Well what can be said about the elections? The President finally got the mandate he’s claimed all along and there was no help needed from the courts this time around. What will they all do with it? No one can say firing Rumsfeld was the wrong thing to do, but it's the ultimate example of too little too late. Other personnel changes in the administration suggest we're in for more of the same. I’m not holding my breath for any big changes.
In fact, I suspect that bitterness over the defeat may lead to gridlock. However, I’d rather have gridlock than unchecked attacks on civil liberties and foreign countries. If only the two parties could politely keep each other in check while at the same time doing the work they were elected to do… but again, I’m not holding my breath. For now I'll be content with leadership that does nothing. At least that will cause less harm for a little while.
Now, on to more important issues. Go Bucks! (I have to admit, that team from up north hung in there better than I expected them to. Seriously though, that game was never really that close if you think about it! I was pretty confident all season long back in 02, but this year's team doesn't strike me a beatable in the college realm. Mrs. Horsepoup and I shared a lovely vision during yesterday's game when she dreamed out loud, "what if the Browns could just draft the entire senior class?")
Which brings me to Go Browns! Beat those Steelers. Who cares if it's only the battle for the basement. What a weekend for football fans in the midwest, eh?!
And finally, Happy Thanksgiving to all in case I don’t talk to you before. Until next time, here’s some light-hearted reading to keep you occupied:
In a paper prepared for a presentation titled, The Art of Making Life Beautiful, Catherine Michaud makes a sound theological, or Christian argument for the importance of beauty in the world, in our lives, in every individual’s life. I think I must have run across this for a project in my Rhetoric class last Spring, but I saved it on my thumb drive because I firmly believe in its premise, especially as it relates to our modern problems in general, and the state of education in particular. It struck me as good ‘blog fodder because in this argument, I see a wonderful meeting place for the religious and non-religious. A common ground. The paper is available at http://minerva.stkate.edu/offices/academic/theology.nsf/pages/michaud/. She's also a senior research associate at Harvard's Center for Population and Development Studies. (I don't just make this stuff up!)
What caused the article to invade my consciousness again is the fact that Michaud refers to Thomas Moore whose book, DARK NIGHTS OF THE SOUL, has been occupying my night stand and brief case (and my conscious and subconscious? thought) for quite a while now. As I continue to make my way through DARK NIGHTS, it amazes me in its uncanny ability to provide common sense insight to issues that all humans face without actually claiming to solve a problem or provide an answer. What DARK NIGHTS does is help one with a little introspection. It helps provide a person with a perspective they may never have considered regarding their own lives, and thus in turn, a new perspective from which to view the world.
As it relates to Michaud’s argument, and I should point out that while her presentation was to a conference called Theological Insights and was thus religious in nature, she, like Moore, cites philosophers, rhetoricians and other language folk both religious and non-religious in support of her claims. As I was saying… as DARK NIGHTS relates to Michaud’s argument, there is more to life than can be studied objectively. Where DARK NIGHTS places primary emphasis on the soul’s journey through its varying states of emotion and feeling and the importance of allowing and thus understanding that journey, Michaud also argues that beauty, or Beauty, serves as a necessary medium or tool in maintaining that understanding. In her argument, Beauty is food, or perhaps even oxygen for the soul. Her focus is on just how necessary beauty is to understanding, and fulfilling the needs of a person’s soul. In her argument, she relies heavily on beauty’s relationship to God. She, like some of the ancients she cites, implies a connection between beauty and God in the sense that beauty may even be God’s form on Earth. I mentioned that her explanation was religious in nature, but I recommend you check it out for yourself before you dismiss it for that reason. It is precisely what led me to the idea that her concept, like Moore's is bigger than religion. It's human.
So what’s this got to do with anything relevant to anyone’s real life? I’ll use Michaud’s transition: During travels in Europe, she recalled the grandeur of European architecture, dedication to the arts, and the ready availability of soul-nourishing materials, sights and sounds surrounding her in every big city and small village. Upon her return, she was struck by the emptiness of our architectural counterparts. Perhaps it's our lack of history, or lack of a value of history. In our quest for pure utility and efficiency, strip malls and barren highways are robbing our souls by removing all things beautiful from our physical environment. It occurred to me that Vegas is a microcosmic example of this emptiness – while its buildings are sights to behold for sure, the fact that they get torn down long before a normal building’s life expectancy is exceeded (rather than being preserved like centuries-old buildings in Europe) seems adequate proof that their designs, while immediately gratifying, lack soul or anything other than superficial, shallow, soulless charm.
The bigger part of the point is that our souls will pay for this. Our souls ARE paying for this and our world is demonstrating the ill effects of the price. It’s just that there’s no PROOF.
