Beyond School

Come on in, Ned. And bring your kids.

[This post had major problems in its original draft. I heavily edited it for all you stumblers. Later posts in the "Unsucky Gilgamesh" series: 2: The Day I Thought Gilgamesh Would Cost Me My Job ~ 3: Adam and Eve, Backwards ~ 4. The Seven Deadly Sins, Backwards ~ 5. Good and Evil, Nature and the Hero - Backwards]

To My Few Student Readers: Please Stay

I’m bored writing for adults these days, and most of my readers are adults. If you’re a student, can you send this link to your friends, put it on Facebook, Stumble it, etc? I want students as my audience for this series, because I want to share with you all a series of posts, beginning today and continuing for years, probably, about:

Why the Classics Only Seem to Suck

I don’t blame students who think classic literature sucks.¹

They have millions of good reasons to think that. They may, for example, have:

1. teachers who aren’t that great at reading, writing, or teaching, or
2. great teachers at not-so-great schools that are afraid to let them read the most controversial literature (almost all schools are really afraid of students and their parents), or
3. English worksheets that turn literature into anatomy tests (”Identify which phrase below is an example of onomatopoeia” and similar dentist drills), or
4. five-paragraph essays to write in which the teacher in #1 tells them that they “must not use ‘I’, must have a topic sentence in the first line of each paragraph,” and a million other rules that real writers (we just excluded most teachers there) ignore altogether, or
5. a lack of time to read the books assigned in English class, what with all the other homework (they want to have a little time of their own to just live their life, after all, to maybe read stuff they want to read - so why not just read the Sparknotes summaries?), or
6. over-their-head levels of language complexity or adult content that they really shouldn’t be expected to comprehend (language) or care about (a middle-aged housewife’s psychology) until they’re well out of high school, or
7. dry lists of words and terms to memorize for that most ultra-sucky thing of all - that thing which more and more schools and parents seem to think education is now - the S.A.T.

My Promises for This Series

I promise not to bore you with trivia or showy diction - to use “use” instead of “utilize.”  And I promise to try to give you enjoyable ideas of why, despite the pain of many English classes, this thing called literature, played with naturally, gives pleasure.  Much classic literature is wonderful.  I get more pleasure out of a used one-dollar copy of a Shakespeare or Oscar Wilde play than I do out of my $5,000 home theater.  When I want a buzz, I choose books over booze and bongs. Good literature is the best drug out there.

Added Bonus: I’ll throw in a “big picture” tour of the history of literature from the earliest story ever told - today’s post - forward through the centuries to the Greeks, the Hebrews and their Bible, the Romans, the fascinatingly whacked Middle Ages and the lovely Renaissance, the supremely dangerous Shakespeare and the often-kinky Romantics, straight on up to a few choice books from our modern times. (That’s another thing that annoys me about so many English classes I’ve had to teach: they rip all books out of their historical context, and disconnect them from their times and each other. It’s like studying butterflies pinned under glass instead of watching them fly among the flowers.)

I’ll also avoid constipated scholar-talk in favor of the conversational, occasionally dangerous style of a teacher who can tell you the truth, as he sees it, about these books without fear of being fired for ruffling the feathers of the fearful “three P’s”: parents, principals, and preachers.

Great books are often door-openings to dangerous places, places polite society fears and deems off-limits.  When those doors open in a classroom, teachers often refuse to enter.  There’s always the student who can’t handle it, who complains to one of the three P’s, and forces the conversation to remain, safe and proper, in the well-lit hallway.

Not so here where, away from school, we can touch the taboos, and experience how literature can be a threat and a danger to who we are, to how we’ve been conditioned to see life, to our culture’s status quo.

Doris Lessing really nails the connection between schools and the status quo better than I could dream of doing, so I’ll close this section with her:²

“You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others, will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself - educating your own judgment. Those that stay must remember, always and all the time, that they are being molded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this society.” - Doris Lessing

Now here goes.

Starting at the beginning - literally: c. 3,000 BCE

Let’s start with the oldest story ever told (or at least that we have written down), the first story in the history of our species, the story whose title, tragically, will make your eyes roll and your feet head for the exit door the minute you hear it, because it’s associated with your lifetime of aversion to classroom classics.

I’m talking about Gilgamesh.

Don’t leave.

Gilgamesh - the Earth's Oldest Epic - in Stephen Mitchell's brilliant 2004 translation.

