Arts Education Eminently Practical

Yes, a university liberal arts education is so useless, I'm sure the rich will stop sending their children to get them at expensive private schools. Or is it only the working class and the middle class who are supposed to remain ignorant of the finer things in life?

Serving the Idol of Ignorance

The human species is capable of both discovering wisdom, and of ignoring it. We’re busy with the latter right now in the U.S.

“We sneer at experts,” observed David DeWitt. “We spit epithets like ‘academic elites’ at professors dedicating their lives to pursuing discovery that benefits humankind. And we worship flashy internet hucksters selling lifestyle scams. 

“We mock intelligence and glorify egomania and materialism. We worship spectacle and are voyeurs for anger, confrontation, and violence. We live in fantasy worlds where what we want to believe is true regardless of whether it is true, because what we want comes first no matter what, certainly no matter any facts, this decadence of mind and body only afforded to us by modernity’s remarkable luxury and technology.”

“It is in these ways that I regard a very great many adults as simply overgrown children.”

Michael Bell wrote, “With the accumulated knowledge of all history at our fingertips, willful ignorance still wins the day.”

“Anti-democratic forces benefit from ‘post-truth politics’ because in the absence of truth, truth is defined by power,” as Chrissy Stroop observed.

And that’s why accepting lies as facts is a snake pit out of which all other evils crawl.

Beware of Confirmation Bias

Accepting lies as facts is a snake pit out of which all other evils crawl.

For example, when a show about basic science can be considered “controversial,” the United States has reached terminal velocity of idiocy.

But facts can only change the minds of those who value them. That doesn’t include people who choose to believe in fairy castles in the sky.

Saved by a Liberal Arts Degree

Yes, a university liberal arts education is so useless, I'm sure the rich will stop sending their children to get them at expensive private schools. Or is it only the working class and the middle class who are supposed to remain ignorant of the finer things in life?

How Banks Feast on American College Students

Because this nation cozies up to ignorance and no longer values education, college students have become nothing but a cash cow to be milked dry by our predatory financial sector.

Students do not deserve to be enslaved to Wall Street greed for life because they had the temerity to want an education. 

I graduated from state university in 1977 with a student loan debt of slightly less than $500. Of course, that was when we all agreed that it was useful — in fact, even imperative — for members of an advanced, civilized society to have easy access to higher education. That was before we decided to chuck all that and just let greedy banks make a lifelong meal out of American students. 

As for paying for loan forgiveness, take it all out of the Pentagon's worthless, obscene budget.

The Elephant Is Hiding in the Tree

As Garry Kasparov wrote: "The point of modern propaganda isn't only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth."

To Those Who Use Science to Hate Science

“The minds of our young people are being poisoned by knowledge,” Stephen Colbert said. “And the source of this toxic cerebral sludge is our schools. They fill our kid’s heads with dangerous concepts like evolution and PE. Happily, there is one bright spot in education, Texas, the large hadron collider of denying science. I have long praised the Texas Board of Education for their valiant work rewriting our nation’s history textbooks. But now, I believe they’ve got some stiff competition from the Texas GOP, who recently put a plank in their 2012 party platform regarding children’s education, that says, and I quote, ‘We oppose the teaching of critical thinking skills.’ Amen brother. For too long we have blindly accepted the idea of not blindly accepting ideas.”

I've always said that I'm surprised televangelists don't give up broadcasting by technology created by that science they so despise, and transmit their message to the masses through that "Power of God" they're always going on and on about.

Real Education: The Antithesis of Ameica

A century ago, the American goal was civic progress. Today, we let roads and bridges collapse, permit the destruction of public education, scheme to turn Social Security and Medicare over to Wall Street, invite sectarians to dismantle secular government, relieve the rich of the burden of taxation while rewarding them with corporate welfare, and constantly seek new means to prevent citizens from voting. Today, the American goal is civic regression.

Sagan Foresees the Century

Margaret Atwood said, “Stupidity is the same as evil if you judge by the results.” And Republicans always think that because they are ignorant of something, that makes it untrue.

Why the Liberal Arts? Here's an Object Lesson

This is why a liberal arts education is useful — to keep people from living worthless, swinish lives like his.

The Eternal Magic of the Book

I have often considered books with the same sense of wonder.

As Empty As An American Head

I once had a bumper sticker on the back of my car that read, “Education Lights a Fire,” or words to that effect. But someone took the trouble to carefully and thoroughly peel it off.

And I must say, nothing in my own education ever prepared me to understand the kind of blind fear and virulent stupidity that would be required to make someone want to do a thing like that. I still shake my head when I see that tattered blank space, as leeringly and malignantly empty as an American head.
That act spoke the very volumes it doesn't read.

