The Compulsive Explainer

Literacy and the Modern World

This is another quote from The Disappearance of Childhood by Neil Postman, pages 38-39. He is talking here about the difference between Northern European and Southern European cultures - something I have to live with all the time.
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One result of the Catholic defection from print and the Protestant alliance with it was an astonishing reversal of the intellectual geography of European culture. Whereas in the Medieval world the level of cultivation and sensibility was higher in the Mediterranean countries than in Northern Europe, by the end of the seventeenth century the situation had turned around. Catholicism remained a religion of the image. It continued and intensified icon worship, and gave great attention to the elaboration of its churches and service. Protestantism developed as the religion of the book, and as a consequence moved towards an austere symbolism.

It was observed by Joseph Kay in the nineteenth century that to attract the poor to religion, one must either "adorn the spectacle," as did the Catholics, or "educate the people" as did the Protestants. While Kay may have a point about how to attract people, we must not overlook the fact that a reading people develop the capacity to conceptualize at a higher level of abstraction than do the illiterate.
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I am the only one who reads in the Orosi area - except students at the language school, who are mostly foreigners. In the Central area one can see people reading newspapers, but only college students read books. In this area, nobody reads at all, although everyone is technically literate: they have been to school long enough to read, if they have to. But in practice they have bypassed literacy and now watch television, and talk on their cell phones. They do not have a literate culture and this effects their thinking skills.

Italy is even worse off: it is the most backward and corrupt country in Europe - where it was once the most advanced.

America is becoming the same way. The schools are underfunded and students have little interest in learning. They have become alienated strangers in their own land.

A friend of mine explains: they develop skills that have entertainment value, not analytical skills.

Political Instability in America

I am now listening to a course on Nazism. The instructor is spending some time describing the political instability in Germany after WWI. Germany came apart at the seams, and was glad to welcome the Fuhrer who would same them from themselves.

In his introductory remarks, he said he had been teaching his course for 20 years, and it had not gotten any easier. I suspect that is because the situation in America is becoming uncomfortably familiar.

A friend of mine down here just got back from a trip to the States, and he said he was amazed by how fearful Americans had become. A neighbor of his bought three freezers and filled them with ammunition in Ziploc bags. They had plans to block invasion attempts of their area, even if they had to fight tanks.

This morning, I read this in the NY Times

Weekend Opinionator: Are Democrats, Too, Facing a Civil War?

Not only are Republicans fighting Democrats, they are fighting each other. On the Republican side:

– Charles Mahtesian and Alex Isenstadt at Politico: “In what could be a nightmare scenario for Republican Party officials, conservative activists are gearing up to challenge leading GOP candidates in more than a dozen key House and Senate races in 2010. Conservatives and tea party activists had already set their sights on some of the GOP’s top Senate recruits — a list that includes Gov. Charlie Crist in Florida, former Rep. Rob Simmons in Connecticut and Rep. Mark Kirk in Illinois, among others … Activists predict a wave that could roll from California to Kentucky to New Hampshire and that could leave even some GOP incumbents — Utah Sen. Bob Bennett is one — facing unexpectedly fierce challenges from their right flank.”

On the Democratic side:

“MoveOn.org is sending out emails today seeking more contributions for its campaign to defeat any Democratic senator who does not fully support Obamacare,” reported The Washington Examiner’s Byron York on Tuesday. 

Later:

MoveOn executive director Justin Ruben says the group has raised $3,578,117 for the project and is thinking of new ways to punish errant Democratic lawmakers.

“It’s a huge sum, and the clearest signal yet that any Democrat who helps Republicans filibuster health care reform will face an enormous backlash from the grassroots,” writes Ruben. And now, working in conjunction with Howard Dean’s old organization Democracy for America, MoveOn is starting a drive to take away the committee chairmanships of any Democrat who fails to live up to MoveOn’s progressive standards. “Many of these senators hold coveted committee chairmanships that give them significant power within the Senate,” Ruben writes. “Our friends at Democracy for America have launched an open letter urging Senate Democrats to strip committee chairmanships from any Democrat who filibusters health care.” Ruben says that more than 66,000 MoveOn and Democracy for America members have pledged to contribute.

Meanwhile, Obama, the great nobody, keeps himself in the background. He doesn't want to dirty his hands.

