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Brainstorm: Lives of the Mind Laurie Fendrich

July 4, 2009

Ruminations on the Fourth of July

As any American school child should know, the American Revolution began on July 4, 1776. It ended up being a thoroughly bloody revolution, but not nearly as bloody as that of the French or the Russians—nor as viciously vengeful. We chucked a monarch and we changed regimes, but we didn’t kill a monarch or attempt to change the social order.

Instead, the Declaration of Independence opened up far more radical territory than mere regicide or class warfare. It began with words expressing carefully thought out ideas—ideas that would be next to impossible to put forth, or rigorously defend, were people as smart as Thomas Jefferson to try to say them today.

The Declaration of Independence begins with an appeal to natural law—i.e., law outside of, or beyond, civil law. It asserts that there are “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” which we Americans, in starting a revolution, were calling on to justify our actions. It goes on to assert that there are certain “self-evident” truths (natural law again)—namely, that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Our revolution bound us together by principles adhered to by Enlightenment thinkers, most of whom were either atheists or, at most, pietists. Yet belief in natural law crumbled almost immediately afterwards—hammered by the combined forces of 19th-century philosophy and science. Who among today’s intelligentsia, other than those within the Catholic Church, would dare to try to vigorously argue the case for natural law? True, there have been a couple of contemporary political philosophers, such as John Rawls, who have tried to resuscitate it, but very few of us, even those of us who read them, passionately commit ourselves to the idea of natural law. No one can revive the thrilling perspective of the Enlightenment, and natural law today has become terrain mostly controlled by crackpots who don’t want to pay taxes, or “feel” that their “personal philosophy” trumps civil law.

So here we are, more than 200 years after our revolution, a country firmly founded on natural law even though natural law would be extremely difficult to defend today.

Perhaps none of this matters. Like millions of others, I will hang the American flag outside my home today. My mother gave me this flag, which replaced the one that had once draped my uncle’s coffin when he was killed near the end of World War II. The original had disintegrated, made into a mess full of holes by moths and the passage of time.

Comment [5]

July 2, 2009

The Terrifying Fence



The Poky Little Puppy (a wonderful string of words to say out loud) begins with one of the most powerful sentences ever constructed in the English language: “Five little puppies dug a hole under the fence and went for a walk in the wide, wide world.” This pretty much sums up experience, and as a plot, it’s the basis for a lot of great literature.

Written by Janette Sebring Lowrey and illustrated by Gustaf Tenggren, the book was first published by Simon and Schuster in their Little Golden Books series that came out in 1942. By 2001, The Poky Little Puppy had sold 15 million copies, and topped the best-seller list of hardcover children’s books in English. Perhaps it’s slipped since then — could be, especially with the ascendance of such brilliant writers and illustrators of children’s books as Maurice Sendak and Shel Silverstein. Yet somehow the poky little puppy story, plain as it is, packs a punch. There are even adults — I’m married to one of them — who have never managed to shake it from their psyches.

The story is simple and the drawings darling. There are a couple of moral lessons included: Do not cheat and do not be late. The Cliff Notes (in case you should ever have to take an exam on the book) read as follows:

“The poky little puppy repeatedly gets into trouble because he lags behind his four siblings when they dig a hole under the fence and keep going out to explore the hill beyond — an action explicitly forbidden them by their mother. At first, only the four who are not poky are punished for being bad, since the poky little puppy, being poky, arrives back home too late to be included in the punishment. By the end of the story, however, the poky little puppy faces some big trouble: The hole beneath the fence has been filled in (!) (by his siblings) and, he’s forced to squeeze his pudgy little self through the fence to get back inside. There he finds his siblings finishing up the strawberry shortcake their mother has left for them. He has to go to bed hungry. The book ends with a new sign posted by the fence that reads, ‘No desserts ever unless puppies never dig holes under the fence again!’”