No one likes to discuss matters of the soul because the soul can’t be documented, charted, graphed and presented neatly in a data-backed PowerPoint presentation. It can’t be tested in classrooms across the country with repeated results. The soul is one of those gray areas that we tend to cast aside because it can’t be quantified, but, like the similarly abstract concept, love, few would really argue its existence or its importance if given a safe place in which to speak.
And though it is difficult to come up with any hard evidence proving that our collective movement away from soulful activity may be to blame for the mess that is politics, higher divorce rates, failing economy, lower test scores, rising crime rates and the general state of despair the world sometimes seems to be, I have a hard time believing there’s no connection.
When we ignore the needs of the soul, which is the source of an individual’s knowledge, their essence and basis upon which their lives are shaped, we pay the price. Of course, another reason people don’t like to discuss the soul is that it might imply religion, and we’ve all been taught to never argue poliltics or religion, but you don’t have to be religious to be spiritual. Both sides of that fight can, and usually do acknowledge the soul.
Likewise, both the sectarian and the non-sectarian world are guilty of soul-robbing activity. Many religious beliefs serve to strangle the needs of the soul below the surface while claiming to save it on the surface. Strict rules regarding marriage, sex, divorce and even finances are often pushed upon religious believers in times or places during their lives when the result is soul-crushing rather than enabling or nurturing. Sometimes there are hidden agendas behind the soul-crushing force of religion and other times it’s simply the result of misunderstood or misinterpreted beliefs.
The sectarian world, with its seeming desire for rationality can also be soul-crushing, as previously demonstrated by the Vegas example, or, to stay with the architectural theme, in Ayn Rand’s THE FOUNTAINHEAD, where conformity, parading as rationality or efficiency crushes the soul of an artist who remains true to his dream of bringing beauty (and utility) to his work. While there are times and places for the pure application of logic or utility without regard for art, the soul needs to find its own logic in the world, not have the world force a version upon it either through systematic efficiency in the use of tax dollars, or by the occasionally misguided leader of a religious group.
But alas, all is not lost. Religion’s aim is to save a soul and thus belief in the importance of the soul is inherent in religious ideals even if it is occasionally crushed by a dogmatic following of moralistic doctrine. And the quest for individuality in the sectarian world and the importance of the arts and culture as a means of expressing that individuality often rise to the top of priorities among those who occasionally rail against religion. What this means is that the goals of these seemingly opposed sides are actually very similar. Whether you believe in saving souls or simply feeding souls, you can work side by side with your religious or anti-religious counterpart.
If, in the end, the soul is to be the beneficiary, it shouldn’t matter whether that soul, in its Earthly form, is being cultivated in service to God, to be delivered to God, or whether it’s simply that of a human trying to be the best human they can be while on Earth. The fact is, both purposes can be served. More importantly, neither will ever be served if more emphasis isn’t placed on the importance of the soul by society in general - both religious and non-religious.
As I said before, talk of the soul causes most people to leave the room. Non-religious folk assume it will entail being coerced into faith. The faithful assume their beliefs will be assaulted. The analytical feel it’s a worthless discussion since no data can be gathered and no evidence compiled. Similarly, public education has turned its back on soul-enhancing activities. As Michaud points out, economically challenged school districts will cut the arts and cultural programs, even core-curriculum supporting programs like speech and debate, drama, and other language enhancing programs long before considering cuts to math or science, and sometimes even before cutting athletic programs.
Math and science are directly related to vocation, employability, and testable results. The importance of arts, culture and language, while vital to the soul, are tougher to prove a need for. (There are those whose approach to math and science are artistic, and thus, soulful, to be sure, but that's rarely the way these subjects are presented in school.) In the past I’ve argued against the modern trend away from real education toward training… purely vocational training, and that’s certainly at issue here, but now I’ve realized that it goes much deeper than the typical basic education argument. Teachers have often claimed that the arts are just as important as technical subjects because they complement each other. Surely arts and culture enhance learning in those technical areas, but their importance is much deeper than that. There is direct, repeated, proven correlation between the absence of arts and culture coursework and diminishing skills in technical areas, but who cares? Even discussing it from that perspective is admitting that the primary concern is vocation… training rather than education... training the hands, maybe even the head, but not the heart or the soul. One’s soul should be a higher priority than one’s vocation. Anyone can learn or teach a trade, only dedicated artists (whether they be Math teachers or Auto Tech teachers or Humanities teachers, or your first boss at the hardware store or bakery) can feed the soul. But unless we turn schools and entry level positions and all training environments into situations that feed the soul, we can just expect more of the decline. Our emphasis has to be on educating a whole person, not just providing job training.
