Ruskin’s 21st Century (an educator’s rant)

“You must either make a tool of the creature, or a man of him. You cannot make both. Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to be precise and perfect in all their actions. If you will have that precision out of them, and make their fingers measure degrees like cog-wheels, and their arms strike curves like compasses, you must unhumanize them. All the energy of their spirits must be given to make cogs and compasses of themselves….On the other hand, if you will make a man of the working creature, you cannot make him a tool. Let him but begin to imagine, to think, to try to do anything worth doing; and the engine-turned precision is lost at once. Out come all his roughness, all his dulness, all his incapability; shame upon shame, failure upon failure, pause after pause: but out comes the whole majesty of him also; and we know the height of it only when we see the clouds settling upon him.”
–John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice (1853)

The language is strange to us today. The dichotomy, of course, is too easy, naïve. Ruskin was a product of his times, as we are products of ours.

On the one hand, apart from perfectionists, that neurotic lot, nobody really speaks of human excellence anymore—or, at any rate, “excellence” as anything more than a tool of advertising or the cant of sports writing and awards shows.

But what Ruskin is talking about, besides Gothic architecture, is education … and what it means to be a human being, not a machine or a tool, calibrated for factory work.

So, on the other hand, as humanly flawed as his prophecy is, Ruskin, the Christian socialist, enchanted with a romanticized concept of pre-industrialized Western culture, could tell a thing or two about a world that would plow under humanism and the humanities for the sake of mechanization, Social Darwinism, and a soulless grinning Christendom cut off from any real concept of or concern for human suffering.

Today, in a post-industrial world, what would Ruskin make of the Internet … and consumerism? More generally, of the mass media?

We live in a society devoid of the humanistic folk element Ruskin and other eminent Victorians bemoaned the loss of, in an age of industrialization and laissez-faire capitalism.

Beginning with the English Romantics Wordsworth and Coleridge, conscious of regimentation of the displaced peasantry (with the “enclosure” of the “commons”—unowned tracts of land, on and off which peasants could live, without ownership), through the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, British intellectuals mourned the loss of what (they knew) could not be recovered (or remembered with any accuracy) and awaited whatever was coming next—an age of dehumanized machines, they feared, and of unbridled greed among the captains of industry (in whom Thomas Carlyle had put his faith for civilization’s future—a little gingerly, I suspect).

Humans reduced to statistics—human labor and imagination reduced to the calibrations of efficiency experts and test audiences—art in an age of mechanical reproduction, cool and perfect objects without the human messiness—inhumanly scaled ideals of beauty and success—intellectual discovery as corporate property—shrill, gaudy entertainments that could shut out nature, including homemade human nature, and streamline the existential muddle of chance, flux, and passion into manageable story “arcs” and simple, understandable motives, with laugh tracks and opinion polls to cue us towards the appropriate affects—consistent and reliable cheeseburgers—a clockwork sense of right and wrong—it’s the world all of us grew up in, so pardon us if we think of Beethoven as background music in a nice restaurant.

It’s in this world that we will leave no child behind. Every child has the right to be made into a decent tool of the state—and, above the state, global corporations. Standardized tests and teachers teaching to the tests leave no room for music or field trips to insect zoos. Team sports prepare young people for the military and management teams. Multiple-choice tests prepare young consumers for the “freedom of choice” provided by a remarkably homogenous set of manufactured products. Every pleasure, even every holiday and vacation, requires a blueprint, planned activities, and rubrics for evaluating the “fun.”

Abstinence-only sex, zero-calorie food, risk-free adventures, virtual reality, role models as heroes.

Perfect tools.

Babel

With six months left in office, the prez is inflicting as much damage as possible, heating up a new front for his war on (of?) terrorism in Iraq, while snuggling up to fellow antihumanists in the Chinese government, whom, he recently stated, he worries about offending if he took concerns over Tibet's sovereignty and China's myriad human-rights abuses so far as not to attend this summer's Olympics festivities. (Note: China is largely banking our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, increasing U.S. debt by billions.)

He's also pushing for off-shore drilling, probably less to lower gas prices for consumers (which it probably won't) than to deepen the pockets of his business interests in the oil industry. This from the candidate who wanted in 2000 to be remembered as the "Environmental President," an ambition all the more preposterous when you remember he was running against Al Gore at the time.

Now he's pushing the Dept of Health and Human Services to adopt and enforce new rules limiting federal funding for organizations (including counseling and other social services programs) who don't hire people who will refuse to pass on birth-control information because of their religious convictions. Perhaps he envisions a future when Planned Parenthood will be unable to ensure that parents seeking help will get any sort of "plan" at all.

The new rule also redefines oral contraception and other birth control techniques as abortion, thus radically redefining the word "abortion." (See Robert Pear, "Abortion Proposal Sets Condition on Aid," NY TIMES 07/15/08.)

