We often talk about someone being the "voice of a generation". Kendrick Lamar is a rapper that has recently risen to be the voice of the newest generation of adults to come from the inner city. When we typically think of the voice of this group, I am sure most minds will immediately jump to gangsta rap artists like Eazy-E. However, Kendrick is anything but your straightforward gangsta rapper. Born and bred in Compton, he is an interesting hybrid of backpack nostalgia and unadulterated style, blending typical tropes of street culture with sincere cultural analysis.
Songs like
Last year he released the album Section.80. It itself is a generational piece referencing the Ronald Reagan era of kids to be born in the 80's and grow up in the environment of Compton.
It’s a balancing act of sensitivity and aggression, of consideration and ignorance, of self-seriousness and jest.
"I’m not on the outside looking in, I’m not on the inside looking out", Lamar bellows on its outro, "I’m in the dead fucking center, looking around."
He is one of the new generation of "conscious" rappers who are expanding their audience beyond the liberal arts college student and moving into the mainstream. Compton's established super stars Dr. Dre and the Game have already tapped him to ascend to superstardom recognizing his talent and progressive agenda. But his demeanor is anything but that of a rapper. In interviews he doesn’t noticeably carry himself like a street dude, he definitely carries the weight of the streets on his shoulders. He has been characterized as a cautious optimist. He often speaks at length about matters like caring for the children of his incarcerated friends and how his ultimate goal is to make enough money to bring community centers back to Compton. It is his naked and candid honesty that some view as a weakness, but I feel that he could serve as a role model for kids like our Dreamers who look up to people like Rick Ross.
He is a unique blend of charisma, technical ability, raw enthusiasm and a legitimate desire to make the world better for all people.
Since I myself am more of the academic type, my
personal meaning for my life is to grow as an intellectual and attempt to
remain a student for the entirety of my life.
It is somewhat of a foreign concept for me to empathize with other
people’s pursuits that fall outside of the academic realm. While I have had
other experiences tutoring kids from this socio-economic background, it was
actually Mr. Jazz that made the broadest impact on my thought process. It was
inspiring for me to see an individual fully dedicating their life to the
cultivation of others’ lives. I feel that this speaks volumes about the Mr.
Jazz’s take on the meaning of life. I have come to reevaluate my take on
science. For much of my life I have been interested in knowing, simply for the
sake of knowing. I feel that this is a disconnect that exists between the
academic world and real world at times. But my reasons for focusing on the
natural sciences have been due to my fatalistic worldview. I have felt that we
as a species were probably too far gone, and that due to the current state of
affairs, there was little that I could do to change the dreary, deterministic outcome.
Volunteering in the IHAD program has initiated a change in this mindset. Being around Mr. Jazz, Ms. Danielle,
and those kids has forced me back down to Earth. Despite the fact that I had tutored before, these kids were able to affect me in a special way. Something about the look of excitement in
those kids eyes when you walk in triggers emotions and feelings that else truly can. In a corny way, I feel that I am learning what it means to be human. We are innately social beings and to deny that is to deny your very genetic programming, something that I feel that I may have been doing unconsciously. It was Dr. Hobby said, these kids expect something genuine out of you. It was startling when I attempted to use my typical tutoring demeanor, which has been successful with middle-schoolers to college students, but these kids were not having it. They forced me to loosen up and show them some true character. This has kind of stirred up the approach that I have taken to 1 on 1 interactions. Strangely, when giving a presentation or speaking to a large group I can be more comfortable than in 1 on 1 situation. IHAD will definitely lead to a change in my communication skills, because kids do not hold back feedback the way that adults do!
Overall, the IHAD experience in conjunction with our class material has forced me to reassess my reasons for pursing knowledge. Rather than understanding the way that nature works for knowledges sake I feel science needs to come down at times to work with layman. But this is a two-way street, a goal of mine that has come into fruition this semester is the enhancement of science literacy in America. A lack of science literacy has plagued minorities for decades, (see Tuskegee Study and The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks), but I feel that it is a problem across the board, as most americans do not understand fundamentals of scientific research nor do they understand how to interpret its results. For example, I log onto Facebook and I see that a "hippy" friend of mine has used a peer-reviewed source to argue that fluoride in water is truly bad. I find the article and it is only tangentially related to the topic that they were addressing! Additionally, we have fundmental lack of technological understanding. We are technologically literate, but computers and cell phones are black boxes, more magical items that need to be charged than carefully designed network of microcircuits. SO in summation to my rambling, I feel that increased fluency in scientific and technological concepts will lead to an positive increase in a number of other areas, like public support for research and even general concepts like evolution.
