Front Phrases

6 August 2012 Leave a comment

It isn’t what we say; it’s how we say it. Because language is symbolic, it lends itself to labels and sound bites, bits that represent so much more. Because language is metaphoric, it lends itself to misleading eloquence, phrasing that conjures appealing imagery. Appearance trumps significance almost every time. Most important about what we say is that it sounds good. We must therefore question everything we see and hear. We have iconized words to represent complex and widely varied philosophies or policies. We ride these banner words for reasons only loosely related to those words. We parade verbal icons before movements whose function and purpose are cynically disconnected from the originating reality, and sometimes fairly antithetical to the operation and even existence of institutions to which the words were initially connected, words subsequently employed to leverage change for obscure and sometimes Machiavellian ends.

What do these iconic phrases mean? Here begins the examination of one such verbal icon, Education Reform. A search of book titles related to “education reform” at Barnes and Noble online reveals 32,640 titles. We can only guess what range of thought this encompasses. Even if the ideas enfolded in the pages of these books are repeated on average a thousand times, it chokes thought to accept that the phrase, which drives billions of dollars and millions of votes, can probably be safely construed only to mean ‘changing something that will affect school age children.’ Of course, it can be pretty certain that it will fuel a great deal of media-fanned political heat. In the end, what is likely to get changed is the flow of money, which generally moves away from schools and often into profit margins and dividends.

Look at the words according to Merriam-Webster’s 11th Collegiate Dictionary (electronic).

Education:

noun :

1 a : the action or process of educating or of being educated; also : a stage of such a process b : the knowledge and development resulting from an educational process <a person of little education>
2 : the field of study that deals mainly with methods of teaching and learning in schools

Reform:

noun :

1 : amendment of what is defective, vicious, corrupt, or depraved
2 : a removal or correction of an abuse, a wrong, or errors

Let us assume that “the field of study that deals mainly with methods of teaching and learning in schools,” and “a removal or correction of an abuse, a wrong, or errors,” are pretty good indicators of what is suggested by the Education Reform advocates. At least something about what happens to school aged children is impacted by “methods of teaching.” It is certainly impacted by methods of learning too, but the field of educational psychology seldom enters the Education Reform discourse. The simplified findings of brain research are sometimes forced into that discourse. Unfortunately, modern brain research is more about what happens in the brain when one learns, but not so much about how one learns.

Memorizing Cassius’ appeal to Brutus probably looks the same as memorizing the opening lines of the Declaration of Independence in terms of brain activity. So how do we memorize better? Should we even be memorizing? Is that “learning,” and if not, what is? And what do we memorize? Our definition of education doesn’t touch on the processes or content we teach and learn. We can fault Merriam-Webster for the shortcoming in its definition of education, but how can we change the rules mid-game? That’s the definition we had going on. And that’s the danger of defining; defining attempts to fix the temporal into the perpetual. The practical reality of teaching and learning is something more and different from “the field of study that deals mainly with methods of teaching and learning in schools.”

If teaching and learning has to do with building society, and it probably does, then social policy probably should specify some of what we are taught. If part of our society, however, wishes to have its members learn, say, music, should society at large have the right, because it has the power, to deprive it of that area of learning? Well, we can’t manage the issue of rights and power here. In practice, our working definition of education deals with methods of learning, how we learn, and public policy doesn’t actually try to legislate that. At the same time, our definition doesn’t deal with what we learn or why, while public policy does put considerable energy into what we learn and in an off-handed way, why we learn it. The latter is not often stated, as it happens, but since the testing that matters is a measure of economic potential, we may extrapolate an economic motive in the prescribed content of education. Not a necessarily bad thing, though a bit flat given the depths of which societies and cultures are capable.

How we learn, returning to our line of argument, likely is affected by “methods of teaching.” At first glance, this seems like the place to effect change to reform this broken world; it looks “manageable,” and in need of repair. If the advocates of Education Reform are to be believed, they may provide the best evidence that past practices in teaching were indeed flawed.  These advocates were either well educated and are deceiving us, or they were poorly educated and shouldn’t be making education policy decisions. One questions whether the policy makers themselves know the answer to that one.

In reality, teaching and learning are complex interpersonal activities, much as parenting and (he improvises) childing. They are reciprocal processes, highly individualized and adaptive, deeply steeped in personal, sometimes sectarian morality, and served with a degree of social propriety and responsibility. Where do we draw the lines around these domains? The beliefs of which institution, family, religion, heritage, state, define those lines? How do we make the right things happen and keep the wrong things from happening when we can’t always agree on what those things are? Still, without having any clear idea what we are referring to, we will leave “methods of teaching” in our Education Reform policy, and move on to the “removal or correction of an abuse, a wrong, or errors,” because the reform part of our policy may resolve this methods conundrum.

Assuredly, if there is something abusive, wrong or in error about the methods of teaching they should be corrected or simply removed. To say there may be something abusive, wrong or in error about the methods of learning challenges reason, and further justifies leaving the learning aspect out of this discussion. We can agree that we want to avoid anything that is “abusive, wrong or in error.” Fair enough, as long as we can agree on that which is constructive, right and correct. Ah. That points to the soft-spoken or unspoken but hard sought goals of the Education Reform movement. Does constructive mean building a sound, secure society or a productive, profitable work force? Does right mean, among other things of course, all for one or everyone for himself.[*] And does correct mean there is only one right answer? We would have good cause to distrust anyone who even attempted to answer these questions. If they are still being asked after millennia of contemplation, one ought to consider the possibility that their irresolvability is their answer. The conundrum not only persists, it seems to loom over this Education Reform policy.

