In the June 6, 2011 issue of the New Yorker in an article titled Why We Have College, Louis Menand said:
Society needs a mechanism for sorting out its more intelligent members from its less intelligent ones, just as a track team needs a mechanism (such as a stopwatch) for sorting out the faster athletes from the slower ones. Society wants to identify intelligent people early on so that it can funnel them into careers that maximize their talents. It wants to get the most out of its human resources. College is a process that is sufficiently multifaceted and fine-grained to do this.
College is, essentially, a four-year intelligence test.
Read more
http://www.newyorker.com/...
I mention this as a sort of entry into what might be another of my explosions of what's been on my mind over the past few weeks. I woke up in the midst of a dream this morning that had me going back to Delta Airlines to confess to having pulled off something that I had only in fact dreamed about doing over the past 40 years, of returning to the job I loved - the job of being a flight attendant in the 70's - the job that taught me much more than the two colleges I'd unsuccessfully attended up to that point. In the dream (which is a recurring in which I elaborate on a previous dream) I find myself explaining to a Delta executive how I'd secretly boarded flights and "worked" trips to the west coast without actually having been rehired - and hilariously-- fit into the uniform that somehow was made available to me by whoever it was that was allowing me to come back as a secret stewardess in these dreams. The executive, in this dream this morning, decides that I am a "find" that he essentially rehires (I'm now 62, even in my dream!) and am being fitted for new uniforms and being told of the electronic bidding system, etc.
When I wake up and realize what I was dreaming, I struggle to hold onto the pieces of this wonderful experience, and find myself thinking "What if I really could go back to that job?"
For a long time I laid there thinking of what I loved about being a flight attendant in the 70's. I learned so much from people I met. I enjoyed traveling to cities I'd never been to and seeing the cross-section of people that depended on Delta back then, most of them for business or political purposes, as there was not much leisure travel in those days because of the cost of air travel. This was before hi-jackings were common, and before security was such an ordeal.
And I am sure that one of the things that triggered this dream was reading about the radiation risk to passengers with the new full body scanners. There are many reasons why I would not want to be a flight attendant today, even if I could get back in the uniform (which would be a stretch, but only a tiny one...)
I recalled the four hour interview, the way I felt completely comfortable talking to the Delta Human Resources people that day, even though I had never been out of Alabama except for a couple of vacation trips, and even though I had just flunked out of Auburn and dropped out of another school in less than a year. As it turned out they had a few openings in the January training class, which was putting them in a last minute search for a few personable girls (no guys allowed back then) that could pass the test. Somehow, I made the cut.
And despite the low self-esteem that I seem to have otherwise, when I put that uniform on I was competent, confident, and courageous. The world I was exposed to was a world not unlike the world today, in many ways. The early 70's were a period of great transition, uncertainty and change. I had a front row seat, and I loved it.
I'm trying to get at what it was about me that the interviewer saw that made him hire me even though I was a college drop-out(and it really could have just been my blonde hair and great legs, but I doubt it -lol) so follow me over the jump if you're still with me...
Essentially, for me, the seven years of being a flight attendant were the beginning of my education. But I wasn't qualified to do anything else but that, and after I left, there was no going back. When I quit to stay home with my firstborn son, I also attempted to finish my art degree, but my husband's job promotions made that impossible. In the ensuing years, I managed to move with my husband eight times, have one more son, become divorced, return to school and work, watch my sons grow up with and without me, and finally return to my hometown to find my roots and begin again.
At age 50, I entered college again, and this time I was determined to finish. My collection of coursework amounted to about 90 hours of classes so far and no degree, though I got close to finishing in 1993 with what might now be classified as a "for-profit professional program" that was being offered in the evenings. In 2005 I completed my long denied degree in Studio Art and in 2007 I added a masters in English to my resume. Finally, I had a degree that would get me a job! A job?
Yeah, teaching at the adjunct level. In 2008, I entered the classroom to stand at the front for the first time. And I walked up to the board and wrote .062 on it.
That was my grade point average at Auburn. The year that I flunked out at age 19 and became a stewardess, I'd managed to muster a .062.
I finished in 2007 with an overall 3.67 I think. My IQ, I paid a therapist to inform me, is in the top 95%.
