Foster Dickson's Blog, page 71

Outfoxed

There is a reason that Saturday Night Live spoofs Fox News mercilessly. Whether you laugh at the ironic humor written into the pseudo-hosts’ banter or at the tidal wave of retracted falsehoods in tiny writing, these sketches carry to exaggeration a phenomenon . . . that isn’t funny at all in reality.

Since the election of 2016, a new hyper-focus on “fake news” has turned our collective attention to questions of journalistic legitimacy. With the decline of readership for print newspapers and the prevalence of social media, anyone with a little web savvy can create a “news” website, and anyone with a Facebook account can inundated us with shares of “news stories” that assert all sorts of wild things. Earlier this month, an NPR story on election-related fake news led their reporters to a suburbanite in California who had manufactured a false report about an investigation of Hillary Clinton that was shared hundreds of thousands of times. NPR’s web text for that story also contained this little nugget: the man “says his writers have tried to write fake news for liberals — but they just never take the bait.”

Interesting. Especially considering a University of Alabama study published last summer that explained how liberals are more interested than conservatives in hearing about “novel scientific data” regarding social and political issues. The UA press release explains that the lead researcher “found that conservatives were less interested in viewing empirical data than liberals in all three studies.” People who are interested in actual facts from reputable sources don’t just “take the bait.”

But lots of people do. In 2014, the Pew Research Center published its “Five Facts about Fox News,” one of which was that “the channel still drew a bigger audience than CNN, MSNBC and HLN combined.” While I appreciate a healthy, thoughtful conservatism as a political force in America, what I don’t appreciate about Fox News involves the assessments from Politifact and Politics USA that so much of the channel’s reportage is half-true or untrue. It’s not good for democracy to have the most-watched news provider on television to be portraying falsehoods as truth.

I live in the staunchly conservative Deep South, and I can’t even imagine Fox News’s market share down here. If it’s high nationally, then it’s got to be exorbitant in this region. I don’t think Deep Southern states needed any help being conservative – that trend predates Fox News by two hundred years – but their rhetoric does contribute to a more frightening trend: the willingness to believe in lies, because those lies reinforce a belief system. And what is perhaps most insidious about this methodology is the embedded notion that anyone who contradicts Fox News (with facts) is a liar— this is what causes all of us “liberals” the most chagrin: when we try to enter into a civil, fact-based discourse about the differences in our ideas, we’re the ones who are immediately mistrusted by the Fox News viewers!

As far as I’m concerned, Fox News doesn’t represent conservative thought at all. Though I only sometimes agree with them, people like George Will, Thomas Sowell, and David Brooks are actual conservative thinkers. No, the Fox News network is something else. It simply captures, broadcasts, and normalizes the blatantly irreverent attitudes of the middle- and working-class people who don’t understand politics and are angry as a result. There are millions of tax-paying, “salt of the earth” Americans who are smart, responsible, and hard-working in their daily lives, but who have little comprehension of the complexities of a federal system or of representative democracy, and are disgruntled about that— thus, we have the popularity of Fox News and the election of Donald Trump. Case and point: Fox News Insider’s Ann Coulter who after once proclaiming, “I Would Die for Trump,” recently tweeted this:

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That isn’t conservatism; that’s fair-weather partisanship. Any conservative thinker would demand that Trump, once elected, adhere to conservative principles. To contrast a Fox News rabble-rouser against an actual conservative writer, last April, George Will wrote an opinion piece for the Washington Post titled, “If Trump is nominated, the GOP must keep him out of the White House.” Likewise, the National Review – another publication that most Fox News viewers probably don’t read – ran an article in October titled “Crisis of the Conservative Intellectual: How populism replaced conservatism in the Republican Party.”

The kinds of flippant political antagonism that Fox News serves up do nothing more than cause many already-disgruntled voters to harden in their embitterment. And this trend against “the establishment” is little more than public resentment against the people who actually do understand American politics. And in this tepid mix, millions of voters get outfoxed. (Just read Jeet Heer’s recent piece in the The New Republic, “Trump’s Populism is a Sham.”)

Thankfully, as The Atlantic reported last August, Fox News may already be on the decline, by virtue of our current historical trajectory. Americans have been moving away from traditional media, like radio and TV, for decades now, and Fox News’s audience is largely older Americans, who still watch traditional TV and haven’t moved over to RSS feeds and news apps. So, as cable TV – an innovation of the 1980s – goes the way of the 8-track tapes and the mimeograph, so may Fox News fade into generational obscurity.

