Sucking the Life Out of Dickens

Professor J,


You? Quibbling? :)

You are right about there being more defections among the "elites." While looking up something else (an Indian cold remedy :)) I found this article: Occupy Economics by Nancy Folbre. She has links to several other articles that are also worth reading. 


There is so much of Hedges' work that needs to be quoted and it was all I could do not to quote ALL of page 97 when he got to literature. After describing how writers from Euripides to Dickens to Upton Sinclair used their writing "as both a mirror and a lens, to reflect back to us, and focus us on, our hypocrisy, moral corruption, and injustice" he says: "In the hands of academics however, who rarely understand or concern themselves with the reality of the world, works of literature are eviscerated and destroyed. They are mined for obscure trivia and irrelevant data. This disconnect between literature and philosophy on one hand and the real on the other is replicated in most academic disciplines."  


We wonder then that young people lose an interest in reading early on, but much of this method of "teaching" literature is adopted long before they get to a university. We don't educate people INTO a love of the written word, we educate them OUT of it (just as Sir Ken says about creativity). A psychology professor at Samford University has a series of videos about how to study and how we learn. One of his main points is that if you can get a person to have an emotional attachment to the thing they are studying they will remember the information without really trying. Literature should be among the easiest subjects to teach then. Yet as  Hedges points out we take something that should cause people to well up with passionate feelings and inspired ideas and we drain the life blood out of it. We then fling the lifeless thing before them and wonder why they are bored to tears. Could this be the reason that the statistics for readers AFTER college are worse than for people who never attend?


Hedges moves us from literature to economics to history: "The foundation of Athenian democracy rose out of the egalitarian social and political reforms of Solon, including his decision to wipe out all of the debts that were bankrupting the Athenian citizens (We see a similar concept in the Old Testament). But the study of the classics, because it is not deemed practical or useful in a digitalized world, leaves such vital lessons unexamined. Tacitus' account of the economic meltdown during the reign of Tiberius--a meltdown that also saw widespread bankruptcies, a collapse of the real estate market, and financial ruin--is a reminder that we are not unique to history or human behavior. The meltdown during Tiberius' reign was finally halted by massive government spending and intervention that included interest free loans to citizens. Those who suffer from historical amnesia, the belief that we are unique in history and have nothing to learn from the past remain children. They live in an illusion.


I wonder how many students of history might relate that they have a distaste for that subject (and a surprising amount of people do) because of the way it has been taught. Many people you talk to about it share an experience of the trudging through the names of battles and dates and seem to know nothing of the impact of big ideas and the people who have them. They have given little thought to how things connect and intertwine, or that events seem to be repeated because people change so little and learn so poorly from the past mistakes of other individuals and civilizations. It's sad that some of the subjects that should spark imagination and even passionate debate leave people flat.


Of course when we get back to what you and I and Ken Robinson and others think education is, compared to what those who maintain and defend the current system think it is, we come to the crux of the problem. As you've pointed out, it may indeed be working very well.  Our author lists a series of specialists in various areas and then says: "They exist to make the system work not to examine it."
Only through the examination can the faults and remedies for them be found, but we must start with a desire for change. Slaves to systems rarely ask questions and muster the courage to effect the change necessary to shift the paradigm. How to tackle THAT?

"Herein lay the spring of the mechanical art and mystery of educating the reason without stooping to the cultivation of the sentiments and affections. Never wonder. By means of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, settle everything somehow, and never wonder."~ Charles Dickens (Hard Times)