Steven Douglas Maloney

Posts Tagged ‘Entitlement’

The Times Higher Education has an article from a part-time instructor teaching at Harvard. What I found interesting about the piece is not the specific claims of Mr. Summers’ discontent, but the general nautre of them. The discontent expressed is with “the game.” The fact that graders, students, administrators and parents all appear to be, in ever-growing numbrs, caught up in the game of educaiton and social status rather than the educating, liberating, self-strengthening character of what I would think most sincere university teachers would call “real education.” If one flips through the pages of the classics on education, from the Greeks to Locke and Rousseau, you will not find anything resembling the general aim of education in our nation today – the conferrence of particular status. This probably has, at least in part, to do with the fact that status was fixed in the “olden days,” which is probably not a desirable state of affairs either. Is there anything that can break the spell? I often doubt it. There has never been some golden era where most people loved learnign for their own sake – perhaps Mr. Summer would feel better comforted with a Strauss-like outlook that we should just make the world safe for our own kind and let the shallow bury the shallow… and pay for our private universities, art museums, and symphony halls. We should also remember that people are not often as serious for caring for themselves as young adults as they are when they get older and confront their responsibilities on more serious grounding. I would imagine that many of my high school and undergraduate (and probably even graduate) would be shocked to know just how much of the ideas that I said I wasn’t interested in or did not like have come back to me as important later in life, and have been absolutuely essential in my pursuit of doing the right thing in my own life. As teachers, we don’t get to witness these critical moments in the ife of our students, but I have a faith that they happen far more than we would dare to expect.

UPDATE: I’m an idiot and I forgot to link the piece to “The Wire” Season 4: where Former Major Colvin learns that troubled kids in the Baltimore School Pilot Program he is working on in retirement are learning in school, but what they are really learning is how to “game” authority.