Filed under: Critical Thinking, Voting Tagged: bushwhacked, conservative, fake news, Fox News, NPR

A writer-editor-teacher’s quote of the week #150

You see the problem. “Snob” is a category in which nobody would willingly, or at least unironically, claim membership. Like the related (and similarly complicated) term “hipster,” it’s what you call someone else. What some of my nearest and dearest, I might as well admit, call me. When I wrinkle my nose at a restaurant or roll my eyes at a movie that everyone else seems to be enjoying, the word comes accusatorily tripping off my children’s tongues, and I find myself at pains to explain that they are quite mistaken. A snob is a person who brandishes borrowed notions of distinction, whereas I — by temperament as well as by profession a critic — have devoted much of my life to the disinterested application of true standards of excellence. It’s the very opposite of snobbery. The difference should be self-evident.

– from “Film Snob? Is That So Wrong?” by AO Scott, published in The New York Times on Sunday, October 4, 2015

Filed under: Critical Thinking, Film/Movies, Teaching, Writing and Editing Tagged: criticism, editing, film, teaching, writing

Where did twenty years go?

I graduated from college twenty years ago this month. I’d like to say that, back then, I was fresh-faced and optimistic, ready to take on the world, but that’s not true. I was twenty-two, heavy-bearded, skinny, generally pale, and still lived with my mother. I had a dead-end job at a veterinarian’s office and drove a 1983 Toyota Celica hatchback, which my insurance company regarded as a “sports car,” even though it had slung a rod during the only road trip I ever tried to take it on. (The seal on the large back window had also rotted, and the rain that collected in the spare-tire well sloshed around every time I turned.) Let’s just say that the world was not my oyster— and I knew it.

After walking across the stage in AUM’s gymnasium in December 1996, my three realities didn’t really mesh well together: a degree in English, which many people in the Deep South regard as a prime example of useless erudition; five or six years of work experience doing menial labor in a variety of settings; and an unrepentantly surly attitude about how my life had gone so far. So I took those skills into the one field where they would be appreciated: the bar business.

My first job after college was working the door at an all-night jazz-and-blues bar called 1048. A friend worked there as a bartender, and she called the week I graduated to ask if I wanted a job. Somebody had just quit, and December was always busy with college students coming home for the break. They needed somebody right now. So, in addition to my vet’s office job,  I started spending every Friday and Saturday night from 9 PM until 2 AM standing in the cold, taking up five-dollar bills, and arguing with people whose friends had gotten in before the bar reached capacity. For my trouble, I earned $35 and two free drinks. It felt like Heaven.

By the spring of 1997, I made two big career moves: a space had opened up for me to barback inside, and I found a job as an inventory clerk for a beeper company making $6.50 an hour, a full dollar-an-hour raise from my vet’s office job! I also upgraded from my 1983 Toyota hatchback to a 1980 Ford F-100 stepside with a three-on-the-column and a wooden bed. (I claimed to be “restoring” the truck, but the truth was much simpler: I didn’t know what to restore, or how.) All that hard work in college, reading Chaucer in Middle English and explicating John Milton, was really paying off. During the day, there were beeper serial numbers to be checked against reports, and at night, there were beer coolers and ice wells that needed filling. I was moving up in the world, from cleaning up kennels and cages to cleaning up spilled drinks and peanut shells.

Though, my parents didn’t see it the way I did. My mother complained that, when I came home just before dawn, the smell I brought with me – a combination a cigarette smoke, stale peanuts, and spilled beer – woke her up. And not exactly pleased with how I was utilizing my education, my dad called one day to say that he had friend who was willing to talk to me about a job driving a wrecker. I could tell that it was time to get my own place.

Though I was only a part-time barback at 1048, the year that I worked there gave me a real-world education to go with the book work I’d done in college. In the bar business, I learned what sons-of-bitches people could be. I witnessed a garden variety of depravity, dishonesty, and debauchery. I was working one night when a bar brawl broke out, the kind you see in the movies. And as exciting as it could be, I also found out one very harsh truth: big fun has big consequences. Some of the heavily lauded rioters from those days are now dead, or sick enough to be close.

