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It is a little over year since the New York Times film critic A.O. Scott praised the movie "Hannah Arendt" for answering a "hunger for engagement with the life of an extraordinary mind." "Arendt," Scott wrote, "was a writer of long books and a maker of complex arguments." She was possessed with the "glamour, charisma and difficulty of a certain kind of German thought." The only problem with the movie by Margarethe von Trotta, Scott suggested, was that it wasn't long enough. He clearly relished the existence of a serious movie for adults, one that was also engaging and watchable. Continue reading
Amor Mundi 2/16/14
Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.
Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.
According to Rich Lowry and Ramesh Ponnuru, "The survival of American exceptionalism as we have known it is at the heart of the debate over Obama's program. It is why that debate is so charged." Mitt Romney repeated this same line during his failed bid to unseat the President, arguing that President Obama "doesn't have the same feelings about American exceptionalism that we do." American exceptionalism—long a sociological concept used to describe qualities that distinguished American cultural and political institutions—has become a political truncheon. Now comes Peter Beinart writing in the National Journal that the conservatives are half correct. It is true that American exceptionalism is threatened and in decline. But the cause is not President Obama. Beinart argues that the real cause of the decline of exceptionalist feeling in the United States is conservatism itself. Here is Beinart on one way the current younger generation is an exception to the tradition of American exceptionalism: "For centuries, observers have seen America as an exception to the European assumption that modernity brings secularism. "There is no country in the world where the Christian religion retains a greater influence over the souls of men than in America," de Tocqueville wrote. In his 1996 book, American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword, Seymour Martin Lipset quoted Karl Marx as calling America "preeminently the country of religiosity," and then argued that Marx was still correct. America, wrote Lipset, remained "the most religious country in Christendom." But in important ways, the exceptional American religiosity that Gingrich wants to defend is an artifact of the past. The share of Americans who refuse any religious affiliation has risen from one in 20 in 1972 to one in five today. Among Americans under 30, it's one in three. According to the Pew Research Center, millennials—Americans born after 1980—are more than 30 percentage points less likely than seniors to say that "religious faith and values are very important to America's success." And young Americans don't merely attend church far less frequently than their elders. They also attend far less than young people did in the past. "Americans," Pew notes, "do not generally become more [religiously] affiliated as they move through the life cycle"—which means it's unlikely that America's decline in religious affiliation will reverse itself simply as millennials age. In 1970, according to the World Religion Database, Europeans were over 16 percentage points more likely than Americans to eschew any religious identification. By 2010, the gap was less than half of 1 percentage point. According to Pew, while Americans are today more likely to affirm a religious affiliation than people in Germany or France, they are actually less likely to do so than Italians and Danes." Read more on Beinart and American exceptionalism in the Weekend Read.
In this interview, Kevin Kelly, one of the founders of Wired magazine, explains his concept of the "technium," or the whole system of technology that has developed over time and which, he argues, has its own biases and tendencies "inherently outside of what humans like us want." One thing technology wants is to watch us and to track us. Kelly writes: "How can we have a world in which we are all watching each other, and everybody feels happy? I don't see any counter force to the forces of surveillance and self-tracking, so I'm trying to listen to what the technology wants, and the technology is suggesting that it wants to be watched. What the Internet does is track, just like what the Internet does is to copy, and you can't stop copying. You have to go with the copies flowing, and I think the same thing about this technology. It's suggesting that it wants to monitor, it wants to track, and that you really can't stop the tracking. So maybe what we have to do is work with this tracking—try to bring symmetry or have areas where there's no tracking in a temporary basis. I don't know, but this is the question I'm asking myself: how are we going to live in a world of ubiquitous tracking?" Asking such questions is where humans fit into the technium world. "In a certain sense," he says, "what becomes really valuable in a world running under Google's reign are great questions, and that's something that for a long time humans will be better at than machines. Machines are for answers; humans are for questions."
Literature Against Consumer Culture
Taking issue with a commentator's claim that The Paris Review's use of the word "crepuscular" (adj., resembling twilight) was elitist, Eleanor Catton suggests that the anti-critical attitude of contemporary readers arises out of consumer culture: "The reader who is outraged by being "forced" to look up an unfamiliar word — characterising the writer as a tyrant, a torturer — is a consumer outraged by inconvenience and false advertising. Advertising relies on the fiction that the personal happiness of the consumer is valued above all other things; we are reassured in every way imaginable that we, the customers, are always right." Literature, she says, resists this attitude, and, in fact cannot be elitist at all: "A book cannot be selective of its readership; nor can it insist upon the conditions under which it is read or received. The degree to which a book is successful depends only on the degree to which it is loved. All a starred review amounts to is an expression of brand loyalty, an assertion of personal preference for one brand of literature above another. It is as hopelessly beside the point as giving four stars to your mother, three stars to your childhood, or two stars to your cat."
Vladislav Inozemtsev reviews Laurence Cockcroft's book Global Corruption. "The book's central argument is that corruption has political roots, which Cockcroft identifies as the "merging of elites." Surveying the mechanisms of top-level decision-making from Russia to Brazil, to Peru and India, as well as in many other countries, he discerns a pattern: Politicians today often act as entrepreneurs, surround themselves with sycophants and deputies, and so navigate the entire political process as they would any commercial business. The hallmarks of a corrupt society are the widespread leveraging of wealth to secure public office; the leveraging of such authority to secure various kinds of privileges; and the interplay of both to make even bigger money. Simply put, corruption is a transformation of public service into a specific kind of entrepreneurship."
George Packer takes a look at Amazon's role in the book business noting that its founder, Jeff Bezos, knew from the start that book sales were only the lure; Amazon's real business was Big Data, a big deal in an industry that speaks to people's hearts and minds as well as their wallets. Still, "Amazon remains intimately tangled up in books. Few notice if Amazon prices an electronics store out of business (except its staff); but, in the influential, self-conscious world of people who care about reading, Amazon's unparalleled power generates endless discussion, along with paranoia, resentment, confusion, and yearning. For its part, Amazon continues to expend considerable effort both to dominate this small, fragile market and to win the hearts and minds of readers. To many book professionals, Amazon is a ruthless predator. The company claims to want a more literate world—and it came along when the book world was in distress, offering a vital new source of sales. But then it started asking a lot of personal questions, and it created dependency and harshly exploited its leverage; eventually, the book world realized that Amazon had its house keys and its bank-account number, and wondered if that had been the intention all along."
Ta-Nehisi Coates, in the wake of NFL prospect Michael Sam's announcement that he is gay, considers how the concept of readiness is backwards: "The question which we so often have been offered—is the NFL ready for a gay player?—is backwards. Powerful interests are rarely "ready" for change, so much as they are assaulted by it. We refer to barriers being "broken" for a reason. The reason is not because great powers generally like to unbar the gates and hold a picnic in the honor of the previously excluded. The NFL has no moral right to be "ready" for a gay player, which is to say it has no right to discriminate against gay men at its leisure which anyone is bound to respect."
This week, the magazine Jacobin released Class Action, a handbook for activist teachers, set against school reform and financed using the Kickstarter crowdfunding platform. One of the many essays contained within is Dean Baker's "Unremedial Education," which contains one of the handbook's major theses, an important reminder for those who are interested in education as a route to both the life of the mind and the success of the person: "Education is tremendously valuable for reasons unrelated to work and income. Literacy, basic numeracy skills, and critical thinking are an essential part of a fulfilling life. Insofar as we have children going through school without developing these skills, it is an enormous failing of society. Any just society would place a top priority on ensuring that all children learn such basic skills before leaving school. However, it clearly is not the case that plausible increases in education quality and attainment will have a substantial impact on inequality."
From the Hannah Arendt Center Blog
This week on the blog, Roger Berkowitz asks "Why Think?". And in the Weekend Read, Berkowitz reflects on the loss of American exceptionalism.
Amor Mundi 9/15/13
Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.
Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.
In the Weekend Read on Friday, Roger Berkowitz shows how Arendt's essay "The Crisis in Education" can help make sense of the debate about MOOCs. While MOOCs can be valuable, we need to distinguish the practice of education from the business of knowledge dissemination. "At the same time, however, there is a second aspect of education that seeks to afford the child "special protection and care so that nothing destructive may happen to him from the world." The teacher must nurture the independence and newness of each child, what "we generally call the free development of characteristic qualities and talents… the uniqueness that distinguishes every human being from every other." The teacher must not simply love the world, but as part of the world in which we live, the teacher must also love the fact—and it is a fact—that the world will change and be transformed by new ideas and new people. Education must love this transformative nature of children, and we must "love our children enough" so that we do not "strike from their hands their chance of undertaking something new, something unforeseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world." Alongside its conservationist role, education also must be revolutionary in the sense that it prepares students to strike out and create something altogether new."
The Public Need Strong Private Lives
Emma Green considers a recent study that suggests that widows and widowers are less likely to vote than others in their respective demographics. In so doing, she provokes us to reflect on Hannah Arendt's insistence that an engaged public sphere depends upon a vibrant private realm. Green concludes: If "public life seems less important when private life collapses, then it's also worth looking at the inverse: Do strong relationships and stable private lives make people better citizens? It's well established that people who are married vote more than those who are not, said the authors, and this study provides evidence that this isn't a coincidence of age or stage of life — influence from a spouse is part of the reason people vote." Green shows that the crisis of the educated citizen—which is the topic of the Hannah Arendt Center's Oct. 3-4 Conference at Bard College—flows at least in part from a related diminishment of private life.