I can't remember if we mentioned this book in class, but "Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States" by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva is a interesting piece that confronts the modern problem of racism. We live in a country were all but a few actually deem themselves as racist, but yet the inequalities that we have confronted in class still exist!
See this NY Times column for an interesting discussion of this topic
Following the many social movements of the 20th
century like the Feminist, Civil Rights, and LBGTQ, we have entered an
unprecedented era of tolerance. I use the word tolerance because this is
different than actual acceptance. This policy of simple tolerance has indicative of abstract liberalism. We respect the rights of a cause by abstractly applying the tenets of liberalism to rationalize our support. Our country was founded on the classic
principles of liberalism, those being individualism, universalism, egalitarianism, and
meliorism; the concepts we are all individuals, equal and through our combined effort can effect positive change.
Bonilla-Silva takes this problem head on tackling it from a number of angles. I particularly enjoyed abstract liberalism turned abstract racism or color-blindness. Bonilla-Silva characterizes abstract racism as “framing race-related issues in the language of liberalism…”. This general is interesting in that it that can be applied beyond the scope racism and be applicable to just about any cause outside of race like gender and sexual orientation discussions.
Even Colbert has picked up on this color blindness:
"Now, I don't see color. People tell me I'm white and I believe them because police officers call me "sir"."
"Racism? Strong words, yes, but let's look the issue straight in its partially unseeing eye. In a colorblind society, White people, who are unlikely to experience disadvantages due to race, can effectively ignore racism in American life, justify the current social order, and feel more comfortable with their relatively privileged standing in society (Fryberg, 2010). Most minorities, however, who regularly encounter difficulties due to race, experience colorblind ideologies quite differently. Colorblindness creates a society that denies their negative racial experiences, rejects their cultural heritage, and invalidates their unique perspectives."
They go on to add that the solution if Multiculturalism and what they describe does manage to pass as cosmopolitanism!
Larueau posits that there are two prevailing modes of understanding in equality in society
1) Society
is fundamentally open. Personal attributes dictate outcomes. We are a society
of individuals
2) Disparities
exist, yet are a matter of “degrees” of difference
“the
communal aspects of class, class subcultures and milieu, have long since
disappeared
Larueae seeks to dispel these notions and show that class truly matters in her study. And from the books that we have read, this is not a farfetched case to make. We have shown in Marked, there is correlation with the incarceration rates as well as finding a job after incarceration. Additionally we have seen the disparities the distribution of industrial waste and the correlation to socio-economic status, which generally correlates to race.
While her sample size was small for the study, I found her qualitative analysis of different parenting styles, their relationship to social class, and the resulting differential transmission of benefits to be fascinating. It reconfirmed my own appreciate for my parents, because despite all of the praise I have received I have always truly felt that my parents were responsible for my success. They definitely took the cultivated approach and when I compare childhoods with friends I am often left thankful for the amount of dedication that my parents poured into my upbringing. They worked extremely hard to get me to do things outside of my comfort zone, a work ethic that I hated at the time, but I now appreciate. I am glad that my parents realized the benefits of the concerted cultivation, because the positive outcomes that Laruea attributes to CC, I have definitely feel that I have received those very same benefits. I definitely entered college with a sense of entitlement and some practice at making social institutions work me. I honestly got along better with adults than peers growing up, a trait that has led to great relationships with professors at UNCA.
It has been a shock to see that not everyone was as naturally comfortable with figures of authority as myself. Most of all this course has been an eye opener to the world of others. My parents always told me I was in a world of my own, and college allowed me to finally make a connection with world of others, particularly this class, as it was of course intended to do.
As a trilogy the Qatsi's offer an interestingly framed perspective of mankind. Koyaanisqatsi in particular interests me. The juxtaposition of the natural world with the "artificial" is fascinating and from a purely aesthetic perspective, its preservation by the US National Film Registry is a no-brainer.