Why the mere mention of the title of such a simple, lovely children’s story causes my husband to cringe is not hard to explain. When he was a little kid growing up in a small southern California version of Levittown, he would wander around the neighborhood playing cowboys and war with the other kids. He was chronically late in getting back home — even when he would hear his mother calling for him from the back porch. She used to like to say to him, “Some day your father and I are going to build a fence in the back yard.” Even at four, he knew the threat implied in those words: He’d be too little to climb that fence and get back home. When he kept on coming home late, his mother pointedly gave him The Poky Little Puppy.

I’d like to say that reading The Poky Little Puppy changed my husband’s behavior, but sadly, he turns out to possess a gene for lateness. Instead, the story left him a man who arrives chronically late to everything while always suffering a sense of urgency and worry about it.

If you like stories about leaving home, wandering the world, and then eventually making it back home, and you don’t have time to read Homer’s Odyssey, try The Poky Little Puppy. After all, it’s the same story, only a heck of a lot shorter.


(Brainstorm illustration incorporating a transformed photo by Flickr user MeaganJean)

Comment [9]

June 29, 2009

The Biological Thinking Machine



Get ready, human beings, to drink the brew now simmering in the kettles of neuroscience. Last night’s 60 Minutes, narrated by Leslie Stahl, reported on the work going on at a couple of neuroscience labs. In case you haven’t been paying attention, neuroscience has come a long way from playing around with twitching frog legs. Now, using computers and MRI’s, neuroscientists can precisely locate the multiple parts in the brain where thoughts are occurring and are moving toward understanding how to predict them.

At Carnegie Mellon, for example, researchers Marcel Just and Tom Mitchell conducted what Just cheerily identified as “thought identification” research. “Our brain is a biological thinking machine,” he said to a clearly worried Stahl.

In their experiments, Just and Mitchell gave their subjects ten specific objects to think about (half of them tools like a screwdriver or hammer, half of them dwellings, like a castle or igloo) while undergoing a brain scan. Recording and analyzing their brain activity patterns, the researchers located the various parts of the brain where the specific thoughts about these objects had occurred. The most startling moment in the program occurred when the researchers conducted an instant analysis of a staff member of 60 Minutes. The computer was able to correctly identify all 10 things she had been thinking about, in their proper order, during her MRI.

Meanwhile, at the Bernstein Institute in Berlin, a researcher who’s studying the problem of intention asked a group of subjects to make a simple decision — to either subtract or add two numbers that they would be given afterward. The researcher was able to figure out what they had decided to do by analyzing the different pattern of brain activity generated by addition compared to that generated by subtraction in the part of the brain that controls intentions. In other words, he correctly figured out their intentions.

Neuroscience is still in its relative infancy, but even so, in the not too distant future (within the century, for sure), society will be forced to decide whether people should have their brains scanned before boarding a plane or submit to brain scans to find out if they’re telling the truth. Perhaps parents will make it a practice to drag little Johnny over to the home brain scanner to see if he’s telling the truth about whether or not he did his homework.

The new knowledge about brains will necessarily exacerbate the polarization between “science” people and “humanities” people famously delineated by C.P. Snow in The Two Cultures (1956). There Snow rued the fact that people had split into two categories — science and nonscience types who could no longer talk to one another. (He laid special blame at the feet of humanities scholars for not knowing a damn thing about science.) Since then, the gap has only widened.

New advances in understanding the brain will add another dimension to Snow’s gap. For scientists, the pursuit of the scientific truth about the goopy machine that is our brain will be a glorious, thrilling and worthy challenge, done for its own sake. For nonscientists, on the other hand, there will be those who find it entertaining, and those more like Leslie Stahl — worried.

Once neuroscientists can see what we think, and where and how we do it, and even what we plan to do with our thoughts, once we’ve thought them, can it be much more than a hop, skip and jump to ferreting out the deepest lies, deceptions, illusions and delusions that spur the imagination to its heights and give birth to our ideals and our art, and even our private little selves?

