Everything Old Is…Radically Different Again

“Wikipedia has evolved a radically different set of epistemological standards,” says Simson L. Garfinkel’s story in MIT’s Technology Review, Wikipedia and the Meaning of Truth: Why the online encyclopedia’s epistemology should worry those who care about traditional notions of accuracy.

…standards that aren’t especially surprising given that the site is rooted in a Web-based community, but that should concern those of us who are interested in traditional notions of truth and accuracy. On Wikipedia, objective truth isn’t all that important, actually. What makes a fact or statement fit for inclusion is that it appeared in some other publication–ideally, one that is in English and is available free online. “The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth,” states Wikipedia’s official policy on the subject.

We ought to be talking a lot more about our understanding of truth in general, not . Not incidentally, I think this sort of philosophical talk, which can be had even with quite young children, is sadly missing in most schools.

But, let’s put aside for a moment the question of Wikipedia’s reliability, though it’s a good question, for sure.

There is nothing radically different about Wikipedia’s conception of the truth, not as Garfinkel describes it anyway. Wikipedia’s conception of truth is a very old one. There was a time before objective truth. You might say it was pre-Scientific Revolution, or pre-Descartes, or even pre-Strato (do you trust the link?), but there was a time. You get a good picture of it in the scenes in the Rainbow Inn in George Eliot’s Silas Marner. For better or worse, for centuries, what was true was what people said was true; it was, as Garfinkel says of the modern Wikipedia, “the consensus view of a subject.”

Before anyone can say, “Well, thank heavens we’ve moved beyond that,” let me say that one of chief errors of science is to think that anyone with a subjective view can’t be trusted. C. S. Lewis wrote an insightful and lovely short essay, Meditation in a Toolshed, in which he says we can look at things, that is objectively, as a scientist does. And we can look along things, that is we can look at them subjectively.

As soon as you have grasped this simple distinction, it raises a question. You get one experience of a thing when you look along it and another when you look at it. Which is the “true” or “valid” experience? Which tells you most about the thing? And you can hardly ask that question without noticing that for the last fifty years or so everyone has been taking the answer for granted. It has been assumed without discussion that if you want the true account of religion you must go, not to religious people, but to anthropologists; that if you want the true account of sexual love you must go, not to lovers, but to psychologists; that if you want to understand some “ideology” (such as medieval chivalry or the nineteenth-century idea of a “gentleman”), you must listen not to those who lived inside it, but to sociologists.

There is nothing that makes looking at intrinsicly better than looking along, says Lewis. We need both points of view. Perhaps Wikipedia tries to combines these. That may be new to our eyes, but it’s hardly radical. In any event, the problem is not Wikpedia’s, but our own understanding of truth and epistemology. If we feel disoriented, it’s not because Wikipedia is radically different. It comes because we no longer give people the sort of epistemological compass–a good grounding in philosophy–in school.

Woolf at My Door

I have not gone in much for feminist polemics. Indeed, I have generally treated them as any bigot treats anyone or anything other than his own kind. That’s an embarrassing admission, but not one for which I am at all inclined to apologize, if I am at all honest. If the various feminine authors feel slighted or even abused by me, it is because those authors have not earned my sympathy or affection, and that in turn occurs because they have written mainly grievances or pleadings. Even the sober Mary Wollstonecraft (The Vindications: The Rights of Men & The Rights of Woman), I felt, thought too much of her sex; and “[…] anything written with that conscious bias is doomed to death,” says Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own. She is right. She is also right that the looking glass of womanhood has made me feel twice the man I really am, which, in a second embarrassing confession, I have enjoyed immensely and completely without warrant.