I also got an education in beer, one of my true loves to this day. Before the microbrew craze of the last decade, 1048 was one of the only places in Montgomery that carried a variety of beers. Beyond Miller and Bud products, the most adventurous choices that most restaurants offered back then were Sam Adams, Corona, or maybe a Rolling Rock.  At 1048, you could get Samuel Smiths, Red Stripe, Shiner, Blue Moon, Anchor, Newcastle, Guinness, Boddington’s, Abita, and Sam Adams seasonals— most of which you can find in a grocery store these days. It was the first time I had ever seen a beer with a cork, instead of a cap. Each night that I worked, rather than giving my two comps to the flirtiest girl at the bar, I’d save them and try two new beers. (I didn’t care anything about wine, and whiskey was above my pay-grade back then.) Rather than sulking home drunk and broke after every shift, I was saving my money and taking advantage of my freebies.

Today, I hear about young college grads who supposedly can’t find jobs, but I’m inclined to think that they just can’t find jobs that they want. When I finished college, I knew that life was going to suck— but it was going to suck in the best possible way. My first apartment, which my having two jobs allowed me to afford, was a two-room wasteland that had been a sunroom on the back of a large house. In the kitchen, only the broiler worked, because the previous tenant had heated the place with the oven; she did that, I found out in the winter, because the wall heater was vented into a crawl space that allowed the wind to come in and blow out the pilot light. One day, when I tried to figure out how the roaches were getting in, I found their entryway in a kitchen cabinet— there was a hole about one-foot-square in the wall! But, you know what, the place was mine, I was paying for it, and no one could fuss or complain about anything I did there. And that felt like Heaven, too.

I would never want to return to being the bitter and confused young man that I was back then, but I do think back fondly to those days. It was a time before smart phones, when we had to leave the house and find out for ourselves what was going on. It was a time when meeting a certain person at a certain place and time meant something, because there was no texting “on my way” or “sorry, running late.” To get to know a girl, I had to look her in the face and talk to her, all nerves and embarrassment, hoping, right there in front of her and everyone else in the bar, that she didn’t make me look like a fool. There was less room for subterfuge— your face at that moment was your profile pic.

I heard recently that Generation X was the least supervised generation in American history. Largely left to our own devices, we learned to handle things— even things we really weren’t old enough to be handling. At the vet’s office, if a snarling dog was trying to bite my hand, I had to handle it. During my time keeping inventory, I learned to keep my mouth shut when I gave a missing-beeper report to a person I was pretty sure had stolen it. And as a barback, I had a job to do: with an empty bus pan, I’d have to work my way through a room jam-packed with drunks, with music too loud for anyone to hear me talk, and clear the empty beer bottles off the tables before they piled up, fell over, broke, and cut somebody. In all of those cases, whining that isn’t wasn’t fair, or that it was too hard, wouldn’t have done a damn bit of good. No one cared if we found the tasks entertaining, and no one felt it their duty to “reach” us.

The mid- to late 1990s were a really good time to be young, the way I recall it. Even though I was stuck, because of socio-economic circumstances, in Folmar-era Montgomery, Alabama, the times felt like good ones. Sure, I was an overeducated manual laborer with a beat-up truck, a shitty apartment, and two low-wage jobs, but something about that garage-band way of life felt right. I sometimes tell my millenial students that I grew up back when ‘alternative’ was called that because it was an alternative to the mainstream. My generation understood what Michael Stipe meant when he sang “Offer me solutions, offer me alternatives, and I . . . decline!” Even though Kurt Cobain died in 1994, what he stood for kept going for a little while longer. And what he stood for was what got me through college and the bleak period afterward: an artful defiance of circumstance.

Though now I use the Internet as much as anyone, I still think that it and prevalence of digital devices destroyed the smug toughness of my generation. When I was coming up, if someone said I couldn’t do something, I did it just to prove them wrong. Today, if you tell a young person that he can’t do something, he tells his parents and they report you for bullying. Over the last twenty years, gaining the ability to solve problems by poking our index fingers at a business-card sized screen has just destroyed something in us— something that was omnipresent twenty years ago, something that was ugly but vital, difficult but challenging, hard but necessary.

