Public education/Private education: A bleg

As part of my school's Comp II class, we have regular discussions of critical thinking--or try to. Discussions are fine up to a point--if they remain only discussions, then the issue at hand remains abstract, untethered from something students might actually encounter in their own lives.

The teaching of assumptions is especially hard for students to "see" precisely because they so often remain unspoken and/or unexamined underneath our own or others' arguments even as they are often a crucial determinant in shaping the sorts of arguments we/others make. Also, it occurs to me that false dichotomies, though taught separately as a kind of logical fallacy, are often the result of those (unexamined) assumptions. That is, sometimes the framing of dichotomies often leaves out other matters of equal (or even greater) value. As one example: the simple categorizing of nations as "pro-American"/"anti-American" presumes that these other nations only worry about their relations with the United States when making decisions; we do tend to forget that they also have their own internal politics and alliances with/pressures from their neighbors to take into account as well.

Thanks to new-to-me local blogger Jilly for an idea on how to demonstrate this in an accessible way in the classroom. In the midst of this post, she notes that "In our little city [Eastborough, in the middle of the east side of Wichita], everyone sends their kids to private school. There are only three exceptions that I know of - us, my cousins (he's a doctor and she's a nurse) and Roni's [Jilly's daughter] friend Ava (her father is a professor at WSU.) My point is, of all these families, there are multiple highter ed degrees and we choose public school." This got me to thinking about my own and my daughters' mother's respective circles of friends with school-age children and, off the top of my head, it does seem to be the case that, for whatever reason, the people we know with some sort of involvement in higher ed. do seem to choose public schools for their children more often than private schools. Yet among my students when we've had this "private vs. public schooling" discussion, their initial response tends to be that private schools are "better"--if you're directly paying for something, it acquires value; public schools are "value-less"; etc.

Here's the bleg part: I'd appreciate hearing from those of you who either have children for whom you've gone through the school choice process or whose parents made the public school/private school choice for you or a siblings. What sorts of assumptions/information drove the decision-making process? If "education" figured into the discussion, how did that word get defined (or, what seemed to be its definition--sometimes, after all, definitions are assumed as well)? Over time, did those things you valued about "education" (again, however defined) change? If so, how? If you are one of the "for me there was no choice" type--that is, there actually was a choice, but the other option simply wasn't considered--why was that the case for you?

My goal in class won't be to prove that one choice is "better" than the other--what I'm interested in is gathering some information that I can present in class so as to get underneath those assumptions and examine them rather than let them blindly guide our thinking, to think about the word "education" as being perhaps more amorphous than we assume it to be.

If you're interested in sharing your experiences on this, drop me an e-mail at "blogmeridian AT sbcglobal DOT net." If you would, also include your own educational attainment (and that of your parents, if that's relevant to the discussion). If you have questions about what I'm asking, please use the comments for those.

Thanks in advance. You'll be helping further the cause of "higher education"--whatever that is.

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"The Most Curious Thing"

Before I forget (again), I want to make sure you know about Errol Morris's collaborative meditation with his readers (not sure what else to call it) on the meaning of a photograph taken at Abu Ghraib--a photograph which, he says, "aided and abetted a terrible miscarriage of justice." After reading the piece, I frankly don't know what to make either of that claim or, for that matter, of what the photograph does show--which is, surely, at least part of Morris' larger point. There is the photograph, which contains its particular information; and there is the photograph's context, which also supplies information, helping us "read" it--indeed, in many cases with photographs, it's that outside context that allows us to say anything about it other than the merely descriptive. But Morris has also supplied another context: the thoughts of the very subject smiling at the viewer, who has lots to say not only about her image but also her motive for having the picture taken.

For me, Morris' piece is about as fine an example of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle in action as one is likely to find, something I'd ordinarily find intellectually cool and remain emotionally cool to; given the photograph's context, though, it's both emotionally and intellectually unsettling, for all sorts of reasons.