So, here I stand, dressed in my best vanity and fine ego, wanting nothing more at this moment than to invite Woolf to a dinner of partridges and port, which she says she would fancy, and both of which I can do rather well. The temptation is to call this a peace offering. The desire is to have some of that “profound, subtle and subterranean glow which is the rich yellow flame of rational discourse.” I was going to say manly discourse. The cause is that she has seduced me with her complete indifference, her offer not of a white feather nor of a red feather, but of no feather at all—I feel like a schoolboy deliberately trying to shock my teacher, who is much too adept to be baited. The reasons are two:

I do not so much want to write like Woolf; her voice is feminine and strange to me. But I do want to think or see more like she does, with a finer, clearer sense of Truth. My habit is to say “This is the way things are.” I speak too consciously, Woolf would tell me. Her habit is to show the way things are. To paraphrase Socrates: better (and harder) to refute the truth, for Woolf, or Wollstonecraft, or Brad are easily refuted. Woolf handles the contentious issue of gender with a courageous disinterest that is difficult to attack, even in Three Guineas, which is the a more political book.

Secondly, Woolf’s delivery seems the way to reinvigorate the so-called naked public square, Richard John Neuhaus’s central metaphor for the morally empty forum of public discussion. Neuhaus contends that moderns erroneously believe we can have a neutral discussion of politics. One is supposed to check one’s values, one’s maleness or femaleness, for example, at the entrance to the square, as if they were hats and coats. This is, of course, impossible. The best short definition of politics is given to us by Aristotle. Politics, he said, is free people deliberating the question, How ought we to order our life together? The “ought” in that definition indicates that politics is essentially a moral enterprise, not a neutral one. I am impressed, pleased, but not surprised that it is a woman, Woolf, who shows men like me how to speak with moral integrity again. She has a disinterested voice, but never a disembodied or neutral one and, thank Heaven, never a masculine one.

Technology + Storytelling + Critical Discourse = Learning 2.0

However good they are, web 2.0 technologies are still immature. Watch the editors of Opening Up Education, John Seely Brown, Toru Iiyoshi and Vijay Kumar, speak about the impact and implications of emerging technologies and you’ll see what I mean.

Part 2

Part 3

Now, if as it appears, the model of education is changing from one of pedagogy-as-knowledge-transfer to socially constructed knowledge, then it seems to me certain social skills–storytelling and critical discourse–are more important than ever. Otherwise, the opportunity to get together with people from all over the globe is wasted. Recently we’ve begun experimenting with web 2.0 technologies such as wikis, IM, Google Apps at my school. The students quickly master the technologies. They can learn to edit a wiki page without being taught. But they see these things as toys. Teaching them how to use the technology is easy–and will get easier as the technology develops. Teaching them how to think and how to tell a compelling story is, as it ever was and ever will be, immensely more challenging–and immensely more fun.

I can’t think of any more practical tool for the job than philosophy. (It may be a few years away yet, but I think we’ll soon realized what a mistake it was to drop it from the general curriculum so long ago. For a savage critique of Canadian education, read Hilda Neatby’s So Little for the Mind: An Indictment of Canadian Education. Written in 1953 is still largely holds true today.) We’ve been teaching practical reasoning and philosophy to middle school students at Island Pacific School for 14 years. The syllabus covers some formal logic, the structure of argument and fallacies, ethics and a survey of Western philosophy. But we’re an independent school and have more flexibility than any public school.

But the program needs work. I need a better look at non-Western philosophies, among other things. And I need to connect it to storytelling.  I do not mean to novel structure, or those zig-zagging plot diagrams. I’m interested in how you teach what a story is, what it does and in why we have stories at all. “Storytelling is one of the few human traits that are truly universal across culture and through all of known history,” says Scientific American has a rather cold account of campfire tales. Richard Rorty says the best answers to our philosophical questions will be found in stories. Interestingly, when I ask my students to tell me their stories, they can’t. “How I spent my summer holidays” just doesn’t cut it. At best that would make a chapter. Even so, but they never write their adventures as if they were chapters. Students often write pedantically, not because they can’t write well, but because they can’t tell stories well. They have no sense of their own lives being part of a narrative, much less any sense of humanity having a narrative. Granted, there is probably something developmental involved here; I think you need meta-cognition before you can write your own story. But I don’t see in any curricula anywhere trying to coax real storytelling out of students at any age. Neither do I see any requiring students to memorize and tell stories. The best place to learn how this will be in something else we tossed out long ago, to our shame: Canadian First Nations culture. Their’s is a living model of socially constructed knowledge passed on through storytelling.

