Jan
6
Remarks delivered at the University of Dallas Due Santi Campus, 1/4/09
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for Marilyn Walker and the Collegium Cantorum
The University of Dallas isn’t really a place, but a spirit. Some want to say the spirit is that of critical inquiry, or that it stems from a vision of the one true Church. The truth might be simpler than that: it could be just wanting to share, trying to encourage the conditions where people can be confident, realize their potential, and bring others together.
It is “sharing” - the attempt to bring others together - that probably defines UD best, and all of us are familiar with Marilyn’s generosity and how deep it runs.
Which brings us to Collegium. All of us are ambassadors for the school, and I don’t mean that in a “Collegium is better than everyone else” way. It is rather the simply obseved fact that I have seen all of you behave with dignity, work very hard to sing well, and make sure no one feels alone or left out. It is seemingly strange that “collegial” is a word so close to our very name, but it is fully in accord with UD’s spirit. We go through old books and all sorts of other difficult subjects in order to share with others what is priceless, at any given moment. A fundamentalist friend of mine once asked why we need any sort of art if we have Scripture. He was told that perhaps the Gospels are so short because God spent most of His time on Earth listening, appreciating the fruits of Creation.
Dec
17
Political Literacy: What do you need to know about the classics that’s relevant today?
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Too much blather, not enough specifics. Memo to all conservative writers and bloggers: until you treat people like they’re intelligent, we’re doomed. Here’s what you need to get started if you’re interested in what the Founders and those who influenced them knew. I’m sticking to contrasts, because I want you to see how different this stuff is:
- A different view of reason. For Aristotle, a reason was something that a person stated because it was good for him and people like him (from Harvey Mansfield, “A Student’s Guide to Political Philosophy.”) Notice how this is extraordinarily different from what we consider a “reason:” we want “truths” that mirror scientific truth in certainty (cf. Descartes) and that apply universally, regardless of the situation. We don’t really make room for statesmen to have “prudence:” we instead shove them into a mechanism, i.e. 3 branches of government that spend more time attacking each other than governing, and the “science” behind that mechanism is supposed to keep us free.
- The question of the soul. Cf. Plato Republic, Phaedrus; Virgil, Aeneid. A person has his appetites, the “epithumos,” that which the “thumos” (heart) sits upon: the stomach and the genitals. Then there’s the “thumos,” the heart, the “spirited” element. Heroes, with their courage, are “thumotic.” The Greeks didn’t quite consider the brain the seat of reason: it was what sat immediately above the “thumos,” the “phron,” from where we get our word “diaphragm,” which was where speech/reason - also known as “logos” - made itself known. Obviously this has been dispensed with entirely in favor of modern psychology, and the question of the “self.” If Freud is considered the origin of modern psychology, you can take a pretty good guess at which element of the “soul” the “self” is.
- A humanistic piety: I don’t know what we can learn from worshipping pagan gods directly, as some nowadays do. I do know that we can learn much from reading how the more advanced authors such as Homer, Euripides, Plato treated the stories about the gods. It looks like for Homer especially, the gods are reason simply. To contemplate the stories about them is to wonder about how rule in the most basic sense exists - mind over the body. Also, note that the idea society could be wholly secular, an idea the modern academy and many anarchists, socialists, libertarians, elites entertain, would be laughable to any ancient people. The objection “you’d find a new way of worshipping yourself” would just be the beginning of the argument - most people today would be unaware how worshipful they are of “freedom” and “rights,” to the degree they injure freedom and rights unknowingly very often. “Know thyself” was what the oracle at Delphi instructed: we’d rather be fundamentalists and put that question off the table.
Dec
13
Before you yell at me for being more arrogant than usual, let me just say that I was asked to do this, and that even I couldn’t get all these questions exactly right unless I looked up the answers. This is for fun, to see how much I remember throughout the years, and obviously I’m not looking for everyone to get everything right. 5/10 is a pass because not all of you read every entry, but this is pass/fail: the medium questions are set up so you can guess. The links to the entries containing the answers are given with the question, but I know you won’t cheat : )
Easy
1. Explain how the first sentence of the Gettysburg Address is a commentary on the Declaration of Independence. (Analysis of the Gettysburg Address)
2. Why is “faction” important to the reasoning underlying the Constitution? (Analysis of the first paragraph of Federalist 10)
3. Why does Bruce Wayne in Batman Begins say he chose the bat for his symbol? What might that be teaching about the relation between justice and fear? (Analysis of Batman Begins)
4. Describe briefly why it sounds like the speaker can do all things in this short poem (Analysis of “What I can do - I will”):
What I can do — I will –
Though it be little as a Daffodil –
That I cannot — must be
Unknown to possibility –
5. Describe the tension between reason and love in Emily Dickinson using any one of the following poems: “Our share of night to bear,” “Love - is anterior to life,” “I could suffice for Him, I knew.” Bonus: if you can do all three, give yourself two points for this question instead of one.
