Beyond School

A permanent present - what a haunting phrase. How bizarre and surreal it must be to serve a life sentence in the prison of the moment, trapped forever in the perpetual now, a world without end, a time without later.  — Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness, p. 14

Call me crazy, but I couldn’t help but think of students when I read this earlier tonight.  A particular kind of student, anyway.  The Korean kind, for sure, and possibly, from what I read, more and more American ones too.

I mean the ones who are so over-scheduled with schoolwork, homework, SAT test-prep cram schools, and all the other madness that keeps them focused on memorizing the data and pounding out the grunt-work, one assignment and one GPA-increment at a time, year in and year out, from what, grade 9? Or is that too late to begin worrying these days? ¹

“A permanent present.” Isn’t that what the overload of content, testing, homework, and extra-curricular bullet-gaming for college applications is creating for our young?  It makes me wonder if school itself is not the cause of “A.D.D.”: when attention is constantly hurried in seven different disciplines from unit to unit, no option to pull the cord and get off the train, is it any wonder attention is deficient and understanding is, to quote an old Bowie line, a series of “one-inch thoughts”?

Maybe I’m wrong. I know I am with some teachers, bless ‘em. The ones that choose thought over coverage, choice over prescription.

That permanent present, by the way?  It’s a description of people who have had lobotomies or other traumas to the frontal lobe.

*     *     *

American college students expect to live longer, stay married longer and travel to Europe more often than average. They believe they are more likely to have a gifted child, to own their own home and to appear in the newspaper, and less likely to have a heart attack, venereal disease, a drinking problem, an auto accident, a broken bone  or gum disease.  Ibid., p. 18

Kids, I hate to break it to you, but my experience of you college-bound grade-junkies is one, overall - again, let’s bless the exceptions - of pity and disappointment.  You’ve got great grades, yes, but so little else. No driving passion for anything unique or original, no budding genius.

Let’s take a quick detour into the meaning and origins of that word, “genius.”  Most of us don’t know what it means when we use it. Apple’s dictionary gives us a good etymology:

ORIGIN late Middle English : from Latin, ‘attendant spirit present from one’s birth, innate ability or inclination,’ from the root of gignere ‘beget.’ The original sense [tutelary spirit attendant on a person] gave rise to a sense [a person's characteristic disposition] (late 16th cent.), which led to a sense [a person's natural ability,] and finally [exceptional natural ability] (mid 17th cent.).

Wikipedia gives us a little more:

In Ancient Rome, the genius was the guiding or “tutelary” spirit of a person, or even of an entire gens, the plural of which was ‘genii’[9]

In Roman mythology, every man had a genius and every woman a juno (Juno was also the name of the queen of the gods).

Originally, the genii and junones were ancestors who guarded over their descendants. Over time, they turned into personal guardian spirits, granting intellectual prowess.

Wikipedia closes with this intriguing gem:

Sacrifices were made to one’s genius or juno on one’s birthday.

And that gem strikes me as crushingly ironic today, because today, we don’t sacrifice to our genius at all; instead, we sacrifice that genius itself  - to our schools.

Look at the emphasized words in the passages above, and tell me if I’m wrong when I say: the essence of genius is precisely what schools exclude.  What does that essence consist of?

1. Individual inclination, innate ability

Note the root “gen” in “genius.”  Genius is present in our origin (same root), our genes, our genesis - our nature.  These shape and determine our individuality.  In this sense, “genius” is not about being brilliant, but about having a cognitive-emotional-creative fingerprint that is entirely unique from the moment we’re born.  To get homespun for a second, it’s just that thing that makes us tick, that piques our individual interest or curiosity.

Sir Ken Robinson tells the sad tale of the researchers asking six-year-olds if they were artists, and all of them saying yes; but asked four years later, deep into the assembly line of generic curriculum and one-size-fits-all learning, only a fraction of hands go up; and by adolescence, almost none do.  You may quibble with the difference between artists and geniuses, but to me they’re deeply related in this simple fact: artists pursue their own “individual inclinations and innate abilities” - their own genius.

2. Genius as “tutelary spirit”

More fun with definitions and etymologies: “tutelary,” defined: “serving as a protector, guardian, or patron.”  Its etymology: “from Latin tutela ‘keeping’ (from tut- ‘watched,’.”