A year ago, I visited the Cathedral in Ely, East Cambridgeshire, England. I was of course impressed by the age, the history, the grandeur, but I was most impressed by what the Reformation had accomplished at Ely, and across England. Under the reign of the deeply religious, nine year old King Edward VI and his Lord Protector, Edward Seymour, 1st Duke of Somerset,

The 1547 Injunctions against images were a more tightly drawn version of those of 1538 but they were more fiercely enforced, at first informally, and then by instruction. All images in churches were to be dismantled; stained glass, shrines, and statues were defaced or destroyed; roods and often their lofts and screens were cut down; bells were taken down; vestments were prohibited and either burned or sold; church plate was to be melted down or sold.

(taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Reformation, 06 Aug 12)

Standing, as I did, among the destruction of nearly an acre of Norman stained glass, scores of friezes of angels’ faces, dozens of religious statues and more, some over 500 years old at the time, and the destruction of the original Saxon remains including the seventh century tomb of the founding nun, Etheldreda, was a profoundly numbing experience. This was a compounded crime against heritage. Local lords and their knights paid the Crown for the privilege of wreaking this destruction.

I became acutely sensitive to the potential for loss of roots, the loss of heritage and the consequential loss of identity inherent in reform. Were the Tudor Protestants about reforming what was an abuse, a wrong, or errors in the Roman Catholic Church in England? No. We know it was about diverting the wealth and power of the Church to the Crown. I make no defense of the Church, but ask who paid the price over time. It turns out that all across England, Victorian wealth replaced much of the lost glass and statuary and even rebuilt many churches, and I’m glad they did. But where did that wealth come from? That which made Great Britain great, the factory workers of the great industrial revolution and the exploited lands and people of the British Empire paid for the sins of fathers not their own. Reform appears to be the great change that never changes.

So, where does that leave us, and how is it that we hear this term and others similarly devised so often? They are front phrases of modern policy. Front phrases are façades raised to make actions and even words appear “pretty.” They are spins on the truth, euphemisms of reality, dust thrown into credulous eyes. Not only do front phrases mean whatever the speakers or writers want them to mean, they give vice the visage of virtue, and pledge solidarity with disparate purveyors of fraud. You see, it isn’t what we say; it’s how we say it.

Assume nothing. Question everything. Look for evidence. All arguments are logical, but not all logics are reasonable. Humans are capable of reasoning. They are also capable of obfuscating, and lying with the appearance of reasonableness. Education Reform sounds like a good thing, but what does it mean? And above what army does it rise as a standard?

Now should we try “Restore American Values?”


[*] I am aware of the gender exclusion here. It is intentional.

Filed under Education Policy, Philosophy, Reflections, Social Commentary Tagged with , ,

2011 Graduation Address, Edison High School, Minneapolis, Minnesota

3 June 2011 Leave a comment

I want to thank you for asking me to speak tonight. "Oh, thank you," wasn’t the first thing I said, but I really am flattered. This is probably my last chance to speak at a graduation, of course. And it really is an honor. As most of you know, I’m retiring next week. Don’t misunderstand; I’m not disappearing. I’m not just going to do nothing. I may even be around Edison a little. I’ll do some of the things I couldn’t do while I was at school day after day after day. I’m retiring, not stopping.

I’ll work with new teachers, I’ll travel, I’ll ride my bikes, I’ll write and I’ll certainly continue to read and even reread some of the books I haven’t been able to get to. And I’m going to study abroad some more, at Cambridge this summer and perhaps other places around the world in years to come. So, I’ll be practicing what I’m preaching tonight. You see, I can’t stop being a teacher. A teacher after all is someone who thinks learning is just so darn much fun, everybody must want to be doing it, all the time. So as I said, I’ll be doing a lot of reading–in planes, on trains, in cars and at home.

In the things I read, I sometimes find wise ideas, and new ways of seeing the world. When I read Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem "Ulysses" I connected with it right away. The original Ulysses epic is the story of a great general whose cleverness as much as his soldiering has saved him and his crew from many monstrous dangers. It is the story of a journey and a lesson in leadership, meant for future leaders, but in his poem, Tennyson takes up Ulysses at the end of his adventures, all his great accomplishments accomplished. In the poem, Ulysses is not satisfied with having achieved everything he has achieved, and he realizes that what made life worthwhile to him was the striving, the trying, not the success. Success is not an end, but a place to start again, to try something new, to go where he hasn’t yet been. He says:

 I am a part of all that I have met;
        Yet all experience is an arch, wherethro’
        Gleams that untravell’d world, whose margins fade
        For ever and for ever as I move.

Now you know that as you move toward the horizon, it will simply move on away from you. But it isn’t just your moving forward that is important about this quotation; it’s about experience and what you can see in your future. Unlike Ulysses, you are still short in experience, but as you gain more experience, you will gain more height, more vision; your horizons, the margins of your world, will grow. You’ll see how big your “untravell’d world” is. You’ll never see all there is to see, do all there is to do, know all there is to know. And no matter how hard you try, you cannot reach the stars, but that doesn’t matter. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t reach. Reaching for the stars is about you, not about the stars.

When you’re down at ground level, you can’t see too far into the distance, but when you get up high, you can see much farther. Reaching, trying and getting experience is like getting up higher. Experience makes you taller in the world of opportunity, and allows you to see much more of the possibility that exists for you. Getting experience is learning: learning by studying, learning by doing and learning by talking with and listening to people. Learn through experience. Be a tall person. See what’s out there for you. No matter what you do in life: school, work, home-making, learn from and in whatever you do. It counts. Make your life count.

