Huck Finn On Interpretation: Jim Answers Coleman

Coleman's Nihilistic Pedagogy
Morse Peckham's non-final Answer
The Instability of "Meaning"
GOP Rep. Dr. Paul Broun (GA) offers an example asserting a "Young Earth" Answer
Jim's goodness as answer to all of this (Huckleberry Finn)
Huck in the fog

***

Famously (apparently) David Coleman uttered the ultimate truth of the ground zero stance in his "pedagogical" nihilism:

Common Core’s architect, David Coleman, says the new writing standards are meant to reverse a pedagogical pendulum that has swung too far, favoring self-­expression and emotion over lucid communication. “As you grow up in this world, you realize people really don’t give a shit about what you feel or what you think,” he famously told a group of educators last year in New York.  (Tyre, Peg. "Writing Revolution," The Atlantic Monthly, Oct. 2012)

Heavens!  What is the lesson learned?

This is out of Nietzsche and refers to the singular individual's "will" to control all stimulus and response interaction.

O man! Listen!  What does the deep Midnight urge?  "I slept, I slept--, from deep dreaming I am awakened: --the world is deep, and deeper than the day has thought.  Deep is the world's woe--, joy--deeper still than agony; woe urges: Perish!  Yet all of joy wants eternal being, wants deep, deep eternal being!" (Thus Spoke Zarathustra) 

The midnight is the voice of the deepest forces in man, powers below the unconscious mind, below Schopenhauer's will, even, powers that unite man to the biological world, and beyond that to the forces of the universe. 

The midnight, as Nietzsche came to realize, is the source of he human will to power, man's drive to dominate, control, and master his environment, not to adjust to it, for man cannot adjust to his environment.  The effort to adjust is a will to submission, which leads to asceticism, to self-denial, to the desire to perish.  The effort to adjust must always fail, for between man and his environment is an eternal disparity; man's mind is but an instrument of the midnight powers, and an instrument is necessarily other than the object it manipulates.  (Peckham, Beyond the Tragic Vision, p 365)

That is, adaptation is submission; mastery is dominance.  It is illusion to propose to dominate the very ground of one's biologic being.  Now then, what is it to dominate other beings?

***


   When I got to it Jim was setting there with his head down between his knees, asleep, with his right arm hanging over the steering-oar. The other oar was smashed off, and the raft was littered up with leaves and branches and dirt. So she'd had a rough time.

   I made fast and laid down under Jim's nose on the raft, and began to gap, and stretch my fists out against Jim, and says:

   "Hello, Jim, have I been asleep? Why didn't you stir me up?"

   "Goodness gracious, is dat you, Huck? En you ain' dead -- you ain' drownded -- you's back agin? It's too good for true, honey, it's too good for true. Lemme look at you chile, lemme feel o' you. No, you ain' dead! you's back agin, 'live en soun', jis de same ole Huck -- de same ole Huck, thanks to goodness!"

   "What's the matter with you, Jim? You been a-drinking?"

   "Drinkin'? Has I ben a-drinkin'? Has I had a chance to be a-drinkin'?"

   "Well, then, what makes you talk so wild?"

   "How does I talk wild?"

   "How? Why, hain't you been talking about my coming back, and all that stuff, as if I'd been gone away?"

   "Huck -- Huck Finn, you look me in de eye; look me in de eye. Hain't you ben gone away?"

   "Gone away? Why, what in the nation do you mean? I hain't been gone anywheres. Where would I go to?"

   "Well, looky here, boss, dey's sumf'n wrong, dey is. Is I me, or who is I? Is I heah, or whah is I? Now dat's what I wants to know."

   "Well, I think you're here, plain enough, but I think you're a tangle-headed old fool, Jim."

   "I is, is I? Well, you answer me dis: Didn't you tote out de line in de canoe fer to make fas' to de tow-head?"

   "No, I didn't. What tow-head? I hain't see no tow-head."

   "You hain't seen no towhead? Looky here, didn't de line pull loose en de raf' go a-hummin' down de river, en leave you en de canoe behine in de fog?"

   "What fog?"

   "Why, de fog! -- de fog dat's been aroun' all night. En didn't you whoop, en didn't I whoop, tell we got mix' up in de islands en one un us got los' en t'other one was jis' as good as los', 'kase he didn' know whah he wuz? En didn't I bust up agin a lot er dem islands en have a turrible time en mos' git drownded? Now ain' dat so, boss -- ain't it so? You answer me dat."

   "Well, this is too many for me, Jim. I hain't seen no fog, nor no islands, nor no troubles, nor nothing. I been setting here talking with you all night till you went to sleep about ten minutes ago, and I reckon I done the same. You couldn't a got drunk in that time, so of course you've been dreaming."

   "Dad fetch it, how is I gwyne to dream all dat in ten minutes?"

   "Well, hang it all, you did dream it, because there didn't any of it happen."

   "But, Huck, it's all jis' as plain to me as -- "

   "It don't make no difference how plain it is; there ain't nothing in it. I know, because I've been here all the time."

   Jim didn't say nothing for about five minutes, but set there studying over it. Then he says:

   "Well, den, I reck'n I did dream it, Huck; but dog my cats ef it ain't de powerfullest dream I ever see. En I hain't ever had no dream b'fo' dat's tired me like dis one."

   "Oh, well, that's all right, because a dream does tire a body like everything sometimes. But this one was a staving dream; tell me all about it, Jim."

   So Jim went to work and told me the whole thing right through, just as it happened, only he painted it up considerable. Then he said he must start in and "'terpret" it, because it was sent for a warning. He said the first towhead stood for a man that would try to do us some good, but the current was another man that would get us away from him. The whoops was warnings that would come to us every now and then, and if we didn't try hard to make out to understand them they'd just take us into bad luck, 'stead of keeping us out of it. The lot of towheads was troubles we was going to get into with quarrelsome people and all kinds of mean folks, but if we minded our business and didn't talk back and aggravate them, we would pull through and get out of the fog and into the big clear river, which was the free States, and wouldn't have no more trouble.

   It had clouded up pretty dark just after I got on to the raft, but it was clearing up again now.

   "Oh, well, that's all interpreted well enough as far as it goes, Jim," I says; "but what does these things stand for?"
   It was the leaves and rubbish on the raft and the smashed oar. You could see them first-rate now.

   Jim looked at the trash, and then looked at me, and back at the trash again. He had got the dream fixed so strong in his head that he couldn't seem to shake it loose and get the facts back into its place again right away. But when he did get the thing straightened around he looked at me steady without ever smiling, and says:

   "What do dey stan' for? I'se gwyne to tell you. When I got all wore out wid work, en wid de callin' for you, en went to sleep, my heart wuz mos' broke bekase you wuz los', en I didn' k'yer no' mo' what become er me en de raf'. En when I wake up en fine you back agin, all safe en soun', de tears come, en I could a got down on my knees en kiss yo' foot, I's so thankful. En all you wuz thinkin' 'bout wuz how you could make a fool uv ole Jim wid a lie. Dat truck dah is trash; en trash is what people is dat puts dirt on de head er dey fren's en makes 'em ashamed."

(from Chapter 12 of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn)


***

If we recognize that meaning is not, as Peckham makes clear in every essay he writes (knowing we are strongly compelled and trained to forget this), immanent (that is to say that there isn't "meaning" within words), then we recognize that all assertions are unstable.  Emerson's wisdom in "Circles," around every circle another can be drawn, offers an example.  And further this helps us understand the nature of "orientation" as applied to "perspective."  Meaning is a negotiated behavior field.  Yes, that sounds willfully complex, but it is really quite simple: if you speak words to someone then he or she responds.  That is a negotiation of directions for behavior.

