Author Archive
Tunnel Vision and Education
To the extent that university level education gives in to student demands to learn only how to make money particularly by doing one thing it has failed in its mission.
I have given up on Hollywood producing any film about racism that is worth anything. The demand that it must appeal to whites to be profitable skews any film. Most often such films must have a white protagonist who learns about the effects of racism and whose story usually overshadows that of any people of color in the film. Not only must it have this “white gaze” it must present racism as something which an individual can overcome simply by not being racist one’s self. The “monster” must be reduced to something the individual can handle in order for the demands of the happy ending to be satisfied, individual success to be achieved, and order restored. I thus checked out the new movie “The Help” with few expectations to be entertained. While it has its flaws I was impressed by how much it put the maids’ story in the foreground. I expected that it would be just another “wasn’t racism hard for white people” story. It has its villains but racism is not only the work of “bad people”. Many others (both black and white,) accept it just as “what is.” Yes some of its characters are just stereotypes like the villain “Hilly” but good acting overcomes many of the limitations of the roles. The four lead actresses, two black and two white, do excellent work to make their characters full blooded people. The parallelism between both white women and black women being caught in societal roles that constrain and belittle them is clearly made. Yet the hardship that white women heap on black women in their conformity to their roles is also firmly pointed out. At the end both one white woman and one black woman are able to make it out of their roles even though the differences in their off-screen economic futures are not discussed. The ending of the film satisfies the Hollywood requirements and produces the desired feel good effect.
My criticism is that racism is seen only as an individual thing (which can be confronted and overcome on an individual basis) rather than a social process which must be tackled on a societal scale. The movie’s individual acts of rebellion are childish, only temporarily satisfying and do not really change the social or economic positions of blacks and whites. The acts of individuals choosing a new life leave the system intact though they opt out. I have long made this argument to students. Racism is not just an act of individual behavior that can be cured by purging that behavior in yourself. Of course we should not knowingly commit racist acts but even if every individual in the country had an overnight enlightenment against racism in their personal behavior, the United States would still be the most racist country on earth. Racism has produced a political economy in which race has a major influence on class position, health care, education and opportunity. This is something Hollywood will probably never explore. There are no easily identified villains and no one individual’s efforts (even an American Nelson Mandela’s) are going to produce the required happy ending. It is only painfully slow efforts by millions of people that is going to produce change if indeed it ever comes.
“Well what did you dream of doing in retirement while you were grading those papers or in all those faculty meetings?,” my son asked. I told him that I dreamed of learning to play the piano in my sixties. I have been a music fan all my life (mostly jazz, R&B, blues) and being a participant and creator rather than a consumer in anything is a worthy pursuit. If I just wanted to learn to play the piano however I could have done so while I was working, but there was more to it than that. I wanted to learn something new in my older years. I wanted to live out my commitment to lifelong learning and to challenge myself. It could have been anything new that I wanted to learn: Spanish, drawing, ballroom dancing, and it still might be. The important point was to keep building pathways through the neurons in my head, training parts of my body (in this case my fingers) to do new things, and proving to myself that I could still learn. It was also what Bill Murray learned in the movie Groundhog Day. You need to keep improving yourself if you are going to be of any use to others.
Nevertheless I had hemmed and hawed about doing it. Is this really the thing I wanted or would it lead to another thing gathering dust like that treadmill that was in the corner? Was I willing to make the commitment of time, money and energy to such a years long project? While I was in my Hamlet-like phase unable to make a decision, my son bought me a keyboard. It was like somebody else suddenly killing Hamlet’s uncle before he had worked up the courage to do it. All at once all my objections dried up. So what if I lost interest in it. That was what e-bay and Craig’s List were for. I could even donate it to some worthy cause if I wanted to. If I did it only for a few months that was a few months of learning I wouldn’t otherwise have had.
As I thanked my son profusely I realized that he had just done for me what we had done for him so often while he was growing up. He had provided me with a chance to pursue a new learning opportunity. We had come full circle. My new keyboard is scheduled to come today and I begin lessons in about 10 days. I can hardly wait. Education never ends.
This post is occasioned by the article here. The argument here is that the question of educational equity should really be a matter of national concern. This was buttressed by this Unicef report (thank you WDP) which points out the low rank of the United States compared to other developed countries in terms of health, education and opportunity equity for its children. The questioned I raised in this conversation was how to “frame” the argument for equity in terms that would gain some traction among the American people and their politicians. One friend argued: Continue Reading
While doing some research I came upon the following quote from W.E.B. Du Bois,
In the long run the people will and must rule. And our only opportunity is in helping to decide what kind of people these potential rulers shall be. The failure of democracy in the United States and in the modern world is due primarily to the fact that the government has not succeeded in making the ruling people intelligent and efficient, so that democratic power is continually wielded by mass ignorance debauched by demagogues.
