Today’s Plan:
- Looking Back
- Giroux
- Homework
Looking Back
A passage regarding assigning difficult texts got me thinking. The passage:
An example of what I believe education should look like is teaching important skills while urging creativity is English classes that require the students to read a handful of books during a semester. The educator will select books that will improve the student’s ability to read challenging text, search for deeper meaning in the text, and offers harder vocabulary to improve the student’s critical skills. Through the use of these selected books, students will gain intellectual skills they may have not had before the class. However, the educator can also use these books to urge creativity in the students by asking them what type of concepts resonated with them after reading the books. This lets the students engage with what they are learning, by letting them create their own reality through their individual understanding of the books. By not narrating students, they will engage with the text through their own everyday experiences and prior knowledge. Freire discusses how students are often oppressed, resulting in them becoming dominated and unable to critically think for themselves. The end goal of education should be to creative individuals who are able to critically think for themselves, shaping their own world through their own knowledge and gained skills.
And my response:
There is certainly an art to reading difficult texts. Some of it is mechanical (not sure if that is the proper term): can you scan difficult sentences to pin down the characters and the actions (which may or may not be the subjects and the verbs)? Can you distinguish when a writer is praising something from when they are critiquing something? Can you isolate the claims of a piece and distinguish it from the evidence (or note when there’s a string of claims without evidence, etc). This stuff is more “skills-y.”
There’s also, I believe, a more psychological aspect to reading difficult texts: can one endure being confused? How long can you read something and say “ok, I have no fucking idea what this is about?” I think everyone who begins reading theory and philosophy goes through this struggle. You have to cultivate a kind of fortitude that let’s you power through.
I’d also say that it is a bit of a terminology thing too, that there is an epistemological dimension to reading difficult texts. Every field has its own specialized language that can amplify confusion. For instance, when I started reading phenomenological theory, I struggled with a set of difficult terms: being, becoming, noesis, ontology, subjectivity, ipseity, etc etc.
I think there’s a big difference between teaching theory so the students “get it right” and teaching theory as developing a process through which students can get it wrong.
The came the question of morality, and I think there is an implicit proposition that teaching difficult texts, in a format that allows every student to develop their own perspective, can help us approach moral conflicts. The paper:
Higher Education should make students view the world around them differently through opening them up to topics that do involve moral issues and let the students take away their own insight, which then steers them in the right direction to their passions, truths, etc. The knowledge I take away from a book might be completely different than the two other students sitting next to me, even though we all read the same material. The same applies with education and morals. Using this English-420 class as an example, I have had many different views than my classmates. We have all read the challenging texts, and have gained more skills that we can all use in the future while examining more difficult papers. However, the concepts from these do differ from each student, as I can assure each of us have a different meaning of what we believe education is. This is an example of creating a baseline for skills, and then letting each student’s take away their own understanding from a class and applying it to deeper understanding. I believe morals can be taught when they are not being forced upon the students, and the students can evaluate each moral for themselves.
And my response:
Cool, and I think you are right. I do wonder what happens when we move to a topic in which there is more at stake.
To explain: I think we can all enjoy these books, and our differences regarding them, because there isn’t much at stake here. We can explore some ideas, consider some different perspectives, etc. But when the class ends, nothing happens. To be clear: I think such intellectual wandering is essential to developing smart, productive people (if for no other reason than because it helps develop the kind of fortitude I mention above).
But I wonder if this ability to *civilly* hold differing views translates into other discussions in which much more is at stake (say a discussion of the future of the Affordable Care Act or the Immigration Ban). Those are subjects that carry what we in rhetoric would call “affective weight.” They are drenched in pathos. I cannot even mention them without the skin crawling a bit, without feeling my nerves rise.
Maybe I’ve strayed too far. Let me pull back a bit. What I am wondering is whether classes in which we allow every student to develop their own idea and opinion adequately prepare us for political situations in which “there can be only one.”
I think this comment has a lot to do with the other paper I graded, in which I reraised what I want to call the Kant question (as opposed to the Q Question, though they are related!). This paper initially worked to distinguish Huxley, and by extension Emerson’s by way of Petrarch’s, individualism from neoliberal prioritization of the self-interested self-subject:
It was by the refinement of himself, the quest undertaken to know himself and to make something of that knowledge, that Petrarch educated perhaps more people throughout the centuries than have been educated by nary another—for, in discovering himself, he incited that very field which claims to be the basis of so much education at all. He improved himself first, and, as Huxley’s maxim would predict, others were improved in turn.
To which I quipped: “Trickle Down Humanities.” I am quite proud of that quip.
