Notes From the North Country

If there’s one writer who has the power to evoke emotion in me unexpectedly, it has always been Joan Didion.  I say “unexpectedly” because Didion is not an overtly “poetic” writer; she works mostly in non-fiction, her style is spare, stripped-down, deemphasized, non-dramatic, straightforward.  But her prose is deceptive; you’re reading some nonchalant lede, and suddenly you’re sitting right there next to Didion back in 1961 or whatever, sitting on a barstool in a train station, overhearing a conversation between two men that makes you think about some dress you used to wear. She pulls you in, transfixes you, raises the atmosphere of some foreign but familiar place all around you — just the way it must have felt.

One of my favorite of her essays, and one I think about often as I read more political and educational philosophy, is from her book The White Album.  The story is called “On the Morning After the Sixties” – just the title itself is so beautifully evocative.  It’s short – not even four full pages – but just devastating.  And for me the central line in the story, the one I find myself thinking often about, comes — characteristically — quite casually, just about halfway through.

But let me set the scene. 

Continue reading “On the Morning After the Sixities — Joan Didion”

I was struck by the negative reaction I had to rereading this book (which I’d first read in college).  

I say that because I like Aristotle.  I have written before about my evolution from youthful Platonic idealism to a more sober, nuts-and-bolts Aristotelian realism.  I love in particular Aristotle’s method of classification, his sensitive and acute separation of a thing into its (many!) categories, parts, or types.  That’s a method that I’ve wholeheartedly adopted into my own thinking in the last five years.  It’s an approach focused on specificity, above all: the notion that the truth is to be found by sifting through the details, by inductive reasoning, by taking everything apart, studying and classifying it, and then putting it back together into some kind of wider and higher system of understanding, moving ever-upward toward truth.

And that’s why I think I reacted so negatively to rereading this book – because I was surprised when Aristotle, after such a promising start, makes such a monumental error in logic – one which, now that I’ve noticed it, changes the way I see his entire famous work.

What is this error of logic?  It is this:

Continue reading “Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics: The Problem at the Heart of It”

Locke – Two Treatises of Government

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been doing a deep dive exploring the works of John Locke.  As you can observe from my last two blog posts, I began with Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education, and then I read his famous An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.  But you can’t do a deep dive on Locke without reading his other most famous work:  the second treatise in his Two Treatises of Government. 

I didn’t know much about this work going into it except that it was supposed to be deeply influential both in the formation of modern liberalism and in the American constitution – even to the extent that Locke’s wording was possibly (though this is much debated) the source of the famous phrase in the Declaration, “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Clearly Locke, writing about a hundred years before the founding of the United States, was a major source of political theory for the founders, and I already knew that many of his concepts supposedly outlined in the famous second treatise were seminal for the political realities of our country: the doctrine of natural rights, the notion of the state of nature leading to a social contract, the famous idea that government exists based on the consent of the governed.  

Continue reading “Locke’s Second Treatise of Government”

During my first year in college, I took an intro philosophy class.  It was the first and only straight philosophy class that I took in college.  Back then philosophy seemed too removed from the real world – a feeling I had about the rest of school, really, but philosophy even more so – it just seemed like a bunch of people sitting around a table and haggling about semantics.  What was the point?  

I’ve often wondered about people whom I’ve read and heard since then who described having an awakening in their first philosophy class in college.  It makes me think that perhaps these people must have entered college with some already strong questions about the world that they wanted to answer, or strong convictions that they wanted to prop up, or strong aversions that they wanted to investigate, to argue back against, to refute.  I remember well one young man in a class of mine on literary theory who really came alive when we were discussing Michel Foucault’s concept of the “deviant.” You could tell there was something there for him — and I’ve often thought that coming into college with some pet “concern” or “issue” with the world is not a bad thing at all — but a spur to inquiry and investigation — almost better than walking onto campus with the classic wide-open mind and lack of preconceived ideas.

Continue reading “The Birth of the Enlightenment: John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding”

As readers of this blog may have gleaned, for some time now I’ve become interested in the question of what comprises “traditional education.” It struck me again recently, while reading Maria Montessori, that so many of the writers, philosophers, and theorists who are comprise the educational “canon” are advocates of progressive, child-centered (or in Montessori’s case, deeply Romantic) forms of education, all of which seem to be responding to some monolithic tradition of lectures, rote learning, and the like – but the question is, who are the thinkers that really comprise, defend, or even originate that traditional approach?  

I want to read something different; I want some pushback; I want to hear what traditionalists have to defend themselves.  I’m not talking about modern traditionalists; I’ve read those already: E.D. Hirsch and the modern-day Essentialists; Allan Bloom, Mortimer Adler, and the 20th Century Perennialists.  Those arguments are important, and they are powerful.  But I want to know more about the thinkers and traditions that shaped whatever it is that Maria Montessori was pushing back against in 1900, whatever it was that John Dewey was rebelling against in 1896, whatever it was that Rousseau was responding to back in the 19th Century.  Who were those thinkers, what were those traditions, and why did they come to be the way they are?

