Class and Education

Here is an article about the wealthiest students becoming interested in the areas of the Humanities such as Languages, History and Philosophy:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/sep/26/arts-degrees-wealthy-humanities-university

In particular, the article is interesting in light of Martha Nussbaum's book "Not for Profit" which has been mentioned in earlier posts (haven't had time to write the review but the book is really, really good). The Arts areas are becoming arenas for the rich and, if following Nussbaum's thinking, the privilege of Classical thought, the right to informed opinion and the ability to act on such views, is becoming their right as well.

Art, the study of Art, Dance, Drama and courses in the Humanities, such as History, English, Philosophy and Languages, encourage the recognition of the "Other" in society and a realization that all acts have consequences and must be considered in that light; these subjects enable critical and examined thought to develop. The past is not merely a litany of Historical facts but choices made in particular situations which involved specific moralities. Critical thought illustrates an elasticity of mind and a willingness to examine situations above the prevalent notions of cost analysis; it enables business men, for one, to anticipate the moral consequences of their choices as well as their profit, the long term repercussions of a dollar made fast rather than with a thoughtful approach.

The fact Art and its fellow Humanities are being removed from the classrooms of the average school indicate a privileging of Science and Math over the Humanities. Noam Chomsky has discussed the problems in Japanese culture that have arisen because the Japanese know and understand facts; they do not have imagination. Math is easy on one level because it is concrete; it is either right or wrong. Russian Math, currently becoming more predominant in some Universities (like U. of T.), is more imaginative and Logic based. The point is a straight forward student will be more obedient to the Math of the Japanese; the more imaginative student will explore the more elastic components of the Russian ideals. (I don't know enough of Japanese Culture to write it off. But, The Russians have also presented the world with Classical Ballet, great composers, great writers and a number of painters--a common reader should know their names (Tolstoy, Tchaikovsky and the like).) And, one can't help but think of Kazuo Ishiguro who was raised in England and is a Japanese writer of the finest class ever. The point being, of course, Ishiguro's mind developed in a culture (England's) that used to celebrate the Humanities but is, currently, being overwhelmed by the needs of factual math.

The absence of a Classical background, according to Nussbaum, also leads to a less concerned voting class; voters act on selfish needs rather than the common good. It also prevents the formation of character and, particularly, the emotion of empathy. Humanist ideals encourage a more participatory electorate; a more concrete world, in a sense, is ensconced in what is rather than what can be. Further, if one looks into the future, an elite could develop because the majority of people will be ignorant, educated but prejudiced against the needs of the common good. In a way, the elite are being educated to lead the masses; a regular guy wants a decent job and his education is directing him away from a thoughtful consideration of the status quo. Chris Hedges' book, "Empire of Illusion" also corroborates this notion when one thinks of how education is evolving; people are distracted away from Classical, empathetic, considerate thought. It is a sad state of affairs and a quandary: for how does one remedy it when the consensus says there is no problem?

Technology and the Brain: In School

Just a collection of some articles about the use of technology in schools today:

The first is an interview with Don Tapscott and advocates greater technological usage in the classroom:

http://www.cbc.ca/consumer/story/2010/08/11/f-school-tapscott.html


The second is about the Premier of Ontario changing his mind about cell-phones/ Blackberries in the classroom. Despite the advice of teachers and the fact cell/phones and Blackberries are not welcome in the Ontario Legislature, the Premier does not believe they are a distraction in classrooms:


http:articl//www.theglobeandmail.com/news/technology/dalton-mcguinty-ignites-debate-over-blackberrys-in-the-classroom/e1709339/


And, finally, an article by Oxford researchers that discuss the possible ways technology is changing the shape of the human brain and the worry this is causing. As an advocate of Classical Education and a strong believer in books rather than machines, this article has my complete endorsement. No to hammer the point home, I have read Marianne Wolfson's book "Proust and the Squid" and think the worrisome dependence of computers in the classroom of some concern.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/sep/14/oxford-scientist-brain-change

Yes, I know this a computer blog, but, you should go read a book.

Liberal Thought

Currently, I am reading Martha Nussbaum"s "Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities." A book review will have to follow; however, in light of News International's sponsorship of schools (Academies) in the United States and England,

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/sep/12/rupert-murdoch-academy-schools

and the current investigation of the Koch brothers in the United States--I have to think Prof. Nussbaum may be on to something.

