Imitate Jesus and Socrates

Stephen M.R. Covey with Revecca R. Merrill. The Speed of Trust. New York: Free Press, 2006.

In 1791 Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography was published, and so began the American tradition of self-help books. In his book, Franklin linked moral behavior with material success. Morality pays off. Covey follows in the Franklin tradition.

The body of the book proper is preceded by eleven pages of testimonials from CEO’s, business executives, media figures, and self-help gurus. The very people I trust the least. Most egregious is the inclusion of Dr. Laura Schlessinger, former radio talk show host who lost her job after an on air racist rant in which she repeated the “N word” multiple times while accusing a Black caller of being too sensitive about racial prejudice and claiming that all of the Blacks who voted for Barak Obama had done so because they were racists. Her diatribe is on Youtube and makes for interesting, appalling, listening. You are known by the company you keep.

This is a book that pushes a conservative, corporatist bias. Bad behaviours are described as “taxes”. Government regulation is portrayed (14-15) as evidence of mistrust, and not the prudent management it usually is. Specifically, Covey cites the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which came about after massive fraud by Enron and WorldCom, as an enormous burden on companies. No thought is given to the pensioners who lost their life savings due to the rampant fraud that necessitated the Act.

Covey loves charts, graphs, and numbered lists. The Speed of Trust reduces moral behavior to a planned activity that can be summarized by a few visuals, desirable because it adds to the bottom line. Strangely, he places the onus for moral improvement on individual behavior and not on large scale corporate wrongs. “Can you see why employees don’t trust their managers?” he asks. And then misdirects our attention: “Most of the time, it’s not the huge, visible withdrawals like Enron and WorldCom ethics violations that wipe out organizational trust. It’s the little things … that gradually weaken and corrode credibililty” (47). No, Mr. Covey, it is corporate misbehavior that weakens trust. It is the vast greed of the CEO’s and investment bankers who ran the world’s economy into the ground and caused millions of honest workers to lose their jobs. That is the problem, not the man or woman who emails a friend from work or takes five extra minutes of coffee break.

Nobody is against trust or decent behaviour. They are valuable qualities in and of themselves, and they do not need to be justified by bottom line concerns, and they definitely do not need to be used to deflect attention from the corporatists responsible for our current economic woes.

Socrates, Democracy, and "Profit"

Martha C. Nussbaum. Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities. Princeton University Press, 2010.

Democracy needs an informed and articulate citizenry that can think critically, yet the academic disciplines which best develop such qualities are rapidly disappearing from the curriculum. In this book, philosopher Martha Nussbaum sounds the warning that “nations all over the world will soon be producing generations of useful machines, rather than complete citizens who can think for themselves, criticize tradition, and understand the significance of another person’s sufferings and achievements” (2).

In place of education for democracy, students are being offered education for economic growth. Such an education is invested in maintenance of the status quo, rather than inspiring youth to improve the world and the lot of its citizens. As Nussbaum puts it “educators for economic growth will not want a study of history that focuses on injustices of class, caste, gender, and  ethnoreligious membership, because this will prompt critical thinking about the present” (21).

A lot of what Nussbaum says is not new or surprising. Humanities types have been warning about this phenomenon for decades. What makes this book important is that it delivers its message in a clear and compact package, with none of the elitist sneering that characterizes a lot of such writing. Chapter IV “Socratic Pedagogy: The Importance of Argument” is brilliant and contains the core her message. It asserts that the chief contribution of Humanities education is that it turns everything into an argument. Argument is not mere contradiction and disagreement; it is the practice of continuous critical analysis, discussion, and questioning. It provides the basis of the scientific method and of sound reasoning in all other areas of human endeavor. As Ronald Reagan said, “trust, but verify.”

The enemy of Socratic Pedagogy is, of course, standardized testing. Nussbaum claims that “to the extent that standardized tests become the norm by which schools are measured, then, Socratic aspects of both curriculum and pedagogy are likely to be left behind. The economic growth culture has a fondness for standardized tests, and an impatience with pedagogy and content that are not easily assessed in this way” (48). Nussbaum demands that each student be treated as an individual “whose powers of mind are unfolding and who is expected to make an active and creative contribution to classroom discussion” (55). We habitually undervalue the skills that will make democracy vibrant and sustainable, the ones that foster innovation and creativity, in favour of test taking and regurgitation of facts.

Presidents need guts

Chad Coauette, “You Know How it Works, It Is a Dance, An Art, Not a Science: Decision Making by Public Two-Year College Presidents.” Leadership 17-1 (Winter 2011): 23-27.