What’s really at stake here is whether we nurture or abandon the souls of those graduates we send off into vocations. How prepared are their souls? We can teach all the citizenship facts we want and we can test them as often as we want, but memorizing facts about when one’s state was founded only helps create better citizens if it is presented as development of the soul. The goal must be in developing a person, not just a recorder of facts who can repeat them on test day. Education only helps society and the individual student if the goal is to make that student richer, to provide them a perspective from which to build experience. Our emphasis has to go back to learning for the sake of learning. Learning how to learn not just the subject content, but learning about ourselves.
Mandatory, nationwide testing has guaranteed that this is no longer an emphasis. The goal of training to pass a test relies purely on memorization, not growth. Memorizing facts teaches little about one's self. It does offer some insight, but it's the same insight as the first time you learn it, so the first grader who memorizes basic vocab skills learns the same thing about himself as the tenth grader who memorizes when Ohio became a state or as the medical student who memorizes which proteins turn into mutants. Education shouldn't ever end there. On the contrary, when the goal of education is to nourish a soul, it doesn’t even have to involve a test. The memorization of terms necessary in the beginning phases is self motivated. Only the latter, soul-nourishing form of education provides fresh crops of good students and good citizens. The trend toward the former has only resulted in colleges dropping their standards and putting more money into rec centers and remodeled luxury dorms instead of attracting accomplished faculty and upholding standards. A high school graduate with a soul can handle flunking a class, knows that a “C” means they’d better buckle down, and doesn’t really vest much in an “A” because they know the heart and effort they poured into getting it mean much more than the letter on the report card. Soulless high school graduates sue the college when they flunk a class even if they never attended the Monday morning lectures.
Another way the importance of the soul relates to education is in the necessity of parents or guardians in the development of the soul. While NCLB claims to make teachers more responsible and accountable, it further downplays the parental role in the development of a child’s soul. This has obvious implications for teachers who spend more and more time on discipline (parenting) and less and less on subject matter, but that sounds too much like a teacher whining about the difficulties of his job. How about the need for schools to provide breakfast for a growing number of their students? There’s plenty of proof that hungry kids don’t learn as well and so again, we’re relying on schools to fill needs that are a parent's responsibility. The bigger issue is that teachers and schools simply can’t substitute for the role a parent plays (or fails to play) in a child’s life. A teacher and a school, try as they might, accountable as they are being held, can’t fill in the missing elements of soul development when a parent doesn’t provide them. They play a part in the development of their students' souls, certainly, but it's not the part that parents must play. To further demonstrate that I’m not just a whining teacher blaming parents, parents aren’t entirely to blame. Ok, maybe they should be for the breakfast thing but…
One thing I know from my teaching experience is that parents are not experts in education or child psychology. Contrary to popular belief, education isn’t something just anyone can do. And for as much fighting with schools as parents may do, they still rely pretty heavily on the advice of schools and school personnel. Since much of the expertise in a school building is now forced into compliance with soul-sucking federal initiatives, the appearance is that the local education experts (teachers and administrators) believe in those programs. Thus parents believe that those programs must have some inherent good in them. How could they believe otherwise with the attention given to “State Report Cards” for school districts. What teachers have given up on and parents don’t understand is that these report cards have as much to do with attendance, and in turn, money as they do with anything that might nurture a student’s soul, or make them a better citizen and more productive member of society. Here again, the need for data, even when it supports nothing, has changed the environment. In the old days, teachers were a little freer to be true to their own souls... to teach the way they knew how and to correct their course as it applied in their classrooms with their students. The need for nationwide data has crippled that soul-enhancing ability to respond.
This emphasis away from the soul isn’t limited to primary and secondary education though. In fact, I occasionally see encouraging signs in my children’s assignments for primary school, but the creeping death of the soul is heading higher before it dares go after our younger students – where good campaign commercials might be shot.
As a teacher, with several years of hands-on experience managing classrooms and putting educational theory into practice, I felt I could serve my own soul as well as my students’ needs better by studying my subject matter rather than educational theory. I was comfortable with my knowledge of the mechanics of English study – grammar, writing basics, literary interpretation and analysis, even reading instruction. What I knew I needed further study in was the writing process. I knew there had been massive changes in the study and teaching of this area since I’d graduated and I knew I was not just personally interested in this area, but that I’d be more able to meet the rapidly changing demands of my students if I were more knowledgeable in teaching writing and in mastering my own ability to put together the many elements of the writing process. By becoming a better writer through my own study and practice, I hoped to become a better teacher of this illusive, necessary subject.
