Remember, this is a man with that old-fashioned European humanist faith in the library as a model of good society and spiritual regeneration – a man who once went so far as to declare that “libraries can take the place of God.”

–Lee Marshall, “The World According to Eco,” Wired.com

I have a hallway for literature that’s 70 meters long. I walk through it several times a day, and I feel good when I do. Culture isn’t knowing when Napoleon died. Culture means knowing how I can find out in two minutes. Of course, nowadays I can find this kind of information on the Internet in no time. But, as I said, you never know with the Internet.

–Umberto Eco, ‘We Like Lists Because We Don’t Want to Die’ (interview in Der Spiegel )

I’ll reward any geek-genius a million cool-points who can teach me how to make this possible on Mac OS X Snow Leopard: “Spotlight” search results with contextual lines around search terms for each file that matches the search.

You know, a Spotlight search that doesn’t look like this:

–but instead, looks like this:

Here’s the vision: My hard drive has dozens and dozens of carefully selected ebooks about my areas of interest right now — primarily World History and Chinese History. I’ve invested a good bit of cash into this because I want a “searchable academic library” on my laptop, out of the following heretical conviction: academic ebooks on a hard drive are a better resource than the internet. Think about it: less time sifting through online search hits; less time evaluating each site’s reliability; higher quality writing; deeper depth of coverage and analysis; broader sample of perspectives from reputable historians specializing in the topics of interest.

Interlude: “I Won’t Go Off on How Exciting This Is”

(I won’t go off on how exciting I find this historically new possibility to have an entire library of hundreds of books in your laptop — a portable, personalized university library, so to speak — ready to be searched, sorted, sifted, copied, compiled, compared, and to generally give you a booklover’s orgasm for its technological speed and literary quality. I just won’t. I won’t say another word about the literal thousands of books you can fit on a standard 500 gigabyte hard drive today, and all but the last few decades of them free and public domain. Not a word, I tell you. I’ll just pretend it’s nothing to get excited about, mention how this idea relates to Umberto Eco’s insistence that personal libraries are more valuable for the books they contain that you haven’t read — but might one day need to crack open to satisfy a spontaneous blast of learning-lust — than for the ones that you have read. Not a word.)

Back to the Geek Challenge:

Let me illustrate:

I posted a vodcast about the Opium Wars and the Fall of the Qing Dynasty on Youtube last year for my History of China course, embedded it on my class Ning for my students to watch and/or download, then promptly ignored the YouTube page. But a couple of days ago I went there for some reason, and discovered a couple thousand visits and a dozen or more comments from the world. Some were the barbaric doozies you’d expect from the Wingnutosphere, but others were quite good — to wit: One viewer questioned a claim I made in the lecture about opium being illegal in England at the very same time England was illegally forcing it on the Chinese market. He said he thought opium was legal in England until the 20th century.

I could have googled “opium england illegal” or whatnot and spent 30 minutes doinking around Wikipedia’s “further reading” links, other sites’ “about” pages, etc. But I knew I had several ebooks on 19th century Chinese history in a folder, so I entered those terms in my spotlight instead, and promptly found info confirming my visitor was right (and interestingly enough, that the famous claim in the open letter of China’s Commissioner Lin to Queen Victoria was also factually wrong), while at the same time being able to read several pages that went deeply into opium use in 19th c. England. It took less than 10 minutes, and had the imprimatur of Oxford, Harvard, and similar ivied fauntleroys to ban the “But is this credible?” goblins from the learning.

The screenshot of that dialogue below (click image to enlarge) shows the quality of the ebook search versus a Wikipedia search, if you look at the level of detail in the passages I copy-pasted into the thread:

Upshot: What I’m envisioning is the ability to integrate ebook search results in classroom discussions. If a question like the Youtube gent’s above came up in class, this type of quick search would be entirely practical and seamless, unlike many a web-search. But, to get back to my original request, it would be even more magical if my hard drive search results looked more like Google’s, and less like Mac’s. (And the possibilities for speeding up the compilation of course packets with sets of pages extracted from the ebooks is another shiny bit of awesome.)

Let me close with a) a prayer that Miguel Guhlin (who has always struck me as an über-geek in the best possible way) answers this trackback and takes on the challenge; and b) since I never thought to share that 20-minute vodcast on the Opium Wars — a fascinating and tragic story that every Westerner should know, if they want to understand better how China sees the Western world — what the hey, here it is. I spent a goodly number of hours on it, which is no guarantee that the investment paid off for the viewers. You tell me:

.

.

8 Comments

• At July 17, 2010, Miguel Guhlin wrote:

  For fun, I wrote it up at - http://www.mguhlin.org/2010/07/seeking-white-hart.html

• At July 17, 2010, Stephen Downes wrote:

  The images in this post are .tiff but .tiff is a non-standard image format for the web and will not be viewable by most users.

  When posting images to the web, images should be .gif .jpg or .png only.

• At July 17, 2010, John Larkin wrote:

  Hi Clay, I wonder if tossing the eBooks in the Web folder of your user folder followed by the creation of a simple HTML page with an embedded Google search directed at that specific local folder would work? Crude and basic but maybe. I might try tmw when I awake. Cheers, John.

• At July 18, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  Fixed, noted, and thanks. (This post shows how un-geeky I am, and so does your comment.)

• At July 18, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  John, that's intriguing. I follow as far as creating the folder in the "Sites" folder, but beyond that...

  If you do try it, let us know if you've solved the challenge, and teach us. Thanks

• At July 18, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  And Stephen, while we're educating, I'll just share more by saying that Mac's "Grab" app takes .tiff's by default, whereas CMD + Shift + 4 takes screenshots in .png format. So the second alternative is better for web-bound screenshots.

  Thanks again for the lesson.

• At July 21, 2010, Thomas Aquinas wrote:

  I don't have the time to code it right now, but methinks that you could use OSX's unix grep capabilities and combine them with this Python library: http://www.boddie.org.uk/david/Projects/Python/pdftools/index.html.

• At July 21, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  I can't believe I'm replying to Thomas Aquinas. Wow.

  And I'm crestfallen at the blank look in my eyes when they see the words "code" and "python," and tantalized that you sense a solution.

  Curious: how much time would it take a geek to do such coding?

  Thanks for dropping in.

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[A fun little conversation I'm having with Laura in this comment thread includes her question about differences between Chinese literary types and Western ones. It reminded me of this post I wrote last year on Change.org, and planned to cross-post here eventually anyway. I hope you agree that its quotes are lovely things.]

~     ~     ~

I just read a passage so striking I have to share it. It’s from Lin Yutang‘s 1936 book on China called My Country and My People, and is quoted in Richard E. Nisbett’s The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently . . . and Why (another keeper):

In Chinese literary criticism there are different methods of writing called “the method of watching a fire across the river” (detachment of style), “the method of dragonflies skimming across the water surface” (lightness of touch), “the method of painting a dragon and dotting its eyes” (bringing out the salient points). (p. 18)

Nisbett’s whole point in this book of “cultural psychology” is to show that modes of thought differ from culture to culture, that Enlightenment universalism is belied by the evidence, etc, etc. The point of the passage itself is to illustrate how unlike our abstract and essentialist Greek way of thinking is the Chinese, which resists hard categories and prefers, as Nisbett puts it, “expressive, metaphoric language.”