Those of you who go to college and other schools study many kinds of things. A liberal education gives you the power of adaptability. When someone tells you to specialize in some subject exclusively, remember that greatness has always been achieved by those who stepped out of their limits into the unknown. The more you know, the more you will come to understand how much there is to know and how little we know of it. It is your flexibility and confidence that will let you go into what you don’t know, and that will lead you to your greatness.

Those of you who go right to work continue to learn, study, experience other things. Learn the guitar or write or join the church choir or learn to fly. No matter what kind of work you do, up on a roof top or down a hole in the ground, alone in an office or on a crowded sales floor, the more you know and the more ready you are to learn, the better you will be in your work and more likely you will be to advance. And the happier you will be in your life which will feel more full and worth living.

And those of you who stay at home and raise children, you will  do the important job of modeling and valuing learning for those children, so that they will aspire and achieve in their lives too. So that they will continue learning in their turn. So they will be the next great generation of kids to graduate from Edison.

Think about this. If you stop learning, you’re dead. Your body may trudge on, but your spirit will have died, that inner light that I and your other teachers have loved about you, will have gone out. And that will be a shame, because that flame that shines in you can light the way to your greatness. That inner light of yours is why I am so thankful to have taught at Edison and to have been allowed to be part of your lives. Keep the flame alive.

Tennyson closes with, the words of an old general, but if old Ulysses could still kick it, I know you can. Ulysses was great not for what he did, which means nothing in the world today, but for how he did it. We can all live our lives as the great ones did by doing as they have done. The great deeds will follow or not, as they may. It isn’t the score; it is how you play the game. Live your life like Ulysses. Live your life greatly. 

I close with the closing line from Tennyson’s poem as my charge to you. I charge you "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."

Congratulations, Edison Class of 2011 and good luck.

Filed under Philosophy, Reflections, Social Commentary Tagged with

CiS Edison/Delano Exchange

8 May 2011 Leave a comment

During the first week of May this year, fifty students stepped into one another’s lives for a few hours over two days, twenty-two of them from a very inner city school in northeast Minneapolis and twenty-eight from a small rural town now turning into a metropolitan bedroom community thirty some miles to the west. In the short time they spent together, following counterparts through a few classes, eating lunch together, and talking and listening to each other in follow up sessions, they were able to accomplish what seems beyond our leadership. The teenagers figured out what people who spend a little time getting to know one another usually seem to figure out; they have much more in common than they have in difference.

The exchange between Edison and Delano has happened the last two springs. It has been carried out with the College in the Schools writing and literature classes of the two schools. Its initial purpose was and remains an academic one. Interacting with people who are culturally different will allow students to expand their scope as they research and read about cultures. Cultures are complex interactions of values, language and traditions played out in an attempt to be safe, secure and perhaps comfortable in a challenging world. We all live in various cultures, sub-cultures and micro-cultures. We know that if we only have a limited set of experience in cultural settings, we will only have a limited understanding of the world. We will only have one way of seeing people and will only be able to understand them and their actions in our limited context.

Helping students better understand their world, College in the Schools courses are directed to expanding the students’ world view. The writing students research and compose an ethnography, an in depth study of a micro-culture. These students have a chance to practice the art of getting inside other people’s “closed” worlds through the exchange. The literature students read Arundhati Roy’s novel “The God of Small Things,” which examines cultural conflicts and issues set in Kerala, Indian. Since the literature students need to open up the differences and cultural conflicts in the novel, they can examine those in the light of their experience confronting the presumed differences our two school groups held prior to the exchange. This will help them understand the unresolved cultural differences in the novel.

Since the two schools represent distinctly different cultural milieus, the exchange became an opportunity to encounter cultural difference with a human face. The students got to expand their perspective to better study and understand how difference can be both enriching and troubling. However, the students accomplished much more. In the process of talking and listening to each other, they generally concluded an important understanding about what we must do if we really want to live together.

At the end of the second day’s follow up discussion session, it had become clear that opening up and talking about home life and personal experience was a source of surprise to some and puzzlement to others. The very diverse city kids opened up about family configurations and expectations, and their feelings about these, revealing considerable differences from one student to the next. They seemed comfortable with difference. Though more limited than the conversations that go on in their classrooms, this openness was surprising to the students from the small town. Conversely, the reticence of the kids from the exurbs to discuss much about their private lives could have come right from a Lake Woebegone routine. That puzzled the city students. The students were examining this phenomenon in a rich dialogue as the time was running out.

With this the only seemingly significant difference out on the floor, students were asked to say what they thought would happen if people don’t talk about such things and what they felt they were taking away from the two days together. The answers were often the same. They were simple, clear and powerful:

“Talking is learning.”

“We need to know about one another.”

“If we don’t talk, we remain divided.”

“We’re all mostly alike. We’re all high school students. We do the same things.”

The students from both schools laugh at what by now looked like foolish preconceptions of the others, but they left with a profound insight into human relations. To get the Edison students back on the bus took considerable prying loose. Emails and numbers were exchanged with promises to stay in touch. The consensus on the bus ride back into town was to say thank you for this exchange.

 

How is it that fifty high school students can reach this level of understanding, this elevation of human dignity in just a few hours over two days? How could they engage so amicably with people they had always thought so alien in this sort of process and walk away having made new friends? How could these kids talking among themselves reach such a morally good understanding about human beings and grow in that process? How could that happen when our leaders seem so bent on dividing us and building walls between communities? A handful of teenagers could tear down those walls in a matter of minutes.

