Lionofzion's comment on my recent post about fixing incivility got me thinking about a classic work of research on learning. LoZ argues that in many instances you can't fix incivility until you get at the reasons why people are uncivil--that as long as one party sees the other as profoundly wrong there is no almost no chance for respect.
I see that point, and it certainly describes one type of incivility--the sort based in, for want of a better word, contempt. And LoZ is right, it is almost impossible to fix contempt. (Gladwell's Blink reports a study suggesting that the strongest predictor of divorce is contempt between spouses, surely a sign of the ability of contempt to ruin relationships.)
Fortunately, not all incivility is at the level of contempt. Nor is all civility deeply rooted in respect for others. So the question becomes: how can we distinguish types of civility and incivility, and having distinguished them, support the types that get to a useful, good end?
Enter the classic work of research on learning, Marton, Hounshell, and Entwistle, The Experience of Learning (known by its fans in Provo, UT as the "Christmas Book" because of its bright red and green cover.) EoL is one of the first works I know to turn the focus away from teaching to learning, and once focused on learning, EoL asks all sorts of important questions about how and why students learn.
In the opening chapter, Noel Entwistle points out that student approaches to learning follow three rough paths. Some students are surface learners, motivated by a desire to keep up with course requirements. Surface learners do not reflect on their learning, they memorize, and they think of knowledge as discrete bits of information. Strategic learners seek the highest possible grades, and because this is their goal, they direct their work to the preferences of their teachers. Deep learners are driven by a desire to understand for themselves. They create connections between pieces of information and across their courses. They aim for learning to become a part of them, indistinguishable from who they think they are deep inside.
Both the categories and the motivations of deep, strategic, and surface learning can be applied to civility. Take, for example, the role of nonviolence in the civil rights movement. Many white Southerners (and some blacks) prided themselves on Southern hospitality. These people with a surface commitment to civility would be polite to each other in public, while holding the most noxious views of others in private. Civility was atomistic--to be applied in one case or with one person but not another.
Young activists in the movement were strategic about civility. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee embraced non-violence as a tactic, its impact to be measured by its ability to win victories for protesters. As long as peaceful protest seemed to win the day, SNCC was on board. But when nonviolence made no headway, or opened the door for unapologetic racists to win the day, SNCC renounced it. Only the faction of the movement affiliated with Martin Luther King, Jr. and/or the historic nonviolent organizations like Fellowship of Reconciliation made a deep commitment to nonviolence as a way of being, not a way to get something.
This post should not necessarily be read as a condemnation of strategic civility in favor of deep civility. If you want to get things done--make decisions in faculty meeting, bring about social change, win in an adversarial setting--then strategic civility may be the best tool. But deep civility holds out another promise--that faculty meetings, civic engagement projects, victories in policy debates, in the courtroom, etc,--are at best partial measures. There is a more profound option--that a commitment to right relationships with others leads to an entirely other point of view, where civility is a byproduct of the decent, long-suffering, nonviolent people who live along side us.
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
How do you fix incivility?
This piece in the New Yorker describes the conditions in the US Senate. By nearly all accounts, the Senate is incapable of carrying out its deliberative role in a civil way, and as a result it is either paralyzed by the intransigence of the minority party, or diminished by the naked use of power by the majority party.
In one way or another, public deliberations in many other places--state legislatures, shareholder meetings, parent-teacher conferences, faculty meetings--are similarly frustrated.
Incivility in public life has of course birthed many proposals on how to resolve it. The ones I know of fall into four categories:
1. the pledge: people who would otherwise act uncivilly take a pledge in advance that they will respect each other. Rebecca Attwood in Inside Higher Education reported on the work of Geoff Shamrock who has created a "Hippocratic Oath" for faculty and administrators. John Kesler, an attorney and activist in Salt Lake City has proposed a series of rules for civil behavior in Utah's governmental bodies.
2. casuistry: Albert Johnson and Stephen Toulmin wrote the classic book on the virtues of casuistry, or arguing by the specifics of the case. Their position is this: that arguing from abstract moral principles leads to impasses; working from specifics allows people who would otherwise not talk to each other (parties to the abortion debate, for example) can find agreement on specific issues (reducing teen pregnancies in the poor neighborhoods of St. Louis, for example). Utah leaders are trying this approach on our own tough issues, starting with the designation of public lands as wilderness.