(Ps. The Koch brothers are as rich as Bill Gates, their father founded the John Birch Society and I, personally, am beginning to feel an almost a feudal sense of entitlement to the very rich developing in the world.)

Schedule, our regular attempt

Another homeschool Mom had a fantastic outline of her family's regular routine on her blog. Try as hard as we might, our schedule in no way resembles what ideally I would like. First, my daughters pretty much run the school and secondly, there are so many other things going on in this house, it is very hard to be constantly consistent. Our best attempt at a regular schedule is like this:

5-6am Mom up and on the computer to read the newspapers--call it guilt free wandering the net.

(okay, Mom still on the computer at 7:30)

7:30/ 8:00 Girls up, eating breakfast, dressing (including washing, tooth brushing and hair combing) , making beds.

9:00 Math: everyone does Math. It just worked out that I read somewhere it is best to do math in the morning and it was easiest to implement as part of the routine.

10:00 English: this includes grammar, composition and writing workshop. Emily and Emma have been known to use this time to work on their writing projects for NaNoWriMo and Elizabeth has been known to just read instead.

11:00 French: it has been a struggle to learn French. My French is not bad, as in not really good, but we are using a French copy of "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban" and a dictionary. I dictate the French sentences, the girls copy and self-correct. It is taking forever but whenever we watch Harry Potter movies, they are in French.

11:30 Latin: I took Latin all through high school and we are using the same Cambridge course I used. The girls don't seem to mind it.

12:00 piano for whomever wants to do it while I make lunch. Sometimes Elizabeth or Emily will practice guitar.

1:00 piano practice for whoever's turn is next and Great Reading for the others. I know it is dictatorial to make sure the children read specific texts but, until Emily actually acts on her views of open revolt, it is the way it is.

2:00 Geography and Logic/ Rhetoric are taken concomitant with Great Reading and piano; books are switched around and music practice continues and, hopefully, everything gets done.

3:00 Generally, everybody is finished for the day except for Elizabeth. Her whole schedule shifts upwards when she is taking VLC courses. Needless to say, she sometimes skips stuff.

There is Art Wednesday night at a local studio; there is no school on Thursday as there are piano and guitar lessons during the day and ballet for Elizabeth and gymnastics for Emily and Emma at night; Friday, there is school during the day but Emily and Emma are at ballet during the evening and Saturday, there are gymnastics for Emily and Emma. Sunday, we do nothing and periodically, in the winter, we skip school to go skiing and, in the summer, we do school and also go to the beach. The classroom is in the basement; our library is there, too, and we have a lot of books. We do not watch t.v. during the week; if there is one rule in the house, that is it: NO T.V. during the week. The girls read a lot. I read a lot. Even my husband reads a lot--though, since he discovered the application of curiousity to google, he also googles a lot.

Our routine is in no way set in stone. The University of Toronto has been known to offer tutoring sessions in Math on a Sunday morning; there are places and to go and people to see when we want; we love going to the museum to just wander around; we love libraries and Chapters bookstores and second-hand bookstores; and sometimes, there are days when we do nothing and others when we do a heck of a lot but none of it applicable to school. Sometimes I feel more important writing what I think we do down than what we actually do--the girls all sew, knit, embroider, crochet, ride, volunteer--you don't learn all that stuff unless something else gives. So, in conclusion, the bit about Math is true and the "no t.v." rule is true and the reading is true--everything paid for is true and everything else is generally kinda-sorta practiced. Now, I feel better.

Classical Schooling et al

Here is a great essay by John Allemange of the Globe and Mail discussing the relevance of a good Classical education: (My link didn't work the first time around and I would ask readers to credit the Globe and Mail and Mr. Allemange for the essay as I am re-publishing without permission):

The great truth of democracy, at least when it's working well, isn't about the levels of turnout at the polling stations or the noise from the opposition benches when someone who calls himself the leader gets carried away with his own sense of power. What's much more fundamental to the 2,500-year-old experiment of people trying to rule themselves can be found in its basic sense of humanity – the ability, as University of Chicago philosopher Martha Nussbaum wrote in Not for Profit, “to see other people as human beings, not simply as objects.”