In the Faculty Dining Room

In the Faculty Dining Room: “Christ, it is sad, sad to see on quite a few of these faces — young ones particularly — a glum, defeated look. Why do they feel this way about their lives? Sure, they are underpaid. Sure, they have no great prospects, in the commercial sense. Sure, they can’t enjoy the bliss of mingling with corporate executives. But isn’t it any consolation to be with students who are still three-quarters alive? Isn’t it some satisfaction to be of use, instead of helping to turn out useless consumer goods? Isn’t it something to know that you belong to one of the few professions in this country which isn’t hopelessly corrupt?

“For these glum ones, apparently not. They should like out, if they dared try. But they have prepared themselves for this job, and now they have got to go through with it. They have wasted the time in which they should have been learning to cheat and grab and lie. They have cut themselves off from the majority — the middlemen, the hucksters, the promoters —by laboriously acquiring all this dry, discredited knowledge — discredited, that is to say, by the middleman, because he can get along without it. All the middleman wants are its products, its practical applications. These professors are suckers, he says. What’s the use of knowing something if you don’t make money out of it? And the glum ones more than half agree with him and feel privately ashamed of not being smart and crooked.”

— Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man

Ikigai: The Intersection of Meaning and Life

My friend Jim Hampton pointed out this Venn diagram, which I love. It is what I have found myself, and what I tried to teach college students.

Jim asked if the student “got it.” I replied, “Some definitely did, some never did. And some wanted to.”

Jim said, “The first and last in that list are the best of students. The middle, well... how sad for them.”

I sad, “Yes. But is their choice.”

Wiki reports: Ikigai is a Japanese concept meaning “a reason for being.” Everyone, according to the Japanese, has an ikigai. Finding it requires a deep and often lengthy search of self. Such a search is regarded as being very important, since it is believed that discovery of one's ikigai brings satisfaction and meaning to life. Examples include work, hobbies and raising children.

The term ikigai compounds two Japanese words: iki meaning “life; alive” and kai “(an) effect; (a) result; (a) fruit; (a) worth; (a) use; (a) benefit; (no, little) avail” (sequentially voiced as gai) “a reason for living [being alive]; a meaning for [to] life; what [something which] makes life worth living; a raison d'etre.”

In the culture of Okinawa, ikigai is thought of as “a reason to get up in the morning;” that is, a reason to enjoy life. In a TED Talk, Dan Buettner suggested ikigai as one of the reasons people in the area had such long lives.

The word ikigai is usually used to indicate the source of value in one’s life or the things that make one’s life worthwhile. Secondly, the word is used to refer to mental and spiritual circumstances under which individuals feel that their lives are valuable. It’s not necessarily linked to one's economic status or the present state of society. Even if a person feels that the present is dark, but they have a goal in mind, they may feel ikigai. Behaviors that make us feel ikigai are not actions which we are forced to take—these are natural and spontaneous actions.

In the article named Ikigai — jibun no kanosei, kaikasaseru katei (“Ikigai: the process of allowing the self's possibilities to blossom”) Kobayashi Tsukasa says that "people can feel real ikigai only when, on the basis of personal maturity, the satisfaction of various desires, love and happiness, encounters with others, and a sense of the value of life, they proceed toward self-realization.”

What I Learned from Teaching Ethics

In teaching, I’ve learned any number of life lessons. Teaching journalism ethics, for example, taught me the universal utility of developmental psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg’s theory of moral development.

Kohlberg divides human moral and ethical development broadly into three stages. Stage one is pre-conventional, the moral level of a child. A child’s moral view is that he wants whatever he wants and he doesn’t want to get punished for getting it. He’s amoral or sub-moral. That’s to be expected in a child, but adults stuck at that level are invariably trouble, often dangerous to themselves and those around them — people like Benito Mussolini and Donald J. Trump.

Stage two is the conventional level, and describes the bulk of humanity. They obey the laws, they go along to get along. Generally good people as far it goes, they are nevertheless subject to what Hannah Arendt termed “the banality of evil.” If they happen to look around and see that everybody else supports slavery or the murder of Jews or torture, then so will they.

Stage three is the post-conventional level, those who recognize and stand up against injustice even if that injustice is backed by authorities, and even at some risk to themselves. This is the level of our heroes from popular culture and history. They’re Marshal Will Kane and attorney Atticus Finch and Captain Kirk and Captain America. They’re Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and Martin Luther King and Ida B. Wells and Edward R. Murrow.

 The Milgram experiment demonstrated that the post-conventional people are vastly outnumbered by the conventional people. But it’s always the post-conventional people who count, who move the morality of the world. “Those who doggedly challenge the orthodoxy of belief, who question the reigning political passions, who refuse to sacrifice their integrity to serve the cult of power, are pushed to the margins,” Chris Hedges noted. “They are denounced by the very people who, years later, will often claim these moral battles as their own.”

One Morning in the Faculty Dining Room

Painting by Cheryl Ratcliff

In the Faculty Dining Room: “Christ, it is sad, sad to see, on quite a few of these faces — young ones particularly — a glum defeated look. Why do they feel this way about their lives? Sure, they are underpaid. Sure, they have no great prospects, in the commercial sense. Sure, they can’t enjoy the bliss of mingling with corporate executives. But isn’t it any consolation to be with students who are still three-quarters alive? Isn’t it some tiny satisfaction to be of use, instead of helping to turn out useless consumer goods? Isn’t it something to know that you belong to one of the few professions in this country which isn’t hopelessly corrupt?

