Creative Class

Don't you love it when American right wing nutjobs start crawling even further right and bump right into their avowed enemies?

Iran's hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called Tuesday for a purge of liberal and secular teachers from the country's universities, urging students to return to 1980s-style radicalism.

"Today, students should shout at the president and ask why liberal and secular university lecturers are present in the universities," the official Islamic Republic News Agency quoted Ahmadinejad as saying during a meeting with a group of students.

David Horowitz, publisher of FrontPage magazine, and whose archive of articles is available online, has long advocated for something he calls "an academic bill of rights." Essentially, the academic bill of rights argues in language that would make the sophists blush with pleasure, that universities are not teaching, they are indoctrinating, and therefore, "intellectual balance" should be brought to bear. It's carefully worded to indicate that no professor should be hired or fired based on political views. It all sounds so reasonable. And then, when you click on Professor Horowitz's blurbs for his most recent book, The Professors, you find this:

So Standardized School is the opposite of World-Class Education,
not its divine incarnation?
Good then.
Let's hear no more about the necessary sacrifice of consigning all children to one-dimensional forehand factories for high-priced, high-stakes stamping into quality-controlled widgets, by has-been and never-were corporate charismatics and labor union drones.

Do you know what words of advice inspire the greatest players in the world as they enter Centre Court for Wimbledon, to show what they know and can do?

“If you can meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two impostors just the same”-
“If” by Rudyard Kipling.

IF we inscribed this on every standardized test booklet for every child our Congressional Coaches promise never to leave behind languishing in the locker room, IF we took it to heart ourselves, then we still might not win 'em all but maybe we could stop feeling like such losers?

I've long called test score mania (in both triumph and disaster) the two-edged sword, but "two-edged imposter" could work even better, might at least shut up the most rigid standard skunks -- clever fellow Kipling.

My imagination was captivated when I came across someone's account of a quite civil "luncheon" strategy, the notion of inviting famously opposed partisans to sit together for a few hours across a social (not bargaining) table with their charming hostess, and make not only eye contact but real conversation.

The point wasn't to resolve major controversy or hit any other measurable outcome target per se, just to create a context conducive to a civil (if not cordial) relationship, from which future conversations and constructive ideas might spring.

I don't even remember now who the opponents were in the column I happened to see, or its author, but it inspired me last summer as the Fourth of July approached and public education tempers were once again hotter than blazes.

Oh, and "MisEducation" was an author's alter ego I created from desperation years ago and patterned on Judith Martin's Miss Manners persona, when I couldn't find anyone to HAVE a civil and creative conversation with me about education cultures, much less actually go to lunch!

MisEducation's Mind Field of the Moment:
Fourth of July Lessons of Freedom

What a week for trying to walk, talk, learn and think at the same time!

First, our 10-year-old son is listening to NPR in the car when he's riveted by news of an important fossil discovery linking fish and land creatures, a so-called tetrapod, lifeforms that left the water to walk on land.

He isn't interested in the news or politics, although he just
discovered Stephen Colbert and gets some of the comedy. He likes the
split screen where the contradictory wisecracks are on the right as
Stephen pontificates on the left. It reminds him of the wisecracking
moose commentary on the Brother Bear DVD.

But yesterday in the car, he suddenly wanted us to turn it up, so
he could hear all about the new fossil link. That was the first really
interesting "news" worth hearing, he proclaimed, but there wasn't enough
to the story. (He actually said this, exactly that way, pronouncing
judgment like a seasoned media critic.)
Intense investigation ensues when we can get online, after which my little boy, who has never been made to think about anything, hugs me with a goofy grin and says, "Hello, my fellow tetrapod!"

Whenever I travel I almost always end up in deep political conversations with people who identify themselves as conservatives and republicans. I guess people feel like they can open up with me. I did at one point want to be a nun and I guess people get that I am not only willing to listen but I take the conversation seriously to the point of it being sacred. To me communication is communion and those 10, 15, 20 minutes to me are sincerely precious.

This is the second time I have been given permission to write about these conversations with pseudonymous attribution. The first conversation I published was the one I had with “The Guy”. I met The Guy during a return trip from Washington DC. I really want to re-publish what he had to say because, honestly, it cannot be repeated enough :

"Michael Moore is right";, he said. I asked him about the coming fight over Roberts and the likes of people like Dobson : "You don't understand, they don't care. These people don't care. This is just entertainment to them. A way to keep the masses fighting with each other. They are out to make billions and billions of dollars, amass incredible wealth and power while we're here, the have-nots of all sorts of incomes, down here duking it out. They don't care about Roberts or homosexuals or dead babies. They only care about power. And that power is money and oil." I sat there quietly, with my eyes wide open. The Guy had told me earlier that he worked in satellite broadcasting media. That means his contracts are in the tens of millions. And this guy looked at Bush as the enemy.