What, after all, is involved in the act of making meaning out of what we see? What is/are the effect(s) of "considering all sides" on the making of meaning?

To be read slowly, over a cup of coffee, and pondered long after.

(Via 3 Quarks Daily)

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More from student papers

Augustine in his study, originally found here.

It's a football-watching, paper-grading Saturday; so, in the spirit of this recent post, I'll be posting some of the more, um, interesting sentences I run across today and tomorrow.

I believe everything to be subjective, except what is not.

This next one is not from a student paper, alas (it comes from here), but one can wish, can't one?:

Growing up in the 1970s, after the bloody craziness of the desegregation era, one tended to grade Mississippi governors on a curve. If they weren't driving around town with somebody's skeletal remains tied to a rope hanging from the bumper of the car, they qualified as progressives.

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Thoreau as critical thinker

There are times, I think, when one could do away with a couple hundred pages of the standard texts on rhetoric foisted on college freshmen and, instead, have them read and think carefully about certain passages from Walden, like this one, from "Economy":

One farmer says to me, "You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make bones with;" and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying his system with the raw material of bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plough along in spite of every obstacle. Some things are really necessaries of life in some circles, the most helpless and diseased, which in others are luxuries merely, and in others still are entirely unknown.

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A rambling meditation on Iraq

All this is prompted by my seeing an article in the Times and these pictures, released yesterday, of flag-draped coffins of U.S. servicemen and -women being unloaded at Dover AFB, which, my foreign readers may not know, the Pentagon had forbidden the public from seeing; indeed, the press hadn't even known pictures were being taken.It is Friday morning; I'm listening to The Powers of Heaven, a profoundly beautiful recording of "Orthodox Music of the 17th and 18th Centuries" by the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Orchestra, on Harmonia Mundi, conducted by Paul Hillier and given to me as a birthday present by my painter friend Susan . . . and I am thinking about Iraq.
As I have been telling my Comp students as we practice our critical thinking skills, if one is a truly thinking person it is absurd to say one is completely for or completely against the events of the past year.  There's no significant disagreement, for example, that Saddam Hussein was a despot of the most vicious and paranoic sort, and few would argue against the ideal that a people should have the freedom to determine their own political destiny.  The ends, as broadly stated above, I had and have no quarrels with.  But from here on, the means by which my nation has chosen to accomplish those ends are incredibly muddy and, in my view, different degrees of (at best) wrong-headed.  Not to be at all flippant or gloating, but the devil is indeed in the details, as my government is finding out.The Bush administration's announced policy of pre-emption, in retrospect, seems to have been the catalyst for all this.  The notion that we have a right to attack another nation if we THINK that nation is a threat to us is such a bad idea--not to mention a dangerous one (did anyone in the adminstration imagine the possibility of another, less "responsible" nation's adopting this same policy as a way of justifying an attack on an enemy?--as to defy my understanding of how anyone could think it was a good one.  Then, all last winter and spring, as the US was first urging the resumption of weapons inspections in Iraq (which I supported as well) and then, almost immediately, criticizing the inspectors' slowness and then their (alleged) ineffectiveness and at the same time claiming to know where those WMDs were hidden and why couldn't Blix find them (which just infuriated me--the criticism, that is, of the very procedure we had worked so hard to gain approval of), it struck me then that it seemed as though my nation actually wanted the inspectors, if not diplomacy itself, to fail.  