From sunstealer - another education rant!

[kitchen_kink]

Current university as consumer haven.

Some highlights:

How I feel in class every day:
"Too often now the pedagogical challenge is to make a lot from a little. Teaching Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey," you ask for comments. No one responds. So you call on Stephen. Stephen: "The sound, this poem really flows." You: "Stephen seems interested in the music of the poem. We might extend his comment to ask if the poem's music coheres with its argument. Are they consistent? Or is there an emotional pain submerged here that's contrary to the poem's appealing melody?" All right, it's not usually that bad. But close. One friend describes it as rebound teaching: they proffer a weightless comment, you hit it back for all you're worth, then it comes dribbling out again. Occasionally, a professor will try to explain away this intellectual timidity by describing the students as perpetrators of postmodern irony, a highly sophisticated mode. Everything's a slick counterfeit, a simulacrum, so by no means should any phenomenon be taken seriously. But the students don't have the urbane, Oscar Wilde-type demeanor that should go with this view. Oscar was cheerful, funny, confident, strange. (Wilde, mortally ill, living in a Paris flophouse: "My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go.") This generation's style is considerate, easy to please, and a touch depressed."

The value of genius:
"A world uninterested in genius is a despondent place, whose sad denizens drift from coffee bar to Prozac dispensary, unfired by ideals, by the glowing image of the self that one might become. As Northrop Frye says in a beautiful and now dramatically unfashionable sentence, "The artist who uses the same energy and genius that Homer and Isaiah had will find that he not only lives in the same palace of art as Homer and Isaiah, but lives in it at the same time." We ought not to deny the existence of such a place simply because we, or those we care for, find the demands it makes intimidating, the rent too high."

Comments

[dda.livejournal.com]

I have to admit that I'm a touch wary, too. I tend to hold back. An unguarded remark, a joke that's taken to be off-color, or simply an uncomprehended comment can lead to difficulties.

I put the blame right here. When you shackle the professor such that "uncomfortable" becomes "actionable" and "accused" becomes "guilty until proven innocent," you have guaranteed the death of teaching. Cause, y'know, some people are uncomfortable when they are being intellectually challenged and we must'n't have that!

Remember that old saying, "The truth shall set you free...but first it will piss you off." :-)

[unknownrockstar.livejournal.com]

too tired to be witty and erudite, but that's your fault, since I stayed at the party til 3, not wanting to be square... thanx for a lovely partay. I"m very glad I went. we still have to have tea though.