In a video filmed as a "Making of" for Koyaanisqatsi, Reggio maintains that the Qatsi films are meant to create an experience and that "it is up [to] the viewer to take for himself/herself what it is that [the film] means." But the statements that he makes in the interviews (that we watched as a class), it is hard to believe that this is true. He is rather aggressive in condemning technology, and constantly compares it to art. His comments honestly suggest ignorance in his understanding of both art and technology.
I feel that he misses that technology is part of being human, since he is so quick to condem its ubiquitous nature. Parsing the word "technology" we see that it simply means the study of art, skill, or craft. This and culture is all that really set us apart from the rest mammals. He dreams of a post-technology future, but that is utterly ridiculous. Viewing human history through the lens of "Guns, Germs, and Steel", technology is the sole reason that culture has been able to move from a virtual afterthought to one of the centers of human establishment. Advances in food production freed up individuals pursue endeavors outside of securing nourishment. It was this surplus from which cultural specialists like religious leaders, thinkers, scientistes, etc. sprung from. So from simply examining the mechanisms by which human society evolved, the idea of a world without this support system seems unfeasible. No, I have no wish to be a hunter-gatherer, and I do not think many other people in our society (First World) wish to be so either. Technology is requisite for our survival as a species, since we are lacking in many other areas with respect to other living organisms.
He says that technology has a life of its own, but I would make the case that it is more like a virus than a living organism, but even that is a stretch. The root of the problem for me is not technology, but the creator itself.
We have created technology to make our lives easier (i.e. get tasks done more efficiently). Why have we done so? Probably because we exist in a finite state. We have a finite amount of time and finite amount of energy, ergo as a self preserving system, we (as individuals and living systems) usually choose the "easiest" path. We evolved the computing power beyond many other organism to perform calculations to optimize our actions under the conditions of our terminal existence. To me, technology is an the product of our execution of this programming. This fortified by the mentality with which we continue to develop technology to be more efficient on many fronts.
We seem to be programmed to be unsatisfied with past improvements and live on a relative scale. Life in third-world countries is likely better than life of humans tens of thousands of years ago, yet today this is the bottom of the scale.
At any rate, Reggio sets the stage for introspective activities such as these. Despite maintaining that the film is essentially neutral, it is clear that he selects the images that he does for his film to instigate specific feelings within ourselves (the viewers). He succeeds in invoking the thought that we humans are a cancerous mass in the supra-organism, an mass that is unsustainably, evolving and replicating for the sake of existing. He succeeds in making me question the purpose of our existence as a race, but his apparent motivations for making the films simply do not jive with my perception of the world.
So I have started reading the Empire of Illusion, written by the same guy, Chris Hedges, who wrote Bobos in Paradise. It has the same harsh tone of Bobo's without the same comedy. This consistent borderline rant character of his writing set off some internal alarms, so I have chosen to look at the man speak, as I am expecting another Kozol situation (I find my self nodding to his writing but shaking my head to his speechs-type situation).
This is what I watched.
He is speaking at the New School, and his message that the government has failed us, before the Vietnam war is interesting, seeing how if one looks into the background of the New School (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_School#History), this rhetoric is not surprising considering it was founded, as an offshoot of academics dissatisfied with the American war rhetoric of WWI. But recently many of the head honchos of the school have had close ties with the Clintons, and other high profile political groups. But they also have a tradition of synthesizing leftist intellectual thought with European philosophy.
At any rate, his use of Michael Jackson for a vehicle to demonstrate how the illusions (and their exploitation/creation by corporations) that have become an integral part of our society. The cult of celebrity has taken over our culture and even political arena. Everything has become a brand, the past election was Brand Obama vs. Brand Bush, so he is arguing that the entire system is indeed corrupt.
But what I find most interesting is his ruminations of totalitarianism, he says that we live in an inverted totalitarian society ( a term first used by Sheldon Wolin)
"While the versions of totalitarianism represented by Nazism and Fascism consolidated power by suppressing liberal political practices that had sunk only shallow cultural roots, Superpower represents a drive towards totality that draws from the setting where liberalism and democracy have been established for more than two centuries. It is Nazism turned upside-down, “inverted totalitarianism.” While it is a system that aspires to totality, it is driven by an ideology of the cost-effective rather than of a “master race” (Herrenvolk), by the material rather than the “ideal.”"
