* The 4T's: Ignoring Yale Presidents and Savaging American Childhood

Two great Yale presidents, A. Whitney Griswold and A. Bartlett Giamatti, made prescient presidential pronouncements about the course of "education" in America
(see below).

Both of them were ignored.

Now Secretary of Education Arne Duncan will institutionalize the very
flaws which Griswold and Giamatti foresaw, by turning American Schools into a "Race to the Top", the ultimate "Athletization of Life" (Giamatti) and a grotesque instance of believing there is a recipe to "teach teachers how to teach" (Griswold).

The result? American schools will abandon the 3R's and replace them with the 4T's: Teaching To The Test.

This is nothing less than a not-so-surreptitious drive toward a national curriculum.

Let's turn childhood into a rigid recipe for success. Let's drain it of every chaotically creative moment of joy which Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer epitomized.

Soon we can outfit all students in uniforms with boots whose heels will click in unison on command.

Parents should shudder with shame if they allow American childhood to be so savaged by the Servants of Standardization.




(Secretary of Education Arne Duncan)


















From "Winning isn't Everything",

a speech delivered as President of Yale University, BBBC
(Before Becoming Baseball Commissioner):














“Many of the abuses, including the abuse of drugs or alcohol or steroids among some college athletes or some professional athletes,stem from the complete athletization of life, the displacement of all social rules by the rules of the game’s culture. Totally absorbed, some feel invulnerable, invincible, completely exempt from conventional expectations … the inevitable result, particularly among some former professional athletes well into their thirties (although I have seen it among college athletes and, in a few cases, with gifted high s chool athletes, whose ‘careers’ stopped at about 19), is that there is no place in the general culture for them when they no longer fit in the cult. They have prepared no skill or trade, have eschewed all other interests, have made no plan or expressed any desire for a plan, because no one told them or they refused to believe that there comes an end to running, an end to the cheers, an end to the life lived on the cuff, to the endless pleasuring of themselves. … Such people are as if newborn when it is over, accustomed to packing a suitcase but not to carrying it, unaccustomed to few if any of the hundreds of daily activities that require one to negotiate for oneself.”
- A. Bartlett Giamatti





Letter: Liberal arts not meant to be useful


Published Friday, April 3, 2009
Letter to the Editor
Yale Daily News


What an unpleasantly utilitarian odor the April 1 technology column (“Tech. requirement would enhance Yale education”) has — suggesting for the second time in a month in the News that the liberal arts are “utilitarian,” i.e. “useful.”

The liberal arts are designed to help people think — not to train them for “useful careers.”















John Ciardi, the late great Dante scholar, defines an intellectual as “someone capable of being excited by ideas.” Yeats said, “Education is about catching fire.”

Put the two together and you have the kindling for a liberal arts education.

Remember, it was a 1940's Yale president, A. Whitney Griswold, who in a single, dramatic stroke of thinking abolished Yale’s graduate department of education, saying, “It is not necessary to teach teachers how to teach.”


















Had the country followed suit 50 years ago, America would not have developed the treadmill of information delivery systems called public education which suffocates thinking today. Instead, our classrooms would have been conducted by exponents of the liberal arts.

Down with utilitarianism.

Set fires.

















Paul Keane

White River Junction, VT
The writer is a 1980 graduate of the Yale Divinity School.
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* Dante's Digitalized Inferno: Teen Suicide

In recent years, two Palo Alto High School students committed suicide on the CalTrain tracks. Steven Wertheimer died in 2002 and Ben Tachibana died in 2003.
Palo Alto On-line News May 5, 2009 re: Gunn High School














Last night as CBS Evening News with Katie Couric showed its video of the Superintendent of Schools speaking before parents about the fourth suicide at Gunn High School of a teen-ager jumping in front of a train, I noticed a tiny detail about his appearance which is revelatory about our anonymous society: the Superintendent had a photo-ID around his neck, as if he needed to let authorities "somewhere" know that he was legitimate, i.e. not a menacing presence.