3. first principles: The moral philosopher Michael Sandel proposed in a recent TED talk that debate ought to focus on first principles instead of cases. His position is this: people on different sides of policy issues may in fact hold similar positions on the core issues behind the policy disagreement. Conservatives and liberals may both value fairness highly, they just see its application differently. So talking about fairness instead of the details of health care allocations can forge common ground.
4. third parties: Here the view is that a neutral third party with a reputation for fairness and impartiality can help parties to a conflict come to a compromise position at least minimally acceptable to the disagreeing parties. This approach has somehow lodged itself in the legal system, where confrontation is otherwise seen as the fastest pathway to a victory.
I am certain that each approach works in specific settings (which I guess makes me a casuist), but their differences mask a common assumption--that spoken disagreements can be resolved by more talking.
There is certainly truth here, but people intent on solving incivility might ask whether actions rather than words might do more to resolve disagreement. There is a hint of this in the history of the Senate, where opponents used to eat, live, and travel together. Today that happens no longer.
There is poetic and philosophical support to the view as well--Emily Dickinson's injunction to "tell all the truth but tell it slant," Jon Kay's suggestion that goals are best reached via "Obliquity."
But for me the most compelling evidence is experiential: people who work side-by-side on a project unrelated to their disagreement are likely to develop a common bond that can supersede spoken disagreement. This is the result of many service-learning and neighborhood work projects; it is the wisdom behind mundane committee service; it is an outcome of responding to disaster.
In the long run, of course, none of these solutions is a solution. They are, instead, responses to problems, cough drops, not cures for a cough. But the trend among people worried about incivility seems to be to talk about it. Why not act instead?
In one way or another, public deliberations in many other places--state legislatures, shareholder meetings, parent-teacher conferences, faculty meetings--are similarly frustrated.
Incivility in public life has of course birthed many proposals on how to resolve it. The ones I know of fall into four categories:
1. the pledge: people who would otherwise act uncivilly take a pledge in advance that they will respect each other. Rebecca Attwood in Inside Higher Education reported on the work of Geoff Shamrock who has created a "Hippocratic Oath" for faculty and administrators. John Kesler, an attorney and activist in Salt Lake City has proposed a series of rules for civil behavior in Utah's governmental bodies.
2. casuistry: Albert Johnson and Stephen Toulmin wrote the classic book on the virtues of casuistry, or arguing by the specifics of the case. Their position is this: that arguing from abstract moral principles leads to impasses; working from specifics allows people who would otherwise not talk to each other (parties to the abortion debate, for example) can find agreement on specific issues (reducing teen pregnancies in the poor neighborhoods of St. Louis, for example). Utah leaders are trying this approach on our own tough issues, starting with the designation of public lands as wilderness.
3. first principles: The moral philosopher Michael Sandel proposed in a recent TED talk that debate ought to focus on first principles instead of cases. His position is this: people on different sides of policy issues may in fact hold similar positions on the core issues behind the policy disagreement. Conservatives and liberals may both value fairness highly, they just see its application differently. So talking about fairness instead of the details of health care allocations can forge common ground.
4. third parties: Here the view is that a neutral third party with a reputation for fairness and impartiality can help parties to a conflict come to a compromise position at least minimally acceptable to the disagreeing parties. This approach has somehow lodged itself in the legal system, where confrontation is otherwise seen as the fastest pathway to a victory.
I am certain that each approach works in specific settings (which I guess makes me a casuist), but their differences mask a common assumption--that spoken disagreements can be resolved by more talking.
There is certainly truth here, but people intent on solving incivility might ask whether actions rather than words might do more to resolve disagreement. There is a hint of this in the history of the Senate, where opponents used to eat, live, and travel together. Today that happens no longer.
There is poetic and philosophical support to the view as well--Emily Dickinson's injunction to "tell all the truth but tell it slant," Jon Kay's suggestion that goals are best reached via "Obliquity."
But for me the most compelling evidence is experiential: people who work side-by-side on a project unrelated to their disagreement are likely to develop a common bond that can supersede spoken disagreement. This is the result of many service-learning and neighborhood work projects; it is the wisdom behind mundane committee service; it is an outcome of responding to disaster.