-From Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought by Wolin
According to Wikipedia there are three main ways in which inverted totalitarianism is the inverted form of classical totalitarianism. In classical totalitarian states, the state dominates economic actors, where as in inverted totalitarianism, corporations through political contributions and lobbying, dominate the state. Second, while the most regimes aimed at the constant political mobilization of the population with military demonstrations and youth groups, inverted totalitarianism aims for the mass of the population to be in a persistent state of political apathy, all that is required is voting. Low electoral turnouts are favorably received as an indication that the bulk of the population has given up hope that the government will ever help them. Lastly, inverted totalitarianism still feigns democracy.
Wolin again: "Inverted totalitarianism reverses things. It is all politics all of the time but a politics largely untempered by the political. Party squabbles are occasionally on public display, and there is a frantic and continuous politics among factions of the party, interest groups, competing corporate powers, and rival media concerns. And there is, of course, the culminating moment of national elections when the attention of the nation is required to make a choice of personalities rather than a choice between alternatives. What is absent is the political, the commitment to finding where the common good lies amidst the welter of well-financed, highly organized, single-minded interests rabidly seeking governmental favors and overwhelming the practices of representative government and public administration by a sea of cash."
The idea being that since the close of WWII and the onset of the Cold War our country/empire has been evolving into this type of state. Alternatively there is also a Managed Democracy that more closely resembles Nazi type totalitarianism. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism#Managed_democracy).
However, the main problem, currently, is the economic slowdown of our empire. Eminent Harvard historian Charles Maier attributes this to a shift from being an Empire of Production to an Empire of Consumption, and from my limited knowledge of history, this seems to be an accurate assessment of why every past empire has fallen from power. I feel that our country is going through what can be seen as a painful growing process, where economically we are realizing what we are still an empire of production in one category, ideas! The reason that we have the best Universities in the world is due to the ingenuity and creativity within the natural sciences that we possess and the ability to translate that to the business world. http://www.forbes.com/sites/panosmourdoukoutas/2012/02/01/why-china-cannot-develop-its-own-iphone/
Our K-12 education system is realizing that the present is not like past, and radical transformations are being made to curriculum around the country, looking to emphasize critical thinking and technology literacy. While hedges brings up a number of issues that are hard to address in this blog, I think that the answers to maintaing our empire at least exist. Perhaps we can still save our bubble economy and become more politically conscious. Unfortunately, according to Hedges these may be irreconcilable.
So I was doing some amazon review reading of my book "unequal childhood" and I stumbled across a user that is consistently putting forth some disturbing yet interesting reviews of books on our general topic. Check them out, I am thinking of discussing them in my talk on tuesday.
Racism in science is now becoming a significant interest of mine!
We should discuss Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life and the firestorm that it created. The reactions to it are fascinating, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve
This is a topic that I have recently found out about and I can't decide to be horrified by the sheer irony of this situation or really just not me surprised at all. It is laughable that feminism has constantly been equated to racism (Loko Ono's famous quote, "woman is nigger of the world"yet it exists within that very movement. It is interesting how racism can pop up it's head just about anywhere and it dates back to the very inception of the feminist movement. Sojourner Truth gave a rousing speech at Seneca Falls that fell upon deaf ears.
And I call it racism using Tatum's definition of the word, because the first two waves were not interested in lobbying for the rights of all women, just the the white-middle class. But the blame lies not only with the current members of the movement, but additionally minority women have been slow to join because as Paulin Terrelonge Stone writes in "Feminist Consciousness and Black Women":
Ethnocentrism and racism is seen in many a classic feminist work like, "The Second Sex", by Simone de Beauvoir also relies this master/slave dialogue, invoking the holy and almighty Hegel. And in characterizing slavery and its parallels to the feminist movement, de Beauvoir fails to connect with any sort of minority audience and connect the respective women's experience with sexism. Although, one could also make the argument, that in 1948, how many colored woman would have the education or socio-economic status to access such a text.
Anyways, I don't think I have anything else intelligent to add at this point I just wanted to call attention to this interesting perspective on feminism. In closing I would like to add that this lack of diversity still exists today, and just take a look the recent "slut walks".
