Santorum’s lament is that college threatens to undo the brainwashing that came before. But that is the point. Woodrow Wilson who, prior to White House, was president of Princeton University, said it best: “The use of Universities is to make young gentlemen as unlike their parents as possible.
[A teacher’s] sense of self is constantly being bolstered and shredded as we succeed and fail. Those of us who are most susceptible to this dynamic might just be the best teachers, if also the most damaged human beings: vain, vulnerable, insatiable for recognition. We feel the vocation as a visceral experience, life and death for our fragile egos. We can excite students with the vitality and urgency of learning because we feel that so much is at stake for ourselves.
I want an older age full of intense learning and creative productivity. But I would never leave it to chance. The brain requires blood (exercise). The brain requires nourishment (walnuts and blueberries and leafy greens). The brain requires sleep. It needs to dream. It needs protection from chronic stress, chronic depression, and blows to the head. It needs to learn.
Play video games, Restak says. Learn Spanish or Italian or ancient Greek. Learn to play the cello. Learn math (if you were terrible at math). Enter some new area of inquiry and blast your way through its veil of vocabulary.
We have forgotten that schools must teach not only what students want to learn but also, and sometimes exactly, what they don’t want or don’t know they want. Otherwise in all primary and middle schools teachers would no longer teach math or Latin, only video games. It’s like the fireman letting the cat run along the highway, because that is what it naturally wants to do.
Umberto Eco
Paula Cohen attacks the philosopher’s views on political correctness. Read.
I have often tried to describe what I like to call “a good class.” It happens periodically, though never consistently, because talk takes an unpredictable course. You nurture a class with interesting, well-presented material, then hope it will spark talk from the students, infusing the material with new life and extending it into new areas.
Their sense of self has already adjusted to the expectations placed on them.
If one cannot really teach students to be gifted writers, one can teach them to be gifted readers—to learn how great stories were produced, and to respect the craftsmanship that went into making them. They can also learn to see when authors were lazy or simply off their game. This helps to put a face behind the literary work—not a conventional biographical face but a human one.
Here then was a group of 18–22 year olds with a sense that they could shape their own destiny.
..
I wonder if the sense that they control their destinies is a function of their careerist orientation, a more general function of their age, or an enduring aspect of the American Dream that still prevails even in difficult economic times.
No experience is educative that does not tend both to knowledge of more facts and entertaining of more ideas and to a better, a more orderly, arranging of them.
John Dewey
Paula Cohen writes about how the contemporary education system (think: standardized tests) in America has strayed from John Dewey’s vision. Read.
William Deresiewicz on politics in academia.
Paula Cohen waxing poetic about Life Coaches.
Priscilla Long explores he Antarctic ice shelf from her armchair with explorer Richard Byrd.
Jessica Love explains phonetic neighborhoods, and why we articulate words and mumble others.
William Zinsser drops some knowledge on prospective writers.
Enjoy your weekend, tumblr.
(Above, Richard Byrd)
