I’m still reading Gerald Graff’s Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Mind. He’s coming to campus in October to speak, and I’d really like to finish the book by then. In fact, Sara Jameson has urged all the TA’s to read the book, and I’d encourage them to as well (though I lament the fact that some TA’s just aren’t that interested in teaching or the conversations around teaching writing).
Ah, but interest. I’m in the middle of Graff’s chapter “The Mixed-Message Curriculm,” and he quotes educator and critic John Taylor Gatto:
Suppose that you and I… decided to create some structural way to make young people indifferent to everything. And suppose we came up with the idea that we would enthusiastically luanch them on an hourly basis on one or another project or art or thinking and then we would ring a bell and say you must stop and move immediately away from this. And we did that for year after year after year. Would that not produce an internal mechanism that said nothing is worth finishing? And if nothing’s worth finishing, isn’t the next logical step that nothing’s worth beginning? (qtd in Graff 73)
And, since Graff is discussing how courses are never linked, he notes that “repeatedly changing the subject without making the necessary connections and transitions is a prescription for apathy” (73).
It’s interesting that he doesn’t want to radically change schools. (Why not demand longer times with students, decry the hourly class system, critique more strongly the way courses are sequenced, ask for a restructuring of elementaries, high schools, and colleges, so that disciplines aren’t so fragmented, call for mandatory committees where instructors in multiple disciplines collaborate? I could be unfair, though – I haven’t finished the chapter. However, Shirley Brice Heath notes in her Review of Clueless in Academe that “He does not call for wide-sweeping structural changes in universities (or any schooling, for that matter), but emphasizes the small manners and means of possible difference.”) I think this apathy is likely to continue without radical changes in schooling structures. When students are treated as products in a student mill, they’re likely to become as interested in school as a package of paper is interested in a saw (note that paper doesn’t have feelings or interests).
Graff, Gerald. Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind. New Haven: Yale UP, 2003.
Aha – but here’s the connection – at least in all liberal arts classes – Rhetoric. Because everything IS an argument, and an ongoing conversation – and that underlies all the we can teach. Further, while Gatto is right that class periods are short – they also recur every day. And this actually makes sense because who can sustain a thought process or conversation all in one spell. And even if we taught one subject for 8 hours in a row, we would still have more to talk about tomorrow. So, the short but repeated bursts of intense (one hopes) conversation on a topic, simulate the real way that people think and talk and ponder in real life. Few people in real life spend all day on a single topic (except maybe grad students! or professors). I’m thinking that most people are like me – constantly distracted in many directions.
Here’s another thought (new train, new digression, you see what happens!) Gatto says – if we constantly interrupt our students and say nothing’s worth finishing and hence why start, Ah – but he is forgetting that nothing is ever finished anyway. That knowledge is never finished but constantly being updated. My favorite story about this – no idea where I heard it, at least 30 years ago – about the Impressionist painter Pissaro, who would go into the Louvre in Paris (or maybe Jeu de Paume gallery, since likely his paintings were not yet official enough for the Louvre?) and have his friend distract the guard while Pissaro took a brush out of his pocket and touched up a corner of his painting. The painting never entirely finished, you see. But maybe Gatto is more of a “what’s done is done” kind of thinker.
Being a constantly recursive thinker, I will think about this more later.