And now, if Mr. Woodward's book is any indication, the decision to go to war was made before the inspections even began, thus, alas, confirming my suspicions.  Indeed, if I were truly cynical, I would say that we knew all along that no such stockpiles existed and thus the war was premeditated. I'm not prepared to go that far, though; not that it's any better to believe it, I "prefer" to think that our intelligence agencies just gave way too much credence to the reports of defectors who sought to curry favor with my government by essentially telling the CIA what they thought--and, apparently, guessed correctly--we wanted to hear.
Add to all the above the now painfully-evident (even, very belatedly, to my government) facts that, militarily and politically and economically, we all "misunderestimated" what we were getting into (and that Bushism could not be more appropriate for what is happening there), and the resulting mess--for my country and, even more so, for the Iraqis--is profoundly and simultaneously saddening and angering.  I include myself in that "we": I remember watching Colin Powell's presentation before the Security Council, hoping against hope that it would be a flimsy case he presented and then saddened that it indeed seemed a solid case but still hopeful that the inspectors could do their work, find what they were charged to find, and the Iraqis would cooperate as they had pledged and disarm, and that would be that.  Saddam Hussein would still remain in power, but at least that perceived threat to our national security would be gone, and our grounds for threatening war would be gone.  But that is the "beauty" of a policy of pre-emption: it's based not on the fact of an attack but on the perception that one may be forthcoming, no matter when that may be.  Kinda like a geo-political Minority Report.
So today, I saw the story and pictures in the Times, and I was profoundly moved by them.  I should also say that I also wanted to visit the site where the pictures were first posted, The Memory Hole here, but the site was so busy that it never opened.  They are powerfully evocative in their, to my mind, apolitical charge.  I have always thought it a huge mistake on the part of President Bush that he has never once met the arrival of one of these planes at Dover.  It seems to me that if he is indeed persuaded of the rightness of the course he has set for our nation in Iraq, he would honor those lost in the sailing of that course.  Yet he recently saw fit, in an attempt at humor for a fund-raising event, to have himself filmed looking for weapons of mass destruction in the Oval Office.  Perhaps irony IS dead, after all.  But as I said, these photos are powerful precisely because they allow us to think anything and everything we want.  Maybe THAT's why the Pentagon wanted to keep them: they evoke and signify too much: the honoring of the dead, indeed; but also, the cost of (choose one) freedom/invasion.  They are a reminder simultaneously of the cost of ideals (some things--freedom--are indeed worth fighting and dying for, even on behalf of other people's achieving their freedom) and the price we all pay (they with their lives, governments with their credibility here and in the world), no matter the means employed, honorable or not.
There's no turning back.  We cannot fail in Iraq: we have cast our lot for freedom for the Iraqi people, and if we indeed mean that, we have no choice but to make that happen, for their sake and, just as crucially, for our own.  The frustrating thing is that, even if we (finally) do it right (and by "right" I mean a process that involves both the Iraqis and the UN), it's not going to be pretty.  More--many more--of those coffins will be arriving at Dover.  I want them to arrive, though, in service of means indeed worthy of the ends we say we want to achieve.  THEN, maybe, we can regain some of what we've lost in the Muslim and Arab worlds.  Maybe.
 
Those wishing to see the comments for the original LiveJournal post can go here.

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Daylight Savings Time; Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind; King Crimson

