Beyond School

[The Unsucky English Gilgamesh series so far: 1: Dangerous Questions ~ 2: The Day I Thought Gilgamesh Would Cost Me My Job ~ 3: Adam and Eve, Backwards ~ 4. The Seven Deadly Sins, Backwards ~ 5. Good, Evil, Nature, and the Hero, Backwards ~ 6. Gilgamesh and the Dawn of Man ~ 7. This Post ~ 8. The Modern Mischief of the Gilgamesh Poets]¹

Gilgamesh - the Earth's Oldest Epic. Stephen Mitchell's fine 2004 adaptation.

We last left Gilgamesh laughing at the elders for urging him to fear the gods and doubt his own ability to do what none have done before. We noted it was perhaps the first Humanist’s laugh in world literature, 2,500 years before Socrates laughed similarly at the pious believers in Zeus.

Gilgamesh and Enkidu are almost, almost ready to embark on their quest to kill Humbaba, the guardian of the sacred Cedar Forest who is sacred to the god Enlil, but evil to several other gods and goddesses, in the wonderfully grey and grown-up moral sphere of the Sumero-Babylonians, so different from the black-and-white moral simplicity of other, more familiar, religions.

But before we follow them out the gate, we have one more stop to make with our two heroes: the Temple of Ninsun, the goddess who is Gilgamesh’s mother. It only makes sense to visit your mother before you leave to court death (I did the same with my best friend when we left my hometown in the ’80s to hitchhike across America all summer, come what monsters may). It makes more sense when she’s a goddess who might pull some divine strings to help you survive your adventure.

It’s an episode with a few details worth pausing over.

Worship on the Heights

We see in this scene, for example, another instance of Sumero-Babylonian religious ritual that causes me envy: their “worship on the heights.” We saw it before in the Temple of Ishtar, the pyramid-like ziggurat atop which, under sun or moon and stars I don’t know, the king seems to have made ritual love to Ishtar’s high priestess. We see it in this scene when Ninsun, after first bathing in “water of tamarisk and soapwort,” arrays herself in “her finest robe, a wide belt, / a jeweled necklace,” and “her crown,” then ascends to the roof of her temple to light incense to accompany her skyward prayer to the sun-god Shamash.

(Can I pause to share that I learned to speak, read and write the Arabic language when I was in the rightly oxymoronic U.S. Army’s Military Intelligence branch back in the ’90s, and that a word I learned there made this prayer-scene a bit mind-bending? The word was not quite “Shamash,” but it was close. It was “shahms” (شمس) – the Arabic word for, you guessed it: sun. The word stretches back to the beginning of human history, and beyond into prehistory. The young god of today’s monotheistic Arabs, Allah, may have taken the throne of heaven from Shamash in Arab religion a mere 1,400 years ago ; but in their language, he still shares heaven with that 6,000-year-oldest god. Shamash still shines on them today.)

We’ll see more of this preference for open-air, panoramic, sky-as-cathedral worship later. I just love it. Synagogues, churches, and mosques should cast a fresh look at their rooftops, and ask if there’s any potential to get closer to the Unnameable up there, instead of down below. [Self-critical update: It occurred to me later that the rooftop heights seem reserved for the elites only - kings and goddesses, so far, in this case. They ascend alone, and return below to the other devotees, from what I can see. I still like the idea, however unsupported it is on second look.]

A Prayer in Babylon’s Defense

Anyway, on her temple rooftop, under the azure dome of Shamash’s sky, Ninsun has her moment on the world-literary stage. She doesn’t blow it.

She asks Shamash the question every mother of a hot-blooded son asks: “You have granted my son / beauty and strength and courage / – why have you burdened him with a restless heart?” Whether intentional or not, I find it interesting that Ninsun’s list of her son’s gifts lacks the gift of wisdom.² Wisdom is what Gilgamesh will gain by the end of the tale – or perhaps only we will, by knowing his story.

