Beyond School

Dates: 1996-98
Surface Culture: Arabs as ‘the Enemy’
Deep Culture: Language; Culture; Religion; Society; Values; Proxemics; Diet
Knowledge Bases for Diversity: Foundations of Racism; Socio-cultural Contexts

Salaam Alaykum: Peace be with You

I graduated with a B.A. in (Eurocentric) Humanities in 1996. Though a liberal secular humanist at heart, I had experienced increasing disenchantment in my final university years with the radical, theory-based dogmatism (for so it seemed to me) of my very left-wing academy: besides the aversively confrontational, shrill, divisive, and often uncivil tactics used by the radical community, I also harbored skepticism toward the theoretical basis of the ‘knowledge’ I was taught by an overwhelmingly white, middle class, existentially sheltered faculty. I wanted direct experience of life as a standard of comparison with the theories dominating my education. I was particularly alienated by the academic attack on the traditional literary canon, which I had devotedly studied and treasured for the prior fifteen years (an unwitting subject of/to the traditionalist philosophy of curriculum). Suddenly this new breed of professors seemed determined to demote Homer and Shakespeare and all my other heroes to politically suspect or simply irrelevant authors. I was so aghast at the prospect of becoming a professor who loved this canon among an intellectual community that didn’t that I abandoned my plans to earn my doctorate in literature and become a professor.

I was also nagged by a feeling of educational incompleteness owing to my lack of a second language, of knowledge of any non-EuroAmerican history and culture, and of direct experience living outside the United States. Finally, being shouldered with over $30,000 debt in the form of college loans, I saw a future of economic insecurity—as a joke at the time had it,

I have a liberal arts degree…will that be for here or to go?

Lo and behold, I stumbled across a solution to all these nagging misgivings in the unlikely form of an army veteran who told me of the possibility of becoming a linguist in Military Intelligence. If I passed the linguistic aptitude test and the security background check, I could be sent to full-time language school in Monterey, California, then stationed in Europe or Asia, have my student loans paid off by the army, and have the direct experience of the most academically demonized institution in the United States. I would be able to climb into the belly of the beast only theoretically known by my professors and fellow-student ideologues. That experience would round out my formal education with an existential reality-check. (The prospect of experiencing military life itself was to me, with my romantic infatuation with Homeric epic, not unappealing at all. I saw it as an opportunity to compare the modern military ethos with that of Homer’s ‘Heroic Age.’ It was an anthropological opportunity to experience that very foreign culture we call the U.S. Military.) My academic friends and most of my professors thought I was either crazy or immoral or both, but I trusted the Clinton administration not to compromise my morality—and anyway, I reasoned, in a worst-case scenario, I could always disobey orders. I only hoped it wouldn’t come to that.

Three months later I had finished basic training (aka “Boot Camp,” which strictly should only refer to Marine Corps basic training, if I recall correctly), and my shaven-headed self was beginning his 64-week, full-time study of al-FusHa (fus-ha)– Modern Standard Arabic. My instructors were all native Arabs from diverse Arab nations, and they all had stories to tell. They also were walking cultural artifacts themselves, representing the civilization that produced them. Overall I found them intensely likable and fascinating.

Studying the language itself was a labor of love. Arabic is a largely ‘pure’ language, uncorrupted by loan-words and structures from other language families. Consequently, the language is itself an artifact of its ancient origins in the Bedouin tribes of the Arabian interior. The desert environment in which the language was born is literally perceptible in the language itself. The Arabic word for mustache, for example, shariban, is based on the verb “to drink” and given the dual suffix “-an”. In other words, the meaning of “two drinks” is embedded in the noun. The function of the “two-sided” mustache as a collector of water to “drink” (by sucking on it when thirsty) points to the presence of the harsh Bedouin life of nomadic travel across the parched deserts of the Rubb al-Khali, the “Empty Quarter,” from oasis to oasis. Similar  examples abound, to be discovered by the student of Arabic.

The irony of this experience is that I was being taught this language implicitly as the language of ‘the enemy.’ Yet the unintended consequence of introducing me to my Arabic professors and the beauties of Arabic language, history, and culture - its propensity, shared with the USA, to attribute the creation of the universe to a mythic superhero who “wrote” three conflicting and conflict-causing books several millennia ago notwithstanding - was to convert me into a person who greatly (yet in certain instances critically) respects, sympathizes with, and reveres ‘the enemy.’ ¹

Pedagogically this experience is relevant in many respects. Our Anglophile tendency to glorify the richness of the English language, while justifiable, should not blind us to the probable glories in other languages. Students of all cultures should have the opportunity to share their pride in their language with non-speakers of it, and to learn about other languages from those who speak them. On a more humanitarian level, the most important thing we as educators can do today is counter any national propaganda that tries to dehumanize ‘enemy’ nations with direct encounters with people from those nations. The best way to convert an enemy to a fellow human being is to give him or her a name and a story.