"Over the Abyss in Rye." That is the traditional title of The Catcher in the Rye in Russian. Reed Johnson writes that the Communist "Party authorized the novel's translation believing that it exposed the rotting core of American capitalism." In the New Yorker, Johnson explores the outrage caused by Max Nemtsov's new translation of The Catcher in the Rye into Russian. Nemstov's title, "Catcher on a Grain Field" begins with this first paragraph: "If you're truly up for listening, for starters you'll probably want me to dish up where I was born and what sort of crap went down in my childhood, what the 'rents did and some such stuff before they had me, and other David Copperfield bullshit, except blabbing about all that doesn't get me stoked, to tell you the truth." According to Johnson, "Nemtsov employs a mélange of English-language calques, Russian provincial speech, neologisms, slang originating in Soviet prison camps, and contemporary hipsterish lingo. The mixture of unconventional speech is deliberate: advocates of foreignizing like to claim that such "marginalized" language, through a bizarre sort of syllogism, best represents the absolute difference of the foreign original. In other words, the Soviet prison slang in Nemtsov's translation is actually meant to stand in for the original's foreignness—its Americanness—for the Russian reader."
The rise of the MOOC has forced college Professors to defend themselves against the charge that computers can do their jobs better than they can. Now, on the other side, a study at Northwestern concludes that lowly-paid adjuncts are more effective teachers than their highly-paid senior colleagues with tenure. "There are many aspects relating to changes in the tenure status of faculty – from the impact on research productivity to the protection of academic freedom," the study says. "But certainly learning outcomes are an important consideration in evaluating whether the observed trend away from tenure track/tenured towards non-tenure line faculty is good or bad. Our results provide evidence that the rise of full-time designated teachers at U.S. colleges and universities may be less of a cause for alarm than some people think, and indeed, may actually be educationally beneficial. Perhaps the growing practice of hiring a combination of research-intensive tenure track faculty members and teaching-intensive lecturers may be an efficient and educationally positive solution to a research university's multi-tasking problem," says the paper." The trend to "full-time designated teachers," in the turgid prose of this study, furthers the overarching trend of turning college education into high school education, with standardized tests, learning goals, and unending assessments. Anyone who cares about the life of the mind should be worried; but the culprit is the professoriate themselves, who continues to defend the status quo of jargon-filled research and overly-specialized teaching. If we don't return universities to sites of intellectual fervent, the bureaucratic reformers will turn them into glorified high schools.
Annalia 1933
A Three Day Festival at FDR Library & Bard College
Learn more here.
The sixth annual fall conference, "Failing Fast:The Educated Citizen in Crisis"
Olin Hall, Bard College
Learn more here.
Hannah Arendt: A Film Screening, Lecture, and Discussion with Roger Berkowitz
One Day University
Learn more here.
John LeJeune gives us the Arendt quote of the week and considers the place of language education in the education of the citizen. Roger Berkowitz shows how Arendt's essay "The Crisis in Education" can help make sense of the debate about MOOCs.
Juvenile U
At Duke University and the University of North Carolina, two highly popular professors have transformed their course Think Again: How to Reason and Argue into a Massive Online Open Course (MOOC) that is taken by 170,000 people from all over the world at one time. This is old news. There is nothing to worry about when hundreds of thousands of people around the world watch flashy lectures by top professors on how to think and argue. Better such diversions than playing Temple Run. There are advantages and benefits from MOOCs and other forms of computer learning. And we should not run scared from MOOCs.
But the alacrity with which universities are adopting MOOCs as a way of cutting costs and marketing themselves as international brands harbors a danger too. The danger is not that more people will watch MOOCs or that MOOCs might be used to convey basic knowledge inside or outside of universities. No, the real danger in MOOCs is that watching a professor on your Ipad becomes confused with education.
You know elite universities are in trouble when their professors say things like Edward Rock. Rock, Distinguished Professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and coordinator of Penn's online education program, has this to say about the impending revolution in online education:
We're in the business of creating and disseminating knowledge. And in 2012, the internet is an incredibly important place to be present if you're in the knowledge dissemination business.
If elite colleges are in the knowledge dissemination business, then they will over time be increasingly devalued and made less relevant. There is no reason that computers or televisions can't convey knowledge as well or even better than humans. Insofar as professors and colleges imagine themselves to be in the "business of creating and disseminating knowledge," they will be replaced by computers. And it will be their own fault.
The rising popularity of MOOCs must be understood not as a product of new technology, but as a response to the failure of our universities. As Scott Newstock has argued, the basic principle behind MOOCs is hardly new. Newstock quotes one prominent expert who argues that the average distance learner "knows more of the subject, and knows it better, than the student who has covered the same ground in the classroom." Indeed, "the day is coming when the work done [via distance learning] will be greater in amount than that done in the class-rooms of our colleges." What you might not expect is that this prediction was made in 1885. "The commentator quoted above was Yale classicist (and future University of Chicago President) William Rainey Harper, evaluating correspondence courses." What Newstock's provocation shows is that efforts to replace education with knowledge dissemination have been around for centuries. But they have failed, at least until now.
MOOCs are so popular today because of the sadly poor quality of much—but certainly not all—college and university education. Around the country there are cavernous lecture halls filled with many hundreds of students. A lone professor stands up front, often with a PowerPoint presentation in a darkened room. Students have their computers open. Some are taking notes, but many are checking Facebook or surfing the Internet. Some are asleep. And others did not bother to show up, since the professor has posted his or her lecture notes online so that students can just read them instead of making the effort to make it to class. Such lectures may be half-decent ways to disseminate knowledge. Some lectures are better than others. But not much learning goes on in such lectures that can't be simply replicated more efficiently and maybe even better on a computer. It is in this context that advocates of MOOCs are correct. When one compares a large lecture course with a well-designed online course, it may very well be that the online course is a superior educational venture. That it is cheaper too makes the advance of MOOCs seemingly inevitable.
As I have written here before, the best argument for MOOCs is that they may finally put the large and impersonal college lecture course out of its misery. There is no reason to be nostalgic for the lecture course. It was never a very good idea. Aside from a few exceptional lecturers—in my world I can think of the reputations of Hegel, his student Eduard Gans, Martin Heidegger, and, of course, Hannah Arendt—college lectures are largely an economical way to allow masses of students to acquire basic introductory knowledge in a field. If the masses are now more massive and the lectures more accessible, I'll accept that as progress.
What this means is that there is an opportunity, at this moment, to embrace MOOCs as a disruptive force that will allow us to re-dedicate our universities and colleges to the practice of education as opposed to the business of knowledge dissemination. What colleges and universities need to offer is not simply knowledge, but education.
"Education," as Martin Luther King wrote, "must also train one for quick, resolute and effective thinking." Quick and resolute thinking requires that one "think incisively" and "think for one's self." This "is very difficult." The difficulty comes from the seduction of conformity and the power of prejudice. "We are prone to let our mental life become invaded by legions of half truths, prejudices, and propaganda." We are all educated into prejudgments. They are human and it is inhuman to live free from prejudicial opinions and thoughts. On the one hand, education is the way we are led into and brought into a world as it exists, with its prejudices and values. And yet, education must also produce self-thinking persons, people who, once they are educated and enter the world as adults, are capable of judging the world into which they been born. (I have written more about King's thoughts on education here).
In her essay "The Crisis in Education," Hannah Arendt writes that education must have a double aspect. First, education leads a new young person into an already existing world. The world is that which is there before the child was born and will continue to exist after the child dies. It is the common world of things, stories, and experiences in which all of us spend our lives. All children, as newcomers who are born into a world that is at first strange to them, must be led into the already existing world. They must be taught to speak a common language, respect common values, see the same facts, and hear the same stories. This common world is what Arendt calls the "truth… we cannot change; metaphorically, it is the ground on which we stand and the sky that stretches above us." In its first aspect, then, education must protect the world from "the onslaught of the new that bursts upon it with each new generation." This is the conservationist function of education: to conserve the common world against the rebelliousness of the new. And this is why Arendt writes, "Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it."
At the same time, however, there is a second aspect of education that seeks to afford the child "special protection and care so that nothing destructive may happen to him from the world." The teacher must nurture the independence and newness of each child, what "we generally call the free development of characteristic qualities and talents… the uniqueness that distinguishes every human being from every other." The teacher must not simply love the world, but as part of the world in which we live, the teacher must also love the fact—and it is a fact—that the world will change and be transformed by new ideas and new people. Education must love this transformative nature of children, and we must "love our children enough" so that we do not "strike from their hands their chance of undertaking something new, something unforeseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world." Alongside its conservationist role, education also must be revolutionary in the sense that it prepares students to strike out and create something altogether new.
Now is the time to use the disruption around MOOCs to rethink and re-invigorate our commitment to education and not simply to the dissemination of knowledge. This will not be easy.
