLuhan began
teaching composition at the University of Wisconsin, he soon realized
that his students couldn’t care less about writers long dead. He began
assigning them such odd tasks as writing about commercials, TV shows,
popular rock bands, and movie stars, but had them do so in the same
serious, scholarly manner that would be expected of them if they were
writing about Percy Shelley. By the end of the semester, they were so
sick of pop culture they went back to writing about Shakespeare and/or
Francis Bacon with glee. This is an example of reverse psychology
par excellence (and another good example of what happens when a teacher embraces resistance rather than attempting to stamp it out).
McLuhan recognized that his students needed to be shocked out of
their media-controlled mindset, so he adapted his skills to their
situation. But he had to be totally free, emphasizing a holistic
approach, in order to even
begin accomplishing the difficult goal
of bridging the vast divide between teacher and student. One way this
can be done is by embracing their resistance through the language of
Art.
In a 1981 book entitled
The Making of Meaning, Ann E. Berthoff
published a fascinating article entitled “The Intelligent Eye and the
Thinking Hand.” Berthoff’s views on Art and Language are far more
compelling than Bartholomae’s. Berthoff is a champion of the
imagination over the mechanistic. She writes, “I believe that for
teachers of composition, such a philosophy of mind is best thought of as
a theory of imagination. If we reclaim imagination as the forming
power of mind, we will have the theoretical wherewithal for teaching
composition as a mode of thinking and a way of learning”.
In his 1980 essay “Concepts of Art and the Teaching of Writing,”
Richard E. Young advocates a more systematic approach. At one point in
the essay he quotes John Genung as saying, “It is as mechanism that
[rhetoric] must be taught; the rest must be left to the student
himself”. But if we approach the teaching of grammar or rhetoric or art
or literature as a mere mechanistic process, if we don’t emphasize
creativity and inspiration and imagination and the sheer aesthetic WOW
that comes from reading an excellent piece of literature or seeing a
brilliant film or experiencing a well-acted play, then what is teaching
for? Do we really instill the love of reading in students by analyzing
nonfiction articles about possible racism in Internal Revenue Service
hiring statistics, or do we demonstrate the sheer LOVE of great art by
allowing them to take part in the process themselves, by letting them
know that artists aren’t exotic silver-haired creatures living atop
mist-enshrouded mountains in some far away land, writing on ancient
parchments with fingers made of glass? Artists started out (and still
are, in most cases) the same exact grubby people as the students.
There’s no difference, except that one has learned to translate
experience into an aesthetic product for the enjoyment of everyone.
Anyone can do the same, even the dullest of us,
if the love of reading is instilled at the earliest age possible.
Marshall McLuhan once said, “I don’t explain, I explore”. If they
want to connect with their students, teachers must encourage exploration
over explanation. Robert Smithson, the brilliant sculptor who created
the breathtaking “Spiral Getty” in Utah, once wrote, “Establish enigmas,
not explanations.” If teachers can somehow learn how to instill a love
of enigmas over explanations in their students—even if they succeed
with only one student in a class of twenty or forty—then progress will
have been made. The language of Art is one of discovery. The teacher
is merely the guide, taking the student by the hand—without the student
ever noticing, ideally, since he or she should be too busy enjoying the
ride—through a maze that isn’t so intimidating at all once the student
begins to love the journey more than the destination.
The Reluctant Hero is a common trope in literature and mythology.
Joseph Campbell writes extensively about this pattern in his numerous
books on the power of myth. Whether in a fairy tale, a religious
parable, an epic poem, a literary masterpiece, a blockbuster summer
movie, or a mere comic book, the Hero very rarely embraces the call to
adventure. He resists it to the bitter end. Only a pre-programmed
machine could be expected to do as it’s instructed—to do “what’s best
for it” without questioning the wisdom of the programmer. Any reaction
other than resistance would be somewhat less than human. What well-read
teacher, versed in the strange idiosyncrasies of human behavior and
history, could be surprised by such resistance?
As former high school teacher John Taylor Gatto wrote in his September 2003
Harper’s Magazine article entitled “Against School”:
First […] we must wake up to what our
schools really are: laboratories of experimentation on young minds,
drill centers for the habits and attitudes that corporate society
demands. Mandatory education serves children only incidentally; its
real purpose is to turn them into servants. Don’t let your own have
their childhoods extended, not even for a day. If David Farragut could
take command of a captured British warship as a preteen, if Thomas
Edison could publish a broadsheet at the age of twelve, if Ben Franklin
could apprentice himself to a printer at the same age (then put himself
through a course of study that would choke a Yale senior today), there’s
no telling what your own kids could do. After a long life, and thirty
years in the public school trenches, I’ve concluded that genius is as
common as dirt. We suppress our genius only because we haven’t yet
figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The
solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.
Alas, I suspect many years will pass before the American educational
system endorses such a simple and glorious solution. As Buckminster
Fuller once said, “Human beings will always do the intelligent thing,
after they’ve exhausted all the stupid alternatives.” I believe an
intelligent course correction is inevitable; however, in the meantime
teachers needn’t sit around waiting for an official endorsement from the
State. All they have to do is exploit the most valuable asset in their
classroom, one that requires no funding from the government.
All they have to do is exercise the imaginations of their students,
as well as their own, by offering a panoply of choices and then getting
the hell out of the way.
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