To make an obvious example.  I've spoken about the difficulty of "containing" the "ADHD-labeled" child in a classroom; that is, the difficulty of controlling his/her (mostly boys?) physical movements and verbal "outbursts."  Often this child displays a very clear understanding of the "appropriate" responses to instructional content questions: one example of what is inappropriate is the outburst of correct answers.  We frown on this because we train for order.  But the "curricular" understanding is evident.  What is "wrong" with this kind of child is that it seems the entire random processes of brain "responses" are always "uncontained," and so, they are labeled "inappropriate."

This is extreme but relevant.  Our responses are contained by cultural expectation, by convention, in all instances.  If there are two people, there is soon a "convention" that is controlling utterance and response.  If groups of humans are small in number these conventions can be contravened and re-established as a matter of "normal" routine with little concern for transgression--in fact transgression might be encouraged as a value.  However, as more and more people gather together transgression is given less and less "freedom" of valuation.  That is to say, "culture" polices utterance and response with far more strictness and aggressiveness.  This is said to be necessary for the smooth operation of civilized peoples.  There must be law, yes, but the cultural codes that are "trained" from birth do much more work in policing "actions" and "thoughts" (not that these need or should be distinct) than the laws and actual armed police force.  But this externalized body of policing responses are simply manifestations of cultural conventions and they are the "last" answer to order--force or naked physical power.

This is all to say that, as the internalized social or cultural conventions lose "force" or lose "meaning," the higher culture managing the institutional structures that support convention (a "right" way to do things, say things, think things) must offer other "utterances" that will manage responses to expectation, to maintain conventional order (retaining privilege and power for some, etc.).  Again, perhaps an extreme example would be the Tea Party agenda.  As all of the citizens of America begin to doubt the coherence of the "idea" of America, especially its "superior morality" as a "force for good" in the world and the assertion that decisions are "democratically" enacted (if so, why are so many of us failing economically, we are forced to consider), a very stringent and forceful reversion to an almost antebellum ethos was employed; that is a reversion to a certain branch of nationalism (my country, wrong or right).

***

    WE judged that three nights more would fetch us to Cairo, at the bottom of Illinois, where the Ohio River comes in, and that was what we was after. We would sell the raft and get on a steamboat and go way up the Ohio amongst the free States, and then be out of trouble.

   Well, the second night a fog begun to come on, and we made for a towhead to tie to, for it wouldn't do to try to run in a fog; but when I paddled ahead in the canoe, with the line to make fast, there warn't anything but little saplings to tie to. I passed the line around one of them right on the edge of the cut bank, but there was a stiff current, and the raft come booming down so lively she tore it out by the roots and away she went. I see the fog closing down, and it made me so sick and scared I couldn't budge for most a half a minute it seemed to me -- and then there warn't no raft in sight; you couldn't see twenty yards. I jumped into the canoe and run back to the stern, and grabbed the paddle and set her back a stroke. But she didn't come. I was in such a hurry I hadn't untied her. I got up and tried to untie her, but I was so excited my hands shook so I couldn't hardly do anything with them.

   As soon as I got started I took out after the raft, hot and heavy, right down the towhead. That was
all right as far as it went, but the towhead warn't sixty yards long, and the minute I flew by the foot of it I shot out into the solid white fog, and hadn't no more idea which way I was going than a dead man.

   Thinks I, it won't do to paddle; first I know I'll run into the bank or a towhead or something; I got to set still and float, and yet it's mighty fidgety business to have to hold your hands still at such a time. I whooped and listened. Away down there somewheres I hears a small whoop, and up comes my spirits. I went tearing after it, listening sharp to hear it again. The next time it come I see I warn't heading for it, but heading away to the right of it. And the next time I was heading away to the left of it -- and not gaining on it much either, for I was flying around, this way and that and t'other, but it was going straight ahead all the time.

   I did wish the fool would think to beat a tin pan, and beat it all the time, but he never did, and it was the still places between the whoops that was making the trouble for me. Well, I fought along, and directly I hears the whoop behind me. I was tangled good now. That was somebody else's whoop, or else I was turned around.

   I throwed the paddle down. I heard the whoop again; it was behind me yet, but in a different place; it kept coming, and kept changing its place, and I kept answering, till by and by it was in front of me again, and I knowed the current had swung the canoe's head down-stream, and I was all right if that was Jim and not some other raftsman hollering. I couldn't tell nothing about voices in a fog, for nothing don't look natural nor sound natural in a fog.

   The whooping went on, and in about a minute I come a-booming down on a cut bank with smoky ghosts of big trees on it, and the current throwed me off to the left and shot by, amongst a lot of snags that fairly roared, the currrent was tearing by them so swift.

   In another second or two it was solid white and still again. I set perfectly still then, listening to my heart thump, and I reckon I didn't draw a breath while it thumped a hundred.

   I just give up then. I knowed what the matter was. That cut bank was an island, and Jim had gone down t'other side of it. It warn't no towhead that you could float by in ten minutes. It had the big timber of a regular island; it might be five or six miles long and more than half a mile wide.

   I kept quiet, with my ears cocked, about fifteen minutes, I reckon. I was floating along, of course, four or five miles an hour; but you don't ever think of that. No, you feel like you are laying dead still on the water; and if a little glimpse of a snag slips by you don't think to yourself how fast you're going, but you catch your breath and think, my! how that snag's tearing along. If you think it ain't dismal and lonesome out in a fog that way by yourself in the night, you try it once -- you'll see.

   Next, for about a half an hour, I whoops now and then; at last I hears the answer a long ways off, and tries to follow it, but I couldn't do it, and directly I judged I'd got into a nest of towheads, for I had little dim glimpses of them on both sides of me -- sometimes just a narrow channel between, and some that I couldn't see I knowed was there because I'd hear -the wash of the current against the old dead brush and trash that hung over the banks. Well, I warn't long loosing the whoops down amongst the towheads; and I only tried to chase them a little while, anyway, because it was worse than chasing a Jack-o'-lantern. You never knowed a sound dodge around so, and swap places so quick and so much.

   I had to claw away from the bank pretty lively four or five times, to keep from knocking the islands out of the river; and so I judged the raft must be butting into the bank every now and then, or else it would get further ahead and clear out of hearing -- it was floating a little faster than what I was.

   Well, I seemed to be in the open river again by and by, but I couldn't hear no sign of a whoop nowheres. I reckoned Jim had fetched up on a snag, maybe, and it was all up with him. I was good and tired, so I laid down in the canoe and said I wouldn't bother no more. I didn't want to go to sleep, of course; but I was so sleepy I couldn't help it; so I thought I would take jest one little cat-nap.

   But I reckon it was more than a cat-nap, for when I waked up the stars was shining bright, the fog was all gone, and I was spinning down a big bend stern first. First I didn't know where I was; I thought I was dreaming; and when things began to come back to me they seemed to come up dim out of last week.

   It was a monstrous big river here, with the tallest and the thickest kind of timber on both banks; just a solid wall, as well as I could see by the stars. I looked away down-stream, and seen a black speck on the water. I took after it; but when I got to it it warn't nothing but a couple of sawlogs made fast together. Then I see another speck, and chased that; then another, and this time I was right. It was the raft.
(from Chapter 12 of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn)

***

From The Great Gatsby:

There was so much to read for one thing and so much fine health to be pulled down out of the young breath-giving air. I bought a dozen volumes on banking and credit and investment securities and they stood on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint, promising to unfold the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Maecenas knew. And I had the high intention of reading many other books besides.  I was rather literary in college--one year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the "Yale News"--and now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the "well-rounded man." This isn't just an epigram--life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all.

