Rethinking Globalization

Though I read several articles in this mostly excellent compilation, I decided to comment on Bertolt Brecht's poem, "Questions from a Worker Who Reads." I chose this entry because of my love of ancient history, my passion for the theatre, and my respect for this extraordinary playwright who believed that theatre could be used to accomplish good.

Brecht believed that theatre should "provoke rational self-reflection" in audiences, and these audiences should use this critical perspective to "identify social ills at work in the world and be moved to go forth from the theatre and effect change." Yet his poem unwittingly suggests that this is nearly impossible. He catalogues millennia of fighting and abuse illustrating, without saying it directly, that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

A cursory review of world history shows that peoples of every nation have at one time or another been exploited and abused by their leaders, and that they in turn exploited others (as Zinn clearly points out). Brecht asks "who built the seven towers of Thebes," wonders "where did the masons go" after the Chinese wall was finished, and indignantly notes "young Alexander plundered India. He alone?" These are rhetorical questions -- the "who" are obviously "the little people" of this world.

There are no angels in this world -- except in the theatre, of course -- and it might be possible to effect change in that dynamic way since theatre is a force in New York City. Nilaja Sun is trying to do just that in her one-woman show, "No Child," in which she dramatizes her experiences putting on a play in the very high school that Jonathan Kozol wrote about in Shame of a Nation. But I fear that effecting real change on a global scale, no matter what approach is used, is an exercise in futility. As we have seen for decades in the U.N., world leaders cannot agree on anything and are mostly pre-occupied with turf. They remind me of when I was a kid and used to say to anyone I didn't like: "Get off of my property." They still haven't grown up.

Feminist that I am, and perhaps a bit world weary, I truly believe that if women ran the governments -- Margaret Thatcher notwithstanding -- there would be less fighting, and more caring. This World War I verse says it all:

"I didn't raise my son to be a soldier / I brought him up to be my pride and joy / Who dares to put a musket on his shoulder / To shoot another mother's darling boy / Why should he fight in someone else's quarrels / It's time to throw the sword and gun away / There would be no war today / If the nations all would say / No I didn't raise my son to be a soldier."

NOTE: The information in the articles are unsubstantiated -- no footnotes, no bibliography -- making it impossible to verify what the authors wrote, a serious flaw.

The Tylerian Model vs. Post-Modern Curriculum

Pinar makes short shrift of Tyler, one of the first clues we get that he believes that that approach to teaching is obsolete. The Tyler Rationale, articulated in the 1940s, "established the basic procedure that reduced curriculum to objectives measured by examinations." Pretty much, the only way to do this, is to teach, say, social studies, as merely a subject that requires the student to memorize the names of people, battles, wars, dates, causes and effects, and then regurgitate them on a short answer exam that can be marked by machine.

To introduce his ideas on post-modern curriculum development, Slattery quotes an essay by Walker Percy who asks, "What does a man do when he finds himself living after an age has ended and he can no longer understand himself because the theories of man of the former age no longer work and the theories of the new age are not yet known."

Not quite as poetic as Percy, Charles Jencks, as quoted by Slattery, writes, "In the last ten years post-modernism has become more than a social condition and cultural movement, it has become a world view." I love the phrase "world view" because it says so much about the way a person perceives herself in relation to the rest of the world -- does she see herself as a victim of a cruel world, a participant in an ever-changing world, a master of a world that is her proverbial oyster? Knowing people's world views would go a long way towards helping one group of people understand another, and not incidentally, also help men and women choose appropriate mates. (I first came across this concept in M. Scott Peck's "The Road Less Traveled.")

Slattery suggests that "we must move from the modern paradigm of curriculum development in the disciplines to the post-modern paradigm of understanding curriculum in various contexts. In this sense, curriculum development becomes kaleidoscope. It is always shifting perspectives and constantly reflecting new and liberating visions of learning and living."