In the long run, of course, none of these solutions is a solution. They are, instead, responses to problems, cough drops, not cures for a cough. But the trend among people worried about incivility seems to be to talk about it. Why not act instead?
Sunday, August 1, 2010
Are we good at discussing but bad at deciding?
Two things about professors seem to be universally believed--that we are good at leading discussions in the classroom and bad at making decisions in the faculty meeting. I do not know why this is--one would think that people whose professions use discussion to lead to learning would excel at using discussion to lead to decisions. And I am not sure that the beliefs are true--good institutions make lots of good decisions, and bad discussions take place everywhere. But it is worth considering why discussion and decision are so segregated in our thinking about higher education.
Why is this the case? Perhaps it is because professors are, before they are faculty, people. As people they share assumptions and practices about decision-making (and -makers) with the general public, a group characterized by ever-stronger ties with like-minded people and ever more hostile relations with people who disagree. If this is the case, then the classroom is the location of like-mindedness and meetings the location (at least potentially) for confrontations with those who disagree. And so discussion is comfortable because it takes place in an atmosphere of consensus, while decisions are difficult because disagreement is the central context.
Or it could be that classroom discussions and university decision-making come from entirely different traditions, so that while they are neighbors on campus they are culturally and intellectually strangers. There is certainly some truth to this theory. Faculty governance emerged after a long period of conflict with administrators in the late-19th and early-20th centuries, (for an excellent history of this period read George Marsden's The Soul of the American University) and when it did it adopted a set of practices codified in two earlier periods of conflict--the years of the early republic (when American parliamentary procedure first emerged) and the years of the civil war and reconstruction, when Robert's Rules of Order came to rule public meetings. The history of learning through discussion is much older, dating to at least to Socrates in the Western tradition, and seems to have flourished independently of institutions of higher learning.
Or perhaps it is the case that there are discussion people and decision people in higher education. This is certainly the case in the self-image of some faculty. It is not at all uncommon for a faculty member, in explaining her/his disengagement from contentious governance issues, to say "I'm here because I love to teach," or "it is the students who really matter to me," implying that while governance is important, it is peripheral to the real work--learning--of the institution. And it is also the case that administrators, department chairs, and presidents of the faculty senate will sometimes wonder out loud why their colleagues won't join the hard work of joint decision-making, favoring instead the safe harbor of the classroom.
Or maybe there is a distinction in beliefs about what is at stake in classroom discussions and decision-making meetings. The classroom carries high potential (a person's life may be transformed forever) but low stakes at any one gathering (after all, one dull discussion of Walden does not guarantee that students will forever lead lives of quiet desperation). Conversely, decision gatherings are often low potential (insert here your favorite story about months spent debating campus policy on the use of chalk to advertise events on campus sidewalks), but high stakes--once a decision is made, the die is set.
Whatever the explanation, higher education needs to focus here, both because the work of most campuses is diminished by poor discussions and poor decision-making; and because the same malady afflicts our public lives. If you believe in democracy, or politics, or the possibility of people making decisions that shape their lives, then you have to hope that people learn to discuss difficult issues, and then make decent determinations about those issues. And if you believe that learning can take place in the space between the ideas held by individuals, then you have to hope that we figure out how to take fuller advantage of discussion's reputation.
Why is this the case? Perhaps it is because professors are, before they are faculty, people. As people they share assumptions and practices about decision-making (and -makers) with the general public, a group characterized by ever-stronger ties with like-minded people and ever more hostile relations with people who disagree. If this is the case, then the classroom is the location of like-mindedness and meetings the location (at least potentially) for confrontations with those who disagree. And so discussion is comfortable because it takes place in an atmosphere of consensus, while decisions are difficult because disagreement is the central context.
Or it could be that classroom discussions and university decision-making come from entirely different traditions, so that while they are neighbors on campus they are culturally and intellectually strangers. There is certainly some truth to this theory. Faculty governance emerged after a long period of conflict with administrators in the late-19th and early-20th centuries, (for an excellent history of this period read George Marsden's The Soul of the American University) and when it did it adopted a set of practices codified in two earlier periods of conflict--the years of the early republic (when American parliamentary procedure first emerged) and the years of the civil war and reconstruction, when Robert's Rules of Order came to rule public meetings. The history of learning through discussion is much older, dating to at least to Socrates in the Western tradition, and seems to have flourished independently of institutions of higher learning.
