THE DALLAS INSTITUTE
OF
HUMANITIES
AND
CULTURE’S
Cowan Center For Education Dear Friends and Colleagues, Lately, the Dallas Institute’s 2013 Hiett Prize in the Humanities winner, Dr. William Deresiewicz, has been making news. Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life, Bill’s newest book, is raising hackles and questions around the country. I like Bill. When he was here to receive his award last year, I found him to be a kindred soul in many ways. I’m proud to claim him as a Dallas Institute Hiett Prize in the Humanities winner. But Deresiewicz’s book also joins the ranks of volumes in a now-popular genre, books in which scholars and university professors decry the state of American higher education. A number of these I have recommended in previous columns: Andrew Delbanco’s College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be (2013), Mark Edmundson’s Why Teach? In Defense of a Real Education (2013), Richard Arum’s and Josipa Roska’s Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (2011), Matthew Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft (2010), and Anthony Kronman’s Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life (2008). In all of these books and in many others, beneath the unique perspective that each writer provides is a sometimes stated, sometimes implied awareness of an unpleasant tone that is the norm in many universities and in some colleges, although colleges seem to be less inclined toward this attitude than their university peers. It’s an attitude of cynicism, and, according to these writers, it’s souring the intellectual and moral “quality of life,” we might call it, of higher education in America. Of course, this is a blanket statement and should be viewed as such. I’m sure there are many wonderful institutions of higher learning fostering hope and honest inquiry rather than cynicism among students and faculty. Of the college and university professors that I know, only a couple could be classified as cynical. However, I do breathe the rarified air of the Dallas Institute and my professional colleagues tend be cut from a different cloth. Last week I read, “Can American Universities Escape the Abyss?” in which Deresiewicz and a current combatant, Steven Pinker, are schooled together. In this piece,
Newsletter Fall 2014 • Volume III, Issue IV
From the Cowan Center Director Thomas Lindsay attributes the cynicism in the “academy” to a “moral and cultural relativism” whose roots Allan Bloom outlined in The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students (1987). Lindsay’s comments brought me back to an article I read years ago on the cusp of this current conversation, one in which a newly minted graduate of a prestigious university made some dismal claim like, “In four short years I went from ignorance to cynicism.” I read this with real concern then, but also, I recall, with a certain confusion. And although the books and articles in these last years attest to this same sensibility, I remember feeling, and I still feel, that
“. . . in a landscape of hope, cynicism doesn’t stand a chance.” this notion is basically foreign to me. I’m about to make a broad generalization, but I beg your indulgence while I make my point. The reason why cynicism as a way of being in the world is unfamiliar to me is because even though I now teach Pre-K—12 educators, I began and continue my career in the spirit of a school teacher. This is not about to become a “university professor, bad; school teacher, good” line, but it is a place to observe a fundamental difference between those who teach in higher education and those who teach Pre-K-12. I once heard a university professor snarl, “nothing really means anything.” This is a person who gets to decide what
and how, even when, he teaches. Understand that such notions are not even dim desires for the average school teacher, who considers a day wonderful if it involves more than one bathroom break. Please know that I’m not trying to vilify university teachers. I just find it interesting that within the “academy,” where faculty have been able to determine so much of what they do and say, cynicism and disdain are apparently the marks of an “educated” person. On the other hand, school teachers— whose creativity and spirits are pinched and pruned by the behaviorism and data worship that dominate schools of education, who are crushed by a bureaucracy that would break anyone’s heart, who are unjustly shackled with the responsibility of correcting all of society’s failings—these people seem naturally given to hope. I’m not saying that school teachers don’t get angry and depressed. But I’ve seen hope in the hearts and minds of crushed, even bitter school teachers flame anew when they are shown the least sign of respect or are given the least bit of substance. Maybe it’s our youthful audience that keeps our belief in learning and change alive. Regardless of the reasons, when acting true to their nature, school teachers default to belief. They believe that what they do makes a difference in the lives of their students, and in a landscape of hope, cynicism doesn’t stand a chance. For this reason, if American education is to be transformed—and I believe that it can be—we may need to look away from the ivory tower to a less predictable source of renewal. For I believe that if we liberate our Pre-K—12 educators from the burdens of bureaucracy, or even if we provide them with substance enough to offset bureaucracy’s crippling effects, we may very well see belief in education stirring back to life.