It’s one of the coolest books you’ll ever read.  It comes from one of the earliest cities, literally, on Earth - but it’s so alien to everything we Judeo-Christian types have been conditioned to think of as “good and evil,” “right and wrong,” that it seems a work of science fiction or fantasy more than anything else.

Really, don’t leave. You’ll miss the part about a religion that sees sex as a good and holy thing.

I’m not making this up.  Here’s the background:

Gilgamesh is the story of a Sumerian king who actually lived and ruled around 2,700 BCE. That’s almost 5,000 years ago. The city itself was a thousand years old when the story was written, so we’re talking a story from a civilization 6,000 years ago.

Stop and let that sink in.  The Bible is only half that old, with the “Old Testament” reaching its final form around 400 BCE, and the “New Testament” not being slapped together until around 330 CE (or A.D., if you’re out of touch with proper scholarly conventions).  So Gilgamesh is more than twice as old as the Bible. The Bible’s a pup compared to this story, and as I’ll argue, the Bible is less wise, in many deep and fundamental ways, than this Sumerian book as well.

Moving on:  The king’s city, Uruk, was such a walled and templed and terraced wonder that the citizens themselves were blown away by it.  Since the story is from an age close to the agricultural revolution, when we stopped wandering around as nomads and living more like herd animals than humans, we get a sense, when we read this story, that the people who wrote it are totally aware of what a cool thing they’ve accomplished by making one of the world’s first grand cities - first, do you hear?

Looking out from Uruk’s walls across the sandy plains of what is today Iraq (Uruk was not far from later Babylon and today’s Baghdad³ ), you would have seen no other cities.  Cities, to repeat, were new, and Uruk was one of the first.  When you read this story, it’s like the story-teller remembers the days before the city was invented, the days of wearing animal skins and being goat-herders or hunter-gatherers.  And you can clearly tell he loves his city all the more for the different kind of life it makes possible - the civilized life.

It’s a story, then, of humanity basically crowing its pride over creating civilization by creating that Most Needful Thing for civilization to exist at all: a city.  If someone were to have written a blurb on the back of the book back then (which he couldn’t have done because the “pages” were actually baked clay tablets stacked like bricks in the library, all covered in reed-imprinted cuneiform), he would have written something like,

Unlike our neighbors in every direction, we aren’t hunter-gatherers, goat-herding nomads, or farmers in country villages.  We’re civilized. We built a city.  And we’re damned proud of that.

Luckily, since Uruk was civilized, it had court poets instead of flag-waving idiots to tell the story a bit more gracefully, and to tweak it and revise it over a couple thousand years to make it just so.

On Sex, Good and Bad

I have to be careful about sex here, because the story itself is.

Rendering of a ziggurat in Uruk (PD-self from Wikicommons)

On the one hand, the city had temples (like the ziggurat pictured right) dedicated to the goddess Ishtar, the goddess of love, fertility, procreation, and - strangely - war. (Aphrodite is basically the Greek version of the much older Ishtar, and Venus the Roman version. You knew that.)

We’re so blind today to the seeming magic through which sexual intercourse leads to pregnancy, and pregnancy to the creation of life from the womb of woman, that it takes a bit of imagination-work for us to appreciate how much sense it would make to pre-civilized and first-civilized humans to consider sex, pregnancy and birth, and above all women, as magical, sacred things.

That the Sumerians did consider sex sacred is clearly shown by this fact:  the temples of Ishtar were staffed with priestesses whose role was to have sex there, in the temple - whether only with the king or other elites, or with everyone, I don’t know.  These temple prostitutes were not “sinners,” were not “immoral”; they were respected every bit as much as Pastor Teds and Imam Abdullahs in churches and mosques around the world today.

And sex was not a “sin.”  It was a holy thing.  Check out “heiros gamos” on Wikipedia for the juicy (but deep) details.  (And stay tuned for my own theory, when we get to the Bible one of these days in this series, of how Ishtar and the Sumerians influenced the Jewish priests who wrote the Bible’s Genesis to make Eve such a bad character in the story, and sex - everybody’s favorite hobby, to riff off Woody Allen - such a bad, guilty act.)

So in Uruk, it may have been your duty as a good, gods-fearing citizen, to go to “church” occasionally to have sex with a temple prostitute.

