Notes From the North Country

Not long ago, I was searching for ways to improve the way I teach peer writing groups in the classroom, when I came across the work of Peter Elbow.  I had heard of his famous 1973 book, Writing Without Teachers, often mentioned in the same sentences as Don Murray’s A Writer Teaches Writing.  It was clearly an important book in the process writing movement, and I’m not sure why I hadn’t gotten around to finally reading it until this year. 

But it was in hunting for ideas about writing groups that I came across Elbow’s writing group principles somewhere else – it was in one of the written-for-ELA-teachers books that I have.  I forget which.  But the author was talking about just the same problem I was having: that peer writing groups among my students were not attaining the results they should be.  The writer described the changes he had finally made, and it seemed like many of them involved embracing some of Elbow’s ideas about running writing groups.  This was welcome, because most of the other information I found about peer feedback was mostly just melted down group work advice.  Elbow’s stuff was aimed at writing groups, and it seemed interesting. 

The main thrust of Elbow’s work, as I could see it at first, seemed to be for peer reviewers not to simply try to “correct” their fellow students’ work, nor even to offer feedback and good and bad aspects of the work, but to relate, in a fairly descriptive fashion, what Elbow called “movies of their minds” – their subjective experiences of what they felt or thought while reading their peers’ work.  Elbow had distilled this down into a number of different specific response types that students could request from their peer readers, the two most important of which were “pointing” (which involves “pointing” to words or phrases in the work that particularly stood out to them), and “summarizing” (which asks readers to summarize the main ideas they heard in the writing).  

I was struck by the notion of allowing readers to choose what type of feedback they wanted from readers as much as I was by the particular categories, and so I made up my mind to adopt these elements into my own teaching practice.  But in my daily practitioner’s time-strapped, I’ve-got-classes-coming-in-on-Monday-morning haste, I just threw his ideas into place without really taking the time to examine the underlying philosophy.  But recently I had a chance to go back and really read his seminal Writing Without Teachers.  His philosophy, especially as distilled in his classic and I think underappreciated “appendix essay”: “The Believing Game” – is worthy of study.

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Much of my reading life for the last eight years has been focused on non-fiction books, largely in my professional field of education, and also in philosophy. But recently I have been “rediscovering” the art of reading fiction, particularly in the evenings once the house settles down. It’s a very different experience, isn’t it, luxuriating into art and storytelling at the end of a day rather than wandering through some obscure philosophical forest, pushing through the overgrown pathways of prose. I suppose, after reading John Dewey for so many years, for instance, that I owe it to myself to read more work in which style is a going concern.

And it was with this in mind that I took the opportunity recently to reread another book I hadn’t read since college: Jack Kerouac’s 1950s classic, On the Road.

Children, I suppose, have a way of carbon dating your life. No longer are you just moving through your days in some vast middle terrain between nursery and nursing home. Now there are distinct phases: the newborn years, the little kid years, the elementary years, and so on. Every parent by necessity becomes a developmentalist. Here is a phase they are coming into, there is one they are just leaving. I find now that I am very conscious of my own stage of life. I am very conscious of being a middle-aged father of young children. Young couples in their early 30s with no children remind me of my wife and me ten years ago – that stage of life. Friends whose children have gone off to college look at me – fondly – with the same understanding.

Continue reading “On the Road: Kids’ Stuff”

There it is, the book on my shelf from college:  Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, by Michael Oakeshott.  And there is his name, woven through the work of Andrew Sullivan – an entire PhD. dissertation, in fact, on Oakeshott.  There he is, one of the most esteemed conservative thinkers of the 20th Century – with a whole book collection of his writing about education – The Voice of Liberal Learning.  By now, I have read widely, sympathetically, in his work, and I have tried hard to give it a fair hearing.  But even after all this, I find that my opinion on the man’s work is unchanged from twenty-plus years ago.  I am afraid that when it comes to why Michael Oakeshott is so admired, I have only one response: I just don’t get it.

