[MD] 42

[david]

Dan Glover wrote:
What intrigued me was how Dr. Steiner talks about his father pointing him in the direction of a career in academics rather than a profession in the creative arts. I think Robert Pirsig goes on about this in ZMM as well. Are academics and creativity mutually exclusive of each other?  I have a few questions. Does academic schooling tend to breed out creativity in students? ... Are teachers simply producing clones? ... Are these parameters based upon the individual students or are they cookie-cutter style textbook learning exercises designed to mimic rather than open new vistas? Can creativity be taught? Or is the foundation of learning rooted in a kind of monkey-seemonkey-do?


 Ron replied:
If we reference the 1961 paper to Edith Buchanan, RMP suggests creativity can be taught and should be taught. I personally believe that the Academic bogeyman producing Cookie cutter clones is an impossible Fiction. It harkens on the rhetoric produced by conservative right wing ideology warning of collectivism and the fear of the loss of the individual. It leads to another sort of anti-intellectualism. An instructor in art school once Said to me that "you first need to learn the rules before you can break them", but also there is the tea ceremony through rigid static patterns dynamic freedom is also found. Freedom through constraint.


Arlo said:...As for "teacher's unions", while problems exist to be sure, these unions (and the concept of tenure) were formed to protect the integrity of the intellectual level from social-capital forces. If you abolish these, you better have a good suggestion for how this integrity can be preserved. Final note: grade-less and degree-less. This will only happen when/if economics (and its derivative social-status) are completely disentangled from education. So long as many (if not most) view education as 'career training', and see degrees as both economic and symbolic forms of social capital, this will never happen. For what its worth, I personally don't believe this is possible in a capitalist society, where these are used to mark the 'worth' of someone's economic value.



dmb says:
These issues play a central role in Pirsig's thinking, especially in the first book. The first thing that springs to mind is the excessively obedient student with thick-lensed glasses, the straight-A student without a shred of creativity. This is a central lesson in ZAMM, a practical approach to the question of quality in thought and speech. She sheds many tears in frustration and nearly has a nervous breakdown - until she learns to think for herself, to see for herself. Rather than merely following instructions or cleverly repeating things she'd heard, she ended up writing a 5000 word essay about a single brick on the upper corner of the Bozeman opera house. Remember? 

I think Pirsig's approach to intellect in general - a root expansion of rationality centered around Quality -  is supposed to be applied to practical realities like education, maybe even education above all. Sarah Vinke's question is what gets the ball rolling, after all.  "Are you teaching Quality?"

Fortunately, we can make use of John Dewey to illuminate and elaborate on such issues. His views are very, very similar to Pirsig's and James's views. All three share a common core; are self-described pragmatists AND radical empiricists. Roughly speaking, we can use Dewey as a proxy MOQer and this is very freaking handy because Dewey's work in education has been central to the debates over education in America for a very long time. Seems like everyone is either for or against Dewey's approach to education; liberals love him and conservatives hate him. A few relevant Wiki-facts to give you a sense of this guy:

"The overriding theme of Dewey's works was his profound belief in democracy, be it in politics, education or communication and journalism. As Dewey himself stated in 1888, while still at the University of Michigan, "Democracy and the one, ultimate, ethical ideal of humanity are to my mind synonymous.""

"As a major advocate for academic freedom, in 1935 Dewey, together with Albert Einstein and Alvin Johnson, became a member of the United States section of the International League for Academic Freedom,.."

"In 1939, John Dewey was elected President of the League for Industrial Democracy, an organization with the goal of educating college students about the labor movement. The Student Branch of the L.I.D. would later become Students for a Democratic Society."
"In 1950, Dewey, Bertrand Russell, Benedetto Croce, Karl Jaspers, and Jacques Maritain agreed to act as honorary chairmen of the Congress for Cultural Freedom."

Here's a little Wiki synopsis of his "Democracy and Education" (1916):
"Dewey  ...saw Rousseau's philosophy as overemphasizing the individual and Plato's philosophy as overemphasizing the society in which the individual lived. For Dewey, this distinction was largely a false one; like Vygotsky, he viewed the mind and its formation as a communal process. Thus the individual is only a meaningful concept when regarded as an inextricable part of his or her society, and the society has no meaning apart from its realization in the lives of its individual members. As evidenced in his later Experience and Nature (1925), this practical element—learning by doing—arose from his subscription to the philosophical school of Pragmatism."

And for those with gourmet taste, here's a nice bit about Dewey from the Stanford Encyclopedia from their article on "Philosophy of Education" (I think it shows his affinity with Pirsig on a deep level):
"Plato's educational scheme was guided, presumably, by the understanding he thought he had achieved of the transcendental realm of fixed “forms”. Dewey, ever a strong critic of positions that were not naturalistic or that incorporated a priori premises, commented as follows:

Plato's starting point is that the organization of society depends ultimately upon knowledge of the end of existence. If we do not know its end, we shall be at the mercy of accident and caprice…. And only those who have rightly trained minds will be able to recognize the end, and ordering principle of things. (Dewey 1916, 102–3)

Furthermore, as Dewey again put it, Plato “had no perception of the uniqueness of individuals…. they fall by nature into classes”, which masks the “infinite diversity of active tendencies” which individuals harbor (104). In addition, Plato tended to talk of learning using the passive language of seeing, which has shaped our discourse down to the present.

In contrast, for Dewey each individual was an organism situated in a biological and social environment in which problems were constantly emerging, forcing the individual to reflect, act, and learn. Dewey, following William James, held that knowledge arises from reflection upon our actions and that the worth of a putative item of knowledge is directly correlated with the problem-solving success of the actions performed under its guidance. Thus Dewey, sharply disagreeing with Plato, regarded knowing as an active rather than a passive affair—a strong theme in his writings is his opposition to what is sometimes called “the spectator theory of knowledge”. "

Spectator. Spectacles. The girl with thick-lens glasses. See?