As I was writing the above a friend emailed me this, GOP Rep.: Evolution, Big Bang 'Lies Straight From The Pit Of Hell':

Congressman Paul Broun (R-Ga.) said last week that evolution and the big bang theory are "lies straight from the pit of Hell." "God's word is true. I've come to understand that. All that stuff I was taught about evolution and embryology and the big bang theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of Hell," said Broun, who is an MD. "It's lies to try to keep me and all the folks who were taught that from understanding that they need a savior." He continued: "You see, there are a lot of scientific data that I've found out as a scientist that actually show that this is really a young Earth. I don't believe that the earth's but about 9,000 years old. I believe it was created in six days as we know them. That's what the Bible says."According to NBC News, Broun's comments were part of a larger speech given at the 2012 Sportsman's Banquet at Liberty Baptist Church in Hartwell, Georgia on September 27th. (h/t focus)

(See this Errant post for more on "young earth theory.")

So, there's that.  

Now, depending on our "orientation" we will respond to this in various ways.  My friend, who is a doctor, expresses shock that a doctor can say this.  She might be trying to assert that a doctor is a "scientist" and that scientists cannot think this way.  I would disagree (and have) that being a doctor makes one a scientist.  Rather, a doctor is a kind of technician who must understand how a system works in order to "fix" it.  It is often a source of real depression when doctors cannot fix patients.  Medicines seem to me an attempt to "palliate" the doctor's response to failing systems as much as the patient's.  "Take this and hopefully you won't need to see me in the morning."  That is to say that  doctors are people and people like answers.  Science, or rather, the "scientific method," is a constant display of "not quite right."  We make predictions and they are proven false, always.  

Politically, as concerns Paul Broun's speech, we might want to say this is "just performance."  Broun has a particular message to sell to a particular constituency and it's irrelevant what the rest of the world thinks about what he has said.  (This leads us back to David Coleman's remarks.)  In fact, we might want to start acknowledging that this stance is the very heart of our modern dilemma.  If I can't find a "right" answer, if no one "cares" about my feelings or thoughts, then all of life must be reduced to a very conscious application of persuasive performances.  This, to be mastered, (education to mastery is a very common instructional trope now), requires acknowledging that "you," the identity you believe inheres "inside you" somehow, is not stable either.

Maybe more to the point: an analytical stance in teaching writing (and reading) primarily seeks to "understand" the "answer" proposed and expose it as at best "an" answer easily replaced by other "valid" answers IF and ONLY IF one can be "persuaded" of validity.

If "persuasion" is our ultimate test of the effective use of language--if it is our most "valued" response--then we must conclude that there is only one valid persuasion in a society acknowledging the instability of meaning: Power.  This includes all that that single word can subsume such as wealth, might, political or corporate positions, etc.

In any event, freedom's just another word for "winning friends and influencing people" (where "friend" means "those less knowing").

***

I would press upon you to read (or, likely more enlighteningly, listen to) The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.  There is hardly a chapter in it that does not shout out in opposition to David Coleman's corporate and personal "will to power."

In the sections of Chapter 12 on offer here Huck describes the very "unknowingness" of our interpretations.  We try and try to "see" in the fog of language and the non-verbal "utterances" that are the "geography" we inhabit.

He then dominates his good friend, Jim, through the power of language and by exploiting the trust between the two.  He lies to him for fun.

In many respects this is the very lesson of which David Coleman's pedagogy approves.  Huck knows how to best Jim, to manipulate him, to persuade him.  Jim answers both Huck's betrayal and Coleman's nihilistic pedagogy.

Writing Instruction Grounding Social Control

Those of us who have been teachers and/or wannabe authors before everyone was an author (see the note yesterday re: artists)--I know I'm treading on my commoner sensibility here, always a tension in me--remember there is a book by William Zinsser called On Writing Well.  I'll confess that I own it and yet have never read it.  When I was in the classroom I preferred the work of Peter Elbow (Writing Without Teachers) for some reason that I can't discover in my copies of his books.  I think there was a freedom to be always in the wrong with Elbow while Zinsser gave me the sense that I had to "do it right."  Just think of the differences implied in the titles above.  But do challenge me on this as these are days gone long by.

I went through a period where I bought "how to" books on writing and publishing: Rust Hills is funny and incisive, but I just read his work like it was a newspaper column, it amused me for the nonce but became more permanent if used in paper mache; Donald Murray, too practical for me--that is too much practice!; Natalie Goldberg--what are "bones" exactly and how do I write with them in any direction, down or up (but this coincided with my "Shambhala" phase as well as I tried to mimic Salinger's Seymour and follow Vedanta)?; John Gardner, another era and smeared as a plagiarist; Lucy Calkins surely was too precious for me; and Richard Rhodes, well, his book on writing is really just an autobiography--but still he offers the best piece of advice ever given. And probably most laughable for me in terms of my absolute, clearly absolute, "American" effort and intention to achieve success by reading about something instead of doing something about that thing: I bought, on the discovered suggestion of William Gass (an onanistic ACROBAT of a writer who should never give anyone advice on writing) I think in a pamphlet for a special library collection of the books which were most influential to his authorial becoming, from a used bookstore not far from The Tivoli Theater on Delmar in University City, Missouri, a rather nice copy of George Saintsbury's A History of English Prosody from the Twelfth Century to the Present Day, 1906.  I'm sure it accompanied me to the water closet a time or two.

That advice shared by Rhodes was actually advice given to him from a newspaper editor: "Rhodes, apply ass to chair."  A newspaper man...these authors, authorities, many of them, if not all, were working stiff writers.  They were forced by their professional livelihoods to "apply ass to chair" and produce coherent sentences every hour of every day!

And so, wisdom, be attentive: you must write to be a writer.  That is, you must do the work of writing...a lot.

To me, the most inspirational book on the work of writing is Donald Hall's Life Work which I suggest you apply as a "soul poultice" once you have traveled with me through the work of Peg Tyre on display as "The Writing Revolution" in the October 2012 Atlantic Monthly.  (She too, like Amanda Ripley, has a "social science" instruction manual about the "right way" to do things for sale.)

***

A quick note prior to setting off down the river of elucidation that follows.  Who are these brilliant pedagogical reformers who claim in every other sentence that their methods are "research-" and "evidence-based" (akin to Amanda Ripley claiming she studies human behavior)?  The folks here are all employees of interested institutions and individuals.  Again, as this is the only industry "thriving" at present, I am not surprised at the "gold rush" mentality in the charter movement and in the extension of "leadership" ideology to the corporate/academic hybrid "centers" of education.

Nell Scharff--Director of the Center for Education Leadership at Baruch College (in partnership with New Visions in Public Schools--an organization serving to "farm club" "leaders" into school systems).
Diedre DeAngelis--Principal of New Dorp High School--one of New Visions "partner schools." All of her training and career is in Special Education.
Steve Graham--Prof in the Ed Department at ASU--all of his work is in Learning Disabilities.
Arthur Applebee--The Center on English Learning & Achievement at the University of Albany.
Judith Hochman--The Hochman Project.   A focus on a formula centering on the words, "but, because, and so."  The Project is also run by Nell Scharff.
Peg Tyre--her bio with the article says she's the director of strategy at the Edwin Gould Foundation.  In other words, this piece is strategic and self-interested.

(I expand a bit below on the preponderance of careers in learning disabilities and special education that seem involved in this revolution.)

I'll have to admit that my current dead mentor, Morse Peckham, might find all of this tip-top and dandy.  He, along with a colleague at UPenn, created their own method of reading poems that started with a very diagrammatic understanding of the structural relations of words in sentences.  This is published as Word, Meaning, Poem.  I recommend this.  I suppose we must say, yes, but, what happens after you learn to write "persuasive" sentences?  Is there any "ethical" content in them?