Or perhaps it is the case that there are discussion people and decision people in higher education. This is certainly the case in the self-image of some faculty. It is not at all uncommon for a faculty member, in explaining her/his disengagement from contentious governance issues, to say "I'm here because I love to teach," or "it is the students who really matter to me," implying that while governance is important, it is peripheral to the real work--learning--of the institution. And it is also the case that administrators, department chairs, and presidents of the faculty senate will sometimes wonder out loud why their colleagues won't join the hard work of joint decision-making, favoring instead the safe harbor of the classroom.
Or maybe there is a distinction in beliefs about what is at stake in classroom discussions and decision-making meetings. The classroom carries high potential (a person's life may be transformed forever) but low stakes at any one gathering (after all, one dull discussion of Walden does not guarantee that students will forever lead lives of quiet desperation). Conversely, decision gatherings are often low potential (insert here your favorite story about months spent debating campus policy on the use of chalk to advertise events on campus sidewalks), but high stakes--once a decision is made, the die is set.
Whatever the explanation, higher education needs to focus here, both because the work of most campuses is diminished by poor discussions and poor decision-making; and because the same malady afflicts our public lives. If you believe in democracy, or politics, or the possibility of people making decisions that shape their lives, then you have to hope that people learn to discuss difficult issues, and then make decent determinations about those issues. And if you believe that learning can take place in the space between the ideas held by individuals, then you have to hope that we figure out how to take fuller advantage of discussion's reputation.
Monday, July 26, 2010
Is teaching work? Is learning?
I don't mean to be asking nonsensical questions here, but the more I think about what work means the more I wonder whether teaching and learning, as we usually practice them, are work. Here is what I mean.
By one standard both teaching and learning are work--people get paid to teach (and receipt of pay is one measure of work in capitalism); people put in substantial effort to learn (and the application of effort to a challenge is another measure of work). Work is happening.
But there is uncertainty about teaching, learning, and work in society. Take for example those people who teach on the side because they simply love to teach. Ask them if teaching is work, and they are likely to say no, that teaching is a pleasure, and therefore not work (dissatisfaction with the effort being another sign that something is work rather than, say, leisure). Or ask the critics of schools of education if teaching is work, and they are likely to deny it, suggesting that developing content knowledge is real work; while pedagogy is merely an effort to gussy up a natural human skills with a scientific patina, or to indoctrinate students with "progressive ideologies".
Learning is equally suspect. Our system of education traditionally puts learning before employment, or put another way, before work. And the opportunity to learn is sometimes sequestered from work. Students leave school because they have to work to afford it.
Why does this matter? Because uncertainty about the status of teaching and learning impedes our ability to know if they are happening, and happening well. For example, if teaching is essentially a pleasure for the teacher, then how do we judge its value? What would allow us to say that a four-hour lecture is less effective than four hours spent otherwise? Or if learning is work because it is essentially effort, then why bother to have such a thing as a class? Why not just give students tasks and wish them well?
At the risk of sounding like a fan, I want to suggest that Shop Class as Soulcraft has a lot to teach about the ways in which teaching and learning are work. The most intriguing to me is the notion that work has a particular telos--an end to which it points. In the case of motorcycle repair it is to get the bike running as if it were new--to "fill the measure of its creation" to borrow a phrase from my religious tradition. (For a great poem on this notion read Zbigniew's Herbert's "Pebble."
Pebble
by Zbigniew Herbert
The pebble
is a perfect creature
equal to itself
mindful of its limits
filled exactly
with a pebbly meaning
with a scent that does not remind one of anything
does not frighten anything away does not arouse desire
its ardour and coldness
are just and full of dignity
I feel a heavy remorse
when I hold it in my hand
and its noble body
is permeated by false warmth
- Pebbles cannot be tamed
to the end they will look at us
with a calm and very clear eye
Translated by Peter Dale Scott and Czeslaw Milosz
Now I know that essentialism has been on the outs in academe for a long time. But many people, including academics, point to experiences where they felt that they had discovered a bit of their essences as human beings--the characteristics that make them who they are at this time. And it seems to me that if we want to understand teaching and learning as work then we need to attend to those moments where teacher and learner together come across experiences where they jointly discover bits of who they are and truths about how the world works. To push a bit further, I want to suggest that neither teaching nor learning can achieve their teleologies without the other.