Ninsun then goes on to utter what I like to call her “Ode to the Sun” which, in Mitchell’s adaptation³, deserves a place in our anthologies of the world’s religious poetry:

O Lord Shamash, glorious sun,
delight of the gods, illuminator
of the world, who rise and the light is born,
it fills the heavens, the whole earth takes shape,
the mountains form, the valleys grow bright,
darkness vanishes, evil retreats,
all creatures wake up and open their eyes,
they see you, they are filled with joy….

If any eight lines of verse can serve to refute all the Bible’s Babylon-bashing – an example of what mythologist Joseph Campbell calls one culture’s “mythic assassination” of its enemy’s culture – these eight have my vote. They’re not deep or fancy, and that’s their merit: the simple reverence of the lines, especially the image of all creatures waking to be filled with joy at the sight of a new day – they bespeak a gentle gratitude and majesty that gives the lie to the “whorish” slurs cast by the Hebrew and Christian texts. It’s wonderful that the Babylonian text can finally speak for itself again. (I don’t think I’ve mentioned that the cuneiform-imprinted clay tablets containing the epic lay mute and buried under the Iraqi sands for over 2,000 years, until they were uncovered by a British traveler around 1850, and then translated about 25 years later. So from the time of roughly Socrates, through the Roman Empire, Middle Ages, Renaissance, and half the modern period, this story was lost to the world, buried in silence. We’re unbelievably lucky to be alive to hear its ancient voice today. It’s a form of time-travel most of our forebears could not enjoy.)

The Visit Ends, the Adventure Begins

Ninsun goes on to do what so many mothers do who fear for their child’s success: she asks the god to cheat for him. When Gilgamesh and Enkidu close in battle with Humbaba, she asks Shamash to pin him with every wind known to nature – East Wind, West Wind, North and South, with tornadoes and gale and hurricane wind thrown in for good measure – to “make it easy” for her son to kill him.

She then descends and returns to Gilgamesh and Enkidu, and adds one more civilized gift to the recently-civilized Enkidu: a family. Ninsun tells Enkidu that she is adopting him as her son, places an amulet around his neck, and tells him to be a good brother to Gilgamesh. And Enkidu, gentle as ever (but not for much longer, as we’ll see), weeps. He has a mother now, and a brother.

An interesting detail in this adoption scene shows us more about the heirodules, or “temple prostitutes” in Ishtar’s cultic service, that we met in the first lecture. Ninsun says she adopts Enkidu “as a priestess takes in an abandoned child.” So we learn that the cult of Ishtar served a charitable function in Sumero-Babylonian society by serving as orphanages. I wonder what more the scholars can tell us about that.

Gilgamesh and Enkidu then take their weaponry and march past the cheering young men and the well-wishing elders to the gate, and beyond. That weaponry, by the way? Each had an axe that weighed “two hundred pounds,” knives with gold mountings, quivers and bows and armor “weighing more than six hundred pounds.”

You have to wonder if there were ever any Sumerian or Babylonian fundamentalists who took these details literally – and if there were any Sumero-Babylonian literature teachers who countered them with the question we ask of our own variety of literalist today: “Can you say hyperbole?”

1. This series based on the fine 2004 Stephen Mitchell adaptation of Gilgamesh. [↩]
2. Since the Gilgamesh court poets polished this epic over 15 centuries, I lean toward “intentional.” [↩]
3. which in this case hews close to the original [↩]

More and more I wonder: is school a good place for teachers who want to make a difference in the lives of their students, and to the future of the world? Is there a way to leave the daily farce of gradebooks, attendance sheets, tests, corporate and nationalist curriculum, homework assignments, grade-licking college careerist “students” (and parents), fear of parents and administrators, and fear of inconvenient socio-political truths – and at the same time, to make a far more meaningful impact on the lives of the young?

I’m thinking yes. I’m thinking, moreover, obviously. I’m not sure how much longer I want to work for schools. I’d so much rather teach.

Did you ever notice that we have no holidays in which we revere history’s true – in the sense of “backed up with evidence” – miracle-workers, those hard-working saviors we call “scientists”?