Parenting as an Act of Rebellion Against Culture

The following is from Neil Postman's book Building a bridge to the 18th Century, page 129:
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If parents wish to preserve childhood for their own children, they must conceive of parenting as an act of rebellion against culture. This is especially the case in America. For example, for parents merely to remain married is itself an act of disobedience and an insult to the spirit of a throwaway culture in which continuity has little value. It is also almost un-American to remain in close proximity to one's extended family so that children can experience, daily, the meaning of kinship and the value of deference and responsibility to elders. Similarly, to insist that one's children learn the discipline of delayed gratification, or modesty in their sexuality, or self-restraint in manners, language, and style is to place oneself in opposition to almost every social trend.

College for $99 month

From Washington Monthly

The next generation of online education could be great for students—and catastrophic for universities.
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Solvig threw herself into the work, studying up to eighteen hours a day. And contrary to expectations, the courses turned out to be just what she was looking for. Every morning she would sit down at her kitchen table and log on to a Web site where she could access course materials, read text, watch videos, listen to podcasts, work through problem sets, and take exams. Online study groups were available where she could collaborate with other students via listserv and instant messaging. StraighterLine courses were designed and overseen by professors with PhDs, and she was assigned a course adviser who was available by e-mail. And if Solvig got stuck and needed help, real live tutors were available at any time, day or night, just a mouse click away.

Crucially for Solvig—who needed to get back into the workforce as soon as possible—StraighterLine let students move through courses as quickly or slowly as they chose. Once a course was finished, Solvig could move on to the next one, without paying more. In less than two months, she had finished four complete courses, for less than $200 total. The same courses would have cost her over $2,700 at Northeastern Illinois, $4,200 at Kaplan University, $6,300 at the University of Phoenix, and roughly the gross domestic product of a small Central American nation at an elite private university. They also would have taken two or three times as long to complete.

And if Solvig needed any further proof that her online education was the real deal, she found it when her daughter came home from a local community college one day, complaining about her math course. When Solvig looked at the course materials, she realized that her daughter was using exactly the same learning modules that she was using at StraighterLine, both developed by textbook giant McGraw-Hill. The only difference was that her daughter was paying a lot more for them, and could only take them on the college’s schedule. And while she had a professor, he wasn’t doing much teaching. “He just stands there,” Solvig’s daughter said, while students worked through modules on their own.

Straighter Line

Inside Higher Ed: Revolt against outsourced courses

But one college among the five is more typical of the kinds of colleges most students attend. It is Fort Hays State University, an institution of 10,000 students in Kansas.

There, even as professors are still pushing to get information about StraighterLine so they can evaluate it, students have taken a look and decided that they don't like what they see. In articles in the student newspaper and in Facebook groups (attracting debates with the university's provost and the company's CEO), the students argue that StraighterLine is devaluing their university and higher education in general.

"In the short term, this may save FHSU a small amount of money (although this is debatable). In the long term, this could increase the cost of a degree for current students, lower the quality of education and academic standards at FHSU, lead to unemployment for many passionate educators, and eventually cheapen the value of a degree from FHSU for both current and future alumni," says the Facebook group created by students that has set off the discussion.

The People no Longer Matter

The People are no longer in control, and powerful forces are making sure that this situation continues. The people have, effectively, been destroyed without their being aware of it.

How could something like this happen? There must be many answers to this question, enough to fill many books. But there is clearly a vast shift in power involved - from the people to something else: something I have labeled the power complex, for lack of a better term. Whatever it is, it definitely exists - and it is in control.

There is also a shift in values here, old values have been abandoned and new values have been accepted - here again, with no awareness of what was going on. This lack of awareness is fundamental and basic to the process. 

Also basic is the substitution of fantasy for reality. Nothing could be more damaging. It is as if people intuited how bad things were getting, how they were powerless to stop it, and simply switched their attention to another reality - a reality these same forces controlled completely. They got hit by a double whammy. 

Along the way, their most important asset: themselves, disappeared. And now they cannot imagine what that could have been. The people no longer mattered because they no longer existed. All they are left with is a vague dissatisfaction they cannot overcome.

If we take the long view, we can see nothing surprising is going on. Mankind is simply reverting to its normal condition: rule by a small minority. The democratic world was a temporary condition, one that sometimes occurs - such as during Periclean Athens or during the Roman Republic - which were quickly overcome. 

Accept of course, that our technology is much more advanced. The new status quo will be something entirely new - but with the same basics: rule by the few.

The objective of many will be to become part of that ruling class, one way or the other: by joining it directly or making themselves useful to it: as modern courtiers. They will always need someone to run their computers for them. And also to run the media and keep everyone under control. And keep the government under control. And all the little bureaucratic functions that keep the machinery greased. They will have little trouble finding little people for this. After all, they have the big carrot (jobs) and the big stick (social collapse).