Filed under Education Policy, Social Commentary Tagged with , ,

Hello Wisconsin

25 February 2011 Leave a comment

See any trends of the Tea Party Movement, radical right wing politicians here?

Those NAZI’s made a damned good Mercedes though…

(cited below)

“…

Origins of Fascism

While socialism (particularly Marxism) came into existence as a clearly formulated theory or program based on a specific interpretation of history, fascism introduced no systematic exposition of its ideology or purpose other than a negative reaction against socialist and democratic egalitarianism. The growth of democratic ideology and popular participation in politics in the 19th cent. was terrifying to some conservative elements in European society, and fascism grew out of the attempt to counter it by forming mass parties based largely on the middle classes and the petty bourgeoisie, exploiting their fear of political domination by the lower classes [my underlining]. Forerunners of fascism, such as Georges Boulanger in France and Adolf Stöker and Karl Lueger in Germany and Austria, in their efforts to gain political power played on people’s fears of revolution with its subsequent chaos, anarchy, and general insecurity. They appealed to nationalist sentiments and prejudices, exploited anti-Semitism , and portrayed themselves as champions of law, order, Christian morality, and the sanctity of private property.

…

Characteristics of Fascist Philosophy

Fascism, especially in its early stages, is obliged to be antitheoretical and frankly opportunistic in order to appeal to many diverse groups. Nevertheless, a few key concepts are basic to it. First and most important is the glorification of the state and the total subordination of the individual to it. The state is defined as an organic whole into which individuals must be absorbed for their own and the state’s benefit. This "total state" is absolute in its methods and unlimited by law in its control and direction of its citizens.

A second ruling concept of fascism is embodied in the theory of social Darwinism. The doctrine of survival of the fittest and the necessity of struggle for life is applied by fascists to the life of a nation-state. Peaceful, complacent nations are seen as doomed to fall before more dynamic ones, making struggle and aggressive militarism a leading characteristic of the fascist state. Imperialism is the logical outcome of this dogma.

Another element of fascism is its elitism. Salvation from rule by the mob and the destruction of the existing social order can be effected only by an authoritarian leader who embodies the highest ideals of the nation. This concept of the leader as hero or superman, borrowed in part from the romanticism of Friedrich Nietzsche , Thomas Carlyle , and Richard Wagner , is closely linked with fascism’s rejection of reason and intelligence and its emphasis on vision, creativeness, and "the will."

…

Corporative state

The economic system inaugurated by the Fascist regime of Benito Mussolini in Italy. It was adapted in modified form under other European dictatorships, among them Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist regime in Germany and the Spanish regime of Francisco Franco. Although the Italian system was based upon unlimited government control of economic life, it still preserved the framework of capitalism. Legislation of 1926 and later years set up guilds, or associations, of employees and employers to administer various sectors of the national economy. These were represented in the national council of corporations. The corporations were generally weighted by the state in favor of the wealthy classes, and they served to combat socialism and syndicalism by absorbing the trade union movement. The Italian corporative state aimed in general at reduced consumption in the interest of militarization. “

Retrieved 25 February 2011, Third World Traveler, http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Fascism/Fascism_def_char_hx.html

I’m not making this up folks. What did the man say? “Bad thing happen when good people do nothing?”

Filed under Philosophy, Social Commentary

My Pain

15 January 2011 Leave a comment

The screams and shouts come loud into the room.
They come in and they go out and come in again.
The screams and shouts and smiles and laughter
Ring around the room.
They are a pain,
As child birth is a pain I guess,
That brings great joy.

Why do I come here? The alarm blats and blats and blats.
Is it the methodical making and meting out of mind matter?
Why do I come here? The house is cold and dark and empty.
Is it the damned demanding and remanding by mandate?
Why do I come here? The streets are pocked and crowded and long.
Is it the closeted bickering and snickering of colleagues?
Why do I come here? The halls are empty and the room is a mess.
Is it the knowledge that no matter what I do,
I will stand condemned by a nation of sheep,
Who neither know nor care,
But are trained to pour their bile
On those who know and care.

I come here because
The screams and shouts come loud into the room.
They come in and they go out and come in again.
The screams and shouts and smiles and laughter
Ring around the room.
They are my pain,
As child birth is a pain I guess,
That brings great joy.

March 2010

Filed under Poetry, Social Commentary

Prepare for the end of the world. More on the ten o’clock news.

11 December 2010 Leave a comment

I was just having some thoughts while driving home this afternoon. I had stayed a little later than I had intended, it was snowing and still a little icy, and it was Friday, so I could have and did anticipate a slow, trafficky commute. I had the pleasure of a fine young man, whom I knew lived on my way home and who would have had to take two city busses in a lengthy trip home. He offered the opportunity for some good talk about school and books we had read and liked and didn’t like. Having his company, made the trip tolerable in the face of some pretty irritating demonstrations of driving that would have lit all my fires on a lonely trip.

This is Minnesota, and now is climate change. Global warming doesn’t mean everywhere keeps on being as it has always been, but one or two degrees centigrade warmer. No. no. Here in the provinces, it means hurricane levels of low pressure rolling through setting new records, spring and summer arriving a few weeks ahead of schedule, and temperatures in the seventies one week and the teens two weeks later. In other words, it means wacky adjustments to the new normal, One thing has not change here in Minnesota though; it snows and we have to drive in it.