I’m going to follow the dragonfly method and leave it to you to watch the ripples of that quote, or not. Just two quick impressions before I go:

First, it somehow ties to the notion of Core Knowledge, and underscores to me the need for that “Core” to be wordly, and not ethnocentric, in order to avoid a sort of in-bred genetic shallowness. We can learn much by trying to see through Chinese eyes, for example, and see our own cultural “core” differently, and surely often benefit from that. (Hell, the Greeks learned from traveling to Egypt, Crete, Asia Minor and the Levant, and North Africa anyway. Their knowledge came less from the core than that far-flung periphery, and it’s the synthesis they performed with it all that was the thing.)

Second, as a writing teacher, I cannot wait to share the above with students. Our Western language for teaching writing does seem, as Nisbett claims, abstract and categorical and, when you think about it from the Chinese angle, mind-numbingly dull: “expository,” “persuasive,” “argumentative,” “analytical,” and so forth are not words to inflame a young mind. But “watching the fire from across the river”? “Skimming the water like a dragonfly”? “Dotting the dragon’s eyes”? Oh, yes.

(Third: point two illustrates point one.)

Image by I’mBatman

Originally posted 4/12/09 on Change.org’s Education blog.

12 Comments

• At July 3, 2010, Sui Fai John Mak wrote:

  Thanks Clay for this very interesting post. We learn those metaphors when young, in fact in Grade 6 (around 12 years old).

  May I clarify a bit on the “watching the fire from across the river”? “Skimming the water like a dragonfly”? “Dotting the dragon’s eyes”?

  1. Watching the fire from across the river means to be detached from the problem, and be an observer. There are subtle meaning here, but when used in in real life setting, it means that you need to ensure your safety, and so don't get yourself into trouble, in case of conflict.

  2. Skimming the water like a dragonfly refers to light touch on a subject, and has a philosophical tone - especially when giving a speech, where one wants to briefly mention about a topic, but not in depth. Another use would be its application in dancing, where one is dancing with such lightness who seems to float.

  3. Dotting the dragon’s eyes - This relates to an old Chinese story. It was about an artist who drew a dragon, but then when the eyes were dotted, the dragon actually flied away. In the dragon dance, the dragon won't have her life unless the eyes are dotted, which is also part of the ceremony at the start of dragon dance. I think people might have then interpreted such dotted of the eyes as the symbolic meaning of drawing out of salient points in an artifact.

  There have been lots of "interpretations" of those metaphors, analogies in Chinese stories, and sometimes, due to the translation from ancient Chinese colloqualism to English, the meaning might have been shifted, exaggerated, or used with a new context.

  There are many versions of these translations, and I don't think there are universal versions which could provide unique explanation. The Lin Yutang Wikipedia entry is reliable.

  As I learnt these at a young age, so it was based on my memory and interpretation.

  Cheers.

  John

• At July 3, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  Wonderful comment, John. If I can persuade you to write about where you were when you learned these as a child, and go more deeply into it, skimming-like, in a memoir piece on your blog, and then to drop a link here so I and others can read it, I'll be a happy man.

  I just bought Lin's book, so I'll be looking into it soon enough.

  Thanks for dropping in,

  Clay

• At July 3, 2010, Laura Gibbs wrote:

  Oh oh oh, you are ringing my bells here... this is exactly the kind of thing I was trying to get at with the ability to let the metaphorical expression of a proverb and its analytical interpretation sit side by side in your mind, not just decoding the form in order to extract the abstract interpretation (and banish the image), but letting them both stand in your mind together and resonate - not forcing the firefly skimming the water to be "only" a firefly but at the same time not losing the firefly even as you let it lead your mind somewhere beyond to other ideas.

  I think you are spot on to identify the Greeks as a crucial turning point in the abstracting and essentializing of things. The word "idea" itself is a great example: Greek eidos and the related word eidolon (whence "idol") were originally words from the realm of the visual, from the seeing of things ("idea" is related linguistically to the "video" we borrowed from Latin). But as the philosophical tradition worked its powers of abstraction and essentializing on the "ideas" they lost their sense of vision and became invisible. Poof: they're gone! Abstracted from the world into the uncertain terrain of our minds.

  Have you read The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image by Leonard Shlain…? Fabulous stuff, I think - very provocative and useful whether you agree or disagree with the directions he goes with that. I learned recently that Shlain has died (http://leonardshlain.com/blog/?p=101)… very sad! I think he still must have had a lot of good books in him that he did not have time to leave behind for us to enjoy and learn from!

• At July 4, 2010, Joan Vinall-Cox wrote:

  Fascinating. I was lucky enough to write an Arts-Based Narrative Inquiry thesis and, although I like theory, that approach allowed me to be metaphorical, poetical, and visual, which was the only way I could truly dot (my) dragon's eye. I guess that's why I thoroughly enjoyed writing it.

• At July 4, 2010, Sui Fai John Mak wrote:

  Thanks Clay for your response. I was educated in Hong Kong and learned these in La Salle Primary School. I could elaborate these in my blog at a later stage, if you wish to know more about Chinese philosophy and how it is applied in our life.

  I liked writings very much and you could find some of my writings here http://suifaijohnmak.wordpress.com and Ning Community Network http://connectivismeducationlearning.ning.com plus my postings on Facebook.

  I like to write about different topics in my blog, and some of my posts relate to Chinese philosophy in education and learning.

  If you are interested in Chinese philosophies, then may I suggest you check these topics out? I Ching, Tao Te Ching, and the Sun Tze 36 military strategies. There are plenty of artifacts on these on wikipedia, Google, Google scholar links, etc. I could also refer you to the officical website from Chinese education authorities if that is of intersts to you. Let me know if you would like to have them.

  You could forward me with an email or via your blog post or mine for further connections. You could check out my other details on Facebook and Twitter too (under suifaijohnmak)

  There are huge potentials in the use of Chinese metaphors - Yin/Yang that is part of Tao Te Ching in understanding nature (see the metaphors on my blogs - with tags of metaphors), in writings, or in education and learning.

  Please note that I am a Catholic and so my belief stems strongly with a Christian belief. However, you may find many Chinese teachings and philosophies align with the teachings of Christ - in passion, in love, in personal integrity (trustworthiness, honesty), and altruism etc.

  Finally, I have read a few of posts before and found them very intersting and inspiring.

  John

• At July 4, 2010, Sui Fai John Mak wrote:

  Here is my combined response post with some links to site http://suifaijohnmak.wordpress.com/2010/07/04/a-response-to-what-china-can-teach-writing-teachers/

  Cheers.

  John

• At July 4, 2010, Lewis wrote:

  As an American writing teacher in China I can and cannot agree with the title of this post. My college students in Beijing must learn academic writing .While these academic styles may not be "words to inflame a young mind" it is a necessary style to learn for academic writing. For other writing styles such as creative writing or personal narratives, or novel writing , or children's books, etc, the above post title can fit and I will agree with the premise.

• At July 4, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  Hi again and thanks for the reply, JSF.

  I'm pretty good on Chinese philosophy and history - I taught it in Shanghai, where I lived for six years, and I'm teaching it here in Singapore. I'm currently in the middle of quite a few books -- Oxford History of Ancient China (1180 pages!), Brooks and Brooks' Original Analects, Fung Yu-Lan's History of Chinese Philosophy, plus the Book of Documents, Book of Songs, Zuo Chronicles, and Sima Qian's works; and I hope to read the Three Kingdoms, Monkey, Plum in the Golden Vase, and Dream of the Red Chamber and other literary classics before the end of the year -- to dig deeper.

  And while I'm not an adherent of any institutional religion -- I'm an ex-Christian who still has much respect for the teachings of Jesus, but few for the dogmas that Rome and the Protestant Church (not much different in terms of the basic creed) attached to his story -- I do find Zhuangzi and Confucius combined about as rich and credible as any ethical-metaphysical system has been on this planet.