A case in point is the same Duke University Course mentioned above, "Think Again: How to Reason and Argue." In a recent article by Michael Fitzgerald, the Professors— Walter Sinnott-Armstrong from Duke and Ram Neta of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill— describe how teaching their MOOC led them to radically re-conceive how they teach in physical university classrooms. Here is Fitzgerald:
"The big shift: far fewer in-class lectures. Students will watch the lectures on Coursera beginning Monday. "Class will become a time for activities and also teamwork," said Sinnott-Armstrong. He's devised exercises to help on-campus students engage with the concepts in the class, including a college bowl-like competition, a murder mystery night and a scavenger hunt, all to help students develop a deeper understanding of the material presented in the lectures. "You can have these fun activities in the classroom when you're not wasting the classroom time with the lectures," he said."
What we see here is that the mass appeal of MOOCs and their use as a way of replacing lectures is not being seized as an opportunity to make education more serious, but as an excuse to make college more fun. That professors at two of this country's elite universities see it as progress that classes are replaced by murder mystery games and scavenger hunts is evidence of a profound confusion between education and infotainment. I have no doubt that much can be learned through fun and games. Children learn through games and it makes all the sense in the world that Finland allows children in schools to play until they are seven or eight years old. Even in primary or at times in secondary school, simulations and games may be useful. But there is a limit. Education, at least higher education, is not simply fun and games in the pursuit of knowledge.
As Arendt understood, education requires that students be nurtured and allowed to grow into adults who think for themselves in a serious and engaged way about the world. This is one reason Arendt is so critical of reformist pedagogy that seeks to stimulate children—especially older children in secondary schools and even college—to learn through play. When we teach children a foreign language through games instead of through grammar or when we make them learn history by playing computer games instead of by reading and studying, we "keep the older child as far as possible at the infant level. The very thing that should prepare the child for the world of adults, the gradually acquired habit of work and of not-playing, is done away with in favor of the autonomy of the world of childhood." The same can be said of university courses that adopt the juvenile means of primary and secondary education.
The reasons for such a move to games in the classroom are many. Games are easy, students love them, and thus they fill massive classes, leading to superstar professors who can command supersized salaries. What is more, games work. You can learn a language through games. But games rarely teach seriousness and independence of thought.
The rise of MOOCs and the rise of fun in the college classroom are part of the trend to reduce education to a juvenile pursuit. One hardly needs an advanced degree to oversee a scavenger hunt or prepare students to take a test. And scavenger hunts, as useful as they may be in making learning fun, will hardly inculcate the independence of mind and strength of character that will produce self-thinking citizens capable of renewing the common world.
The question of how to address the crisis in education today—the fact that an ever more knowledgeable population with greatest access to information than at any time in the history of the world is perhaps the most politically illiterate citizenry in centuries—is the theme of the upcoming Hannah Arendt Center Conference, "Failing Fast: The Educated Citizen in Crisis." In preparation for the conference, you can do nothing better than to re-read Hannah Arendt's essay, "The Crisis in Education." You can also buy Between Past and Future the book of essays in which it appears. However you read it, "The Crisis in Education" is your weekend read.
Imagine You Are a Nazi
Werner Feig was a gifted teacher at my high school from whom I learned European History and Constitutional Law. Along with his colleague—the astounding and inspirational Eric Rothschild—Mr. Feig made sure that me and my fellow students loved history, not simply that we knew it. He also made us uncomfortable.
Feig lived history—fleeing Germany as a boy and growing up in the Hongkew Jewish ghetto of Shanghai, China. He later made his way to the U.S. where he earned Masters degrees in both education and political science, before settling down to teach high school social studies. He was a passionate teacher, and is rightly memorialized by his former student Aaron Sorkin, who has one "West Wing" character cite Feig as his inspiration for going into public service.
But Feig had an unusual way about teaching us to think and question authority. In my Constitutional Law class, he used to call me "Little Hitler." Sometimes, along with other Jewish students, I was called versions of Berko-kyke. A Chinese colleague of mine was referred to as "no tick-ee no washee." When another Asian student went to the chalkboard, we could hear our esteemed teacher mutter: "I need some Coolie labor now." A Jewish friend was "Shlomo." And my sister, two years behind me, was "Little Hitler's sister." There were worse names as well.
Hearing these epithets at the time was bracing. But it was also provocative—in the best sense. Mr. Feig got us thinking. He was teaching us Constitutional Law and Free Speech, and forcing us above all to think about the power of words as well as the right, his right, to use them. It was a powerful lesson, one that has never left me. I can safely say that Mr. Feig's classroom was one of the most intellectually infectious I have ever experienced. He is, for me, one of that select group of teachers on whom I model my own teaching. Teaching, he showed me, should be free to provoke in the name of thinking. Indeed, it must.
I've been thinking about Werner Feig a lot this past week, ever since I came across a NY Times article about a high school teacher in Albany who has been suspended for asking his students to write an essay arguing that Jews are evil. The assignment was thought to be so awful a breach of teaching judgment that the school district refuses to release the name of the teacher. Here is the Times' account:
The students were instructed to imagine that their teacher was a Nazi and to construct an argument that Jews were "the source of our problems" using historical propaganda and, of course, a traditional high school essay structure.
"Your essay must be five paragraphs long, with an introduction, three body paragraphs containing your strongest arguments, and a conclusion," the assignment read. "You do not have a choice in your position: you must argue that Jews are evil, and use solid rationale from government propaganda to convince me of your loyalty to the Third Reich!"
The reaction to the assignment has been—with very few exceptions—highly negative. Marguerite Vanden Wyngaard, the superintendent of schools in Albany, fully repudiated the teacher: "Obviously, we have a severe lack of judgment and a horrible level of insensitivity. That's not the assignment that any school district, and certainly not mine, is going to tolerate." Jewish organizations swung into action, joining the superintendent at a press conference. The Anti-Defamation League will run sensitivity training workshops.
New York City Councilman David Greenfield went further and insisted the teacher be fired. In a statement, Greenfield writes: "The teacher responsible for coming up with and assigning students with this task must be held accountable for attempting to indoctrinate children with anti-Semitic beliefs. Quite obviously, this teacher lacks the judgment and common sense necessary to have a position of such great responsibility and is clearly not fit to return to the classroom."
The press too has jumped on this story, making it a national news item, covered on all the networks and in papers around the country. Writing on Jezebel, David Barry made a feint in the direction of understanding the value of such an assignment, but then about-faced and concluded:
However, nothing ever good comes from pretending that you're a Nazi, and there is literally an infinite number of FAR BETTER persuasive writing prompts, such as, "Convince me that you, a human high school student, are actually a glass of apple cider," or "Convince me that you're an acorn that is running for the mayor of Oakton on an anti-squirrel platform. Make me believe that you despise squirrels." The Nazi prompt isn't just bigoted writing assignment — it's also a cheap trick, a way to stir up the volatile psyches of high school students in an effort to engage them in a task that they hate, namely, writing essays.
Reading about this assignment and the heated reaction it elicited, my first reaction was to think back to Mr. Feig. Would his style of teaching simply be impossible today? Do we really live in a world in which a teacher is unable to ask students to put themselves in the shoes of evil people? Are we so far down the road of thou-shalt-not-offend that we simply cannot tolerate the exercise and effort to think from the perspective of those with whom we disagree or even those whose opinions we view as intolerable?
The outrage in Albany also brought to my mind the recent debate over gun control. For many on the left, the Newtown tragedy was an unanswerable wakeup call for gun control. I get that. As I wrote shortly after Newtown, the fact that one person without any assistance could do so much damage with automatic weapons is good reason to regulate automatic weapons. We will never stop killing. And we will never stop killing with guns. But when one crazy person can kill dozens or potentially hundreds with high-powered guns, we should work to keep such guns out of the hands of unstable people.
At the same time, I understand and respect the strong attachment that many people have to guns. Some love to hunt. Others see guns as a symbol of their freedom. In a world where people feel powerless and vulnerable, owning a weapon offers a feeling of power (real or fictional). I respect that need. It is part of the beauty of America that we imbue in people the desire to feel powerful. That is the genius of democracy: that every individual matters. At a time when most people feel alienated from our broken democracy, guns can become a crutch. I may wish people found other symbols of their power, but I do get why owning a gun is meaningful. There are times when I want one myself.
What the gun control fiasco in Congress illustrates is how neither side made any effort to really understand the other. Actually, it is worse than that. Partisans of gun control are vitriolic in their baiting of those who will argue against gun control. Gun advocates are at times even worse, as the crosshairs scandal around the shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords made clear. The ill will and disgust that proponents of both positions have for the other was palpable in every editorial and every argument. In short, for advocates and opponents of gun control, the other side was so stupid and wrong and evil as to be simply incomprehensible.
Which brings me back to the unnamed teacher in Albany who has been disciplined and shamed and abandoned for asking high school students to put themselves in the place of an official during the Nazi government. Such an official might well be asked to write such a memo. The students in the school had been studying Nazi propaganda in school. They were about to read Elie Wiesel's memoir Night. Doesn't it make sense in this context to push students to understand how it might be that Nazi's did what they did?