I’m glad to see web technologies develop. But I’d like to see concurrent development of philosophy and of storytelling in language/literature curricula in grade school curricula. Without those two, Learning 2.0 just doesn’t add up.

We Think, Therefore We Are

Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0: an excellent paper on opening up education, or OUE, by John Seely Brown, Visiting Scholar and Advisor to the Provost at the University of Southern California (USC) and Independent Co-Chairman of a New Deloitte Research Center, and Richard P. Adler, Research Affiliate at the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto and Principal of People & Technology, a research and consulting firm in Cupertino, California.

I quite like the distinction Brown and Adler make between the Cartesian and what they call the social view of learning:

(Source: http://connect.educause.edu/Library/EDUCAUSE+Review/MindsonFireOpenEducationt/45823?time=1223153029)

(Source: http://connect.educause.edu/Library/EDUCAUSE+Review/MindsonFireOpenEducationt/45823?time=1223153029)

One of the promises of the social learning model–not often talked about–is that it moves us away from the deadening effects of reductionism that I spoke about in my last post. So far as schools have followed the Cartesian model Brown and Adler describe, they’ve shut off a great deal of important conversation about what we each and collectively believe about the nature of things. Philosophically speaking, the modern world sees fundamental metaphysical matters as relative: you have your world view and I have mine. But, contemporary thought says that even if it was to grant that such talk is about absolutes, it is not clearly and distinctly knowable in an empirical, or Cartesian, way and therefore falls outside any profitable discussion. Faith claims are like flavours of ice cream in this sense. Psychologically speaking, the modern world sees any transferring of what it deems mere opinion as proselytising or indoctrination. Thus, the very structure of modern pedagogy inhibits robust discussion of the very things that move us most deeply, as I said in my August 23, ‘08 post “First Things.” Moreover, the structure of modern pedagogy says such discussions are unimportant.

On the other hand, a social view of learning might reawaken intelligent conversation about first things, or faith claims or metaphysics–whatever we want to call those frames of reference that shape all we say and do. First of all, it is about dialogue, which is something structurally different from the essentially one-way communication in the Cartesian model. In dialogue, we seek one of two things: the truth, if it can be known; and if it can’t, which is more often the case, a better understanding of the problem. We come to these by comparing our views with those of others. That simply can’t be done in the Cartesian model.

Dizzy Over Descartes

If the Discourse on Method (read it here) made me dizzy and giddy as a schoolboy, it is because in the fabulous few pages of part four of his book, Descartes turns the world right on its head. A reductionist might say he did it in just the three words (in Latin, five in English) of the cogito. From “I think” I can know “I am” and from there I can know I have a soul and from that I can know God. Not only can I know God, but I can know Him more clearly and distinctly than I can know anything else. And it is this first rule of Descartes’ method—never to accept anything as true unless it is known clearly and distinctly—that upsets the whole of Christendom. Very few people have the greatness to bend history itself, as Robert Kennedy said, but our Frenchman is one of them.

After all the excitement, however, I cannot help but to return to my thoughts about Lucretius (August 29, 08). Cartesian reductionism does not seem so different from Epicurean atomism in its deadening effect on my spirit. But even the prosaic Lucretius thought it important to think about reality. Descartes thought it more important to think about thinking. When he says “I think, therefore I am” he still believes in God, but he makes Him transcendent to thought.  He hives off theological questions. Had he left them to theologians that would have been fine, but the first rule of his method cuts short any rational discussion of the mystery of being. That is, we cannot accept mystery because by definition it cannot be known clearly and distinctly–Descartes conditions for claiming knowledge. This is not immediately obvious in the Discourse, but I don’t think Descartes hoped to fool Catholic censors; he knew they were too clever to be tricked. I suspect he was carried away by his enthusiasm, in the way the modern scientist will split an atom to see what is inside even at the risk of blowing up the world. The upshot is that theology becomes superfluous, if not superstitious talk; and I am left with an inadequate account of my being and, worse, no means to make a better one.