As goopy machines subject to the binary diagnosis of computers, we’ll no doubt hum along more perfectly than ever before. Yet one can’t help but wonder if there isn’t a rub to all of this. If we should indeed conquer our brains to the point that we can control them, what dreams are there that will never come?


(Brainstorm illustration incorporating images by Flickr users rooneg, brain_blogger, and Sarah G)

Comment [30]

June 25, 2009

A Sad and Sorry Saga ...



NOTE: Thanks to a reader for pointing out that I wrote “Adirondacks” instead of “Appalachian Trail.” The error has been corrected.

Ever since yesterday’s tearful confession by Governor Mark Sanford that no, actually he hadn’t run off without notice to go hiking alone on the Appalachian Trail but instead had gone to Argentina to end his affair, a panoply of experts in psychology, sex addiction, marriage counseling, and politics — on television, in the papers, and in the blogs — has been earnestly inquiring why a man who’s such a rising star in the galaxy of Republican governors, who is married to such “a lovely wife” and has “four wonderful kids,” would do such a thing.

What planet do these “experts” live on? As far as I can see, sex is barely controllable by society, no matter the strictness of the laws or customs in place. Plenty of people holding deeply held principles about the sanctity of marriage succumb to sex outside of marriage — sometimes with prostitutes, sometimes in one-night stands, and sometimes in long-term affairs. Even in places where adulterers are stoned to death, adultery exists.

Experts everywhere, consider the following proposition: Sex is one of the two great wild cards in life (the other being Fortuna). It’s a leering joker, always ready to upset even the best-laid plans. It has a terrible way of liking to show up precisely at moments when people think they’ve got their lives under control.

Lord Chesterfield was right, of course, when he said about sex that “the pleasure is momentary, the position ridiculous, and the expense damnable.” But since when has truth ever stopped anyone? It’s irrelevant, except for philosophers. When sex joins with love, we enter the tragic terrain of Anna Karenina and Vronsky (if you like to think in terms of novels — which, by the way, remain the single best form for understanding how sex and love really work) or Julius Caesar and Cleopatra (if you prefer learning lessons about sex and love via history).

It was particularly interesting (actually, nauseating is a better word to use) to listen to talking therapy heads on Larry King Live last night while they pontificated about Governor Sanford’s affair. Their discussion was entirely in terms of psychology and politics, and not one of them considered, for a moment, that Governor Sanford might have fallen in love with the woman from Argentina. With no evidence whatsoever that Sanford is suffering from “sex addiction,” or that power had “gone to his head,” they talked about him as if he were a “sex addict” suffering from the problem of “narcissism.” And these “experts” presumed to diagnose Sanford’s “case” without knowing a thing about him, his wife, or the other woman in question.

Let me be clear that I am not advocating adultery, or forgetting that many people have been harmed by Governor Sanford’s affair. This is yet another sad and sorry story of a public official who has betrayed his wife. But any man who would disappear for a week in order to end an affair with a woman he’s been seeing for a year is probably not a “sex addict.”

As often happens, Jon Stewart offered the best commentary. “Oh,” he said. “Marital infidelity. You’re just another run-of-the-mill human being whose simple moralizing about the sanctity of marriage is only marred by the complexities of life.”

What if Governor Sanford had said at his press conference, “I am sorry, but I have simply fallen deeply in love with the most wonderful woman on the face of the earth. So I am leaving my wife and four children and hereby announcing my resignation from the office of the governor of South Carolina, and my intention is to move to Buenos Aires to be with the woman I love.” Then we’d be talking about a far more excruciating and agonizing human problem than “sex addiction” — the profound and disturbing disruption caused by passionate love.

Comment [52]

June 23, 2009

Burqa Ban


Photo by Flickr user Tinou Bao

Tucked into a speech to the French parliament that concentrated on the French economic mess, President Sarkozy of France said yesterday that the French are opposed to women wearing burqas (the garment worn by some Muslim women that fully covers their face and body save for a tiny space for the eyes) in France. He didn’t flinch from using strong words. The burqa is “against French values,” he said, adding that the French “cannot accept that women be prisoners behind a screen, cut off from all social life, deprived of all identity.” He said the burqa “is not a religious sign, it’s a sign of subservience, a sign of debasement. I want to say it solemnly: It will not be welcome on the territory of the French Republic.” Sarkozy thereby gave his backing to a multi-party initiative, by several legislators, for a parliamentary commission to study the burqa and how to stop its spread.

