THE DALLAS INSTITUTE
OF
HUMANITIES
AND
CULTURE’S
Cowan Center For Education Dear Friends and Colleagues, Some years ago, I was asked by an important citizen what I thought was the greatest challenge for the Dallas Independent School District. Having worked by that time with hundreds of Dallas ISD teachers, principals, and administrators—and finding them overwhelmingly to be generousspirited, dedicated professionals—I replied, to his chagrin, that the primary problem as I saw it was the “bureaucracy.” He was not convinced by this answer, insisting that people are the ones who make up a system and that the responsibility for problems therefore must fall on shoulders of individuals. I understood completely what he was saying on a practical level, but I remember thinking that he was overlooking something, something important—the invisible, unseen qualities that inhere in human undertakings, things that take on a life and ultimately a force of their own when the enterprise goes to the point where those in charge lose sight of the higher purposes informing their cause. Bureaucracies are smug, like fortresses. There is also a peculiar brand of mediocrity that settles in when a system builds up enough layers of procedure to constitute itself as a bureaucracy. Here complacency and lethargy coexist in a peculiar union that somehow finds the energy to assert itself in a myriad of unthinking daily routines and endless procedures that, when investigated, are often revealed to have come from nowhere but that somehow seem to dominate everywhere. From where I stand, it is the mindlessness of a bureaucracy that is particularly debilitating, and nowhere is mindlessness more dangerous in a human enterprise than it is in education. One would hope that in educational institutions—those places that bear witness to and exist for the actual purpose of developing the life of the mind—that the hearts and minds of all of those involved would be engaged and nurtured, but this is not my experience of late, nor is it in numerous testimonies of people who do their work in our classrooms and schools. Bureaucracy is on the top of my mind, as it is for many Dallas citizens, I imagine, because of another development in the ongoing saga of the Dallas ISD. The prospect of becoming a “home-rule district” has been put forth, and while my intention here is not to debate the merits or dangers of
Newsletter Spring 2014 • Volume III, Issue II
From the Cowan Center Director such a proposal, given the crippling effects of much of the public school system, exemptions from state mandates—from any mandate that receives its authority from the obtuse motions of a bureaucratic system—seem like a good place to start at least a conversation. I feel the press of the bureaucracy now even more than I did when questioned by that concerned citizen years ago. In this last year, we in the Cowan Center have been asked to increase our work with local public schools and districts, and in so doing, I have found myself inhabiting two distinct worlds. On one hand, I get to office in and inhabit the rarified air of the Dallas Institute’s Cowan Center for Education, a place in which hope and patience and transfor-
“Our challenge may be that we have replaced vision with system.” mation and yes, even love, are honored as the foundations of every true learning experience, for students as well as for teachers. On the other hand, I am now privileged to spend a good deal of time on campuses and in classrooms, but being there often feels like triage because I encounter the dulling, even stupefying effects that the bureaucracy of the public school system has on the minds and souls of my beleaguered colleagues and their students. Considering the drain on the hearts and minds of the teachers and principals, it’s amazing that we’re giving students as good of an education as we are.
But excellence in the system comes largely at the expense of teachers and school leaders, surely not as a result of the system, a thing that daily pushes these noble people to make choices that they know compromise the high vision of teaching and leading that brought them into the profession in the first place. You may be thinking that I’ve gone back on my word about advocating the homerule proposal. I’m not. If those who have the power in educational reforms get to turn the district into a merely practical, efficient enterprise for training workers or skill-ready college plebes, we will be as far off the mark as we are with those who seek to maintain the status quo of the bureaucratic machine. Surely, we need a better paradigm. We need a school system that is run responsibly insofar as its business goes. But we need a system that encourages and even fosters a philosophical thoughtfulness in its teachers and leaders so that they can recognize the seduction of trends and see whether or not these things are adequate standards by which to judge or measure human beings. Our challenge may be that we have replaced vision with system and in so doing we have given the system the freedom to become an end unto itself. Fortunately, although I do believe that my interrogator was wrong not to acknowledge the awful drain of the bureaucratic daze, he was correct in saying that people can make a difference. In truth, bureaucracies only seem unassailable. As our amazing public school teachers and leaders show us every day, bureaucracies are no match for those who possess the highest vision, for those who are courageous enough to continue storming the gates until we can get over the walls.