Another change that comes with climate change, though I don’t think there is any causal link, is a progressive increase in the tone of weather prediction and reporting. Weather is drama.  Katrina set the mark for a new high in politicized media hype around weather. Not that Katrina didn’t deserve the coverage, but such a media blitz doesn’t come often, thank goodness, or easily. I does change the game though. Now, the weather people assure us that weather is a sign of Armageddon. Demonic catastrophe falls from the clouds in paralyzing sheets. It swells from the seas in all consuming waves. It screams out of the very air around us in shrieking blasts. I mean, this really sells more soap than they do on WDUM. With this in our minds, mine and the driver of the car ahead of me, I could understand why that car was travelling 15 miles per hour while everyone was trying to maneuver around it on somewhat slippery roads in the Friday afternoon rush. That driver had heard the weather report warning of the almost certain difficulty on the drive home once the snow began to fall. That driver, like me, had heard this warning  Wednesday and yesterday and this morning, three? Six? A dozen times? "It must be bad out here. These other drivers have no idea how bad these conditions are!"

We did indeed know how bad conditions were. The streets were riddled with cars driven by hundreds, perhaps thousands of people who believed death was stalking them in an ice encrusted Kenworth truck, or maybe a beslushed Prius. They slowed for intersections, although they were already going slowly. They straddled lanes to avoid a sudden, perilous sideways slide into a city bus. Tentative. Cautious. And making driving conditions damnedably difficult, just as the weather person had warned me.

I realized, though I did not share my realization with my young passenger, that the media were competing in this dramatizing of rather typical predictions and events because they need to get and keep our attention as part of the free market environment in which we are currently wallowing. We live in market driven times. The old fifties assessment that the advertisers created the need they were then ready to fill has become more systemic, more internalized in our twenty-first century psyche. In almost Pavlovian obedience, we are always searching around for things we need, and we will know we need them when we find them. Since we are always searching, the world must be ever ready to produce needs. Today’s drivers needed to know that the drive home tonight would be difficult. I would not have been able to assess the surface conditions walking across the street and parking lot from school, brushing the snow off my cold car, driving out of the parking lot and down the block to the stop sign, and there turning left. I had however already learned from six or seven animated, terror fueled  media warnings what I needed to know; the driving conditions were going to be difficult.

Enjoying my oppositional disorder to the max, I drove as I normally would on slightly slippery streets, made slippery by the way by the ice  remained from two days before. We had not needed to be warned about that storm so much. A lost marketing opportunity.

Well, if the media are not trying to cause traffic jams with their weather forecasting, why does it happen? And it does happen. It feels hotter when we are told repeatedly how hot it will be, colder when we’re told how cold, and snowier when we’re told how snowy it will be.  When Democrats were told by almost every media outlet for weeks that they would not be going to the polls during a midterm election in a great recession because they were seriously unexcited about the election, they dutifully did not vote. Why do we comply in these self-fulfilling prophesies promulgated by the media markets in the guise of news and weather? Because they tell us what we need to know, and therefore, we know that if they hadn’t told us, it was because we didn’t need to know. We are after all helpless, and the media simply plays to our sense of helplessness. It assumes, perhaps correctly, that we cannot do anything to improve our lives, and we certainly can do nothing to make this a better world. That’s out of our hands, and luckily someone else’s fault. We will be told what we need to know.

I got my young man home in plenty of time. The snow wasn’t so bad. I guess I didn’t need to know.

Now, I must admit, it is some days later, and we are in the middle of the worst snow storm in almost 20 years, which the media has been hyping for two days as the worst blizzard in nearly 20 years. I hate when they’re right on top of 60 hours of alarmist, apocalyptic doom weather news!

Filed under Foolery, Social Commentary Tagged with , , ,

Embrace your cultural identities

17 September 2010 Leave a comment

The connection between culture – heritage and history – and individual identity is definite. We are our histories, our experiences and how we have been given to understand values. We may reject or deny, but rejecting or denying something still brings it into our existence. Only ignorance can create that which is not. Knowing and understanding our own personal and familial histories is clarifying, if not actually defining of our knowing and understanding of self. Discovering more of our history, the historical context of the place we grew up and spent our formative and the stories of the people who surrounded and influenced those years, expands our knowledge and understanding of self, who we are and how we got to be us. More knowledge and understanding comes from knowing and understanding the further back history of the place we grew up and the histories of the people who came there, those histories that created the historical context of or childhood and youth and peopled it with people such as they were.

All this knowledge and understanding of where we came from and how we came to be who we are, for good or bad, forms the layers of our culture—personal, familial, associative, local, regional, national/ethnic and global. We are to a greater or lesser degree a product of all of this, and the better we know it, the better we understand it, the better we know and understand who we are as an individual in all of this. And the more empowered we are to do something about it if we wish, or not, possibly depending on how comfortably fitted all the parts of our self are.

This knowledge and understanding is also very empowering for changing our relationship to others. We may walk away from some things and toward others. We may capitalize on our strengths and bolster our weaknesses. (Yes, I used that word – humbling, yes but not humiliating and not euphemistic.) We may share what we know with others to help them understand us, and we can better understand others and truly appreciate their differences, differences that can teach and enrich us as encountering new histories and new people do, when those encounters are equitable. Self knowledge is self empowerment. Shared knowledge cast light on the shadow of ignorance. Ignorance, observed a nineteen year old sociology student, leads to fear and fear leads to hatred. Then doesn’t knowledge lead to security and comfort, and don’t security and comfort lead to acceptance and love, love in the sense of loving thy neighbor, love and the binding force in community?