So to the ancients, our individually innate inclinations and abilities, our”genius,” was that thing that protected us, guarded us, “kept” us, “watched” us and, most interestingly - playing with the sense of “patron” - fathered us.

Quit reading if you’re not into this line of thought, because I want to follow it down another linguistic byroad to the obvious and, today, ubiquitous derivative of the old world “tutelage”: you guessed it - “tutor.”  It’s another crushing irony: though derived from “tutelage,” the deep old word associated with letting our genius be our teacher, the word “tutor” today has nothing to do with inborn genius, and everything to do with its opposite: school-manufactured uniformity and anti-individualism, anti-genius.  Again, the dictionary is my witness:

tutor |ˈt(y)oōtər|
noun
a private teacher, typically one who teaches a single student or a very small group.
• chiefly Brit. a university or college teacher responsible for the teaching and supervision of assigned students.
• an assistant lecturer in a college or university. [emphasis added]

Goodbye, genius; hello, schooliness.  Gone is the language of spirit, of nature, of self-tutelage now, and in its place is the lexicon of schools: “teacher, student, university, college, responsible for, supervision, assigned, lecturer.”  Genius, the once-”tutelary guardian, protector, and patron” of “natural, innate inclination and disposition” is overthrown, and in its place now is the academic teacher, the master of a classroom, stuffing the headpieces of the young with the straw that will be transformed into golden grades.  To hell with your genes, your nature, your curiosity.  My job as a tutor is to help you advance to the front of whatever class you are forced to take.²

The Why of this Rant: To Students

flowers, drowning

College will not make you successful.  A degree that gets you a good job will not make you happy.  Unless: you remember your genius (if any has survived your schooling), and let it drive your educational choices.

I can’t tell you how many well-heeled parents I’ve spoken with at length in parent conferences over the years, parents wealthy, attractive, full of status and prestige and awash in luxury, who have nonetheless left me, again, feeling little more than pity and disappointment.  The sparkle in their rings and watches did not extend into their conversation, their wit, their eyes.  They had succeeded at the college game, made buckets of money, but with all of that success, had failed to find happiness.

The exceptions? Bless them, they seemed to choose an education in line with their genius - not their parents or their society’s wishes.

And all of this comes from a few pages from a book on that wonderful new field of psychology, “happiness studies,” and its wonderful news that, when it comes to making choices that steer us to happy futures, we’re our own worst enemies.  Check it out. It’s a good read - and hey, it will also impress your SAT essay reader, since it’s by a Harvard professor.

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Photo credits: Progress by ~BostonBill~ ; Roses by Tio

1. I read recently that the ETS is now floating a PSAT clone for the middle school years.  Great work, bastards. Rob even more living and learning from childhood by making them obsess on indelible test scores even earlier in their childhoods.  Pocket more profits from your stupifying study guides for tests that kill curiosity and implant the quest for the safe, right answer. [↩]
2. And let me tell you: my tutoring experience so far has been fun, but shocking too. The parents are generally indifferent to the growth of any passion or wisdom or skill in their children that is not related to helping them ace this or that class or test.  They could care less, in other words, about the genius of their children than schools do. [↩]

Awake and refreshed now. Neurons still firing from a heady mental cocktail blending the Shanghai Learning 2.0 Conference, my RSS subscription to Crooks and Liars (my favorite political blog), the creative potential of iLife for student-people and teacher-people alike and, five minutes ago, a dash of eureka inspired by reader comments to a week-old and month-old post on this blog.

Crooks and Liars linked to an ACLU online graphic novel about racial profiling that caught this English teachergeek’s eye. I followed the link and read the comic. Here are a couple frames:

Then I thought of my AP Literature King Lear project (we’re adapting the Lear story to the present, re-writing the verse as contemporary English prose, still in dramatic format, on our King Lear Street Talk wiki, after which we’ll record “radio theater” performances of it for publication on Librivox).

I thought of two reader comments of late that gave me ideas I wouldn’t otherwise have had (the power of blogging-as-conversation, again, for Those Who Still Don’t Get It): One of those readers - also a writer, in what I want to call the “reader/writer web,” since this new web turns all of us who use it into a new breed of reader/writer/audience/co-thinker - was Diane Cordell (her Journeys here). Reading one of Diane’s posts a month ago, in which she posted a comic creation she’d made on ToonDo, led to me making one of my own here. This led to Diane’s comment,

You DO realize that the next step might be to create graphic novels - or graphic poetry anthologies.