We don't do this instinctively – it takes training. Animals might be collective by nature, but they are hierarchical in their attitudes toward self-preservation and exceedingly narrow in their range of sympathetic feelings. Authoritarian cultures and regimes exploit this us-and-them survival impulse to their advantage, but a democracy glories in achieving the best version yet of the good life thanks to what are traditionally called liberal arts – the broad-based critical education that freed people from all-knowing authority and allowed them to see both themselves and others as fully human.

But the more this good life is repositioned and redefined as material goods, where objects have become more intrinsically human than people themselves, the faster the liberal arts have fallen out of favour – in the academy, the economy and society at large, where a doctor, an X-ray technician and a former engineering student are now charged with wanting to bomb us into oblivion.

Clearly jihadists are the sworn enemies of liberal democracy, but can there be a connection between the disappearance of the liberal arts and the rise of homegrown terrorism? Or put another way, can we deter violence by teaching young people to think more clearly and compassionately than they now do in a technology-obsessed society where democracy is too often defined by its unthinking excesses? Prof. Nussbaum believes so.

As the culture of homegrown terrorism was coming into being, she undertook a study of the Indian province of Gujarat, where religious violence and an ambitious modernization of the educational system starkly exist side by side. “Gujarat is a classic place,” she says, “where schools have cut out all trace of critical thinking and the humanities, and placed a relentless focus on the technical training of people going into engineering and computer science and so on. I do think that is conducive to a culture where you blindly follow authority and respond to peer pressure. Lacking the empathy developed by a more critical kind of education, these tendencies reign unopposed.”

Reuters

Indian men carry a charred body of a train passenger in Gujarat, Feb. 27, 2002. A train carrying Hindu activists was set on fire, sparking further violence.

In 2002, Hindu mobs in Gujarat killed 2,000 Muslims, a pogrom that Prof. Nussbaum traces to “technically trained people who do not know how to criticize authority, useful profit-makers with obtuse imaginations.” We're reminded of that willing deference to higher authority and that failure of imagination when someone among us is arrested and charged with, as the law politely says, conspiracy to facilitate an act of terrorism. It's a disturbing throwback to an animalistic kill-or-be-killed relationship when the calculating minds of homegrown plotters can so casually reduce us from compassionate humanity to objects of disaffection.

Because we remain human beings, despite the best efforts of our enemies to get past that fact, we can also visualize the pain and the suffering and the horror that are the essential parts of the bomber's objectifying obliteration. This intellectual leap, sadly, is the great strength of what Northrop Frye called the educated imagination. If we've learned to share the strong feelings of characters in War and Peace and Madame Bovary, how can we not also identify with the sufferings in our own time and place.

The bombs didn't go off, and yet this reaction is distressingly powerful, at least in those who still know how to feel. But here's the essential conundrum with so-called homegrown terrorists: How do they come to be missing this visceral empathy, and how can they so easily shrug off the fellow feelings of the democracy they were raised in? Is there a hole in their soul? Something about their upbringing, their formation, their training that has gone missing or was never there?

Khurram Sher hams it up during a 2008 auditon for Canadian Idol in Montreal.

Khurram Sher hams it up during a 2008 auditon for Canadian Idol in Montreal.

A young man who plays a brilliant game of ball hockey, does a jokey turn for Canadian Idol auditions and has achieved all that was needed to get through McGill University medical school doesn't sound like the classic outsider. To the contrary. Khurram Sher is undeniably one of us – whoever we are, to use democracy's necessary qualifier.

So if we have a problem with him, then we should have a problem with our society and its shifting values that make it harder to decide what's good and what's bad. Is there a dehumanizing strain infecting the Western value system? The late historian Tony Judt thought so. “Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today,” he wrote in Ill Fares the Land. “For 30 years, we have made a virtue of the pursuit of material self-interest: Indeed, this very pursuit now constitutes whatever remains of our sense of collective purpose.”

The supreme virtue of self distorts liberal values, which strive to incorporate other people and other ways of thinking into the ongoing argument. Any education or career directed toward material enrichment is necessarily going to give short shrift to the competing needs and views of others. A humanities education is famously success-averse in financial terms, and yet, Prof. Nussbaum says, “there are reasons to think it pushes people in the direction of more empathetic relations with others.”