—

¹Learning the history of that “enemy” since those days, from the Crusades to the Imperial politics of of Palestine and the birth of Israel in the WW I and WW II eras, and of the Cold War politics after that (especially concerning Iran which, while not Arab is still a Muslim Middle Eastern nation: the USA and Britain overthrew Iranian democracy in 1953 to impose the brutal Shah as a puppet serving the interests of Western oil corporations, which led to the anti-American Islamist Revolution under the Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979, and leads today to the Bush/Cheney administration’s eagerness to again topple an Iranian government for geopolitical advantage) — all of that has only increased my understanding that the Arab resentment against the West has deeply justified historical roots.  Here’s a nice little video lesson on that Iranian story, which all Arabs and Iranians haven’t forgotten, though most Americans (if they ever knew it at all) have:

—

Photo credits: Soldier in Al-Anbar, Iraq by Jayel Aheram; Arabic Calligraphy by twocentsworth

___

The Legacy Series So Far:
1. Fear and Trembling: Goodbye to Christianity
2. The Hulk Leads to Hamlet: Reading Despite School
3. Of Jocks and Fags: The High School Bullying Years
4. In the Crumbling Temple of the Dead White Males: The Beatnik College Years, pt. 1
5. Human Sacrifice: The College Years, pt. 2

*

In the Crumbling Temple of the Dead White Males

Artifact: Shakespeare’s Sonnets
Dates: 1980-present

I escaped high school and the American South the summer after I graduated. I arrived in Los Angeles on a Greyhound bus, educated in comic books, Tolkein and Frank Herbert, album-oriented rock music, the Ten Best Reasons to Escape the South, and the effects of a few popular recreational drugs. I also had the high school diploma I’d earned by not quitting school. I’d never seen a big city before. I’d never even been out of the South.

It took me a year to settle into Los Angeles enough to enter college. Midway through my first year I left class one day and didn’t go back. I don’t remember why, though I’m sure life got in the way somehow. So much for higher education.

My education in the literary classics actually began, true to pattern, outside of school. Beth, a girl in my apartment complex, was infatuated with an English grad student who to me seemed pretty infatuated with himself, judging by the reading list he gave her. Next to his entry on the list of Hemingway’s “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” he had written some cryptic note to the effect that if Beth understood this story, she would understand him. She thought he was so important that she asked me to read the recommended books with her. Maybe I would help her unlock the mystery of this sage’s being.

I didn’t have anything better to do. Looking back, though, it’s hard to imagine Hemingway as a grad student.

Anyway, first on the list was Kerouac’s On the Road. This was fateful for me–fateful. I read it in complete, unguided isolation. Beth was too star-struck to read anything on this list critically, and all I knew, equally uncritically, was that I was reading a classic, I was reading Literature—and classic literature meant wisdom to me, and wisdom meant truth. So my first taste of truth and wisdom came from the seductive pen of this drug-addled hedonist’s glorification of the great speed-freak Neal Cassidy, as the two of them hitch-hiked across America seeking alternately mystical or sexual kicks. I bought it. Soon I was dressing like a French Beatnik unstuck in time, and writing narcissistic free verse poetry bad enough to make the angels weep.

I shared Kerouac with John, an L.A. surfer dude I worked with who had never read anything. But he enjoyed my influence (and I his), and off we went. We devoured the Beats that year and, as soon as I wrote his final junior college essay for him and he was out of school for the summer, we strapped on backpacks and hitch-hiked across America. And back. (It was the first of many such summer trips that decade, usually alone.)

Hitch-hiking didn’t work so well in the Yuppie ‘80s as it did in the post-War Beat ‘50s. The first day out of Los Angeles, we covered about 100 miles to the Mojave Desert, where we spent the next two days stranded on the side of the highway under the desert sun, sunburnt and sandy-eyed, watching hundreds of cars pass us with no interest at all. We were Beat alright. We split up at that point and crossed the rest of the country solo to meet on the other side. I was amazed at how many male drivers of blue and white collar backgrounds—husbands and fathers as a rule: a Mormon preacher in Utah, a real estate executive in Omaha, hard-hatted tobacco-spitting construction worker in Kentucy, truck-drivers from Nowhere and Everywhere—took me as a safe opportunity to slip out of the closet and suggest a little sex of one sort or another. Kerouac never wrote about that. Luckily, in the end they were all gentlemen who took no for an answer. (I was especially glad this was true of the rodeo cowboy in Colorado who wrestled bulls and broncos for a living. At 6’5” or so of steel-framed beef, he could have lifted me over his head and snapped me in two if he’d wanted to. Instead, he began sobbing, apologized for any offense, and told me that he would be rope-tied and castrated by the other cowboys if they ever found out. I wonder how many cowboys would actually have embraced him instead.)