Filed under: Alabama, Education, Generation X, Random, The Deep South Tagged: 1990s, 1996, Alabama, college, Generation X, montgomery

A writer-editor-teacher’s quote of the week #149

Our expectations are constructed through our values systems, upbringing, and past experiences, and can be very different from those of others. These expectations can become major sources of frustration when not met or matched by others’ behavior, such as that of our tutees.

The best thing to do is to try to enter tutoring without any expectations at all. This, of course, includes giving up expectations you may have of your future students and their personalities, their academic skills or progress, and their motivation and attitude toward you. Every child is different. They have different backgrounds, different strengths, and different weaknesses. Some may be thrilled to be tutored; others may be suspicious. A tutor’s conception of a student should be a blank slate. Tutors must be prepared to accept and work with any student they are assigned.

– from the chapter “Attitudes, Anxieties, and Expectations” in Tutoring Matters: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About How to Tutor by Jerome Rabow, Tiffany Chin, and Nima Fahimian.

Filed under: Critical Thinking, Education, High School, Multiculturalism, Race, Schools, Social Justice, Teaching, Writing and Editing Tagged: diversity, editing, Education, teaching, tutoring, writing

Teach.

On the evening that my students and I met the traveling students from Phillips Exeter Academy for the first time, their teacher Olutoyin Augustus-Ikwuakor had a sheet full of activities planned for our two-hour preliminary session. Mrs. Augustus-Ikwuakor and I had corresponded in the spring about their trip from New Hampshire to Alabama, where they would spend four days in late November learning about social justice and Civil Rights issues, and she wanted her students to meet and collaborate with some local students. On the Monday after Thanksgiving, we were gathered in their hotel’s conference room to eat dinner together, to get to know each other, and to do some educational groundwork. As we looked over her list of activities, I asked if I could have a few minutes to talk with them about Southern history, and she replied, a little surprised, “Oh, you want to teach?”

I did want to teach. The history of the Deep South, with respect to social justice issues, cannot be approached casually, for that can easily lead to something like shell-shock. The brutality of this history is evident immediately to anyone who comes to survey a broad spectrum of museum exhibits that include graphic images of the burnt and battered bodies of lynching victims and scenes of police-led mob violence. This would be a lot to digest for a group of teenagers from New England who had given up the latter half of their two-week Thanksgiving break, and for my students, some of whom had only encountered the sanitized overviews in social studies textbooks and school-lunchroom pow-wows that celebrate Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr. No, this was the real stuff. What these 27 students would see and hear constitutes the reasons that the Civil Rights movement had to happen, and needs to continue.

After we had finished meeting and greeting, and munching on double-decker sandwiches and chicken fingers from a local deli, we got down to business— and it was my turn.

The South is a land of myth, I told them all. This lesson is relevant both to outsiders and to long-timers. In this region, famous for its storytelling and for its violence, the understood truths matter more than actual empirical truths. The understood truths of white supremacy dictated many people’s actions, public and private, from the late 1700s until the mid-1800s. Those shattered ideals then became the myth of the Lost Cause, which dominated the next century, from the end of the Civil War until the Civil Rights movement, effectively laying the foundation for Jim Crow. Finally, those myths were shattered in the mid-20th century by a movement whose protestors declared, “We shall overcome,” and “I AM A MAN.” And for those of us who lived after the movement, those supremacist ideals are as hard to fathom as ideals of equality would have been for the Southerners of the past. So tread lightly, I told them, and be slow to judge. For these short days would only be glimpses into something very large and very complex.

The next morning, our groups convened in a misty rain outside of the Equal Justice Initiative law firm. When it was time to go in, we were greeted warmly and led upstairs by programs assistant Joshua Kubakundimana, where we sat down for a presentation by him, communications director Maki Somosot and law fellow Brooks Emanuel. For about an hour that morning, the students and us teachers listened and asked questions and learned just how bad it still is, how severe the racial imbalances are between the general population and the incarcerated population, and how EJI is working to raise awareness and to remedy these injustices one at a time. Then, as we moved from a general overview of EJI’s work into their death penalty work specifically, we watched a short video about one of their successes, involving a death-row exoneree named Anthony Ray Hinton.

Hinton, the video explained, had been wrongfully convicted of two murders in 1986. Though evidence in his favor should easily have cast reasonable doubt, Hinton, who was black, was convicted by a white judge, a white prosecutor, and an all-white jury. He then spent thirty years in a 5’ x 7’ cell on Alabama’s death row at Holman Prison near Atmore.