I loved the Illustrated Classics comic books (not the abridged novels we use now for reluctant readers) that were published when I was a child - I’d be interested in seeing how your class portrayed good old J. Alfred - or tackled Blake’s Tyger. Or re-interpreted Beowulf (maybe you could collaborate with Christian Long’s Brit Lit class). Frankenstein might also be fun to tinker with.

Then I thought of another comment from Patrick Higgins of the always-excellent Chalkdust, replying to my post about the Lear project. Patrick wrote,

I am going to scout out our curriculum tomorrow for our AP Lit teachers and see if they, too are reading King Lear and have them [meaning "the students," I think - and being an ESL specialist, I see the value here] use your page as “cheat sheet” when they have difficulty.

And it hit me: Diane was right about Classics Illustrated comics in the Old Days - I loved them. I remember getting an A on a high school English class essay on the Iliad based on the comic version * And Patrick underscored the usefulness of such a product.**

And we have Apple’s Comic Life bundled on our students’ MacBooks, plus ToonDo online, for two options for making a modern King Lear graphic novel.

The only problem I can see is time. Making the graphic novel still requires the re-writing on the wiki, so creating the comic art would add more hours to the project. But I still think the graphic novel idea is pedagogically valuable, because that genre differs from the prose wiki format in a way uniquely tailored to benefit student writing in the much-needed area of verbal economy. Look at this panel from the ACLU comic and you’ll see what I mean:

The graphic novel, by restricting text to limited fields - narration boxes, speech and thought bubbles - forces economy in a way that text-only writing does not. And economy - saying the most with the fewest words possible - is a stylistic skill sorely in need of training for my seventeen-year-olds (and let me beat you to the punch by confessing I need it, on these pages, as well).

So if anybody else out there is reading Lear this year, and is interested in collaborating…. If we could divide the labor, my 35 students creating the book alongside yours, just picture the final product: a talking graphic novel - wiki-based? - with mp3 performances of each page embedded on the page. How cool would that be?

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*That Comics Illustrated Iliad was probably better than many of the lame, archaic prose translations high schools assign out of either cluelessness or cost-consciousness. I can’t believe how many English classes I’ve seen using horrible, 100-year-old translations of the classics that I would hate to read, but that students, due to the Victorian or otherwise stilted English of those bargain-basement translations, would have a hard time even understanding - when there are fantastic new translations in our own generation’s English that might bring those classics to life in the classroom. Examples: Stephen Mitchell’s new Gilgamesh translation, Theo Cuffe’s new Penguin translation of Candide, Jack Zipes’ recent Signet adaptation of Burton’s translation of The Arabian Nights. Yet teachers still buy the Dover editions. *shudder*

**I shared Patrick’s comment with my classes, and they saw the sense of what he noted, and seemed to see that this was more real-world than a stupid homework or school project because it would be used Out There in the World. Thanks, Patrick. Getting students to understand the Beyond School goal is incredibly difficult.

I’ll probably get another B+ for this. Teacher loves this novel, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. This student disagrees. ‘-) And for you “English-y types” from the last post, thanks for your feedback. I try to clarify things here.

More homework from my AP Lit workshop. I worked harder on the style and ideas for this one. It’s my summing-up after finishing the blasted thing.

The grass was wet with dew. I strode rapidly with clenched fists. I fancy I had some vague notion of . . . giving him a drubbing. . . .I had some imbecilic thoughts. The knitting old woman with the cat obtruded herself upon my memory as a most improper person to be sitting at the other end of such an affair.

Not your most pointed example of European “darkness,” but I liked it all the more for that. All this blood, rapine, and devastation implicates even our grannies (and yes, English teachers, the allusion to Clotho and Lachesis, the Greek Fates, didn’t escape us. Pretty obvious, really, isn’t it? The denotative suggestion is more interesting here. The old lady is living off her country’s profits from Kurtz and his ilk. It’s the same today in the developed world. We just use the WTO and IMF.).

We could multiply more obvious examples. No point, though. They’re obvious.

What’s maybe not so obvious is one last piece of trickery that furthers my judgment of Conrad, not Marlowe, as one sorry world traveler - a yokel abroad.

