Education

Education

  • November 15, 2018
  • By Admin: mrbauld
  • Comments: Comments off

This page contains articles for a) students who understand that education is an affair that goes on between teacher and student and who therefore might feel that some insight into this affair from the teacher’s point of view could be revealing; b) student teachers, both past and future, who might be relieved to know that other voices exist than those heard in the education centres that require your attendance in order to be licensed; and c) colleagues who have perhaps suffered along with me at in-services where technique, theory, and self righteousness seemed to be the guiding forces, and who might be refreshed by the spirit of what first brought them to education.

The following excerpts are from David Solway’s inspiring book, Education Lost, published in 1989. Discovering Solway has been, for me, an exciting event. I ordered his book through Chapters on the internet and it came in about 4 days. Gilbert Highet, Jacques Barzun, Northrop Frye, Neil Postman–not many names come to mind in the course of a lengthy teaching career–but David Solway, who teaches at John Abbott College in Quebec, says what too few of us teachers are permitted to hear. He writes with an enviable vocabulary and eloquence, but he is great fun to read if you keep at it. Indeed, his more recent book, Lying About the Wolf,(1997) is a joyous roller coaster ride of language and ideas. He has also, most recently, published a collection of literary essays, Ripostes, which offers the same breathtaking command of language. His poetry can be sampled on the Atlantic Unbound website (see Links).

  • Education as “Transformative Rite”
  • The Elements of a Teacher
  • The Good Teacher
  • Mark Lilla on “The Politics of Jacques Derrida”
    This lucid description of the history and present state of “deconstruction” should appeal to those interested in the ideological underpinnings of the English Language Arts Curriculum about to be implemented in all four Atlantic Provinces. Is this an ideology most Nova Scotians will be happy with?

    The following three excerpts come from David Lehman’s Signs of the Times, a cogent study and history of Deconstruction, that French theory whose jargon so inspires the new Atlantic Provinces Language Arts Curriculum Guide. Lehman spends much of the book on deflating the reputation of Paul DeMan, a leading influence in American deconstruction. The following pieces focus on the central ideas and the linguistic jargon which insulates them from criticism and mystifies the uninitiated.

  • David Lehman’s Deconstructive Decalogue.
    This is an outstanding 10 point introduction to the main ideas of deconstruction.
  • The Orwellian Element in Deconstruction
    -an extended discussion of this age’s Newspeak (see also “Bad Writing Contest” on Grammar-page for more, as well as the “Postmodern Generator” on Links-page).
  • The Disturbing Element in Deconstruction
    -a brief sense of why teachers might not welcome the effects of “theory” in the classroom.

  • High School 2000: Read Elinor Burkett’s reflections on becoming a high school student at age 55
  • Nineteen Theses on Literature by Roger Shattuck
    Here Mr Shattuck posts those principles which the deconstructing “textualists” are doing their best to undermine. See more on this topic on the Literary Criticism page
  • Roger Shattuck’s first two chapters of his Candor and Perversion revisits his “Nineteen Theses On Reading” followed by a call for the return of educational sanity in designing English curriculae
  • The Authority of the Teacher, by Northrop Frye.
    Not everyone knows. Frye knows. I remember the lecturer from Mt. A telling me that Frye was old hat. May I never get that smart.
  • Northrop Frye on the primacy of poetry in the English classroom
  • Wayne Booth on Emotion And Reason.
    Booth goes back to enlarge the definition of Reason. This interesting discussion makes me think of the way some use Howard Gardiner’s “multiple intelligences” to depreciate “intellect” in the schools.

  • Christina Hoff Sommers on the need for moral reeducation
    Sommers is an ethics professor whose previous book Who Stole Feminism? created a stir among certain sorts of feminist. Why has my English Teachers’ Association never invited anyone resembling Sommers to speak at our yearly conferences?
  • Christina Hoff Sommers’ Atlantic Monthly article, “Girls Rule”, which calls attention to the way the media helps activist professors promote myths of their own making.
  • Christina Hoff Sommers in a 1998 lecture which covers similar ground to the Atlantic piece, but with some extra anecdotes.
  • The Lecture: A Tool for Intellectual Liberation
    If Northrop Frye, or David Solway, or Noam Chomsky gave a class, or a course, would you want to be put into groups or listen to him?

    Neil Postman is the author of over two dozen books, from the early Teaching as a Subversive Activity to the more recent Amusing Ourselves to Death, and Technopoly, expressing concern over the ways television and computer might actually limit our chance of an education.

  • “My Graduation Speech” -wherein Mr Postman explains the difference between Athenian and Visigoth
  • “Informing Ourselves to Death” -wherein Mr Postman considers that essential(ist) question: what is worth knowing?
  • A Booknotes interview with Neil Postman on his Technopoly