Today’s Plan:
- A Quick Quiz
- Quick Review Blogs
- Responding to Papers
- Discuss Nathan
- Homework
A Quick Quiz
Let’s start class with an experiment. I will admit I got a 75%.
Blog Formatting
Formatting.
- No first-line paragraph indents
- Spaces in between paragraphs
- Indent blockquotes (quotes over 3 lines, or really important)
- NO: “Reading this article, I believe the conclusion on page 68 points out what I think stands out to me” or ” I found this quote to be interesting”; fixing Krystal’s
- Font changes
This and Topic Sentences
My dissertation director gave me one concrete piece of writing advice that I have carried with me to this day: never begin a paragraph with “this.” In fact, try to eliminate that word from your vocabulary. Consider these sentences
>This is why I believe education should somewhat also rely on the student experiences in life.
This leads me into education should be more individualized and a little less curriculum
that just teaches you to pass the tests.
Let me make another suggestion: NEVER use the word “interesting.” “Interesting” is an empty place holder, it signifies a thought-still-in-process. Don’t tell me X is interesting, rather, change the sentence and tell me *why* X is interesting. So, instead of: “I found Nathan’s chapter on how international students perceive American students interesting” you might write: “I was shocked by some of the characterizations international students made of their American peers.”
Specialized Vocabulary
One last comment on writing that pertains to both the blogs and the papers (especially the papers): understand that theoretical writing–like technical writing–requires you to pay special attention to specialized discourse. Notice, for instance, how Nathan takes the time early in chapter 5 to discuss the meaning of the term “ritual” in Anthropology; she does not assume her audience is composed solely of anthropologists, or that the average reader understands the complexity of the term. Many of you used terms like “traditional” or “progressive” education in your papers, but failed to connect these terms to Dewey and/or give a precise sense of what these terms means. Similarly, many of you said Plato was concerned with helping students determine Truth, but didn’t define what Plato means by that term.
Responding to the Papers (and Blogs)
Many of the comments below began as comments in response to specific parts of people’s papers or blogs; I have extended them here as a way of “wrapping up” my thoughts on the first section of the course.
A Quick Summary of Lanham
This was the hardest reading we did all semester, so I will cut you some slack. But that first paragraph is pretty empty.
Lanham’s essay opens tracing two different approaches to rhetoric. The first and more dominant, which he identifies as the weak defense, argues that truth is independent from rhetoric. Drawing upon Plato, the weak defense argues that rhetoric is a means to convey truth, and thus “bad” people use “bad” rhetoric to do “bad” things while “good” people use “good” rhetoric to do “good” things. Contrary to this dominant perception, Lanham argues for a strong defense of rhetoric, one that sees rhetorical encounter and negotiation as central to making truth, and not merely as a means to communicate truths already determined.
On Lanham and Cicero, The Strong Defense, Architectonic Rhetoric, and Civic Education
My reaction to your Lanham and Cicero posts is a lot of head nodding. You got the gist here. I would add this: the problem Lanham (and contemporary philosopher Bruno Latour) sees with universities is that they are built around free standing disciplines that create knowledge for knowledge’s sake. Yes, sure, ideally (like Plato advised) this knowledge is supposed to make its way into our lives and into politics. But in reality, that doesn’t happen as much as it should. And it doesn’t happen because we have designed–at the macro [how we structure political decision making and universities] and micro levels [how we voting and design classrooms]–systems that work to keep them separated.
Thinking about Freire, Lorde, and the “problems of the 21st century”
I really like the association you draw between Petrarch and Lorde. And, yes, Lorde is looking to develop poetry specifically for women as a means of addressing issues of patriarchy (while Freire is looking for something more politically active, Lorde stresses the importance of providing individuals with a means of personal introspection–one acts out on society, one acts “in/side” ourselves).
Petrarch’s poetry seeks for a *universal* way of coping with distinctive/individual human experiences. For Petrarch, or at least for the Enlightenment that his poetry helps inspire, there is one Universal Soul to which we all aspire. This was the common philosophical foundation of the 18th and 19th century (and still resonates in some places/desires of the 20th century). Our schools and institutions–designed and built during those times–are reflective of this Same-but-different philosophy.
