Posts Tagged ‘school’
“Man’s first expression, like his first dream, was an aesthetic one”*…
From the new series, “Conjectures,” in the invaluable Public Domain Review, a piece by Octavian Esanu…
What do we want from “school”? Knowledge, surely. But other things too. Experience, perhaps? — the vibrating sense of having been present as new thinking happened, of having been affected by an encounter with ideas? Certain kinds of teaching and learning, anyway, privilege that vaunted nexus of knowing and being. Early in the first session of his seminar on Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, the American Marxist literary scholar Fredric Jameson asserts, here below, that “aesthetics” can be thought of as precisely a project that lies “halfway between the cognitive and the artistic” — which is to say, it is the enterprise of trying to understand (conceptually) that which seems to elude reduction to concepts (because we are, somehow, there in aesthetic experiences; and we are not conceptual!). By meticulously translating his recordings of Jameson’s seminars into the theatrical idiom of the stage script, the artist and scholar (and former Jameson student) Octavian Esanu doubles down, playfully and tenderly, on this deep problem. Pedagogy as performance? Teaching and learning, about art — as a work of art?
Series editor D. Graham Burnett‘s introduction
An experiment with historical form and method: “[Door creaks open. Footsteps]: Fredric Jameson’s Seminar on Aesthetic Theory,” from @PublicDomainRev.
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As we investigate the ineffable, we might send absolutist birthday greetings to Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury; he was born on this date in 1588. A father of political philosophy and political science, Hobbes developed some of the fundamentals of European liberal thought: the right of the individual; the natural equality of all men; the artificial character of the political order (which led to the later distinction between civil society and the state); the view that all legitimate political power must be “representative” and based on the consent of the people; and a liberal interpretation of law which leaves people free to do whatever the law does not explicitly forbid– all this, though Hobbes was, on rational grounds, a champion of absolutism for the sovereign. It was that, Hobbes reasoned, or the bloody chaos of a “war of all against all.” His 1651 book Leviathan established social contract theory, the foundation of most later Western political philosophy.
Indeed, it was in some large measure Hobbes (and his legacy) that Adorno’s Frankfurt School colleagues Max Horkheimer, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse (et al.) were working to revise.
“Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition”*…
One quibbles with Jacques Barzun, the author of this post’s title quote, at one’s peril. Still, as Lapham’s Quarterly points out, disrespect, even disdain for formal education has a long history. In this season of school’s end, LQ reaches back to the 17th Century for an example: an excerpt from Nicholas Breton’s The Court and Country, in which the then-popular author argues that on-the-job training, in the fields where husbands know their wives and farmers know their cattle, is all the learning anyone needs:
Now for learning, what your neede is thereof I know not, but with us, this is all we goe to schoole for: to read common Prayers at Church and set downe common prices at Markets; write a Letter and make a Bond; set downe the day of our Births, our Marriage Day, and make our Wills when we are sicke for the disposing of our goods when we are dead. These are the chiefe matters that wemeddle with, and we find enough to trouble our heads withal. For if the fathers knowe their owne children, wives their owne husbands from other men, maydens keep their by-your-leaves from subtle batchelors, Farmers know their cattle by the heads, and Sheepheards know their sheepe by the brand, what more learning have we need of but that experience will teach us without booke? We can learne to plough and harrow, sow and reape, plant and prune, thrash and fanne, winnow and grinde, brue and bake, and all without booke; and these are our chiefe businesses in the Country, except we be Jury men to hang a theefe, or speake truth in a man’s right, which conscience & experience will teach us with a little learning. Then what should we study for, except it were to talke with the man in the Moone about the course of the Starres?
* Jacques Barzun
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As we celebrate the onset of summer, we might send back-to-nature birthday greetings to Ralph Waldo Emerson; he was born on this date in 1803. The essayist (“Nature,” “Self-Reliance,” et al.), lecturer, and poet who led the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century, he was one of the linchpins of the American romantic movement, and friend and mentor to Henry David Thoreau.
“Since my last report, your child has reached rock bottom and has started to dig”*…
Between 1830 and 1860, historian Carl F. Kaestle has written, American schools, influenced by theories stemming from European educators Joseph Lancaster and Johann Pestalozzi, began to favor the inculcation of “internalized discipline through proper motivation.” In practice, this kind of discipline might include positive reinforcement, like these certificates, as well as corporal punishment.