French hostility toward the burqa is said to lie in their concern that the women who wear it are forced to do so (usually by their husbands). Obviously, hidden in this attitude lurks a hefty amount of anti-Muslim sentiment as well. The French are intolerant toward — even suspicious of — religion of any kind spilling over into secular life. Their revolution, unlike ours, was deeply anti-clerical (as well as anti-monarchical and anti-aristocratic), and they used their national razor with a frenzied joy to slice off the head of more than one priest.

The effects of that revolution are felt today. In a law enacted in 2004, the French banned students of any religion from wearing any overt religious garb in public schools — no Muslim headscarves, Jewish scull caps or large Christian crosses are permitted. The French idea is that immigrants should assimilate to the French way, which is secular, although their attitude that no immigrant could ever possibly become fully French makes this nearly impossible.

In America, our attitude is entirely different. When it comes to sartorial matters, more or less anything goes. In Cairo, President Obama took pains to mention that Americans have no problem with Muslim women wearing headscarves, but in Normandy he acknowledged that he understood the French point of view. Obama acknowledges that our different national histories have led to different conclusions about how religion fits into society.

Head scarves here are one thing, but they’re a far cry from burqas. As a friend of mine put it — bluntly expressing the horror many Westerners like me feel at the sight of a burqa — “What kind of society dresses its women in bags?” Women in the West gave up the veil during the Renaissance, and in liberating their faces for public view, they simultaneously unleashed public acceptance of female vanity (a bad thing, when in excess), as well as the female intellect (a good thing, even in small doses). Putting a public face on women brought women into the public sphere.

Last fall, I stepped into a New York subway car and sat down to a startling sight — two women, seated across from me, by chance seated side-by-side. On the one side was a Muslim woman in a full niqab (different from a burqa, which has a screen, the niqab is a completely black, top-to-toe covering with a small horizontal slit for the eyes). On the other side, squeezed up against her (the subway was crowded), was a young twenty-something mother, baby tucked into a stroller in front of her. She was dressed in one of those tight, sleeveless spandex tops that explicitly reveals the form and cleavage of the breasts, long dangly earrings, a very, very short skirt, and platform heels.

Considered separately, the outfits might very well each have annoyed me, were I to have let my mind go that way. They were the bookends of the way women exist in the modern world. Taken together, however, they were hilarious — worthy of a New Yorker cover. (If no one’s done this yet, I hereby offer the idea).

Although the woman in black sort of scared me, in a mild sort of way, I was more irritated than scared. The outfit stood for female oppression. But as I said, the deeper reason is because when there’s no face in public there’s no face at all. On the other hand, the spandexed woman frightened me as well. She, in her own way, also stood for female oppression. For whom, exactly, was she in such a state of undress, if not for others who are not the father of her child?

At the same time, the sight of these two women sitting together on a subway in New York was, in retrospect, uplifting, perhaps even beautiful, in a Walt Whitman, Leaves of Subway sort of way. This is democratic America, after all, not democratic France. We’re probably about as tolerant as a society can get.

Comment [30]

June 20, 2009

Parallel Universe

The following c.v. was sent to me via email. I checked it out, and it’s real. I am humbled.