For Hannah Arendt, political thinking demands the practice of enlarged thinking, of thinking from the position of those who are absent. She writes: "Political thought is representative. I form an opinion by considering a given issue from different viewpoints, by making present to my mind the standpoint of those who are absent; that is, I represent them." She does not mean that in political thinking we think what others think, but that the first requirement of political life—a life alongside others with whom one often disagrees—is to seek to think from their point of view. To have a chance of convincing someone they are wrong, you must first understand that person's argument in its strongest and most compelling sense. Only then, also, can you respond to those with whom you disagree as human beings.
When I teach The Origins of Totalitarianism, I emphasize Arendt's insistence that we must not simply condemn antisemitism (we must do that too) but ask as well what are the logical and rational reasons why modern antisemitism could lead to the holocaust? It is not an accident, nor is it irrational, she argues, but has something to do with the way that Jewish separateness and distinction exists in a problematic way in the modern world that demands equal treatment. Such questions are uncomfortable and she does not ask them to excuse antisemitism, but to understand its modern power. Students regularly come to see the benefit of such queries, made even more difficult when I extend the discussion to ask after the rationales for the continued relevance of racism, sexism, and homophobia. Luckily for me, my students understand the value of this exercise and don't condemn me as a racist or antisemite.
It is easy to say that Nazis are not human beings and that the effort to understand them is, itself, immoral. That is the argument the Albany superintendent made. It is the same argument that leads many to say that racists are inhuman and that all bigots are sub-human. But to comprehend is not the same as to agree. Rather, as Arendt writes in the preface to The Origins of Totalitarianism, comprehension is the prerequisite for resistance.
Of the many responses I found to the suspension of the Albany school teacher, only one defended him. Writing on the CNN Belief Blog, Stephen Prothero of Boston University told of his experience teaching Nazi theology who taught that Jews were evil and were responsible for killing Christ, amongst other antisemitic slanders. He writes:
First, I wanted my students to realize that smart Christians with doctoral degrees supported the Holocaust. Second, I wanted them to grapple with the implications of this fact on their own religious commitments. Do Christians today have any responsibility to know this history and to try to make sure it doesn't happen again? If so, how can they exercise that responsibility without coming to understand the contours of Nazi thought?
Prothero reminds me of the importance of teachers like Werner Feig. He offers a thoughtful and compelling argument for why we need to challenge our young people with precisely the kinds of assignments that have been rejected in Albany. The scandal in Albany may prove that such teaching is simply no longer be possible today. If that is true, it is for the worse. To help see why, I commend to you Stephen Prothero's defense of teaching Nazi theology. It is your weekend read.
Water and Desert: Perspectives in Education
For two years I taught literature, reading and writing at a public university in one of New York City's outer Boroughs. Of course having come out of a liberal arts "thinking" institution what I really thought (maybe hoped) I was teaching was new perspectives. Ironically, the challenge that most struck me was not administrative, nor class size or terrible grammar and endless hours of grading, the most pressing obstacle lay in creating a case for the value of "thinking."
I state "case" because I regularly felt like my passions and beliefs, as well as my liberal arts education went on daily trial. I had originally come from a hard-scrabble immigrant reality, but my perception of reality had been altered by my education experience, and as an educator I felt the need to authenticate my progressive (core text) education with my students.
I was regularly reminded that the immediate world of the "average" student (citizen) with all its pressing, "real" concerns does not immediately open itself to "thought" in the liberal arts sense. We are a specialization, automation, struggling and hyper competitive society. The "learning time" of a student citizen is spent in the acquisition of "marketable," and differentiating skills, while their "free time" is the opportunity to decompress from, or completely escape the pressures of competitive skill acquisition. The whole cycle is guided by an air of anxiety fostered in our national eduction philosophy, as well as the troubled economy and scattered society at large. I don't think one can teach the humanities without listening to their students, and listening to the students calls for a deep inventory on the value of "thought" in the humanities sense, and then ultimately in how to most truthfully communicate this value to the students.
I need to add here that my students were quite smart and insightful. This made it even greater of a challenge. Their intelligence was one of realism. I needed to both acknowledge and sway their perspective, as well as my own.
Each semester I began with a close-reading of David Foster Wallace's commencement speech at Kenyon College, "What is Water." He begins his speech with the parable of two fish swimming by an older fish which as it swims by asks, How is the Water?" The little ones swim on and only later ask each other, "What is water?" Didactic parable, cliche — yes — but Wallace goes on to deconstruct the artifice of commencement speeches, parables, and cliches, and then rebuilds them. Having so skillfully deconstructed them he has invited his listers into the form making, and as he communicates the truth beneath what had earlier seemed lofty or cliche, the listers follow him towards meaning making. Ultimately Wallace states that education is "less about teaching you how to think, and more about teaching you of the choice in what to think about." To have agency is to be a meaning maker. And as more and more cultural institutions artfully vie for the citizens devotion and loyalty — politics, religion, but even more so, corporate houses and pop culture designs, in the ever growing noise of institutional marketing the call to choose seems ever more muted.
The choice, for so many students today, is simply in how to most skillfully compartmentalize themselves and their lives in the face of the anxieties of their immediate world. The choice for many young teachers, facing their own set of related anxieties, is in how far are they willing step away from the ideal of learning-living-teaching integration model — so easy is it today as an educator to simply become disenchanted, frustrated and aloof. Sometimes, "thinking" is the process of choosing what to keep and what to give away.
Wallace's insightful, no b.s, humorous and sincere tone resonated with my students, that is of course until they found out that Wallace killed himself. Then, that's what everyone wanted to focus on. I can not blame them. There is a 'text' to 'personal' mystery, a 'content' to 'context' disjunction that opens itself at such a revelation, a mystery that the "thinking" mind wants to explore. The modern "thinking" mind draws little separation between the lofty and the sublime, the public and the personal. Such is a byproduct of a generation raised on reality television and celebrity stories. I, in all sincerity cannot judge this. My generation, the X's who came of age on the cusp of the Millennials, were culturally educated by MTV, The Real World and Road Rules, and thus we crave hip, colorful, appropriately gentrified spaces to occupy — think of artist collectives, or Facebook and Google working environments (bean bags, chill and chic prescription sunglasses, lounge happy hour with juice bars, untraditional working hours, colorful earth tones). I digress, I meant to make some observation of "thinking."
I was excited to teach what excited me: I began with Wallace, then Kafka, O'Connor (Flannery or Frank), Platonov, Carver, Babel, Achebe Kundera, Elliot, etc… It is, essentially, the seven sisters freshmen reading list, a popular catalogue of classic stories peppered with some international obscurity. It is the "cool" thing in liberal arts. But, over and over my students came to me complaining that they could not find this relevant to their lives. After such reports I would tweak my lesson plans to give a greater introduction to the works, going deeper into the philosophical tenets of the stories, and into the universal reward of being able to utilize the tools of the thinking, writing mind. Induct, deduct, compare, contrast, relate, "give it greater shape," I would say. "Breath life into it."
To have the skills to decipher plot, to record the echo of a narrative, to infer characterization from setting, to understand the complex structure of a character, to be invited to participate in the co-creation of a narrative which gently guides you through action but leaves the moral implications up to the reader. These are "indispensable," I would advise my students. "Indispensable for human agency." Some would slowly gravitate to my vision, as I prodded further and further into their motivations for being in school, career, and other 'relevant' choice. Yet, they often felt only like visitors in my library, preparing to check out and return to the "default" education thinking mode as soon as the quarter, mid, or end semester exam periods began. The pressures of what they call "the real world" are much stronger then the ghosts of books and introspective thought — vague, powerless, intangible.
"The real world:" Here I am reminded of the scene from the Matrix when Morpheus unveils to Neo "the desert of the real." A barren waste land of human energy as only a power source nourished for consumption. The Matrix, I will add here, is based on a work by Jean Baudrillard, a french philosopher who warns of a modern society as a place existing in consumption and entertainment, devoid of meaning making — the urge towards agency, in hibernation; the map towards meaning, defunct. In describing this new world he coined the phrase "the desert of the real." Again, I fall into tangental thought.
I needed to find a way to invite, seduce, capture my students. I tried using myself as a conduit.
I pride myself on the fact that I am an immigrant, a former "at risk" student, that my tattoos all have mythological meaning and thought behind them, that I am a high-school drop out with credentials to my name, a top tier education, a masters degree, etc… I felt like these could help me bridge for my students the platforms of reality-setting discourse and humanistic thought. I had, and still do, believed that real "thinking" is indispensable in being human, in being free, and in the ability to have fun and play with the world.
Again, my students would, at times, meet me in the middle space I wanted to create, though rarely did this space become living for them, instead they lay their heads to the sound of another's palpitation and breath, and then moved on. Maybe I planted a seed, I like to think. But then, maybe, they were bringing me somewhere as well.
They could not recklessly follow me, or I them. It was an issue of pragmatic bonds. For a moment, my class, or an individual student I was reading with would delve into the power of words with me and the ending of Andrei Platonov's "Potudon River" would finally break through the events of the page: "Not every grief can be comforted; there is a grief that ends only after the heart has been worn away in long oblivion, or in distraction amidst life's everyday concerns." And my students would draw new understanding of the passage, enter it through a word or phrase that could unlock that middle space between their worlds and the world of literature, philosophy, metaphor. "Grief," "long oblivion," life's everyday concerns," all the sudden my students would give these new meaning, now only slightly guided by the story and letting their lives find a grip to the reigns. They would find new connections, and again they would return to the "real" world.