At any rate, two or three years went by delving deeper into classic Beat wisdom. John and I starting smoking cigarettes as a stamp of culture. We were bona fide existentialists. We started reading different stuff—introductions to Buddhism, Hermann Hesse, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, and such. Each book was wise and right and we had no doubt about it. We were young enough (only 20) to know that we knew everything.

At about that time, I sat one night in a Ship’s coffee shop (the closest thing to an intellectual French cafe L.A. had to offer at the time),  chain-smoking with a bottomless fifty-cent cup of coffee, and improving myself through literature by reading, I believe, Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice. In walked a striking young African-American man (who turned out to be a fashion model, the son of a famous singer from the Jazz Age, and brother of another famous R&B female vocalist), who noticed me reading and struck up a conversation.

“No, no, no,” he said, “you’ve got it all wrong. Why are you reading all this 20th Century crap when you could be reading Homer and Shakespeare, the Bible and Spenser and Milton?”

“Tell me more,” I said. And he did. And did. And did. For several months he did. (He finally dismissed me to find a pupil who wasn’t straight, essentially.) He gave me a copy of Homer’s epics and we discussed them (rather, he talked and I listened). He gave me Plato, which was such a revelation and a joy that I took immediate action to create the maximum free time to study his works. I moved out of my apartment and into my beat old VW bus—it had a comfy bed in back and good closets and sound system—and I reduced my schedule at the restaurant I worked at to provide just enough money for gas, food, coffee shops, two types of smokes, and the complete works of Plato (plus savings for the next summer’s hitchhiking). My Beatnik influence was powerful enough to sanction this unconventional move. I parked on the side of the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu every night and read, and woke in the morning to emerge from my van onto the literal sands of my prime beachfront property. (It really wasn’t bad–I had a cooler and a beach chair. What more did I need?) I got through the complete works and left hazy marginalia on every page. I had a couple of mystical experiences becoming one with Plato’s forms.

My elitist mentor/suitor also gave me Beethoven symphonies, Mahler, Wagner (“Why are you listening to that modern, plebeian rock crap?” my mentor said. “Really, Clay.” He literally clucked as he shook his head). I sponged them up, and passed them on to John (who lived with his parents but often spent the night parked next to me in his own van). We discovered that Beethoven and Mahler - good god, Mahler! - were gods. We listened to them on the beach with double headphones in one Walkman. The finales would crank us up so much we’d normally run into the surf and clash like sumo wrestlers. We couldn’t imagine how our culture had cheated us of these treasures all our lives, and given us Ozzie Osborne instead. We pretty much abandoned rock and pop at that point, and I’ve never been able to get into it again since–though Jazz has long since eclipsed classical for me.

The awareness dawned on John and me that, if literature roughly began with Homer around the 7th Century BCE, we should be able to start there and just read right through until we reached our time period (thank god for the ‘Dark Ages’). So we tried it. It wasn’t easy, of course. It was impossible. We finally surrendered and admitted that we needed a framework and an experienced guide to give us context and titles so we’d get ‘the’ ‘whole picture.’ This gave us a reason to go to college. John changed his mind and decided to travel around the world that year, but I had no savings so I couldn’t join him. I went back to college alone.

I loved it. I finally had that love of literature—not just comics and science fiction anymore. It made me want to study literature and want to write about it. (It is worth repeating that it was not the university but rather reading as a shared social act that made me value the classics.) I loved meeting students who also wanted to study literature, who were there voluntarily like me. We did little else but read, talk, write, and dream literature. We were all still goofy young boneheads, sure, mistaking traditional authority for truth and beauty, but by god it often was at least profound, and as often stunningly beautiful.

I took a Survey of Western Philosophy course under a woman of mystical bent who led us from the Pre-Socratics to Kant over a full year. She was hip, smart, enthusiastic, and beautiful. When she assigned papers on these philosophers, we all leapt to the task because we saw it as an opportunity to demonstrate our understanding of the internal argument of the philosopher. We were proud to be able to demonstrate this because I think we were all surprised that middle-class students like us could ‘get’ this stuff. Never mind that one week I fully agreed with Thales that motion and change didn’t exist—I remember riding my bike home from school one day convinced that everything was an illusion and all was a changeless monistic One, so my getting hit by a truck was not really my getting hit by a truck—and the next week agreed with Heraclitus that we can’t step into the same river twice and all was flux. Never mind that Plato’s idealism and Aristotle’s materialism were both true. Let Augustine prove God’s existence and Nietzsche announce His death.

The redemptive fact in this comedy of confusion is that we boneheads were unconsciously preparing for the moment when all these contradictions would impress themselves on us consciously, and we would recognize the historicity of all human knowledge and values. I am so thankful that this professor didn’t do what later, and to me misguided, professors did: introduce these texts as tools of oppression to be mistrusted and opposed. Instead, she let us suckle these creeds outworn and search for truth through them, trusting all the while, I suspect, that their collective incoherence would speak for itself eventually, and we would reach that conclusion ourselves through experience.

