The Sacred and Beautiful

Roger Scruton has a short essay on the postmodern life, posted up on the City Journal website. Let me offer two responses.

1.) Scruton does not need to work so hard trying to scrape out a new form of transcendence in human experience. While the rational mind of this era does "desecrate" by nature - putting reason to the sacred in order to understand its human utility and social construction - and can be "transported" and "captured" by a moment of empty clarity, we people of the modern have always kept alive the sacred in a most fundamental way: ourselves. Consciousness, that undoubtable moment of experienced self-awareness, can not desacralize itself. The "phenomenon of consciousness" (as termed by William James) keeps itself whole; we can not stand apart from our own being to problematize our self in any way other than the abstract. Action in the world is self-actualizing, and no amount of reflection can alter the immanence with which we live.

2.) Scruton sets aside certain human endeavors (holiday meals; getting lost into a suddenly appearing shaft of sunlight) as evidence that we still live invested in beauty. In doing so, he emphasizes what Ellen Dissanayake calls "making special." This means, to be entirely too reductive, to invest value into acts of social construction, to acknowledge what William James (again) called the more to our lives. The very power than enjoins human reason to understand the world elides what it can not fit into meaningfulness. "For what we do not have language, we pass over in silence" (Wittgenstein). Elision becomes ignorance; the more becomes not the mystical dimension, where art and religion serve with soteriological agency, but a null part of human existence. Put another way, the observable and rational subvert the hapticity of experience. What we can not explain, we dismiss and move on.

His essay adds elegant prose to the dialogue between art and utility. The fact that something is created by humans for humans in order to live more autonomously in the world of humans does not deprive it of a kind of godliness. The final cause can not be known. The challenge for us the people is how to deal with that.

ADDED: I had the chance to attend a dinner in honor of Nell Painter, the Princeton professor of History. There were few people around the table, maybe ten, at the point that Dr. Painter claimed that "beauty did not have a narrative." Cam White and I had no idea what she meant, and neither of us were bold enough to approach her about this claim (it came across with a tone of perceived obviousness). I am still unable to understand her point, though I occasionally find ways to justify it.

Its relevance here, then, reminds me of the complex dimensions at play in what Scruton writes. Is beauty a thing itself, an end without recourse as a means? Should we pursue beauty, like the good and the true, for no utility other than to experience the beautiful? If so, then beauty as a social construction opens us to bad, bad faith: creating out of the flesh of human experience the portal of transcendence from humanity negates the transcendence. We fall back into ourselves.

Schools fail this test continually. Art, or any non-"objective" content subject course like music and PE, gain traction in schools in proportion to the utility for the mainline content course. Or their ability to raise measurements (re: testing) of these contents or the efficacy of schooling. There is, of course, a political and practical advantage to taking this purposefulness as a given. What it means, though, is the subjugation of beauty, and truth and the good, to their value in social life. Education deprives students of their experience of the goals of meaningfulness, in order to prepare them for a life that seeks these goals. Pursuit of the Good is not an end of schooling. Education sucks away the humanity of experience - even just the recognition that such a thing as the Good exists and the significance of a life of seeking.

Education becomes the process of regression, the infinite deferral of the goals of living in favor of more tools in which to seek them.

two ideas

1.) Results oriented action. Life is unpredictable, but somewhat consistent. They idea that we can know, with surety, the next moment does not create a kind of bad faith. Things seem to work out as planned, making it safe to anticipate the reaction and results of our actions. 'Anger the Gods; make plans' fizzles into a harder reality of 'anger the Gods; lack expectations.'

So for schooling. Outcome-based teaching seems a rational approach to education. Figure out what we want our students to know, to know how to do and to feel; create lessons that enable students to know, to know how to and to feel. Results; proof; efficacy.

Yet striving for outcomes depends on a messy process. Knowledge, skills and disposition are not produced so easily in a lab setting, much less the decidedly unsterile schoolhouse. Too many factors jump into play for teachers or students. What is learned does not easily fit into concise, clearly conceptualized results. Broadly, yes; a student learns to add, to dissect, to read, to understand how a bill gets enacted. If these rather broad goals count as results, then outcome-based teaching has a strong kind of validity. In fact, the broader the goals, the less we care about the mess. Learning on a macro-level does not impose complexity. Increasingly, though, learned is being targeted on the micro-level. We must deal with the mess; the divergent nature of knowledge and skills and the highly individual psychology of every student.

Put another way, schooling resembles a court case. The law is what it is, but the process determines the reality of the abstract law. And that process is highly contingent (the personalities of the lawyers and judges and juries; the particulars of any case; the social climate and norms present at the time of the case), thus messy. The results of the case can not be known ahead of time, even though the broad outline can be: the law will be applied in a way that does little damage to what the law means.

The little things are the most unpredictable and least conducive to plan for. However, they are the heart of how truth is discovered.