More and more I struggled to make thinking relevant. "Will this help me get a better job?" I was asked.
Thinking about it I had to encounter my own struggles with this question. I know the answers. I know the programed liberal arts answer, and the "real" answer. I know that the liberal arts answer exposes the "real" as something at best lacking, at its worst empty. I also know that the real, is real; it happens in real time, removed from the concerns of literature, poetry, and philosophy which concern themselves with the work of mans eternity.
"Unlikely," I would answer. For gods sake, though I was teaching all these things I cared so deeply about, I also worked nights as a bartender to satisfy the demands of the real. I had to produce something consumable and all of my learning and thoughts on thinking are not that.
Here I acknowledge that this answer is not entirely true. We can find jobs which call for liberal arts skills, but these are few and far between and rarely afford a comfortable standard of living. We may also posit the argument that liberal arts skills will contribute to ones ability to perform better and have a greater understanding of ones job, but this argument does not lend itself to substantial evidence, no matter how much I may actually believe it. This was the litmus test of my "thinking," and it only survives in embracing the privacies of my world, that I chose my private world despite and above the "real."
"Unlikely." And where does that leave us?
Ultimately, all I have as a conscious being is the ability to tell stories, to choose and create my narrative from the scattered world I am provided. Ultimately, after deconstructing both the "real" and the "lofty" I could only encourage my students to choose their own themes. To the question of "what is water?" I could only answer, "the desert."
Oddly enough, and as "unlikely" as it may seem, when I answered with honesty, to them as well as myself, they followed. — we could talk.
-Nikita Nelin
Learning From Crisis
"[T]here is another even more cogent reason for [the layman] concerning himself with a critical situation in which he is not immediately involved. And that is the opportunity, provided by the very fact of crisis—which tears away facades and obliterates prejudices—to explore and inquire into whatever has been laid bare of the essence of the matter…"
-Hannah Arendt, "The Crisis in Education"
It is often said that the Chinese word for "crisis," or weiji, means a combination of "danger" and "opportunity," and every so often the trope appears in the highest echelons of American politics. Linguist Benjamin Zimmer cites its frequent use by John F. Kennedy in speeches leading into the 1960 presidential election; and more recently, Al Gore in 2006-7 used weiji to anchor both his Congressional testimony on the problem of climate change, and his Vanity Fair article ("The Moment of Truth") concerning the same. During her January 2007 trip to the Middle East, then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told reporters of conditions in the region, "I don't read Chinese but I am told that the Chinese character for crisis is wei-ji, which means both danger and opportunity…And I think that states it very well. We'll try to maximize the opportunity."
This use of weiji has irked some linguists. Zimmer calls Gore's Chinese riff a "linguistic canard" and writes that in all these cases, "[T]he trope was deployed for similar effect: as a framing technique for describing current perils posed by a particular world crisis and future possibilities for resolving that crisis. Thus it allows the speaker to shift rhetorical footing from pessimism to optimism, ending with an upbeat tone and a call to action." Victor H. Mair, a professor of Chinese language and literature at UPenn, identifies a "fatal" error of interpretation that centers on the second character, ji, which rather than "opportunity," here means something like "incipient moment; crucial point (when something begins or changes)." Thus, "A weiji indicates a perilous situation when one should be especially wary. It is not a juncture when one goes looking for advantages and benefits."
To those still seeking New Age wisdom in the danger/opportunity coupling, Mair points to the old Greek usage. Modern "crisis" stems from the Greek krinein, meaning to separate, decide, or judge. The word reached Middle English in the 15th century via Latin, and the Oxford English Dictionary says that by mid-16th century it meant judgment related specifically to sickness and the sudden change of disease (The Online Etymology Dictionary cites Hippocrates using krinein in the same way.). Soon thereafter it referred more generally to "A vitally important or decisive stage in the progress of anything; a turning-point," as well as judgment or decision simply, and "A point by which to judge; a criterion; token; sign."
In moments of crisis the important connection between "danger" and "opportunity" centers on their common source in a disruption of normal order, a disruption that entails instability and volatility, but also openings to previously precluded or unimagined possibilities for action. The moment of crisis is transient, and in political matters the statesman's virtue is two-fold—not only to manage (or "seize") a crisis situation, but also to recognize the situation when it arises (See Lenin, "The Crisis Has Matured," September 29, 1917) or foresee its coming. By recognizing a crisis for what it is—a moment of decision—we can wrest the decision to ourselves.
Hannah Arendt's essay "The Crisis in Education" seems to offer a different understanding of social and political crisis—one less concerned with critical moments and more concerned with the "elemental structures" of modernity that "crystallize" over time and manifest today in a variety of ways. The essay starts by observing that "The general crisis that has overtaken the modern world everywhere and in almost every sphere of life manifests itself differently in each country, involving different areas and taking on different forms." In America the general crisis has assumed the form of "the recurring crisis in education that, during the last decade at least, has become a political problem of the first magnitude[.]" This introduces a recurring theme in the essay, that while examining a particular political crisis in America, the essay is also—and perhaps more fundamentally—about "a more general crisis and instability in modern society."
This more general crisis is the modern crisis of authority that is "closely connected with the crisis of tradition…the crisis in our attitude towards the realm of the past." Seeing how this bears on the crisis of education requires examining "whatever has been laid bare of the essence of the matter, and the essence of education is natality, the fact that human beings are born into the world." At the same time, Arendt writes, "Basically we are always educating for a world that is or is becoming out of joint," a world that, because it is made by mortals, "runs the risk of becoming as mortal as they." And thus—because the essence of education is natality, and the "newcomers" need a world in which to live and act, but the world in which we live and act constantly "is or is becoming out of joint"—the problem of education concerns how to stabilize this world for the "newcomers" without also stifling their capacity to renew or even drastically alter it: "Exactly for the sake of what is new and revolutionary in every child," Arendt writes, "education must be conservative; it must preserve this newness and introduce it as a new thing into an old world[.]"
Here the crisis of modernity and education converge—for the process of giving students a world has historically relied on the authority of tradition and the past. But if these authorities can no longer be relied upon, then what remains? Stunningly, Arendt locates a new authority for modern conditions in the teacher's "assumption of responsibility for that world."
Arendt's account of the American crisis of education illustrates the connection between local political crises around the world and a larger civilizational crisis. Indeed, a central goal of "The Crisis in Education" is to highlight the blind spots in understanding that result when one regards "a local phenomenon" like the crisis of education as "unconnected with the larger issues of the century, to be blamed on certain peculiarities of life in the United States" (as for example its history of "continuous immigration"). To localize such problems is tempting because "However clearly a general problem may present itself in a crisis, it is nevertheless impossible ever to isolate completely the universal element from the concrete and specific circumstances in which it makes its appearance." But while "There is always a temptation to believe that we are dealing with specific problems confined within historical and national boundaries and of importance only to those immediately affected"— "It is precisely this belief that in our time has consistently proved false" (emphasis added).
This false belief prevents us from, among other things, ascertaining "which aspects of the modern world and its crisis have actually revealed themselves" (in a local crisis)—that is, "the true reasons that for decades things could be said and done in such glaring contradiction to common sense." And events continue in this manner due in part to the illusion that situation-specific and/or scientific solutions, which may (or may not) satisfactorily solve local problems in the short term, actually touch upon the heart of the matter. The illusion manifests in "repeat performance" of the crisis, "though perhaps different in form, since there are no limits to the possibilities of nonsense and capricious notions that can be decked out as the last word in science." Arendt's criticism of the futility of pragmatist pedagogy in addressing the crisis of authority in the classroom represents a case in point.
In recent months and years, few words have achieved more prominence in Washington politics than crisis. As recently as February 3, President Obama said in a CBS interview that "Washington cannot continually operate under a cloud of crisis." And following the latest inconclusive negotiations over the country's fiscal situation and looming (depending on who you ask) "debt crisis," a recent article in the Huffington Post bemoans the "pattern of a Congress that governs from crisis to crisis" that has become "all too familiar—and predictable. The trend goes something like this: As a deadline approaches, Republicans repeat their calls for spending cuts. Democrats accuse Republicans of hostage-taking. A short-term agreement is then reached that averts economic calamity, but ultimately kicks the can down the road for yet another fight."
What does it mean for a Congress to routinely "govern from crisis to crisis"? Does "governing by crisis" constitute functioning politics, or a political crisis of the first order? In The Crisis in Education Arendt writes that "the very fact of crisis…tears away facades and obliterates prejudices," and allows one "to explore and inquire into whatever has been laid bare of the essence of the matter." But to state the obvious, if "the very fact of crisis…tears away facades and obliterates prejudices," then such tearing and obliteration requires that "the very fact of crisis" be recognized and acknowledged. In the current governing crisis in Washington, what fundamentally new, to say nothing of unprejudiced, questions—other than how Washington's two parties will "compromise" and avoid self-destruction—have been asked? Who has spoken seriously, truthfully, and critically, in an effort to lay bare the essence of the matter?