John came back from the world the next summer and we took a ride in my van so I could fill him in on the history of Western philosophy. That fall he enrolled in college as a philosophy major. Again we were off.

Eventually we both transferred to the University of Oregon. I loved too many subjects to consider abandoning any of them, so I declared Interdisciplinary Arts and Letters as my major. The first year in the program required survey courses in at least four disciplines, all chronologically taught. This meant that all five of my classes in term one were devoted to Greece and Rome from different angles (eg, literature, philosophy, history, art, religion); the next term treated the Middle Ages in the same interdisciplinary way; and the final term surveyed the Renaissance to the Modern Age. I had found that framework for ‘the’ big picture I was looking for. (At the end of Term 1, I wanted to be first a Classicist, then a monk after Term 2, and finally a Marxist revolutionary by the end of that year.)

I didn’t realize it then, but the curriculum at the time was embattled by feminists, Marxists, traditionalists, and post-Structuralists. I’m glad it was a hidden battle, because the inclusion of Other perspectives in our canon—primarily Marxist and women thinkers and artists—was not surrounded by controversy. Instead, we students experienced that inclusion as natural.

By the time I took my upper division classes, however, the tone changed radically (literally). Ideologues of every sort in the most extreme cases unapologetically bashed the works we had earlier studied with the categorical baseball bat for “Dead White Males.” This type of generalization was unspeakably thoughtless to me: were Oscar Wilde’s homo-eroticism, Defoe’s feminism, Blake’s liberalism, Nietzsche’s ecstatic critique of Christian history and metaphysics all to be tossed because of their sires’ gender? Were the wisdoms of only late-20th century far left thinkers to be studied, when their knowledge too is historically constructed and determined? (Wasn’t I still smoking because of the classic modern wisdom of the Beats and Camus and Sartre?) Was indignation to be the only respectable motive for research and exploration? Was all of that pleasure of the mind I’d so come to love from my earlier studies suddenly invalid and unwelcome? Couldn’t I do good simply by being a conduit for Keats to all students who want to love him? Was aesthetic rapture banned by the new regime? I know these are gross generalizations. But that was my impression of American intellectualism in the mid-‘90s. I didn’t have the stomach for it. I graduated as quickly as I could and left academia.

Looking back on this now, it seems to me that the problem I had with the new –ists was not with their –isms, but with their pedagogy. Simply put, they were uncivil. They showed no concern for, and made no attempt to learn about, my background. Instead they attacked what I loved and consequently as much as told me I did not belong. They were radical Gradgrinds in post-modern hard times. They often employed the same traditionalist pedagogy they theoretically opposed by deciding for me what they must teach and I must learn, when constructivist explorations could well have succeeded in bringing me to see and experience something probably close to their perspective. They often seemed to accept that all truth was constructed - except their own.

In short, they forgot about the learner in their zeal to be teachers. This is why their teaching failed to win me. And this makes me reflect, while looking at the Holistic Circle of Learning, that a teacher can be dazzlingly interdisciplinary, can teach for all the multiple intelligences squared, and can be impressively perspectivistic and multi-modal and multi-cultural until the cows come home—they will still probably fail. Unless…they start with knowing their learners, with respecting and esteeming them, and whatever cultural scripts those learners bring into the class.

—

*The Legacy Series So Far:
1. Fear and Trembling: Goodbye to Christianity
2. The Hulk Leads to Hamlet: Reading Despite School
3. Of Jocks and Fags: The High School Bullying Years

Gloucester: O! let me kiss that hand!
Lear: Let me wipe it first; it smells of mortality.
–Shakespeare, King Lear, IV.vi.131-2

I don’t mean to get morbid here, it being summer and all, but I’ve been spending a good bit of time lately in the Intensive Care Unit with my mother-in-law, and the sights there of “old age, sickness, and death” are as forceful today as they were when they slammed into the mind of the young Buddha 2,600 years ago.¹

They put me in mind again of Will’s post, “My Blogging Legacy,” about how all his digital offerings may one day serve, as Will put it,  “as a piece of my brain [that] lived on, one that was able to provide for my kids a richer understanding of their histories and legacies.”

To cut to the chase, this post is offered from that angle. It’s the first of about ten pieces that I wrote for a multiculturalism in education class I took in Mallorca, Spain about six summers ago. The professor, Dr. Tonya Huber, assigned us to select any “artifact” from our lives, write about it as a piece of our culture, and connect it to the pedagogical issues of the course. Because I love to write, because I was alone in an apartment with a balcony under soft Mediterranean moons perfect for writing, and because I was there alone with nothing to stop me from writing midnights to sunrises on that balcony, filling coffee cups and ashtrays and pages and pages (my wife was Stateside at the time), I ended up writing ten pieces that pretty much formed a skeletal autobiography.