Mark those moments that seem like the times when understanding has emerged. ;If Crawford is right in Shop Class then they are the rare moments when work happens. The rest of the time we might be engaged in labor, or effort, or struggle, or leisure, but we haven't yet done any work.
By one standard both teaching and learning are work--people get paid to teach (and receipt of pay is one measure of work in capitalism); people put in substantial effort to learn (and the application of effort to a challenge is another measure of work). Work is happening.
But there is uncertainty about teaching, learning, and work in society. Take for example those people who teach on the side because they simply love to teach. Ask them if teaching is work, and they are likely to say no, that teaching is a pleasure, and therefore not work (dissatisfaction with the effort being another sign that something is work rather than, say, leisure). Or ask the critics of schools of education if teaching is work, and they are likely to deny it, suggesting that developing content knowledge is real work; while pedagogy is merely an effort to gussy up a natural human skills with a scientific patina, or to indoctrinate students with "progressive ideologies".
Learning is equally suspect. Our system of education traditionally puts learning before employment, or put another way, before work. And the opportunity to learn is sometimes sequestered from work. Students leave school because they have to work to afford it.
Why does this matter? Because uncertainty about the status of teaching and learning impedes our ability to know if they are happening, and happening well. For example, if teaching is essentially a pleasure for the teacher, then how do we judge its value? What would allow us to say that a four-hour lecture is less effective than four hours spent otherwise? Or if learning is work because it is essentially effort, then why bother to have such a thing as a class? Why not just give students tasks and wish them well?
At the risk of sounding like a fan, I want to suggest that Shop Class as Soulcraft has a lot to teach about the ways in which teaching and learning are work. The most intriguing to me is the notion that work has a particular telos--an end to which it points. In the case of motorcycle repair it is to get the bike running as if it were new--to "fill the measure of its creation" to borrow a phrase from my religious tradition. (For a great poem on this notion read Zbigniew's Herbert's "Pebble."
Pebble
by Zbigniew Herbert
The pebble
is a perfect creature
equal to itself
mindful of its limits
filled exactly
with a pebbly meaning
with a scent that does not remind one of anything
does not frighten anything away does not arouse desire
its ardour and coldness
are just and full of dignity
I feel a heavy remorse
when I hold it in my hand
and its noble body
is permeated by false warmth
- Pebbles cannot be tamed
to the end they will look at us
with a calm and very clear eye
Translated by Peter Dale Scott and Czeslaw Milosz
Now I know that essentialism has been on the outs in academe for a long time. But many people, including academics, point to experiences where they felt that they had discovered a bit of their essences as human beings--the characteristics that make them who they are at this time. And it seems to me that if we want to understand teaching and learning as work then we need to attend to those moments where teacher and learner together come across experiences where they jointly discover bits of who they are and truths about how the world works. To push a bit further, I want to suggest that neither teaching nor learning can achieve their teleologies without the other.
Mark those moments that seem like the times when understanding has emerged. ;If Crawford is right in Shop Class then they are the rare moments when work happens. The rest of the time we might be engaged in labor, or effort, or struggle, or leisure, but we haven't yet done any work.
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
The geography of extra work
This has been a season for thinking about extra work in higher education. We are hiring adjuncts for fall--many of them in the Bill and Vieve Gore School of Business are executives who also teach a course or two. At the college, nearly every adjunct also has another job (or two, or three). New projects that pop up have to be taken on by existing employees--it is too late to do searches for fall (hence my second job as Interim Dean). Faculty are finding projects to supplement their incomes--consulting, facilitating meetings, joining new initiatives, etc.
Though these types of extra work are disparate, they share two characteristics. First, they all use pay as an incentive to encourage people to take on work that is not in their main job description. A small point to be sure, but one that is increasingly common in higher education, where a little bit of pay is the central form of encouragement to try new things.