A second, unintended consequence arises. When he removed religion, that is our theories of everything, Descartes created an epistemological vacuum and human nature did what every nature does with a vacuum. Since Descartes, it let science slide into that part of understanding that was once occupied by theology. (Take at look at the Temple of Science in Wired). Ironically, this is the very place from which Descartes saw—and saw rightly—it needed to be extricated. Now, however, moderns act like the old instrumentalists: New theories—or old ones such as Catholicism—can be discussed so long as they do not question the authority of science on matters of ultimate truths. This is Galileo and his friend-turned-persecutor, Cardinal Barbarini, inverted.

More Tools of Learning

I don’t mind new technology, so long as we remain the ones driving it. Alan Kay, a pioneer of the GUI, said he wouldn’t let anyone within 15 yards of a computer unless he was sure it was a kind of bike for them. This may be a reference to a comment by a much younger looking Steve Jobs:

Still, as Dorothy Sayers suggests in the Lost Tools of Learning (below), we’re going to need to get a feel for the tools we have before we can judge their worth. Some of the best commentary and links I’ve read on Web 2.0 for education, or Learning 2.0, are coming from Georgio Bertini over on Twine, a semantic web project I’m just beginning to explore. Twine is still in beta-invite, but should be open soon, so they say.

One to start, with permission from George:

Too busy to learn? An introduction to collaborative leadership learning.pdf

The handbook is organised into four sections:

1 The Challenge of Collaborative Learning
Readings and resources to help establish or revisit how learning is central to leadership and to explore how leaders learning together can help improve and transform schools.

2 Exploring the Territory
Five case studies of headteacher groups in England and Wales exploring, in practical ways, how groups form, develop and sustain their work.

3 Development and Review
Review materials to help groups take stock of how they work together, surface expectations and launch, affirm or redirect the work of the group.

4 New Directions
A summary of learning frames, a template for recording action points, references and other general information.

(from the handbook’s TOC)

Titian and Tennyson

I like to show my students Titian’s, Flaying of Marsyas.

Titian's Flaying of Marsyas. Source: Wikimedia

Here is the story of Marsyas, a satyr who challenged Apollo, the god of music, to a musical contest. It was agreed that the winner could do what he wished with the loser. Marsyas, we see in the painting, has lost, and Apollo has chosen to see him flayed alive.

But with what transcendent genius Titian turns this pain into poetry. Titian understood what that meant; to challenge the god, and of course to lose, to have your skin taken off, to be exposed, with all of you to look at. On the left, there is Apollo, the golden-headed god, so meticulously and lovingly taking the skin off Marsyas’ heart. Above him, a butcher, the common man, is working his knife, too: the artist, is exposed to everyone. There is another satyr, trying to help, but pitifully, vainly so. The lonely artist cannot be helped; art is a solitary business.

Around Marsyas are three other figures representing, as I am told, three stages of the artist. There is a child, the potential artist, horrified at what being an artist can mean. There is the young artist playing a viola, looking away, as if unable to face up to the possibility of not being a great artist. And there is the old man, wearing the crown of success. It is Titian himself, in a self-portrait, who seems to be thinking “Have I done it? Have I gone far enough to be stripped bare before the world?”

The answer is in Marsyas’s remarkable face. It is not at all what we expect. Marsyas’s eyes are brilliant. He is ecstatic. He knows he has gone the whole way. And Titian, because he could paint such a picture must know, too, that he has gone so far.

I am no student of art, but I do not think I am putting the brush in Titian’s hand if I suggest that he was not speaking merely of artists, but of human beings, of which he may have considered artists to be the best examples, and not merely of music, but of all the human pursuits. It is the heroic heart Titian wants us to see. Tennyson, later, wanted to show us the same in his poem Ulysses:

…My mariners,
Souls that have toil’d, and wrought, and thought with me—
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads—you and I are old;
Old age hath yet his honour and his toil.
Death closes all; but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men who strove with Gods.