This is a short, but interesting, article on how College Presidents and other senior administrators make decisions about complex issues. Coauette’s conclusion is that personal experience, rather than educational experience, is the guiding factor. “College presidents’ past experiences” he asserts, “inform how they see current events at their institutions …their previous experiences led them to make intuitive or ‘gut’ decisions” (23).

All hail William Zinsser!

Every Friday, William Zinsser publishes an essay at www.theamericanscholar.org
He is 88 years old, has written 17 books including the wonderful "On Writing Well", teaches at Columbia School of Journalism, and, in his spare time, plays piano in a New York Jazz bar.
The essay linked to below is about the idea of giving yourself and others permission to be creative. Everybody needs somebody to believe in them. It is a teacher's job to give his or her students permission to try great things, to dare to be different.
Creative people also need to give themselves permission to create. As he puts it, "Nobody gave George Gershwin permission to write 'Rhapsody in Blue' at the age of 25, when he had only written 32-bar popular songs." Gershwin gave himself permission to do something entirely new, and great.
Zinsser has been giving himself permission for several decades. May he do so for a few more.
in reference to: Zinsser on Friday: Permission Givers | The American Scholar (view on Google Sidewiki)

Help! The horse is out of the barn!

All over the world, social media are undercutting power structures. Just as the invention of movable type made books and newspapers, and the knowledge and information they contain, available to anyone who could read, social media is giving voice and authority to anyone with a cell phone or laptop computer. Twitter almost brought down the government of Iran last year. Businesses have been destroyed by hostile reviews on web sites such as yelp.com Movie stars have had their careers wiped out by cell phone video. Just think of Michael Richard.
So now the Mashable social media web site has put together "24 essential social media resources you may have missed." The purpose of the article is to give tips to companies and individuals who see in social media a way to make a buck through marketing or "presence" or "digital branding". There are some in the world who still think there is a chance for corporations and governments to get out ahead of the social media phenomenon and direct it to their own ends. Good luck.
I looked into a few of the resources listed in the article, three of them to be exact. And they all say the same thing: get out there, try hard, try to take control. Nothing they offer is so specific as to help anyone take control. And that's not surprising. Control of social media is not possible. Millions of people are out there writing, taking pictures, shooting video, and uploading it to the net.
The best companies can hope is that they don't draw their wrathful gaze any time soon. The BP oil spill video is available online, in real time, 24-7. Dead corporation walking.

in reference to: 24 Essential Social Media Resources You May Have Missed (view on Google Sidewiki)

Manage your own damn privacy

Facebook has been in receipt of a lot of attacks lately for its privacy policy. The author of this piece, Mashable's "Social Analyst" editor, argues that this anger is misdirected. His thesis is that "people [who] believe that Facebook and the web in general should be able to protect the information we post online" are wrong. His conclusion is that we alone are responsible for managing our online identities and that people should simply make wiser choices about what information they make available about themselves on the web.

in reference to: In Defense of Facebook (view on Google Sidewiki)

Patterns make beauty

Here we have a brilliant piece that brings together poetry and mathematics. Cohen shows how a poem is structured like a mathematical formula and how a mathematical formula is structured like a poem. The link is that both employ chiasmus; just as my previous sentence does.
Classical rhetoric remains supremely useful; belle lettristic essays still cast the brightest light.

in reference to: A Mindful Beauty | The American Scholar (view on Google Sidewiki)

It's Galileo all over again

The Attorney General of Virginia believes that claims of climate change are not true. Michael Mann is a climate-change scientist who, until recently, taught and did research at the University of Virginia. The Attorney General has subpoenaed email between Mann and other climate-change scientists as part of a fraud investigation. The Attorney General asserts that claims of climate change are fraudulent and that scientists who support climate change are guilty of fraud.
This article asks, does this subpoena violate academic freedom and does academic freedom exist as a right under law? The short answer to both questions is (probably) yes, unless the case ends up in the US Supreme Court and they overturn precedent.
The authors of this article make the fascinating point that this case is pretty much a repeat of the Vatican's trial of Galileo. Galileo published findings that challenged the received wisdom of the people in power. He was hauled up on charges and imprisoned. Scientific truth was not considered an acceptable defense.
Will the present case be judged on the scientific merits of the research? Should that matter? Will every scientist who publishes findings that offend a politician find herself up on charges of fraud?

in reference to: Does the Constitution really protect a right to "academic freedom"? - By Dahlia Lithwick and Richard Schragger - Slate Magazine (view on Google Sidewiki)

What service?

