Education in America concerns me deeply. No, this is not the normal topic of this blogsite, but it has a spiritual component. Bennington College President Liz Coleman touched me in a profoundly spiritual way in her closing speech at the TED2009 Conference. Not that the lecture, in itself was spiritual, for it belongs to what I would term the “soulish” realm (a potentially good realm in spite of a lot of people’s religious opinions). But she affected my spiritual sensibilities.
She is, unquestionably, a supremely gifted woman. She splits my sensibilities right down the middle. Part of me cheers for her appreciation of a good general education, and part of me sees the possible trajectory of where her other thoughts could lead. She opens her speech with an anecdote of how she was brought in to assist in the transformation of university education in Eastern Europe. They had chosen to place new emphasis on the traditional liberal arts education. Coleman realized, in all truth, the shambles of the liberal arts education in America.
In truth, liberal arts education no longer exists– at least genuine liberals arts education — in this country. We have professionalized liberal arts to the point where they no longer provide the breadth of application and the enhanced capacity for civic engagement that is their signature. Over the past century, the “expert” has dethroned the educated generalist to become the sole model of intellectual accomplishment. Expertise has, for sure, had its moments, but the price of its dominance is enormous.
Subject matters are broken up into smaller and smaller pieces with increasing emphasis on the technical and obscure. We have even managed to make the study of literature arcane. You may think you know what is going on in that Jane Austen novel — that is, until your first encounter with post-modern deconstructionism. The progression of today’s college student is to jettison every interest except one and, within that one, to continually narrow the focus, learning more and more about less and less. [Coleman, speech at TEDConference 2009.]
She is preaching to the choir as far as I am concerned. Such moments of affirmation for the generalist cause me anguish at first take for the ridiculous amount of time I spent in school instead of engaging in things far closer to my heart. But isn’t that what education has taught? — that we don’t know anything unless we specialize in something?
Gone, mostly, are the truly skilled artists, philosophers, statesmen and thinkers. They have been replaced by men and women whose careers hinge on the number of degrees they hold and the number of published works they can churn out. How is it that the “bucking broncos” among them are easily swept into elite cults that mistake obnoxious thought for true revolution? Blame goes partly to the cancerous mission of educators to keep reproducing themselves at the expense of developing hard skills in the truly talented. It also goes to the American public for reducing themselves to the nonsense of mass consumerism and novelty in education with the resulting devastation of the truly intelligent and the refined.
Coleman has rightly identified the wasted motion and dead weight. For Coleman, there are no absolutes. In this we differ. I believe in absolute principles even if some areas of life appear superficially gray. In a world of pluralistic values, Coleman has chosen no particular values in order to get along at the bargaining table. She takes specific aim at fundamentalists (Christians, presumably) who use education to further their own values at the expense of all others. I’m pained to say that I quite agree with her, although I wonder if she is aware that she has just placed her own values ahead of all others. But it may be that her way appears the most sensible in a violently splintered society.
If my sympathies strike those who think they know me as strange, I can only answer that God never sent us into the world to negotiate a place for Him on the world’s terms — that is, through domination of world systems. Coleman completely understands what fundamentalists are doing while they, in turn, misunderstand their own mission on earth. Coleman wants to change the world. So do a lot of “Christians”, except that Jesus never asked us to do such a thing. Coleman believes in compromise as the way to peace and public advancement. Her position makes perfect sense for a great mind in a field that has too often had to contort itself into ridiculous postures to please conservative Christian reactionaries. It is, however, the way of Babylon — the way of bringing all persons to the table without value judgment in order to create a world in which the universal Human Being can achieve happiness and purpose without answering or deferring to a Creator.
Coleman has assembled an interesting combination — Deist-influenced Constitutional ideals (she cites Jefferson) and a firm belief that no one can really know this God (therefore, we must drop Him while negotiating at the table). Coleman’s plan makes perfect sense for those who desire order, equity and justice but are sick of being derailed from any progress by mindless and uninquiring religious fear mongers. Her goal, through the leadership of educators (is that wise?), is to include those who have been left out of the process of social change for too long. She is a practical woman, for sure.
When improvisation, resourcefulness, imagination are key, artists — at long last — take their place at the table when strategies of action are in the process of being designed. In this dramatically expanded ideal of a liberal arts education where the continuum of thought and action are its life’s blood, knowledge honed outside the academy becomes essential. Social activists, business leaders, lawyers, politicians, professionals will join the faculty as active and ongoing participants in this wedding of liberal education to the advancement of the public good.