What will they learn?

That is the simple question the American Council of Trustees and Alumni asks in this report. We do so by exploring the state of general education, those courses designed to give college students a firm grounding in the areas of knowledge they will use for a lifetime. Specifically, we evaluate whether 100 major institutions require seven key subjects: English composition, literature, foreign language, U.S. government or history, economics, mathematics, and science.

What we found is alarming. Even as our students need broad-based skills and knowledge to succeed in the global marketplace, our colleges and universities are failing to deliver. Topics like U.S. government or history, literature, mathematics, and economics have become mere options on far too many campuses. Not surprisingly, students are graduating with great gaps in their knowledge—and employers are noticing. If not remedied, this will have significant consequences for U.S. competitiveness and innovation.

Read the rest here (PDF) Thanks to Stanley Fish in the NY Times.

Stanley Fish goes on to say:
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Founded by Lynne Cheney and Jerry Martin in 1995, ACTA (I quote from its website) is “an independent, non-profit organization committed to academic freedom, excellence and accountability at America’s colleges.” Sounds good, but that “commitment” takes the form of mobilizing trustees and alumni in an effort to pressure colleges and universities to make changes in their curricula and requirements. Academic institutions, the ACTA website declares, “need checks and balances” because “internal constituencies” — which means professors — cannot be trusted to be responsive to public concerns about the state of higher education.

The battle between those who actually work in the academy and those who would monitor academic work from the outside has been going on for well over 100 years and I am on record (in “Save The World On Your Own Time” and elsewhere ) as being against external regulation of classroom practices if only because the impulse animating the effort to regulate is always political rather than intellectual.

It is of course true that political motives can also inform the decisions made by academic insiders; the professorial guild is far from pure. But the cure for the politicization of the classroom by some professors is not the counter-politicization urged by ACTA when it crusades for “accountability,” a code word for reconfiguring the academy according to conservative ideas and agendas.
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And then more, all of it good.

The Case for the Humanities

The September issue of Harper's Magazine has an article Dehumanized: when math and science rule the school.

In the section The case for the humanities Mark Slouka says this:
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Rain does not follow the plow. Political freedom, whatever the market evangelists may tell us, is not an automatic by-product of a growing economy; democratic institutions do not spring up, like flowers at the feet of the magi, in the tire tracks of commerce. They just don’t. They’re a different species. They require a different kind of tending.

The case for the humanities is not hard to make, though it can be difficult—to such an extent have we been marginalized, so long have we acceded to that marginalization—not to sound either defensive or naive. The humanities, done right, are the crucible within which our evolving notions of what it means to be fully human are put to the test; they teach us, incrementally, endlessly, not what to do but how to be. Their method is confrontational, their domain unlimited, their “product” not truth but the reasoned search for truth, their “success” something very much like Frost’s momentary stay against confusion.

They are thus, inescapably, political. Why? Because they complicate our vision, pull our most cherished notions out by the roots, flay our pieties. Because they grow uncertainty. Because they expand the reach of our understanding (and therefore our compassion), even as they force us to draw and redraw the borders of tolerance. Because out of all this work of self-building might emerge an individual capable of humility in the face of complexity; an individual formed through questioning and therefore unlikely to cede that right; an individual resistant to coercion, to manipulation and demagoguery in all their forms. The humanities, in short, are a superb delivery mechanism for what we might call democratic values. There is no better that I am aware of.

This, I would submit, is value—and cheap at the price. This is utility of a higher order. Considering where the rising arcs of our ignorance and our deference lead, what could represent a better investment? Given our fondness for slogans, our childlike susceptibility to bullying and rant, our impatience with both evidence and ambiguity, what could earn us, over time, a better rate of return?
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Well put; I couldn't have done it better. But will this make any difference? Not at all. The schools have become training centers, obsessed with turning out better employees. Not better citizens.

My Spanish Teacher

Monday I was in Orosi when I met this assertive young Russian woman who informed me that she was a language teacher - and that I should hire her to teach me Spanish. She is one of these persons who picks up a language easily and speaks all kinds of languages - even Lithuanian. She graduated in Physics in the former USSR, but ended up in the US somehow with her two young sons (I didn't ask for details). There are former Russians all over the world now, scrambling to make a new life for themselves in all kinds of ways.

After listening to her pitch, I thought she might have a new wrinkle in teaching a language - maybe something I could use to learn Spanish. So I agreed to a lesson the next day. It didn't take long for me to realize I made a mistake - but I was studying Spanish again, and that was something I needed. And she was good at manipulating me into keeping her as my language instructor.