This book did not start well for me, after the first chapter on defining terms I think I had already written the book off, as her inconsistencies drove me to a state of hyperbolic state of madness ( I was looping all over the place). I find issue with her examples of racism particularly the passive form, because it has little to do with a "system of advantage based on race", since I really do not see how laughing a racial joke is merely racial prejudice for one person, then it suddenly is racism if they are of a different color, but moreover what does laughing at a racial joke have to do with a system of advantage? I guess it depends on the joke... Additionally, she distinguishes between racial identity and ethnic identity, defining the latter as a group that is based upon cultural criteria such as language, customs, and shared history, but she doesn't define racial identity or truly distinguish between the two. To me, saying that I am partially black has little to do with my actual skin tone and more with the implied shared history and potentially assumed language and cultural customs. I feel in much of the book what she describes as race is actually ethnicity and she is rather confused herself. It seems that it is ethnicity which is central to much of what she is discussing rather than race. For example when she talks about the development of a racial identity, she says, "the black child absorbs many of the beliefs and values of the dominant white CULTURE...", how exactly is this racial identity development if we are discussing culture? Countless more examples are abound, like the development of an oppositional identity, where the individual goes out of their way to be more "black", are they going out and tanning to get darker? They are purposely displaying more customs and language, which sounds to me like ethnicity once again.
Is Snoop Dogg black or "Black"
The reason that I care so much is that, then the term racism is being misused, because much of the topics being discussed actually seem to be about ethnicity, i.e. language and custom, that it is assumed to comes along with being a certain color. Why is there this overwhelming pressure from society, even Tatum herself for a person of a certain color to come to grips with the general ethnicity that seems to come with being that color. Of course Tatum would have you believe that I am simply in denial, but what is wrong with refusing to acquiesce to the pressure of society, isn't that the trendy thing to do nowadays? If a black kid is thrown out into the wild and grows up outside of society, are they "Black" or just black? Or are they black then when they return to society they are now "Black"?
Anyways I found this interesting in the context of our musings on the American Dream and maybe the whole "pull yourself up by the boot straps" adage. A great listen, it examines the motivations of quitting for everyone from washed up baseball players to prostitutes.
They mentioned an interesting trick being employed by the company Zappos, in which after having a week of training, they were offered $3,000 dollars to quit. Of the the thousands who the company has trained, only 30 have taken it. Then almost no one quits in the initial months after training because they’d feel like fools to quit for nothing when they could have quit for money. The cognitive dissonance would be too great. This is the power of resisted temptation. This takes advantage of the phenomenon that when we sink a many resources into something, we will be slow to abandon it. We even convince ourselves we must love it, the same that fraternities/sororities, sports teams, and the military do to their new members. I wonder if we could somehow employ this in our efforts to find strategies for gap closure and such.
Cosmopolitanism is not a novel concept, it predates Christ by hundreds of years and takes its name from the Ancient Greek language. Although we demonstrate quite a bit of arrogant to call our global human community a city of the universe....Kwame Anthony Appiah seeks to reenter cosmopolitanism into the discussion of how to unite a world of clashing ideas and norms, and maintains that it is revelvant, “this neglected and attractive tradition of thought deserves serious attention as a habitable middle ground between liberalism and relativism”. And he does so with simple goal of "making it harder to think of the world as divided between..."us" and them"" because conversations across boundaries will be inevitable. In doing so he will question some abstract yet simultaneously abstract yet fundamental questions like, "how real are values?" and "What do we owe strangers by virtue of our shared humanity?" At the very least, Appiah seeks to open a meaningful dialogue between cultures concerning values rather than sink to a cultural relativism, that refuses to engage with other cultures for the very fact that their perspectives are different and therefore have no place in each others' respective domains.
I may just be fan-boying this video just cuz I like it, but I think it is a great example of cultural cosmopolitism.