Students, in turn, continuously move outside the classroom to engage the world directly. And, of course, this “new wine” needs new bottles. If we are to capture the liveliness and dynamism of this ideal, the most important discovery we made in our focus on public action was to appreciate that the hard choices are not between good and evil, but between competing goods. [Ibid.]
Notice now that “evil” no longer exists. We may no longer speak in those terms, for now all is clean and acceptable by public fiat. We are dealing only in “good” things that compete with one another — if only we had known all those centuries! (Is this where she believes evolution plays a part?) This is where I feel uncomfortable. Where are we going with this? She unwraps the Bennington plan to build a new Center for the Advancement of Public Action and says to think of it as a kind of secular “church”. Her solution to public polity seems a mix between ancient Roman ideals and the same old state-as-god mentality of the Eastern Europeans she was trying to help in the second paragraph way back there. Perhaps she envisions this as a new and more humane way of socialism, albeit with some interesting brainstorming sessions.
Nevertheless, I thank Coleman for making me rethink the strengths of my own life — and how a liberal arts education broadened me. Who cannot like Coleman at the heart of her intent? People like Coleman make me a better person for forcing me to rethink the purpose and direction of my life in a positive way.
For a long time after graduating from college, I didn’t “get it”. I felt shortchanged, wasted, and wondered why the world seemed to have no place for me. The jobs that existed seemed to lead me nowhere I really wanted to go in life. I understand now that I had graduated with a liberal arts degree into a world where technical expertise was valued over general knowledge and life experience.
I did not become an “expert” in a field, as my curiosity went all over the place. Still, my creativity and understanding of things in general was greatly enhanced by the liberal arts education I received. Had I grasped it then, I would have wasted less time trying to fit into a world of self-important “experts” and embraced my real gift of questioning all things and promoting the value of all human beings made in the image of God.
Thank you, President Coleman for being you, though we come from “different planets”, as it were.
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June 5, 2009 at 7:01 pm
Melville
Part I
Specialization of knowledge, we don’t know anything unless we specialize in something.
My approach would be to teach the difference between really knowing something and believing what one is taught. You don’t know a thing until you know how it is that they [claim to] know. This is for the upper grades. In the lower grades, when children are fragile, don’t make them eat what requires huge intellectual concepts and advanced knowledge to get anywhere near to understanding. I loved the anecdote from the life of Corrie Ten Boom, when as a very little girl she heard adults use the term “sex sin”, and asked her father what that meant. He illustrated by picking up his heavy suitcase and asking her to help him by picking it up. “It’s too heavy”, she said, to which he replied that it was the same with sex sin, too heavy for a little girl to carry.
We, the public are told to trust the experts. It’s too difficult for you to understand. Look to those with the most prestigious letters behind their names.
Inconsistency in Dr. Coleman’s thought.
She laments that most Americans don’t even believe in evolution. But evolution is ENTIRELY the province of experts, of highly specialized ones at that. That whole system of belief, for it is that for most people, is put together and upheld by many, many highly detailed scientific papers and studies, which no single person can be able to compass. Evolution is the prevailing scientific opinion, believed in a very general way to be fact. But it is not taught in a way to make people more scientific, by way of rigorous critical thinking. It is taught so as to have people believe in scientists, and that the popularizations of evolutionary findings found in the textbooks and illustrations in museums and on the internet are to be entirely trusted. The main thing is to get people to believe in evolution.
Does one detect an agenda behind this? Why is it considered so important to get people to believe in evolution from cradle to grave? Is it a type of knowledge that people can’t properly live without, or that so knowing makes people better citizens, in line with Dr. Coleman’s paradigm of the purpose of a liberal arts education?
“Her goal, through the leadership of educators (is that wise?), . . .” Something missing here is that it has been educators themselves who, through tinkering with teaching methods for the last 50 years at least, “fixing” what wasn’t broken, were responsible for “why Johnny can’t read”.
June 5, 2009 at 7:02 pm
Melville
Part II
Is it not interesting how she pulls a metaphor from Jesus, “new wine in old bottles”? She is surely culturally literate, but then appears virtually terrified of impending “theocracy” if certain people get their way, or is it certain ideas? I wonder if there’s something here of what she means by competing goods more than good vs. evil.
To take a major issue before the electorate, abortion deprives the unborn of life and messes up the mother psychologically. But then we don’t really know what happens to the unborn, to the miscarriage, for example. In Job it is said that the miscarriage goes into obscurity. We don’t know what happens to it. If we believe it is a human being already, then isn’t that unborn soul somehow going before God? Surely He is not unjust so as to condemn someone who has never done good or evil.