We should study and discover our on histories and heritage and the histories and heritage of as many others as we practically can, certainly those with whom we must live and work and learn. And I think this is particularly true for those in the dominant positions in a society. Whiteness has no privilege when we know its history, class has enormous, too often unmet responsibility when we know its history, and affluence has a counter balance whose history suggests to possibilities of a future price, a consequence. What we don’t know is perhaps what is or will be hurting us. We can start to make a better world when we learn everything we can about the individual piece of the world that we are.

Filed under Education Policy, Racial Issues, Reflections, Social Commentary Tagged with , ,

Cultural Neural Network

24 May 2010 Leave a comment

In recent years, I have grown aware of a newish way of people’s separating themselves out from and above others, a newer form of elitism. In the past, educated people were rather legitimately accused of elitism as they held themselves above the uneducated, unwashed masses. Those masses had the good sense to retaliate with a much more pervasive anti-intellectual movement. Long Live Homer Simpson! This making the elite look silly had to stop, of course. In an effort to recover some dignity from the ignominy of dummy-bashing in the PC era, the educated elite embraced those less favored in a new way—through their “studies.” Gay studies, women’s studies, cultural studies…, something like crosses between sociology and natural science. The result of this superficial shift in perspective is that the modes of discourse preserve the cultural disparity between haves and have-nots.

By studying discrete social groups, those who are educated can show some level of respect for “marginalized” people, much as we would identify an endangered species, but they still identify such others as not-themselves. “Othering”—assuming a position of power that allows one to say who is outside the circle of power and privilege—identifies and labels people who differ from an educated norm as “marginalized,” at once creating a category of people to study, award rights, offer respect, and in the same breath placing them at the margins of main-stream society. Marginalization can only occur from the center, after all. Liberal academics will tell you that it is other empowered elements that have placed such people at the margins of society. But privilege is privilege and power is power. The academics comply with this othering when they study the marginalized, not the process of marginalization. Were it any less the educated empowered, they would have set the conversation differently. As it is, academia accepts and supports, even thrives on, an axis and rim vision of society and its relationships to its people, one center, many margins.

I want to look at an entirely different model for thinking about cultural difference. This assumes that cultural difference is significant in some meaningful way and not just as a means of elevating some folks over others. Culture can be considered as a group of people who share characteristics that make them identifiably different from others. Members must understand membership in the culture at some level. A gang will have a culture, but a random group of criminals will not, unless perhaps, they share an extended period of incarceration. Cultural groups should empower themselves by coming together for the purpose of defining themselves in some significant and presumably justifiable way as different from others. Such self-defined groups should examine their defining characteristics and determine how their group identity serves the needs of their members. Cultural groups should be self-defined and purposeful; otherwise, there is no reason to separate themselves, or be separated from the herd.

Such self-defining places a cultural group at the center of its own wheel with relationship to other cultural groups each of whom is at the center of its own wheel, each spoke representing a unique perspective. There is no need for a cultural “norm” that defines those at its margins. With no central power, there are no margins. The visual image of the wheel becomes increasingly less useful as we picture many groups sharing spokes with many other groups. Taken all together, these self-defined groups and their tangle of perspectives and relationships becomes a sort of cultural neural network. With the greater society viewed as a sort of brain, studying itself becomes just that—studying itself, not one part getting to study all the others, but a collaborative effort that results in a vastly more powerful understanding of who we are and how we fit together in the world.

Academia may not like this arrangement, as it dislodges them from privilege and asks them to share power; although sharing it could increase their power. The educated do not need to define any group but their own. I count myself in this group, while others may count me out. So be it. Academia is able to define itself, e.g., diplomas, publication, or perhaps simply demonstrable facility with knowledge. Without its privilege of othering, it might be hard to see the usefulness of a culture of educated. And the educated would have to redefine their relationship to other groups, no more Us and Them. Group identity must be about defining ourselves, not excluding others. So with a network of cultural study groups, we could study and be studied by other cultural groups. We must first study ourselves, however. We must first know who we are, if only to answer others’ questions about us. Within each group, would almost certainly be members who are also members of other groups. Much could be gained by learning from this intra-group diversity. Once we know ourselves, there would be learning and sharing dialogues between and among groups where inter-group relationships exist. These dialogues must be two-way conversations that ask, “Who are you?” and answer, “This is who I am.” No more is there a single source that says, “This is who they are,” or worse, “This is who you are.”

What does this say about the universities and colleges courses of study? Cultural Studies becomes Intercultural Studies with academia serving as a forum and occasionally as moderator. The content of such programs would not be the content of the cultures, but the perspectives among selves. New questions would be studied:

“Who am I?”

“What do I see through my eyes?”

“Who is he?”

“What does she see through her eyes?”

“How do our perceptions matter to us?”

“How do our perceptions define us and how are we defined by our perceptions?”

“How does it feel to me us or them?”

“What are our dreams and fears, shared and at odds?”

“How can or should we change how we look at things and ourselves.”

This may not be the ultimate goal, and it will require new thinking and a reorganization of some deeply vested resources. But it can greatly improve how we could get along, and it could greatly increase our potential for making real and sustainable progress in social status and material wellbeing.

 

Filed under Racial Issues, Social Commentary Tagged with , ,

Be True to Your School?

27 December 2009 Leave a comment

28 December 2009

Members of the Minneapolis Board of Education,

I live in Minneapolis Park Board District 6, as do some of the Board members. I attend caucuses and I support candidates who are trustworthy and work for the people of this city where I have lived for 33 years and taught for 28. I have dedicated my life to the young people of this city. In the past few years, I have been sadly disappointed in the decisions of the Minneapolis School Board to ignore promises it has made to its citizens and its employees. Has this board taken its lead from the Wall Street scammers, to promise great things it never intended to honor? How does this help the children? What is your word worth?