It has to do with that Buddha image that opens and closes the novella. It’s easy to throw allusions in, as Conrad apparently understands to excess. It keeps the English teachers and literati happy, gives them something to gush about. (Reminds me of Joyce saying about either Ulysses or Finnegan’s Wake, I forget which, “I put enough symbols and allusions in there to keep the professors working for centuries,” or something to that effect. He knew the game.)

But it’s harder to intellectually justify your allusion-play with your ideas. Conrad fails here. His Buddha allusion, like so much else of his novel, is shabby, exploiting (as usual) obscurantism to suggest a depth that’s not there.

My evidence? Marlowe, when he finally encounters Kurtz, suddenly shifts the balance of his diction toward the old-time religion of his homeland. Examples (italics added):

“[Kurtz's] soul was mad.” (There’s no “soul” in Buddhism. Self and identity are illusions. Enlightenment is knowing precisely that fact.)

“I had - for my sins, I suppose - to go through the ordeal of looking into it myself.” (”Sin” is a Judeo-Christian-Islamic - an Abrahamic - notion. The closest Buddhism comes to this idea is fear and desire as the causes of suffering, and the Noble Eightfold Path as an ethical, not a metaphysical, set of guidelines to reduce suffering and lead to Enlightenment and Nirvana.)

“I saw the inconceivable mystery of a soul that knew no restraint, no faith, and no fear, yet struggling blindly with itself.” (Buddha warns against “faith” - again, a theistic notion bound most closely to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam - and teaches the opposite: to not believe his (Buddha’s) teachings without confirming them through one’s own experience of their truth, through practice. Buddhism is based on Knowledge, not Faith.)

“[T]he deep murmers of the [African] crowd, interrupted suddenly, were like the responses of some satanic litany.” (There is no “god” of evil, or god period, in Buddhism. There is Mara, the “demon” of “fear and desire,” but this is a psychological reality, not a metaphysical one - an explicit metaphor for our own mental habits that cause us and others to suffer. As for condemning other religions, Buddha was too civilized for that. He is said to have taught, instead, “Don’t mistake the finger for the moon” - all religions being the “fingers”, attempts to point to Truth(s) beyond words, “the moon.” He would have seen the African religion as yet one more finger among the handsful of the world.)

So for all Conrad’s mumbo-jumbo about Buddhism through a couple of cheap allusions, we see, when Marlowe finally gets off the boat and actually joins an “Other” culture - instead of yammering about it incessantly from the safety of his boat - that he carries the full baggage of his hometown biases with him. He’s a provincial traveler, a traveler in body, not mind.

He’s not a Buddha. With all his praise of deliverance through mechanical work, he’s more of what I can’t help but call a “Calvinist Ulysses.”

Too bad he couldn’t read Weber’s On the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

But I guess describing Marlowe as sitting in the posture of Calvin wouldn’t have sounded so “deep” and mysterious.

There are better books - more enjoyable, clearer style, leaner prose, less confused and racist - to use for colonial literature. Gulliver’s Travels is brilliant, if we’d only read it without visions of Disney in our heads, and damns colonialism with a sharper moral vision, a more savage punch, a better plot, and best of all, a barrel of laughs. A Passage to India fits the bill for a rough contemporary of Conrad. And again, Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian will win him a future Nobel, if that body’s worth its salt.

Unfortunately, Conrad’s turgid work will probably survive in the canon. Teachers were told it’s great when they were students, so they’ll assign it when they’re teachers. It’s short, too, which helps us in our unnatural “factory schedule” schools.

It’s a shame, though. Because worse than anything else, it probably makes most students think a) literature has to be migraine-difficult to decode; and b) Conrad’s style is good writing.

(For the record: yes, Conrad has some fine stylistic moments in the novella. When you strain like a constipated hourglass on every page to produce such moments, of course you’ll squeeze out a winner occasionally.)

Restock your aspirin for some purple student prose for the year after they read this work.

[Update 2 AUG 07: A follow-up post on HOD here.l

A little light summer reading: Joseph Conrad's "classic" Heart of Darkness. Skip it unless you want to defend its merit. I loved it in my 20s, but now it seems such a joke. Anybody want to show me what I'm mising?Here's my homework for my lovely AP Lit workshop:

"The Horror": Conrad's Smoke and Mirrors?

I just finished the famous last words: "The horror! The horror!"

For the life of me, the only specific images of Kurtz's life that I see don't stack up to the hype (is hype related to hypnotism?).