2.) Understanding life. In a longish discussion on affirmative action, I tried to make the case that using race as a 'plus' factor for a candidate will not help bring about the end to race-based decisions (on hiring, school admissions, whatever). Even as a transition, from the overtly racist, white paternalism, to a more just society, I doubted that using race to move past using race would effect any social change. My partner explained something, though, that I found important: Blacks have lived the experience of being black. No matter how equal the qualifications between two candidates - one black; the other white - the lived experiences in contemporary America will be different.

To be clear, I have no delusions that such a thing as "equal qualifications" exist, nor the immense value of diversifying a faculty or student body for its own sake. And I understand the logic of compensatory measures to equilibrate the diversity of an organization. My concerns are that such action will not lead to overcoming such actions.

And this argument which I found really strong - the experience of being a minority in America - got me thinking. By this, do we mean that a black's experience of being black is enough? In other words, is their blackness itself the worthy feature of their experience? Or is it their ability to experience their experience of being black? Is there a difference between hiring someone who is black and hiring someone who is conscious of the experience of being black? The distinction seems crucial, since awareness of experience is not limited to minorities, and thus perhaps a better description of what race in American means.

For example, I am white, Jewish, well educated and from successful parents. This experience is not unique in itself. Nor does it lend me to an untapped perspective on things. But let's say that I come to understand what it means to be white in American; I develop a consciousness complementary and opposite of blacks who are conscious of their experience in being black. And I develop a consciousness of being Jewish; the consciousness of being relatively privileged and secure as I grew-up; the conscious of what these mean in society today. Would these levels of awareness mean that I have a similar experience as minorities who are conscious of and understanding for being a minority in America?

Perhaps this sounds all very dismissive to the real plight of many in America, of the history of real discrimination and poverty suffered, of the actual experience of living this experience. It may be that my words here make it seem like I am looking for a way to explain away this experience, to not have to deal with it, by turning a lived experience into a concept, and a concept that I can arrange for myself. And maybe what I have just done is demonstrate to those, like my partner, who argue for diversity as a value itself to slap awake those, like me, who can not truly know what it means to live in the other Americas.

I probably agree, then, to all that. My point, though, is to help make clear the messiness of our concepts and actions, to anchor what is to be done more snugly into the bedrock of why we need to do it. This post may be a terrible, and possibility ignorant and insulting attempt. Grant me the chance to start here as I make my way somewhere better.

Zen and that quality-thing

Here is an email I sent this morning to my dean, regarding how our teacher education should best respond to the down slope of applicants.  The response was, "Thanks.  That helps."  We shall see it if really did.

Rita,

If tasked with making our case to the BOT, I'm not sure I would use "independence."  "Autonomy" rings truer.  We can read the decline in our application/matriculants in two divergent ways. a.) We are too expensive, too rigorous, too much more of everything than what the prevailing expectations for teacher education have become, or b.) there are fewer people choosing to become teachers.  I believe in absolute terms b.), but in relative terms (for the Northwest) b.) is a nearer truth.  That leaves us, and the Board, a kind of choice: what would we like out of our program?  Arthur Levine smacked down on the most recent generation of teacher ed programs.  With the exception of the rare few, most colleges have focused not so much on the quality but of the quantity of $ these ed programs bring in.  Curricula are similar across the country, so much so that a consistent array of theories and ideologies, types of field experiences and outcome expectations appear everywhere (abetted no doubt by the NCATE-ization of standards).  Traditionally, ed programs have been criticized for their theory-less foundation, for the lack of mental wattage needed to become a teacher and for the routinization of programs that could be handled in an easier, simplified manner in alternative ways (TFA, district-run programs like the NYC and Boston internships, for-profit private programs).  In a corrosive way, the expectations for teaching had become so low, that ed schools hollowed out their own expectations of quality.  Thus we get many teaching candidates who want a narrow, limited "how do I teach math/3rd grade/reading ...?"  If a program does not provide that, in a straightforward, take-away manner, the program is seen to fail even on these neap-tide expectations. Society does not have tremendous respect for what it takes to be a teacher.  What respect it does have is for the technology of teaching.  "Knowledge workers"?  Long finish.  We are left with a rather unfair false choice: quality or $?  Assuming that pursuing both at the same time ensures that neither is reached, I would advocate for the former and ask Board support for our efforts to make the quality of teachers - their minds, their ideas, their creativity, the leadership - our vision.  Of course, this would mean a more than concerted effort on behalf of the faculty to pursue this, both in scholarship and in practice (what we research and disseminate and how our program enjoins its implications).  I believe it is more than imperative that we not shift this argument to the M.Ed, but focus on the holistic and socially contexted need for a quality teacher prep program.  Does that help?

Bank Lending

When an editorial supporting the Geithner bank plan appears in the WSJ, perhaps we should rethink the Geithner bank plan.