So I blew the dust off my Spanish books and started in. It didn't feel too bad. But Ana (that was her name) was always ahead of me - and I was always stumbling along trying to keep up. I made it clear that today (our third lesson) was our last. She got the message.

Then she said she needed a new place for her and her sons to stay. They had tried a local school, and lived in two different homes. All were disasters. I could relate. So I suggested a new hostel just up the street from where I live across the river.

We took off walking there, but they were much faster walkers than I was, and kept waiting for me to catch up. 

They taught me something: I am too old to go back to work. I had fantasies of working as a business process modeler, something that interests me and I would be good at. Except with my old brain and my old body I simply couldn't maintain a normal working pace.

The Deterioration of the American Mind

America has fallen both externally and internally. Our external situation, our pecking order in the world, is well-known to everybody. Our internal situation, the state of our minds, is practically unknown - especially to us, the people who should be thinking the most about it. This is probably because we don't do much thinking about anything - our thinking skills have deteriorated dramatically - and we could care less.

We seem to think that thinking is only for stupid people - people who aren't already in the know. People who know the right way to be intuitively. People who know nothing, and don't want to know. The perfect people for today's world - at least in America.

I have an expert to back me up: Maggie Jackson in her book Distracted. From page 233:

The American Philosophical Association in part defines critical thinking as purposeful self-regulatory judgment. Americans are missing the self-regulation part. 

Unless people develop the competencies to sustain delay and continue to exercise their will when they want and need to do so, the choice itself is lost.

Perhaps attention is the true missing key to better learning. Without the powers of focus, awareness, and judgment that fuel self-control, we cannot fend off distractions, set goals, manage a complex, changing environment, and ultimately shape the trajectory of our lives.

We should be concerned by the fact that most campuses are plagued by high dropout rates, lukewarm gains in critical thinking and reflective judgment, and low engagement with the life of the mind.

A disturbing 35-year old longitudinal study by Alexander Astin reports that 80 percent of incoming college students in the 1960s called "developing a meaningful philosophy of life" their most essential goal, while 45 percent chose "being very well off" as their primary aim. Today, their values have shifted markedly. Nearly 74 percent of freshmen rate being wealthy as essential, while 43 percent chose life philosophy as most important.

Most Americans agree that ADHD is an American disease, as I wrote earlier.

Those with ADHD suffer from forgetfulness and impulsivity, traits that impair their ability to shape the course of their lives."The child with ADHD will be more under the control of external events that of mental representations about time and future, under the influence of others rather than acting to control the self, pursuing immediate gratification over deferred gratification and under the influence of the temporal now more than of the probable social futures that lie ahead."

ADHD is a disorder of "attention to the future and what one needs to do to prepare for its arrival. It is a disorder of time."

I suffer from this too. My stomach walks in the door before I do, fed by lots of instant gratification. My bank account is just the opposite.

My Sister on Teaching and Learning

My sister Linda stopped being a teacher to become a librarian, but she is still a teacher at heart. She still thinks the young can learn, if properly taught. These are some of her recent thoughts:
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We have to teach our children in sound bites, they can't focus on anything much bigger. 

I have been going over my files and updating some of what I used to teach in the library and have noticed that for the presentation to be successful, even to other teachers, I have to shorten each slide, put in more visuals, add more frills such as sound that really gets their attention.  We have to teach as entertainers, competing with TV, video games, wii, etc. 

Some young teachers have even gone so far as to have posters using texting language, nothing wrong with that but kids can't spell as it is.  So what are our standards we are pushing on our students? 

More people are being turned off my conventional religion, TV churches are all over the place, you can "attend" without getting out of your home.  More people are talking about spiritual things, at least in my school.  The book "The Shack" is making the rounds among all ages and students are talking about it in class.  The younger population are looking for something more permanent because their parents don't have anything.  They are not looking for a church where you can go, listen to a sermon, go to confession, take communion, etc., if it doesn't mean anything. 

They are already in uncertainty, best of all they realize it and are looking.  People in their 40's on up are settling for what they have always known, they like the boxes they are in.  The younger people don't like boxes and it is a threat to teachers who try to put them in boxes, students are actively rejecting their way of teaching, their life styles even. 

Next week I will spend time learning different ways to teach, last year it meant adding technology more in the classroom.  But really what they are trying to get teachers to realize is that students are creative, let them learn in a more creative way, use their creativeness by allowing them to explore in what ever way they need to learn.  Don't put the learning in a box of the teachers mind set, even if the teacher is creative, it may not match what the student needs.