Claire V. Oyant* is a Certified Practitioner, LMT, Intuitive Healer, and Reiki Master/Teacher, Ordained minister through the Universal Life Church, Certified Angelspeake Facilitator, and Psychic/Medium. She has been working with energy for over 11 years and is a graduate of the Boston Institute of Shiatsu and Complementary Therapies. She has training in several modalities, Distant Healing, Magnetic Therapy, Reiki, Qi Gong Energy Healing, and Quantum Healing. Claire is a gentle and gifted intuitive/psychic medium who is clairaudient, clairvoyant, and clairsentient. Claire offers both psychic/mediumistic readings and is a channel — a bridge working with the spirit. Claire is a psychic/medium who validates there is an after life, that is sensitive to the frequency’s of the spirit as well as past, present or future events. Claire does not use any tools, tarot cards ETC, when she is delivering her messages; she simply gets her message directly from spirit.

*Claire V. Oyant is a pseudonym (duh!), but I swear the c.v. is real.

Comment [19]

June 18, 2009

Come On, PETA, Lighten Up!



What’s with PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals), anyway? When they first started out, they seemed like a crazy fringe group. They liked to do stuff like break into science labs during the night to release guinea pigs from their cages, completely disregarding any human beings that might be hurt in the process. They then moved on from guinea pig and bunny rescues to spraying fur coats, which seemed a little bit more acceptable, in my mind, at least, even if it violated the sanctity of private property. Spraying fur coats didn’t put anyone’s life at risk.

I myself am practically a vegetarian, and I’ll admit I secretly admired PETA activists when they were going around New York spraying fur coats. Anyone who wears fur is vain as well as willfully oblivious to the cruelty that produced that fur, period. Long ago, fur was necessary for people living in northern climes in order to keep warm. Now, in an age of global warming and lots of wool, it’s a a stupid and ugly sign of luxury. Pat Nixon had it right, what with her Republican cloth coat. In the last couple of years, however, PETA seemed to have let up even on spraying coats and turned instead to publishing gruesome images of animal suffering caused by humans in order to get us to enact animal-protection laws. They seemed to have become almost mainstream, like the Humane Society.

As of today, however, PETA has gone back to their bonkers origins. They found it necessary to chastise President Obama for killing a fly during a White House interview with CNBC’s John Harwood. The president had deliberately let the bothersome critter settle on his left hand, waited just the right amount of time, and then … whack! Using his right hand, he proudly killed it with a single blow. Not bad, especially for a lefty. I’ve seen a couple of people do this maneuver, and always been rather impressed by it. Not PETA. They announced that they considered it cruel.

Unless you ascribe to Jainism, you’re probably like me and don’t think of flies as having souls. Still, for especially sensitive souls, PETA surely speaks truth. And generally speaking, killing anything, even a fly, incontrovertibly fits into the category of “the cruel.” It’s certainly not a kind or sweet thing to do to a creature. On the other hand, the category of the cruel frequently overlaps the category of the useful, and often the category of the beneficial — and therein lies the problem.

Most of us living in Western culture have come to terms with low-level cruelty, accepting the way it permeates life from top to bottom. We try to put our energy into preventing higher-level cruelties. Few of us have the outlook that sees souls in lowly flies, and it’s emotionally exhausting to give them too much consideration. We kill all sorts of things, rather mercilessly, all the time.

Our only redeeming feature as killers is that we rank our killings from the low and meaningless to the high and meaningful. If killing a fly could be shown to cause increased violence against higher-level animals, I’d agree with PETA. But killing a fly, although indeed a little cruel, is only that — a little cruel. It’s also a little tiny bit fun, not to mention a little tiny bit beneficial.

If PETA truly wants to be effective in making us care about cows, it would do better to keep quiet when we kill flies.

Comment [41]

June 15, 2009

Equality in Education

Equality — the central tenet that gives meaning and purpose to American democracy—has a way of generating real-life headaches. (This is an admittedly simplistic summing up of Tocqueville’s rich and subtle argument in Democracy in America, but it’s useful for my purpose here.) The hallowed Declaration of Independence eloquently affirms our commitment to the democratic principle that all men are created equal. Yet who of us, deep down, really believes this? To reconcile our lofty democratic ideals about humanity’s equality with our everyday experiences of people requires we modify the word “equality” with the words, “of opportunity.”