When the video was over, the EJI staffers, who had moved to the rear of the large room, turned the lights back on, and as we turned to watch them walk back to the front, they were accompanied by Anthony Ray Hinton. Nearly every one of us gasped. Here was the man himself, walking calmly and confidently among us, wearing a black three-piece suit and a red shirt and tie, his beard closely cropped and grey. As Hinton arrived at the front, I don’t think any of us knew what to say. I don’t think we knew whether to clap for him, or to wait on him to speak, or to go up and give him a hug. Breaking the silence, Hinton told us that most speakers would stand but that he preferred to sit.

For the next hour, Anthony Ray Hinton did what I had tried to do the night before: he taught. As he detailed his experiences, from his genuine surprise at being arrested while he cut his mother’s grass to his imaginative ways of allowing his mind to leave that small cell, Hinton showed us what true patience looked like. He had left his mother’s yard in handcuffs at age 29. Here he sat before us, nearly 60, after spending ten thousand days alone in a room the size of a walk-in closet. During the time he was on death row at Holman, more than fifty people were executed, he told us, and another twenty-two committed suicide. From the back row, I watched as many of the students wept along with Anthony Ray Hinton, who wept himself as he told his story with a mix of dry humor and firm resolve and deep sadness.

Seldom in my adult life have I been in the presence of someone whose suffering and whose humility about that suffering have combined to such great effect. Hinton wasn’t telling us his story so that we would like him or feel sorry for him. He was telling us a truth that he knew we didn’t know: how he and others find themselves in the belly of the beast, unaware of how to connect the dots between their actions and their predicament, and incapable of reaching anyone who can help. His example made it clear that the criminal justice system harbors some people within its wall who should not be there. Anthony Ray Hinton hadn’t researched this phenomenon, he hadn’t written a book about it, he didn’t found a non-profit to advocate for this cause—he had lived it.

When Hinton’s talk was done, it was nearing our time to leave, and he quite amiably agreed to have his picture made with the students. Yet, as I watched, the scene of that picture was endearingly grotesque. Here stood this large man, who had spent three decades in a living hell, surrounded by smiling teenagers, giddy and proud to be in his presence as though he were a celebrity. And behind them on a massive wall, shallow shelves held large jars of earth, collected by volunteers, which had come from the sites of lynchings around Alabama. Where Hinton himself was a living reminder of injustice, the rows of jars that reached to the tall ceiling testified to the enormity of the problem and to the length of time that it has been going on.

During his talk, Anthony Ray Hinton told us about how white supremacist myths put him behind bars. According to Hinton’s telling, before he ever stepped foot in a jail, one of the detectives who arrested him explained in the car why he would be convicted: almost everyone involved in his trial would be white, and he was black. And that came true. Where slavery and Jim Crow represent the most brutal aspects in Southern history, Anthony Ray Hinton’s story represents our ongoing plight in this land of myth: changing ourselves, our attitudes, and our values to the extent that race is no longer a determiner of outcome or opportunity. Until then . . . it will remain necessary to keeping sharing hard truths, and to keeping hearing them.

Filed under: Alabama, Civil Rights, Critical Thinking, Education, High School, Local Issues, Race, Social Justice, Teaching, The Deep South Tagged: Alabama, Anthony Ray Hinton, death penalty, EJI, teaching

Grow up.

Every school year, in my twelfth grade English class, we have a few weeks after finishing the Middle Ages and before exams. Two weeks is too little time to start on the Renaissance, which we would then finish in January and February, so I have them read some good current journalism about what it means (and what it takes) to get a college education. If they haven’t really thought about that by December of their senior year, then it’s high time they do.

This year, alongside other articles from The New York Times, The Atlantic, and The Washington Post, I had my seniors to read a long-form piece from Salon.com, from June 2014, about the “tuition spiral,” which was ominously titled “Colleges are full of it: Behind the three-decade scheme to raise tuition, bankrupt generations, and hypnotize the media.” Somehow I had either overlooked this article in past years, or had opted not to include it due to its length – I don’t know which – but its substance is eye-opening.