To read the Cowan Center Newsletter online, go to the Cowan Center link on the homepage of the Dallas Institute’s website: dallasinstitute.org. READ THE ARTICLE ABOUT THE SUE ROSE SUMMER INSTITUTE FOR TEACHERS IN THE MOST RECENT ISSUE OF THE AMERICAN EDUCATOR MAGAZINE: CLICK HERE
The Legacy
of Genius
2014 — The 100th Anniversary of Dr. Donald Cowan’s Birthday
M
AY 26, 2014, marks the 100th anniversary of the birthday of Dr. Donald Cowan. Before he was a professor and even before he received a degree in the field of physics, Donald Cowan showed such aptitude for science that he was made Assistant Chief Engineer of a radar components plant, heading the General Dynamics project for peacetime uses of atomic energy. His discoveries in radar technology during World War II made him a desirable candidate for recruiting by a number of technology-based institutions—which included all of the enticements of financial remunerations—but he and Dr. Louise Cowan decided that they would dedicate themselves instead to education, in order, as Dr. Louise says, that they might “change the world.” In his professional career as an educator, Dr. Donald was recognized widely by civic and corporate leaders, especially while he was professor of physics and then while he served as President of the University of Dallas from 1962-1977. During his tenure at UD, he and Dr. Louise founded the University so that it became one of the gems of liberal arts education in the country, a distinction that it holds to this day. In 1980, along with Dr. Louise, Dr. Donald became one of the six founders of the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture. At the Dallas Institute he found time to publish a small portion of the volumes of speeches and papers he had given and written while at the University, as well as new work that he took up at the Institute. Dr. Donald was included in Mortimer Adler’s original Paideia Group, whose members outlined a primary and secondary educational system for American students that would ground students in the knowledge and skills that would allow even those who were not
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going to college to live as full citizens. Dr. Donald’s Unbinding Prometheus: Education for the Coming Age, stands as one of the unique and original contributions to educational theory in modern times. Mortimer Adler pointed out the book’s importance, explaining, “the reflections . . . by Dr. Donald Cowan give us a vision of the educational task in the largest possible perspective. It focuses on a future that gives signs of being emergent from the present age with its roots in the past. Like Francis Bacon, Donald Cowan writes with a firm grasp on all three of the great forms of human learning—history, poetry, and science—with appeal to man’s memory, imagination, and reason.” Jacques Barzun described it as the “thoughtful reader’s” destination because the essays in the volume “show a teacher who has taught well and analyzed his craft in the light of immense knowledge and a fine imagination.” Dr. Donald’s thought is central to every Cowan Center program—for teachers, principals, and superintendents—and is often the actual text for the lessons at hand. In honor of the 100th anniversary of his birthday, and in gratitude for how his high and sturdy vision has made possible our entering and dwelling in a world of significance, we dedicate these pages to the life and work of Dr. Donald Cowan with this small tribute to his work.
From Unbinding Prometheus “Fortunately, in the classroom itself professors . . . become Promethean— that is to say, they become teachers. With the sacred space of the classroom, that temple with doors closed so that learning can be celebrated, they see in those bright faces spread before them the perennial future.”
“We always live in a myth—a large overarching metaphor that gives philosophical meaning to the experience of everyday life.” “The poetic imagination is the active creative agent of culture, a power that transforms raw materials by raising them to a higher, more knowable state and thereby ennobling them, making of them objects of intellect rather than of brute nature.” “The point of my emphasis is that the kind of education we are providing now, the imagination we are fostering, the human wisdom we are instilling, will determine our very survival in the quite near future.” “Does the blame for Hiroshima, then, lie at the door of science? Might not technology, the use of science, be the real culprit?” “This ability to retire into the imagination to seek truth is a poiesis, a making of an art form out of disparate and often painful experience.” “Some mentor has to lead and instruct if we are to make our way to a recognition of the high, the noble, the magnanimous.” “. . . it is transformation, not knowledge of the artifact—the printed text or the reproduction—that is the action of learning.”
“The cultivation of language is the real task of education.”
in performance, pointing toward understanding.”
“Something excellent does not so much surpass other things as it joins a company of excellences above the degrees of comparison, existing in a realm where one is free to consider things as they are. It is like goodness in this respect: the more there is of it the better.”
