Reflections on the state of the world which proceed with the scriptures in one hand and the newspaper in the other
Wednesday, June 20, 2012
Vocatus
As I sit in the workshop listening to the latest news about the state of Florida and its war on higher education, I find my heart aching, my head spinning. The General Education Plan will be cut from 36 hours to 30. Universities will require the providing programs to duke it out among themselves to see which one among the many providing GEP social and cultural foundations classes will get the designated class all students will be required to take and then squabble over the scraps left for the other allotted class.
What that means is that the classes I have relied upon to provide me a guaranteed place on our faculty (as guaranteed as annual appointment instructors can be) are no longer a sure bet. Just as Marx predicted, the workers have been turned against each other to fight over decreasing resources. And that war as already begun.
From deep inside, that small, still voice whispers to me, as it always does. "To what is my life calling me now? And how will I know?" it says.
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The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino
Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy
of Law
This is the final week of the first six week summer
session course I teach. Taught online, the
course is Humanistic Traditions II. It looks at human history through the lens
of the arts, religion, philosophy and various social sciences. The question I
pose as the organizing theme of these classes is simply “What does it mean to
be human? And how do we know?”
I begin the course with an assignment that asks students
to become conscious of their hermeneutical lenses: What difference has your upbringing made in the way you see human
existence and human nature? How do the ascriptive factors of your life – sex,
ethnicity, sexual orientation, class, ability level, age – impact the way you see the world? My
theory is that if students can at least become conscious of these various
aspects of understanding they bring to the process of learning, they can begin
to account for them in their understandings.
I also have the students post their reflections in a discussion
folder and encourage students to read and respond to each other’s posts. I find
this tends to help students recognize that there are other ways of seeing
things and that those who differ from them are not simply being difficult but
perhaps are coming from very different places in arriving at those
understandings.
At the end of the course, I have students reflect back
over the entire course. They are required to choose three topics from each of
the sections of the text that grabbed them in some manner – elated them,
angered them, threw them off balance, provided the “Aha!” moment. They then
talk about what each of these topics tells us about being human. Finally, they
are required to reflect on what they now know about being human they did not
know prior to the class and what they’ve learned about themselves in the
process.
Inevitably, I have students who tell me they haven’t
learned anything new about either of those subjects. In some cases, it’s a
matter of simply blowing off the assignment. In other cases, it’s a bit of smug
arrogance that reflects a largely closed mind more than anything else. While I
tend to be more empathetic to the slacker than the pursed lipped purist, in either case, it suggests the
wasting of a perfectly good opportunity to learn. And, sadly, in some cases,
that’s an accurate reflection of reality.
In an effort to provoke a bit more thoughtfulness, I wrote
a post and placed it in the class announcements. I doubt it will prevent the
lame, generalized statements that many students offer in response to deep
questions today more often than not. It probably also won’t deter the folks
whose failure to even read the announcement is consistent with a lackluster
performance overall in the course. They may well not have much to offer on what
they’ve actually learned here. But, on the outside chance it might provoke a
little more thoughtfulness than I might otherwise get from them, I posted the
following:
As we approach the end of this last week, here are some
things to consider:
Summary
Reflections
Please take this assignment seriously. It is the final of
your four Gordon Rule Paper (GRP) assignments and it is worth 20 points. You
only have to write an original post this time, no responses required, though
you are welcome to respond as you see fit.
Here’s a thought about those final questions. You are
being asked to consider what you know now about being human that you did not
know previously. This could be simply a new insight about something you knew
previously. It could be an awareness that your own insights about a given
subject were limited and that there is more than one way to understand this
material. I learn new insights from my students in every class I teach every
semester.
Moreover there is not a single semester that goes by that
I do not learn something new about this material. Consider the disciplines
covered in this course: Art, Architecture, Music, Literature, Theatre, Dance,
Film, Religion, Philosophy, History not to mention the aspects of Psychology,
Sociology, Anthropology and the sciences generally that inform this material. There’s
no small amount of arrogance in suggesting one knew everything they needed to
know coming into a course, whether as instructor or student. No one is an
expert in all those subjects. And thus, for those of us who teach this course
and for those who come to this course with an intention to actually learn,
there are plenty of opportunities to grow and develop in one’s understandings of
what it means to be human.
Clearly it is tempting to blow off this assignment. It
comes at the end of the term and all of us are tired. It requires us to think
critically, to reflect over a semester’s worth of work. For some of us, we
assume it will be easier to simply say “I really didn’t learn anything new
about being human or about myself.”
But is that honest? If it is, it unwittingly admits two possible
failures. First, it not only says you punted on this assignment, it really
suggests you punted on the course itself. But consider the implications of such
a move. It says you’ve ultimately wasted the time of your instructor, your
classmates and yourself. It also says you’ve wasted the money you and/or your
parents invested in this class and the other 51% of the cost of producing this
class born by state taxpayers. I’m not
sure that’s something I’d want to admit.
But secondly, and perhaps more serious, if this decision
is consonant with a general approach to life, it suggests a failure to develop
the skills to live meaningful lives. The result is often a rather superficial, narcissistic
life. A life with meaning requires reflection, the ability to be critical about
your own thought, an ability to bring your own life experience to bear but not
be so bound by it that you cannot benefit from the experience and wisdom of
others. It does not require forgetting about your own life and those of your
immediate significant others. It simply means recognizing that the concerns of
those lives do not exhaust the concerns a fully human being considers.
Socrates said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.”
It’s also not really worth talking about even as we fill the airwaves – and often
the lanes of our highways to the detriment of others - with the trivialities of
meaningless lives.
On
Idiocy and Instant Gratification
The human being who avoids reflection, who fails to develop
the skills to think critically and creatively about their own lives and the
world we live in, often tends to be focused on the immediacies of their own
lives to the exclusion of all else. In ancient Greek society, such persons were
known as idiotes, from which comes
our modern word idiot.
I have linked a provocative
article from Walter Parker, a professor of education and political
science at the University of Washington which poses a pointed question to all
of us: Will you be an idiot?
I also recently came across a blog entry I found amazing
in its lack of critical insight. In it the blogger argues that the Gen
Y Millenials somehow “need” instant gratification. Of course, instant
gratification is the staple of consumer advertising: “Obey your thirst! Just do it! Have it your way! Talk all the time!
Never stop playing!” In Lawrence Kohlberg’s six stage analysis of moral
reasoning, this is stage two reasoning, the reasoning of the small child: What’s in it for me? I want it and I want it
now!
This is also the stage that Sigmund Freud observed that
children learn to control their id,
their self-focused instant gratification impulse, with the super ego, the morals
and manners of the society in which one is raised which place restraints on the
pursuit of the id. For Freud, id-driven people acted like…well, idiots. So, is
it true that an entire generation of human beings is being taught to actually avoid maturing into adulthood with its
prerequisite of the ability to delay gratification and consider the needs of
others?
I’ve created a Discussion category for these articles if
you are inclined to discuss them. Bear in mind the rules for any kind of
intellectually honest discussion. Speak for your own perspective, not for
revealed truth of any kind. Offer reasons and reasoned arguments for you
understandings, presuming you wish others to take them seriously. And, finally,
listen to what others are saying. Remember what the Greeks are saying to us
here: Only idiots presume that they have
all the answers, that the concerns of their own immediate lives are all that
count, and that they have no need to interact with others in the public square.
I look forward to your Summary Reflection Paper posts and
your discussion posts on idiocy and instant gratification.