I want to post those here, simply because I don’t write on any space but this one. (As a side-note, I wonder how many other people chafe at the pressures to “stay on topic” because they’ve somehow been pigeonholed as “edubloggers,” when really, they never signed any such contract. And maybe it would be fun for other people to spend the summer giving edu-topics a rest, and turning to personal narrative to make this ’sphere a little more, well, personal. You never know what affinities we may discover for each other as a result.)

So to steal a line from Petrarch, one of the coolest dead white males I know, consider this the first of ten “Letters to Posterity“ á la Will’s “blogging legacy” theme. Here’s clip one:

Ambivalent Apostasy

or,

Fear and Trembling at “Camp Joy”

Artifact: King James Bible

Date: August, 1972-present

From preschool to sixth grade, my maternal grandfather was my closest extended family relationship. I remember taking walks with him in my neighborhood before I was old enough to go to school—he always carried a walking stick that he would swing rhythmically in full circles as he walked, and I would pick up any old stick and imitate him as I walked beside him. He was an extremely handsome, curly-haired, square-jawed man with a glint in his blue eyes. Although I didn’t know it at the time, he had quite the womanizing past—but around the time I was born, he was rendered impotent by testicular cancer.

Apparently this was the trigger for his conversion from womanizing to proselytizing: he converted to the Southern Baptist faith and became a fervid evangelist to all, including me, his grandson. Visits to his house always found him with the Bible in his lap—he read two chapters a day, and claimed he’d read it through in its entirety several times. I remember one visit when I was apparently, in his eyes, overdue for a haircut. He opened the Book in his lap to chapter and verse which spelled out in no uncertain terms the absolute wrongness of a man (and boy) wearing long, womanly hair. The message was clear: get a haircut to be right with God.

So my Tennessee upbringing included in its macroculture the evangelical perspective. It didn’t require that my family regularly attend church—mine didn’t—for me to be gripped, one evening when I was maybe five years old, with such terror that I tore down the stairs from my bedroom to my parents’ bedroom and leapt sobbing into their bed. When they asked why I was so upset, I told them that I knew that I would go to heaven, but they would go to hell, and I would never see them again through all eternity.

At any rate, when I was 11 years old, my grandfather persuaded my parents to enroll me in the largest Southern Baptist summer camp in the American southeast: “Camp Joy.” Each night, the 400-odd campers, pubescent boys all, were herded into an outdoor revival tent, captive audiences for a sermon that fed us such vivid images of the sufferings of eternal hell that, when the call to come forward and be saved was issued, I was among the first to answer (again, that pubescent bit is key: what healthy 11-year-old boy isn’t guilty of epic “self-abuse” on the scale of Solomon, but without, unfortunately to the lad, Solomon’s thousand concubines?). I came forward, almost trotting, as all closed their eyes in prayer, was taken outside by a camp counselor, and instructed to repeat the magic formula that would save me from the torments the speaker had taken such trouble to invent for us. Tears streaming, I sputtered the formula in total fear and trembling, and was told by the counselor that I was saved.

I went back to my cabin that night and compared notes with another boy in my group, Lance, who was also saved. We both noted that we felt different since accepting the Lord in our hearts.

Later that week, all who had come forward were baptized. After the baptism ceremony (the baptismal water of which was suspected as the cause of a severe case of empitigo, a breaking out of scabs on my face and body, the week after camp, which is the best rorschach scene for medievalism - “It was demons leaving him!” - or modernism - “Didn’t they use chlorine in that tub?” - that I can imagine), awards were given for “Camper of the Week.” After announcing the second and first runners-up, they announced the winner.

Though they mispronounced my last name, I realized I had won. They awarded me with this Bible, inscribed with my (misspelled) name. Looking back on it now, I think I won because a) I ran fastest to the altar; b) When converting, I cried more than the other boys; and c) I was a real goody-goody at that age.

On the last day of camp, some Southern Baptist radio station - the biggest in the Southeast, I was told - interviewed the two “runners-up” and me, in that order, beauty pageant-like. The second and first runners-up, when asked about the experience at Camp Joy, answered in ways any healthy boy would: “Oh, it was great! I rode horses, played baseball, shot bow-and-arrow, made lots of new friends,” etc.  I picture my father at home nodding his approval as he listened.

Then it was my turn.

My voice was always deep, even as a child, and slow. Call it a drone (massive doses of caffeine became my remedy for that in recent years). So when asked the same question, drone I did:  “Well, I wuz saaaved, and I took the Looord into mah heaart, ‘n’ I wuz Baaa-ptiiized….”  I’ve always pictured my dad, the sports buff and former football coach, dropping his head and shaking it back and forth slowly, wondering what his father-in-law had done to his boy; I would have done so if I were him. But he was a good sport and never mentioned anything. (My grandfather died shortly after that, in true Faulknerian fashion, of a self-inflicted shot to the chest from a 12-gauge shotgun, and so, thus, did his influence upon my development. For a brief spell I pictured him watching me from heaven behind my locked bedroom door, an uncomfortable experience that soon, thankfully, passed as well.)