Titian has something else to show us, however, and that something is in the young lute player. He is healthier fundamentally than so many in the modern world because he at least knows what he is afraid to look at. Excellence can be agony, as we see, and it takes a noble heart to face being human.

But moderns only know heroism because they are so well acquainted with timidity. Titian asked if he has gone far enough: moderns would ask Marsyas if he feels good about himself. The question is silly and irrelevant. Worse, it leads us to an emasculated, sentimental way of thinking. We wouldn’t flay Marsyas today; we’d castrate him and not even Titian could turn that into poetry. Taking into account all the care we must have in encouraging and supporting the children we teach, I would still say that good feelings, any personal feelings if we believe Titian, have nothing to do with being excellent, not directly anyway, and certainly not in the way we commonly think of the words “good” and “feelings” these days.

Actually, modern sorts of people are more likely to ask if the rest of us feel good about ourselves, seeing how Marsyas has been singled out for special recognition by the god. And with that final, fatal turn, they paint us out of the picture altogether. They make us neither the old man, nor the young man, nor even the child. They render us un-human. We cannot even play the forlorn second satyr because we are looking at ourselves when we ought to be looking at Marsyas. We should be looking at Marsyas not because Marsyas is himself great, but because he shows us what greatness itself is. The situation is sad; I can think of no other word. “All previous ages have sweated and been crucified in an attempt to realize what is really the right life, what was really the good man,” G. K. Chesterton wrote. Nowadays we cannot describe good men, not only because we cannot describe the good, but also because we no longer know what it is to be men.

It ought to be obvious at this point that we cannot lay out greatness, such as Marsyas and Titian show us, as a list of criteria to be met by any who are interested, like we would set out the qualifications for an Olympic event. Human excellence is not something to be empirically measured. What would we measure in Titian’s painting? And even in the Olympics, while we marvel at the raw speed of a sprinter, we marvel more at the way the sprinter drives body and soul ever higher, faster, farther. And how absurd it would be to tell Titian that we will call him great only when he has created a painting seven feet high, with these exact pigments, with this sort of composition, with that sort of story. How weird it would be to tell Marsyas that we will call him excellent when he plays such and such a tune at such and such a tempo. Excellence has spontaneity in it; there are too many avenues to it to name them ahead of time. We can’t predict greatness, but we can call out when we see it, as Titian did.

We’ve talked about having Raphael’s School of Athens mounted in the school foyer. I would choose Titian’s last great painting instead. Raphael shows us how and what; Titian shows us why.

Lost Tools of Learning 2.0

While I love what Web 2.0 is doing for Learning 2.0, I don’t think it’s all that revolutionary–contrary to all the buzz I read on Twitter, Twine and a dozen RSS feeds. Recently, I commented on Stowe Boyd’s /Message, saying that we’ve been twittering for generations, only we once called it campfire chat or idle gossip. Not too long ago I was in New York giving a paper at conference on the humanities Columbia University. In one of the keynote talks, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University, said that there are no ruptures, just repetitions. For example, globalization was described as an unprecedented challenge of the modern world. Really, she says, it was another repetition of eternal attempts to take in the world in a single theory. Likewise, as exciting and technologically marvelous as Google is, it is just a repetition of library research; nothing is fundamentally different. Calling out “rupture” or revolution is a failure to recognize another repetition.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m very glad Web 2.0 (can I use that as shorthand, please) is here–I recently rolled out Google Apps at my school and we’re setting up a WikiEducation project next month–but I sometimes worry that the sort of collaborative learning that is all the buzz around Things 2.0, will be the next flavour of the month, like constructivism or the International Baccalaureate Middle years Program, and we’ll lose sight of the fundamental ends of education. We’ll start giving lessons in order to teach collaboration instead of teaching collaboration in order to give lessons and then we’ll have the whole thing upside-down.