Medium
6. What do the witches signify in “Macbeth?” In what sense do they represent a progression and regression regarding the theme of the play? (An Essay on Macbeth, pt. 4)
7. Describe the three parts of the soul as initially presented to us in Plato’s Republic. Briefly: what is peculiar about the middle element? Does our age take it rather seriously? (“These are the days when birds come back…”)
8. Describe an argument against our emphasis on “rights:” you could discuss whether free speech exists in practice, or for what specific reasons Hamilton thought declaring “freedom of the press” made no sense. (Against free speech absolutism, or Federalist no. 84)
Hard
9. What is natural right? (On Aristotlean Natural Right)
10. What are the Greek gods exactly? Describe the implications of thinking through what they represent for us. (On Oedipus Tyrannus, Blake’s “The Tyger,” Yeats’ “Leda and the Swan”)
Dec
13
Is Teaching like Quarterbacking? On Malcolm Gladwell’s “Most Likely To Succeed”
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Malcolm Gladwell’s “Most Likely To Succeed” is probably a very important essay. He argues that good teachers are like good NFL quarterbacks - it isn’t clear how what is done in college will translate into the classroom or field, and he states rather flatly at one point that “no one knows what a person with the potential to be a great teacher looks like.” Yet research has shown there is an enormous difference in learning among students who have good teachers and those who have bad ones. His solution:
…we shouldn’t be raising standards. We should be lowering them, because there is no point in raising standards if standards don’t track with what we care about. Teaching should be open to anyone with a pulse and a college degree—and teachers should be judged after they have started their jobs, not before….It needs an apprenticeship system that allows candidates to be rigorously evaluated. Kane and Staiger have calculated that, given the enormous differences between the top and the bottom of the profession, you’d probably have to try out four candidates to find one good teacher. That means tenure can’t be routinely awarded, the way it is now. Currently, the salary structure of the teaching profession is highly rigid, and that would also have to change in a world where we want to rate teachers on their actual performance. An apprentice should get apprentice wages. But if we find eighty-fifth-percentile teachers who can teach a year and a half’s material in one year, we’re going to have to pay them a lot—both because we want them to stay and because the only way to get people to try out for what will suddenly be a high-risk profession is to offer those who survive the winnowing a healthy reward.
I like Gladwell’s conclusion, but his reasoning leaves much to be desired. A few quick notes:
- The analogy with quaterbacking fails. There is actually a way, devised by David Lewin of Football Outsiders, of seeing whether a college QB may make it in the NFL: look at his completion percentage and games started. If he has a high completion percentage and has been playing pretty much his whole four/five year career, he stands a reasonable chance of success. The scouting one does - watching film of him, seeing what system he works in, etc. - isn’t irrelevant when these more critical factors are considered.
- The failure of the analogy with quarterbacking leads to the bigger question of what education is. Is it really as quantifiable as the article says? It seems more like this: we can track, with the “value-added” analysis, to a degree whether a teacher is completely failing at his job. We can’t even do this for certain, because certain student populations will not learn no matter what: it should shock no one that school choice in Milwaukee hasn’t done much. The safe argument is that some aspects of teaching are quantifiable…
- …but the most crucial ones aren’t. This includes content, which is treated as much the same by any empirical analysis. And content determines teaching styles that may not work with all students. Teaching the Gettysburg Address requires a sense among the students that something awesome is going on: students have to be a bit more attentive, not as bored. Trying to use modern psychology and educational theory to figure out what their instinctive responses are and work from there ignores the issue of their discipline.
That brings us to the final point - what is being missed in all educational debates is just how much education is a matter of value, of how one does things as opposed to that one does things. The object of sports is to win or lose: that analogy cannot hold for an enlightened people. The skills one needs to participate in a democracy, respect his fellow man, and achieve a legacy that he is proud of are had by relating to a teacher on a much deeper level than just seeing him as an entertainer of sorts who keeps your interest so that you learn parallel lines don’t intersect. The reason why an apprenticeship system for teaching will work is that in a free society, there are a variety of ways to reach the good, and it is precisely that variety which the current system stifles through its emphasis on quantifying everything. Only a system of education that takes into account that we have values already and doesn’t try to merely force or charm information into us will be successful.
Nov
20
Lament.
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At the bookstore yesterday I read a chapter or two of Mark Bauerlein’s The Dumbest Generation, which is much livelier, forceful reading than his blog. His most important claim, that our unparalleled access to knowledge is coeval with a culture of decadence which allows the construction of entire worlds around our purely adolescent selves, has enormous ramifications for me. He makes this point: when surveys ask what the significance of 1776 was or what the 25th letter of the English alphabet is, and 90% of young adults, say, get that wrong, we have to consider how much effort it takes not to know such a thing.
The questions for this blog are as follows:
- Can students be simply divided into those that want to learn and those that don’t? I actually don’t think Plato would countenance such a division: that would only account for the rational and appetitive elements, if we took the account of the soul in the Republic seriously. Seth Benardete, in his commentary on the Republic, is fond of the word “thumoeidetic” - thumos: “spiritedness,” “heart” & eidos: “image,” “form.”
- Given that we have decided in the United States that populism is a good thing with no qualifications whatsoever - today my Dad said that one party rule by the Democrats would ensure a just, efficient government (my Dad watches/listens to 7 hours of news each day) - is it possible to work with the voters who voted for Obama in droves but couldn’t tell you which party controlled Congress at the time of the election? (this link is Republican as all hell)
- What can be done on a practical level? Should I write an article on the Jonas Brothers and Nietzsche? Should anything be done at a practical level?
I feel that if I keep writing, something is bound to break through. The trick is to not dumb it down, not one bit: people need to be challenged, and that’s not the same thing as the competitiveness which drives us in school. Fighting hard for a grade on a piece of paper is not the same thing as wondering what Heidegger could mean by “Dasein” when he says it is “openness to being.”