Second, when people talk about this type of work, they always use a geographical metaphor. They are doing work "on top of" their regular assignments. Or they are doing the additional work "on the side." Or they are picking up work "here and there."
What does this connection between geography and work mean? It seems to indicate that whatever our jobs, we conceive of them in space--the assignments in a geographical relationship to each other (as opposed, I guess, to temporal relationships or relationships based on priority.) It also means that this extra work is just that--extra, not part of the core of what we do.
I am particularly intrigued by the use of the phrase "on the side." It has had negative connotations. Consider, for example, the way we say that an unfaithful spouse has a lover "on the side" or the connotation that side-work is secondary. But the phrase is getting some rehabilitation in the call for faculty to move from being "Sage[s] on the stage" to "guide[s] on the side." In that use of the phrase, being on the side is a good thing, something that allows others (students) to take responsibility for their work.
I wonder if there is possibility in that use for all of us who take on work "on the side." It is worth asking whether there is anything in the view of work encapsulated in "guide on the side' that suggests how we can do extra work. Perhaps as work moves more to the side the person responsible must be more facilitative than directive. Or perhaps where several people are working on side projects, we would be wise to follow the model of collaborative work on the internet, where, to use Clay Shirky's phrase, we contribute from our cognitive surplus to projects of which no one is in charge. Or it could simply suggest that the more work we do on the side, the less centered our work is, for good or ill.
Though these types of extra work are disparate, they share two characteristics. First, they all use pay as an incentive to encourage people to take on work that is not in their main job description. A small point to be sure, but one that is increasingly common in higher education, where a little bit of pay is the central form of encouragement to try new things.
Second, when people talk about this type of work, they always use a geographical metaphor. They are doing work "on top of" their regular assignments. Or they are doing the additional work "on the side." Or they are picking up work "here and there."
What does this connection between geography and work mean? It seems to indicate that whatever our jobs, we conceive of them in space--the assignments in a geographical relationship to each other (as opposed, I guess, to temporal relationships or relationships based on priority.) It also means that this extra work is just that--extra, not part of the core of what we do.
I am particularly intrigued by the use of the phrase "on the side." It has had negative connotations. Consider, for example, the way we say that an unfaithful spouse has a lover "on the side" or the connotation that side-work is secondary. But the phrase is getting some rehabilitation in the call for faculty to move from being "Sage[s] on the stage" to "guide[s] on the side." In that use of the phrase, being on the side is a good thing, something that allows others (students) to take responsibility for their work.
I wonder if there is possibility in that use for all of us who take on work "on the side." It is worth asking whether there is anything in the view of work encapsulated in "guide on the side' that suggests how we can do extra work. Perhaps as work moves more to the side the person responsible must be more facilitative than directive. Or perhaps where several people are working on side projects, we would be wise to follow the model of collaborative work on the internet, where, to use Clay Shirky's phrase, we contribute from our cognitive surplus to projects of which no one is in charge. Or it could simply suggest that the more work we do on the side, the less centered our work is, for good or ill.
Sunday, July 18, 2010
What about work?
(For the next while I am trying a new approach to this blog. Each Monday I will post on a particular theme for the week. Any posts that follow during the week will expand on the theme; the following Monday I'll write about a new theme. Trying to put a bit of organization to my writing here, in hopes that it eventually adds up to something in addition to discrete mini-essays on learning...This week's theme is Work.)
With all of the attention higher education gives to getting graduates employed, it is astonishing how little interest we have in work. By this I mean simply that it is rare for an institution to help its students consider what work is, how it shapes human beings, and how it gives meaning to life. I cannot think of any college (though I am sure there are some) that requires courses about the meaning of work, only a few campuses that consider the learning that comes from employment while in school, and only an handful of business programs that attend to the questions about justice, human fulfillment, and the social good that emerge from the way that employers structure work.
This issue is on my mind for several reasons. I've spent the past 18 months on a task force working to connect student employment at Westminster to the college's learning goals. Our hope is that every student who works on campus will have a job that leads to learning, and that that learning will be of value to the student. My wife's job currently requires 14 hour days and weekend work, with almost no consideration of the toll a workload like that takes on her, us, or the quality of her work. And I have been asked to take on a major additional assignment at the college, serving as Interim Dean of the Bill and Vieve Gore School of Business, an assignment that raises questions about my ability to complete good quality work while maintaining the balance and clear-sightedness that might make it possible to do that work.
