Now, more than ever, the graduates of our schools and colleges will live in worlds different from those in which they were born and went to school. A discipline called English must help them prepare for unknown conditions. The best preparation we can give our students will be the highest level of competence as readers and writers, producers and consumers of the various texts they will encounter. (154)
Scholes, Robert. The Rise and Fall of English: Reconstructing English as a Discipline. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1998.
The disease of modern culture is specialization. (19)
Berry, Wendell. The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture. NY: Avon Books, 1977.
We must … reject the concept of specialization. We need the contrary, a diversified economy, for only such an economy will allow for populations to participate fully in our society. Specialization inevitably leads to chronic unemployment and to lower wages. (179)
Goldsmith, James. “The Winners and the Losers.” The Case Against the Global Economy. eds. J. Mander and E. Goldsmith. San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1996.
… for some years now the activity of the artist in our society has been trending more toward the function of the ecologist: one who deals with environmental relationships. Ecology is defined as the totality or pattern of relations between organisms and their environment. Thus the act of creation for the new artist is not so much the invention of new objects as the revelation of previously unrecognized relationships between existing phenomena, both physical and metaphysical. So we find that ecology is art in the most fundamental and pragmatic sense, expanding our apprehension of reality. (346)
Youngblood, Eugene. Expanded Cinema. NY: Dutton, 1970.
The great ecological issues of our time have to do in one way or another with our failure to see things in their entirety. That failure occurs when minds are taught to think in boxes and not taught how to transcend those boxes or to question overly much how they fit with other boxes. We educate lots of in-the-box thinkers who perform within their various specialties rather like a dog kept in the yard by an electronic barrier. And there is a connection between knowledge organized in boxes, minds that stay in those boxes, and degraded ecologies and global imbalances. (94-95)
Orr, David. Earth in Mind: On Education, Environment, and the Human Prospect. Washington D.C.: Island, 1994.
1 comment:
Thanks Mason, for your poetic response.
As an academic insider I would hope that it doesn't become the sole defender of interdisciplinary/liberal values as the university/colleges are fully corporate and just as "fearful of thinking outside of boxes"--maximizing profit at every stage of the development of our nation's youth (Although there are those that still operate in the belly of the beast).
Its interesting that you mention Harper's and suburbia in the same breath. I read the new Harper's this week and frankly the trio of articles on the new right's war on (heathen) America scared me... we need to get more people to be aware of these people and their agenda. They fear those that are different and their only method of security/faith is to destroy any difference ... for these people questions are threatening and open relations of acceptance are to be condemned. Nothing like insecure fanatics, they doubt and must destroy to deny that doubt...
Also this week I watched the 1983 movie Suburbia about disaffected Punks trying to survive in a decaying suburbia.
I wonder if we are producing new generations of destroyed possibilities... everytime I see the picture of you and your daughter, or think of my good friends who just had a son... children with strong, intelligent parents who will teach them to be open and to ask questions without fear--our best hope!
Peace friend!
Post a Comment