A rather crowded agenda for this entry . . . just making up for lost time.
Fearful Syzygy's recent entry on the Dane/Danish fellow/Dansker (which is it nowadays?) who attributes some of Denmark's fiscal rotteness to that nation's version of Daylight Savings Time inspires the first part of this blog.  As of 2 a.m. this morning, we have sprung forward here, "here" signifying most of the U.S.  Arizona opts out of Daylight Savings Time entirely; even stranger, though, is the case of Indiana, which not only is bifurcated by the Eastern and Central time zone lines but also has individual COUNTIES on BOTH sides of that line which have chosen not to spring forward or fall back.  It becomes more than a little complicated to rise with the chickens there in the Hoosier State.And that last line leads me to argue against Daylight Savings Time as well, though for a reason different than the one offered by the fellow in Denmark.  I don't know why DST was initiated there, but here it was proposed by Benjamin Franklin as a way maximizing daylight hours during the winter, when the days grow shorter, for the benefit of farmers.  With the rise of mechanization on farms (one of the simplest signs of that being tractors with headlights on them), that reason no longer applies.  No doubt someone in this country makes arguments in support of DST, but I truly can't imagine what they would be.  At least the chief argument in favor of raising speed limits on major highways to 70 mph was that some people want to drive faster than 65.  So then, at least from my myopic perspective, we keep DST around for the same reason that most school districts keep the 9-month school year: a tradition dating back to our agrarian roots.  Nothing wrong with that, I suppose.  Much can be said in support of the idea that our agrarian society, without sentimentalizing it, was in most respects a healthier society: poor diets, yes, but the labor performed on farms resulted in less obesity in the population; only the upper classes could complain of boredom--now, of course, even the poor are so media-saturated that boredom permeates all societal levels of our culture; and I do think that the sort of communal labor that gets performed in such cultures leads to the sustaining of societies whose people do give at least a small darn about the welfare of their neighbors.  But DST, even in our mostly-agrarian past, didn't nurture the strengths mentioned above.  It didn't save time, the way most machines are supposed to do; it saved daylight so that there was "more" of it for working.  It paradoxically didn't allow farmers to keep time with the rhythms of the sun and seasons but actually tied them more tightly to the workings of gears inside clocks: "Well, the clock says 6, no  matter what the sun says."Could one make an argument that DST, far from aiding farmers in their work, is actually, if not a cause, then at least symptomatic of my nation's move away from agrarianism and toward an urban society?  That and the railroads, whose invention created the need for standardized time zones in the first place?I have no proof for any of the above.  I think Thoreau would dig this, though (I've been teaching a brief excerpt from Walden in my comp classes recently).  We can't revert from urbanism, and I'm not arguing that we should.  But the fact remains, as Thoreau argues and demonstrates so eloquently, that our self-removal from participation in daily and the seasonal rhythms via the Machine has the long-term effect of emptying our lives of a simpler and more genuine meaning for our living.
Speaking of thought-provoking ideas: two weeks ago, I went to see the most recent Charlie Kaufman-written film, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (starring Jim Carrey, Kate Wimslet, Kristen Durst, and Elijah Wood in a decidedly anti-Frodo role).  In an earlier entry, the Blog mentioned some favorite directors, but inexplicably left off the list was Spike Jonze's work with Kaufman: Being John Malkovic and Adaptation are really imaginative films in the fullest sense of that adjective, I think, not just for their quirkiness but also in that (and this is especially true of the first one) they at their hearts tell familiar tales but make them appear fresh: What's it like to see the world through the eyes of another person?  What if we could in some way remove ourselves from our decidedly subjective point of view and THEN, in effect, see the world as we see it, but this time from that outsider's perspective?  