Our inattention to work is not for lack of meaningful content to study. The meaning of work is a core concern of many major religions (right livelihood in Buddhism; the notion of a holy day of rest in Western religions); assumptions about it undergird Marxism and Capitalism; the topic is more universally experienced by students than anything except sleep.
What is more, the recent economic downturn has pushed the meaning of work to the fore of American culture. I had lunch last week with two former students, honors graduates of the college, recipients of graduation awards, perhaps the two most civically engaged students I have ever known. Neither has full-timer permanent work. One works temporarily for the state doing field biology; the other takes tickets at the local aviary. Work is a huge issue for them--they both have large amounts of student debt, but they both also want to live decent lives and be part of the human conversation rather than structuring their lives around their jobs. And on a more abstract level, the problem of work is at the center of some of the most influential books published in the past year--Rework and Shop Class as Soulcraft among them.
I don't have any idea about how to insert (or is it re-insert) the study of work into the curriculum. But it seems that if faculty, staff, administrators, and students do not take up the questions that come out of work seriously then our institutions are failing our students, and we are failing ourselves.
With all of the attention higher education gives to getting graduates employed, it is astonishing how little interest we have in work. By this I mean simply that it is rare for an institution to help its students consider what work is, how it shapes human beings, and how it gives meaning to life. I cannot think of any college (though I am sure there are some) that requires courses about the meaning of work, only a few campuses that consider the learning that comes from employment while in school, and only an handful of business programs that attend to the questions about justice, human fulfillment, and the social good that emerge from the way that employers structure work.
This issue is on my mind for several reasons. I've spent the past 18 months on a task force working to connect student employment at Westminster to the college's learning goals. Our hope is that every student who works on campus will have a job that leads to learning, and that that learning will be of value to the student. My wife's job currently requires 14 hour days and weekend work, with almost no consideration of the toll a workload like that takes on her, us, or the quality of her work. And I have been asked to take on a major additional assignment at the college, serving as Interim Dean of the Bill and Vieve Gore School of Business, an assignment that raises questions about my ability to complete good quality work while maintaining the balance and clear-sightedness that might make it possible to do that work.
Our inattention to work is not for lack of meaningful content to study. The meaning of work is a core concern of many major religions (right livelihood in Buddhism; the notion of a holy day of rest in Western religions); assumptions about it undergird Marxism and Capitalism; the topic is more universally experienced by students than anything except sleep.
What is more, the recent economic downturn has pushed the meaning of work to the fore of American culture. I had lunch last week with two former students, honors graduates of the college, recipients of graduation awards, perhaps the two most civically engaged students I have ever known. Neither has full-timer permanent work. One works temporarily for the state doing field biology; the other takes tickets at the local aviary. Work is a huge issue for them--they both have large amounts of student debt, but they both also want to live decent lives and be part of the human conversation rather than structuring their lives around their jobs. And on a more abstract level, the problem of work is at the center of some of the most influential books published in the past year--Rework and Shop Class as Soulcraft among them.
I don't have any idea about how to insert (or is it re-insert) the study of work into the curriculum. But it seems that if faculty, staff, administrators, and students do not take up the questions that come out of work seriously then our institutions are failing our students, and we are failing ourselves.
Tuesday, July 6, 2010
Why are we still asking if it is OK for someone to choose not to attend college?
In response to my last post Bryce Bunting wrote the following:
Crawford's ideas got me thinking about the current push to increase accessibility to higher education. Everywhere you look these days there is a new online college, community college, or for-profit venture that touts its ability to increase access.
Is there any danger that the rhetoric of organizations like KIPP ("every single person in this room is going to college") and the oft-heard message that college is the best path for everyone, will devalue the role of the crafts in society? If Crawford is right and certain crafts can provide the financial security and cognitive fulfillment, should we be so concerned with getting everyone to college? Will there come a time when a college education doesn't lead to good jobs and meaningful work and we'll end up wishing for more mechanics and skilled repair-men?