Think about it: scientists, through the “miracle” of human reason, have eradicated diseases for literally billions of people through medicine, created light and warmth in winter through electricity, bread for the hungry through improved agriculture, knowledge of “the heavens” through astronomy, knowledge of creation and generation through biology and genetics. They’ve literally given man the “miraculous” power to fly around the earth and to the stars; to speak face-to-face from opposite ends of the earth (and from the moon); they’re close to creating life itself, and have already created a doubled average lifespan for all of us in a mere century.

Why we don’t give thanks at Temples of Science, and donate our tithes there to promote more Good Works, is a question for future historians – if our future is not cut short by nuclear- or bioweapon-armed religious fanatics in the name of one authoritarian book or another (and it’s funny that Buddhists, of all world religions I’m aware of, are the only ones not to claim knowledge of any god at all, and also the only ones not to be engaged in violence in the name of their creed). Why we take our children to hospitals when they’re sick – we used to take them to priests – but turn around and attack the teachings of science in our schools….this saddens and frustrates me to no end.

As a history teacher and humanist, as a simple human amazed at the changes over time in human history – women’s liberation, civil rights, the triumph of modern science and reason over medieval and Iron Age ignorance, and so forth – I’m keenly interested in the rise of the “new atheists” in Western culture (again, “atheism” makes no sense in Buddhist, Taoist, and Confucian Asia, since it was never “theist” to begin with). Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and others have led a fascinating movement to challenge one of the last unreasoned taboos – the desirability of religion in modern civilization.

Yesterday, I was reading the Science Blogs in my Bloglines, and came across a post that had the following 2-hour “coffee klatsch” conversation of four of the earth’s leading contemporary “heretics” (in Latin, this simply means “ones who choose”) and champions of science. While I’ve seen them all featured in the media in one place or another, it has usually been in situations in which they argued their positions from an editorial soapbox, or else engaged in a somewhat sensationalistic debate with a proponent of one faith or another.

In the videos below, though, things are remarkably different: they’re among friends and fellow-travelers. No name-calling, no thumping of Darwin or Moses here. Instead, they unwind into a wonderfully intelligent discussion of their motives for attacking superstition, their fears of its untrammeled progress in the future, their frustrations at our culture’s ignorance of the basic principles of science and scientific “knowledge” and “truth” and, perhaps most remarkably, their own misgivings about both what they are doing, and how they are doing it.

In this setting, we see different sides of these men. Richard Dawkins, author of the best-selling The God Delusion, who has often seemed peevish and combative in discussions with such religious leaders as the fallen “cocaine-with-male-prostitutes” megachurch preacher and Bush-adviser Ted Haggard (here) (and to be fair, Haggard castigated Dawkins with all the self-righteousness of the best of our American Elmer Gantry’s) and with a Jewish convert to Islam in Jerusalem (here), emerges in the videos below a much milder, more humble and likable man.

Similarly, Sam Harris, whose The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason is a masterpiece of style and rhetoric in its arguments against religion, but at the same time threatens to alienate the very audience it hopes to reach through that very force, poses in the talks below some exquisite questions about these rationalists’ own assumptions of their “righteousness.” It’s scientific humility in action, and at its best. (Harris gave a brilliant speech in 2005 at Canada’s version of TED Talks, “Idea City,” here, but thankfully seems since then to have reconsidered the efficacy of calling religion “bullsh*t,” as he does in an ill-advised moment at the end of this speech.)

Daniel Dennett is Professor of Cognitive Studies at Tufts, author, and a staff writer of my favorite intellectual science-and-culture blog, The Edge, (don’t miss his “Thank Goodness” post for a beautiful paean to the good works of scientists worldwide working together for a universal good, rather than against each other for a tribal one. Dennett wrote it after surviving

a nine-hour surgery, in which [his] heart was stopped entirely and [his] body and brain were chilled down to about 45 degrees to prevent brain damage from lack of oxygen until they could get the heart-lung machine pumping

–and it is a truly beautiful, inspiring piece of writing from a man recently back from the final precipice.) Dennett comes off as warm and civil as his Santa-white beard suggests he should (and I just discovered he gives three TED Talks here).