And, in Adaptation, just where IS that boundary between the writer and his work. It took seeing Eternal Sunshine . . . to see these matters more clearly, to see these films' quirkiness as means to their respective ends.  This is a romance, in both the movie genre AND the Hawthornian senses of that word (In his preface to The Blithedale Romance, Hawthorne says that in romances, the "work is not exactly put side by side with nature," thus permitting "a license with regard to every-day Probability, in view of the improved effects which [the author] is bound to produce thereby.")  Via decidedly sci-fi means--kinda like The Matrix, but this time we're inside individual minds rather than (maybe, maybe not) computers--this film examines the relationship between love and memory: what is it exactly that love is?  Is love the result of memory, or is memory the result of love?  How is love (or memory, for that matter?) preserved?  Is that solely an act of the individual who remembers his/her lover, or does it come from somewhere else, ie., outside the individual?  Once we gain our narrative sea-legs in the plot, we root for the lovers, as we're supposed to do in all movie romances; but when approached from the Hawthornian angle, the film becomes less about the particulars of the lovers' relationship and more about a metaphysics of love, a dynamic of love, that we couldn't examine, one suspects, without the literal invasion of a decidedly anti-R/romantic Machine into the plot.  I'm afraid to say much more here for two reasons: 1) The film surprises in many ways, not the least of which is the richness produced by its explorations of that metaphysics of love, and I don't want to spoil that for the potential viewer; 2) If I keep talking about this intellectually and visually magical film, I'll never get to King Crimson in Arkansas today.  Perhaps I can continue that discussion, though, with those who see fit to comment on this entry.
The drive from Wichita to where my children live is 14 hours, so I take along a selection of CDs to listen to.  I try for a variety of things; my selections for the spring break trip were: the Branford Marsalis Quartet, Romare Bearden Revealed; Led Zeppelin, Presence; King Crimson, THRAK; The Rough Guide to Samba; Lizz Wright, Salt; and Yes, The Yes Album.  Oddly, I want to talk about THRAK because it disappointed me.  I like very much early Crimson--the debut album and Red especially stand out, I think--and one of my favorite albums, period, is Discipline.  All these albums have an elegance to them: an emphasis on melody and precision.  Discipline in particular works because of its impossibly tight rhythm section of Tony Levin (bass) and Bill Bruford ("batterie").  More recent Crimson, though, is different.  From this period I have THRAK and The ConstruKction of Light, and each of these albums explores the possibilities of imposing noise over simpler song constructions (and I'm certain there's a better way to say this).  As a comparison: maybe an artier Sonic Youth or Dinosaur Jr.?  I don't mind noise, but what I found myself noticing on THRAK was a lack of melodic variety and, despite a couple of "quiet" songs, an emphasis on heaviness.  It became tedious, wearying to listen to: not the sort of thing one wants one's music to be when driving through the flatlands of the Mississippi alluvial plain.  As for lyrics, one of the refreshing things about Discipline is the wit of Adrian Belew's lyrics--after all this time, they still make my brain smile.  But in THRAK, the words sound forced or tired.  I suppose, then, that it disappoints because it's not the Crimson that I prefer; one could say that it's unfair not to permit a band that's been around for so long the license to experiment with its sound . . . would that Yes would do a bit more of that in its newer work even as it settles into the stage persona of prog-rock oldies band.  But it IS fair for fans not to especially approve of the results of those experiments.I like better The ConstruKction of Light; as its title suggests, to these ears, at least, there's a return to an intricate melodicism underlying the heaviness--you can see why they toured with Tool for about a month a couple of years ago.
Susan and I continue our discussion of Flemish/Dutch painting; more talk of that will be forthcoming.