Studies by University of Kansas psychology professor Daniel Batson suggest that those who are better able to take the perspective of other people are more likely to help them – essentially, that there's a connection between vivid, imaginative empathy and real-life moral behaviour. But achieving that high level of emotional engagement is key to motivating altruism, which becomes not a detached act of charity but a powerful human-to-human bond.

The liberal arts value emotional introspection alongside critical inquiry. Does that mean liberal-arts graduates are less likely to become cold-blooded homegrown terrorists than those who haven't read their Shakespeare? That seems a stretch, or as the scientists would say, we don't have research on that.

“Hot feelings are always going to wipe out critical thinking,” says Janice Stein, director of the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs. “You can be a great critical thinker, but when you feel humiliated and marginalized, rightly or wrongly, the power of thought is overwhelmed.”

Teaching Empathy
The strange and interesting thing about many homegrown terrorists is that they themselves do not appear to have suffered intense humiliation and marginalization in their own lives. If anything, they have achieved the outward trappings of success.

But success is relative, as any good liberal-arts students knows. Status and money do not ensure happiness, according to psychologists who study the good life. We overestimate the happiness of big earners, without realizing that money brings pressures and conflicts that counteract the more basic and accessible pleasures of friends, family, conversation, creative idleness. Imagine being programmed for medical school from your earliest years, snaring a rare place at a good school with your A+ average, working desperately to keep up with your fellow overachievers, and then feeling empty at the end when the payoff isn't the paradise you expected. Could you talk yourself into resentment, or look for a higher purpose that would channel your feelings into someone's warped idea of a greater good?

“ We teach empathy – what would it be like if I were in this person's shoes?”— Cathy Risdon, McMaster University professor of family medicine

“Once you're in medicine,” says Cathy Risdon, a professor of family medicine at McMaster University, “what might have been fantasized about the power of belonging quickly dissipates, because it has the same mundane humane textures and politics and cruelties and generosities as any other field of play. I could easily imagine that the satisfaction of yearning to belong wouldn't turn out as one might expect it should. And then there are other groups you could turn to where that yearning might be satisfied more. The closeness and the secrecy and the centrality of purpose that go with people doing covert things might become very attractive.”

Dr. Risdon helps to design curriculum at McMaster, and part of her goal is to find ways to humanize highly technical and authority-driven medical training. “The foundation of all the incredible technical knowledge we expect of doctors is acquired through training that is all about generalization and abstraction – personal experience is regarded as highly dubious.” Her aim is to make young people who are focused on technical mastery see the particulars of the individual human being known as the patient, to turn the medical autocracy, if you like, into more of a democracy.

“We teach empathy – what would it be like if I were in this person's shoes? – as a way of working with the particulars of a human being. And I think the humanities are a way of doing that, since the narratives and stories that come from the humanities are always the particular. It does force students to think about how their own experience relates to the theme of a story, that medicine is not just about the universals. But developmentally people can have difficulty exercising that level of imagination, particularly in their 20s.”

A good liberal-arts education takes these emotionally underdeveloped twentysomethings and compels them to think as if they were a character in Pride and Prejudice or Huckleberry Finn or Crime and Punishment, to mix with those unlike themselves in Dante's Inferno, Thucydides's History of the Peloponnesian War and Montaigne's Essays, to challenge their theories with unsettling particulars instead of sheltering in an authoritative generalization. It doesn't necessarily come with virtuous ethical content, but it at least promotes a variety of approaches that steer impressionable minds away from the seductive haven of the single universal truth.

Jihad is one of those all-purpose, all-powerful truths, a know-it-all answer to an equivocating liberal world. And in a faith where no one can claim orthodoxy, radical Islam has an easier job of spoon-feeding the one true story to uncritical young people. Interestingly for humanities graduates, there is something highly McLuhanistic about the improbable success of jihadists in recruiting from the impressionable West.