This is my gut feeling--that the training of writers has been discovered to have some kind of corollary to a controlling mechanism--that the CONTENT now becomes extremely IMPORTANT as one internalizes the "data" that is used in "sentence" training.

***

Here's the point sitting underneath Tyre's point in this article: Education is about the only viable "market" or "industry" going in this country.  (This includes the polemical texts of the authors on display in The Atlantic and being plugged for sale .)

We don't make anything and we don't do anything.  We talk a lot and a lot of that talk is nonsense and incoherent.

For it matters not how small the beginning may seem to be: what is once well done is done forever. But we love better to talk about it: that we say is our mission. Reform keeps many scores of newspapers in its service, but not one man. (HDT)

We watch television and movies and youtube videos of talking dogs and anything that is "incongruent," still mostly "jack-asses" hurting themselves (cue "nut-punch") or offering up their "dignity."  (Though a raving, narrow-minded blowhard now, Dennis Miller did have a fantastic joke about this aspect of culture--seeded many moons ago but springing up to a kind of "nationalism" that the Japanese seem to have exceeded us in of late--"Let's make a deal host Monty Hall stumped the entire audience by offering cash to anyone who could produce an ounce of dignity.")

Sub-point: Common Core State Standards is a product that folks "in the know" (these, in this case, are "progressives," though the method is anything but) approve of for the educational market.

Sub-sub: You really don't get to have a say.  But you have never had a say in how and what your kids were taught anyway (unless you homeschool).

***

The problem for me here is that I want to be honest when trying to convey the content of this piece.  I want to say that there are many things in here I would agree with BUT...and I've lost you.  The "but" I want to offer is that none of this is new and that it never is.  So, these ideas have always "played" and many of us believe that much of this can be used and that teaching using these tools CAN work.  BUT, this is not what the article (nor Tyre's book) is really selling.

I might propose that reformers (especially well-paid foot soldiers for the masters at The Atlantic and the other oligarchs in DC and NYC) simply aim to require that your tax money be used to buy new curricular content and implement "new" teaching methods, and this is most easily done by hiring "new" cheaper labor to enforce the top-down hierarchically proper curriculum.  An added bonus is that this "order" entirely undercuts any "local" input into education.  States are requiring a "common" core of content and this will be implemented by lock-step rule-followers that we are calling "training cadres" (at least in one state).

Rather, I might observe that this is the consequence of what is a full frontal attack on existing structures and organizations that have been "doing" our learning.  This is my surmise.

Or, I might say, this is good stuff, at least initially.

***

However, it seems just as easy to say that many of these folks do indeed want to "fix" education by "fixing" particular pedagogies and the carriers of those methods, i.e. the teachers.  That is, many of these reformers want to apply "systems approaches" to the classroom and school and they need all parties to be properly trained for that.  And proper and disciplined training is the key.  I only wish there were more honesty in how this is sold.  The fact that all citizens are coerced into "formal" education undercuts any discussion about "freedom" and "liberty" in this country.  Even a good progressive like John Stuart Mill, while agreeing that the state must check up on the "results" of state-funded education, insisted that state have ZERO say in the what and how (excepting of course the "basics" of literacy and numeracy).  Of course now is the time when all chime in about 21st Century skills.  Do tell, what has changed for the laboring class except the fact that there isn't one?

Recall that slave-owners in this country were adamant that a slave should NOT be taught to read.  Why?  Well, I'm sure there are many belittling reasons, but one is that reading would allow one to know OTHER opinions that couldn't be HEARD on the plantation.  Such as there being support in OPPOSITION to slavery (which we should note is called, rightly, an "institution").

One of the difficulties in thinking through any of this is that the social managers have as their goal the proper management of the proper order as they conceive of it.  Their ideas serve, well, themselves.  Even if we might (generously) contend they have "good hearts" and really want to see children "succeed."  That is, succeed in the way appropriate to the cultural presumptions of social managers.

***

What Peg Tyre conveys, finally, is, interestingly, an actual "revolution."  One definitional aspect being: "a procedure or course, as if in a circuit, back to a starting point."

Of course, as the circle is our geometrical truth, though we insist on privileging the boxing square, this is only natural.  From the article comes our Common Core rationale for the "revolution" in education.

Fifty years ago, elementary-school teachers taught the general rules of spelling and the structure of sentences. Later instruction focused on building solid paragraphs into full-blown essays. Some kids mastered it, but many did not. About 25 years ago, in an effort to enliven instruction and get more kids writing, schools of education began promoting a different approach. The popular thinking was that writing should be “caught, not taught,” explains Steven Graham, a professor of education instruction at Arizona State University. Roughly, it was supposed to work like this: Give students interesting creative-writing assignments; put that writing in a fun, social context in which kids share their work. Kids, the theory goes, will “catch” what they need in order to be successful writers. Formal lessons in grammar, sentence structure, and essay-writing took a back seat to creative expression.

(Would it surprise you to know that Prof Graham has spent his entire career, a long and distinguished one, and, as he points out again and again on his CV, productive, in the management of the educational environment for those considered learning disabled?  It's a fact that I find incredibly revealing as to the "orientation" of our "experts" as they apply their work to our population at large.)

It would be hard to argue against the erroneous order of asking for "creativity" prior to mechanics.  Again, you see that we will agree on many particulars.

Coleman, the Common Core, Nell Scharff, New Visions and all those involved in "centering" educational leadership are attempting to run the movie Pleasantville in reverse.  Perhaps Coleman, in offering his own version of Obama's "God and Guns" comment, revealed the true animus of this reform:

...Coleman, says the new writing standards are meant to reverse a pedagogical pendulum that has swung too far, favoring self-­expression and emotion over lucid communication. “As you grow up in this world, you realize people really don’t give a shit about what you feel or what you think,” he famously told a group of educators last year in New York.

We are still being subject to the conservative and cultural backlash against 60s idealism.  This includes a Rights movement yielding real human achievement in justice that has been systematically dismantled as soon as it was constructed.  Coleman offers the standard conservative line--who cares how you feel?; but more, well, surprising, is the inclusion of "what you think" in there as well.

Further, the majority of the "reform" is aimed at the fact that the country's population needs better social management.  That is to say, the coherence of America as an "ideal" has crumbled for many among us due to many things but not least a corporate economic structure that has, as obviously as the operation of a grain auger, pulled out all the wealth of the country and moved it off-shore.  That corporate structure was the very MATERIAL counter-statement to the IDEAL dreams (dreams!) of the 60s "counter-culture."  Note the CULTURE was and is MATERIAL and in that way has been and always will be REAL and dominant.

But, and here's the tricky part, the pedagogy is sound per Rhodes advice above as well as the first sentence of the Thoreau quotation ("For it matters not how small the beginning may seem to be: what is once well done is done forever.")  What must be made more clear to all is that this is a training environment and training has nothing to do with "freedom."  The basics in literacy are "trainable" surely--just as 2+2 is 4 without calculation so can the identification of subject and predicate be--but this seems to beg the "content and container" question, one akin to chicken or egg.  As Morse Peckham has indicated, mathematics is empty of content, but extremely useful being capable of "containing" any meaning.  The formulae of speech parts might be seen to fulfill this same function.

This training pedagogy--like any behavior-directed method--seeks to inculcate and habituate.  Perhaps we will readily agree that without proper habits, without proper discipline, we are afloat and rudderless coursing with dangerous speed southward on the Big Muddy.  But what is the what (a la Eggers) of this training?