The paper then turns to consider the Rickert issue that we discussed last week–the issue of indoctrination (the potential tyranny of teaching, sliding into a banking model):
But the question remains: one might still easily inquire how such a mode of education— of actively expending one’s efforts for the cultivation of efforts in another to be expended in turn—can be actualized. And indeed, what if one’s ultimate intentions are, certainly nobly so, to educate the world foremost, but if said one is induced by reading this argument to the conclusion that they must refine themselves first? It might easily happen that one wishes simultaneously to educate but not to incur any tyranny nor imposition of ideas upon their pupils, smothering their possibility to refine themselves and refining in them instead a crude effigy of whatever ideals are deemed worthy of learning.
To which I responded:
This is a strong paragraph that asks a meaningful question. I would suggest that question if from the position of the teacher, who finds themselves in something of a paradox.
I would also suggest that the paradox appears more forceful to those who want to live in a world of purity and absolutes (as the rhetorician Kenneth Burke says, humans are “rotten with [the idea of] perfection”). Those who see either total freedom or total tyranny in every action will eventually fall victim to paralysis by analysis.
I actually have a fairly different question. My question comes from Kant, and I have been thinking about it quite a bit given our contemporary political divides. What do we do with the students, the people, who have no desire to “know themselves”? To commit themselves to the hard work, often uncomfortable work, of introspection? I am thinking specifically of Kant’s line in “A Question Concerning Enlightenment” that “the people want to be duped.” This, of course, is also a dominant theme in Plato’s Republic.
But beyond our classical readings, I think this question is bubbling under the surface of some of our contemporary readings as well. Nathan noted the opposition to intellectual pursuits in My Freshman Year, and I don’t think one has to leap too far to draw a similar proposition from Arum and Roksa’s empirical data.
So, instead of thinking about the paradox of a teacher’s imposition on individual students, I might reframe the question as one of an institution force feeding liberation on students who aren’t feeling oppressed by anything other than the force feeding of liberation.
This isn’t a question I have an answer to, but one that haunts me quite a bit.
And upon further reflection, I wrote:
Thinking a bit about our ontological differences, and about how those differences would manifest themselves: I think a subject is very much a production of her environment. The self isn’t an essence, or an entity, that then comes into relation with others. Rather, the self/subject is an ongoing production of a socializing process. “I” is a re.articulation of the surround. Some of the surround is ideological force (religion, politics, etc). Some of the surround is passion and pathos. Etc. My point is that what surrounds us shapes us, sets our horizons (a Heideggerian term I am borrowing and riffing off).
So, the problem I have with a theory such as Emerson is that it assumes that an individual’s surround has prepared them for self-reliance, that there is a willingness to take the leap toward “questions.” My research into rhetoric leads me to be quite skeptical of such a belief. Ultimately, I think people want security, They want to feel safe. And what scares them more than anything is *not knowing* something. It takes a particularly strong character to admit our limitations. Those are the people who want to be duped, as Kant says, who will believe anything so long as it promises to keep them “certain.” Certainty, ultimately, is the enemy of the Good (which I would define as the ability to encounter the strange without hostility, to suppress the desire to kill what is other).
Ultimately, I find much to laud in Emerson the person. I would get along fabulously with Emerson. I would want everyone to read Emerson, and appreciate Emerson, and to replicate his inquisitive nature and intellectual bravery. But I would suggest that there are few Emerson’s in the world. As few Emerson’s as there are witches in a classroom. And my ontological position–that we are through a relation to the other–means that I am more interested in reaching out to others than dwelling with those who are the self-same.
Homework
In Thursday’s class, I will update the syllabus and lay out the final paper project. We have two books left to read (Dowd & Bensimon and Nussbaum), and after that you will have time to research your paper.
In preparation for Thursday’s class, I’d like you to write a one page paper on a potential topic. Bring enough copies for everyone in the class. Organize your paper according to the following section headings:
- Question / Problem
- Methods & Readings
- Expectations / Hypothesis / Thoughts
Not everyone will need all those categories. For instance, if your question concerns Petrarch’s influence on the humanities, and you want to read more about the Italian Renaissance (Vico, Bruni, etc), then you don’t need to tell me about your research methods as much as you need to tell me about your reading list. If, however, your question is about whether or not students want to pursue the intellectual life, or to test whether Academically Adrift’s information on student time management is accurate, then you would need some more background research on how students spend their time, examples of past surveys, and perhaps a few readings on how to develop a survey in addition to thinking about how you would deploy your survey (when, to whom, etc).
YOU ARE NOT COMMITTED IN ANY WAY TO THIS PROJECT. Rather, I just want a sense of what people are interested in pursuing and hope that sharing ideas spurns invention.