Starting in the early 20th century, philosophy changes and begins to question this “universal” foundation. It starts to posit that we are all different, and that there isn’t necessarily an underlying similitude that can bring us (or should bring us) together. Much of this is a response to totalitarianism and some pretty gruesome horrors of the late 19th and early 20th century. Lorde’s poetry is definitely of this spirit. It isn’t using art or creating art to communicate our common troubles, but rather to speculate and unfold troubles unique to *me* (understanding that my experiences are not necessarily your experiences). We are still working through the ramifications of these philosophical shifts.
Freire: Whether Resistance and Questioning are Innate or Learned
I think what Freire and I would question is your claim that “Freire fails to understand that while a child is in elementary that type of ‘rule’ may exist but humans have a Natural curiosity about things that eventually as they get older they will start to question regardless of what the oppressor says or does.”
I would like to think that this rebellious spirit is natural and inevitable. But as an educator for going on 20 years, I can’t agree. My experience suggests that while some people develop a curiosity and a critical perspective, many others do not. They become complacent, cynical, or–even worse–incredibly reactionary, lashing out at anyone or anything that questions the established order.
I would argue–to the end of days–that a person’s willingness to question is related (though not necessarily determined) by their educational experiences. Questions can be encouraged, discouraged, or disallowed. And the systems and structures we set up do much to encourage, discourage, or disallow. This is why I am so disturbed by Jon Taylor Gatto’s “Against School,” because I tend to agree that the institutional structures of contemporary schooling are designed to teach docility (which, in a more rhetorical framing, might be termed “respect for authority”). Yes, there are some natural-born Neo’s who will question the matrix, there are some who will–independent of context–rage against the machine. But there are others who will love big brother.
Freire looked at education in the 1950s and saw more indoctrination into Nationalist ideology than he saw fostering questioning. Students were taught facts. But more than content, classrooms were structured in a way that commanded obedience.
One more on thought on Lorde & Petrarch: Emotional Education
I think Lorde and Petrarch do more than just stress the importance of writing (which, as you point out, they do–and obviously, as an English professor, I believe in the importance and power of writing).
They also encourage us to recognize that education has to do more than provide us with information, or even teach us how to think. Education has to help us–explicitly–cope with our emotions.
Trying to be Fair to Plato’s Legacy
Plato wanted to make outstanding philosophers, and he wanted everyone else to learn to listen to those philosophers. He assumed philosophers should be the one’s who led.
But we have to start asking what it means to lead.
On connecting Dewey and Freire (and maybe Cicero and Lanham)
This post started as a response to an argument against Dewey’s notion of progressive education, arguing that schools needed to teach a measure of fundamentals, an argument to which I have some sympathy. Whenever I see tests that demonstrate how little Americans know about history and the machinations of their governments, I get scared. But, we should also recognize how many studies insist that what matters about education isn’t the specific material you learn, but rather the methods, processes, and attitudes you form toward problem-solving.
But I think Dewey would respond that we can measure a student’s ability and teach fundamentals without resorting to memorization. His argument (and he is the theorist who is writing about elementary school, so he is the one you are arguing against here) is that the way we teach kids is important, because that forms their attitudes toward school. So, if we teach them that school is about sitting there and doing what you are told early, then that experience will inform not only how they feel about school, but also how they feel about the world around them.
One Last Problem with Plato and Universal, Objective, Abstract Truth (Or, When Everything Becomes Math)
The problem is when we frame *all questions* like math questions. We teach students the syntax X is Y. America is a land of justice. Or Good people work hard. Or Marriage is between a man and a woman. Etc. We teach a structure of knowledge and truth that corresponds to mathematics–that for each question there is one right answer, and that their teacher can supply them that answer.
Homework
For our next class, I would like you to read the first chapter of Arum and Roksa’s Academically Adrift. As you read, try to identify two things. First, try to find one connection to one of our historic readings (Plato, Isocrates, Cicero, Lanham, Petrarch, Dewey, Freire, or Lorde). Second, try to find one connection to Nathan.
Note that these connections don’t have to be similarities–it might be differences. Or it might be a shared terminology. Or they both might refer to another author, study, or idea.
What we are looking for here is a choric spark of invention.
Finally–I encourage you to find a connection between this reading and anything you have done in the Chronicle or Inside Higher ed. Pretty soon I am going to ask you to start thinking about your final projects. Start identifying a question, idea, problem, statistic, etc. that you would like to study.