Those wishing to read the comments from the original LiveJournal post can go here.

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"Are YOU a serial killer??"

I had a restful spring break, during which I delighted in the company of my children.  The hardest thing about my visits is the driving there and back (by car, about 14 hours if I drive straight through).  For once, my stay there coincided with some school activities that I could be part of: my younger daughter and the rest of her class had memorized little poems about an animal they had selected (she had chosen a crocodile) and then, at an evening recital, each group of kids who had selected a given poem dressed up at that animal and recited their poem.  Two days later, all the kids in her grade, accompanied by their parents, went on an all-day field trip to a large zoo in a nearby city; I got to go with her.  She had been to this zoo 2 years ago, but she didn't seem to remember having been there before.  No matter--in fact, in retrospect it could be that the trip went so well precisely because all seemed new to her.  The 8-week grading period for the girls' school also ended that week, and my older daughter was announced in an assembly, along with other kids, as being an all-A student AND, according to her teacher, the best writer in her class.Not quite "cute-kid" stories, but I had promised from the outset of this blog not to talk much about them.  But suffice it to say that nothing happened last week to make me anything else than very proud that I am their father.
And then I return to Wichita and I learn that a serial killer who had been active here from the mid-70s to the mid-80s had, last week, sent a letter that, despite the absence of text, signaled to this place that he had "returned."  Or had never left and wanted to let us know that.  No matter: some extreme unpleasantness from the past has exhumed itself and forced itself back into this town's collective awareness. Some links follow here, in case you're interested. This second link gives extensive background to this guy's activities from the mid-70s; what's especially unnerving about his resurfacing as he has, as you'll read in the first link, is that he has sent images that in their very muteness declare, more powerfully than writing ever could, that he's responsible for a murder that had not previously been attributed to him.
On the one hand, in my composition classes such an event as his reemergence is fresh meat for class discussions about critical thinking, the separation of fact from speculation . . . indeed, the teaching of the basic but crucial principle that facts, in and of themselves, have no meaning (recall Hamlet: "Nothing is good or bad/But thinking makes it so.").  And let me tell you that this news has fairly emasculated some of my coworkers' critical thinking faculties.  It's that last observation that leads me to my "on the other hand": why it is that serial killers fascinate us even as they chill us to the bone.  The same reason, incidentally: we just don't get this kind of murder.I'm under no delusions here, by the way, as to how original this thinking is, even though it's only now come to me why we're so naturally drawn to such stuff.  The crime buff or criminologist or psychologist reading this will likely roll his/her eyes at this entry's cliche-ridden (or at least very familiar) "analysis."  But.  To ME, my awareness of this line of thought is new.  So, it's not overly familiar and thus not cliche. (The immediate above, by the way, is a nod to Fearful Syzygy's recent entry about cliche--look for the link to his blog in my Friends list in my profile.[note: Newcomers will find that here])We understand the motives for the vast majority of murders, no matter whether we personally would or could ever do such a thing.  Love, requited or no.  Passion/anger.  Desire for someone else's money or possessions.  Because we so clearly and easily can locate the cause(s) of most murders and we innately understand that the vast majority of murders occur between people who know each other, even as we register their horribleness we instinctively know we are safe.  We don't have to think about them anymore.  One of the primary functions of narrative is to make sense of experience, and the motives of most murders are narratives that usually write themselves, they are so familiar--like our morning/afternoon commute.  But who knows what motivates the serial killer?  Because we don't, we immediately engage in speculation, and the lack of motive, even as we're fed elaborate detail about MOs, the selected contents of letters and FBI profiles, renders unfamiliar those usual well-travelled roads.  Narrative fails to make us feel as though we can order this experience and thus feel safe.  Jack the Ripper still haunts, a century after the fact, not simply because of the gruesome nature of his crimes but because (Patricia Cornwall notwithstanding), we don't know his motives and can't confirm his identity.  So now, I see things like this: Whether coincidence or not, it's a fact that all of BTK's victims have the number 3 somewhere in their street addresses.  So, those of my friends and colleagues that happen to have that to be true about themselves worry more--they can't otherwise exclude themselves from this man's list of possible targets.  It's irrational, those of us without 3's say, and they would agree, but because this narrative lacks motives and facts, that one fact assumes a larger importance--as with Henry James's famous description of a symbol, it throws a shadow curiouser than itself.  They forget that BTK would be at least in his 50s by now and thus way past the age of the typical serial killer; they forget that his most recent correspondence consisted solely of pictures--no text (so we're told by the police) that would indicate even why he sent them, much less an intent to kill again.  They cling to speculation in hopes that it will make them feel safer; it ends up frightening them even more.  The comfort machine that is narrative fails them. Hmm--the "typical serial killer."  A profile of a serial killer is a kind of stand-in narrative shaped by a combination of the facts of a particular case and what has been generally true of serial killers in the past.  But they too fail.  The DC-area police were initially looking for an individual white man, not two black men: they were working from a profile built on, among other things, the fact that such killers are overwhelmingly white and male and alone.I don't have any conclusions here; I'm merely describing a dynamic that is and will always be true.  I derive an odd sort of comfort, though, from recognizing that narrative fails, that, to borrow Mr. Compson's words from Absalom, Absalom!, it just doesn't explain.  Knowing that makes me more alert to new fact and how it might (re)shape speculation, and more ready to accept the failure of profiles and eyewitness accounts if those failures should come.
For Friday: back on track with a discussion of some music.

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