Finally, Christopher Hitchens, author and staff writer at Vanity Fair, contributes his own spice to the mix. He frankly annoys me by dominating so much of the conversation, ignoring others’ attempts to weigh in, and otherwise showing a lack of social intelligence. But his discussion of the fateful event which Hannukah celebrates, and his argument that it was actually an unparalleled disaster for the future of civilization, was one of the high moments, intellectually, for this history buff’s experience of the film. It’s in the last ten minutes or so of the second video.

Before embedding the videos, I’ll add the following caveat: as an educator tasked with inspiring critical thinking abilities to the next generation, and as a person who simply stands up for advancing the Good as he sees it, I hope I don’t have to apologize to anyone for asking valid questions like this. I’ve said it before in these pages, and I’ll say it again: the problem with schools, generally, is they only practice critical thinking about safe subjects – and that’s an increasingly tragic oxymoron for our world.

I hope you’ll find a couple hours to be entertained by some sorely needed, very civil, conversation about one of the chief questions in our shared historical moment.

Hour One:

[googlevideo]http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-869630813464694890&hl=en[/googlevideo]

Hour Two:

[googlevideo]http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-225595257312538919&hl=en[/googlevideo]

Best holiday wishes to you all, by the way. You’ve enriched my life (with the aid of this scientific miracle called the read-write web) over the past year in ways for which I am truly thankful.

Scott McLeod from Dangerously Irrelevant tagged me with this interesting meme, so here are the rules, followed by the last five educational podcasts I listened to and/or watched:

Meme guidelines

1. Choose five of your favorite education podcasts. Any kind of education podcast is okay – students, teachers, administrators, professors, etc. – feel free to pick ones that you’ve made yourself! Try and pick specific podcasts, not podcast feeds.
2. Tag others for the meme. Feel free to participate even if you haven’t been ‘tagged.’
3. Please use a Technorati tag of educationpodcast or podcasteducation.
4. Please add your selections to the Moving Forward podcasts wiki page (and create categories as needed) so that others can benefit too!

My Last Five Podcasts or Videopodcasts:
1. David Warlick’s K12 Online Preconference Keynote, 2007: More on that in a later post, as a follow-up to this immediate take-aways post (just a k12 chatroom copy-paste) from a few days ago. You can also read the conversation about the keynote in the comments to the K12 page linked above.

2. David Warlick’s K12 Online Keynote, 2006: I loved watching last year’s keynote right before watching this year’s. I’m so new to the edublogosphere (only 10 months old), I didn’t know about last year’s event. Doesn’t matter: I went back in time 12 months and caught myself up on the K12 website.

3. Jessica Yun’s “audiobook” of “Roots,” her published 1001 Flat World Tales story: (from last year’s first edition – more to come from new schools and writers at the end of this school year, and every school year following). Jessica was 15 when she wrote this story, and podcasted it. She tells her stories as well as she writes them. Watch out for this one – she’s got a future as a writer, if she wants it. (And check out her blog, and tell her to get back to writing. Actually, she won’t have a choice: we’re launching our re-tooled schoolwide student blogging program in two weeks.)

4. Wesley Fryer interviewing Scott McLeod: Podcast 151: Dr. Scott McLeod on Administrator Idea-Sharing on Blogs, [etc], and Educating Others for the Transition to 21st Century Schools: on school 2.0 and school administrators 1.0: I sent this one to my admin. Wonder if they listened to it. Interesting on many levels, from Scott’s perspective on ivory tower educator-leaders’ oblivion and/or resistance to the edublogosphere’s vibrant and up-to-date discourse, to Scott’s own thoughts about the growing – but by no means new – irrelevance and inconsequentiality of much peer-reviewed academic publishing. (Lucky you, Scott: I’m not making this up. A free plug )