The upward-trending “tuition spiral” began in the early 1980s and hasn’t stopped yet. When I was in college from 1992 through 1996, I can remember tuition going up nearly every quarter, and if my memory serves me, it had nearly doubled by the time I graduated. However, Salon’s Thomas Frank wrote, there’s this:

But somehow nothing ever gets done. The trend does continue. And for 30 years the journalists who cover the subject have followed the same pointless script. They have hunted fruitlessly for the legitimate expense that they knew must be driving up the prices. They have chased repeatedly after the wrong answers, blaming everybody and everything except for the obvious culprits. They have related to us the politicians’ plans for bringing the spiral to a stop—plans that everyone can see have virtually no chance of succeeding.

So what’s causing it? Frank explains to his readers that, while university administrators blame everyone else in the equation for the fact that tuition has gone up 1,100–1,200% in the last thirty years, the culprits might be the very people who are raising it:

The possibility that higher tuition prices were going to pay for rapidly multiplying and yet educationally unnecessary administrators was not really raised in earnest until a memorable page-one series published in 1996 by the Philadelphia Inquirer. This interpretation had the virtue of being accurate: Unlike tenured faculty, university administrations actually have grown by 369 percent since the mid-1970s.

I have plenty of friends who are university professors, and I can tell you that neither their salaries nor their numbers have increased 1,200% in thirty years; nor can that be said for custodians, secretaries, or librarians. Maybe all that extra dough is not trickling down into services that students actually use.

However, I will readily concede that tuition should have gone up in thirty years and should have outpaced inflation. Though computers were available in the mid-1990s when I was finishing my bachelor’s degree, I didn’t know anybody who had one. I and everyone else I knew completed our education with three basic components: professors, books, and typewriters. Ten years later, when I went back to grad school at that same university, there were computers everywhere! Those machines and software, and the infrastructure and personnel to support them, had to have cost millions of dollars! I’ve asked my high school students before: would you consider going to a college that had affordable tuition but that used only professors, books, and typewriters? They all roundly dismiss the notion as foolish, absurd, nonsensical.

And that tip of the hat to the very real cost increase doesn’t mention the improvements to “amenities,” which Frank also discusses. When I was an undergraduate, the campus police were just above laughable, and the school certainly didn’t offer a “Wellness Center,” where we could work out on state-of-the-art equipment. My tuition bought me instruction from professors and access to the library; the rest was up to me.

But back to Thomas Frank. So what do we do about the fact that a college education is, in terms of cost, out of reach for most families, if they had to pay cash from their own pockets? Now that we know . . .

The first thing is to understand the situation, and the situation seems pretty clear. In addition to the Salon.com article, I also had my students to read two other articles on the same subject – A New York Times opinion piece from April 2015 and a September 2016 article from The Atlantic – and both said basically the same things. (Frank Bruni has been writing about these subjects for years.)

Part of the problem is that students are paying for too many things that have absolutely nothing with getting an education: high-end dorms, workout centers, bureaucrats. Students and their families need to start asking, What would it cost if I didn’t want those things? What if I wanted just the classes? That might force colleges to create tiered tuition plans that include the ability to opt-out of some features, thus allowing parents to look their children and say, I’m sorry, honey, but you’re to have do without the workout center. Speaking as a nontraditional adult student, I was in graduate school from 2005 until 2008, and though my “tuition” entitled me to that Wellness Center, I never went once— and never considered going.

When we know the facts, we can act accordingly. Now we know that we’re not sending our high-school graduates to college; we’re sending them to overly expensive year-round summer camps where layers of paid professionals are charged with the duty of keeping them safe, coddling them, counseling them, reminding them, making sure they have WiFi everywhere they go— let’s be honest: allowing them not to take responsibility for themselves.

Maybe it’s time for all of us to stop paying these overblown costs. Maybe it’s time we save some of our hard-earned cash, stop protecting them, and let them do what we all did: grow up.

Filed under: Critical Thinking, Education, High School, Social Justice Tagged: college, Education, money

A writer-editor-teacher’s quote of the week #148

Q: If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be?

A: This reminds me that I am never going to be in a position to require the president to do anything. If we should have a president who needs to read one book, I would advise him or her to read none, but instead to find some smart people who disagree with her or him and listen to them carefully.