After reading these three texts, it is obvious that Pinar, Slattery and Edgerton are all buddies, and they quote one another extensively. This academic incest may flatter everyone's egos, but all it means is that they are talking to one another, and not being of much help to us folks who are actually teaching. If they're relying on Trickle Down Theory -- i.e., their graduate students will translate the ideas for their underlings who in turn will dilute them yet again for us on the frontlines so we can implement them in our teaching -- they are taking too much for granted. It isn't happening yet.

Concept of Currere

Pinar started it all -- looking at curriculum, not as a noun, but as a verb. He reconceptualizes the word so that teachers and other educators might look at what and how we teach our students as a journey of which we are a part, rather than just a bunch of facts about people, places, dates, and events to be memorized.

He does this by translating the word "curriculum" back into the Latin verb "currere," meaning to run the course, and sheds a whole new light on what curriculum could be. He sees it as an autobiographical method that "asks us to slow down, to remember even re-enter the past, and to meditatively imagine the future. Then slowly and in one's own terms, one analyzes one's experience of the past and fantasies of the future in order to understand more fully, with more complexity and subtlety, one's submergence in the present."

His method involves returning to the past (regressive), imagining the future (progressive), understanding the connection between the two (analytic), and then putting it all together so that it helps us see ourselves in relation to history, as a part of history, and as creators of history by having an effect on the future (synthetic).

Slattery clarifies this concept further in his book, explaining it as an "inward journey." He points out that educators are accustomed to seeing curriculum as a "tangible object" rather than a "process," and quotes Schubert to explain what happens when curriculum is understood in this different way: "The individual seeks meaning amid the swirl of present events, moves historically into his or her own past to recover and reconstitute origins, and imagines and creates possible directions of his or her own future."

Edgerton brings up the rear with the weakest of the texts. She talks about the "currere of marginality," and discusses the "ways in which marginalized groups, individuals, and ideas come to be marginalized in a given culture, society, and/or place." She says this has much to do with what is "considered to be knowledge and who is considered to possess it." The margin, she continues, "must 'know' the center in order to survive, but the reverse is not true to the same extent. Yet neither the margin nor center exists as such without the other."

I say Edgerton's is the weakest because of her exclusive language, opaque explanations, and made up words (e.g., problematics) which inhibit understanding and marginalize the reader!

Ways of Seeing by John Berger

John Berger has an axe to grind, and he does this, rather naively, when he compares oil painting and publicity (see NOTE below), using that comparison to attack the evils of capitalism. Oil painting, he explains at length, "celebrated a new kind of wealth." It demonstrated "the desirability of what money could buy." He points out that Holbein's The Ambassadors illustrates that the men "belonged to a class who were convinced that the world was there to furnish their residence." It is a historical document that also documents their value in society. His exposition of this medium is written about in a didactic style, devoid of value judgments.

Publicity, he says, proposes that we can "transform ourselves, or our lives, by buying something more. This more…will make us in some way richer -- even though we will be poorer by having spent our money." His analysis of this medium, in every paragraph, is written with a sneer; it is quite clear he disapproves of what advertising purports to do.

He concludes with a sweeping indictment of capitalism, which, he says, "survives by forcing the majority, whom it exploits to define their own interests as narrowly as possible. This was once achieved by extensive deprivation. Today in the developed countries it is being achieved by imposing a false standard of what is and what is not desirable."

Just today? I'm surprised someone as intelligent and as thoughtful as Berger is blind to the fact that this is true for all societies and always has been. In African tribes, for instance, if your body isn't painted a certain way, you're not desirable, not part of the group. And just look at pictures of Cleopatra! What else is new? Standards are arbitrary, made up by whatever group happens to be in power at the time, and are always in flux.

Why do writers, thinkers and reformers keep railing against human nature? Like the alligator who promised not to eat the fox when he ferried him across the river, and then ate him, he simply explained: Of course I ate him; I'm an alligator. People would be more successful in making great, beneficial changes in society if human nature were taken into account, instead of denied.