5. Robert Green Ingersoll: “Improved Man”: (Ingersoll podcasts channel on iTunes): Ingersoll was a late 19th century secular humanist – a better word than that strange “atheist” word (am I also an “a-horoscopist”?) who wrote powerfully and elegantly about all the ways in which religion is most often a tragically misguided attempt to “be and do good.” It’s frustrating to think that America and much of the rest of the world have only gone backwards in their heroic “March into the Middle Ages” since Ingersoll wrote his passionate, erudite, and “radically sane” critiques and visions a century and a quarter ago. Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Friedrich Nietzsche readers really should subscribe to these podcasts. My favorite educational quote from Ingersoll:

“Schools should be today’s churches, and teachers, today’s preachers.”

He wrote this around 1890, and today I’m watching America’s Intelligent Design proponents attempting to expand their virulent attacks on science and reason around the globe – including here in Korean international schools. So I can’t say I’m hopeful about the future of reason in education. It seems America – the majority of its people and its disastrous political leadership – is intent on praying for an end to Global Warming (or indifferent to it, since heaven is the real world anyway), while at the same time continuing to ignore or attack science – and good, hardworking, life-saving, true miracle-working scientists.

It’s not easy, and certainly not fun, risking alienating my religious readers out there. But a commitment to science, enlightenment, education, and the fate of our planet make me feel it’s a duty. As a former Baptist and lifelong student of religious texts and religious history (see my LibraryThing widget in sidebar), I feel more qualified than most to confidently take on that duty. I’m just trying to do good by my own lights, not tradition’s.

More on Ingersoll from James Carr’s Ingersoll Podcasts page on Podcast Directory – a magnificent resource, with dozens of Ingersoll’s works, which Carr delivers with sterling quality:

Robert Green Ingersoll was an eloquent spokesman for free thinking, reason, and science in 19th century America. His intelligence, logic, humor, and clear thinking still speaks to us today. This podcast will include readings from his speeches and writings. Robert Ingersoll has an important place in American history, although, due to the weakness and politicization of our educational system, most of us have never heard of him. [emphasis added]

I tag (and apologize to, if inopportune):

Darren Kuropatwa (nice to talk to Darren for the first time in Warlick’s Fireside Chat)
Stephen Downes
Wesley Fryer
Will Richardson
Kim Cofino
Vicki Davis
Clarence Fisher
Doug Noon
Graham Wegner

Scott, this meme is a good idea. I’ll be checking out that wiki for human-filtered podcasts by the minds I admire the most. Thanks for the opportunity.

Technorati Tags: educationpodcast, podcasteducation, k12online, k12online07

“See, Hear, Speak No Evil” by AndyRamdin on Flickr

[Update: This post is extends a critique of my own teaching, and typical schooling in general, that I wrote last week in "I'm Nobody. Goodbye to All of That." Makes sense to start there, if you haven't read it already.]

I have a headache and a neck-and-shoulder ache, but we all know how thoughts wing away if we don’t snare them on take-off. This might be clumsy, but here goes.

I think I’m figuring out a way to make school more relevant – at least in my classroom. And how to liberate the young adults in my high school classroom from the diapers the classroom makes these infantilized physics-, calculus-, and Shakespeare-capable young adults wear and, worse yet, find natural, in the first place. I think I’m figuring out a way to give them the initiation into the world of adult citizenship, adult community, adult participation, adult empowerment, which they wish I’d invite them to enter.

You remember how angry you were, when you were in high school, to be treated like a kid by the adults, don’t you? How you knew you were capable of more than the adults allowed you to show? I think I’m figuring out how to stop being one of those adults myself, now. And how to stop being one of those teachers.

It occurs to me that this should be easy for a high school language arts teacher who has managed one Big Project – albeit it an ultimately trivial one – on web 2.0. I’ve already written about that, and have students in Seoul actually acting on it, with the year-long Global Cooling Project. That’s step one: re-design my fay little web 2.0 student showcase from the merry-go-round blue-print of last year – gee, kiddies, isn’t this fun? – to something modeled after the real-world campaigns in the adult world. Need examples? Check out the presidential campaigns in the US using YouTube, check out Live Earth’s website and its actions, praise goodness, beyond the “producing informational products” fetish of the current stage of our “school 2.0″ visionaries (that’s not aimed at you, Will). As if going from text only verbiage to multimedia verbiage is going to change anything.