I struggle every day to improve the chances and lives of some of the city’s most neglected students at Edison High School. Mine are students who need hours of individual help and small group, interactive time to get caught up with their age-mates elsewhere. Yet day after day, I lose the time to meet individually with students or parents, because I am in meetings intended to improve my performance. The meetings are keeping me from performing at all. And while my performance scores are more than proficient, I am denied the pay increases my good work was contracted to earn through TAP and ATPPS, pay structures for which the district receives millions of additional state dollars.

“The School Board now refuses to pay teachers what was rightfully earned through traditional means as well as the through the ATPPS MOA and supported through the continuing contract language in Article I, Section C.1 of the MFT 2007-09 Teachers Contract which states ‘This Agreement shall remain in full force and effect. . . until a new agreement is reached,’”  states a recent teachers’ union petition.  Business as usual? Promises never meant?

A similar conflict between teachers’ learning and students’ learning surrounds the time spent learning AVID—the same skills but with different names, the adoption of which brings more money to the school. This conflict hobbles us with the days we are pulled out of class to learn the very same skills again in IB training, and again in IFL Disciplinary Literacy training. Small wonder the students leave. They see what’s happening. For many whole days, students are deprived of their teachers. Their education suffers because the District pays millions of dollars to hire reserve teachers, while “training” the regular teachers to be better educators in a vacated school building.

Students do not learn in the absence of their regular teachers. Meetings, training and testing pull me away from my students more than ten percent of the time. MPS policy is depriving its students by “improving” its teachers.

Yet the focused training teachers get on their own, often at their own expense, that meets the real and everyday needs of teaching the students in their rooms –students who may be the first in their family to graduate high school, students who are taking college prep classes with three and four years of English experience—this training that we know helps goes unrewarded, in fact uncompensated.

If you see no need to compensate me for improvement, I see no need to improve, especially since the MPS model of improvement hinders our teaching and our students learning. Are your interests politics and public finance, or Minneapolis children and their education?

Break with the past; be true to your word.

Jay Ritterson
Edison High School, English Dept.
Minneapolis, Minnesota

Filed under Education Policy, Social Commentary Tagged with , ,

In the “Race to the Top,” who gets left behind?

24 July 2009 Leave a comment

[This is a rambling hodge-podge. Maybe there’s something in here.]

Our obsession with competition as a solution has thrown us all into Life Lotto. So here goes. I have twenty ziglets. I need six ziglets to make my mortgage payment, two for utilities, three for food, and five for my daughter’s tuition. She’s majoring in ziglet management and will make lots of ziglets in a few years. So I have four ziglets left. I can buy two chances in the billion ziglet Life Lotto game!

Now let’s see: my two chances…one billion ziglets…the Lotto Commission keeps 50% of revenues…Hey! My chances of winning are 2 in 1,000,000,000! Imagine that if you can. I certainly can’t, but I understand this: To have a chance to be a winner of the big ziglets, I’d have to start with a lot of ziglets. What if I earned a lot of ziglets? What if I could give myself a billion ziglet bonus on top of the two billion ziglet salary I already earned? (I not sure earned is the right word there.) I could buy a half a billion two-ziglet chances, and still have billions left over, and my chances of winning are even! I’d hold have half the chance tickets! These are good odds. But all I do is win back what I paid half the time, and lose half the time. The commission is the only winner, pulling billions of ziglets out of the system, mostly from the hundreds of millions of people who buy few chances and always, always lose.

Okay, let’s get rid of the commission. Free Market Life Lotto. Now we’re ready to fly. I buy my two tickets at 4 ziglets. The pot is doubled; it’s now 2 billion ziglets. My odds are still 2 in a billion, but Ms. Golds-Sackman is loaded with ziglets. She could buy half the chances, and the odds would be that she would break even over the long haul. Hundreds of millions of losers would still feed the process, and a very few – about one every other year, if Ms. Golds-Sackman nullifies half the game – would win really big and lose most of it by investing in the Golds-Sackman Brokerage Bank. So really Ms. Golds-Sackman wouldn’t play Life Lotto, because she profits by having more one-time winners investing with her. She knows the principle of Life Lotto: some people get all the ziglets and the rest of us just gamble ours away.

Okay. Everybody knows that lotteries are just big shell games. So why do we insist on applying the principles to everything else we institutionalize? In education, we pay rewards to the success for the most advantaged while denying the least advantaged the additional resources they need just to keep up. We tilt the playing field – The New York Times article “Administration Takes Aim at State Laws on Teachers” makes clear that there is a belief that all children arrive the same and learn the same and that all content is taught the same and can be tested in an assembly line model. States must be allowed to pass laws requiring teachers to be evaluated on student test scores, i.e., pay for performance. That being the case, the teacher’s class list is their available ziglets in the “…$4.3 billion Race to the Top competition…,” as the Times calls it. And it is a competition indeed. Teachers will compete for the best, most able students, compete to teach in the most well endowed schools, and will teach to the tests, no matter how shallow the skills they assess. Their goal is not to better the students; it is to best their colleagues. And with limited resources, most will still lose in the long run.

Lose? What about the children left behind? The students who have already to suffer the indignities of not being native English speakers, not coming from a home with two college educated parents, not having had adequate prenatal care, not having adequate healthcare, not having access to healthy food, not having a home to go to after school? The Principle of Life Lotto tells us that the odds of being a biracial child, raised by a single parent and rising to the presidency are very, very long, so long that just the novelty of it at all substantially reduced those odds. But now it’s not even novel. One off.

