Saturday, November 06, 2004

Teaching Snippet

Teaching Reflection

I am amazed at the dual tensions that are rippling through our young intellectuals. While many are in search of profits or chasing illusionary celebrity, a smaller, but increasing minority are becoming very vocal and politically active, trying to effect change…

You can’t rush at them like a middle linebacker, hitting them with reality and all its dirty secrets, rather you have to engage in the dialogic co-creation/exploration of the world, in which the student is introduced to critical tools that allow them to access multiple narratives of understanding/meaning. Once they recognize that the “one” truth they have been indoctrinated into all their lives is so exclusionary of so many other possibilities then the world opens up before their eyes. Of course, this is a fragile process, it can be destabilizing and threatening, so slow, careful steps—progress towards meta-awareness, not pell-mell destruction of beliefs.

Last week I had a young, bright, student tell me how she was a big fan of Ayn Rand and desired to write her paper on the benefits of free-market capitalism and individualistic competition. I said great, write me a proposal—which she did, the proposal was amazing (written over a week), a true document of inner turmoil caused by the accessing of different perspectives on an issue that was represented as an unquestioned truth. Like many intellectuals she was struggling to reconcile her lifelong indoctrination into a worldview that celebrated unfettered capitalism as the supreme beneficial societal force and her desire that we all have the basic necessities of life. A major, recent influence was a “social services” course that introduced her to different realities and perspectives about the world. In this course she began to engage these perspectives, and in doing so her paper proposal to write on Ayn Rand changed into a critique of the values that she defended at the beginning of the project. In the proposal’s original narrative she kept coming up against a truism that had been repeated to her throughout her upbringing—“unfettered free-market capitalism is the superior social system because the freedom of individualistic competition is the most beneficial for everyone”—bam! She continuously ran into this paradoxical wall, bam! bam! four times in her proposal, bam! … just yesterday she told me she had always believed, somehow, that it was true and that no one had encouraged her, of course, to consider those that lose in the competition, or, those that are excluded from ever joining the race…

3 comments:

JoshSN said...

1. What Harry said.

2. Family values is the value of having someone in your family give you a $300,000 unsecured loan.

Michael said...

Oso,

I agree Wendell Berry is definitely a conservative, and extremely nostalgic to boot, but he is nothing like the selfish conservative me-first philosophy of Ayn Rand (also to be distinguished from the more positive leftist-communal me-first philosophies of Herbert Marcuse and Raoul Vaneigem)

think about it... read Wendell Berry's Thought's In the Presence of Fear and think about how he is different...

argghhh, Ayn Rand is like the road map to intense masturbation based on self-gratifying imagery and denial of the other, while Berry is like a developed relationship based on the communal sharing of lovemaking... of course Herbert Marcuse and Raoul Vaneigem are even more communal and they are into intense fucking as communication (you should introduce them to Moreno)

Michael said...

Wow! That program seems like the perfect place to study and to work with Angela Davis! I went to hear her speak on campus last year with Patricia Hill Collins. Davis is a very powerful, intelligent presence--I was very impressed by the level of her conversation and her ability to interact with the audience (during questions).

T.C. Boyle is an amazing writer. I read his Friend of the Earth earlier this year... I saw that he has a new hardback out about Kinsey and the sex research.

Let me know what you think about Drop City I've been thinking about getting it. I'm 50 pages into Ruth Ozeki's "All Over Creation" ...