– from the New York Times Book Review‘s “By the Book” interview with Wendell Berry, from March 13, 2016

Filed under: Critical Thinking, Teaching, Writing and Editing Tagged: editing, interview, New York Times, president, teaching, Wendell Berry, writing

To regard others as worthy of kindness

In the thirteenth chapter of Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, after the often-repeated “Love is patient, love is kind” passages, we read another often-repeated portion:

11. When I was a child, I used to talk as a child, think as a child, reason as a child; when I became a man, I put aside childish things.

12. At present we see indistinctly, as in a mirror, but then face to face. At present I know partially; then I shall know fully, as I am fully known.

We come into the world knowing nothing, not even who or what we are. We can’t even open our eyes, the new light is so bright, and our only recognizable instinct is to suck on anything put into our mouths.

Our parents are our first educators. During our earliest years, they teach us the basics, things we never remember not knowing, like how to aim a spoon at our mouths and actually get the food in there. Others around us, like neighbors and daycare workers, teach us to be social: to regard others as worthy of kindness, to value cooperation and order. As our consciousness of the world grows, our knowledge of ourselves is enhanced by the ability to compare unlike ways of living to our own. Though St. Paul’s letter is addressing our relationship to God, in the temporal world we also come to know others as we are known to them.

After we have grown up ourselves, we have a duty to help raise up the “generations coming on.” This duty includes not only teaching practical skills, like cleaning up messes and tying shoes, it also includes instructing young people about the moral obligations to the people around them. It might be cute to say, “I’m lookin’ out for number one!” but if that were a valid philosophy at all, we would have discarded all notions of society long ago, and rolled right into anarchy. No, we must look out for ourselves and for each other, and as hard as it may be to face, part of that duty means recognizing when and how we hurt other people.

It is this consciousness – that other people are like ourselves – that raises us up, to be the best that a human being can be. An awareness that other people also suffer requires each of us to respond, hopefully with kindness, empathy, and even charity. Without that understanding of human nature, which comes from sources both inside and outside of a classroom, we devolve into anti-social brutes who make choices based only on perceived self-interest.

Our families and our communities have a role to play in dismantling the divisiveness and anger that now dominates our American culture. This derision cannot be handled on a mass scale with politics; it must be taken apart one individual at a time. Each of us must take each step toward peace in each instance when we have an opportunity to keep the anger going. Yes, it’s hard to embrace dignity and kindness while another person spews venom onto something we value. But reciprocating with our own venom will only leave two people tainted and hurt, where one hurt is too many.

My own education has steeped me in the liberal arts tradition of critical inquiry and in the facts of Jim Crow and of Civil Rights history. Some of that education occurred inside a classroom, but much of it did not. Spending time learning about man’s inhumanity to man changed how I view life, culture, and politics. Applying the lessons of the past to situations that I see in the present makes me fearful that our nation is about to repeat some terrible errors in judgment. Unfortunately, many people around me, in Alabama, don’t see it that way.

But some of my own experiences have educated me on how to approach other people on matters where we disagree and on how to respond when they are emphatic that I am wrong. I’m always prepared for the knee-jerk anger, the unwillingness to listen, and the refusal to budge on matters of ideals. Often enough, these difficult situations arise between me and people who I care about very much, but I am firm in my conviction that, if those people truly care about me, then they will value my honesty and respect our differences, which is what I will gladly do for them.

Though I have learned a great deal in classrooms and from books, I do share one idea in common with conservative-minded people. I also value a real-world education, rich in everyday experiences that enhance one’s value system with practical insights. That real-world education should teach a person how to live effectively among other people, which includes dealing civilly with diversity of opinion and backing up one’s own ideas with facts. Forrest Gump famously asserted that “stupid is as stupid does,” and unfortunately, to have a real-world education lead to embitterment, intolerance, and anxiety is stupid. If a person’s real-world education leads him to retreat from and fear the world’s diversity, then he didn’t learn anything. That man who comes to those conclusions is like the child in the back of the classroom who puts his head down during the lesson and leaves just as ignorant as he arrived.

Anyone who has raised children has seen what behaviors result from ignorance. Toddlers, who know little about the world, scream and cry when they don’t get their way. They hit other children who take their toys. They run from their parents, with no idea of where they are going or what they will do next. When a person is driven by visceral emotions, like self-involved anxiety, the actions that will result won’t be much better than a child’s. And no matter whether one’s leanings are conservative, liberal, or moderate, one thing that we all should share in common with our fellow man: the desire not to think, speak, or act as a child.