  So I guess we balance each other ;-)

  Anyway, the broad strokes, and many of the finer ones, in Chinese history and culture I get. But the little peeks at such things as its rhetorical tradition and approaches that Lin points to above? These don't find their way into most historical writings. Thus the delight at bumbling across them in a book and wanting to know more.

  All for now and take care.

• At July 4, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  Um, Lewis, I can't find any assertion in the post that college students shouldn't learn academic writing.

  But the second half of your comment gets closer to what I did mean to imply.

  Thanks for dropping in,

  Clay

• At July 4, 2010, Sui Fai John Mak wrote:

  Thanks Clay for sharing your background experience. I greatly appreciate your intersts in the literary classis. When I was in my high school, we were free to study to Three Kingdoms, Monkey, and Dream of the Red Chamber. However, in our lessons, there were only selected chapters from these three classics, and since they were written in colloquialism, we needed more elaboration from other literature review and teacher's guidance to understand the genre, syntax, semiotics and pragmatics of such colloquialism. There were other rich themes in ancient poets (the 5 and 7 "narrative" poets).

  Relating the Chinese literature, it was divided into the ancient and modern ones, which are based on the modern prose, which is more pragmatic and comprehensible. Nowadays, most communication in Chinese are based on plain simple Chinese syntax, that was all originated from the "evolution" of modernisation of Chinese language.

  I think you could trace back lots of traditional metaphors, though the modern interpretation might be a bit difficult to comprehend, as one must consider the historical context, and why those metaphors were used.

  Relating to religious belief, thanks for the great sharing. I respect your belief, and so I am delighted to see its significance in one's writings too.

  Take care and best wishes from John

• At July 28, 2010, Cristy wrote:

  An interesting post. The native americans in our area describe their language as representative of their religion. I think that is often the case in other cultures. Ours represents the “expository,” “persuasive,” “argumentative,” “analytical,” because of our Judaeo/

  christian heritage. Cristy

• At July 30, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  Hi Cristy,

  Sorry to be so late on this, but I'd say those categories are far more Greek than Hebrew. Know what I mean?

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Readers of George Orwell’s Animal Farm should remember Squealer, the pig whose “journalism” manipulated the entire animal society into unquestioningly supporting the dictatorial pig Napoleon.

If they studied Animal Farm in the classroom, the depressing odds are they learned it as a good, all-American attack on socialism. The most simple-minded of our teachers make a travesty of the novel’s allegory along these breathless lines:

Napoleon, children, equals Stalin and Karl Marx all rolled up in one. And Squealer equals their propaganda machine, the communist newspaper Pravda. Write ‘Pravda’ in your notes, children, because you have to know it for the test. It’s very important. It’s an example of journalism in communism, and how it prints government lies instead of the truth that we get in newspapers in free democracies.”

Of course, Animal Farm was more than that. Orwell was a socialist, after all — but he was also a thinker. So he could condemn what Stalin had done in the Soviet Union as a perversion of the socialist vision, while at the same time condemning the capitalism of  the United States and Western Europe with equal scorn.

That second part tends to get left out, I suspect, in discussions of capitalism and communism in most Western classrooms, whether English classes teaching Animal Farm or history classes teaching the 19th and 20th centuries. Instead, capitalism is trotted out in the white hat of “freedom and democracy,” and communism in the black hat of “tyranny and totalitarianism.”

Teachers and textbooks who frame the issue this way strangle the baby of inquiry in the cradle, and slip in its place a plump little bundle of propaganda to comfort the kids and teachers by cooing that they’re on the right side of history, and the enemy was on the wrong. But “Capitalism versus Communism” and “Democracy versus Dictatorship” aren’t simple “Good versus Bad,” “Right versus Wrong” stories. Both sides, the communist and the capitalist, have their strengths and weaknesses, their angels and demons, their moments of heroism and of villainy. Both sides.

So you don’t have to be a communist to criticize capitalism, or a capitalist to criticize communism. Thinkers in both camps criticize not just the other system, but their own. (Politicians do this routinely when they craft legislation.) Any classrooms learning about these two systems should front-load their explorations with that truth — assuming, at any rate, that we want to produce thinking citizens in our classrooms instead of bleating farm animals. It sometimes seems we don’t want to.

Breaking News: War is Peace. Torture is Justice.

From the indispensable Plum Line blog’s Greg Sargent at the Washington Post:

Harvard’s school of government has released a study of how major media discusses waterboarding that really seems like it was done for Glenn Greenwald.

Click on “released a study” above and you’ll get the full report in PDF. The Greenwald link is a rich resource for the classroom too.

And they’re “rich” because they call into question America’s mainstream media — the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and all the rest of the “free” press — and the bald similarities of Squealer and Pravda to the editors of those trusted institutions and their newspapers. (Torches down, dear nationalists: you should agree we have to read newspapers on two feet, like free-thinking humans, and not four, like all the sheep in Orwell and too many sheeple in America. Remember the good old days when an “informed citizenry” was a national ideal in America, before it was replaced with “a productive consumer” — a patriotic shopper?)

Need a teaser? From the study’s abstract:

The current debate over waterboarding has spawned hundreds of newspaper articles in the last two years alone. However, waterboarding has been the subject of press attention for over a century. Examining the four newspapers with the highest daily circulation in the country, we found a significant and sudden shift in how newspapers characterized waterboarding. From the early 1930s until the modern story broke in 2004, the newspapers that covered waterboarding almost uniformly called the practice torture or implied it was torture: The New York Times characterized it thus in 81.5% (44 of 54) of articles on the subject and The Los Angeles Times did so in 96.3% of articles (26 of 27). By contrast, from 2002‐2008, the studied newspapers almost never referred to waterboarding as torture. The New York Times called waterboarding torture or implied it was torture in just 2 of 143 articles (1.4%). The Los Angeles Times did so in 4.8% of articles (3 of 63). The Wall Street Journal characterized the practice as torture in just 1 of 63 articles (1.6%). USA Today never called waterboarding torture or implied it was torture. In addition, the newspapers are much more likely to call waterboarding torture if a country other than the United States is the perpetrator. In The New York Times, 85.8% of articles (28 of 33) that dealt with a country other than the United States using waterboarding called it torture or implied it was torture while only 7.69% (16 of 208) did so when the United States was responsible. The Los Angeles Times characterized the practice as torture in 91.3% of articles (21 of 23) when another country was the violator, but in only 11.4% of articles (9 of 79) when the United States was the perpetrator.

This type of study is not new, I know. But this particular one recommends itself for use in the classroom for several reasons: it’s current. It’s clear. It’s free. It’s from Harvard. Oh, and it’s about the survival of the rule of law and human rights in the United States. Almost forgot that one.

Or we could just give the lambs a handout about Pravda and follow it with a quiz.

Update: The New York Times responds to the study, finds its inner Squealer. Life imitates (Orwellian) art.

Update 2: Joan McCarter at Daily Kos puts the Times‘ explanation for its Squealerism in the larger context in a must-read post. A snippet:

A Times spokesman gave Michael Calderone this incredible justification

“As the debate over interrogation of terror suspects grew post-9/11, defenders of the practice (including senior officials of the Bush administration) insisted that it did not constitute torture,” a Times spokesman said in a statement.

“When using a word amounts to taking sides in a political dispute, our general practice is to supply the readers with the information to decide for themselves. Thus we describe the practice vividly, and we point out that it is denounced by international covenants and in American tradition as a form of torture.”

So a rose is a rose until someone calls it a dandelion, for the purposes of a political point. The Gray Lady only prints what’s fit not to “take sides” over in a political dispute, creating, as Calderone puts it, “a factual contradiction between its newer work and its own archives.” And a factual contradiction between reality and Bush administration spin.