Don't think for a second, that a world in which teenagers are surrounded by adults every day who need to wear photo-ID's around their neck isn't sending kids a very subtle and devastating message: You are not safe; you live in the post-Columbine era.

Remember the time when you were young and had "bad" dreams and your parents comforted you with words like "you're safe, nothing's going to happen to you as long as we're here".

Now adults wear name tags which ironically are designed to create a safe, identifiable adult staff in a school system, but send exactly the OPPOSITE message: You are NOT safe therefore adults must wear a name tag and photo that matches his/her face.

Add to that anxiety, the anxiety of being judged annually if not semi annually, and in some cases quarterly, by computer generated tests and told that you "fit" or "don't fit" on this level of an achievement scale and one can feel the increased anxiety and sense of futiltiy in the already difficult process of childhood evolution escalating exponentially.


And now, parents can check their students' grades in each course daily on-line. One doesn't even have to ask, "Did you do your homework?" One merely accuses: "Your gradesheet says you aren't doing your homework".

And if you live in an America 2009 riddled with Willy Loman's disease, the "Anonymity of Modern Man" (Death of a Saleman, 1949, Arthur Miller), there is very little hope for you to get the same kind of attention from adults and friends which they give to televison, computers, cellphones and iPods.

I am nobody---even if I am on the Honor Roll---these kids are telling us.

And we are good adults: We are listening attentively with our earphones turned down low so we can hear---but we are not listening with our with our hearts.

We're busy.




We have turned their world into a technological circle of emptiness in Dante's Digitalized Inferno.

We're here ------- but we do not hear.

* Blessed Trinity: Data, Benchmark, and Holy Outcome

Let's face it: What the Old World has done with Christianity in the realms of art, architecture and music, the New World has never even begun to approximate: Oh perhaps Shaker hymns and furniture, and African American spirituals, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and Bernstein's Mass * ---but that's it. Michaelangelo's world and Emerson's are as different as outdoors and indoors: the one tangible and imagistic (think the David; the Pieta) ; the other intangible and cerebral (think The American Scholar; The Address to Harvard Divinity Students) . But both worlds are --or could be -- connected by a bridge : the human Spirit.

The New World's religion--Materialism -- has been ritualized not in stained glass, Gregorian chants, Baldaccino's, and Sistine chapels, but in skyscrapers, spacewalks, super-highways,and stock-exchanges---all of which now perform their rites in the most sacred and hallowed of Matrialism's cathedrals, the Internet.

This new theology offers for examination and worship the Holy Word of the God Data. Data sits as the trinity on a throne of rubrics: at His right hand sits the divine Son, Benchmark; and at His left hand, the Holy Ghost, Outcome.

It's as if the new God is a Giant Appetite: Feed it its food (data) , direct the data toward a benchmark,and god-the-data-machine vomits up (or excretes) an outcome.



What is missing from this new datology is the voice of the prophet in the wilderness shouting: False God!! Idolatary !! Sin !!


The consequences of this bogus worship sadly can be seen in current events and national policies:

A.) Generals projecting a war in Afghanistan speaking about benchmarks and outcomes as if they involve no human blood;

B.) Education officals projecting dominance once again when America leads the world in the number of people it graduates annually from college (as if a lifetime spent in the straightjacket of standardized tests won't make students'ultimate exit from the educational treadmill with a college degree merely a national procession of empty mortaboards and gowns, draped on vapid scarecrows);

C.) Stock Exchange gurus producing benchmarks like the Prince of Ponzi, Bernie Madoff, and outcomes like the aging Elie Wiesel, the great humanitarian who was suckered into the embrace of the false God Data, losing his entire portfolio to greed.(To say nothing of the millions of others who have lost their retirement security and their mortgages to the same false God.)


If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am become as sounding brass, or a clanging cymbal. (1 Corinthians 13:1)

The theology of the New World speaks the hollow truth of its hollow mercantile God.

It has become a brass, bellowing out benchmarks, stifling the human spirit--the bridge to the artistic beauty of the Old World -- in order to unleash empty vessels made of human flesh, who Consume, Consume, Consume.