Initially, I was thrilled with my coursework in a master of arts program majoring in Composition and Rhetoric. The program allowed enough flexibility that I could incorporate writing instruction theory into the larger-picture study of composition in which I was the writer/student, not a teacher. The Rhetoric side of it allowed me to continue my study of the history of writing and selected literary study as well. Finally, I thought, I’ve found a program that encompasses training for a teacher even as its bigger goal is to make me a better person (feed my soul) through the study of my chosen subject. In that bigger picture realm, I’m still pretty confident in the program and would recommend it, the university, and most of the instructors to any English teacher, but I was disappointed by the need for “data” that snuck into many of the class discussions. It’s not that I don’t believe there are areas where data can support, and effectively guide a student or a teacher toward improvement. (duh) It’s more that the subjects of most of those classes, like the soul, aren’t things best served through that kind of study. Data rarely accounts for epiphany. It records growth, or lack of it, but it rarely creates it. As a teacher, it may steer me toward a better way of encouraging student growth, but that data should be my concern, guiding my lesson planning, not something held over my student. But what disappointed me most about this quest for data was the artificiality in how it was applied, as though by simply having it present, regardless of its relevance to a paper or a project’s intentions, it somehow made the project or paper more valid.
One case I remember involved studying revision methods and how writers went about revising. What they spent time on, how it affected the finished product. It stands out because most of it made sense, and admittedly, the data here even works for some of the more particular aspects of the study, but the overall idea of studying something as human and illusory as the revision process, and forcing measurable data into the picture struck me as odd. In fact, some of the objects of the data gathering seemed odd too. One measure taken was keystrokes on the keyboard and the time between them. That sounds great when measuring someone's typing speed, but what does it really tell us, collectively, about the very personal, varied creative process of revising one's own written work? To be fair, whenever a pause was noted in this data, the student/subject was questioned as to what they were doing or thinking about during the pause, and thus some insight was provided. But if you ask say Steven King, Ghandi, and one of my former students about their revision processes, you'll get three answers so different, they won't support any theories with which that data might correlate. It's simply not very useful in understanding such individual, human, soulful practices. For this particular phase of the writing process, no data can be applied to every writer, rather a teacher must be armed with a variety of methods to offer the student and then let the student decide which methods work best for her.
The flip side of this quest came in a discussion during a rhetoric class of a particular rhetorician... it might have even been an ancient Roman rhetorician. The professor was explaining this rhetorician's theory, how it differed from previous theory, and how it led to subsequent theory. Of course, some subsequent theory disputed the validity of the theory in question. As we all argued about that, one student asked how the rhetorician in question proved the validity on his own... where's the data to support it. Why are we even studying this guy? The professor pointed out that the data, though not neatly collected into columns or spreadsheets, did in fact exist in the shared human experience. What that rhetorician theorized was something we'd all experienced in our real lives. No statistics were necessary. The power of observation provided all the data needed.
Which brings us back to religion. There are no statistics for the proof of God, but believers know that the belief nurtures their souls. That their souls aren't complete without it. It can't be quanitified. It can't be proven. There's no data to support it. In fact, if you approach faith objectively, it sounds a little crazy, but the faithful know how important it is to their souls. They may not always follow it in ways that help their souls, but they at least acknowledge the importance of the soul in their quest.
The non-religious face similar challenges to soul development. They are often sidetracked or distracted by matters that not only don't serve the soul, but draw their full energy away from soul-serving activity. Money, status, politics, clothing, cars, winning the argument rather than getting to the bottom of something... (oh yeah, religious folks fall into these traps too). In the end, the traps are truly non-discriminatory. They prevent everyone, regardless of religious or political affiliation from nurturing their souls. But there's plenty of common ground where we can all get along and all serve our own individual efforts while allowing for the other side's goals to be served as well. In that middle ground, we can actually serve each other and be the team that “accomplishes more.” Thus, if we would focus on the task at hand and how it fits into the bigger human picture, we might realize we're all on a pretty similar page. Instead, we focus on details from another page which convert the common ground into the arena of battle. When we choose to devalue our souls in favor of irrelevant measurable details for the context at hand, we create adversarial relationships that don't necessarily exist in any real sense. Not only do we fail as a group to enrich the soul, we draw artificial lines and create conflicts that further distract all participants from tending to their souls individually.
Serving one's soul is a win-win whether it involves faith, vocation, or simple peace of mind. Serving only one's career or training or immediate material needs generally turns out to be a lose lose for the individual and the society robbed of that individual's full contributions. Given the short span of time we have as humans on Earth, theres no point in spinning our wheels arguing about whose spiritual inclinations best serve that end.
Luth,
Out.
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