At a time when happenings in Washington "could be said and done in such glaring contradiction to common sense" (How else are we to understand "governing by crisis"?), Hannah Arendt reminds us to seek out and overcome those "prejudices" and "preformed judgments"—including the obligatory moves to technocratic and ideological narratives—that preclude the introduction of new questions and corresponding answers that require direct and original judgments and, perhaps most importantly, thinking and responsibility. Counterintuitively, in such situations Arendt highlights the importance of questions rather than solutions in confronting political crisis—that the proper response to crisis requires thinking rather than knowledge. To narrowly search for efficient policy "solutions" or ideological "compromises" based on prior prejudices simply misses the point.
If crisis does not seem especially urgent to Arendt in "The Crisis on Education," she does warn that, in the end, "unreflective perseverance…can only…lead to ruin." Ironically, one of the prejudiced assumptions that seems most prevalent in Congress today—that abandoning one's prejudices and preformed judgments spells political death—may be most indicative of our current political crisis.–—And yet if, as Arendt suggests on more than one occasion, one answer to the modern crisis of authority lies in the "assumption of responsibility"—be it responsibility for the world in the classroom, responsibility for extraordinary action in politics (Arendt once attributed Lenin's revolutionary authority to his singular willingness to "assume responsibility for the revolution after it happened."), or even responsibility for truthful speech (as opposed to "mere talk") and action in normal, everyday politics—then notwithstanding whatever the American crisis is, whoever has the courage to speak truthfully and accept political responsibility may wake up to find real power and opportunity suddenly within his grasp.
-John LeJeune
Guided Into the World
"Heidegger is wrong: man is not "thrown" "in the world;" if we are thrown, then – no differently from animals – onto the earth. Man is precisely guided, not thrown, precisely for that reason his continuity arises and the way he belongs appears. Poor us, if we are thrown into the world!"
"Heidegger hat unrecht: "in die Welt" ist der Mensch nicht "geworfen;" wenn wir geworfen sind, so – nicht anders als die Tiere – auf die Erde. In die Welt gerade wird der Mensch geleitet, nicht geworfen, da gerade stellt sich seine Kontinuität her und offenbart seine Zugehörigkeit. Wehe uns, wenn wir in die Welt geworfen werden!"
-Hannah Arendt, Denktagebuch, Notebook 21, Section 68, August, 1955
Hannah Arendt follows her teacher Martin Heidegger in casting the classical philosophical question of the relation of the one and the many as the relationship between the individual and the world. Like the early Heidegger, she emphasizes the future, but she more frequently combines conceptual and narrative explication. For Arendt, freedom is at stake, the freedom of plural humanity that can call on, but cannot be reduced to, guiding ideas of tradition or authority. Yet while she consistently defends freedom through action that cannot be tied to the logic of the past or an assumed goal in the future, her thinking has both a moment of freedom and concern with connection to the past.
In Being and Time, Heidegger's idea of "thrownness" (Geworfenheit) offers a conceptual hinge between a limitation and expansion of freedom. On the one hand, the thrown "Dasein" cannot choose to come into the world, much less into a particular world. On the other hand, once situated in a field of relations, possibilities open that allow Dasein to fashion a sense of the future and self-knowledge.
Arendt can be seen to ask how exactly we are to recognize the original condition of being thrown in such a way that new possibilities open up. Her objection to Heidegger in the passage above takes a subtle linguistic path that shows how her method of reading inflects her philosophical ideas. Rather than holding exclusively to the conceptual development of "thrownness," she offers a terminological challenge. She says that man is only thrown into the natural "earth," not the humanly-made "world." In inserting this distinction between the earth and the world, she reads "geworfen" not abstractly as "thrown," but concretely, implying that she has in mind a second use of the German verb "werfen:" to refer to animals giving birth.
Arendt wants to leave the merely animal behind. The German verb "leiten" that I have translated here as "guided" could also mean to direct, to conduct, to lead, to govern. Thinking ahead to Arendt's writing on education, I hear a connection to "begleiten," which means to accompany. The guiding that one receives gives a sense of continuing and belonging to a greater world. Heidegger insists that Dasein does not choose to be thrown into a specific world, we are born without our choice or input. For Arendt, this is our earthliness and she emphasizes the difference between the human world and the given earth. With respect to the world, she highlights the connection to others from the start. Since others exist before the entrance of the newcomer, we also assume responsibility for their entry to the world. One must be educated into the world, which is not simply the earth, but the humanly constructed edifice that includes history and memory and the polis.
Dana Villa and Peg Birmingham suggest that Arendt replaces Heidegger's "geworfen" with "geboren" ("thrown" with "born"). The passage from the Thought Diary above shows the complexity of this substitution and that it only works by changing the context to the world rather than earth. However, while the quote shows that Arendt relegates Heidegger's thrownness to the realm of the earth and body, her own idea of "natality" brings the body back to her thinking of freedom. Being born is very important for Arendt, but not in Heidegger's sense. If "werfen" can refer to animals giving birth, Arendt works out a specific way in which humans are born, one that emphasizes a liberating break from the earth. Humans, as Arendt will say in The Human Condition, are born with the ability to start something completely new.
I think Arendt would say that we are always guided in a certain way. This leads us to ask if today we are making a choice as a society to abdicate explicit reflection and responsibility regarding the terms of guidance, either by "outsourcing" these decisions to experts or assuming that individuals can still make rational choices in the face of corporations and institutions that carefully take advantage of cognitive limitations. In other words: In what ways are people guided into the world that we do not think about, and how could reflection help us here?
On the other hand, the note ends with an existential lament that reminds us of the Romantic poet Friedrich Holderlin's "weh mir" ("poor me"). After noting how she thinks Heidegger is wrong to see us thrown into the world, Arendt returns us to his despair; but the despair she imagines arises insofar as we are thrown into the world—which would mean that we lose the world as a humanly built home.
-Jeffrey Champlin
The Flipped Classroom
For those of us who care about education, at either the college or high school level, there is nothing more exciting and terrifying today than the promise of the use of technology in teaching. At this moment, numerous companies around the country are working with high schools and colleges to create online courses, tutorials, and webinars that will be able to provide training and information to millions of people around the world. In fact, I just took a webinar today, required by the New York Council for the Humanities, a mandatory course that was supposed to train me to facilitate a Community Conversation on democracy that will be held next week at the Arendt Center.
Many of these web-based courses are offered free. They will be taught by leading experts who teach at the best universities in the world. And they will be available to anyone in any country of any income with a computer. The possibilities and potential benefits of such courses are extraordinary. And yet, as with any great new technology, these courses are also dangerous.
A recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education describes Tony Hyun Kim, a MIT graduate who moved to Mongolia and spent three months tutoring and teaching local high school students as they took a course in circuits-and-electronics class, a class that is usually taken by MIT sophomores. The class offered free online by edX, a consortium of MIT and Harvard, uses video and interactive exercises and is available to anyone who signs up. What Mr. Kim did is use this advanced course taught by MIT professors as a basic resource for his high school students in Mongolia. He then helped the young students to take the course. Twelve of his students passed the course and earned a certificate of completion. "One 15-year-old, Battushig, aced the course, one of 320 out of students worldwide to do so." According to the Chronicle:
The adventure made the young MIT graduate one of the first to blend edX's content with face-to-face teaching. His hybrid model is one that many American students may experience as edX presses one of its toughest goals: to reimagine campus learning. EdX ended up hiring Mr. Kim, who hopes to start a related project at the university level in Mongolia.
What is now being called the "flipped classroom"—authoritative professors lecture thousands or hundreds of thousands in their dorm rooms while young facilitators then meet with students physically in classrooms—has enormous consequences for education around the world and also in the United States.
Currently, every university hires Ph.D.s as professors to teach courses and high schools hire teachers. These professors and teachers teach their own courses, set their curriculum, and are responsible for creating an educational environment. Often they are large lectures or poor classes in which students learn very little. Sometimes at research universities the professors have graduate students who spend time with the undergrads while professors do their own work. Often these graduate students in turn care less about teaching than their own research, leaving poor undergraduates to fend for themselves. In most instances, large lecture courses provide students with painfully little personal attention, the kind of one on one or small group interaction in which real education happens. What is more, these courses are expensive, since the universities subsidize the research and training of the professors.
Now imagine that community colleges and even large universities embrace the flipped classroom? Why not have students take a course from edX or Coursera, another similar service. The course is free. The college or university could then hire facilitators like Mr. Kim to work one on one with students. These facilitators can be cheap. They may even be free. As the Chronicle reports, Harvard professors E. Francis Cook Jr. and Marcello Pagano are working to mobilize a crowd of volunteers to help teach their courses.
The veteran professors will teach a class on epidemiology and biostatistics this fall, one of Harvard's first on edX. Details are still being worked out, but they hope to entice alumni to participate, possibly by moderating online forums or, for those based abroad, leading discussions for local students. Mr. Cook sees those graduates as an "untapped resource. We draw people into this program who want to improve the health of the world," he says. "I'm hoping we'll get a huge buy-in from our alums."