This is a very telling quote, because it shows just how easy it is to manipulate newspapers into exactly what they’re being constantly manipulated into–taking political sides by appearing not to take political sides.  All you have to do to dispute a known physical or legal fact is to… dispute it.  If you want to say that oil helps pelicans grow, you can just say it; the mere act of saying it will make it “disputed,” rendering the New York Times powerless to say flatly whether it is true or not. If it’s policy to not call a lie a lie in the name of “balance,” then the most basic function of that newspaper goes out the window. (read the rest)

Images:
(top) “All Animals are Equal” (detail) by Night Owl City
(middle) Animal Farm cover by Ben Templesmith
(bottom) USA Today truck by william couch

9 Comments

• At July 1, 2010, Ric Murry wrote:

  Clay,

  It is good to have you back writing these kinds of posts. I mean no offense by that statement, but you (like many of us), took a needed break from the kind of writing you do best. This is it.

  Jeez, what I wrote sounds terrible, but I hope our years of communicating and "debating" make it clear what I mean. There is a needed context for your other readers. So let me conclude by saying...THIS IS A GREAT POST, filled with thought-provoking, academically challenging, and multi-disciplinary information. That's what I like, and it is what you provide as well as any educator on the Internet.

• At July 1, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  Hi Ric,

  Your comment didn't offend me. It made me giggle.

  Because you're right about the "break," though the rest is up to question.

  Anyway, it finally feels good to write again, and encouraging to get good feedback.

  (And I'll probably always only write what I want to write, in the end, and leave it up to readers to filter. I miss the Unsucky Lectures most of all, but these little brainfarts like the one above keep nudging down the queue of things to finish.)

• At July 1, 2010, Ric Murry wrote:

  I always like the Unsucky Lectures too.

  If this is a "brainfart" may you head be filled gas in the years to come.

  Peace, my friend.

• At July 1, 2010, laura gibbs wrote:

  Thanks for sharing this piece! Made me think of this great piece here on euphemisms used by journalists and politicans, with some material in particular re: waterboarding and the term "abuse" v. "torture".

  Euphemism and American Violence

  April 3, 2008 - New York Review of Books

  by David Bromwich

  http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2008/apr/03/euphemism-and-american-violence/

  (if that URL is too long, here's a tiny one: http://tinyurl.com/24mzr4v)

  Language. Very dangerous when it becomes the reality for us and we have nothing to compare it against...

• At July 1, 2010, Stephen Downes wrote:

  Anyone questioning Orwell's politics should read his diaries. They are being released one day at a time on the Orwell prize (where it is now July 1, 1940). http://orwelldiaries.wordpress.com/

  Fantastic reading and great insight. I've been following since 2008 (1938) - which until a couple weeks ago was not so exciting as it sounds, his main passions being his farm and the infamous egg count. The the outbreak of the war, it has been gripping reading (and makes the two years of pre-reading well worth while).

• At July 2, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  That "when we have nothing to compare it against" is an intriguing touch. I've been fortunate to stumble across the world against all odds -- working class boy -- and the realities I've discovered versus the ideas I had of them when an ocean-locked American still stagger me today. Those oceans make good walls, but the keep Americans in at the same time they keep attackers out.

  China's "godless Communists," to quote the Reagan mantra, are my favorite case in point. All in all, among the most wholesome "family values" types I've ever known, and the safest cities.

  Thanks for the link, Laura.

• At July 2, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  Maybe it was you who initially tipped me off to the Orwell Diaries site, and I subscribed to it at least a year ago. But those mundane entries cluttering my feed made me grumpy, so I unsubscribed. At what date do they get interesting?

  (If you haven't read his essay, "Shooting an Elephant," about his days as a colonial grunt in India, fly, don't run, to Google for a great read.)

  Signed, C Burell (with one "r") ;-)

• At July 2, 2010, Stephen Downes wrote:

  > At what date do they get interesting?

  It's just been since the last couple of weeks.

• At July 2, 2010, Marie wrote:

  I think my favorite thing I hear in high school, though it is not entirely related to this post, is when people conflate fascism and communism. I so often hear that "Hitler was a communist". Ironically, this ordinarily comes from people teetering the lines of fascism in my small, red-neck town.

  I love your posts, by the way, and I wish my classes were as wonderful as yours appear to be. You sound like an excellent teacher who I would love to have.

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3. A Real-World Mini-Lesson in Critical Reading and Writing
4. Modeling Digital Literacy 1

A teacher recently dismissed, I gather, for encouraging critical thinking in her class in (where else?) my native United States writes:

I am stunned by the number of “conservatives” who truly appear to loathe teachers. What is up with that? Why the distrust of educators?

And all I can say is, “Come teach in Asia. They respect teachers here.”

To back that up, a little story that taught me that about four years ago:

Passing Through Customs

During my five or six years teaching secondary history and literature in Shanghai in the early-to-mid ‘naughties, my hobby was going on DVD scavenger hunts. I’d spend a good four or five hours weekly, usually on Saturday afternoons, making the rounds through a handful of DVD shops I’d discovered had the richest selection of offerings, and in each one I would literally check each disc on its shelves for any new arrivals. We’re talking hundreds of discs, sometimes over a thousand, in each shop.

To understand the beauty of this ritual, you have to understand the Shanghai DVD shop at its best. Shanghai is as cosmopolitan as it gets. People from every point of the globe live there, and they’re all potential customers for these shops, which cater mostly to foreigners. So to skim their shelves is to skim through titles in Chinese, Russian, German, Italian, Spanish, Arabic, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Thai, on and on.

For a history teacher totally uninterested in this year’s version of a lame-ass Tom Cruise blockbuster, these shops were a fantasy land. I’d find dozens of films I never knew existed, exquisite things: documentaries from the Soviet Union mashing up footage from the Nazi archives they’d captured when they defeated Hitler, giving the Soviet take on Fascism and the Great Patriotic War; other documentaries from around the globe, like the incredible Darwin’s Nightmare, that Americans would never see or hear about at home; box sets of Tarkovsky, Fellini, Cassavetes, Bergman, Chaplin, Zhang Yimou, Kurosawa, and other international Shakespeares of the Film Age; concerts of Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, Gustav Mahler, Beethoven, Nick Cave, Joni Mitchell, and other gods; on and on and on.

(Hey, if you click on all those links above on my blog instead of in your feed-reader, Apture popups will give you some wonderful clips from the directors and my favorite pieces from the musicians, links to Wikipedia, and more.)

Don’t tell anybody, but each of these items cost one to five US bucks. For the price of a fine meal that would turn to feces within four hours (pity the poor “live to eat” types), I’d come home with a feast of hours to last a lifetime — at home and in the classroom.

That weekly habit, over six years, produced a library of at least a thousand discs, whose thousand dollar investment proved Oscar Wilde‘s maxim about people who “know the price of everything, and the value of nothing.” Because this collection was priceless.

And the day came when I expected to lose it all.

That day came because those Shanghai years fell victim to the international teacher’s wanderlust. Wanting a change of Experience, I’d resigned my post and sought employment in a new land. Fate offered Korea, among other possibilities, and I took it. But that turned out to mean, I learned, that I probably wouldn’t be able to take that collection with me. Anybody familiar with airport customs knows what I’m talking about. DVDs from the People’s Republic of the Middle Kingdom scream “contraband.”

So there I was passing through the gates into Life’s Next Chapter: The Korea Years, and I mean that “gates” literally: I was at the [name withheld to protect the guilty heavensent] airport’s arrival gate, sweating bullets, because I’d packed my Collection in my suitcases instead of shipping them with my furniture.  I’d been told the odds of getting them in were higher this way. Picture two large suitcases stuffed with more DVDs than clothes.

