|
| Monday, April 23, 2001 |
 |
The Gatto Reader: There are some writers who energize me every time I read them — even when they piss me off. John Taylor Gatto is at the top of my list. Today's most energizing line (because it speaks to what we've been debating about journalism): "We need a ferocious national debate that doesn't quit, day after day, year after year, the kind of continuous debate that journalism finds boring." Here's a quick pile of links, mostly at the Baraka site, which is an interesting tour on its own :
| | The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher, a knockout speech he gave on accepting his New York State Teacher of the Year Award in 1990. Bonus: "The Green Monongahela," another essay at the bottom of the same long page.
|
| | What Really Matters. Here Gatto says stuff about education that Cluetrain says about marketing:
|
| | This man for all his excellence was only some other man's agent. The kids sensed that his talk, too, had been written by someone else — that he was part of what the Protestant theologian Reinhold Hiebuhr called the non-thought of received ideas. It was irrelevant whether this astronaut understood the significance of his experiments or not. He was only an agent, not a principal in the same way many school teachers are only agents retailing someone else's orders. This astronaut wasn't walking his own talk but someone else's. A machine can do that.
|
| | The moral logic of technology is one of obedience, subordination and passiv ity in the face of experts. One carefully controlled study of the Reader Rabbit Reading Program, already in 100,000 schools, shows students who use it lose the power to answer open-ended questions. That shouldn't surprise you.
|
| | Schooling is an instrument to disseminate this bleak and sterile vision of a blind-chance universe. When schooling is able to displace education, as happened in the U.S. just about a century ago, a deterministic world could be simulated. We can entrap children into becoming organic machinery simply by ignoring the universal human awareness that there is something dreadfully important beyond the rational. We can cause children to mistrust themselves so severely they come to depend on cost-benefit analyses for everything. We can teach them to scorn faith so comprehensively that buying things and feeling good becomes the point of their lives.
|
| | When I see the dense concentration of big business names associated with school reform I get crazy, not because they are bad people - most aren't any worse than you or me - but because the best interests of a developing mind and corporate interests can't possibly be a good fit; and frequently they are violently antagonistic. Think of cigarettes, whisky, fast cars and foxy young women as icons of the marketing-promulgated good life. Morality aside, the mental conditioning it takes to accommodate such things as the goals of work don't live easily with home, hearth, family, intimate friendships or thoughts of any transcendent reality.
|
| | All school curricula except the most basic will either secure or disestablish things as they are; it's not a polar thing, of course, but the cumulative effect of centralized curriculum tends in one or another direction: consumption...or production. Mudsill theory prepares the ground for an outlook on ordinary people as "masses," simplified consumption units biologically incompetent for much other than to be held in a low-level narcotized state until public policy decides what to do with them in a micro-chip age. It doesn't require much imagination to figure out what eventually the answer has to be.
|
Caste-ing aspersions: The term "gifted" is suddenly getting a lot of play. Glenn quotes Dan on the subject. Dave pushes back a bit today, because he sees condescension in the term. I didn't see it when I read the originals, but I agree with the sentiment — for pretty much the same reasons John Taylor Gatto gave when he publicly resigned from teaching through an op-ed piece in The Wall Street Journal.
Quote of the month: the practice of journalism is turning from a lecture to a conversation. Thanks, Dan.
Polylog rolling: That term, polylog, occurred to me while I was reading soapbox, one slogan of which is from monolog to dialog. Made me think... what comes after dialog? I arrived at soapbox after reading a great post to the Cluetrain List that was excerpted from the April 17 edition of the blog. Reminds me I need to hang out there a bit more. In fact, I just thought of a question I'd like to post.
Still looks like hail to me: Peter Merholz told me this in an email on Saturday:
| | A couple weeks ago, when I was in Seattle, I had beers with a Microsoftie. Who said, pretty much, "Make no doubt, it's called 'hailstorm' because we plan on raining down all over AOL." They can't say that publicly (I guess it wouldn't be nice), but that's definitely what they think about it internally.
|
| | Meanwhile Phil Wolff pointed me to his take on the matter. Note the verb "promotes" in the bulleted list: Passport "promotes" a standard, backend software, etc. Wouldn't the right word be "requires?"
|
I've said this before: Microsoft isn't just a competitive company. They're a combative one. There's a difference. But maybe Microsoft's combativeness is a virtue a bit (though not entirely) like the one Robinson Jeffers lauds in The Bloody Sire, written on the occasion of World War II:
| | It is not bad. Let them play.
Let the guns bark and the bombing-plane
Speak his prodigious blasphemies.
It is not bad, it is high time,
Stark violence is still the sire of all the world's values.
|
| | What but the Wolf's tooth chiseled so fine
The fleet limbs of the antelope?
What but fear winged the birds and hunger
Gemmed with such eyes the great goshawk's head?
Violence has been sire of all the world's values.
|
| | Who would remember Helen's face
Lacking the terrible halo of spears?
Who formed Christ but Herod and Ceasar,
The cruel and bloody victories of Caesar?
Violence has been sire of all the world's values.
|
| | Never weep, let them play.
Old violence is not too old to beget new values.
|
I'm not saying Microsoft is Bad here. I'm saying we forgive the wolf his teeth, and the lion her claws. And we find ways to live with both.
Markets are environments. What we do for the Web we do for its ecology. The nice thing about interstructural software is, the wolves of the world aren't the only ones writing it.
First things last: So I'm still writing this editorial about Hailstorm, and I told my managing editor at dawn that I'll wrap it when I get into the office, where I can go through the piles emails and the Web pages on the big machine, which has a 21" screen and plenty of RAM. I have my sister Jan with me, who's going to help bring Sense to my accounting system (currently a neglected box of paper shreds, basically), and .... I have no key. Long story short, I just got in. It's now 11:42. When I was younger this kind of thing usually invited autoflagellation. Now I just figure out a way around it. Age and guile, I guess.
discuss
Copyright 2009 The Doc Searls Weblog
|