Remembering that I have no economic training, let me propose a humble alternative plan, Instead of using Fed support to induce hedge funds et. al. to buy up the "legacy assets" at large banks (whose presence on their balance sheets prevent them from lending - no one trusts the solvency of the banks), what if the government channeled the TALF/TARP/whatever to solvent, and necessarily smaller banks?  Without the slime of any unpriced assets, without the over-leveraged balance of debt to liquidity, without the post-Glass-Seagal interconnection of services and speculation, these mid-sized banks across the nation would be the new financial engine of recovery. Limiting their size by limiting the ratio of debt they may carry (how about ... 6:1?) might create trust in their lending.

As for the big, soiled banks so much in the media?  Without government money as a lifeline, they would need to deleverage quickly to get into the action.  That means dumping these securitized instruments.  Government could assist homeowners through mortgage rate reduction (warning: I am a home owner who owes about what my home is now worth), say to 2.5%, though with no revaluation of the homes.  That might help keep people in their homes; the government pays the interest up to the contracted rate (for example, my interest rate is 6.5%; I longer own enough equity to refinance down to the current 4.5%; in my pseudo-plan, I would pay a mortgage at 2.5%, with the government funding the gap up to 6.5% until I once again own enough equity to refinance down to current levels), which may add stability to the securities.  Once the big banks are able to start selling their load of toxicities, they can slowly deleverage down in size.

There are many problems here, even I recognize (like who decides which mid-size banks get the money? how independent are they?).  Yet I question the justness of a financial recovery by our government.  Instead of using the profit incentive to lure in more fantastical speculation (with almost no risk), why should we use the government strength to create a need for the banks to establish their own market for the clogs that are freezing their willingness to loan?  In the meantime,  added capitalization of mid-sized banks will allow small business and home buyer lending, within reason.

"Pseudo-objectivity"

Completely unrelated (it would seem) to education?  I extrapolate an apt analogy from Dr. Muller's critique of using mathematical models to accurately represent qualitative content.  Put another way, the "cult of accountablilty" led to the false conception that numbers were all that mattered.  Get the equation right, get the statistical objectivity down, get the final tabulation graphed, and you create a true vision of what is what.

Read the whole essay for a nice primer in the economic recession.  Then read again, only this time think "school" instead of economy.

In Praise of Ms. Rhee

Nicholas Kristoff uses his column to commend the work of D.C. school chancellor Michelle Rhee, and exhort ed policy makers to follow her lead.  To do so, he makes three assumptive errors, all completely understandable and all too commonly taken as given:

a. scores on standardized tests adequately measure learning

b. the gap in scores between high achievers and lower achievers can be bridged

c. merit pay will inspire teachers to make the necessary effort to teach well

In a much longer post I could break-down each of these points and their misconceptions.  Here, though, let me be way too brief:

a.  they can, but only by defining "learning" as that which is measurable in standardized tests

b. it can, but only by under-testing the ability of the high achievers and teaching the lower achievers how to succeed on these tests

c. insulting, and ironic: conceivably true only by admitting that teachers are underpaid in poor performing schools

The point here is not to dismiss Mr. Kristoff's plea, nor Ms. Rhee's effort.  Rather, by focusing on the assumptions and cognitive biases involving in rethinking schools, we can avoid policies and pedagogy that perpetuate easy empirical proof and ignore the complex and often ineffable social contexts of learning.  There is nothing to attempting radical or didactic approaches to shake out the best of our schools.  We just need to get over the idea that any of them are sustainable.

Mr. Brooks' cattle

David Brooks  gives another passionate and clear-eyed defense of the need for accountability in education.  He suggests, more over, that ed schools need to be held to the same kinds of data-riven measurements.  While he does not explicate what kinds of data are appropriate, he does define as successful "which teachers are bringing their students’ achievement up by two grades in a single year and which are bringing their students’ levels up by only half a grade."

Which leads me to point out the problem with his thinking.  Bad teachers, he tells us are "the ones who treat students like cattle to be processed."  And so for "bad schools," I would imagine (though he does not write this).   Yet, with standardized testing as the main accountability determinant for state, district, school and teacher evaluation, student learning becomes a by-product (though, in theory, an important one) of successful state, district, school and teacher evaluations.  In this way, students are the means by which school systems collect their rewards or suffer their punishments.  The ends are high accountability ratings, which produce the lucre of merit pay or federal cash or an increase of students from education-savvy parents.

As for teacher education, strong programs focus their graduates toward thriving careers. This often ignored dimension of preparation for the classroom means the difference between a teacher who has instant success but a flatter growth curve and a teacher whose early trials lack the bright shining of immediate spectacular effects, but who develops at an accelerated pace as they gain more experience.  The first kind of teacher is what most schools think they need right now.  The second kind of teacher is what all schools need for long-term sustainable practices in the very best interests of our generations.