My first suitcase had already spewed forth from the baggage carousel without incident, so I was hopeful as I watched for the second one. That hope was shattered when it slid to me with, of all things, this strange yellow collar locked to the handle. Printed on it were instructions for me to proceed to a customs officer.

As my luggage cart approached the customs desk, the lock went all Rabbit Hole on me: it belted out this weird electronic alarm. People within 30 meters stared. I hear convicted pedophiles have to wear such things around their ankles, and that they do similar things when said convicts approach schools. It’s not a pleasant feeling. And it wasn’t an auspicious start for The Next Chapter, this entry as a branded criminal.

Hollywood really has a hold on airports worldwide, I thought. Freaking weird. What’s in it for foreign countries to protect the profit margins of Western corporations?

The customs officer wasn’t exactly warm as he told me to open my suitcase. He was no warmer when he saw the dozen or so DVD wallets stashed inside a folded shirt here, some folded pants there.

He asked me to take them out and show them to him.

“Most of them seem illegal,” he said.

“I don’t know. I bought them in Shanghai. I don’t read Chinese.”

Then came Fate’s Fist:

“You can’t take them in. I have to confiscate them and destroy them.”

I didn’t cry, but I did, just a little bit, whine. But sincerely:

“Aww. I use those in my classroom. You don’t know how many hours I put into building that collection.”

Then came Confucius‘ Grace:

“You’re a teacher?”

“Yes.”

“You’re going to teach in Korea?”

“Yes.”

“Can you prove it?”

I showed him the business card the school had sent me, and my contract, and this blessed man looked at the Laws of Commerce on his left shoulder, and the Laws of Confucius on his right, and had no apparent difficulty choosing which to serve:

“Go ahead. And good luck. Teaching is an important job. Thank you for doing it in Korea.”

I swear to Goodness, he actually said that. Thanks to Confucius, the Next Chapter had started off happily after all.

* * *

I’ve told this story many times, and most people don’t find it as interesting as I think they should. Because it brought home to me, concretely, what I’d only known in the academic abstract in my years teaching Confucianism in my Asian history classrooms — ironically enough, in China, the very homeland of Confucius. The lesson it brought home is this:

East Asia is blessed by its Confucianism. When the Han Dynasty, 2,000 years ago, put its political support behind the teachings of this Master, it unknowingly rooted in the Chinese spirit a devotion to education and scholarship — and that means to teachers, to students, and to schools.

It’s easy to criticize how East Asian countries educate, and what the word “education” means to them, but that’s beside the point here. Because it’s incomparably easier to criticize American civilization for its disdain for education. Its teacher-bashing vogue, its funds-cutting mania, and a million other details speak volumes on this point. The Chinese have a word for such a culture: barbarian.

Somebody said “A person ages into the face he deserves.” The same is true of a civilization. If America has aged into a face of illiteracy, innumeracy, historical, geographic, and scientific ignorance, it’s no mystery why.

So again, to those teachers who put their minds and hearts into managing and designing and sweating blood for the learning of a small army of young souls each year, and are thanked for it with scorn and bile — seriously, it’s not like that everywhere. There are other lands of opportunity in the world, and after a decade of teaching in China, in Korea, and now in Singapore, I can’t recommend the Confucian ones highly enough.

And with that, I’ll close with a few verses from the Confucian scriptures themselves, so remarkably sane and reasonable to this Westerner, and thus so beautifully civilized. From the Analects:

2:14. Confucius said, “The superior man is broadminded but not partisan; the inferior man is partisan but not broadminded.”

2:15. Confucius said, “He who learns but does not think is lost; he who thinks but does not learn is in danger.”

2:17. Confucius said, “Yu, shall I teach you [the way to acquire] knowledge? To say that you know when you do know and say that you do not know when you do not know — that is [the way to acquire] knowledge.”

And most germane, perhaps, to those Americans described by our ex-teacher in the opening quote, is this final Confucian verse:

8:13. Confucius said, “Have sincere faith and love learning. Be not afraid to die for pursuing the good Way. Do not enter a tottering state nor stay in a chaotic one.  When the Way prevails in the empire, then show yourself; when it does not prevail, then hide. When the Way prevails in your own state and you are poor and in a humble position, be ashamed of yourself. When the Way does not prevail in your state and you are wealthy and in an honorable position, be ashamed of yourself.”

–emphasis added, and for good reason: Teachers have “asked what they can do for their country,” and they do it. Daily. But they should have the good sense to also ask what their country is doing for them, patriotic martyrdom propaganda aside. If their country has reached a “tottering, chaotic” point at which it “loathes” them, then teachers do have choices.

One of those choices is Asia. America used to be a magnet for other countries’ brain-drain. Asia seems the better magnet now.

It is for me, anyhow.  I’m thankful that I teach in Asia — because Asia is thankful for it, too.

25 Comments

• At June 30, 2010, Laura Gibbs wrote:

  Now THAT is an awesome little anecdote. I have filed it away for future reference!!!

  Re: the comment that prompted you to share the story here, I just wanted to point that there are plenty of "thought police" on the left AND on the right - I speak as someone who lost a teaching job in a department filled with political liberals who were, nevertheless, unable to cope with pedagogical innovation of any kind... free thinking in the classroom is a fright to anyone adamant about their own authority, left or right, it seems to me.

  :-)

• At June 30, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  Hi Laura,

  I'm totally with you on that one. Point well-taken. Now an invitation: give us the juicy details.

• At June 30, 2010, Laura Gibbs wrote:

  Ha ha, well, here's a short version of the story - I can laugh about it now but at the time it was pretty traumatic.

  I had been hired fresh out of grad school (Berkeley PhD 1999) to be an assistant professor in the Classics dept. at Univ. of Oklahoma. Everybody was surprised when I got hired since I was the opposite of a traditional classicist in every way - my interest is in folklore, and I study fables, proverbs, jokes, riddles, etc.; I have about zero interest in classical authors except insofar as they, like all great literary masters, often incorporated folklore and traditional storytelling motifs into their literary work. I also studied Russian and Polish (lived in Poland for a while, taught Polish) and so I teach Latin in a way that is more like teaching a living language than the usual "translate-and-parse" approach which is the main mode of Latin teaching. Instead of reading super-hard classical authors, I prefer to use simple stories, fables, fairy tales, etc., things that are easy to read, short genres that teach some kind of moral or lesson which you can debate about, and which also lend themselves to being creatively rewritten (anybody can make up their own version of a fairy tale or fable, very fun).

  Sooooo… it was a complete disaster. After one year, when they found out what kind of Latin and Greek I was teaching and how I was teaching it, they took away all my language classes and only gave me literature-in-translation classes to teach - so, I allowed students to enroll in "group independent studies" with me, creating reading groups where we could read easy Latin and easy Greek together. Since I ended up with more students in my independent study groups than in the regular Latin classes, the faculty were furious and went to the Dean to get me fired for "fomenting a curriculum contrary to the classical tradition." He explained that they could not fire me for that (academic freedom??? hello????), but he did agree to let them take away my privilege to offer independent study courses (although he admitted I would be the only faculty member at the university who was denied that privilege). At that point, my only choice was to cave in, or sue, or quit. So I quit.