But just who are these writers?

Continue reading “John Locke’s “Some Thoughts Concerning Education”: Not at All What I Thought it Would Be”

I had never heard of Montessori schools until sometime after college, when I moved to a city and gradually became aware that they were, in the affluent part of town, ubiquitous.  Eventually I developed a hazy understanding of these institutions as vaguely progressive places – do-it-yourself, get out in nature, let the children be themselves, blossoming, flowering, unfurling, that sort of thing.  Defer to the child’s nature.  They seemed pretty similar to Waldorf schools.

I’d had a copy of The Montessori Method for some time, but to be honest, the education of very young children has never particularly interested me (even though it should).  Still, I knew this book is an educational classic, a seminal book, so I’ve just started reading it, and wanted to share what I’m noticing so far.

Continue reading “The Montessori Method”

I want to touch a little more on what Francis Fukuyama — in his new book, Liberalism and Its Discontents, sees as the main challenges to liberalism from the right and from the left.  In both cases, he sees that liberalism’s central virtue – it’s protection of individual autonomy from the coercion of the stage – has been carried to extremes.  

The challenges from the left are more obscure and harder to understand, likely because they are less materialistic and more idealistic and philosophical.   In chapter 4, “The Sovereign Self,” Fukuyama makes the argument that autonomy has been taken too far by the political left to the point that we’re essentially all self-interested people, worshiping at the altar of our Rousseau-ian inner “selves,” which Fukuyama argues turns us away from the public-mindedness that we need to have to run a democratic republic.  I found this point ultimately obscure and unconvincing, but I did find his history of this progress – from Martin Luther to Rousseau, to Immanuel Kant, to John Rawls – to be fascinating.  It reminded me of Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind – an interesting account of our turn from civic-mindedness to self-involvement and even relativism.  John Rawls, in particular, comes in for hard treatment from Fukuyama (as he did in Bloom’s book).  I have never read Rawls and had thought of him as perhaps being the touchstone of the progressive left – the philosopher of redistribution.  But for Fukuyama, he’s more than that – he’s the philosopher of non-judgmentalism, of value-free society, and above all, of relativism.  This was a surprise to me, but, after all, I’ve never read Rawls, so what do I know? 

Continue reading “Liberalism: The Critiques”

Thoughts about Liberalism

I once knew a coworker who’d started as an English teacher but then veered into Special Education because she wanted to better understand how to support all of her students, and this new background proved advantageous for helping all.  The longer I teach, the more I can appreciate this desire.  For me the desire is a little bit different: the longer I teach, the more I realize that I need to know more – not just about the means of supporting students, but about the ultimate ends toward which I want to instruct students in the first place.  Specifically, I need to know more about the type of society – which is to say the vision of the good life – toward which we should aim our educational goals.

Continue reading “Liberalism and Its Discontents”

Perhaps inspired by Dane Jackson’s recent set of videos from his stint at the Grand Canyon of the Stikine in British Columbia (often thought to be the hardest, most committing regularly-run kayaking river in the world), I’ve found myself obsessively watching all of the Stikine footage I can.  I am drawn back most to the first two legendary descents: The 1985 raft and kayak descent, and – especially – the first descent in August 1981, four months before I was born.

Continue reading “What Makes a Stylish Whitewater Kayaker?”

I thought I’d take a slight detour away from Bloom and into a related set of authors: Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe.  Thinking about the way I’ve been taught to begin every student learning objective with the word “understand” (as in, “Students will understand . . . ”) is surely something “rooted in” (as the critical theorists would say) Bloom, but something I dimly recalled being straight out of Wiggins and McTighe – especially their popular ed book, Understanding by Design.” So I thought I might revisit that book to see how it aligns with Bloom.

As it turns out, Wiggins and McTighe are an especially interesting companion to Bloom – they are explicitly carrying on his legacy, building on his work, speaking in conversation with him, modifying him, and sometimes adapting him to suit new purposes.  Plus, I’m fairly sure this is where that “students will understand” dogma that I was taught probably comes from – I’d forgotten what a central feature it is in this book.  But how do they define “understanding”?  And how does it relate to Bloom’s goals?

One side note before I dive into the book:  As I remembered from my first read-through some years ago, I really enjoyed re-reading Understanding by Design.  I appreciated the focus of Wiggins and McTighe’s work on identifying the most important and worthy goals in education and pursuing them with clarity.  I appreciated their connection to and clear familiarity with the seminal figures in education (they often quote Dewey and Bloom, for instance), and their constant real-world examples.

At the same time, as I started re-reading, I remembered something more negative from their work, as well:  For two authors so focused on clarity, Wiggins and McTighe are often surprisingly unable to define what they mean regarding the basic concepts of their philosophy.  This is nowhere more clear than in their repeated – shaky – attempts to define “understanding” – for them the core, critical goal of education.

Continue reading “Understanding by Design”