Filed under: Civil Rights, Critical Thinking, Education, Schools, Social Justice, Teaching, Voting, Writing and Editing Tagged: childhood, Corinthians, Education, Paul, teaching

That’s news to me.

On the Monday of Thanksgiving week, the Wall Street Journal ran a chilling story about the young people of our nation. It wasn’t about drug use, unplanned pregnancies, binge drinking, casual sex, or dropout rates. Far more frighteningly, the report relayed the findings of a Stanford University study about the current generation’s inability to distinguish real news from paid advertisements. Put simply, they don’t know corporate bullshit when they’re looking right at it.

But we can’t necessarily be mad at them. The generation who have raised them are at least partly to blame. Young people who are currently under age 18 were born after 1998, when the explosion of personal technology was beginning. These kids have never lived in a world without ready access to a screen that will comply with their every request. By the time the oldest among them were starting school, both iTunes and Facebook had been launched. They can never remember a time that these innovations weren’t around. A great deal of the problem is our willingness to allow developing young minds to be inundated by messages from screen media.

And the WSJ‘s Sue Shellenbarger tells us what that has done to them:

Some 82% of middle-schoolers couldn’t distinguish between an ad labeled “sponsored content” and a real news story on a website.

The Stanford researchers who conducted the study used a population sample of nearly 8,000 ranging in age from middle school to college-age, and also found this:

Many students judged the credibility of newsy tweets based on how much detail they contained or whether a large photo was attached, rather than on the source.

It’s no wonder that I’m having trouble teaching my high school students about evaluating the credibility of a source they will use in a research paper— No, a blog author named “crazybob” who writes for “The Know It All Ninja” isn’t someone you should trust.

I’m also trying to teach my students to be critical thinkers, and this fact from the article helps me to understand what I’m up against:

More than two out of three middle-schoolers couldn’t see any valid reason to mistrust a post written by a bank executive arguing that young adults need more financial-planning help.

Any Gen-Xer will tell you: never trust a corporation! Never. These kids desperately need a healthy dose of cynicism. So where are their parents? Probably on their phones.

By the end of the article, one cognizant, thoughtful parent does appear; he watchdogs his kids, talks with them about subjects that confuse them, and blocks sites he doesn’t trust. But the rest of America’s middle-schoolers must be flapping in the wind. The article says “that preteens are online 7-1/2 hours a day outside of school.” In the stupefied words of this generation: Wait— what?

My dad used to laugh about something he had heard in one of Redd Foxx’s latter-day TV shows. In the show, Foxx was a grandfather, and in the scene, he told his grandson, who had done something to get in trouble, “Life is hard . . . and it’s even harder when you’re stupid.” He’s right, it is.

We can’t survive as a culture if our children are screen-addicted, gullible, and foolish. And it’s not the schools’ job to fix this. Parents provide the devices and pay the bills, otherwise these teens and pre-teens wouldn’t be able to get online “outside of school.” If we all work together to teach young people the difference between fake and real news, then we change the course of their thinking.

However, that also begs askance: how many adults don’t know the difference?

Filed under: Critical Thinking, Education, High School, Reading, Schools, Teaching Tagged: Critical Thinking, fake news, social media, students, teaching, Wall Street Journal

A writer-editor-teacher’s quote of the week #147

Conventional wisdom has it that most of the poetry written in an era is fated to be minor. In the cosmic view of things, this proposition seems self-evident. Judged by the standards of Shakespeare and Milton, how many contemporaries will strike future generations as major? Critics, whose job it is to make discriminations, are not the only ones who put poets in their place. The poets themselves do it unconsciously. It may help motivate us — some of us anyway — to adopt Hemingway’s metaphor and imagine that we are getting in the ring with Rilke when we write our next poem. Reading, however, as lovers of poetry rather than as pugnacious aspirants to personal greatness, we are bound to be less severe in our judgment, more generous with our hearts. Reading for the pure pleasure of it, we find abundance.

— from David Lehman’s “Foreword” to The Best American Poetry, 1991, edited by Mark Strand

Filed under: Poetry, Teaching, Writing and Editing Tagged: David Lehman, editing, Mark Strand, poetry, teaching, writing