  Luckily, I ended up with a great job teaching folklore and mythology courses, online, in the General Education program at this same university (I am a geek, so that works for me; I love teaching online - my courses are at my mythfolklore.net). This means I do not have a department and do not answer to a department, and I have been free to develop the classes in a way that matches my goals and beliefs as a teacher. As an instructor on a year-to-year contract, I have zero job security and I am earning about half what a professor makes - but that is a small price to pay for FREEDOM. :-)

  Meanwhile, let me ask you a question: from the people I knew who did Chinese in graduate school, it is my impression that in the Chinese tradition, there is not this dreadful disconnect between proverbs and fables on the one hand, and literature on the other hand, as has happened in modern-day Classical studies (i.e. Latin and Greek Classics). Is that your experience also?

  It's crazy to me: even though the ancient Greeks and Romans collected their fables and proverbs with pride, and even though they were much beloved by Renaissance scholars, starting in the 19th and 20th centuries, the academic discipline of Classics purged itself of proverbs and fables. That's a sad thing in terms of understanding the cultural tradition and it also creates a practical problem for teaching the languages, too!

  It used to be that Aesop's fables were a core component of the basic Latin learner's curriculum, but no more. Students are condemned to read Vergil and Caesar and Cicero and other works far too hard for beginners, all because the fables have been cast out into the darkness. Alas.

• At June 30, 2010, mike whatley wrote:

  I'm a conservative and I don't "loathe" teachers. I do however withhold automatic praise and respect for teachers. (I also do same with those in the military).

  In the US, teachers and their culture are overrated. Yes, I still recall my 3rd grade teacher fondly, (Mrs Parman) and had the good fortune of having studied under an AAUP "Professor of the Year" among others.

  But K-12 instruction and "teachers" are full of mediocrity. Moreover our society no longer values education. (When upwards of 40% of urban HS students dropout/flunk out, your community does not respect the value of learning.) That failure is something worth "loathing". And teachers are an icon of that failure. Not solely responsible but visible participants in the demise.

  Still an interesting post. Thanks.

• At June 30, 2010, elaine! wrote:

  That story is amazing. I wish teachers got more respect here. Maybe then the problem teachers that a few commenters are pointing out would rise to meet the public's expectations.

• At June 30, 2010, » Land of Opportunity Sam Harrelson wrote:

  [...] post: Advice for Teachers Scorned: “‘Go ahead. And good luck. Teaching is an important job. Thank you for doing it in [...]

• At June 30, 2010, Come teach in Asia | Learning & Teaching wrote:

  [...] teach in Asia Clay Burell in a blog post about America’s disdain for teachers: Somebody said “A person ages into the face he [...]

• At June 30, 2010, Harold Jarche » Trends wrote:

  [...] Shifts Eastward: Clay Burell’s advice for teachers scorned: Teachers have “asked what they can do for their country,” and they [...]

• At July 1, 2010, Terry Elliott wrote:

  I am one who is very interested in what you are saying here. I have the same problem even among teachers when I do tech trainings. Most are appreciative, but others make one wonder. I told your DVD story to my wife and she said let's move.

• At July 1, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  Hi Terry,

  If you're serious, I wrote this post a while back about the interview process.

  This Google search will take you to recruitment agencies (I used ISS, and Search Associates is the other one I most often hear about -- disclaimer: you'll get mixed reviews of all such outfits, so I'm not recommending any particular one) to learn the ropes of registering for and planning to attend one or more recruitment fairs. Give yourself several months to get your ducks in order for the Winter fairs.

  Let me know if I can help in any way, and I'll try.

  C.

• At July 1, 2010, leighblackall wrote:

  Nice post. Especially the DVD story. Tagged it "resistcopyright". Thanks for writing it.

• At July 1, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  Thanks for stopping in, Leigh, and thanks for the tip on the tag. Worth exploring.

• At July 2, 2010, Chuck wrote:

  l love this posting, all postings for that matter, right to the last two lines. I really do. Always informative and entertaining.

  Thank you for the invite to teach in Asia, Clay. I would like to be thankful to Asia. I would love to accept that noble calling, literally, if only your host would extend the same courtesy to their descendents in form of ABC/CBC (American/Canadian Born Chinese) as to our lighter pigment brethrens and sisters. Sigh, many are called, white are chosen. Woe to the person who looks Asian but wants to go to Asia to teach. Yes, my lament is echoed ad nauseam on EFL message boards, but it doesn't seem to cause a ripple of improvement. Sorry if I sound like a whiny little boy. I am not looking for a soapbox to vent. After years of toiling for the profit motive I changed careers to fulfill my long held naïve boyscout ideals.

  This brings back to mind of a sign, "No Dogs or Chinese Allowed" that Bruce Lee split in half in one of his movies in a fit of anger -- full of symbolism. When I am looking to teach in Asia, all kinds of words and visions swimming in my head like “colonialism” and “imperialism” in the “concession areas”, but I can't say that. It's perpetrated by the Chinese themselves. I know, there are plenty of ABCs who are hired to teach English over there. There are more progressive administers granted, if progressive is the right word, I would venture to say they are in the minority. Wish me luck. I am continuing to apply to China and Korea.

  Whatley's post is another matter. I had to bite my tongue.

• At July 2, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  Laura,

  What a SAD (Standard Academic Discourse) story. I'm not surprised, but I am glad you've got good falling-cat skills. Survivors are tops in my book.

  I can't speak with any expertise to your question about the Chinese attitude toward its folklore, fables, and proverbs. You ask the question precisely as I prep for a summer of diving into China's literary classics, which I know only superficially. But from what I've gathered so far, that divide doesn't exist -- and part of the reason for that is probably the essential difference between the West and China, when it comes to their ancient literature: Latin and (almost) Greek are dead languages, foreign languages, to Westerners, so Western classics are a strange sort of "ESL" for Westerners wanting to read them in the original.

  It's not the case for China. From the Oracle Bone inscriptions of 3,000 years ago to today, China's literary tradition is unbroken and in the same (though obviously evolving) language. Instead of being faced with having to learn a dead language at the beginner's level, their situation seems more akin to that of English speakers taking on Shakespeare or Chaucer. Not nearly as tall an order. Thus they have the advantage in being able to range across a fuller spectrum of their classics than Westerners do.

  And then there's the entirely different stylistic and rhetorical taste of Chinese literary expression. From what I've read (from Chinese scholars as well as Western ones), Chinese classics eschew the stilt-riding gravitas of the West in favor of an earthier and more poetic style even in their greatest of writers. And this makes me suspect the "high/low culture" dichotomy of our hrumph-hrumphing Western academics is less present among the Mandarins.

  More on that as I read away the summer as a mental time-traveling tourist in Chinese literature -- and write about it here.

  Funny coincidence: I've found your site and bookmarked it as a resource long before we connected.

  And it's totally cool that you've translated for Oxford Classics. You're interesting.

  All for now.

• At July 2, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  In the US, Americans and their culture are overrated and mediocre too, aren't they? From Congress to Wall Street to the pulpits of our churches to the board rooms of our corporations to the guns flooding our cities, the junk fattening our bodies, and the values fattening the spirits of our consumer-citizens.

  So let's withhold praise from all of them equally, or else damn them all equally with the same broad brush: logically, if all are mediocre because some are, then let's apply that attitude across the board.

  In other words, I don't get your logic.

  And I wonder what evidence you have for your claims.

  And seriously doubt you've known the teachers I've known -- some of whom were indeed mediocre, and some of whom were most emphatically not.

  Thanks for checking in anyway.

  But that's neither here nor there.

• At July 2, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  Hi Chuck,

  I hear you on all points, but have known a good number of "foreign Asians" with jobs in Asian international schools.

  Sounds like you want to teach ESL though, which is way gnarlier in this respect, I know, and totally unfair. But as you say, that's the native Asian prejudice. They want whitey. Saw it in Korea all the time.