From this viewpoint, Nussbaum's attempt at defining universally what a person is capable of becomes quite pertinent and potentially a vital step in linking individual communities into a global network. While the internet has already linked much of the world together, but these connections have been created in a laissez-faire manner. I feel that her capabilities approach is a noble attempt at achieving one of the goals of cosmopolitanism, blurring the line the between "us" and them "less". Interestingly, this connects back to my previous post in which I spoke of the dehumanization of enemies by nations and more relevantly socio-economic groups. The idiom that democracies never go war with each other seems to be rooted in cosmopolitism and as such this may be the answer to that problem. So the next question is, how do we achieve this in America? Well a great first answer is in education...which we have already discussed is a problem for many constituencies in America. Unfortunately, it is our current foreign policy, which revolves around defense of freedom via multi-billion dollar pieces of technology, that is taking precedence over the funding of our schools and hence enlightenment of Americans. So we seem to be stuck in at somewhat of an impasse. For some odd reason in America once you make it out of the primary education system into the realm of secondary education, you are in the best place to be in the world. Not all of these schools are working hard to promote this expanded worldview and dialogue extolled by Appiah, but some are, like good old UNC-Asheville and many other liberal arts schools. Many students avoid these schools looking for short-term returns on a education that perceived to be more valuable for getting a job. With the interest of forging a better world community, I suppose it is the duty of individuals like us, to spread the merits of the liberal arts experience via word of mouth and by our actions.
In The Shame of a Nation Jonathan Kozol addresses a disturbing fact that poor minority students in America attend schools that are criminally underfunded, labeling this an apartheid in America.This inflammatory label implies that this gap is somehow a culturally and politically enforced, an insult to those in South Africa who endured an actual apartheid. I feel that the use of of such language is simply a way of gaining attention to his book, but more than being annoyed with Kozol's language, I feel that this diagnosis focuses on symptoms of a problem rather than the root of problem, which is not the "nation", it is as a fellow classmate mentioned, the individuals that make up this nation. This segregation speaks to the mindset of the individuals that make up this nation. I find the following Chappelle skit funny and sobering in the way that it places one stereotype in the place of another and contrasts inequalities between socio-economic groups that exist in America, and in this case, the legal system.
It is not about throwing money at the problem, which may be a good start, but it is about changing the fundamental values of Americans and the way that they engage with relationships with each other. This is a multi-component problem that is made up of relationship between individuals within these lower socio-economic groups as well as the way that the rest of the American population relates and interacts with these groups.
Despite the fact that we live in a limited democracy, I feel that the government still represents sentiments of the people and that it will get away with serving the needs of one group at the cost of another if it can get away with it. Kozol is doing some good in that he is his calling for the government to be held accountable for its decisions, a central tenet to a democracy, but at some point the people who elected these officials need to be held accountable for themselves and their viewpoints and it is this area that Kozol avoids. Wal-mart is a pertinent example, instead of just deriding Wal-Mart for its poor practices, we also hold the people that economically support it and therefore its practices accountable as well.
Historically, human reaction to other humans that they would consider enemies has been dehumanization. By making these other individuals devoid of any characteristics that they may empathize with, they can commit (or allow) the many atrocities that dot the landscape of human history.
In America today, a similar occurrence that is likely a remnant of America's twisted version of chivalry where white men had to protect white women from the animal nature of the black man, has happened or I should say has continued and extended beyond racial borders to encompass a broad socio-economic group, poor people are dangerous in America.
These people are dangerous!!!!!
With the growing gap between rich and poor, an increase gap in the reliability of the haves and have-nots has broken down further, perhaps even to the point of royalty vs. peasantry. A primary reason that the injustices that Kozol describes continue is this rift in society where somehow poor people's lives are worth less than those with all the money. The social factors that have contributed to the this extend far beyond scope of this discussion could easily likely require a book (which I am by no means qualified to write). My next piece is that rich/white people are often so quick to engage that guilt complex that is seemingly becoming more and more standard in today's population. I would posit that this reaction occurs so swiftly that it completely ignores the people that they feel "empathy" and comes right back around to the individual feeling the guilt. Then some sort of charitable contribution or action is made and that guilt recedes to the back their consciousness. (I am aware that I am lumping many people together, the same crime I may hold against others.)
In the same vein as the guilt I mentioned above, but in an opposing manner, I feel that many minority groups (I can only speak for African-Americans) are quick to lay the blame for their current status on others rather than looking to solutions to actually fix that current problem. My grandmother could have gone on being a poor sharecropper and beget another generation of alcoholic and poor negroes, but she saw a solution for getting out of the situation and drilled into her kids the importance of critical thinking and an education, despite the fact that she only made it to 8th grade herself. Since I am sitting here typing this on a Macbook Pro, writing for a class for which my parents pay out-of-state tuition, I think her message got through to my dad. Now, Dr. Hobby raised a good point the other day in class, asking if I felt that my family was an exception, and the answer is yes, but it does not have to be that way.