“Education supplies only a portion of learning. Its function is not so much to supply learning as to ready people for the task of learning.”
“Learning must cause a metamorphosis of the person, not merely elevate him—must make him into something different from what he was before.” “There is a soul that is the learner, a cogito that is the knower, a self that wills to act empowered by knowledge.” “. . . human beings can be fully human only when their souls are formed by the high aims and ideals of their myths; they can know their own capabilities only when they see themselves in the light of the heroic achievement of their traditions.” “. . . redundancy, we might consider, has its own benefits; indeed, redundancy, rather than some such guide as Occam’s razor, describes the essential path of imagination.” “Industries at times make the mistake of assuming that organization charts really define the flow of authority. The chart is merely a refuge of last resort; if a person’s authority is solely derived from that thin line on a chart, someone else should be in his position.” “. . . the imagination is goal-oriented. It seeks to know its object however it can and by as many ways as it can.” “But although data, information, analysis, scholarship, and criticism may present themselves at the door of understanding, only imagination opens that door.” “From time to time it must be clarified that education is a symbolic process: it is not the gathering of information; it is not life itself: it is an art form, requiring skill in design and skill
“In the past we have begun logically with the simplest and most boring ideas . . . expecting to build up a qualitative competency adequate for advanced ideas. This method is like expecting Ferdinand to hew wood and draw water before he has seen Miranda—or making Dante undergo his laborious climb through the cosmos without ever having seen the face of Beatrice. We have to let him at least peek. What must be held up in the early stages is a vision of completeness splendid in its universality.” “. . . the purpose of education is not to prepare the young for immediate usefulness in society as we know it. As it turns out, well-educated persons are useful precisely because they have not been narrowly trained for a particular job; but that usefulness is, in a sense, simply a fortunate byproduct of education.” “A person must be elevated, his soul magnified, if he is to construct future society and move it toward those high aims that, though never fully achieved, impel civilization toward the good.” “It is difficult for many of us to believe that it is precisely the non-utilitarian commitment that endows liberal education with its transforming power.” “But further, the persons who reach the rarefied levels of upper significance are different in kind from those who do not. They were not born different; somewhere along the way they have been transformed.” “One discovers a habit of soul that seeks not to master but to submit to all experience, to know it for what it is and to become part of it.” “There is a grace of office adequate
for every task we are called to do.” “There seems to be in technology an implicit aspiration to spread its benefits to all.” “Certainly science, in it essence, is directed toward knowledge and not toward products. Its fundamental action is the expansion of knowledge for its own sake. It is a liberal art.” “Perhaps the characteristic that distinguishes great minds from others is not brilliance nor hard work but acceptance—acceptance of failure, we might say, so that the will relaxes and
“. . .the kind of education we are providing now, the imagination we are fostering, the human wisdom we are instilling, will determine our very survival in the quite near future.” the mind walks among presences, be they archetypes or angels, that come visiting out of the plenitude of reality. Truth, it seems, is not an argument but a presence.” “Those creative leaps that we call revolutions in science are, more accurately, revelations.” “. . . taste is more than a decoration upon society; it is one of its sources of energy and its primary instrument of decision.” “We should make no mistake. The spirit of liberal learning is marked by joy. If that joy is absent, it is a sign that we have ourselves blocked the passages to insight and wisdom.” 3
Learning to Read —John David Bennett
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Several years ago, I took fifty ninthgraders to the Dallas Institute to meet with Dr. Glenn Arbery. The eager students had just finished a twelve-week study of the Iliad, so when Gus—an undersized, usually reticent boy— raised his hand, he was ready with his question. “Dr. Arbery,” he asked, “if Athena is the goddess of light and truth, why does she lie so much?” The question drew a muted, choral affirmation from the other students. Most of them, while in eighth grade, had the benefit of a good mythology unit, and as it happens in many such units, the gods had been specifically characterized. I could be imagining Dr. Arbery’s immediate response, but I remember him taking a quick glance at me, because, two years prior, I had had asked him the same question, although not as gracefully. During the first morning of my first Summer Institute, while in a seminar discussion about the Iliad, I made a comment that went something like, “The ancient Greeks would have considered Athena an