Two articles — “No Longer Letting Scores Separate Pupils,” in this morning’s New York Times, and “Not Every Child is Secretly a Genius,” in today’s Chronicle of Higher Education — struck me as deeply related to one another, despite their different topics. Although neither article mentions the word “equality,” each is ultimately concerned with the matter.

The Times article concerns public middle schools in Stamford, Connecticut. Beginning this fall they will abandon their long practice of “tracking,” or placing students in academic levels based on their academic ability as measured by standardized tests. Instead, Stamford will divide middle school students into two simple groups: The top quarter will enter honors classes and the rest will go into regular college-prep classes.

Many parents of the students who were in what had been the top track of Stamford’s multi-tiered system object to the new plan, but the Stanford superintendent says that tracking is “not fair to too many kids.” The Times points out that although Hispanic and black students constituted 46 percent of Stamford’s sixth grade this year, they made up 78 percent of the middle track and only 7 percent of the highest track. The argument for ending tracking in Stamford rests on the social injustice of any system that ends up with numbers like these, along with evidence that when kids of all academic abilities are grouped together, objections notwithstanding that the top group ends up a little bit bored, the bottom group shows significant academic improvement.

Now consider Chronicle author Christopher Ferguson’s article. Ferguson, a professor of behavioral and applied sciences and criminal justice at Texas A&M International University, argues that it’s time to abandon Howard Gardner’s oft-cited theory of multiple intelligences. Although politically appealing, Ferguson argues, the theory doesn’t hold water.

Ferguson segues into a discussion of education, arguing that educators should return to the old idea of a “single intelligence.” Intelligence (understood in the old way) and motivation, according to Ferguson, are the two best predictors of academic success and, later on, employment.

Ferguson brusquely admits that the old notion of intelligence is a “fundamentally meritocratic construct” in which there are “winners and there are losers.” He carefully warns us that we need to “avoid the fallacy that some people deserve to live in poverty, or that entire groups of people are inherently inferior in regard to intelligence.” What’s needed, he argues, is to openly accept that “some children and adults are just unintelligent.” The problem is “to work with the reality we have, not the one we wish we had.” Climbing out of poverty, he concludes, requires a “healthy dose” of both motivation and intelligence understood in the traditional way.

After reading Ferguson, I was left wondering how, exactly, talking openly about some people being more intelligent than others can help anything. It seems to me that it leads straight to making us an even meaner species than we already are. Will it improve education? Will it make things better for less intelligent people — many of whom already know they’re not the sharpest crayons in the box? Will it benefit smart people, who’ve already been given an edge by Mother Nature that almost inevitably (according to Ferguson) leads to their success in life?

Whether we call students “bright” or “academically successful” doesn’t matter one whit to them, except for the odd fact that the former feeds individual vanity far more than the latter. But calling students “unintelligent” is always harmful.

Let’s say, for argument’s sake, that Ferguson is right that we should abandon multiple-intelligence theories and use only the one, traditional idea of intelligence. We still don’t know the best way to educate all the children in our society.

One thing we do know, however. If Ferguson is right, Stamford is right to give up tracking. If dumped into one pool, the smartest and most motivated kids, whatever race or ethnic group they come from, and whether they’re rich or poor, will end up succeeding no matter what. The students we must worry about are what Ferguson referred to as “losers.” Calling them that is the dumbest idea in the world.

Comment [8]

June 12, 2009

First, They Kill Language



With Shakespeare taking up residence in a part of their brains almost from the moment they’re born, the British possess an inherently finer knack for writing in the Queen’s language than we Americans. To be sure, there are fine American writers, but we’ll never, ever be as good with English as the English. This is both a bad thing and, as you will see, a good one.

The Nuffield Review, released a few days ago, is the first comprehensive review of British education for 14- to 19-year-olds in England and Wales in 50 years. (The U.K. system doesn’t quite jibe with ours; the subject group approximates our high-schoolers, with a year of college added on.) The review team, funded by the independent Nuffield Foundation, was led by Professor Richard Pring of Oxford, but included several others from different institutions.