And for more than a year now I've been unemployed more by choice than for any other reason, having left the world of academia because of proration in my poorest of the poor state, and because of a need to find a place as emotionally rewarding as teaching freshmen was, but that will be more financially and intellectually supportive.
And with a six figure financial aid bill that I'll never live long enough to pay off, I am thankful that I am 62 and eligible for social security. On January 25, 2012, I get my first check. I have been getting food stamps for two months.
Teaching freshmen to write is by far the most difficult of the challenges a faculty member can face, adjunct or tenured, so much so that Robert Pirsig fashioned a monumental work of creative non-fiction around the dilemna such a teacher faces.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Remember? He was trying to get students to write when he finally cracked up. I know how he felt.
In a big way, my thesis Delusions of Grandeur was about the craziness of trying to be authentic in a world that doesn't value that. Artists just call it being creative.
I assigned it for extra credit the first year I taught writing. A few students said they read a few chapters of it. One claims to still be reading it. If I ever teach again, I'll assign it again,or the new book that is a novel based on having taken that same trip, or the audio version plus some other thing,
but I'll also assign Louis Menand's The Metaphysical Club. These two books have made me see the world if ideas, of intelligence, of writing, reasoning, and communication in ways I could not have expected and in a funny way, they seem like bookends for my entire intellectual journey. One of them I read when I was 20 and one of them I read last month, after starting it years ago.
The thing that Robert Pirsig was so desperate to achieve in his classroom was to have his students actually see the world around them in a way that made them able to write about it, describe it, visualize it and articulate that visualization. This is what writing teachers must be able to do, and it's the most difficult thing imaginable to accomplish.
At the end of the day, it's almost enough to have your students tell you that you were the best teacher they ever had, the only one that believed in them, and the one they wish they had now. And what I did, more often than not, was tell them my stories. When they come to understand that it took me 40 years to finish my college education instead of 4, or 6, or even 8, they begin to sit differently in the desk, and I begin to be able to reach them.
But the problem is that even if college actually does act as a four year intelligence test, the society at large doesn't value the education that the students are getting in most cases. Whether it's because the curriculum doesn't match the needs of the working world or whether there are no jobs in the field the student has prepared for, the reality facing the graduate today is that they are not likely to find jobs easy to come by even if they are lucky enough to be in one of the recession-proof fields. My own experience might have been different had I been lucky enough to stumble into some sort of career that withstood the changes that my own babyboomer generation caused, but what career would that be?
Menand, in the New Yorker piece, looks at recent books on higher education such as "Academically Adrift" and others of recent note:
Assuming that these new books are right (not a fully warranted assumption), and that many students are increasingly disengaged from the academic part of the college experience, it may be because the system has become too big and too heterogeneous to work equally well for all who are in it. The system appears to be drawing in large numbers of people who have no firm career goals but failing to help them acquire focus.
I read this after already realizing that my journey in and out of college was partly a result of an odd timing of my life that meant that I was constantly reshaping my self-image to fit the 70's, then the 80's, and by the 90's I had reinvented myself so many times I wasn't sure where I should go next. My heart was in the digital world but my talents and expertise were in the artistic and writing arena, only I didn't see a place where I could gain entry without "certification"
If I close my eyes and trace back, I can remember some really horrible interviews over a 45 year span where I convinced myself I was qualified for something and was so totally slammed against the wall for being overqualified, or under-qualified, or uncertified, or just plain unsuitable for whatever I was trying to do. Even now, with three degrees under my belt and living in a town where people know me and celebrate my art, I still have a terrible time with the whole aspect of interviewing. When people encourage me to get a job they don't have in their minds eye the string of horrible interviews I've been on that turned out to be the worst nightmares of my life. When I say I can do everything but earn a living, it's a joking reference to the fact that all the things I've done in my life were done for (a) little or no pay, (b) someone else's glory or benefit and/or (c)creative, unique and not easily repeated for profit -
(And then there's the problem of me not being able to condense any answers to questions like "Tell me a bit about yourself" down to a couple hundred pages or so, let alone a paragraph or god forbid a sentence or two...I used to refer them to my VisualCV but now even it is going away! I guess I could refer them to my DailyKos AlabamaLiberal diaries, but I live in ...well, you know..)