Going back to Suzie Boss and the WorldChanging.com article, and back to the talismanic power the tagline of her forthcoming book holds on me now – “Real World Project-Based Learning in the Digital Age” – it’s clear that the notion of school should evaporate as much as possible when designing projects for my young adults. John Edwards, Barack Obama, Hillary, Giuliani, even Bush (if he ever learns to email and use “The Google”), Gore, Micheal Moore: all these adults use the media and the read-write web to “produce informational constructions of meaning” (as we so clumsily put it) for real world, relevant, important purposes. And here’s the rub: these world-changing adults are all still “learners” engaged in their own, adult, versions of “real world project-based learning.” It’s not like web 2.0 is old hat to them, either. You can bet your last dollar they’re learning up a storm on a minute-by-minute basis in all these campaigns.

Again, the difference: they’re applying that learning with a real-world purpose that can produce real-world change, for problems that matter. In school, our projects are usually lacking that vital element. Again, they’re just nice little diversions that for some tragically unfathomable reason we, as teachers, generally cannot think beyond. (Maybe it’s very fathomable, this shackling force. Maybe it’s simply fear of parents, administrators, community leaders, or the fear of being uncommon generally – though why trying to make engaged citizens out of young adults is a controversial issue among educators, of all people, is indeed tragic.)

So: the problem with me, as a teacher, is that I design units that don’t address anything important. I’ve been trained to think that my job is to stuff the headpieces of the next generation with such irrelevant things as the definition of litotes and onomatopoeia, to write cute little stories about nothing, to know Stratford-upon-Avon. To be able, paradoxically, to think critically about safe subjects. And above all, not to think about anything that might, god forbid, rankle the status quo. And let’s not even start to think about taking any sort of action.

Again, so: As soon as I stop thinking like a teacher, designing units derived from an institutional culture that defines me as a teacher, and subconsciously makes me far more traditional in my teaching than my progressively-posing ego likes to acknowledge….as soon as I re-define myself as a community leader – as that once-upon-a-time American thing called a citizen – instead, maybe the young adults of my community might have an opportunity to learn how to function in the world they’ll inherit from and manage for us all-too-soon.

I know. Wordy. I have a headache. I’ll move on.

The task of last year’s 1001 Flat World Tales “project”? (For those of you who don’t know it, it actually managed to get over a dozen schools from four or five continents writing together on a wiki in self-contained k-12 collaborative workshops, though some of those workshops crashed and burned. The one my students participated in with Arapahoe¹ and Honolulu made it to the end of the two-month unit.) That task was something like, “Write a story that reveals your local culture for readers from other cultures.”

Cindy Barnsley, who worked on the project in Australia (with Shanghai and Serbia – it crashed, but not without lessons learned, so it wasn’t a failure), has taken me to task for damning my own baby, and she’s partly justified. The conceptual objective of the project was a more conscious, more critical, understanding of the students’ own, and their global peers’ “Other,” cultures. The skills? To use process writing coupled with the 6 Traits of Effective Writing to refine those writing skills, giving and receiving peer feedback from across the globe.

I’m not saying it’s garbage, Cindy. I’m saying that, when all is said and done, and all that energy in bringing together, in my workshop alone, 130 students from the Korean peninsula, the mid-Pacific Ocean, and the Rocky Mountains – when all that energy has been expended, what’s the result? Students have written a story for their English class. And it’s been published in a little e-Book (sorry, but I still think it’s true in the grand scheme of things, though I loved some of the writing that happened there).

Couldn’t that immense amount of energy have been expended on something more consequential?