“Marshall McLuhan described electronic communication as a kind of external nervous system,” says Feisal G. Mohamed, a Milton scholar at the University of Illinois. “The sense of connection is different from print, which created an imagined national community. Now, we're no longer nations of readers of print, but people connected by impulse from around the globe who seem to find reflected their sort of primordial instinct in co-religionists and people of the same culture. For this reason, the plugged-in generation seems more radical than their immigrant parents.”

Their schooling, then, has to contend with Internet preachers who challenge them to take on the marginalization of Muslims elsewhere, a role-playing game with potentially catastrophic consequences.

The humanities' limits
But if you're going to counteract the strange appeal of jihadists, can you really hope to succeed with something like Western philosophy, the product of the kind of Enlightenment secularism that true believers despise? Or if you just want to make more empathetic doctors, is it really necessary to look outside the field to find the required humanity?

Nav Persaud, a family-medicine resident and graduate of University of Toronto medical school who also studied philosophy and psychology at Oxford, is well placed to compare and contrast. “I think I'd worry far more about philosophy students than medical students,” he says. “I seem to recall rubbing shoulders with far more misanthropes in philosophy class than in medical school.”

Critical thinking was a key part of Dr. Persaud's medical education, along with training in ethical behaviour. Students are evaluated according to how well they interact with patients, he says, and if people find their doctors cold and aloof, that's because “you're trained in your professional life to focus on the facts necessary to make a professional decision. But in the end, the overall goal is to help people, to be mindful of what's best for them.”

Which, of course, makes it seem even more perplexing when someone like Dr. Sher is charged, or when 29-year-old British National Health Service doctor Bilal Abdullah was convicted in 2008 of trying to kill Londoners outside a West End nightclub before attempting a suicide attack on the Glasgow airport the next day.

“As a physician, I feel shame when another physician is charged,” Dr. Persaud says. “There's a big disconnect. It's definitely hard to reconcile with what a doctor does taking care of patients on a daily basis.”

Searching for a connection, he glimpses it not in medicine as such but in the glory perceived to be associated with the job. “Some people are attracted to the idea of becoming a doctor because it's a respected position in society. And maybe that need for recognition has a counterpart in the praise and notoriety you might get from a subset of people who support terror.”

There’s not much the liberal arts can do about the yearning for fame in the age of celebrity – pointing out its hollowness seems like a curiously antiquarian pursuit when even a graduate of McGill medical school currently awaiting trial on terrorism charges can be seen on YouTube singing an Avril Lavigne tune.

Edmonton-born Prof. Mohamed is convinced that there is a role for the humanities curriculum in banishing the kind of parochialism where radical Islam flourishes. But, to succeed in winning over those who resist the triumphalism of the West, he insists that the do-gooding humanities need to remake themselves.

“I think there has to be a re-enrichment of liberal education that's more alive to other traditions. You can't have a circling of the wagons around the Western tradition because you believe it has a monopoly on humane conduct. Because we know the humanist tradition is more conflicted than that. Milton, after all, was a famous champion of liberty, but he was also consistently anti-Catholic and fundamentally anti-democratic. It's not that terrorists are missing out on a traditional liberal education, that they need to learn their Plato or their Milton. The problem is that they don't know their own tradition and haven't studied the Islamic strain of humanism.”

That said, at a personal level, he notes that reading the novels of Philip Roth helped him better understand his identity as an Egyptian Canadian and enabled him to realize how the minority experience of feeling isolated was part of the mainstream North American story. “One of the virtues of humanities education,” he says, “is the way it reveals to us that we live in a world that is thick with culture and history.” Which is why the first-generation immigrant kids in the Canadian suburbs should be learning something good and useful about themselves from the profound otherness of the Jewish-American novel.

But that means there have to be students who will shortcut their economic advancement in order to hear the tale, and a broader society that will value this liberal use of the mind not as an intellectual distraction, but as the prime component of both peace and happiness. If all else fails, there's the scare story of the man who put too much faith in the promises of the job market. Mohamed Atta, the ringleader of the 9/11 terrorists, was a quick-witted engineering student who trained in Germany but was crushed when he couldn't find work after returning to Egypt. Think of him and his frustrations when the decision-makers promise to treat higher education as job training. And think what those students are missing whose intellectual explorations are cut off by too much practicality.

John Allemang is a feature writer for The Globe and Mail.

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