There will be many young people who will volunteer to facilitate such courses. In return they will learn something. They will meet smart young potential employees and recruit them to work in their business ventures. And they will do a service to their alma maters. This enlistment of free labor to help with online learning is already happening. And it will upend the teaching profession at all levels, just as star doctors at major hospitals will increasingly diagnose hundreds of patients a day from their offices while assistants around the world simply follow their instructions.
Will the new educational regime offer a better education for the students? In some cases yes. There are unmistakable advantages both in cost and maybe even in quality that such flipped courses offer. But there is also a profound loss of what might be called educational space and, more importantly, educational authority.
If such facilitators are recent college graduates, like Mr. Kim, or if they are Ph.D.s but hired not as professors and thus without the authority of present professors, there is a loss of the very sense of what a university or college is—a space for the transmission of knowledge from scholars and scientists to young citizens. What does it mean to lose the community of professors who currently populate these educational institutions?
And what about when this hollowing out of the professoriate infects elite universities like MIT and Harvard themselves? The Chronicle asks:
One question is how edX might improve elite universities, which are late to the e-learning game. In the spring, MIT tested the edX circuits class with about 20 on-campus students. It was a hit: A majority said they would take another Web class….Another benefit: Students could rewind or fast-forward their professor. Data showed MIT students tended to watch the videos at 1.5 speed, which makes voices sound almost like chipmunks but delivers information more rapidly. "I do want MIT to offer more online education," Ms. LaPenta says.
A hit with students it may be. And they may indeed learn the material and pass the course. But listening to their professor's lectures at 1.5 speed—that is fascinating and frightening. We all are aware of the ways that technology divorces us from the traditional pace of human life. We drive or fly and travel distances in hours that used to take years. We send mail at the speed of the internet. But what will it mean when we speak at 1.5 speed? And speaking is one thing. But teaching and learning?
I have no doubt that studies are being done right now to measure the optimal speeds at which students can listen to lectures and still process the information. Pretty soon students will watch lectures like many of us now watch t.v., on delay so that it can be fast-forwarded, rewound, and sped up. It is one thing to imagine this as useful for individuals who want to learn how to program a computer or fix an engine or publish a book. But to think that our most illustrious liberal arts institutions will adopt the motto of education at the personal speed of the internet is more than simply strange.
Education, writes Hannah Arendt in The Crisis in Education, is predicated on the basic fact that human beings are born into the world. Young people come into the world and, because they are newcomers and uninitiated, need to be educated, which means they must be introduced to the world. Parents do this to some degree in the home, bringing the child from the home into the wider world. But the primary institutions in which children are educated, in which they are led into the world, are schools.
Normally the child is first introduced to the world in school. Now school is by no means the world and must not pretend to be; it is rather the institution we interpose between the private domain of the home and the world in order to make the transition from the family to the world possible at all.
For Arendt, the key element of education is the authority of the parent, teacher or professor. The teacher takes responsibility for bringing the child into the world, which requires authority:
The teacher's qualification consists in knowing the world and being able to instruct others about it, but his authority rests on his assumption of responsibility for that world. Vis-à-vis the child it is as though he were a representative of all adult inhabitants, pointing out the details and saying to the child: This is our world.
The authority of the teacher is, at bottom, a matter of his or her willingness to take responsibility for the world. In other words, the teacher must be conservative in the sense that his or her role is to "cherish and protect something—the child against the world, the world against the child, the new against the old, the old against the new." The teacher conserves both the world as it is—insofar as he teaches the child what is rather than what should be or what will be—and the child in her newness—by refusing to tell the child what will be or should be, and thus allowing the child the experience of freedom to rebel against the world when and if the time is right.
Arendt's point is that education requires that a child be confronted with the world as it is, not how the student wants it to be. This will often be painful and uncomfortable. It requires authority, and it requires that the student learn to conform to the world. An essential part of education, therefore, is that the student not be in control and that students be led by an external, adult, and respected authority. Which is why, for Arendt, education depends upon the authority of teachers and professors. The idea that our best institutions are imagining an educational present where students spend more and more of their time online where they, and not the professors, control and determine their way of learning does present a threat to education.
Of course, the goal of education is to create independent thinkers. The capstone experience at Bard College, where I teach, and at Amherst College, where I studied, is a senior thesis (at Bard this is mandatory, at Amherst only for honors students). The senior thesis is the transition from education to adulthood and it can be an extraordinary and moving experience. But it is a mistake when students insist—as they often do—on doing too many tutorials or seminars too early in their careers. Students must first learn and such learning requires being led by an authority. Too many students and professors today ignore the importance of authority in education. Technology threatens to feed that already present cultural tendency to free students from their tutelage to professors.
Amongst the myriad of benefits promised by distance learning and the flipped classroom, it is imperative to see where the real dangers and pitfalls lie. The grave danger of the flipped classroom is precisely in the perpetuation of the dominant trend of progressive education that has infiltrated teaching at all levels since Piaget and Dewey. It is the claim that students can and ought to be in charge of their own education.
In freeing students from the classroom, in distancing them further from the authority figure of a professor, in replacing Ph.D.s and professors with lesser trained facilitators, in giving students the power to speed up or slow down the professor's lecture, we are empowering and liberating students and giving them ever more control over their education. This may allow them to learn better or graduate more quickly. It may reduce the cost of college and high school and it may train people better for certain jobs. They may enjoy their education more. But such an education does not teach students what the world is like. It does not insist that they first learn what is before they begin to fashion the world as they want it to be. It comes from a loss of faith in and love for the world as it is, a loss that pervades our society that no longer believes in itself. Such an attitude does not assume responsibility for the world and insist that young people must first learn about the world, at least as the world is now. And it is just such a responsibility that educators must adopt.
The real problem with the rush towards technological education is that is focused interminably on the future. On qualifications for jobs and preparation for what is to come. Education, at least education that might succeed in introducing young people into a common world which they love and treasure, requires a turn towards the past. Just such a turn from the backwards-glancing education of the liberal arts to the forward-thrusting education to prepare students for jobs and careers is the real threat inherent in the present mania for technologically-enhanced pedagogy. Technology is not evil; it can be greatly helpful. But we must first understand why it is we are so desperate for it if we are to integrate it into our world. Otherwise, it will break the world.
On this weekend, I encourage you to take up Hannah Arendt's essay, The Crisis in Education. You can order it here from Amazon. Or listen to Hannah Arendt read from her essay in animated form here.
The Gap in American Skilled Labor
I flew back from Germany Friday and sat next to a young woman from Berlin. The young woman was attending Humboldt University and was studying to be a teacher. Like many in Germany, her undergraduate education was a professional one. On another plane between Zürich and Berlin I met a young man in a technical university, studying to be an electrician. This is one of the things that most strikes one about the differences between young people in Germany and the United States. In the U.S. both these young people would be pursuing liberal arts degrees, delaying concerns about a job or a career until after college. In Germany, they are aiming at a technical education preparing them for specific jobs.
The liberal arts can be and often are an extraordinary opportunity for young people to embrace the complexity and richness of human life on earth. A liberal arts education can transform one's life, helping a young man or woman to find meaning in life, in art, and in nature. As someone who dedicates himself to liberal arts writing and teaching, I have an enormous faith in and love for the determination to teach young people broadly and widely.
And yet, as much as I value and believe in the liberal arts, we should not think that it is a necessity for everyone. This has been one of our mistakes, to insist, against all good evidence, that a liberal arts education is the path to being both a good citizen and a successful person. Many have come to think that only someone with a B.A. or a liberal arts degree is educated, a prejudice that defies human history as well as our own experience.
I had a good friend who grew up in Switzerland and learned to build organs. He could walk through a forest and hear the wood play in the wind and pick precisely that tree whose fibrous inners would produce the most vibrant tones demanded of professional organ players. To think such a person uneducated would be folly. He was in tune with the natural world and with music in a way that few musicians ever would be. And yet it is precisely people who are skilled at doing things—from building organs to fixing pipes, from fixing electronics to growing food, and from cooking dinner to building a deck—that are increasingly absent in our modern society.
A number of years ago Matthew B. Crawford wrote a book Shop Class as Soulcraft. The book had two simple theses. First, that skilled work was deeply important. It teaches judgment, mastery, and engagement with the world around us, with the things that in Hannah Arendt's sense, make up our physical world. Second, that American high schools increasingly do not teach shop classes or home economics classes or auto repair classes, classes that used to instruct young people in the art of fixing and understanding the mechanical world around us. Crawford argued that while high schools were ditching shop class in favor of college prep, it was actually the case that more and more of the jobs available in our society were ones that required a physical skill at building and fixing things. Not only were we losing out economically, but also our educated elite was increasingly separated from those who know how to do things.
Crawford is right. And one result of the bias against skilled labor he highlights is the persistent disconnect between sky-high unemployment and increasing job openings. Businesses report a shortage of qualified workers. There is, in other words, a skills gap. Jobs are available, but they are not the jobs young people want to do.