While I am aware that the success or failure of the United States democracy is in the eye of the beholder and different folks have different yardsticks to measure it by, in regards to education, health care, citizens incarcerated, income distribution, job creation and so on, the American democracy is way behind other Western democracies. Continue Reading
Way back in my youth in an anthology I read a story by C.M. Kornbluth written in 1951 called “The Marching Morons.” In it a man from the past awakes in a distant future shaped by a population problem. Simply put there was not enough reproduction by those with high IQ’s and overproduction by those with low ones. This has shaped a future where the few with high intelligence must constantly work to ensure the survival of the society because the vast majority of people are not intelligent enough to do so by themselves. You can read the plot summary here. I have always been skeptical of the story because I saw it as class based one where those of the upper class resent (fear?) those of the lower classes and interpret them as having lower intelligence. Perhaps African Americans having been called less intelligent and relegated to this caste for so long, have a special sensitivity here. Nevertheless we are moving toward a bifurcated educational system which will eventually make a two tiered society of a minority who know how to do things and a majority who do not. Education was supposed to be the method that kept this from happening. It was supposed to spread the skills needed to become productive members of society wide even while reserving the best education for the upper classes. Scholarships and such were supposed to be the lubricant that allowed the “cream” of the lower classes to move up into the ruling group. Myths of upward mobility and meritocracy were supposed to gain the non ruling classes’ complicity in this system.
In a sense the public education system has succeeded in doing exactly what it was designed to do: make uncomplaining consumers who accept the status quo. Continue Reading
The dirty little secret about college teaching is that not everybody is concerned with doing it well. No one is dedicated to doing it badly and all would rather be better at it than worse, but how much effort one puts into it is variable. There really two parts of a college teacher’s job: producing scholarship and teaching. There are certainly other aspects of it such as college administration through committee service, department chairing and even administration for those who have crossed over to the dark side. Rarely do these however earn one the accolades, rewards and academic promotions of scholarship and teaching. The degree to which either is valued depends upon the department, university and individual interest of the individual. Although the Holy Grail would be to do both well most of us fall short of that ideal. How much of each is expected varies from the major research universities where research and scholarship may be all and teaching is seen as a burden, to those colleges which see teaching as the mission and scholarship as just an extra garnish that may or may not be added. Most academic institutions lie somewhere on this continuum. Continue Reading
In a recent post I wondered aloud what the new existence of information formats that were “not-books” meant for the academy. At that time I did not either spell out the varieties of format that will become not-books nor really even tentatively explore what differences they make for the academy. I did not do so because the former is still in motion and the latter calls for a longer discussion than I can tackle in this space. I will explore neither of those things here but rather relate an experience that sheds light on both.
Last summer I participated in a workshop dedicated to one not-book platform being developed by USC. Undoubtedly many more such platforms will be developed, compete, and finally shake down to several standards. This platform was using us as guinea pigs or excuse me, as a focus group to see how selected scholars from different stages in their careers (dissertation writing graduate students all the way to established scholars) would use this platform in projects of their own choosing. The developers of this platform are still in the alpha stages and made many changes on the fly as we pushed and pulled the platform in various ways in our projects. Several outside speakers came in to talk to us ranging from a scholar whose project built on a preliminary version of the platform would be tested market by a university press to several preeminent scholars who spoke about the attempts to get non-book projects launched and funded at their schools, opposition they may have faced and finally building coalitions and centers to get things done.
One of the things that became clear is that much of the opposition they face is from those who think that only books have real scholarly value and books should be the metaphor in which the academy thinks. Continue Reading
I just got a new e-book reader. I love it but it provides an opportunity to think about what the digital revolution implies for the information format that has served for hundreds of years. I am by no means predicting the end of the book; books in paper or electronic form will always survive and be part of humankind’s legacy. Yet the transformation of them into electronic bits and bytes offers a new way of thinking about storing and transmitting information. One can argue that this is also true for audio, video and photographs as well, but I only want to talk about the book and the educational process. Academia is a strange place to say the least, but it and the book as repository of knowledge grew up in the same place: the monastery. They are intimately intertwined, share fundamentals and are both threatened by this digital revolution. For example tenure is based upon how much content published in peer journals or at reputable publishing houses a person may have done. Some of this content is provided for free at journals and such in exchange for publishing services provided by the publisher.
The contemporary institutions of both that is, the publishing house and the university, treat the digital revolution with suspicion so they have embraced it tentatively and gingerly. It threatens the way they have done business and endangers the control over the fatted cows that provides them with a living. Continue Reading
1. Mount a legal challenge to it.
I am no legal expert but common sense and a historical perspective make me suspect that the right of a state school board to dictate what should or should not be taught in local schools may be a legal principle that has been reaffirmed several times. However the right to exclude a class or group of Americans from the curriculum may indeed provide grounds for a legal challenge. Here I would defer to those who have more knowledge and experience of the legal system. Whether it does or not I hope that this law gets challenged in court like the Arizona anti-immigrant law. At the very least this court case would provide a valuable educational forum for a debate. Is this a case where local or community rights supersede state rights? Do state laws supersede federal laws or constitutional rights in the fourteenth amendment for example? I would hope that civil liberties groups might take up this issue or that other organizations might see in this a threat to the ethnic minorities and provide free or low costs legal services or at the very least raise money for a legal challenge.
2. Use this as an occasion to organize, organize, organize.
Organize for political action. Whether it is to punish those who voted for this law, help those who opposed it or to run new candidates more respectful and sympathetic to the educational needs of the local community. The law gives the power to the local school boards to enforce its dictates. Pay more attention to who is on those school boards. Run and support candidates Continue Reading