Menand has written a new work called The Marketplace of Ideas
here's the publisher's blurb on it:
Why do professors all tend to think alike? What makes it so hard for colleges to decide which subjects should be required? Why do teachers and scholars find it so difficult to transcend the limits of their disciplines? Why, in short, are problems that should be easy for universities to solve so intractable? The answer, Louis Menand argues, is that the institutional structure and the educational philosophy of higher education have remained the same for one hundred years, while faculties and student bodies have radically changed and technology has drastically transformed the way people produce and disseminate knowledge. At a time when competition to get into and succeed in college has never been more intense, universities are providing a less-useful education. Sparking a long-overdue debate about the future of American education, The Marketplace of Ideas examines what professors and students—and all the rest of us—might be better off without, while assessing what it is worth saving in our traditional university institutions.
Menand is suggesting a dialogue. Not solutions. If you read The Metaphysical Club, you can begin to respect HIS RESPECT for ideas. Look, I read it and couldn't believe I could actually understand all those guys and what they were trying to say. It's William James, Charles S. Pierce, Henry James, John Dewey, and Oliver Wendell Holmes for chrissake! But Menand made it make sense to me and I think it's important to be able to understand the history of where ideas come from. I also note that there have been others who have criticized Menand's portrayal of Pragmatism (I don't even think portrayal is the right word, but you know what I mean!)
So while I do think that the MSM has done much damage to our culture, including our educational institutions and our political process, by constantly attempting to convince us that complex ideas can be somehow simplified into shorthand or soundbytes, I do see signs of hope that the polarization might be so extreme that it has become laughable. And even those who think the world is coming apart at the seams might be right, but some of the seams, I think, need to be let out a lot....
I cannot help but believe there are some signs of the fever breaking and that intentional living and dialogue will help us rebuild this dream which the rest of the world is so intent on copying -(makes me wonder if they've ever been to any other America besides the one on TV!) - the main stream media is choking on its own clogged arteries and it will be dead one day very soon.
( and a sign of it's heart condition might be the GOP circus wagon with the wheels falling off- I mean, how long can it last when the questions are being put to the candidates via twitter?)
The arbiters of who decides "truth" is still being decided by money to a large extent, but access to media throughout the world via cable and internet has definitely changed and continues to change the voices that media hears and pays attention to. If you are a consumer of only one media resource then you don't see this as easily as those, like me, who are "all over the place!"
So I'm always hoping that people I like and respect for their intelligence and thoughtfulness will soon embrace new media in ways that inform them and help them become part of the conversation rather than just reinforce what they already think -
I'm grateful, for instance, to blogs like Bag News Notes which has been pointing out the images that are used, blogs like How to Save the World, which taught many of us how to blog in the first place (and not incidentally helped Kos get more of an audience early on), to Salon.com which predated Slate.com, TPM, Air America Radio, and virtually every other online universe, and whose TableTalk was the first online forum on which I was able actually "lurk" for many years while I read the books that were talked about and watched the world become a better place. But I'm also grateful for aol.com, compuserve and prodigy before that, where many of us oldtimers learned that there even was a virtual world in the making.
The changes that allow someone to post a Ron Paul ad on THIS site and suggest that it should "go Viral" - get recommended, be called a Troll, and be defended at the same time are why this place is still the best place to have a conversation about what democracy is all about.
Studying, understanding, and revealing the truth isn't a moneymaker because no one statement constitutes truth. I can tell my truth, but even that is not reliable because I can only see truth through the lens of my own experience. (Well, and I'm pretty bad at short, pithy sentences...lol)
I listen to a local NPR station that broadcasts the BBC at night and I'm fascinated with the different ways that stories are emphasized. I've noticed a change in the stories and today I learned that they (and also NPR and Rachael Maddow and most likely others) are putting out pre-story "feelers" asking for input on Facebook -- for a good while there has been a crossover between online sites and MSNBC and even the most idiotic thugs now at least know who Jon Stewart and Rachael Maddow are
which has made it much more interesting to live in a red state than ever before - I now go to parties and NEVER know what political side someone is going to be on when I first meet them. So much has changed in the past eight years, and yet there are still many more myths that need to be busted.
Damn, every time I think I'm ready to publish this diary it keeps growing and I know it's out of control. I'm gonna publish it and get out of bed -- I've already missed most of the day. You guys ROCK!