If fundamentalists believe in letting every child have a chance at life, but also believe in hell for the unsaved, it seems to me a fifty/fifty proposition. Save an unborn baby for a miserable life, who is going to have to go to hell if he doesn’t accept Jesus and remain faithful to the end, in contrast to being with God because she never had a chance to sin. Or do they believe the soul is destroyed if it was never born. I wonder if any of the politically motivated pro-life people have thought any of this through. Pro-life activists shout and carry signs but neither they nor their leaders put forward any actual plan for what they would like to see happen, such as what criminal penalties they want enacted for desperate women or clandestine service providers. Surely they ought to have a goal in vies for how they expect this to be handled, though you never hear it. And that’s the very thing that may make thinking people like Dr. Coleman very nervous. Me too, frankly.
Is this not something that may remain a mystery, the destiny of the unborn? Perhaps not criminalizing abortion and being pro-life are two such competing goods as Dr. C envisions.
It’s my view that this has been the wrong battlefield for Christians anyway, spiritually speaking, going down to earth to fight when the real battles are won in the heavens. This also goes to there being too much identification of the USA as somehow the land of God. Our homeland in Christ is not here.
I wonder if Dr. Coleman would consider the need to protect children from what is more they can handle when they are tender without damaging them and freedom of speech to also be competing goods. It seems likely. She evidently compares and contrasts good and bad uses of military force. Without, wisely I would say, specifying the war in Iraq, she does mention Darfur and Rwanda as examples of international impotence. I wonder if she would come down on one side or another in such latter cases, to if she would prefer the role of facilitator of discussion . .
June 5, 2009 at 9:11 pm
saltsister
Brilliant, Melville! You even picked up on some things I noticed but didn’t mention.
Now to correct a point where I was maybe too strong. I noted her remarks about “good” and “evil”, but I should have said that — yes — sometimes it really is about “competing goods”. I will give her that. Sometimes. But not every interest is a “good”. Some things really are evil. And that’s what I really intended to get across — that we cannot now say without qualification that everything people bring to the table is a “good”.
My other reason for posting such an odd topic for SaltSister is that a deep question is embedded in all this: “How should we who walk in the footsteps of the Messiah live in the midst of all this?” Coleman said, “No one knows the answers.” Intellectually, no. But she has ridded the possibility of the spirit.
Those of us who walk in the reality of an accomplished salvation often encounter answers that we could never have dreamed up by our own means. Everything in the world is pregnant with possibilities of answers, for the spirit makes use of all things. The world cannot receive the correction of the spirit and is therefore consigned to repeat the same errors in a multiplicity of forms — even if it has a great think tank. It’s all been tried and done before.
The world will continue in circles as it always has with its highs and lows. And we will continue to walk through all these things, mostly invisibly, as the Lord gives us peace in the middle of it all.
June 6, 2009 at 12:53 am
Melville
Part III
Further thoughts on evolution:
navigating a middle path between being lumped by secular humanists among the uninquiring and mindless, religious fear mongers or by evangelicals and fundamentalists as having fallen from the faith.
A year or so ago I found myself on an ostensibly Christian group on facebook, an attempt to bring all Christians together. I found a discussion board where a topic piqued my interest. I’d seen the movie with Ben Stein, “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed”, and had also listened to a talk by Stephen Meyers, whose paper started the whole flap with the Smithsonian, and had had a brief word with him afterwards. The thread was about this question: Can a person be a Christian and also believe in evolution? So I was curious what people were saying about “Intelligent Design”. There were some who said yes to the latter, but who didn’t say anything substantive. As it turned out, with an exception or two, the thread was far and away intellectually dominated by quite well-informed atheists.
For better or worse I put my foot into it and what a ride that was! At one point I felt myself overwhelmed by the flood of web pages and videos the Darwinists offered as proofs, the sheer quantity of it. But I persevered.
One thing I discovered was that maintaining a standard of civility and respect is highly valuable. Unfortunately both Christians and fundamentalist Darwinists can get hot headed and start name calling, which undermines their credibility.
Another is to look closely at the facts. Don’t let people get away with secondary or even further removed sources (which I think is a valuable principle for any debated subject). If I may offer a couple of examples . . .
A creationist posed the question, Are there any real experiments that show evolution in progress. A smart Darwinist linked to a study at Michigan State. Actually he linked to a science writer telling about it, but the actual research paper was online so I went there.