In class, this point would get giggles from the immature or freak-outs from the ever-present class prudes, and the following idea would never sink in - which is sad, because it could lead to possibly deep and beautiful ideas such as this:

Think of how different it must have been, as a young person entering puberty, not to be shamed for suddenly discovering sexuality, but to instead, I imagine, be congratulated by family and society, maybe brought to “church” - the temple - to have that sexual awakening honored and instructed through some religious initiation.  To be welcomed into this magical new stage, rather than met with the silence and denial puberty is usually met with in our own culture.  “Abstinence-only” sex education would be laughed at in Sumer, and priests, parents, and schools would be comfortable with this natural thing.  There were far fewer locked doors, hidden materials, and guilt-burdened consciences for boys and girls back then, I suspect.

But it could also lead to less “beautiful” but still “deep” questions like this: For the “prostitute,” how was “temple prostitution” then different from prostitution now? Since sex wasn’t shameful then, was prostitution also not shameful?  Were the temple prostitutes abused and frowned upon the way many prostitutes are today?⁴  Or were they protected from abuse by the temple, and by the reverent treatment of those they served there - treated less like today’s “whores,” in other words, than like today’s preachers?   Since they surely thought of sex differently than we in the West do in the Judeo-Christian framework - and we inherited much of that framework whether we’re religious or not - it’s not an easy question to answer.⁵

(Do you see the “science fiction” side yet?)

But on the other hand, there was such a thing as “bad sex” in this story - and it’s what gets the plot rolling.

King Gilgamesh was a bit of a jerk when it came to sex.  Because he was king, and above the law, he had more choices than his wives or the temple prostitutes.  And the choice he made struck everyone involved - even the gods, who looked on from heaven - as really, really wrong: Gilgamesh chose to treat himself to the bed of every new bride on her wedding day - before her husband did.

So the people of the kingdom get understandably offended by this cocky king, and their complaints finally make it to the ears of the gods: the big-daddy god in particular, Anu (think Zeus and you’re close enough).

And here’s another place I think it gets deep and beautiful - but first let me take a detour to mention a couple of important things that connect to the beliefs of Jews and Christians and Muslims today.  The “deep and beautiful” stuff won’t work unless you know this.

On God, His Leadership Style, and His Fore-Fathers

First, the Gilgamesh epic is from a culture⁶ that spoke a Semitic language related to Hebrew and Arabic, and that dominated the Middle East for thousands of years before Judaism, the religion of the Bible and of Jesus, even existed.

Second, the Hebrews who first settled Israel over a thousand years after the Gilgamesh story knew this dominant culture, and included many Sumerian myths in the Bible; two well-known examples are the Six-Days’ Creation and Noah and the Flood in Genesis (the Sumerian Noah, Utnapishtim, will be a major character by this story’s end, by the way - and will tell the original and much older Sumerian version of the Flood later adapted in Genesis). You can read the Sumerian creation myth, the Enuma Elish, yourself to see the similarities.  It’s only a few pages long.

But the differences between the Sumerian and Judeo-Christian gods are even more interesting.

The most interesting difference to me is that the Sumerian religion had male and female gods and, more importantly, that the main Sumerian “god the father” type was, like most fathers, married. It’s always seemed weird to me that the Judeo-Christian-Islamic god is alone, unmarried.  Zeus had Hera, the Sumerian Anu had Aruru, but Yahweh, the “God” of the Bible?⁷  No female for him.  You have to wonder why the Hebrews took the female from heaven, who did it, when, and how.  I do, anyway. But I’ll share those thoughts down the road.

The other interesting difference is in the morality - I almost want to say “leadership style” - of the two father gods. To see the difference, let’s do a thought experiment:  pretend Gilgamesh did his wife-stealing stunt in Jerusalem, that Gilgamesh was a Hebrew and his god was not Anu but Yahweh, the god of the Jews and Christians.

When that God hears that Gilgamesh is deflowering all the wives of all “His people” - “coveting” more than his neighbors’ (and subjects’) “asses” and therefore breaking one of the Ten Commandments - how do you think that God would react?

People will argue with me here, but I don’t see how they can win: that God deals with sinners, rebels, and others who disobey him with this “leadership decision”: punishment.  He’s an “angry God,” as he says himself. ⁸ It’s hard to see that God doing much but using angry force to punish Gilgamesh and make him change his ways.  Human obedience is what matters to that God, as I read him; human wisdom comes a distant second.  You want evidence?  God’s instructions for dealing with people who disobey his laws, over and over (in Deuteronomy especially), is to simply kill them. And Adam and Eve received one hell of a punishment because of their disobedience, too.

Back to the Story: “What Would Jesus Anu Do?”

But the earlier Sumerian god, Anu?  His reaction to Gilgamesh’s adulterous outrage is totally intriguing, and in my view, totally cool.  I like this god.