“For these glum ones, apparently not. They would like out, if they dared try. But they have prepared themselves for this job and now they have to go through with it. They have wasted the time in which they should have been learning to cheat and grab and lie. They have cut themselves off from the majority — the middlemen, the hucksters, the promoters — by laboriously acquiring all this dry, discredited knowledge; discredited, that is to say, by the middleman, because he can get along without it. All the middleman wants are its products, its practical applications. These professors are suckers, he says. What’s the use of knowing something if you don’t make money out of it? And the glum ones more than half agree with him, and fell privately ashamed of not being smart and crooked.”

— Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man

Robert Shaw: That Certain Teacher

 “I had one schoolmaster who got me to read all sorts of things — pretty well everything, including all the classic novels. He was just one of those bits of luck in one’s life. His name was Cyril Wilkes, and I still see him from time to time.

Actor Robert Shaw

“He must have been lonely, and that that was his life — teaching boys and helping them. He used to take three or four of us to see plays in London. The first real play I ever saw, in the autumn of 1944, was Hamlet, with John Gielgud, in a repertory production put on at the Haymarket. Mr. Wilkes took some of us to London during a school holiday. We saw Gielgud’s Hamlet at a matinee. That evening, we saw Margaret Leighton and Ralph Richardson in Peer Gynt, and the next day we saw Laurence Olivier in Richard III at a matinee, and Alastair Sim in the James Birdie play It Depends What You Mean that evening. The third day, we saw Laurence Olivier in the film Henry V in the morning, and in the evening we saw John Gielgud again, in Love for Love.

“I was quite dazzled. Gielgud made an extraordinary impression on me. I can see him now as he looked in Hamlet — that long, angular body in the black costume. That first night, I went back to the hotel room, picked up Hamlet, and read it from beginning to end.

“Me. Wilkes taught French and directed all the school plays. He always had time to talk to the boys. We used to sit in his room until two or three in the morning talking about books and politics. Mr. Wilkes was one of those English liberal of the thirties — a member of the Left Book Club, who probably thought about going to fight fascism in Spain but then hadn’t done it. He was that kind of teacher.

“He directed me in the school plays, but told me not to try to become a professional actor. He said that I had the wrong temperament for it — that I was too rebellious and wanted my own way too much. Later on, I found out that it was his policy to say that to everybody, on the theory that if you’re set on doing a thing, you’ll go ahead and do it anyway.” —  Robert Shaw, The Player: Profile of An Art

Why the American Right Hates Higher Education

California philosophy professor Troy Jollimore wrote, “These abilities are associated with the humanities and the arts: the ability to think critically; the ability to transcend local loyalties and to approach world problems as ‘a citizen of the world;’ and, finally, the ability to imagine sympathetically the predicament of another person.”

And that makes it easy to see why the contemporary American right wing loathes higher education almost instinctively.

The GOP base is frightened of any unfamiliar ideas that might threaten their world view, and their leaders prefer them ignorant and therefore easily manipulable. The right herds its angry base through jingoism and tribalism, by making sure they continue to fear “the Other.” They must never permit tribal loyalties to be transcended. Empathy must be crushed, because it would undermine the public’s willingness to wage unjustified wars and indifference to crushing economic inequality.

Empathy, by the way, is the actual basis of ethics and morality. One of the most elemental tests of ethics is how you and your society treat the stranger. The American right, hostile to empathy, must instead base its morality on unquestioned and contradictory Daddy-in-the-Sky rules that, after sufficient cherry-picking, finally reflect nothing but their own petty prejudices and power-lust. 

About Beauty and Brains

Raram facit misturam cum sapientia forma

“We have Petronius’s Satyricon to blame for this canard, literally “beauty and wisdom are rarely found together.” The myth of ‘beautiful but dumb’ is destroyed by university teachers each time they look up from their notes. What they see is a lecture hall filled with intelligent and attractive students. What the students see may be another matter.”

— Eugene Ehrlich, Amo, Amas, Amat and More.

A Look at A-literate America

“The current American relationship to reading and writing … is best described not as illiterate but as a-literate,” Susan Jacoby wrote in “Age of American Unreason.”

“That Americans inhabit a less contemplative and judicious society than they did just four decades ago is arguable only to the ever-expanding group of infotainment marketers who stand to profit from the videoization of everything. The greater accessibility of information through computers and the internet serves to foster the illusion that the ability to retrieve words and numbers with the click of a mouse also confers the capacity to judge whether those words and numbers represent truth, lies or something in between.

“The illusion is not of course confined to America, but its effects are especially deleterious in a culture (unlike, say, that of France or Japan) with an endemic predilection for technological answers to non-technological problems and an endemic suspicion of anything that smacks of intellectual elitism.”