This is particularly true of The Voice of Liberal Learning, which I have just finished re-reading.  It’s not that I particularly disagree with anything he writes.  Although he is a wonderful writer and a gifted stylist, his work is quite obscure at first.  There is, in my view, a simple, fundamental reason why, and I will describe this below.  But once one uncovers this, and begins to understand what Oakeshott is really saying, the real problem emerges:  In my view, there is just not a lot going on in his work.

But let’s see what he is actually saying.

Continue reading “I Just Don’t Get It: The Educational Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott”

Not long ago, I was standing in my home workshop, thinking to myself: “I really need to get serious about dust collection,” when it occurred to me how far I have come.  If you’d told me two years ago that I’d become interested in woodworking, I wouldn’t even have laughed.  I would have imagined that I had undergone some sort of “Regarding Henry”-style traumatic brain injury, rewiring my basic personality.  Because that would have meant my morphing from the kind of person who looked down on using tools of any kind as little more exciting than vacuuming or cleaning a toilet to the kind of man who refers to his tablesaw as his “third child.” But it’s all true.  I have become that man.  And I do love my third child (“Bosch 4100”).

Come a long way?  I certainly have.

For many years – say between the ages of First Consciousness and 41, I held the sort of attitude toward physical work that can best be described as a cross between “wanting to wish it away” and “just trying to dispatch with it with as little thought as possible.”

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One of the interesting things I’ve noticed in the last few years is that some of the most astute and interesting analyses of modern Critical Theory (CT) – whether podcasts, articles, or even books – actually come from the Christian right.  I have also noticed that as the culture starts to catch up with CT, the books and articles that analyze the movement have begun to get more serious and are written by more qualified scholars and writers rather than culture warriors. 

Both of these trends converge in a fascinating recent book called To Change All Worlds: Critical Theory from Marx to Marcuse, written by a British professor of religion named Carl Trueman.  It is one of the most accessible and insightful analyses of Critical Theory I have ever read; that he wrote it explicitly for a Christian audience should not put secular readers off of this book either.

Continue reading “To Change All Worlds”

Years ago, as a student teacher, I was faced with the chore of having teaching high school juniors a book that I absolutely hated as junior: The Scarlet Letter.  I had dim memories of slogging through the first third before giving up and faking my way through discussions of the rest of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s antiquated, lifeless prose.  The stale comings and goings of ancient characters made me want to jump out the huge picture window in my English classroom and start running. The only thing that had stuck with me was how old the book seemed, how remote from me.

But being a 27-year-old reader is not the same as being a 17-year-old reader, and within minutes of reopening The Scarlet Letter again, I found myself riveted.  Hawthorne’s prose wasn’t stale – it was fresh and vivid.  The characters, who’d once seemed about 300 years old to me, suddenly drew into focus for what they were: young and vital, really the same age as I was.  There was the sex, the lust — all of it simmering right below the surface, the chilling jealousy of the aptly named Chillingworth, the heroism of Hester Prynne in not giving up the name of her paramour.  And then of course the remarkable sophistication – genius, even – of Hawthorne’s complex portrayal of the way that guilt can borrow into the human heart.  If I’d had any doubt I wanted to be an English teacher that semester, it was gone within a few pages of rereading this old classic.

Continue reading “Louise Rosenblatt: Literature as Exploration”

I read many of the Platonic dialogues in college, and I read The Republic several times, but I’d never read Meno, known to be one of Plato’s most influential dialogues on the field of education.  After several false starts over the last few years, I finally got around to reading the whole thing.  It is, like all of Plato’s work, at once simple and commonsensical, and yet rich and complex.  

The main idea is that Socrates and Meno are – in true Socratic fashion – attempting to understand what arete (often translated as “virtue” but in the version I read as “excellence”) really is.  As usual, Socrates is ostensibly trying to learn about excellence from Meno, who claims that he knows much and has spoken to great crowds about it before, but through Socrates’s dialectic questioning, it quickly becomes apparent to the reader and to Meno that he has trouble defining excellence.  Socrates contends that this is the best approach:

“And the more dialectical approach is probably not only to give truthful answers, but also to proceed via whatever the person being questioned admits that he knows. So I shall endeavour to talk with you in this way too.”