I took this Bible home and read it cover to cover in the summer between sixth and seventh grade. Since it’s a crazy-quilt of tracts cobbled together for the Roman emperor Constantine at the Council of Nicaea three entire centuries after the life of Jesus (if indeed he was an historical character at all, which scholars debate), and without any sort of editors’ introduction to tie all those chapters together so the reader knows what the heck it’s all about, it’s not something I’d recommend anybody try.

When I reached adolescence shortly after, in my junior high years, my circle of friends and I started experimenting with what I’ll euphemistically call “expansive thinking.” One conversation we had concerned what our reactions, as a planet, would be if Martians were to come to earth and reveal to us their divine revelations in a book entirely devoid of God, Jesus, and all that we ‘knew.’ This and similar conversations (not to mention the tendency I noted of my Christian community to justify hateful treatment of certain groups by virtue of Biblical authority) shortly led to my disavowal of Christianity.  Call it my hillbilly Rastafarian stage.

In my twenties and thirties, I would develop an interest in world religions and out of philosophical interest read the Bible again, as well as Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and other key theologians. But I never considered rejoining the Christian faith.

Then a funny thing happened. I was forty years old and living in China, and my then-wife and I were in the States sifting through my library to decide what books to donate to Goodwill, and which to ship (at exorbitant cost) to China. I put the prize Bible from Camp Joy in the “donate” stack, but my wife, though not a Christian herself, urged me to keep it because it was “part of my story.” So I kept it.

I only kept a few other books. Most of them, it turns out, are in the Christian tradition: William Blake’s poetry and etchings and John Donne’s Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions particularly.

Why would Christian works still loom so large in my preferred reading, when there was little chance of me ever returning to the faith? First, I think it reflects my discomfort with living a life completely devoid of a routine and communal spiritual/moral focus. Though I cannot rationally (or, after reading Deuteronomy and Joshua, among other books, morally) accept the tenets of Christianity, I am at the same time uncomfortable with the alternative of having no spiritual community or fellowship at all. I still desire the inclusion in the structure of my life of regular, communal reflection on spiritual matters—the weekly church meeting on Sundays structure is very appealing to me. My rejection of Christianity unfortunately means, in American culture, that there are few if any substitutes to replace it. Consumerism and hedonism do not fill this vacuum—and unfortunately, the one satisfying alternative I have found, Unitarian Universalism, does not exist in Shanghai.

Second, the Bible is ironically a source of the concern for social justice that infuses the radical elements of progressive society. As such, I won’t categorically condemn its followers. I prefer the company and the agency of many good-hearted Christians I have known to that of many non-Christians I have known, while I have also known many non-Christians who are better practicing “Christians” than professing ones. I also note the incremental gains made for multiculturalism and tolerance within its tradition: a case in point is the recent nomination for arch-deacon of an openly gay cleric in the Anglican Church.

Third, my experience of apostasy turns out to be part and parcel of the cultural script of “Aggregate Individualism,” in which “individuals are strongly encouraged to separate from their ascribed relationships such as family, relatives, community, and religion” (Choi, 234).  Would I have been better off never to have encountered evangelical Christianity? Though the full answer to this would be “in many ways, yes, and in many ways, no,” I think that the engagement with moral and religious questions this experience gave me prepared me for later, culturally-transcendent explorations of non-Western religions—above all, Buddhism, Taoism, and the Native American Sun-Dance and Peyote religions. While I may regret the monolithic hold of Christianity on the environment of my childhood, and wish that Buddhism or any number of naturalistic spiritualities had captured me first, Christianity nonetheless allowed me to cut my teeth on it, and developmentally wrestle with its doctrine and its paradigm. I would be spiritually skinnier without that encounter.

Related to this is the issue of the value of Aggregate Individualism itself. We Westerners—including, perhaps especially, the intellectuals—pride ourselves on transcending and leaving behind our “families, relatives, community, and religion” (Choi). Such accomplishments would be frowned upon by collective cultures. There is a curious irony in the fact that the Western intellectuals of the classic Aggregate Individualistic pattern very often valorize the ‘relational,’ culturally-conservative collectivism of ‘other’ cultures — cultures that would never dream of approving of individual separation from culturally sanctioned affiliations with traditional familial, communal, and (religious-) institutional structures. Culturally atomized, we very often valorize cultural conformity—toward non-Western cultures, at any rate. I only observe this irony…I don’t know what to make of it.

So how is this relevant to culturally responsible pedagogy? It makes me aware that I should respect “even” the Christian roads that my students may be traveling, and strive to communicate with them in terms of their own scripts, rather than condescendingly “tutoring” them from my own. Whether they renounce or affirm their faith is immaterial to the real issue, which is whether they become conscious shapers of their scripts toward their fellow human beings. In the final analysis, we can’t wish Christianity away. Pragmatically, the best we can do is to try to foster a critical and reformist impulse toward it—and within it.