Schools that wanted to teach children to be “obedient, punctual, deferential, and task-oriented,” Kaestle writes, were responding to the exigencies of a classroom environment that could easily descend into chaos. (Nineteenth-century schoolrooms might be crowded with large numbers of students or be required to serve a wide variety of ages and abilities; teachers were sometimes young and inexperienced.)
This range of merit certificates shows what kinds of behaviors were valued in 19th-century students: selflessness, “correct deportment,” and diligence…
The digital archive of The Henry Ford has a group of 60 examples of rewards of merit given to 19th-century schoolchildren; more at “School Certificates of Merit For Good Little 19th-Century Boys and Girls.”
* actual comment made by a New York Public School teacher on a report card; see others– equally amusing– here
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As we polish the apple, we might spare a thought for Ron Toomer; he died on this date in 2011. Toomer began his career as an aeronautical engineer who contributed to the heat shields on NASA’s Apollo spacecraft. But in 1965, he joined Arrow Development, an amusement park ride design company, where he became a legendary creator of steel roller coasters. His first assignment was “The Run-Away Mine Train” (at Six Flags Over Texas), the first “mine train” ride, and the second steel roller coaster (after Arrow’s Matterhorn Ride at Disneyland). Toomer went on to design 93 coasters worldwide, and was especially known for his creation of the first “inversion” coasters (he built the first coasters with 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7, loops). In 2000, he was inducted in the International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions (IAAPA) Hall of Fame as a “Living Legend.”
Toomer with his design model for “The Corkscrew,” the first three-inversion coaster
“The Corkscrew” at Cedar Point Amusement Park, Ohio
“The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way… But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself”*…
“We’ve taken a complete rethink of how wood is used as a material,” said designer Gavin Munro. His production method upends traditional furniture manufacturing processes that involve cutting down trees, trucking logs, sawing the wood, then gluing back them together, generating a lot of industrial and ecological waste in the process.
Over the last four years, Munro and his team at Full Grown have been nurturing hundreds of willow trees, patiently waiting for the right harvest time. Guided by Munro’s studies in tree shaping and botanical craftsmanship, the trained furniture designer is using grafting techniques to coax the tree branches to form chairs, tables and lamp, and frames…
More at “This designer doesn’t make chairs. He grows them—from trees.”
* William Blake
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As we agree that there is nothing like a tree, we might recall that it was on this date in 1898 that the first school of professional forestry in the U.S., the New York State College of Forestry at Cornell, was created by an act of the New York State Legislature. Dr. Bernhard Fernow, then chief of the USDA’s Division of Forestry, was invited to head the new College, and set about creating a 30,000 acre demonstration forest in the Adirondacks. In part to test his theories of forest management and in part to help pay for the program, Fernow and Cornell entered into a contract with the Brooklyn Cooperage Company to deliver them wood… and set about clear-cutting large swaths of the forest. As a result of the public outcry that followed, the school was defunded and closed in 1903. (It “reopened” under new management in 1911 at Syracuse University, where it has been operating since.)
Dr, Fernow
“I had to walk fifteen miles to school barefoot in the snow! Uphill both ways!”*…
5-Hour Journey Into The Mountains On A 1ft Wide Path To Probably The Most Remote School In The World, Gulu, China
In fact, some schoolchildren do have to work really hard for their educations…
Kids Traverse 800m Steel Cable 400m Above The Rio Negro River, Colombia
More perilous paths at “25 Of The Most Dangerous And Unusual Journeys To School In The World.”
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Lest we wonder if it’s worth it, we might spare a memorial moment for Michel Eyquem de Montaigne; he died on this date in 1592. Best known during his lifetime as a statesman, Montaigne is remembered for popularizing the essay as a literary form. His effortless merger of serious intellectual exercises with casual anecdotes and autobiography– and his massive volume Essais (translated literally as “Attempts” or “Trials”)– contain what are, to this day, some of the most widely influential essays ever written. Montaigne had a powerful influence on writers ever after, from Descartes, Pascal, and Rousseau, through Hazlitt, Emerson, and Nietzsche, to Zweig, Hoffer, and Asimov. Indeed, he’s believed to have been an influence on the later works of Shakespeare.
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