Service learning is an admirable endeavour. Students learn valuable, real life experience while performing free work for a non-profit. What could go wrong? According to this New York Times article, some non-profits cannot afford the cost of training and supervising the "free" student workers. Larger, better funded, agencies can afford a coordinator to train and supervise them, but smaller outfits cannot. Perhaps the colleges and universities that use the non-profits to round their students' education should be dropping some money into the kitty to defray the added cost.

in reference to: Does Service Learning Really Help? - NYTimes.com (view on Google Sidewiki)

Where's the learning?

Stan Katz writes about "service learning" in response to a New York Times article (referred to in a separate blog posting) that questions whether students taking service learning courses really provide a useful service to the non-profits that host them.
Katz asks the other obvious questions: does service learning contribute to learning the curriculum of the course of which service learning is a part?
Is service learning more than community service? Katz concludes that it can be, if the course is "well designed and managed by the instructor". But, he adds, it's a difficult job to satisfy the competing demands of "service" and "learning".

in reference to: Does Service Learning Really Help? - Brainstorm - The Chronicle of Higher Education (view on Google Sidewiki)

What NOW?

On September 30 and October 1, 2009 I attended the NOW Conference, hosted by the University of Calgary. Most of the sessions took place at the Telus Convention Centre in Calgary.

The conference had three streams: Youth, Academic, and Non-profit. Some sessions were open to all streams, while others were exclusively for one specific stream. I was in the Academic stream. At first, this was confusing because the materials which I received before the conference did not make this arrangement at all clear.

The conference began with a keynote address by F.W. de Klerk. De Klerk is a former President of South Africa and a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. He led South Africa out of apartheid and into its present democratic government structure. The theme of his talk was leading change. It was both analytical and inspiring. He spoke from actual experience of leading a country through monumental change that, if done improperly, could have caused massive bloodshed. Among the points he made was the importance of a guiding vision, the necessity of working with all parties, and (most interesting of all to me) the need to be able to tell when to be cautious and when to gamble. He cited two examples of the latter: his decision to put the end of apartheid to a vote among the white electorate and his decision to destroy South Africa's nuclear arsenal. Remarkably, white voters elected to end apartheid and hand power over to the black majority. And South Africa is the only country that has disarmed itself of nuclear weapons. De Klerk's keynote was an excellent beginning to the conference.

The next session I attended was called "Service-Learning Course Design in Higher Education." For me, this was the weakest that I attended. I came to it very interested in the possibility of introducing service learning into the college where I work, but came away with very little that I could use to do so. Partly, I was put off by the presenter's style. Although there were only about 10 people in the session, he shouted at us as if we were a crowd of hundreds. The session was supposed to be a workshop, but it was difficult to get into a workshop mood after being railed at. In fact, the presenter went on at such length that there was actually little time left for the workshop to happen and we were left with handouts and the promise that we could use them productively on our own.

Next came the highlight of the conference, a public talk by the Dalai Lama before 17,000 people at the Pengrowth Saddledome. After a 45 minute presentation of music and song from various performers, hosted by Olympic medalist Mark Tewksbury and actress Sandra Oh, the Dalai Lama appeared on the stage. Clad in saffron monk's robes and sitting on a chair on a raised stage with a translator/assistant nearby, he spoke for nearly an hour. He began by addressing the youth in the audience, urging them to work for reform in a nonviolent and nonsectarian way. He then broadened his message to speak of the dangers of religious conflict, materialism, and an education system that trains the head and not the heart. His speech was filled with compassion and humour. At the end of his speech he entertained questions from the audience, which he answered with seriousness and wit.

The second day of the conference was to begin with a keynote by Jan Egeland, former Undersecretary of the United Nations. Unfortunately, security at the venue was so tight--because the Dalai Lama was in attendance--that about half of the delegates, including me, were unable to get through the screening process in time to hear him. Poor planning on the part of the conference organizers. To compensate for the missed opportunity, I purchased a copy of a book by Egeland.

Once through security, I proceeded to the large lecture hall where many of the seats were already filled by people waiting to hear the Dalai Lama speak. This was to be a more "private" speech for conference delegates only. Since there were between 300 and 400 delegates, the setting was hardly an intimate one.

The Dalai Lama's speech was focussed on education and picked up on the previous day's theme that education was for the heart and not just for the mind. He urged educators to strive for a balance between factual knowledge and right feeling. He also spoke at some length about the importance of developing one's analytical powers and advised everyone to think long and carefully before making important decisions and to consider both the heart and the head in making the decision. He then took questions from the audience.