Yes. And how it could, by the way, is the idea that spurred me to sit down and write this post now. Here’s how:

Real-world literature - the great works we tame in our classrooms – invariably consists of precisely the critical thinking and literacy skills we aimed to develop in the 1001 Tales. But that project was fatally flawed by it’s lack of real-world literature’s concomitant element: a social problem worth criticizing.

“Reveal your culture” is so pathetically fay and schooly by that standard.

These young adults are screaming their critical attitude toward the roles we’ve limited them to in our culture in everything they do, from their attitudes to their music, fashions, and past-times. They live in passive revolt against what schools, parents, communities at large are doing to them. And having no constructive outlet, they either self-destruct or seek solace in the trivial.

So why not let them write about that?

A bit more: They’re also woefully oblivious to the burning issues of their futures (and that pun, though pregnant, was not intended). Doug has commented about the fear in (American) schools of teaching anything controversial, god help us (and this does not mean Doug’s complicit in that). That’s a screaming admission that schools fear relevance.

The logical corollary? Fear makes schools irrelevant.

Etymology time: “Educate” – “to lead out.” If we’re afraid, as educators, to lead our students “out” to anything important in the real world, what exactly are we doing? I mean, besides paying the bills and perpetuating worldly ignorance?

So back to those “burning issues”: Diane got me thinking about the need for educators to serve as “futurist guides” to remedy the “soft news diet” of mainstream media and community ignorance of what scientists of all stripes, social as well as natural, are unable to get us to notice. (Another etymology check: “science” – “knowledge”; one hopes schools would defend science, especially in the anti-scientific US, against its detractors, but I’m not seeing it. I’m seeing more cowed, fearful, silent educators.)

Again: “Our past is not their future.” If the international community of scientists is dismissed as crank Cassandras by the Bush administration, by fundamentalist churches, and by all the followers in our communities of the information campaigns so powerfully managed by both of those camps, how do our children stand a chance of meeting future challenges if we’re afraid to talk about them? We’re like the current Democratic congress: we have the power, but we fail our constituents by fearing to wield it for the best interests, scientifically-grounded, of that community and of the globe.

So instead of a writing project that limits students to expressing what they already know too well – that they’re subtly ticked off and passively rebellious over their infantilization and the irrelevance of schools – why can’t we, as “futurist guides,” “lead them out” to questions posed by science about their futures?

That’s another “problem worth criticizing via literature.” Students around the globe comparing artfully-crafted, critically-observed notes in story form of the “consensus trance” of their local community as it trashes their futures with nary a thought. Students being encouraged to authentically express whatever satirical, lyrical, tragic, comic, or utopian variation on this theme suits them. Or to challenge the premise. This is not indoctrination, but “teaching the controversy,” as Doug so sharply frames it.

Or are we so afraid to educate (instead of merely teach) that we can’t even ask open questions like: “Is global warming a problem?”

If so, isn’t school kind of like studying for the SAT on the deck of the Titanic – post-iceburg?

Parting shot. On July 9, I mentioned in my little “personal commencement” post, which announced my graduation from the web 2.0 church and conversion to the church of relevance, that one of my new goals is to become “less of a teacher and more of a community leader, and to expand my relationship with the young adults in my community beyond the 9-month term.” Something like that, anyway.

One of the things that has disturbed me in that respect is this: I’ve had expressions of interest from surely more than 30 adults about the “Year of Global Cooling” and “Concerts for Global Chilling” project targeted to culminate, “flat world community service” style, on Earth Day of next year. I’m literate enough in the science to think it’s worth continuing to “flog” this idea on this blog, as Jeff Wasserman so pricelessly (and accurately) put it. I’m trying to be the change I want to see, and I insist that the time to get young adults involved in starting the “real-world project-based learning” so historically relevant to their futures is now, in the summer – before school swallows them back into homework and SAT-world for nine fallow months beginning soon. These young adults are free right now to be relevant. And if I’m right, some of them would like the opportunity to be invited into that relevance and treated like they could have some fun doing something good.