***

What can literature teach us?  Everything and nothing!  We are the "preceptors" as much as "receptors" of meaning in that humans must be taught by responding and "observing" what comes next.  That is, the response may be "random" and the return response may be conventional (proper, culturally appropriate).  The conventional response is a "policing" act.  A random and inappropriate response will be "corrected."  The application of convention is an application of cultural force--an assertion of what is "right" and should be "replicated."

Let's look at a section of a book that has long been "curricular" but has also long been "contentious" as a proper text for the education of "right" citizenship.  Recently this book has been reproduced for the educational market excised of offensive words, well, one word: "nigger."  Can the excision of a word make the world a kinder, gentler, more caring place?  No.  But it can change the past (and he who controls the past...).  You might have guessed already that I'm talking about Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.  This novel is full of rebellion.  That is it's key element--it's real strength.  Huck on the river is a free human and he spends most of the book standing against "proper" civilization.  It is one of the travesties of "education" and our cultural interpretation that we "judge" a book based on its transcription of a word that bears the load of a cultural bigotry that was PROPER and appropriate.  The common and casual use is descriptive of how the world was socially managed.  I have written more abou this in "True Education: Huck's River..."

I know this falls outside of David Coleman's advised "informational texts" to be used to teach "proper" analytical skills, but hey, I'm an old man and past training (except by force, of course, thank you "at will" employment).

But perhaps you will allow it me if I present this "anecdotal" evidence for support.  In his "The Morality of Scientific Technology" Paul Goodman notes that Norbert Weiner, the "father" of cybernetics (feedback systems!) "used to point out that the repetition of communication just increases the noise; in general, he said, there is more new information in a good poem than a scientific report."

As Norbert and Goodman have my back, here are some ideas about reforming a body from Huck Finn.

From Chapter 1:

   Pretty soon I wanted to smoke, and asked the widow to let me. But she wouldn't. She said it was a mean practice and wasn't clean, and I must try to not do it any more. That is just the way with some people. They get down on a thing when they don't know nothing about it. Here she was a-bothering about Moses, which was no kin to her, and no use to anybody, being gone, you see, yet finding a power of fault with me for doing a thing that had some good in it. And she took snuff, too; of course that was all right, because she done it herself.

From Chapter 6:

   He kept me with him all the time, and I never got a chance to run off. We lived in that old cabin, and he always locked the door and put the key under his head nights. He had a gun which he had stole, I reckon, and we fished and hunted, and that was what we lived on. Every little while he locked me in and went down to the store, three miles, to the ferry, and traded fish and game for whisky, and fetched it home and got drunk and had a good time, and licked me. The widow she found out where I was by and by, and she sent a man over to try to get hold of me; but pap drove him off with the gun, and it warn't long after that till I was used to being where I was, and liked it -- all but the cowhide part.

   It was kind of lazy and jolly, laying off comfortable all day, smoking and fishing, and no books nor study. Two months or more run along, and my clothes got to be all rags and dirt, and I didn't see how I'd ever got to like it so well at the widow's, where you had to wash, and eat on a plate, and comb up, and go to bed and get up regular, and be forever bothering over a book, and have old Miss Watson pecking at you all the time. I didn't want to go back no more. I had stopped cussing, because the widow didn't like it; but now I took to it again because pap hadn't no objections. It was pretty good times up in the woods there, take it all around.  

How shall we analyze this?  Huck is one of the best people in all of literature.  Can we make more of him?  

***

One other necessary item of which me must be aware (if you are not already): this is also a concerted attack on the "left" perspective of the "dispossessed."  Tyre's article takes a pot-shot at academic training of educators by trying to undermine the "usefulness" of "sixtiesism."  

Apparently all those hours of studying "leftist texts" really did a number on our "teacher training" institutions.  (I went through one of these programs in the early-90s and I can assure you there was very little talk of oppression.) Tyre makes this egregious ideological claim--as if our constant victors, the white and wealthy among us have had their hard-working values undermined by the pedagogy of the oppressed indigenous cultures.  

Back on Staten Island, more New Dorp teachers were growing uncomfortably aware of their students’ profound deficiencies—and their own. “At teachers college, you read a lot of theory, like Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, but don’t learn how to teach writing,” said Fran Simmons. How could the staff backfill the absent foundational skills their students needed in order to learn to write?

How could we let Paulo Friere insinuate his ideology of being oppressed into our Golden Land?  Please seek out some information on Freire--note that the institute that bears his name is dedicated to social justice and not the marketing of educational products and methods.

This, to me, is an indication of the ideology at work underneath all of this.  If we can properly train our underclass there will be greater social control.

You see, it seems very clear to me more and more that the managers MUST institute greater social control in our centers for social obedience, or public schools.  Freire's pedagogy instructs us in the exact opposite way, by "community-based learning."

And finally, we must stop arguing with those in power.  As David Coleman made clear--in this country all of us are inconsequential and no one gives a shit about what we feel or think.

It is time for a rebellion, not a revolution, one family at a time.

***

Photo of David Coleman accompanies The Atlantic article "The Schoolmaster."

Schools (Don't?) Matter, Nor Does Creativity

Okay, I'll confess to being less than tactful most of the time.  But I gotta tell you, I'm pretty sick of one particular complaint that I hear (rather, read) again and again on education sites and FB pages dedicated to parent organizations against testing regimes in public education: "Your stealing my child's creativity!"

First, there's no such thing.

...since the criterion of creativity cannot distinguish between the artist and the nonartist, anyone who calls himself an artist is an artist, and anyone who calls himself creative is creative. 

Innovation is the norm of human behavior.  The human brain is so constructed that nobody ever gets anything right.  Innovation which is validated by the culture or by some subculture within the culture is called creativity; innovation which is invalidated is called error.  Creativity is validated error; error is invalidated creativity.  (Morse Peckham)

That is to say, these are cultural conventions that are not worth arguing about.  Sure, testing reduces the time your child spends "learning" something else in school, but what exactly?  Is there a "creativity" curriculum available somewhere?  Let me show you some creativity that sets my teeth on edge.

Competitive tennis, like money pool, requires geometric thinking, the ability to calculate not merely your own angles but the angles of response to your angles … Because the expansion of response possibilities is quadratic, you are required to think n shots ahead, where n is a hyperbolic function limited by (roughly) your opponent’s talent and the number of shots in the rally so far. I was good at this.  (David Foster Wallace, "Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley.")

That is interesting and I'd guess you agree...but what is it saying (and why is "money pool" particularly of consequence)?  I think it says this: the brain does stuff and my (DFW's) brain does this particular stuff pretty well and I think I'll describe it this way cuz there is no way to know "cause"...'n'stuff.

But the "creativity" here says nothing at all.  Or rather, and this is indeed important, it says, "terms mathematical are metaphorical, see?"  But did you think this metaphorical or mathematically incisive--in other words, did you think that "math" is "inside" all things?

In other words, is this an example of that mythical beast, creativity?

Second, schools have never encouraged creativity--it's an obedience training institution!  And who could, with a straight face, say otherwise?  Most creativity is born of a reaction AGAINST "the man" (systems and institutions of hierarchical dominance).  So, really, you should be giving your child instructions to be ANGRY and show them how to take that anger and USE it.

Third, this, that I posted on more than one FB site today:

While I, in the spirit of solidarity, am against unfettered technology in the classroom--I have to point out that Paul Goodman nailed this issue in 1966 already pointing out the perils of GE funding of education "because they have money and tech and why not"--I am also against the blanket term "creativity." It's an easy non-specific "value" that has zero meaning. Here is the issue about technology, and specifically technology "tools" like "iPads:" they are not educational learning tools. They are very simply one thing only--a consumption portal for material products and ideological products. If you worried about "brainwashing" via TV--how in the world can you not see this incursion into the classroom as anything short of revolutionary--a mind control device in every child's hands. Let's stop the blather about creativity--this is a WAR for your independence of THOUGHT--period.