  Singapore, by the way, seems different in its attitude toward Western Asians. Have you checked it out?

  As for the colonialism bit, I'm sensitive to it too, and rankle when I see some of my compatriots acting the dumbass in my adopted countries. But it's a global world, immigration cuts all ways now, and Asia is reasserting itself against the old imperialists in ways that don't seem like they'll stop any time soon.

  Anyway, I do wish you luck. Thanks for the kind words.

• At July 2, 2010, Chuck wrote:

  Thanks for the thoughtful reply, Laozhi. My other "teachable" is Business, which I find most schools over there are limited to Economics. Strangely, most of Canadian, Ontario schools anyway, throw Econ in the Social Science Dept mix bag. I do find teaching ESL more rewarding. Certainly, I would love to teach Business too, as you know the pay could be far more lucrative. So be it then, Business in Asia jt is then. Happy Independence Day. The Queen is visiting us now :-) Still July 1, Canada Day here. It seems I'm behind the times once again.

  Good luck in Korea. I just might you see you there if I have any luck, in YongIn anyway.

• At July 2, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  Coffee's on me if our paths cross. (But I live in Singapore now, not Korea :) )

• At July 2, 2010, What China Can Teach Writing Teachers | Beyond School wrote:

  [...] fun little conversation I'm having with Laura in this comment thread includes her question about differences between Chinese literary types and Western [...]

• At July 3, 2010, Sue VanHattum wrote:

  I loved reading this, Clay. From recent reports, it sounds like Finland respects teachers and education also...

• At July 3, 2010, mike whatley wrote:

  Clay--- Teachers are not special as a group. Though they certainly think highly of themselves as you have demonstrated. It's hardly deserved in the US.

  I am the son of 2 Phd's the brother of a public school teacher and have taught at the Graduate level in University. (with student reviews among the highest in the department) While that is hardly "evidence", I'm comfortable with the assertion.

  The world beats a path to America's door. They drink in our vulgar culture. Emulate us. And want to live here. And the teachers here are very much a part of that low brow culture. As are the 75% of American youth unfit to serve in the military (obese/uneducated/criminal conduct/ mental health/ etc.--- and yes it matters) or the near 50% of urban youth who drop out/ flunk out of high school, or the fewer than 50% that matriculate/graduate from the widely acclaimed California community college system.

  Cheers from Pasadena

  !

• At July 3, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  Thanks for the response.

• At July 3, 2010, Laura Gibbs wrote:

  Hi Clay, I think I benefited from the "life imitates art" thing: if my area of interest were tragedy, I'm sure all those events could have seemed very tragic indeed... but since I work on Aesop's fables, where the whole point is to learn from your mistakes and have a good laugh about them, well, that definitely helps to cultivate good falling-cat skills (ha ha, I like that one - our very fat cat is fond of climbing up high in the trees, very ambitious when it comes to birds, and always manages to land just fine).

  As for the split between folklore and literature in European traditions, argh, what a mess it has made, especially in the loss of proverbs (so often eschewed as cliches in a hyper-glamorized Romantic quest for "originality"). When I was teaching Latin at Berkeley to a very international group of students, the Asian students were fabulous with the proverbs (we would do 20 proverbs per day in Latin, every day) - they understood the metaphorical meaning of them instantly (while many of the American students were just baffled by the riddling metaphorical quality of many of the proverbs) and, even better, they were able to share with me the proverbs from their own countries that expressed the same idea but in a different way, using different natural metaphors to express the same psychological message, while the American students were often totally unfamiliar with the English-language equivalents to the Latin sayings. One of my favorites, for example, Latin Inter os et offam multa intervenire possunt, "between the mouth and the morsel many things can intervene" = "there's many a slip 'twixt cup and lip" met with stares of bafflement in a room of very bright undergraduates, who were stuck on the idea that it had something to do with being careful not to dribble when you drank something... they were stuck on the literal. The best proverbs are tiny little metaphorical poems - the medieval Latin ones even rhyme. Delightful stuff that used to be fully part of the cultural tradition, but hardly so anymore.

  I am doing a huge Aesop book this summer in Latin and have been persuaded that I should do an English translation after I finish the Latin version. I will send you a PDF copy; it's going to have 1000 fables in it - covering the whole range of medieval and Renaissance fables, too, unlike the Oxford book which had 600 fables, pretty much strictly Greek and Roman because that's what they wanted for that series. But the medieval ones especially are so much fun! :-)

• At July 10, 2010, Megan wrote:

  Clay,

  It's a nice story and an inspirational post, but I have to question the idea that your experience with the customs official is based on a universal Korean (or Asian) respect for teachers.

  I taught English for a year in a Korean elementary school; as a public school teacher here in the U.S., too, I was fascinated with comparisons between the two systems and had many, many conversations with the teachers at my school (all Korean except for me). They repeatedly told me that, while teaching is considered by many Koreans an enviable job because of the job security (once you're in, you have a job for life), teaching as a profession is not highly-regarded in modern Korean culture. Teachers are not treated as professionals with expertise, but expected to present a cookie-cutter curriculum. The public school system is widely considered useless and parents spend $1000s a year sending children to private after-school institutes. People looking for a prestigious career with social admiration do NOT choose teaching.

  Of course, I was only there a year and these opinions are from only one school's worth of teachers; maybe you got different opinions about teachers and public education from other Koreans while you were there. But I suspect that a Korean teacher transporting those same DVDs, with the same explanation, through airport customs would have gotten no such consideration. I think the customs official gave you that break because you are an ENGLISH-SPEAKING teacher, and as a nation (not every single individual), Korea is obsessed with mastering English and anxious to make a positive impression on foreigners.

  Again, I know my experience there was limited. But my friends who are Korean public school teachers would strenuously disagree with the idea that Korean culture uniformly respects and admires teachers.

• At July 10, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  Hi Megan,

  All your points are well-taken, and point to Korea's oddity as -- in my experience, anyway -- the most Americanized of East Asian nations. (The jaw-dropping density of Christian crosses per block in Seoul is one indicator, and the density of Western conspicuous consumption vanity brands adorning each Korean body another.)

  The hagwon mania, the overworked and scripted teachers, the corruption of families and students to get the grade and learning be damned -- all of these fall under the

  "It’s easy to criticize how East Asian countries educate, and what the word “education” means to them, but that’s beside the point here"

  caveat in the post. (The conservative Lee administration is only making things worse in all these respects.)

  As for the "prestige" factor, you're right: Koreans equate prestige and money (as do most other cultures everywhere today), and I didn't mean to imply that teaching was seen as an "elite" occupation. I did mean to suggest, though, that it's not disparaged with the vitriol so common in the US.

  And that customs officer? Maybe you're right, maybe not. He did initially move to destroy my collection, which doesn't suggest an initial impulse to treat me favorably to create a good impression of Korea. It's only when he found out I was a teacher that he changed his position.

  All good points, though. How much they apply to China, Singapore, Taiwan, and Japan is a different question. I'm in Singapore now, an English-speaking but still largely Confucian country, and don't see or hear the teacher-bashing I see and read from American sources online.

  I think the bottom line is, again, the Confucianism. At the heart of that belief-system is that education is the most important thing in life, and family next. Money and wealth fall far, far below both in that values hierarchy (and are in fact seen as "vulgar" interests from Zhou times to Qing). There's no doubt that modern Western consumerism complicates Confucian values in Asia now, but it hasn't replaced it, and probably never will.

  Thanks for dropping in.