I’d say it’s time to read again Dorothy Sayers’ excellent essay, “The Lost Tools of Learning” presented at Oxford in 1947, in which she proposes a modified version of medieval scholastic curriculum!

On the Nature of Things

I was looking for a reference in Lucretius’ epic philosophical poem, On the Nature of Things, as I prepared my classes for the fall school start up. Lucretius, and his muse, Epicurus, expect materialism to inspire confidence. No longer need we fear death, those two say, because where we are, death is not. That is, when we are dead, there will be no consciousness to register the fact, so, as Bobby McFerrin sang some 2,000 years later, “Don’t worry. Be happy.”

My own brush with mortality leads me to believe otherwise; Death and I once spent an intimate and exceedingly unpleasant moment together in the shadow of Notre Dame cathedral in Paris. We may argue endlessly about whether this near-death experience was in fact real or merely some hallucination, brought to life, as many tell me, by my Western Christian prejudices about dying and the afterlife. If I am deluded, then my delusion is complete, for although I cannot offer any conventional proof that things happened as I claim they did, they are the surest things I lay claim to knowing. But never mind here, let us just register that this happened.

Notwithstanding my own experience then, it is hard to take inspiration from or to find confidence in a way of thinking that emboldens me to pursue nothing. If it is true, Lucretius’ story frees me from ultimate fears, and being mortal I feel most gratified to anything that can do that; but whether or not it is true, the story does not free me for anything in particular, or at least nothing of particular importance. Being good to one another and living by modest means is a very fine way to go about the world; and no doubt it seemed especially fine to a Roman in the violent years of the waning Republic. But I cannot help thinking that cows also live modestly and benignly, if not exactly kindly. Not many people have jumped out of an airplane and had the misfortune of parachuting into a pasture full of happy cows. But those who have will tell you that you can yell “Cow! Cow! Watch out!” until you’re blue in the face but the cows will not budge one step. They will look left and right rather stupidly and go back to jawing cud; it just doesn’t occur to them that something of consequence might come down from above.

Of course, all may indeed be the blind destiny of matter. We may quite properly look to the grass at our feet instead of the stars over our heads for meaning. But at this moment I do not want to consider the relation of materialism to the truth. My objections here are psychological. The road marked by materialism is far more contracted than the narrow path to the Kingdom of Heaven. The Roman Catholic Church can say sorry to Galileo and still be a church, but Lucretius cannot say sorry to God without his whole world coming undone. And for Plato’s philosopher kings, 40 years of the most intensive study will neither enliven life’s journey nor take them anywhere else but to a bleak dissolution. Materialism’s grey philosophy leaves out first causes and instead deals only with simple or efficient causes and thus succumbs to all the deadening effects of mere efficiency. Ironically, what is missing from Lucretius’ poem is poetry—and hope, initiative, inquisitiveness, striving, resolution…all that is human.

The Sound of Silence

This story, How Do you Teach Kids to Pay Attention, appeared in Pajamas recently.

For two years now, I’ve scheduled so-called Silent School mornings, several times a year. After our morning announcements, the whole school goes quiet. No one speaks a word and the doors to the office are closed so the students and staff aren’t interrupted by phone calls. All teaching is done silently–usually this means the students are working on projects and other works in progress. But I once had my grade 6 math class construct a huge 3′ x 5′ times table wall chart out of a hundred or so bits of coloured paper without anyone saying a word.

The first time we ran this was an odd experience in a school full of 11- to 14-year olds. Part way through the morning it started to snow and I thought all was lost. You could feel the students vibrate with excitement. But no one said a thing. At lunch they all walked down to our meeting room, quiet as monks and nuns, and waited for me to speak again.

The students loved the exercise: most said they could concentrate better and that they finished far more work than they usually do. I found they asked better questions because they had to think first before going to the trouble to write down their problem. Indeed, a significant number of students wanted a weekly Silent School day. We haven’t gone that far. Not yet.