He doesn’t say “Punish him.”  He doesn’t say “Kill him.”  Instead, he turns to Aruru, the goddess who the Sumerians believed created humanity from earthly clay, and tells her to do it one more time.

He tells her, more interesting still, not to create any old human, but instead a special type. “Now go and create,” he tells her,

“a double for Gilgamesh, his second self,
a man who equals his strength and courage,
a man who equals his stormy heart.
Create a new hero, let them balance each other
perfectly, so that Uruk has peace.”

And so she does.

I’m going to stop here for the moment, and just share why I think Anu is a god worthy of the title.  Because by creating a “double” for Gilgamesh instead of simply killing him on the spot, he shows that to him, “sin” is a lack of wisdom.  As you’ll see, he creates this double so that Gilgamesh may have the experiences he needs to grow wiser.  I also think he’s just plain smooth for not freaking out and throwing a temper tantrum, but instead coolly coming up with this mysterious idea:

“Make a double for him. That should do the trick.”

What a wtf plot twist. Love it. Suspense accomplished.

And it’s a wonderfully optimistic view of man for a God to have: not “fallen” and in need of salvation, not infantile and in need of a list of Commandments to unthinkingly obey, not tainted by any “original sin,” but instead: capable of growing through experience, of learning and finding his own way, of finding “balance” that brings “peace.”

That “double,” by the way?  His name is Enkidu - and he’s Gilgamesh’s double in a curious and fascinating way: Gilgamesh is two-thirds divine, one-third human; Enkidu, on the other hand, is - get this - two-thirds animal, one-third human. Gilgamesh is the king of civilization; Enkidu is a wild-man living naked in the wilderness, alone with no human companionship.  But this animal-man is actually innocent and good - shades of some pre-Biblical Darwinian understanding that, hello?, humans are indeed animals in the animal kingdom, and that that bit of natural obviousness is nothing to freak out about?

Before Closing:

Challenges, corrections, extensions, additions, and anything else are welcome. More on Gilgamesh soon.⁹

Next: 2: The Day I Thought Gilgamesh Would Cost Me My Job ~ 3: Adam and Eve, Backwards ~ 4. The Seven Deadly Sins, Backwards ~ 5. Good and Evil, Nature and the Hero - Backwards

~     ~     ~

If you like this post, please spread it: (But don't tag it "education." That will bury it.)

1. thanks to Tom, by the way,  whose post partly inspired this and who turned me on to that article. [↩]
2. and thanks to R. Greco for this gem [↩]
3. that’s right: the US military is occupying and bombing the earliest civilization in the Middle East, and for any of you familiar with Mosul, that’s where the clay tablets holding the Gilgamesh story were uncovered, after two thousand years of sand-buried silence, by a British guy in the late 1800s [↩]
4. And - are there prostitutes today that don’t feel ashamed, aren’t abused or frowned upon, and actually find fulfillment in their profession?  Aren’t the questions endless? [↩]
5. Thanks to the Salon.com forum that mentions this post for pointing out this angle. [↩]
6. it’s complicated: the earlier Sumerians, whose language was not related to the Semitic Hebrew and Arabic, were overthrown by other races, including the Akkadians and Babylonians, whose languages were both dialects of Semitic Assyrian, and who kept the story alive [↩]
7. Yahweh is a Hebrew name for what English-speaking Jews and Christians call “God” [↩]
8. And boy, I just opened the floodgates to a million evangelists to explain how Jesus marked a change in God’s law, a new covenant, with mercy replacing wrath, et cetera. But I’m going to side with the Jewish people on this one, for the sake of argument, and stick only to their original, non-Christian texts. The Torah above all.  I’m talking about that God as the literary character we read about in Jewish religious literature. [↩]
9. and if you decide to buy the book, be sure to buy the Mitchell translation pictured above. All the other ones I’ve seen are pretty crappy in comparison. This one’s fantastic. [↩]

[See here for Part 1: On the Death of Genius for the Sake of College]

The fact is that human beings come into the world with a passion for control, they go out of the world the same way, and research suggests that if they lost their ability to control things at any point between their entrance and their exit, they become unhappy, helpless, hopeless and depressed.
–Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness, p. 21

No Control

Psychologist Gilbert cites in this section an experiment in which two groups of seniors in a nursing home were given plants for their rooms.  The first group was given the responsibility for watering and keeping the plants alive; the second group was denied any control over the plants’ care, which was the responsibility of the nursing home’s staff.

Six months later, 30% of the seniors with no control over the plants had died; only 15% of the group with control died in the same period.