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2. Of Confucius, Holy Clowns, and Holy Murderers: Some Advantages of China’s Religious Atheism
3. A New Diigo Vision and Call for Advice: On Students Teaching China to the West
4. Chinese v. Western History: A Few “Mental Party” Highlights

[Stanford Psychology] Professor Philip Zimbardo conveys how our individual perspectives of time affect our work, health and well-being. Time influences who we are as a person, how we view relationships and how we act in the world.

Interesting all the way through, but the gallery below previews  parts that should  interest educators.  See the full vid below the fold.

.

The blurb doesn’t mention Zimbardo’s segue into education (at the 5.40 mark) and the allegedly re-wired brains of teens.  Nor does it  mention that Zimbardo also designed the fascinating Stanford Prison Experiment back in 1971. (Hover over that link to see a popup video via my Apture plugin.)

Ed 2.0 geeks may find little new here, but the RSA Animate production values package the ideas with more bling than usual. This may be useful for tech evangelists who haven’t resigned themselves to the similar inertial laws governing schools and glaciers .

The vid does raise a question for me, though only half-serious. To wit: Okay, so the addled minds of our 10,000-hours-of- gaming-and-XXX-addicted teenage boys now find “analogue” classrooms boring. If we’re to compete with that, what’s the guidance? And how realistic is it to think that rigorous thought about, say, Confucianism can come close to WoW killing and W-o-P0rn [redacted]-ing?

Yes, I have issues with the edu-tainment imperative. Handle with care.

Now the vid:

–your thoughts?

h/t Decrepit Old Fool

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4. My Wikispaces in Education Webinar Presentation Video is Up

All too often education actually acts as a form of aversion therapy, that what we’re really teaching our children is to associate learning with work and to associate work with drudgery so that the remainder of their lives they will possibly never go near a book because they associate books with learning, learning with work and work with drudgery. [A]fter a hard day’s toil, instead of relaxing with a book they’ll be much more likely to sit down in front of an undemanding soap opera because this is obviously teaching them nothing, so it is not learning, so it is not work, it is not drudgery, so it must be pleasure. And I think that that is the kind of circuitry that we tend to have imprinted on us because of the education process.

Bingo. Such a tidy summary of the Business Roundtable vision of education as preparing workers for the workforce.

Moore has more to say about how, for him, the counterculture and independent reading were his education. He was apparently expelled from secondary school for experimenting with mind-altering drugs other than alcohol, television, and consumerism, and never went to college either.

He seems to be doing okay despite that.

(I taught V for Vendetta in a literature class a couple years ago. It was a great counter-piece to Animal Farm, except this time dark regime was on the far right. So many connections to current events in the Bush-Cheney-Rove era, you’d have never guessed it was written in reaction to Thatcher’s England.)

Switching gears, check out this fantastic Moore video. From its YouTube page,

A comic strip film noir featuring hardboiled gangsters, double crosses and dead blondes. Written and animated by Alan Moore and Lloyd Thatcher. Music by The Sinister Ducks. Edited by Vile Balloon on a overcast Saturday as the rain pounded on the ground like a meaty fist into a face.

.

(Hat-tip to One Good Move for the video.) Reminds me of Tom Waits (the son of two school-teachers, I just learned by clicking on the link. Follow it for both a Wikipedia entry and a whacked video of his song, “God’s Away on Business”.  I love Apture plugins!).

Article, without video, cross-posted from Education.Change.org
Photo by acb

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Hear, hear:

University students worried about getting a job see the study of the humanities as a waste of precious time. . . . Times are hard for humanists.

But when economic growth becomes the focus of education, both democracy and human decency are in jeopardy. In her new book, Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (Princeton), acclaimed University of Chicago philosopher and legal scholar Martha Nussbaum argues that our culture of market-driven schooling is headed for a fall.

As the critical thinking taught by the humanities is replaced by the unexamined life of the job-seekers, our ability to argue rights and wrongs is silenced. In a society of unreflective, undiscerning yes-men and yes-women, politics becomes meaner and business can invite disasters such as the economic meltdown or the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. (read the rest)

I had a nice dinner a couple nights ago with some students heading off to college, and this very issue came up: how so many unquestioningly buy into the “economic growth” model as the basic pre-requisite for the global “good life,” when that very model, to anybody who sees with their eyes instead of their media-, ideology-, and cultural-bias-saturated ears, is shredding not just the fabric of the planet, but also of the social well-being of much of its population.

The philosopher above gives us images clear enough to cut through the thousands of words so daily arguing otherwise everywhere: meaner politics, disastrous business ethics, economic meltdowns caused by successful frauds, the Gulf of Mexico BP (Exxon, Petrobras, whatever), and the army of young yes-men and yes-women marching off to serve all of these forces in the name of being successful.

I’m old enough now to know that these Cassandra-cries about the death of the humanities are nothing new and, sadder still, to believe they won’t make a dent in the economically over-heated minds of our young and old alike. But that doesn’t mean I don’t agree with them whole-heartedly.

Because teaching that success means responsibility to more than economic growth may have avoided the profit-driven cut corners that gave us this:

"BP: Bringing You a Greener Tomorrow"

(h/t to Scotteriology and Bag News Notes)

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7 Comments

• At June 13, 2010, Tim Goree wrote:

  Strangely, the U.S. has the exact opposite problem. Not enough high school students looking toward technical learning. Over here, seems like everyone is a liberal arts major.

• At June 13, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  If that's the case, maybe it's good news. I can't help suspecting the students from the families with most power and privilege, and thus the best chances of making a difference at a larger scale than the majority of students, don't fall into your diagnosis. And it seems the thrust of the article was that "technical learning" alone only brings us more of the same unwise wizardry?

• At June 14, 2010, Laura Gibbs wrote:

  Hmmmm, I'm not sold on humanities as some kind of moral panacea: have you seen the film Conspiracy, about the Wannsee Conference? Reinhard Heydrich, architect of the Nazi holocaust, shows himself in the final scene to be a cultivated lover of music... an emblematic moment, I think (and it's a great little film, very much worth watching for pondering the role of business AND ideology in the making of the Holocaust). It seems to me that there is plenty of profit-seeking to be found among those well read in philosophy and/or history and/or literature etc. If we want to teach a brand of ideology (and I'm very much of the "small is beautiful" persuasion myself), then I think we would best do that under the label of ideology, openly and honestly, rather than assuming that students will indirectly get the message by slogging their way through a generic Great Books curriculum.

• At June 14, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  I think we're more in line than you gather from my post. To me, Humanities includes ideology, is often even framed by it in the study, but with the issues opened for inquiry instead of fed as indoctrination.

  It doesn't hurt, though, for the "small is beautiful" to be more practicable, to expose students to the pleasures of art as art.

  But as I say, I don't think there's a panacea at all at this point. We're too far gone for any easy solutions, I think.

  I'll look for Conspiracy, thanks.

• At June 16, 2010, Fugue: Jesus, Plato, Confucius, and Goldman Sachs | Beyond School wrote:

  [...] no answers. I’ll just stop here instead, while it goes on and on regardless. Blame it on a conversation with graduating students last week, whose excitement about the future I was found it uncomfortably [...]

• At June 18, 2010, Bill Farren wrote:

  Good to see you're back to blogging, Clay. Check out Liz Coleman's talk on TED, if you haven't already.

  Laura's comment above reminded me of the book http://www.smallisprofitable.org/, which could address some of Tim Goree's concerns (above).

  "Small is Profitable shows critical lessons for the new century: technologies tailored to the needs of people, not the reverse, can improve the economy and the environment."

• At June 18, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  Good to hear from you, Bill, and to plumb your recommendations for yet another valuable resource. That one's worth showing in the classroom. Thanks for passing it on.

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