—

References: Kim, Uichol and Choi, Soo-Hyang: “Individualism, Collectivism, and Child Development: A Korean Perspective,” Cross-cultural Roots of Minority Child Development, Patricia Marks Greenfield, Rodney R. Cocking.

—

¹Speaking of the Buddha, here’s a clip from the BBC’s The Life of the Buddha that I’ve used in Asian history classes. It’s brilliant, and my students loved it. You’ll see why in this segment, in which Gatauma, under the Bo Tree, faces the twin “demons” of Fear and Desire and, with some wicked good special effects, vanquishes them both to attain Englightenment.  I made a viewing guide that I’ll share with anybody who’s interested in using it in their classes. The whole show is available here:

“I want to stress that this book is not, and never was, intended to replace any textbooks of history that may serve a very different purpose at school. I would like my readers to relax, and to follow the story without having to take notes or to memorise names and dates. In fact, I promise that I shall not examine them on what they have read.”
–E.H. Gombrich, preface to the Turkish edition of A Little History of the World

Schooly History: Neither Forest nor Trees (or, “History as Test-Garbage In, Test, Test-Garbage Out”)

I’m tutoring a couple of Korean students home for the summer from their Oregon high school. Like many English language learners, they’re wonderfully bright, but challenged by the readability level of their assigned  high school texts. And like many students generally, all their years of schooling in history have failed to equip them with any coherent understanding of the flow of history at all.

This I’ve confirmed with almost all students (not just English Language Learners) in high school classrooms over the years by doing this simple exercise: Scramble the major periods of history in a random cluster on the board or a handout - you know, “Medieval Period,” “Cold War,” “Roman Empire,” “Enlightenment,” “Age of Exploration,” “Classical Greece,” “Industrial Revolution,” “Greek Heroic Age/Trojan War,” “Renaissance,” “Sumer,” “Solomon Builds the Jewish Temple,” “Scientific Revolution,” “Alexander the Great,” “World War I and II,” “Mohammed and Islam,” “The Crusades,” “Egyptian Pharoahs,” “The Reformation,” “Buddha,” “The Romantic Era,” “The Catholic Church Begins,” “Confucius.” (We can quibble about this list, of course, but for now play along.)

Then tell the students: “Make a list in which you place these major historical events and periods in the correct chronological order.  Then, write the approximate dates you think each one took place or began.”

Then wander the room monitoring the students’ progress. In almost all cases, depending on your personality, you’ll either laugh or weep. It’s not unusual to see the Industrial Revolution occurring before the Middle Ages, the Holocaust during the Enlightenment, and Columbus before Confucius. Stalin was a Renaissance Man. What a muddle.

I tried this on my “advanced placement” seniors this year, and the above description fits (again, there were about two exceptions). Whatever history they’d learned seemed to be garbage in for the test, then garbage out.

Penetrating the Students to Reach the Learners

I recommend doing this with students, because in my experience, it opens up a wonderful space for asking, “How could you have gone through more than a decade of schooling and remember - or understand - so little of what you were supposedly taught of the story of our species on this planet?”

The nice thing about this conversation is that it leads wonderfully into the follow-up: “You’re about to graduate and become adults. You won’t have many more chances to get your head around this story, which truly educated adults should know. If I promise that this 5,000 year old story is really pretty easy to learn and know - as a story - do you want to take this opportunity (possibly your last) to learn it?”

The refreshing thing: By a wide margin, the answer is a very sincere “Yes.”  This conversation seems to penetrate the thick defenses against schoolwork that students have built up over the years, and get them in touch with that part of us that simply doesn’t want to be ignorant about basic things like history. It’s a wonderfully ironic “a-ha” moment that, if subtitled in a film, would read, “How the hell did I remain so ignorant of all this stuff after having it crammed into me for all these years? What a debacle! What a charade, my high GPA!”

History Teacher as Epic Bard, Students as Bardic Apprentices

At that point, the 5,000 year story of history has what it needs to be enjoyed: an eager audience, and (we pray) a skillful story-teller (I’d like to be humble here, but I know my strengths as well as my¹ weaknesses, and telling the story of the last 5,000 years as a narrative, as the real Greatest Story Ever Told - full of gut laughter, wistful “what ifs,” amazing characters and events, philosophical wonder, and chains of cause and effect over centuries, over millennia, all liberally peppered with audience-participation requests for predictions, connections to earlier episodes, summaries of why Marx couldn’t have come earlier than the Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment couldn’t have come before the Renaissance, on and on - that is one of my strengths).

But hearing the story, being mere audience, isn’t enough to learn it.  Like the bards that kept the Iliad and Odyssey alive through several centuries of the Greek “Dark Age,” during which reading and writing disappeared, and the story lived through oral transmission from older to younger storytellers, the students need to rehearse what they’ve heard from teacher - and a simple, low-tech way for them to do that is simply to re-tell the story they’re hearing, episode by episode, as simple written narrative summaries.¹

Back to the two students I’m tutoring: Today we just concluded our last class together. Over the course of two or three hours of this story-telling for each of twelve days, they’ve gone from the muddle above to being able to tell the story of five millennia, with approximately correct dates, causal connections, main players and events - and with enthusiasm. That’s roughly how long it took Homeric bards to recite the Iliad and the Odyssey.