I don't know how to say this more strongly.  We are fighting "distractions."  Hunker down, people.  Find your focus at home!  The national crazy is being manufactured.

***

Further to this point--i.e. that "damping" creativity is a distraction (a meaning-free zone)--Schools Matter contributor Robert Skeels offered this comment on my "Homeschooling" post:

Homeschooling. Because every child deserves to learn that humans rode dinosaurs.

Now, many of us (I wrote "most" and changed it) must wonder how in this age and time there are people who have found themselves presented with the "reasonable" explanation that Adam and Eve named dinosaurs and/or that homo sapiens lived among these behemoths.  I can certainly easily opine on this but not here.  I have thought a bit about it and written something that might be interesting to you here, "Young Earth Activists and the Gap Theory."  The easy money available for this kind of "believertainment" is almost shocking (I am hardly "shockable" any longer).

But, I don't find this an issue to worry over.  Instead it seems like the right time to "gather ye rosebuds" and so forth.

My reply to Dr. Skeels (corrected):

I wrote the following in an email to a friend who has been working to salvage a community-run school in an Midwestern city. The group is already talking about creating "hierarchy" in the management of the teaching and operational decisions and he is despairing as the community has done so much to mitigate the vicissitudes of "leadership:"

***

Institutions are not for "persons" but for a "collective" or "managed" version of a "good" that serves a species (not a man or woman or child). An institution requires an explanation and an hierarchical structure.

Otherwise, I would not call it a school and I would not pay anyone as an employee but perhaps create a fund to supply the "gift" of housing and meals for the "instructor" in residence.

Perhaps this is too Ichabod Crane, but the teacher once was a kind of itinerant, seasonal worker (agrarian) who basically was paid his keep and nothing beyond as all the community lived in a subsistence manner. THAT was what was most "communally" shared--a common life of subsistence where days were not tomorrows but only today.

Further, a teacher was primarily a basic literacy and numeracy instructor unless hired per family to tutor in the more advanced knowledge (mostly classics--Greek and Latin)--here the teacher might be seen as storing up acorns against the winter.

It seems plausible to me that this is still the most useful "form" of the occupation. We must teach students how to use the tools of language--teach the way language uses us without our "self-knowledge"--and then let them fend for themselves--let them employ these strategies against the manipulation of their "perspective" by parents, preachers, politicians, con artists, and even ourselves as teachers.

***

I'm not sure that we're not missing an opportunity to dismiss the institutional coercion that keeps us fighting for an "obedience center" rather than a locus of learning and human community.

In some sense I may be arguing that schools don't matter.  That is that we are clinging to an institution that we "idealize" as PUBLIC without considering it's actual mission and impact.

My wish is that we come together to agree locally on what indeed IS a public education--that is, one that we agree upon in our own places--of worship, of business, of concern.

Homeschooling, Freely Unequal

Dismantling The Atlantic Monthly Reform Manifesto
2nd Installment

I.

I introduced the The Atlantic's Reform pamphlet ("22 pages...") by focusing on the presentation of content.  But, I regret to say I left out what might have been the most important part: the "cover" of the section.  It's a TEST BOOKLET!  Surprised?

II.

Now, this is clearly ideological content on all levels.  There is ZERO subtlety here.  How is this possible?  For whom are these articles written?  Surely these writers and these editors must realize that they are writing a very obvious form of "persuasion" empty of anything deeper than bald ideology.  If I assume that, then what?

I think it's necessary now to approach much of this as if it were not solely propaganda.  What I mean is, our first examination, after acknowledging the bald intent, must be to see these pieces as an attempt of offer coherent instructions.  So, these pieces in The Atlantic Monthly must be seen as instructions to its readers to "change" what Paul Elie, in letter B above, calls the "cult, creed, and dogma of public school."  That is, re-describe the institution and then act appropriate to those instructions.  This is propaganda, yes, but like Peckham's description of mathematics, it is empty of content.  That is, the content consists of directions which are persuasive but not honest in that they don't point to the goal behind the instructions.  That is to say, authors of propaganda want you to do something, think something, feel something exactly as instructed but not for the same reason that they wrote the propaganda.  They are writing to create a coherence on a lower level while they seek to operate within a distinctly different coherence at a higher level of culture (i.e., more educated, greater wealth, Caucasian,  etc.).  Management rules and labor rules are an example.  Celebrity drug use and criminal drug laws for the urban poor is another.  There must be a reason why some people cannot do a thing while another group is allowed to do that same thing and often to greater extremes.  This is why an oxycodone addict like Rush Limbaugh is allowed to blather on about urban pot-smokers and this is considered "appropriate."

Dickens pointed to this over an over.  Examples are legion in Hard Times, but a clear instruction is found in chapter eleven, "No Way Out," when Stephen Blackpool asks, hat in hand, advice of Mr. Bounderby--factory owner and Stephen's boss--as to how to attain a divorce.  Blackpool responds to Bounderby's answer by noting the inconsistency and incoherence of the social instructions while Bounderby insists on it as a coherence.

    '...I mun be ridden o' this woman, and I want t' know how?'
    'No how,' returned Mr. Bounderby.
    'If I do her any hurt, sir, there's a law to punish me?'
    'Of course there is.'
    'If I flee from her, there's a law to punish me?'
    'Of course there is.'
    'If I marry t'oother dear lass, there's a law to punish me?'
    'Of course there is.'
    'If I was to live wi' her an' not marry her-saying such a thing could be, which it never could or would, an' her so good-there's a law to punish me, in every innocent child belonging to me?'
    'Of course there is.'
    'Now, a' God's name,' said Stephen Blackpool, 'show me the law to help me!'
    'Hem! There's a sanctity in this relation of life,' said Mr. Bounderby, 'and-and-it must be kept up.'

It is often shocking to me that this is still our preferred mode of social management.

III.

Paul Elie, the author of "The Homeschool Diaries," is described as

a senior fellow with Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs. His second book, Reinventing Bach, is out this month from FSG.

Paul Elie has been writing and editing in the publishing industry since 1987, always and consistently, as far as this interview details, moving up in the world.  It would appear that finally he has "made it" and is likely more successful than he imagined he would be.  He has become an institutional voice.

Further, Paul Elie is a Catholic whose book on Catholic writers, with a title taken from a Flannery O'Connor short story, "The Life You Save May Be Your Own," was extremely successful and placed on many "best Catholic books" lists.  It was Beliefnet's 2003 "Book of the Year."  In an interview there it is clear that Elie is a man trying to live his faith and promote that way of being.  He says of the subjects of his book, "These people were trying to make points with their whole lives."

What point is a representative of the Catholic faith trying to make with "The Homeschool Diaries?"

IV.

The entire piece, all 1,400 words, is pure "everything-and-the-kitchen-sink" "dog whistle" for an "anti-government," "tribal" reader.  It is frankly an embarrassing piece of writing if we judge it from a literary standpoint.  As indicated, it is less than subtle.  Each of its twelve paragraphs can be read as a 12-step program designed to bludgeon one with ideological cliches.

1. City government is incompetent.  The body in question is the city Department of Education.  The city redrew district lines and his kids were then denied access to a "gifted" program (Elie's quotes).

2. City public school officials are criminals and/or inexperienced and/or incompetent.

3. His wife, Lenora, can stay at home, join like-minded groups, and educate their child (bolstered by Elie's "curricular" abilities as a writer and grad-school instructor) instead of working to pay for private schools.  In effect, Elie is the Principal and Lenora is the labor.