After a short break, I attended a session titled "Mother Earth: Creating a Natural Harmony--An Aboriginal Perspective." The session was moderated by Leroy Littlebear, a First Nations elder and professor at Lethbridge University. The panel consisted of four presenters: one a University of Toronto Professor of Forestry of First Nations descent, and three First Nations elders. Unfortunately, the program brochure did not provide their names. The session addressed three topics: traditional perspectives on the concept of human stewardship, sacred connections to the land and nature, and the concept of Balance and Harmony in relation to the ecological systems, the environment, nature, and economic development. A fourth key theme that emerged was the importance of language preservation to the survival of Aboriginal peoples. This was an excellent session that raised many thought provoking questions.

After lunch, I attended my final session of the conference: "Four Realms: Balancing Humanity--An Aboriginal Perspective". Dr. Cora Voyageur of the University of Calgary was the moderator and the panel consisted of four First Nations educators, three PhD's and an MD. All of the presenters spoke of their struggles to maintain a sense of balance between their Aboriginal identity and culture and the Eurocentric world of the academy. They spoke with passion and humour. Once again, the preservation of Aboriginal language emerged as a theme, as did the importance of elders in assisting young Aboriginals in maintaining a balanced perspective.

The conference concluded with a Chancellor's reception hosted by the University of Calgary. The event provided me with an opportunity to share my impressions with other delegates.

The NOW Conference was an excellent experience and I came away from it with some useful knowledge and a lot of good memories.

We don't need no education: did we really think that?

"The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future(Or, Don't Trust Anyone Under 30)" (Mark Bauerlein)
Mark Bauerlein is Professor of English at Emory University in Atlanta and former director of Research and Analysis at the National Endowment for the Arts. The thesis of this book is that the digital age is making students "dumb" in both senses of the word. Students can't think and they can't communicate, he argues, because they spend too much time watching tv, playing computer games, and hanging out on Facebook. He does not say that the digital age makes people less intelligent; in fact, he reports that IQ scores have gone up over the last 20 years. But he also points out that scores in standardized tests for numeracy, language skills, and general knowledge have all gone down over the same period of time. It would seem we have a pool of brighter students who know less, can't express themselves, and lack the knowledge we would expect of citizens in a democratic society.

In my opinion, one of his most relevant complaints is that electronic culture promotes narcissism and isolation. Young people can communicate nonstop with their peers. They can reinforce peer values, while rejecting the larger needs and values of society. It is an unchallenging environment that doesn't promote reasoning or analysis. When students confront difficult issues in school or life, they shut down and run back to Myspace.

I share many of Bauerlein's concerns. Young people can be narcissistic and closed minded. I recall the class where several of my students walked out because I played them some Bach. "Our generation doesn't listen to that stuff," one of them told me. But, frankly, he comes across as a bit of an old fogey: someone who seems to see all change as a loss.

Furthermore, he tends to lay too much blame on the young people and not enough on the old people who have allowed this to happen. If you feed a child junk food all of its life, is it surprising that the child doesn't like his/her first taste of mashed turnips?

I would like to have seen more examination of causes and more suggestions for answers. Bauerlein's problem is that he is a neo-conservative caught in a contradiction. While bemoaning the loss of certain traditional skills and values, he cannot bring himself to say that capitalism and consumerism are the main causes of the problem and so he blames the victim.

Technorati Tags: education, internet culture, language

Getting clued in

"Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind" (Professor Gerald Graff)
Gerald Graff is professor of English and Education at the University of Illinois. He is author of several books and articles and a major contributor to cultural debate in the United States. In this book, he looks at the difficulty contemporary students have with academic discourse. Why can't they understand and follow the debates and discussions central to their academic majors? The title sounds like he is laying blame on the students, but in fact, he isn't.

Students are "clueless"  for two reasons: (a) they are not sufficiently challenged in secondary school and tend to shut down when confronted with "difficult" writing and (b) their professors refuse to compromise their language so that neophytes can understand it. Graff sets out to pose solutions to both of these problems in his book.

For students, the answer is an educational system that is more challenging and less concerned that everyone pass. It would be an education system firmly grounded in books and reading as opposed to experiential learning. This will probably never happen; too many entrenched interests would be affected.

For professors, the answer is to get down off their high horses and deign to explain things to their students. Graff offers several practical writing tips for professors, many of them the kind of thing one would tell a freshman class: use examples, occasionally employ colloquial language, consider your audience. That professors should require writing tips is troubling.

I enjoyed this book because Graff puts a lot of energy into proposing solutions without ignoring the problems. I think his a particularly humanities oriented approach that will not find acceptance in other fields.

Technorati Tags: education