The study took six years to complete, and it amounts to what they call “a ringing indictment” of contemporary English education, particularly for failing to serve English “Neets” (i.e., teenagers who are not in education, employment, or training, and are likely to end up jobless).

The review minces no words, and blames much of the problem of disaffected youth on the English education establishment, in cahoots with the government, for imposing its wretched educationalese on schools. Pupils have been turned into “consumers,” curricula are now “delivered,” and success is measured by “audits” (i.e., tests). British teachers are compelled to use such terms as “performance indicators,” “measurable inputs,” “outputs,” “targets,” “customers,” “deliverers,” and “efficiency gains.” That last one is a howler: It signifies — get this — cuts in funding.

My fave Orwellian nonsense word is “performativity” (which is the allegedly positive effect that government monitoring has on achieving “targets”). But other phrases that should be up for Big Brother Awards are “level descriptor” (the outcomes that a learner should attain), “dialogic teaching” (an emphasis on speaking and listening between teachers and pupils — now there’s a novel idea) and “articulated progression” (allowing pupils options for their next step in the qualification system).

The review argues that when educrats use the Orwellian language of “performance management,” they “are undermining teenagers’ education by turning them into ‘customers’ rather than students.” [Note: The report itself — not merely me — uses the word “Orwellian” to thrash the educational system.] In turn, the review concludes, this destroys learning for everyone — including the brightest of the academic bunch — and creates overall social alienation.

With no route to success other than through academic tests and some kind of university education — no alternative curricula for kids with a creative bent, or a love of fixing machines, or making music, or making things with plants and earth, or hair or food, or whatever — the result is that at least half the kids have ended up not merely miserable losers, but internalizing the idea that they’re hopeless miserable losers. The review, in sum, argues there’s a strong and direct connection between these disaffected youth and English outcomes-assessment practices.

To their dubious credit, however, the British — equipped with their superior aptitude for the English language — while going about the business of destroying a kind of education that takes account of the full human being, have created some fabulous assessment jargon. It’s much more powerful and intimidating than anything we’ve got. Why, we Americans are practically plain-spoken compared to the English. Our “rubrics” — crammed with “mission statements,” “learning goals”, “assessment goals,” “mappings,” “interpretations,” and “concluding loops” — were at first applied to K-12 education, and are now spreading like kudzu over American higher education. And you know what? While we’re probably doing almost as good a job at strangling the last breaths of humanity, passion, and excitement out of all levels of education, we’re linguistically downright pathetic, in our description of what we’re doing, compared to our British counterparts.

Perhaps we on this side of the Pond should be thankful that we’re not quite as handy at bureaucratic, doublespeak educationalese as the British. As the review reminds readers, “The words we use shape our thinking.” And since we use them less well than the British, it will probably take our own outcomes-assessment movement just a tad longer to use them to bury education.

Comment [22]

June 8, 2009

Dear Giotto

Dear Giotto,

Thanks for the chance to see your work. After all the winking and blinking and shouting and “investigating the social construct of” this or that in the national pavilions and the Arsenale of this year’s Venice Biennale, my husband and I took the train over to Padova to see the installation you did back in 1305 in the Scrovegni Chapel. You were famous back then—probably more famous than anyone in the contemporary art world that I inhabit. You did work for the Pope, and people were in awe of the way your paintings captured nature—especially the expressions on faces, and the folds of cloth, and the way buildings and trees and rocks occupy 3-dimensional space.

We’d seen your chapel once before—almost twenty years ago, when visiting it was no big deal. Back then, visitors simply bought tickets at the door and strolled on in. You could stay as long as you wanted. My husband and I had stayed a long time back then, sitting on the built-in wooden benches that line the chapel, wondering silently at the astounding manner in which you painted the story of the Virgin and Christ, the Last Judgment and the prophets. You managed to get it all in, without a sense of crowding. We had leaned our heads way back in order to see the panels at the top, and the blue, star-studded ceiling. They say it took you two years to complete the project? Two? Only two? How did you do that?