They did a follow-up study with the same “control” variable to study the roles of control and autonomy in fostering mental and physical health. In this study, youth volunteers began a weekly visitation program to seniors in two groups. The first group was given the autonomy to schedule the visits and decide their durations themselves; the second group had no choice: the young visitors came on a schedule prescribed by the nursing home administration (in cahoots with the experimenters).

Again, two months later, the group with control and autonomy was healthier, taking fewer medications, and showing various other symptoms of increased well-being compared to their state at the beginning of the experiment.

That’s interesting enough¹ - but the more interesting thing happened next, and was completely unexpected:  when the visitation experiment was over, the visits stopped - and so did the exercise of autonomy and control enjoyed by the “happier” seniors.  And within a few months, “a disproportionate number of [seniors] in the high-control group had died.”

Gilbert concludes:

Only in retrospect did the cause of this tragedy seem clear. The residents who had been given control, and who had benefited measurably from that control while they had it, were inadvertently robbed of control when the study ended. Apparently, gaining control can have a positive impact on one’s health and well-being, but losing control can be worse than never having had any control at all (21-2).

Implications for Schools

It should be obvious, but more and more I learn that the obvious should never be taken for granted.  So here goes:

1. Students given some control over the content and demonstration of their learning are happier.

This is an old saw in education, but it doesn’t hurt to support it with psychological research.

2. The basic structure of schools - prescribed course selection, prescribed schedules and durations, prescribed timetables for learning and moving on - are innately “depressing” for students.

In other words, even those students given the freedom, in this or that class, to choose their content and design their own projects to demonstrate learning, are still stuck within a larger system of no control.  For these students, the autonomous classroom is an anomalous blip on the screen of a much larger matrix of no choice, no autonomy, no “passionate control.”

3. If not the norm in schools, student experience of autonomous learning under one teacher may do more harm than good.

Graham Wegner and I touched on this in an exchange a while back², and it bears repeating here: Graham told of hallway talks with students to whom he had given this autonomy the previous year, students now back in the passive mode in their current classrooms. And the students were predictably uniform, if memory serves, in their doldrums. Like the seniors after the visitation scheduling was taken away from them, the students who had control and lost it may have been worse off for that brief moment of learners’ happiness.

The Law of the Fall

Let’s call it the Law of the Fall:  the higher you climb, the harder the fall - especially if you’re pushed from that height.  And the pushers here are the teachers who keep control of everything that happens in their students’ experiences in their classrooms.

The bigger pushers, though - aren’t they the administrators?  I don’t mean to admin-bash here, but only to ask the obvious question: if autonomous learning is the miniscule exception in a school instead of the norm, who is ultimately responsible for that, if not principals?

Conversely, if the loss of autonomy is more damaging than the benefits of its brief possession, might that not mean that administrators have to make a choice? Namely, the choice between requiring all teachers to provide autonomy, or else, paradoxically, requiring that no teachers do?

–

Photo: Waiting by RebelBlueAngel

Bonus: TED Talk with Daniel Gilbert

Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness is my kind of scholarship: witty, playful, devoid of the constipated, jargon-stuffed voice of most academics. Reading it, you laugh as you think along.  Here’s a TED talk for those of you interested in learning more about this guy:

If you like this post, please spread it: (But don't tag it "education." That will bury it.)

1. and you statisticians and scientists are welcome to weigh in with criticisms of the experiments, because I can only trust the authority of a Harvard professor’s citation of it here [↩]
2. and Graham, if you can give me the link to that, I’d appreciate. I searched but did not find [↩]

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? - that they rarely have time to pull back and reflect on anything at all. 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.  It’s more schools’ fault than yours, but you’re not completely free of blame.  You’re the ones allowing yourselves to be turned into carbon copies of “competitive college applicants.”  You can choose else-wise.

I hate to break this to you too:  the college of your dreams is no guarantee of happiness. You may already be decreasing your chances of future happiness by your daily compromises to get into those schools.  It’s hard to have a soulful life, if you sold your soul before graduating high school.  Souls are hard things to buy back.

*     *     *

Genius Defined (It’s not what you think):

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. . . .

In Roman mythology, every man had a genius and every woman a juno. . . .

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.

To be clearer, to the ancients, the only teacher you needed was your own “genius,” your own curiosity and drive to satisfy it - whatever “it” is, which depends on who you are.

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.

–

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

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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 seem no more concerned, in other words, with the genius of their children than schools are. [↩]

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?

—

*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.

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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.

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