I can't answer Bryce's questions with any certainty. It seems that the future Bryce imagines is a possibility; on the other hand, the "a college degree will be essential to the employment possibilities of every American" seems equally likely, especially given the way that the educational, economic, and political establishments have lined up behind that view.
But Bryce's question raises another question that I would like to take a shot at: Why are we still asking if it is OK for someone to choose not to attend college? There are two answers, I think, both rooted in America's cultural ambivalence towards history.
First, we have to ask that question because our discussions are haunted by the history of discrimination in American education. More particularly, this discussion is haunted by the way that progressives created a tiered educational system where the children of WASP families were encouraged towards university while the children of Jews, Blacks, Latinos, plus women were encouraged to pursue the trades. (For a compelling history of these actions, take a look at Diane Ravitch's book, Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms.) In our history, then, the argument that certain young people ought not to attend college is always linked with our history of racism and sexism.
Second, we have to ask because of education's commitment to serve the progress of the nation. There is of course an irony here: that in a decentralized educational system the aims of education are nationalist. But that is indeed the case. Again and again educational leaders have shifted the curriculum and mission of education to pursue whatever the "future" held. At one time in the 1800s our future looked like a future of tradesmen, and so schools and universities set out to teach students the trades (hence the land grant colleges and universities, which originally were tuned to apply science both to agriculture and to mechanics, hence the "A&M" schools.) But since at least WWII the future has not be a future of tradesmen but of managers, knowledge workers, engineers. And so that perceived need, driven by the Cold War then and by our obsessive fear that we are falling behind our global competitors today, means that any call for students to learn trades is a call for an America that looks backwards.
Since neither of our major political parties is concerned with tradition, and since key sectors of government, the media, and business are convinced that the future is one of technology (as if there is only one future...), studying the trades appears to be as useless as studying history.
Crawford's ideas got me thinking about the current push to increase accessibility to higher education. Everywhere you look these days there is a new online college, community college, or for-profit venture that touts its ability to increase access.
Is there any danger that the rhetoric of organizations like KIPP ("every single person in this room is going to college") and the oft-heard message that college is the best path for everyone, will devalue the role of the crafts in society? If Crawford is right and certain crafts can provide the financial security and cognitive fulfillment, should we be so concerned with getting everyone to college? Will there come a time when a college education doesn't lead to good jobs and meaningful work and we'll end up wishing for more mechanics and skilled repair-men?
I can't answer Bryce's questions with any certainty. It seems that the future Bryce imagines is a possibility; on the other hand, the "a college degree will be essential to the employment possibilities of every American" seems equally likely, especially given the way that the educational, economic, and political establishments have lined up behind that view.
But Bryce's question raises another question that I would like to take a shot at: Why are we still asking if it is OK for someone to choose not to attend college? There are two answers, I think, both rooted in America's cultural ambivalence towards history.
First, we have to ask that question because our discussions are haunted by the history of discrimination in American education. More particularly, this discussion is haunted by the way that progressives created a tiered educational system where the children of WASP families were encouraged towards university while the children of Jews, Blacks, Latinos, plus women were encouraged to pursue the trades. (For a compelling history of these actions, take a look at Diane Ravitch's book, Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms.) In our history, then, the argument that certain young people ought not to attend college is always linked with our history of racism and sexism.
Second, we have to ask because of education's commitment to serve the progress of the nation. There is of course an irony here: that in a decentralized educational system the aims of education are nationalist. But that is indeed the case. Again and again educational leaders have shifted the curriculum and mission of education to pursue whatever the "future" held. At one time in the 1800s our future looked like a future of tradesmen, and so schools and universities set out to teach students the trades (hence the land grant colleges and universities, which originally were tuned to apply science both to agriculture and to mechanics, hence the "A&M" schools.) But since at least WWII the future has not be a future of tradesmen but of managers, knowledge workers, engineers. And so that perceived need, driven by the Cold War then and by our obsessive fear that we are falling behind our global competitors today, means that any call for students to learn trades is a call for an America that looks backwards.
Since neither of our major political parties is concerned with tradition, and since key sectors of government, the media, and business are convinced that the future is one of technology (as if there is only one future...), studying the trades appears to be as useless as studying history.
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