Mike Rowe, host of "Dirty Jobs" on the Discovery Channel, has written open letters to both Mitt Romney and Barack Obama expressing his thoughts on the grounds for the skills gap. (Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds) This skills gap is but a symptom of what Rowe believes to be a fundamental problem facing this country – the growing emotional disconnect between the general American population and skilled labor.
"We have embraced a ridiculously narrow view of education," wrote Rowe in his open letter to Governor Romney this past Labor Day."
Any kind of training or study that does not come with a four-year degree is now deemed 'alternative.' Many viable careers once aspired to are now seen as 'vocational consolation prizes,' and many of the jobs this current administration has tried to 'create' over the last four years are the same jobs that parents and teachers actively discourage kids from pursuing.
The irony underlying the emotional disconnect with skilled labor is that these jobs are just what they claim to be – skilled – and require diverse education across a number of fields, a far cry from the bleak picture transfixed in the minds of many parents and teachers concerning these careers. In the manufacturing industry, for example, machinists are typically required to be adept at computer programming and geometry. These jobs are not avenues for opting out of an engaged and intelligent lifestyle, rather, they represent in many ways the beautiful symbiosis that may exist between education and practice.
Far from the "alternative" label given careers in skilled trades today, these professions were once described as possessing qualities uniquely apt for democratic peoples. Alexis de Tocqueville has a chapter in Democracy in America dedicated to the question of why Americans are drawn to the practice of science (such as skilled trade jobs), and writes that "In America the purely practical part of the sciences is cultivated admirably, and people attend carefully to the theoretical portion immediately necessary to application; in this way the Americans display a mind that is always clear, free, original, and fertile…" A far cry from the "vocational consolation prizes" these professions are deemed today.
Hannah Arendt also decried the "lost contact between the world of the senses and appearances and the physical world view." And Arendt understands that it is practical persons—plumbers and technicians—who will better be able to re-establish that lost contact that many educated people and scientists feel in the face of the physical world.
There is no doubt about our disconnect from physical and skilled labor, there is only the question of what to make of it. Mike Rowe writes,
Forty years ago, people understood that sweat and dirt were the hallmarks of important work. Today, that understanding has faded. Somewhere in our economy's massive transition from manufacturing to financial services, we have forsaken skilled labor, along with many aspects of our traditional work ethic.
Skilled laborer positions are still financially lucrative. Many machinists, for example, make about $60,000 a year and some have the opportunity of making as much as $100,000 a year with overtime, but these jobs are no longer celebrated as worthwhile and honorable positions, and this, Rowe argues, is why so many Americans fail to consider these careers.
Rowe argues that we need to confront the social stigmas and stereotypes attached to skilled-labor so that we may begin to reevaluate the jobs which for years now have been underappreciated despite their necessity. There was "a time when Work was not seen as a thing to avoid," Rowe wrote in his concluding remarks to President Obama, "When skilled tradesmen were seen as role models, and a paycheck was not the only benefit of a job well done. We need to recapture that sentiment. We need to celebrate, on a bigger scale, the role models right in front of us."
—RB (with assistance from David Breitenbucher)
Leading a Student Into the World
As long as our world changes so rapidly that children can expect to live very differently than their parents, it is likely that education and child rearing will always be in crisis.
This is the first sentence of a senior project I am reading today, the first of many I will read over the next two weeks. If the others are as fascinating as this one, it will be a happy two weeks.
The Bard senior project is the culmination of a Bard Student's year-long inquiry into a topic of their choosing. In this case, my student Steven Tatum—an aspiring teacher who will attend Bard's Master in Teaching Program next year—set out to explore the sense and import of our crisis in education.
In its most basic sense, education is how we lead new human beings into the world and introduce them to it. The Latin root of our word "educate" is educo, which means to rear or bring up a child, but it also means to lead forth and draw out. For most of Western history, education in this sense was a relatively simple matter of leading children into the lifestyles that their families had maintained for generations. But with the modern emphasis on equality, self-determination, and social mobility, the task of leading children into the world became much more difficult since educators could never know how a given student would choose to live in the world. Schools were given the task of leading students into a world of freedom and possibilities.
While these benefits for human freedom certainly make the increased burden on education worth bearing, this difficulty becomes a crisis when parents and teachers cannot be sure what the world will be like when their children and students reach adulthood. How can parents and teachers lead the next generation into a world that neither generation knows?
Tatum's Senior Project asks how to lead a student into the world, and seeks guidance from Hannah Arendt's essay, The Crisis in Education.
In this project I follow Arendt through the crisis in education as a way of learning with her about the essence of education and the educational challenges we face in our uncertain time. I begin at the beginning of education: the birth of a child. For Arendt, the fact that new people are continuously born into the world is the essence of education. In addition to marking the beginning of a living growing being, Arendt focuses on birth as the origin of our capacity to make new beginnings of our own throughout our lives by acting in the world. She believes the task of education is to preserve and foster this capacity for action so that the members of each new generation can participate in building and rebuilding a common world.
The tension in education today is between the need to lead people into an already existing world and the equally pressing imperative to prepare them for a new world that certainly is approaching, faster and more unpredictably than any of us imagine. The news this week is filled with articles about new initiatives at Stanford, the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard, and MIT to create new corporations that will offer courses on the internet. This is part of the trend to orient education toward the future, in the hope that we can teach students more quickly and more efficiently what they will need to know in the new economy.
Underlying much contemporary educational thinking is the assumption that our present world will not last long. More important than leading students into the world, is the need to give them the tools of the future. And this is not wrong. We do live in a world in which the constancy of tradition has been disrupted. Ours is a world in which the foundations are fluid and we cannot rely on past verities, be they moral, political, or scientific. Everything is changeable, and we must prepare our children for such a world.
And yet, even in a world in which we must "think without banisters," there is still a world, a common sense and a common space where people congregate. As Arendt writes,
The loss of worldly permanence and reliability … does not entail, at least not necessarily, the loss of the human capacity for building, preserving, and caring for a world that can survive us and remain a place fit to live in for those who come after us.
It may be that we live in a time of flux and change, one where permanence and structure are necessarily fleeting. At the same time, it is human to build structures that last, to tell stories that are meaningful, and build works that memorialize. As much as education is about preparing students for the new, it is also about teaching them the stories, showing them the works, and introducing them to the heroes that together comprise the world into which they have been born. Education is importantly a collective effort at remembering and thus calling to mind the world in which we live.
With that in mind, it is helpful to consider these lines from Steven's Thesis.
While I focus on the arguments she makes in her published work, studying Arendt has also allowed me to reflect on how my own education has taken place. As a student at Bard College, I found Hannah Arendt's grave in the college cemetery well before I read any of her work. In writing this project, I have found more and more ways in which I share a common world with her. I did research in her personal library, read her letters, spoke with people who knew her, and sat by her grave. I also learned recently that one of the desks in the classroom at Bard's Hannah Arendt Center where I took a class on her book Between Past and Future is the desk from her apartment in New York City. These experiences have done more than add personal touches to my research; they resonate with the content of this project in the sense that they have lead me to a deeper awareness of and appreciation for the world that I am entering.
For your weekend read, I commend to you Hannah Arendt's essay, The Crisis in Education.


text:
It's raining spiders- level 3
27-05-2015 15:00
It looks like something from a horror movie, doesn't it? Well, for residents in Goulburn, in south Australia, it was reality.
They had a horrifying shock when thousands of baby spiders quite literally rained down from the sky. The town was invaded by the creepy-crawlies as homes and gardens were reportedly covered with the spiders and mounds of their silky threads.
Whilst the terrifying scenes would probably cause mass panic in most places, the phenomenon commonly known as "Spider Rain" or "Angel Hair," isn't uncommon across parts of Australia. And there's actually a word for it: ballooning.
Ballooning is a form of spider transportation. It's basically when some species of spiders climb to the highest heights they possibly can, like to the tops of plants or trees. They then use their web silk as tiny parachutes and just leap off. The silk catches on the breeze and carries the spider wherever he wants to go. We are then left with gossamer, the name for the silver sheets of silken webs left behind.
This is reportedly going on around us all the time, we just don't notice it, because it's not common for millions of spiders to do it at the same time and land in the same place. Bad luck to the people of Goulburn!
Spiders are thought to come raining down because of a change in weather conditions. If it rains a lot and the ground gets waterlogged, spiders that either live on the surface of the ground or in burrows make their way upwards to avoid drowning. They then use their silk roads to escape. Spiders have virtually no control of where or how far they travel, but by ballooning, they can often travel pretty big distances. Some have been seen flying more than 1.8 miles above the ground.
Difficult words: literally (actually), creepy-crawly (an insect), mound (a lot of things on top of each other), phenomenon (an event), species (a type of animal), tiny (very little), gossamer (thin, silver pieces of a web), waterlog (to be full of water), burrow (a hole an animal lives in), silk road (a long web), virtually (actually).
Source: www.ondemandnews.com
What would you do if you saw this?
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subset: commoncrawl


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AeHyun Yum
School: Arizona State University
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School: Arizona State University
This movie is the story about the bond between two sisters: Claire and Jamie. Jamie, Claire's adopted sister, is a simple-minded girl; always kind-hearted, but somewhat clumsy. Claire on... more
date posted: 2010-07-14 | views: 600 | type: Movie
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