This time around, we had to make reservations ahead of time—for a specific 15-minute chunk of time. My husband and I are both painters, and we decided to purchase two successive chunks so we could have 30 minutes to be with your chapel.

I suspect you’d be shocked to learn that your chapel is no longer a place to worship God, but rather a place where people go to see art for its own sake. By the way, today’s visitors have to sit in an air-conditioned room for 15 minutes before being permitted entry into the chapel. Our bodies have to cool down so our breath does less damage to your frescoes. During the cool-down, we watched a short film explaining, among other things, that your patron Enrico Scrovegni was a rich nobleman who hired you to do this work because he was afraid for the soul of his father Reginaldo, whom Dante mentioned as a usurer in the 17th canto of his Inferno.

This visit, I felt an initial sense of shame upon entering your chapel. What we artists do now looks so chaotic, overproduced, pretentious and utterly materialistic compared to what you showed us. The gap between people in your time and ours is terribly large. You believed deeply in what you were doing—the Virgin, Christ, heaven and hell formed a circle of God around all your perceptions and artistic actions. Still, you were an artist who had work to do, a craft to develop, and while you worked you surely had to concentrate hard to get the right effects—especially in that difficult medium of fresco, where one has so little time to get things right.

My awe at your work made me cry. I especially loved the tender donkey on which the Virgin rides with the Christ child, the odd camel at the manger that you made up out of what you probably heard they looked like, and the weeping women around the body of Christ. The photograph, you know, has ruined all that for us—we know what everything on Earth looks like, and for many human beings today, nothing is left to the imagination. If artists nowadays tried to do what you did, their work would end up sentimental and corny.

Some might say that we contemporary artists ought to go ahead and just do what you did again. But you, of all artists, must know that we can’t do that. We can’t spin belief in what art can do in a time that doesn’t believe what you believed in. All we’d end up with is an imitation of the look of believing in your kind of art. We’d get something your century never even heard of: kitsch.

I could feel what it must have been like for a believer to have his faith confirmed and even intensified by your frescoes. But I do not believe that God offers salvation to wicked human beings simply if they believe in him. And when we are bad—which is most of the time—even the profound story embedded in your clear and convincing frescoes fails to change us.
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Giotto, I must ask this. Do you believe in collective guilt? Do you blame those of us who live today, as a whole, for the failure of our art to be informed by the kind of deep beliefs that drove yours? Our art isn’t like yours, but I suspect not for the reasons you think. We’re doing the best we can with what our century has dealt us. You try getting a commission to do a chapel today. There are few chapels to be built, and when there are, those in power would never hire the likes even of you.

Even you, the great Giotto, faced the problem of fashion in art. Your art made Cimabue look out of date, and once new artists figured out the laws of linear perspective, you ended up looking old-fashioned.

And you had to please your patron, Scrovegni. Nowadways, the patrons are more diffuse, but we still have to please them. Take the example of Guggenheim and MacArthur, whose support of the arts is a kind of secular salvation for having built their fortunes on uranium and insurance. But they don’t make esthetic decisions themselves. Instead, they hire outside panels of experts.

If I had a chance to take you through the Biennale I just saw, I’d stop to show you Fiona Tan (from the Netherlands) and Bruce Nauman (from the United States). I’d try to explain to you that even though their art isn’t beautiful in the simple, pure and compelling way yours is, it speaks to our times in a surprisingly living and forceful way. We don’t have your faith; we live with endless Doubt, with a capital D, and the best artists express that Doubt the way you expressed your faith.

By the way, I like your chapel and ceiling better than Mike’s in Rome. Yours is so much more beautifully connected to nature, and not so much about strutting your ability to do millions of muscles. You’re not nearly the show-off Mike was, perhaps because you were willing to submit your form to your content, and you weren’t quite so cocky. Your content was pure, clear and straightforward—some say innocent. Would that we could find that again.

Thank you so much for everything.

Yours truly,

Laurie Fendrich

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