The obscenity of such actions is depicted in the article “Professor’s Arrest Tests Beliefs on Racial Progress” also for The New York Times. In the United States, we, meaning empowered mostly white people, mostly men, are pathetically blind to the world we have created and now blame for its shortcomings. The election of a biracial president has rightly returned the spotlight to issue of race, but not back to the core of the issue. It was empowered white people, mostly men, who defined race in the first place to define what would be allowed privilege and what would not. In our “classless” society, we have formed and cemented “class-like” definitions into our psyches, on all sides of all lines, with such success that we simply assume that there is a real difference because for hundreds of years we have said, there is.

We have built the walls along the borders of our thoughts, and we all hold those walls up in our minds no matter which side of the walls we are on. Walls are our societal Frankenstein’s monster that will obsess us and drive us screaming into the frozen waste to wrestle to some end. Like Dr. Frankenstein, we have no way to uncreate this horrible force that in its rage ravages blindly. Perhaps we need to start by understanding that we too are on one side of these walls, as those across our walls have always understood.

Then we need to release the limited resource of power. It was power, not authority that put up the walls. It will take power to bring them down. In the giving up of power and the taking on of power, we need to end the competition. Power, like ziglets, is a limited resource. Deserved power is backed by authority, which brings with it responsibility. These are human rights: the basic rights to make decisions about ourselves, in our own self-interest, without impingement on others, and to continue our lives in the form of offspring for which you are then responsible and therefore over whom we have some authority. Nothing in this empowers anyone to define “other.” There is no need to define other, unless we assume authority we do not have by sheer dint of power and for the sake of disempowering, that is taking power from, others.

What we have done has been to focus our struggle, not one neutralizing the definition of race, but over who has power, because it is clear to the people on one side of their wall that they don’t have the power that the people on the other side of that wall do have. The struggle has been to get over the walls. The walls cannot be removed, at least not entirely, because they are part of who we are and have been.

The empowered people, mostly white, mostly men, don’t recognize or won’t acknowledge the unauthorized power they have. Furthermore, when they do recognize it, usually rarely and only slightly, they are at a loss as to how to give it back. Most of us have been somewhat disempowered in other power competitions anyway. Remember the principle of Life Lotto: some people get all the ziglets and the rest of us just gamble ours away. But that’s just it. The more power one has, the more one can acquire. The rich get rich, and the poor… But do the white get whiter? Well, yes. Especially if you view Whiteness as something collateral to color.

Let’s say I’m biracial, but was raised mostly by my white parent side of the family. This could be a perverse advantage of single parenting. I look black enough to get into everywhere black. I can be trusted. At the same time, I know white. I can jump across the wall and look black enough to capitalize on white guilt, people like this writer who are going to encourage “others” to get into the power. I’m truly bi-cultural, fully functional in two, competing cultures. And I can use my great intellect (God bless the DNA that built a brain that can form dendrites easily.) trained at white power-culture institutions to maneuver easily into considerable power. What cultural traits, common language and/or beliefs, have increased and which been diminished to get here? What culture defines who I am and how I am? What defines any success in this country? From infancy to wealth and power, who has the most changing to do? Why will lottery winners never become powerful, and will probably never stay rich? Because the white power-culture has been consolidated into a super-norm that even most white people can’t achieve. Whaddaya think? Pick the winner:

Image1

[1. Lost her identity, sorry; 2. Sgt. James Crowley who arrested Professor Gates in Cambridge; 3. Kenneth C. Griffin, 40 year old founder of the Citadel Investment Group, the $20 billion hedge fund; 4. Al Vivian, left, is a diversity consultant in Atlanta. images 1, 3 and 4 from The New York Times, image 2 from the Christian Science Monitor.]

In Life Lotto, is it hard to guess who has the power, just from the pictures? If you say yes, I’d wager you are way white, and are having a hard time getting what I’m writing.

Living in air doesn’t demand thinking much about air until the air starts to run out. It’s easy to see that those without enough air have the problem. It’s not easy to see that having so much of the air is the problem. It’s also easy to see why everyone is trying to get where the air is. It’s a privilege to be where the air is from the start. What percentage of your chances in this world is determined at the moment of conception? It may not make much sense when everyone, especially people who look and sound different from you, starts trying to get into your space, breathe your air, share your privilege. It may seem threatening. But here’s the real question: Who said it was your air? Whose air was it in the first place? Surely air wasn’t in the sole possession of the European aristocracy and subsequently spread throughout the rest of the world through benevolent colonization.

So as we race to the top, who gets left behind? Where isn’t there enough air? In teaching, it will be the teachers who need the most support to help kids learn, and are shoved aside to make room for new teachers. The first five years of teaching are the least productive, yet the Race to the Top will encourage churning. In learning, it will be the ones who start out behind. While the top is the target and the models are the Ken Griffins, we will never get those who start out farthest from that reality across the cultural wall into that game. If greed and avarice are deeply antithetical to your own heritage, it makes you a very poor competitor. And in life, it will still be the ones who are already gasping for air, playing Life Lotto, hoping and dreaming of getting across to a world they don’t “belong” in.

Who got to say what was top? Maybe we should just test the “best,” and forget the rest. We can define a new wall: education. Those inside the education wall will have most of the education, most of the ziglets, most of the air, most of the power. Real reform that will get us right to the top! We can build the wall on the foundations of classism and racism, maybe even sexism. Educationism!

Some people get all the ziglets and the rest of us just gamble ours away.

Filed under Education Policy, Racial Issues, Social Commentary Tagged with , ,

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