So here’s what’s bothering me: If 30 educators have expressed interest and even joined the project Ning, but only one has managed to produce a single young adult – while over 20 students here in Seoul are working on it, during summer, with no grades involved – does that indicate something troublesome about our relationships, as youth leaders (we are youth leaders, like it or not), with our youth? And is that troubling thing possibly rooted in some strange perversion of adult-youth community relations caused by the fact that schools make teachers “want vacations from the kids” because . . . beyond assigning them work, disciplining them, and branding them with grades, we don’t have human relationships to them?

I fear the answer is too often yes. If not, why are no world youths being told about this by their educators during the summer? Is it that hard to pass an email invitation to a few young adults in our communities, when we spend nine months a year with them? What’s going on there?

Finally: Cindy Barnsley’s blog has a great conversation going right now about “dissenting voices” and the need for them. (See cocomments in the sidebar too.) I hope it goes without saying that I shouldn’t have to apologize for any statements critical of the status quo. I’m here to field comments and learn from those that teach me. (And Dana, did this help you understand what I’m getting at?)

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Photo 2: “The Ghosts of No Evil” by lindes on Flickr.
Photo 3: “See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil” by Auntie P on Flickr.
Photo 4: “Fear Squared” by seetwist on Flickr.
Photo 5: “Fear Limited Edition Tee” by spcoon on Flickr.

1. Denver [↩]

Charley Tart on Consensus Trance: Wake up!

• Interesting challenge to conventional notions of “conscious thought” as, instead, “consensus trance.” From the intro, a clip relevant to the Global Cooling campaign:

  The relationship between the use of language and the induction of trance states might be one of the keys to understanding life in the last years of the technology millenium. What if we’re all in a trance, and have been given hypnotic suggestions to ignore the evidence that we are in a trance? As we stumble around, bedazzled, enormous machines eat the earth. How would we treat people who try to tell us that we need to wake up?
  – post by cburell

Sam Harris and Andrew Sullivan on Faith, Religion, Tolerance, Moderates, Bible, God, Islam, Atheism, Jesus, Christian Nation — Beliefnet.com

• Interesting dialogue between two thinking (and opposing) individuals on the validity of ancient religion in the modern world.
  – post by cburell

Unknown News | Lies from the Bush-Cheney administration

• Partisan? Yes. But also supported by documentary evidence. Could be a resource for Animal Farm, etc. Squealer doesn’t only symbolize Stalinist distorters of the truth, after all.–Clay
  

Political News, Blogs, Humor featuring Republicans, Democrats, Independents and More

• For social studies and contemporary issues teachers looking for a site representing a wide spectrum of positions on US political issues. I can see students using Scenemaker to clip segments from the videos on this site for “quotes” in essays they write about contemporary political issues.Useful for teachers who find one-stop shopping for balancing viewpoints a hassle.
  –Clay
  

Nag Hammadi Library

• It’s hard to overstate the importance of the Nag Hammadi Library for an understanding of the many interpretations of Jesus and Christianity before the Roman Catholic Church–and Imperial Roman police–violently destroyed them. Many of these original Christian texts bear more resemblance to Buddhism than to contemporary Christian belief.

  This website has translations of the early Christian texts that were buried in the 4th Century CE to preserve them from the destruction of the first great book-burning in European history. Essential for religious studies, European history, and informed religious discourse today.

  From the website:

• The Nag Hammadi Library, a collection of thirteen ancient codices containing over fifty texts, was discovered in upper Egypt in 1945. This immensely important discovery includes a large number of primary Gnostic scriptures — texts once thought to have been entirely destroyed during the early Christian struggle to define “orthodoxy” – scriptures such as the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Philip, and the Gospel of Truth.

  The discovery and translation of the Nag Hammadi
  library, completed in the 1970’s, has provided impetus to a major re-evaluation of early Christian history and the nature of Gnosticism. Readers unfamiliar with this history may wish to review the brief Introduction to Gnosticism and the Nag Hammadi Library provided here, as well as an excerpt from Elaine Pagels’ excellent popular introduction to the Nag Hammadi texts, The Gnostic Gospels.