What are those specifics, when we clear away all Conrad's mystifications?

Kurtz:
1. had an African mate
2. "raided" neighboring areas for ivory
3. killed "rebels"
4. ruled as a chief or something like a king
5. converted to a set of magico-ritualistic beliefs different from those of Europe.

The rest of the Kurtz mystique, I argue, is Conrad's smoke and mirrors with adjectives. So how "dark" is Kurtz? Re: 1-5 above:

1. Only a racist would fault him for having an African mistress (and a hypocrite or puritan for having a mistress at all - if adultery makes us "devils," devils are pretty common things).

2-3. Only a hypocrite would make a special case for Kurtz's wars of conquest for profit. Iraq's oil and the close to one million Iraqi dead since 2003 [update: fact-check at Iraq Body Count: confirmed Iraqi deaths: 75,000; estimated Iraqi deaths: 985,000] is more horrible than Kurtz’s little ivory raids. And Saddam’s YouTube head in the noose is one of a million parallels we can make to Kurtz’s impaled rebel heads. Need another? The CIA cut off Che Guevara’s hands after executing him in Bolivia in 1967, and mailed them to Fidel Castro in a box. Abu Ghraib and secret torture prisons, anyone? “The horror?”

4. Ruling as king? Nothing unusual there either, and certainly nothing specifically “African” or primitive.

5. African religion used antelope horns and feathers and “midnight fires”? How, in any rational way, are they any different from the religious rites and magic of the West, based as they are, as historians and philosophers of religion have noted countless times, on rituals and beliefs based on human sacrifice and cannibalism? “The horror?”

So I don’t buy this novella. I don’t see the “darkness.”

Maybe that’s because Conrad never shows it to us. Instead, he just chants us into an adjectival stupor.

Worse yet, the majority of those adjectives are empty of content because they’re of the negating variety.

The remainder appeal to our own European stereotypes of “evil” and “satanism” that strike me as childish. Marlowe’s/Conrad’s characterization of all Africans as “brutes” and “savages” is ridiculous. Reminds me of my reaction to the Noah/Flood and Plagues of Egypt myths: “Really? Everybody was so ‘ee-vil’ they deserved to be wiped out? A whole world or city? So every single farmer and mother of newborn - every child - was ‘ee-vil’? Makes no sense. Most people are too busy with the necessities of daily living to be such cartoonishly ‘evil’ folks.”

How Conrad expects us to fall for such a caricature of individual husbands and wives, parents and children in villages along the Congo is beyond me. I kept rolling my eyes at his breathless attempts to make me go, “Wow, they’re sooo savage.” Okay, they dance. They dress less in the heat. They use different weapons. They have different moral codes and languages and skin color. They don’t have engines and machines. They live naturally. This doesn’t qualify them as “brute savages.”

I heard “godless Communists” chanted at me from parents, preachers, teachers, teevees and politicians from birth to 30. Then I lived with these “godless” people in China for five years and discovered that, by and large, their civilization was superior to my own. It’s 3,000 years older - and unbroken by any period of Dark Ages, unlike ours - and its religions are based on philosophy rather than magic (ever notice there are no Buddhist terrorists or Crusaders?). Its diet is healthier, its families closer-knit. We should be so lucky.

Conrad traveled the world, didn’t he? Didn’t he notice, as I did with the Chinese and Vietnamese and Arabs, that they’re every bit as normal, and full of good or bad eggs, within their own frameworks, as we are within ours?

If he did, how come Marlowe comes off as such a yokel? Calling African religion “satanic.” Give me a break.

Show me what I’m missing, specifically.

I don’t want to spoil the new Harry Potter movie for anyone who’s not seen it, but I saw it last night and, hot on the heels of the “Convergences” post I wrote a day or two ago, saw the film mostly as a critique of schools when they’re at their irrelevant worst.

I’ll just say that this is a thought-provoking film for educators. Much more grown up, too, as Harry is in this sequel - despite the school’s best efforts to ignore that reality. That’s the conflict that interested me.

The whole thing can be viewed as an allegory about a world beyond the schoolhouse with real problems, and a schoolhouse determined to ignore that fact - at the world’s peril. Substitute “climate change” (or your own pet challenge) for “he who cannot be named” (Voldemort), and you’ll see how much this story goes beyond fantasy.

Equally important - it’s good fun.