To read the Cowan Center Newsletter online, go to the Cowan Center link on the homepage of the Dallas Institute’s website: dallasinstitute.org.
The Epic Through Their Eyes: the 2014
Sue Rose Summer Institute for Teachers “This has been a breath of fresh air, a brain stimulating and inspiring experience. Other p.d. I’ve attended were on a low level—basic ideas and ways to apply concepts in the classroom— nothing to inspire and stimulate. This has reminded me of what I love… learning. And it’s that love of learning that you can mirror and reflect back on students.” Alyx Kaminski AP Art History, Art, Richardson ISD “There is no comparison. I feel not only more developed as a professional but more enriched as a human being. (Dr. Cowan was right!).” Ty Hathorn IB World History, Dallas ISD “The difference between the Summer Institutes and other professional developments is like the difference between day and night. The Summer Institutes are rays of sunshine in an otherwise dark and dreary and murky sea of this beast—professional development. Sadly, teachers being encouraged to think is unheard of in a world of data-driven games.” Lesli Jones English II, Pre-AP English II, Frisco ISD “So much of the time professional development seems a waste of time. This experience is so far away from that! I’m teaching parts of many of these works for the first time, and it is such a relief to feel like I actually have an in-depth understanding of them. Even if I weren’t teaching them, the insight they give into the cultures that created them is so valuable to a history teacher, like me. Additionally, I found these 3 weeks enjoyable, which I can rarely say about professional development.” Caitlin Bailey World and European History Jasper High School 2
“The Summer Institute has no comparison at all. Other professional development courses focus on teaching strategies or new ideas to implement in the classroom, but the Summer Institute’s purpose is to heal, renew, and feed the soul of the teacher.” Esther Cuevas Elementary EC-4, Dallas ISD “This has been the most enriching professional development I have ever attended.” María González French and Spanish, Rockwall ISD “This is completely different from any other p.d. experience I’ve had. I felt like it transformed my soul, my selfperceptions, and my perceptions of others. It made me want to be a better person. Beyond that, it showed me how to achieve these ends.” Lexy Graves English I, Dallas ISD “I have participated in a plethora of workshops, classes, and seminars. For the most part, each of these aimed to provide me with knowledge or skills that would enable me to become a ‘better’ teacher. None—none— of these equal the value of what I have gained in the Summer Institute! I have been edified! I have not only gained knowledge, I have had an elevation of my spirit.” Maria Ramirez English IV British Literature, Dallas ISD “I loved it! Professional development is usually remedial or unapplicable. This I will use every day for the rest of my life.” Mindy O’Connell Astronomy, Dallas ISD “If this type of learning were honored on all campuses, I think our educational system would be doing justice to students. The value and joy of learning, along with the accountability of this program is the type of structure, the model, that we should be providing for all our students.” Heather Lurvey English, Lewisville ISD “This Institute offers real opportunity to foster the spirit we are attempting to share with our students.” Michael Unruh, English/Literature, Covenant School 3
A Last Word “Heroic Madness and the Digestible Divine” —Michael Unruh The following essay was a timed writing composed on the last day of the 2014 Epic Summer Institute in response to a request to choose an epic feature from our study and write an essay in which images of this “epic” feature are explored. There is, perhaps, no more “indigestible” epic feature for our contemporary frame of experience than the proximity of the divine world to that of mortal man. In the epic, as Louise Cowan notes, the “divine and human can come together to work at the task of history.” We see this feature throughout the epic landscape, as gods literally descend from the heavens to take part in human battles, quarrels, trials, and rites. The Greek epics are framed by the explicit will of Zeus—an indication of the trajectory of the human action and the ultimate meaning of the human struggle. But in a highly skeptical and deeply materialistic contemporary