4. Homeschooling's not just for religious traditionalists.  This is Elie's redescription of "fundamentalists."  His gang includes professors, composers, restauranteurs, and even someone who seems to be blue-collar, though given a full title to make him more like Elie, a "Columbia University physical-plant supervisor."  In other words, a manager.

5. a) Public schools are underfunded, overcrowded and "perpetually in turnaround." b) Public schools force questionable and irrelevant testing on students. c) Up-scale gentrification--moving middle class whitey out of neighborhoods--is driving up real estate in those districts with "good" public schools (how can there be any?).

6. a) Private schools are unaffordable.  b) Catholic schools are being undercut by their "poor relations," parochial schools.

7. Homeschoolers have all kinds of reasons, but most of them are to Elie, "high culture" reasons set beside the "public schools' emphasis on standardized testing" to the detriment of an arts education.

8. You already, if you live in someplace with high culture (ehem), supplement your poor, public school education with cultural outings.

9. Elie's "day"--math at home with dad first thing; then it seems as though dad goes to work off-site at an office space (that must be pricey); Lenora, teaches the rest and they then go culture site-hopping.

10. These cultural sites are often free! (um...paid for by tax dollars).  Then he lists great instructive opportunities offered at bargain rates compared with private school per deum rates.

11. But, we are traditionalists!  (ah, there's the conservative rub)

12. What about the future?  We already are teaching our kids like a college curriculum so what's the big deal?

So, how does this say more than this: If you can afford it, if you live in a city, if you are educated, if your friends are educated, keep your kids out of the public school system.

Is this good advice?  I won't argue with one man's particulars.  We all SHOULD consider the ways we live our lives as families.  But isn't this action designed in the main to remove as much "value" from the public school as possible?  And what of the non-Elie's ("Are they my poor?") who cannot fit this cultural template?  What is a public system for?  Without it, what do we envision happening?

Imagine, in a city like New York, the entire school age population NOT going to school but staying at home, taking field trips, etc.  Is that viable?

V.

So, when confronted with this "practical" approach to "learning" we should probably ask why Paul Elie doesn't want to reform public school education and share his immense capabilities with more than his tribe.  Why isn't Paul Elie running for school board or local office?

Because many of us would agree with much of what Elie has written regarding the troubling situation of our public schools.  These are not to be "fixed" by the Elie's of this world.  They are to be erased.  And as social management must have institutions like schools to do the automatic work of cultural indoctrination, what would schools, once destroyed and bankrupted, be replaced by to serve that institutional role?

VI.

You know there was once a more thoughtful, deeper, more caring man named Paul who also disagreed with mandatory schooling and the industrial processes favoring a political indoctrination based on an economic system.  Paul Goodman was his name.  Here are some of his thoughts to counterbalance Elie's "pragmatism" of class interest.

Human beings tend to be excluded when a logistic style becomes universally pervasive, so that values and data that cannot be standardized and programmed are disregarded; when function is adjusted to the technology rather than technology to function; when technology is confused with autonomous science, a good in itself, rather than being limited by political and moral prudence; when there develops an establishment of managers and experts who alone license and allot resources, and it deludes itself that it knows the only right method and is omnicompetent.  Then common people become docile clients, maintained by sufferance or they are treated as deviant.... 

The chief danger to American society at present, and to the world from American Society, is our mindlessness, induced by empty institutions.  It is a kind of mesmerism, a self-delusion of formal Tightness, that affects both leaders and people.  We have all the talking-points but less and less content...we have lost our common sense, for which we were once noted...We have lost it by becoming personnel of a mechanical system and exclusive suburbanites, by getting out of contact with real jobs and real people.  (1966, Massey Lectures)

Goodman asks us to think about how our institutions have been undermined.  He would have agreed with Elie, likely, on many of the personal particulars, but he would not have wanted to undermine our social responsibilities, especially in cities.  (See his book, written with his brother, Communitas.)

VII.

To adapt a line from Thoreau, a tactic I've used most of my writing life, I do not ask at once for no school, but rather a better school.

On evidence in "The Homeschooling Diaries" is the confusing of the abstraction we call "school" with the politics that direct it (give it instructions in behavior).  Elie says several times that the Public Schools are failing because of "their" emphasis on this, that and the other.  The error seems intentional.  Public Schools, their organization, their content, their mandate, their policies, their operations, are under the direction of managers beholden to city, state and federal directives.  Therefore the schools do not emphasize testing, the politicians do.  Public schools do not "gentrify" neighborhoods, politicians do (at the behest of campaign donors).  Public schools do not redraw district lines and force you to pay more rent in order to go to the school you deem the "right" kind of school...politicians do.

Politicians are now best defined as individuals with the position in society most advantageous to aiding their own material existence and furthering their own, and the "master class," ideology.  They direct us how we should properly live according to race, class, culture, creed.

That is, the school is simply a reflection of the cultural instructions dictated by the powerful.

VIII.

Elie, begins his piece by offering himself as coming to homeschooling passively--it "happened" to him. He claims his wife wanted it and then that city government and real estate economics forced his hand.  In one paragraph he claims he wanted to stick with public schooling because he "had been raised on the cult, creed, and dogma of public school, and this [homeschooling] felt like leaving the fold."

That is what we might term "ironic" coming from a man who is trying to live his Catholic faith in his work (writing and teaching and directing others).  But, it does seem to me to be the most explicit reference in the piece by being truly the least obvious and most subtle.

Paul feels he can create (recreate?) his religio-cultural tribe by enveloping himself and his family in a self-selected community of "sameness" and he specifies the church as one of his primary community locations.

I have no issues with this in the least.  I do find it particularly narrow and as a man with no need to make God my normative regress (my "final answer") I find it liable to lead to an intolerance that wields its effects in a cash imbalance.  My "regress" makes more than your "regress."  My regress can beat up your regress.

IX.

The question, what about the rest of us?, never seems to enter the equation anymore but for the high abstraction, noted elsewhere, of human capital.  Something akin to Temple Grandin's cows who are happy all the way through their brief and humanly-determined existence.  They taste better that way, quoth she.

Goodman again:

Corporate and bureaucratic societies, whether ruled by priests, mandarins, generals, or business managers, have always tended to diminish the importance of personal needs and human feeling, in the interest of abstractions and systemic necessities.  And where there has been no check by strong community ties, effective democracy, or a free market, it has not been rare for the business of society to be largely without utility or common sense.  Nevertheless, modern corporate societies that can wield a high technology are liable to an unique temptation: since they do not exploit common labor, they may tend to exclude the majority of human beings altogether, as useless for the needs of the system and therefore as not quite persons....

Also, are the people useless?  The concept of efficiency is largely, maybe mainly, systemic.  It depends on the goals of the system, which may be too narrowly and inflexibly conceived; it depends on the ease of administration, which is considered as more important than economic or social costs; but it depends also on the method of calculating costs, which may create a false image of efficiency by ruling out "intangibles" that do not suit the method.

One feels a truth in Paul Elie's desire not to be at the whim of the state and the state's bureaucracies; and further to minimize the intrusion of "Education" companies like Pearson and ACT into the brains of our progeny.

I want community, public education.  I want a "homeschool" attitude within it.  I want a teacher who knows more about content than I do but doesn't assume he or she knows more about my children and the proper way they should learn.  I want a collaboration.  I do want more "homeschooling" in my public school.  I just don't want to promote the segregations of sameness; these are the same as segregations of difference.

Perhaps you'd like to have Paul Elie's wife and friends teach your child.  You know you can't.  But why can't you have a "Paul and Lenora"-type public opportunity?

It's an important question we should try to answer and thank Paul for raising, even if Paul meant something else by his article.