actual, influencing god, so we can assume…” I don’t remember exactly how I finished, but as soon as I did, Dr. Arbery responded with a light objection that confused me. Not that what he said was wrong; it wasn’t: I had, as he pointed out, historicized a scene in the epic, which was something I did often—especially as a teacher—in order, I thought, to put books and poems in “their proper contexts.” I was certain that what I’d done was consistent with what good English teachers do, so for the remainder of the discussion, I tried to make sense of what he said, but I couldn’t. After the seminar, I took the chair next to Arbery and peppered him with questions. I think the poor man thought he’d offended me, but he didn’t know that I, while ruminating, sensed there was something liberating about his idea, something that I suppose I’d been looking for, something that might give me the license to read the epic less like an academician would, and more like the poet would want me to read it. Two years later, Dr. Arbery answered Gus’ question, and mine— again. He said that Athena in the Iliad isn’t necessarily Bullfinch’s or Edith Hamilton’s Athena. “She is,” he said, “the Athena that the poet needs her to be.” Of course she is, which seems so obvious now, so obvious you’d
think every reader of good writing would see that that is how poeticism works—that via analogy, the poet, by crafting his Athena provides a view of what otherwise couldn’t be seen. After three weeks of my first Institute summer, three weeks spent talking about analogy, I walked away with this nugget: Homer, Vergil, Dante, Melville, Faulkner, and Morrison didn’t use story and analogy because it’s a good way to offer a significant impression of the human experience. They did it because it’s often the only way. I wish I could say that I had forgotten what poeticism is until I went to the Institute, but, I don’t think I had ever really known. I had read stacks of books, memorized my favorite lines of verse, and even allowed literature to inform my life, so poetics were all around me, but my relationship with poeticism was similar to the relationship many people have with
“I never forget the gift I received on Routh Street: the freedom to read a poem as poetry . . . it’s become the greatest gift I give my students.” Nature. They talk about how much they love Nature; they may even like “to go out into Nature” because exposure to Nature is good for us, but they forget that Nature isn’t an Other. It doesn’t exist elsewhere, marked on maps with tent icons. People may be in convenient enclosures that make them think we’ve gotten away from Nature, but we breathe Nature’s air and walk on its ground and need its light and its rain. It’s everywhere. By learning what Dr. Arbery and the Drs. Allums—as students of Dr. Cowan— taught me, I began to see that—like Nature—poetics is everywhere, absolutely everywhere, in the common ways we convey ideas. It’s in the symbols of mathematics, in the terminology of the hard sciences, in the varied dialects of my and every other language of the world, and in the poetic words of small children. So, as Nature
is in my next sip of water, poeticism is in a three-year-old’s telling me how amazing something is when I may have otherwise meandered by it without noticing. When I enrolled for my first Summer Institute, I had been teaching almost a decade. Dumb luck had landed me a job at Dallas’ High School for the Talented and Gifted, where my colleague and sort of partner-in-crime, Alfonso Correa, talked often of the “Institute.” He once stacked all the books for one summer’s course on a desk in his classroom for his students to see. They were impressed. I was intimidated. Eventually, I took the leap; I attended. It was the most important leap of my career. Its effect on my life, personally and professionally, is profound. Students had always enjoyed my classes. The buzz had always been good. But in the first years, my classes were three parts energy and one part substance. I loved the books I taught, but I was passionately teaching them with the same traditional nuts and bolts you might find in many English classrooms. I was overly concerned with teaching the parts of a short story and literary terms, and way too mindful of providing all the “necessary” information about the Globe Theater before we read the first line of Hamlet. After my first Summer Institute, I took what was, for me, a bold step: I taught Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “Sympathy” without mentioning that he was an African-American poet who wrote at the turn of the 20th century. Instead, I let the language of the poem teach the students, and as I suspected, almost every child could feel the remarkably universal words of the poem and immediately, on their levels, connect to the caged bird. After a day with the poem, I told my students about Dunbar, just as I now teach kids about the Globe (after we’ve let Hamlet be Hamlet). But I never forget the gift I received on Routh Street: the freedom to read a poem as poetry—and it’s become the greatest gift I give my students.
John David Bennett taught in the Dallas ISD and served as one of the district's Advanced Placement Lead English Teachers. He was a founding member of the Cowan Center’s Teachers Alumni Advisory Board. He now teaches English and coaches fastpitch softball at Mercersburg Academy, a boarding school in Pennsylvania.