landscape, such literal divine presences are strange and alienating, cutting the reader off from accepting the text and its full insight, and relegating the work to the smirk-circumferenced world of “supernatural” fiction, along with ghost stories, romance novels, and the Twilight saga. The classical epics, though, seem to manifest a capacity for the literal digestibility of the divine—the ability for the characters and the action to take in and assimilate all of the disparate and seemingly contrary components of the divine will as it works itself out in the world, even as it cuts across human intentions—which forms the ultimate test for the epic hero: to accept physically or to reject the divine hand behind all human movement. Achilles, the man-slaughtering paradigm of warfare in the Iliad, is able to “pass” this test when he relents to Priam at the end of the poem. Like Poseidon’s submission showed earlier in the poem, the greatness of wrath is not easily turned from its object. Achilles has an excellence that is not to be denied, and he is willing to sacrifice every Greek in the army to the unavailing and sepulchral edifice of 4
his greatness. From a certain perspective such railing makes sense, as it is the only fitting response to the mockery of his short life and the impossibility of attaining a glory equal to his strength. There is a point, however, in which even Achilles turns. His hands kissed by the reverend lips of a great king who has suffered much, Achilles is struck by the thought of that which he has lost and left undone—his failure in his duty to protect his friend’s life and his necessary negligence of his own aged father at home. Achilles’ mortal sinews are tugged by Priam’s kiss. He seems to receive a divine vibration of meaning and he absorbs a milder filial piety into his own fatalistic, Titanic world of wrath. As Iris had said to Poseidon, even the “hearts of great ones can be changed.” Dante, likewise, reveals such a willingness to bend to the inscrutability of the divine throughout the Divine Com-
“As Iris had said to Poseidon, even the ‘hearts of great ones can be changed.’” edy. With his very first steps he confronts the paradox of coming to Christ through the guidance of a pagan poet. Immediately following this encounter, Virgil tells him he must journey down through the depths of hell in order to ascend to the heights of heaven. At this radically inverted cosmography Dante’s reason very naturally gives pause, and he asks how it is possible that he is destined for such a journey. Here, however, Virgil introduces the name of Beatrice, and Dante’s trepidation is converted to conviction. His mortal frame bearing witness to the presence of the divine in the physical aspect of Beatrice, Dante becomes eager to assimilate this journey into his understanding of the divine will. By contrast, Moby-Dick presents in the figure of Ahab a man of great soul who, in his monomaniacal inability to
assimilate the rationally incommensurable features of divine action, nurtures an ulcerous wound in his “gashed” soul which “bleeds into” his “torn body” and “so interfusing, makes him mad.” Like Achilles, Ahab bears a kind of magnitude that is not to be denied. He calls down fire from the heavens, strikes sea-compasses into operation, and rallies a whole crew of sailors behind his mad endeavor to strike at the gods. Ahab feels driven to a confrontation with the White Whale, almost paradoxically, by God himself, who, he says, “does that beating, does that thinking, does that living and not I.” However, in his monomania, Ahab is unable to move his attention from the one aspect of divinity that he feels has wounded his soul. Transfixed like Dante’s Satan in the depths of hell, Ahab gnaws uselessly on a divine lesson which he is wholly unable to digest; all of this, while being, at times, literally immersed in a more benign, brotherly aspect of the divine image—as Ishmael understands it—in the form of the life and livelihoodgiving interior of whale’s bodies. Arrested in a frustrated madness, Ahab chokes on what he believes to be the stark “indigestibility” of divine power and wrath, and, perhaps not unlike contemporary society, Ahab, too, seems unable to find a way to nourish his soul.
Michael Unruh teaches literature and theology at The Covenant School of Dallas. He is an alumnus of the 2013-2014 Sue Rose Summer Institutes for Teachers.
C OMING S OON? The “Louise and Donald Cowan School” in the Dallas ISD. Details to follow.