But when Socrates proposes that this inability to define excellence on both of their parts should motivate them to search together for the truth, Meno replies by asking a fascinating question about how he and Socrates will know when they arrive at the truth – the so-called-Meno’s Paradox:

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“We should, however, give to our children a vision of the possibilities which lie ahead and endeavor to enlist their loyalties and enthusiasms in the realization of the vision.”

– George Counts, Dare the School Build a New Social Order?

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As I’ve just finished immersing myself in John Gatto’s powerful arguments for unschooling – the crux of which is that compulsory education is not to be seen as a lever of change, but as a fundamental imposition – I thought it was time to revisit what is perhaps the second most powerful (behind Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed) call for educational social reconstruction that I’ve ever read: George Counts’s 1932 pamphlet “Dare the School Build a New Social Order?” While I’d read this years ago, I’d never written about it, while I’ve written at least two or three times about Freire.  It was time.

Although it’s not nearly as long as Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Counts’s work is powerful, lucid, beautifully written, and direct.  He begins by outlining the stakes that the country faces, the tremendous and grinding economic deprivation of the Great Depression.  Then he moves on to chastising teachers, on the one hand, for their hitherto passive political role, and – famously, scandalously – the “child-centered” educational progressives who prioritize the individual comfort and security of their positions (and their children’s) over meaningful political engagement and care for the less privileged:

“The weakness of Progressive Education thus lies in the fact that it has elaborated no theory of social welfare, unless it be that of anarchy or extreme individualism. In this, of course, it is but reflecting the viewpoint of the members of the liberal-minded upper middle class who send their children to the Progressive schools.”

Continue reading “George Counts: Dare the School Build a New Social Order?”

It’s not unusual that some of the most ardent school reformers are former educators.  But it is unusual if they’re arguing not to reform school but to get rid of it.

But that’s John Gatto. He rose to fame in the early 1990s as a three-time New York City teacher of the year, and who became known for using the occasion winning New York State’s teacher of the year award in 1991 to announce his resignation from the profession because he no longer believed in compulsory education.

Even more unique are his reasons.  Gatto’s thinking and writing – which proliferated upon his retirement – is a bracing mixture of historical perspective, hardcore and hard-to-classify political invective, and slice-of-life stories of hope and inspiration.  Gatto’s an onion; keep peeling back the layers and he’ll more and more convince you that his criticism of public schools is one of the strongest, if most cynical, that you’ve ever read, one that deserves to be taken seriously.

Continue reading “John Gatto:  Against School”

Several years back, in a flurry of activity, I set out to read the fundamental books in the social contract tradition.  I read Rousseau, I read Locke, and I read Hobbes.  Around the same time, I set a goal of reading John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice, and I got as far as purchasing a copy and reading the first twenty or so pages before I was stopped by the wall of dense, complex theory and prose.  There it was, staring back at me from my shelf, a tome, a massive reproach, a hole and a gap in my knowledge of 20th century philosophy.  

As the parent of young children, I’ve found that my ability to read much of anything over the last few years outside of the materials I read for work has dwindled to almost nothing.  I sometimes see friends posting year-end charts recording all the books they’ve read; my own, once robust, would look almost entirely blank over the last several years.  My usual intake of reading material on nights and weekends includes little more than the instructional manuals of various appliances and power tools immediately necessary for household operations, peered at in the dim light of the basement or garage, with the kind of quizzical look on my face that wonders how it is possible that a snowblower’s carburetor can at once be intricate and unseeable by the human eye.  For me, as a middle-aged father of small children, reading has become more of a utilitarian pastime.  

Continue reading “John Rawls: A Theory of Justice”