You will also note that Bush the linguist has also struggled to limit the definition of the word "torture" to exclude water-boarding and other interrogation techniques traditionally viewed as torture. (On the other hand, he supports efforts to limit the word "marriage" to retain its traditional exclusion of same-sex couples.)

His No Child Left Behind initiative, along with his support of school vouchers, has crippled America's public school system. For the present administration, "education" now means teaching to standardized, multiple-choice tests, instead of challenging students to understand the world more clearly and to think for themselves.

(Right now I have no patience with supporters of vouchers benefiting parents who wish to send their children to private schools. If folks want to send their kids to private schools, fine, but public schools are "public" because the public [you, me, all of us] supposedly supports them. As a single man with no children, I get no tax considerations for keeping children out of the public school system either. Paying taxes is part of my responsibility as an American citizen these days; more importantly it's a contribution to the public good, even when my money goes to people and causes that have no personal interest to me individually.)

The innovative vocabulary of the present administration is an affront to logic and reason. Bush's scrambling of syntax has struck many as funny, embarrassing, or cute. But it is more disturbingly a direct attack on our abilities to communicate with each other with any definite meaning or understanding. Further, it's an attack on logic itself.

As Orwell warned in "Politics and the English Language," "A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts."

Thinking

I tell my writing students that thinking is not the same thing as having thoughts. The first is an action. The second is an acquisition.

The thoughts acquired through thinking are theirs. The rest are secondhand.

Somewhere in their education most students get the impression (perhaps because they have been taught to believe) the point of research is to gather a bunch of expert opinions and to string them together, stretched or shortened to fit whatever page count the assignment requires. I call this the Easter-egg or show-and-tell approach to research, and I spend a good part of any semester discouraging students en masse and individually from taking this approach.

Instead, I tell them, the point of research is to educate themselves about an issue, to be skeptical about what they find (look for the assumptions, verify the facts, weigh the conclusions), and ultimately, on the basis of their newly acquired knowledge, along with what they knew already or thought they knew, assert an opinion that can be supported by accepted facts and valid reasons. That opinion should be theirs, not what they think I want them to believe, not their sources' opinions. In my writing classes, students have the right to express any opinion they can back up for themselves--but only those opinions they can back up.

For me, the whole point of writing is thinking. Writing pushes me to think. Students sometimes complain that if the point of writing is thinking, why the emphasis on grammar and sentence structure? I get their point, but I don't accept their assumption that structure and content are unrelated. Sure, some grammar is just affectation, and I don't emphasize that sort of thing, but most grammar has to do with attention to detail and the more anomalous quality of "getting it right," both of which are essential to thinking.

Feeling, too, is important, but I have little to teach 18 year olds about feeling--except to introduce them to matters, ideas, and attitudes they have probably not encountered before--to show them how new feelings and new tastes may be acquired through curiosity and courage and how to shape their feelings into ideas--mainly through the acquisition of knowledge and the practice of communication.

Also, I'm convinced that sloppy thinking leads to inauthentic feeling--so thinking is a good way to put my feelings to the test.

I'm not sure how one goes about teaching people how to think. I'm successful with some students, unsuccessful with many more. Partly, I suppose, it's by being a thinking person oneself. Partly, it's demanding that people think and not letting them too easily off the hook when they substitute platitudes and bumper-sticker cliches for original thought. Partly, it's developing a curiosity about what other people think, really think, about matters of some importance to everybody. Partly, it's a matter of making oneself and others responsible--for things said as much as for things done--and expecting every opinion to have sound support, whether one approves or disapproves of the opinion.

Driving 55

Long long ago I gave up on wishing I could be somebody else. Sure, I would change some things if I could, opportunities more than choices.

I’m 55, 55 and a quarter, on the crest of middle age, with the certainty of an eventual wipeout in view.

I’m single. By choice. No regrets. Naturally, opportunities for sweaty casual fucking thin out with age, especially for someone like me, lacking the desperation the situation perhaps calls for, averse to pursuing unexciting quarry for the sake of having my ticket punched. But, honestly, no regrets.

As a community college instructor, I have good seats for observing the young—the beautiful and the not so beautiful—so I can say with certainty that I do not wish to be young again. I like young people, looking at them and teaching them and hearing their outlooks on life. But I do not want to join them. Envy is not what I am writing about.

Still I want to be the best that I can be, and I have to admit I have let myself go lately. I haven’t stepped in a gym for five years. Letting oneself go is of course liberating in its own way—a way of shouting fuck you to other people’s expectations—but carried too far, it dims energy, pleasure, and hopefulness.

I think it would do me good to look after myself better than I have been doing.

To live is to move forward.