Now it's Mr. D's turn.

I met Mr. D on the way over to the airport. Mr. D works in finance and was taking a plane to Las Vegas to take the qualifying exam for their fire department. To my beanie-wearing readers, Mr. D looked like he could be the love child of Clay Shirky and Cam Barrett. Young, white, affluent. Not your typical red stater but certainly of the kind that matters to the GOP (and unfortunately to any political party) : he's a guy with money to spare in the form of campaign contributions.

Why was Mr. D. leaving an extremely well paid job with gobs of economic perks for a chance to work as a firefighter? Two words : September 11.

Maybe I got it wrong before, and moving school nurses to mega-grocery stores is a good idea?

I didn't see the disaster-preparedness angle when I wrote:

We're getting one of these fancy food-clinic combos in my state, right in Miami where school corruption is a more popular sport than football and jai alai put together. Miami is the perfect place to play around with anything that disadvantages schoolkids to generate ill-gotten profits for greedy grownups.

So now I'm thinking, what's best for kids if their school can't be accessed, maybe isn't there at all?

Where are we wiser to place expensive institutional electric generators, to avoid Katrina-scale misery -- in schools or grocery stores?

It could be that South Florida culture is doing something smart for survival preparedness even if they didn't exactly plan it that way, haven't recognized it and never admit it.

HURRICANE SEASON
By Elaine Walker

The next time a major hurricane strikes South Florida, shoppers should be able to find their local Publix stocked with milk, cheese and ice even before the power returns.

Students don't want to be there.
Teachers don't want to be there.

So what's not working in schools (everywhere) is the bribery, coercion and behavior modification? No surprise then, that the expert solution is better compulsion and manipulation, invest our national treasure in more carrots and sticks! -- the teachers and kids of America are a pesky breed of surly mules to be driven to market any way we can get them there. Otherwise, institutions can't make money on them!

[Raising my hand obediently, because I spent a couple of decades being socialized in school myself] --
As a free-thinking individual, may I ask a couple of questions?

For the moment let's leave aside the Alfie Kohn issue of carrots and sticks not "working" in learning and education. Apparently they work in schooling, to at least keep the parking lots full every day and the money flowing.

What's free, open, democratic, progressive, or academic (much less creative culture-fostering) about all this again? Are even liberal-leaning school thinkers now satisfied to equate "something that works" to keep staff and students at school despite their compelling desire not to be there, with something that works to create an educated populace?

HOME-omorphism - continuous transformation. Homeschoolers, especially classic liberals and libertarians, would be drawn to this in droves, wouldn't you think?

And by definition, home-omorphism happens with one-to-one correspondence! How much better could it get?

What do you do, the polite stranger in the market would ask - oh, we're heavily into homeomorphism, I would say, our facial expressions and body language transforming continuously and enigmatically right in front of her, as she gapes. Let's go play chess, I would then say to my child, in affectionate one-to-one correspondence. Right after the opera and ballet, corresponding child would answer, to my happy assent. More gaping.

Continuous transformation is the best part of homeschooling for Thinking Parents, why I personally love how my family lives homeschooling as continuous transformation - it's like never having to graduate and leave college! We're still there, baby, delving into everything all at the same time, meeting minds, burning through the library and the midnight oil discovering something new and stunning every day, including the most RADICAL words and ideas, setting our own pace and schedule, world by the tail, hoping our support holds out, lounging on the lawns, alternating between the organic homegrown and the cafeteria candy counter . . .

Power of story professionals in the theatre community have a bone to pick with our skidding common culture. They would like us to consider that the story of what you present is shaped (misshapen!) by how loudly and artificially you're induced to present it.

. . .Today even sermons in churches and temples are almost always carried through loudspeakers. If Abraham Lincoln were to reappear at the Great Hall of Cooper Union, where he gave a historic speech as a presidential candidate, exasperated audiences would be shouting at him to use a sound system.

A little McLuhan-esque wordplay -- when did the concept of "speakers" come to denote wired boxes for cranking up the volume to levels now often considered assault outside the concert or convention hall, rather than "speakers" being all-too-human individuals who get together to really listen to and be enhanced by each other's ideas?

Isn't that what we originally set out to amplify, not our differences but our understanding OF those differences, the better to hear how it can amplify our common humanity?

In a powerful story needing no amplication to hold MY attention -- its Power of Story knocks me out! -- the New York Times this week adds swelling music and sublime lyrics to Liza's latest dramatic theme, about how political noise machines distort what we value most in public policy, culture, art and education.