I share this simply because I find it wonderful, but vexingly difficult to implement in the school setting. In schools, bells would have stopped the story. Other classes would have choked and vitiated the story’s roots with competing homework. Large class sizes would have made the constant comprehension-checking conversations impossible - unless one of you can suggest a way to pull it off, for which I’m all ears.

I know it’s not fair that all students can’t afford this kind of private education - but I wonder if a different approach to delivering it (YouTube presentations?) might not narrow that unjust gap.  But besides that, I just discovered a book that comes very close to that “bardic” approach to narrative history.

E.H. Gombrich’s A Little History of the World: The Big Picture for Little People, English Language Learners, and Historically Clueless Adults

Gombrich is deservedly acclaimed for his majestic The Story of Art, which was my college art history textbook; but he wrote A Little History of the World for children. The results are overall wonderful: the readability level, lexically and syntactically, is appropriate for eight-year-olds, but better still, so is the tone. By tailoring his story for that toughest of audiences, eight-year-olds - too young to pimp for grades and too alive to endure boredom - Gombrich succeeds at restoring the wonders of storytelling to world history, in a way that has both entertained me and, better still, clarified for me some of the basic stories and their significance to the bigger story. Best of all, he refuses to underrate his audience by refusing to dumb history down; the waters stay deep, but because they’re unmuddied by too many names, dates, and ten-dollar words, they’re clearer too. They never lose track of the storyline. (To see just how “deep” this history is, check out this commentary on the controversy it has caused between conservatives and progressives in England. And I’ll add my own little cavil: Gombrich seems to lose his objectivity when treating Judeo-Christianity as history, implying more metaphysical truth in it than in the other world religions he discusses. But maybe I’m just sensitive that way.)

So whether you’re a homeschooler, a parent wanting your child (and maybe yourself) to know history better, or a teacher with a textbook at frustration readability level (or pedantry level) for some or all of your students, I can’t recommend it highly enough. It’s almost 300 pages long, and a total page-turner for me.

And best of all: If you failed that little history challenge above, I guarantee you you’ll pass it after reading this book. The story takes care of the plot in such a clear, lucid way that you’ll never again reverse Romans and Romantics.

Bonus Video: The Perfect Prehistoric Introduction

My students spent the night in our apartment last night, and we had dinner and a movie night. I couldn’t resist showing them “The Dawn of Man,” the 20-odd minute prelude of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, as I’ve done at the beginning of so many history and literature classes in schools.  It’s a stunningly realistic “Genesis for moderns,” as I see it, complete with the (technological) “Fall of Man” and Darwinian “Cain and Abel” story. Just stunning. Enjoy:

(Thanks to Christopher Sessums for tweeting me the link.)

—

¹ For you techies out there, I will add that my favorite unit design since I drank the digital koolaid employed videotaping students telling the story to class in pairs, episode by episode, and embedding those videos in a student-created wiki history textbook (scroll to bottom for student lectures) a couple of years ago; they also rehearsed all the episodes, not just the ones they orally re-presented, by summarizing them - as stories - in Moodle forums. In retrospect, this local, low-key unit seems more valuable than the splashier global collaborations these same students did in other units - and danah boyd’s findings that teens just aren’t very interested in connecting with strangers in global collaborations - because they’re more keen to extend their face-to-face school relationships with these tools instead - seems to explain this phenomenon. I was far more abuzz about global collaboration than my students, and I didn’t get it until I watched danah’s presentation on YouTube a few weeks ago.  Oh what the heck: here it is. danah starts in the middle third, wearing the wool cap:

1. many [↩]

Now that I’ve left schooling, it’s wonderful to explore things for teaching. Case in point: Annenberg Media / Learner.org’s A Biography of America series.  It’s an astonishingly media-rich 26-part series - count ‘em, 26 half-hour PBS episodes featuring leading US historians, plus transcripts of each episode, plus interactive maps, photos, primary sources, and more for each episode - that covers US history from pre-Columbian times to the present.  And it’s free.

(Click screenshot for full-size view, including “chapter” headings.)

Can somebody remind me why, with free online resources like this, schools are spending tens of thousands of dollars on short-shelf-life textbooks, often dumbed-down and intellectually neutered (or worse, downright propagandistic)  due to the textbook industry’s fear of alienating their biggest markets in conservative Texas and California?

[Update: I should have mentioned that the US History resources are only one example of Learner.org's offerings. They have full-year courses in just about every subject area imaginable, k-college, plus professional development courses for teachers. Browse them here. Amazingly good use of US tax dollars at work via the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.]