Appetite reigns.

Data help us!










* Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms does not qualify in this regard for two reasons: He is Russian and Psalms are pre-New Testament (i.e. pre-"Christianity")




Photo: The Cathedral of La Sagrada Familia, Barcelona

* Worth More Dead Than Alive: Emptiness Reigns

Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman tells his friend Charlie “. . . you end up worth more dead than alive.”

Those words seem uncomfortably true after a 16-year-old honors student was beaten to death by boys with sticks in Roseland, Illinois last week. Suddenly the Divines swooped down on the occasion, Reverends Jackson and Farrakhan, and the Bureaucrats too, General Holder and Secretary Duncan.

Too little, too late. He was being paid more attention dead than he ever received alive. And the same goes for the safety problems he might have faced as he moved from home to school environs.

It is ironic that Mr. Duncan came to grieve and pontificate. It was his very own school policies as eductaion chief in Chicago which failed to create an environment of safety for this boy (and thousands of others) and may have even exacerbated his isolation by revving up the very competitive mentality which eats Willy Loman alive from the inside out: the archetypal "get ahead" American Dream which has been rotting in front of the nostrils of Salesman audiences who have smelled its stink for 60 years now.

Competition is what isolates and destroys community in our society. If “coming out number one man ” is “the only dream you can have” as Happy Loman declares over his father’s dead body at the end of Salesman, then 99% of the dreamers are doomed to despair and frustration.

Mr. Duncan seems to think that by valorizing competition and anointing the winners in his “race to the top” he is reforming schools. He is merely metastasizing the cancer which is already eating at society----another Arthur Miller theme in Death of a Salesman: The Anonymity of Modern Man [and woman].

I remember the Reverend Jesse Jackson coming to Kent State the year after the 1970 shootings and leading an outdoor rally of hundreds of students in a shouted chant “I AM somebody” over and over again, as if there might be some doubt about that fact that needed clarification.

"I am Willy Loman and you are Biff Loman", the father screams in frustration to the son in Salesman, betraying a similar doubt and desperate need to clarify.





(Rev. Jesse Jackson, 1970)














In communities where police walked a beat and knew your name instead of rolling by in motorized shields, where teachers thought of their students as “MY kids” instead of test takers, where parents, not a television or computer, kept a mothering or fathering eye on their kids, people DID feel like somebody.

Now no matter how many times we chant those words over and over and over again the claim seems hollow, even laughable today.

As Biff Loman says to his father, most of us are “just another hard-working drummer who winds up in the ash can like all the rest of them.”






(Secretary of Education Arne Duncan)



(Attorney General Eric Holder)


















Mr. Duncan, Mr. Holder, and the Divines can do all the post-mortem band-aid work they want. The problem is greater than us all: The engine which runs our economy, eats its people alive.

The God of Materialism is ever hungry and ever on the prowl.


Emptiness reigns.





PK
_____________________________________________________________

From the author of "Winning isn't Everything", a speech delivered as President of Yale University

“Many of the abuses, including the abuse of drugs or alcohol or steroids among some college athletes or some professional athletes, stem from the complete athletization of life, the displacement of all social rules by the rules of the game’s culture. Totally absorbed, some feel invulnerable, invincible, completely exempt from conventional expectations … the inevitable result, particularly among some former professional athletes well into their thirties (although I have seen it among college athletes and, in a few cases, with gifted high s chool athletes, whose ‘careers’ stopped at about 19), is that there is no place in the general culture for them when they no longer fit in the cult. They have prepared no skill or trade, have eschewed all other interests, have made no plan or expressed any desire for a plan, because no one told them or they refused to believe that there comes an end to running, an end to the cheers, an end to the life lived on the cuff, to the endless pleasuring of themselves. … Such people are as if newborn when it is over, accustomed to packing a suitcase but not to carrying it, unaccustomed to few if any of the hundreds of daily activities that require one to negotiate for oneself.”
- A. Bartlett Giamatti