Empowering children at an early age with critical thinking skills, rather than teaching to a standardized benchmark is a great starting point, a part of which Kozol captures, "If the road does not lead to Rome," said a woman, "we don't want it followed." "Rome", she said, "is the examination children would be given at the end of a specific sequence of instruction."(Kozol, Pg. 111). If you blindly lead a horse to water, will it ever find it again? Thinking back to my childhood, my parents always asked me why I was doing something. What did I hope to get out a certain activity? They stressed that every decision has a consequence, whether it be positive or negative. I once told my dad that I wanted to be "free", he told me that I was free to walk to the end of the driveway and make the decision to turn right or left at my own discretion, but not to come back! While extreme, I will never forget the lesson that taught me.
I feel that we patronize kids by not allowing them to think for themselves, giving the rules to follow with some abstract consequences. I could have stayed at home, got all of my meals, clothes, my car, my college paid for or I could have left and struck it out on my own, it was purely my decision. It is obvious that others may not have the same incentives or consequences, but the approach is worth something. In the middle ages the concept of child did not really exist, rather kids were seen as little adults. Although this is also extreme, this is somewhat useful in that we stop "babying" our kids and make them understand (perhaps before becoming young adults) what is truly at stake and what they can do. This may seem harsh, but the role of the parent in nature is not to be friends with their child, but to teach them how to one day fend for themselves. No this is not bashing parenting or pointing fingers, I feel that anyone, be it a tutor, mentor, teacher, parent, etc. can do these very same things.
Yep, like many others in our class this is my first blog. Personally, I feel it a bit self-indulgent to have a page devoted to my own ramblings, but considering that it is merely a drop in the dumpster of junk that is the internet, I guess I can go right ahead.
Anyways, I liked how we began our class discussion with the meaning of life and what it meant to each of us. One of my usual problems with this topic is the ego-centric manner that we humans approach this question; that self being our individual self or collectively as humans.
Yes, Star Trek IV sums up my feelings quite nicely on this point. In the film, aprobe is causing critical damage to the Earth, almost totally ionizing the atmosphere. Spock concludes that it must be a message from an intelligent race. McCoy asks if they are saying hello to humans, but Spock points out that human arrogance assumes the message must be meant for them.
Tragically, our perspective is inherently flawed by our own existence, objectivity is an illusion, but to accept this and move beyond it, is the only way to step back from a cliff for which awaits the free-fall of nihilism. I feel that we must understand that we have limited sphere of relevance, that is minute with respect to others, like the supra-organism that is Earth.
Anyways, Erwin Schrödinger encapsulates much of the early discourse on the matter meaning, writing DEUS FACTUS SUM (I have become god), similar to the Vedantic axiom Atman=Brahman. I wonder whether he had Descartes in mind as well, because this gels nicely with his musings in the Second Meditation, in which he declares, "So after considering everything very thoroughly, I must finally conclude that this proposition, I am, I exist, is necessarily true whenever it is put forward by me or conceived in my mind." (Med. 2, AT 7:25). So it follows that If we define our own existence, than we must define the meaning of that existence ourselves. It also kinda explains why we collectively and as individuals are unable to consistently think beyond ourselves
Examined Life I found many of the thinkers featured to be pretentious and at times disconnected with society, but I found Dr. Appiah to be refreshing. He for the most part avoided intellectual jargon and abstractionism and heads straight for what I think is the crux of our problem, we have quickly expanded beyond social structure of small groups until relatively recently to these communities that have 300 million-1.5 billion members. I agree that the problem is that we now have obligations to individuals whom we have never even met, and that is a challenging task.
I Have a Dream Foundation I am excited that programs like this exist, because I believe that influencing kids at this young and programmable, ahem excuse me, formative period, sets them up to more aggressively pursue interests outside of their immediate surroundings and have a perspective outside of there current environment. While we can talk about funding battles and the logistics of school, I strongly believe that if we plant a thirst for learning in a student's mind and a self-confidence to achieve we will have already won more than half the battle of getting "at-risk" kids into higher learning institutions without even coming near the mess of red tape that is the bureaucracy of our government.