Autism, ADHD, Adaptation and Randomization

I.

Some time ago I wrote a piece noting how it seems autism is becoming a useful "disorder" to have.  (I used the quotes for a reason which I hope becomes clear.)  The post, "Autism: the next 'specialty' credential," tried to create a kind of choral effect between an essay by Adam Philips on the cultural definitions (always changing) of "mental illness," and a Wired article detailing the hiring practices of an "entrepreneur" (someone with money, or access to money, who can create little bubbles of reality in which to try out new definitions), Thorkil Sonne; he finds the "autistic human capital" uniquely wired to work in the IT field.  "In Sonne's native Denmark, as elsewhere, autistics are typically considered unemployable. But Sonne worked in IT, a field more suited to people with autism and related conditions like Asperger's syndrome. 'As a general view, they have excellent memory and strong attention to detail. They are persistent and good at following structures and routines,' he says. In other words, they're born software engineers." ( Thorkil Sonne: Recruit Autistics in Wired, 9/09)

II.

...I have been able to come to no other than the unsettling conclusion that the meaning of an utterance is the response to that utterance and that the connection between the two is entirely conventional.  That is, meaning is not immanent in utterance.  If that is the case, as I believe it to be, it follows that any utterance is theoretically capable of eliciting all possible responses, and that all utterances are theoretically capable of eliciting but one single response....Two kinds of what we call insanity can be understood from this point of view, the one characterized by an increasing randomness and unpredictability of response, the other by an increasing limitation of response, sometimes to the point that any utterance elicits one of only an increasingly smaller family of responses, or even but one response...Thus, to humans the world consists--except for reflex responses not fed through the brain--of signs, to each of which all possible responses are theoretically possible....(Peckham, Morse, "Humanism, Politics, and Government in the Nineteenth Century.")

III.

Recently, at the WaPo "Answer Sheet," there was a piece regarding children diagnosed with ADHD in public schools.  Here is the set-up to the personal narrative that followed.

There’s a group of students struggling through school rd to navigate that gets little attention in the media or in the debate about how to fix schools: Children with ADHD. 

ADHD, or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, is a brain condition that makes it especially hard for children to focus and concentrate in school and has a number of other symptoms. It is too often misunderstood by teachers, parents and even the students themselves. According to the Centers for Disease Control, about 9.5% or 5.4 million children 4-17 years of age, had been diagnosed with ADHD, as of 2007. Many others who have the disorder haven’t had the benefit of a diagnosis. 

Here is a powerful post by David Bernstein, a nonprofit executive who lives in Gaithersburg, Md., writing about the difficulties that his two sons, ages 7 and 15, have confronted in school as a result of ADHD.

I normally like "The Answer Sheet," and it seems a column devoted to defending the schools as the proper locus of our social commons, but this piece set my spider-sense tingling.  And it reminded me of the piece on Thorkil Sonne.

Greg Selkoe, the 36-year-old CEO of Karmaloop, a growing hipster media company with revenue of more than $130 Million a year, stated in a recent interview in Inc.: “I was diagnosed with ADHD in elementary school and actually got kicked out of several schools before landing in one for kids with learning issues. What made me not do well in school has actually been very beneficial in business, because I can focus on something very intensely for a short while and then move on to the next thing.”

What is the goal of "marketing" the benefit of "disorder?"

Yet today’s schools insist that we prescribe our kids drugs to rid them of their hyper-focus.

 There is a concerted effort to redefine a social "error" into a "creativity" and benefit.

IV.

Social management may thus be more precisely defined as the limitation and channeling of semantic response to verbal and nonverbal signs and sign-constellations, or, in one aspect fo language, the syntactical, sign structures.  Against such channeling two forces are at work.  The brain, such is its construction, constantly produces random variations of response--or at least at present (1973) the process is best understood as a random process, the nonrandom being obedience to the conventions and practices of a situation.  Second, as situations change by the introduction of novel factors, semantic response becomes inappropriate.  By this I mean that both these factors introduce incoherence into families of semantic response--a social role, for example.  For interaction to continue, such incoherences need to be resolved...(Ibid.)

V.

In a classroom, the inclusion students are often ignored.  What I mean is that the strategy employed is that of ignoring the "minor" distractions of a child who cannot seem to sit with a "normal" attention or focus.  Constant movement, if small and contained, can be ignored; a kind of running commentary, if quiet, can be ignored; even getting out of the seat and simply moving to another place in the room can be ignored.  Other things cannot.  Loud outbursts of any kind, which means any of the above taken "up a notch," cannot be ignored.  And all attention moves towards the student.  At that moment, what can be taught and/or what can be learned?  What behaviors are instructed?

VI.

There is no doubt that schools are failures of flexibility.  They are easily the most recalcitrant institution we have.  The law changes exponentially more often than our schools.  What is at question though is the way the schools are losing their public mandate; rather, the way the public mandate of a place of commonness, and ostensibly "equalizing" institution, is being made "unpublic" and so "uncommon."

VII.

"Yet today’s schools insist that we prescribe our kids drugs to rid them of their hyper-focus."

I just wanted to note the figuration here of "schools" as agents as I will return to this again when I post about the homeschooling essay by Paul Elie in The Atlantic.

Schools are institutions managed by the state, and currently the state is under aggressive management by self-interested politicians with economic ties to privatization companies.  

Schools are not entities to blame.  They are "policed" (we might see this as "policy-ed") by the very people who are elected to protect our public interests.  People are to blame.  Senators and representatives are to blame.  School Boards are to blame.  Superintendents are to blame.  These are the institutional handmaidens of self-interested power.

VIII.

I'm a guy who would easily ascribe much of our "new brains" to the configuration of our social "entertainments" but also our "change-oriented" lifestyles.  Constant imagery, constant change, constant stimulus.  Why not see this as a kind of adaptation instead of a disorder?  Perhaps this kind of brain is simply not constraining its randomness.  That's probably a worthy adaptive strategy.  Should we try to squelch this?  Or should we find ways to nurture it?  Should we encourage all brains to "randomize?"

"Science" as it theorizes (blindly guesses) is a kind of randomization engine in itself.  The Wikipedia entry on ADHD makes it very clear that all of the data is speculative, to put it kindly.  Here is my favorite part:

See also: Hunter vs. farmer hypothesis

As ADHD is more common than 1 percent of the population, researchers have proposed that due to the high prevalence of ADHD that natural selection has favoured ADHD possibly because the individual traits may be beneficial on their own, and only become dysfunctional when these traits combine to form ADHD.  The high prevalence of ADHD may in part be because women in general are more attracted to males who are risk takers, thereby promoting ADHD in the gene pool.

Sure, why not?  But that's unhelpful to say the least and bases unprovable nonsense on unprovable nonsense.

A behavior is "dysfunctional" when it is not conventionally appropriate.  That in no way precludes it from being highly beneficial.  

"Social management" lacks the flexibility to see dysfunction from a functional perspective.  Perhaps this is exactly the benefit that Thorkil Sonne and George Selkoe proposes.  Even if their perspectives are manipulative for profit, they are at least creating another possibility, an outlet for randomness, an appropriateness.

IX.

For aeons Satan and the other heavenly beings had been thronged in serried hierarchical order around the Heavenly Throne, worshipping the Divine Being.  One fine day, however, Satan said to himself, "Really, there must be something else to do."  What happened can be put, I think, quite simply.  he had been engaged in a socioculturally validated pattern of behavior--a pattern validated, moreover, by the highest possible authority; a pattern, worse still, which he had been created to perform.  His sin was simply that he innovated and performed an alternative pattern of behavior.  (Peckham, "Rebellion and Deviance.")