One interesting result of that was that the paper, like scientific papers in general, is loaded with technical vocabulary. I’ve wondered if the people in those super-specialized, rarified realms that Dr. Coleman referred to don’t purposely invent an obscure language instead of using regular words in order to mystify the public. Don’t be put off by that. As Dr. Robert Mendelssohn wrote in Confessions of a Medical Heretic, “Anyone with an eight grade education and a dictionary can read ANY medical textbook.” (That was maybe a few years ago when he wrote that . . . about an 8th grade education . . .)
Even so, the thing was hard to follow, and there came a wonderful admission from another of the bright and articulate atheist/scientists. Even she didn’t get a lot of what it was talking about. It was over her head too. My point here is that if one can’t read a paper intelligently then how can one be sure he knows what it proven by it? Are we to think for ourselves or rely on the intellectual elite to interpret everything for us?
But the upshot was pretty clear. The study traced carefully accounted for strains of e coli bacteria over several decades and revealed an adaptation that surprised even the researchers. It had to do with what the microbes could eat. They lived on glucose, but couldn’t take in citrate. Something to do with the cell membrane. The citrate molecules couldn’t get through it. But after awhile a single group began to be able to eat citrate. Awhile indeed. It took over 30,000 generations for this to begin to happen! 30,000! For just one trait. I began to do some simple calculation over the proposed time between the closest quasi-humanoid fossils and the appearance of homo sapiens, based on the age of reproductive maturity of the closest living similar primate, the chimp. It was looking like there may not have been enough even geologic time to get 30,000 generations in, and this was only one trait. If this is all undirected random mutation it seems to stretch the brain a bit beyond probability. So while the study shows adaptability, it may actually through a monkey wrench into the Darwinian works. (Actually, strait Darwinism has had to be modified quite a lot between him and now, but they still call it that).
One thing the macro-evolutionists kept referring to was “a common ancestor”. No, we aren’t descended from chimpanzees, but each from a “common ancestor”. OK, so where is this common ancestor? Silence. They don’t have the smoking gun . . . I mean ancestor. It is a theoretical.
Another “proof” of evolution brought in was the duck-billed platypus*, which has been found to have bird, reptilian, and mammalian DNA. Huh? So what? I was baffled over what may have ever mated with what to come out with this biological cocktail. The creature looks like a total anomaly even in evolutionary terms. It doesn’t make sense. And further, I wonder if, since DNA is an information system to tell the organism which proteins to make where and for what, wouldn’t what they are calling bird DNA simply mean telling the body to make a bill, or mammal DNA telling it to make fur, for example?
* Who doesn’t like the duck billed platypus? But they are not friendly . . .
I’m straying. The point is that, with patience and without coming on with an ideology, one can play along with the same game. Don’t be afraid of truth, even if parts of it are being used to promote a lie. Truth is our friend. It’s the side we are on, and it’s found in looking closely at the details. The problem with people on both sides of a debate is often that they won’t receive truths that appear to threaten their fixed positions. That’s been a major theme in history, I think, and it will apply to fundamentalist Darwinists as well and religious fundamentalists.
June 6, 2009 at 1:57 am
saltsister
I find it refreshing that you have gone to the trouble of laying all this out, Melville. Evolution has never been my cup of tea, but I see what you mean.
Right now I’m part of a group that is doing mtDNA research and they talk in terms of 35,000 years ago and 65.000 years ago. I suspect they are wrong on some level, but I don’t throw it all out. I think of these years as “scientific years” because we have no sure way to measure some of these distances in time against anything. Even their guesses of the spread of human population against ice ages and glaciers is pretty speculative — little scientific about that. But in the meantime we need a common way to refer to distances in time, whether we can prove their accuracy or not. So, for me, I’ll accept the thousands of years speculation as “scientific years to be changed with new knowledge”.
It does seem pretty sure that our mtDNA came from one thing and then another in a measurable way. Was it all out of Africa? It sure seems like it, but there is always something you don’t know that can turn the whole thing around again. So I view these things with a sort of suspended belief.
Back to what you said about many Christians being unable to examine scientific evidence or even to inform themselves on it… This is kind of a reverse to that. When I sat in college under a particularly atheistic professor (who really was brilliant, I must say), he had certain views of Christians from centuries gone by with his list of evidences. And, like the Christians who don’t inform themselves of evolution before getting into discussions about it, he only about knew the Christian culture that was married to the state.
I don’t have to tell you that if he were really informed, he would have known that much of that history was not “the faith once delivered to the saints”. He had discovered Christendom, not the living faith of Jesus. Too bad. But that’s what happens when the lowest common denominator of understanding marries up with real academics. It’s lopsided.