NOTE: Publicity and advertising are not synonyms. Publicity is Jamaica Kincaid doing a book signing at Barnes & Noble. Advertising is a page in a newspaper urging you to buy her book. During class, I would be happy to discuss advertising in greater detail -- I had a 22-year career in the industry.

Place-Based Education by David Sobel

As a librarian, unfortunately, opportunities to educate students in the manner described by David Sobel in his two excellent books never arise, but reading his books sparked two memories that are always with me:

1. I've always been a tree-hugger. I think that after I die, if I did come back to earth, it would most definitely be as a tree. This arboreal love developed during my teens, when I was a Girl Scout. My summers were spent living in the woods, setting up campsites, building lean-tos, digging latrines, and cooking over an open fire. One day when we were dismantling a campsite to move on, my counselor asked me to pick up a crushed milk carton that was on the ground. When I replied that it wasn't ours, she simply said, "Wherever you go in life, Barbara, always leave the place a little better than when you found it." This has been the guiding principle of my entire life.

2. In college, I took a year of geology with two inspiring laboratory professors. During my first semester, we took a trip to the Delaware Water Gap where, with miniature picks and chisels, we extracted fossils of trilobites and graptolites from the side of a mountain. It was exhilarating to find all these "real-life" fossils that looked just like the pictures in our textbook. The second semester, we went to Bronx Park where we saw first hand ancient rock formations, and found specimens of the rocks we'd been studying. As we passed one very large outcropping, my professor, noting that right in the middle of it were some large dog droppings, wryly commented, "These are a fine example of Manhattan schist."

Here it is some 40 years later, and I remember these forays into the wilds as vividly as if they happened yesterday. Imagine the impact we could have on our children if this were still done. Alas.

"Feed," an excellent young adult novel by M. T. Anderson, is about a future society disconnected from the natural world. Earth had become so overcrowded that people lived in layers, the highest being the only one in which people could see sky, and the lowest the only one where people lived with trees and grass. I recommend it highly.

To this day, I cry -- quite literally -- when I pass workers chopping down beautiful trees to widen our roads to accommodate more cars. Though I'm a single woman who likes to date, I chose to live in the suburbs (where there is a dearth of single men) rather than Manhattan after my divorce because I couldn’t bear to live without the smell of wet grass, newly blooming trees, and the sounds of birds. A tree-hugger to the end, I guess.

A People's History of the United States 1942-Present

John Hope Franklin, my professor at Brooklyn College, introduced me to the scholarship of Henry Steele Commager and, yes, Samuel Eliot Morison, so you can imagine how startled I was when Zinn criticized Morison's history. But as I read further, and understood what Zinn was trying to accomplish, it brought to mind the plot of "Rashomon," a Japanese film that related the story of a crime from the viewpoints of four witnesses -- all different. Which viewpoint was the truth?

Zinn says "I prefer to try to tell the story of the discovery of America from the viewpoint of the Arawaks, of the Constitution from the standpoint of the slaves, of Andrew Jackson as seen by the Cherokees…." In other words, Zinn is relating history from the viewpoint of the subjugated, enslaved, and decimated rather than from that of the conquerors, the governments, and the rulers. He makes no apologies for telling their truth because, as he correctly points out, history is biased; it's not that historians are lying, but rather that what one omits or includes constitutes a bias.

In the first chapter, "Columbus, the Indians, and Human Progress," Zinn reshapes our historical perspective according to how the Spanish conquistadores -- Columbus, Cortes, and Pizarro -- treated the peoples they conquered. Their murderous brutality is heartbreaking to read, even 500 years later.

But Zinn makes it clear that the subjugated were also, at one time, subjugators. Cortes may have destroyed the Aztecs, but he notes that the Aztecs had done the same to the Mayans, Toltecs and Zapotecs.

Reading Zinn, and adding Kincaid's book, just confirms what I've always believed -- the need for power is in the male DNA and no matter how we try to civilize that necessary half of the human population, we always fail. So I say, "Let's try a noble experiment. Let women rule the world and see if the need to invade and conquer really is only a male trait, or if women have it too, and it just needs the right circumstances for it to develop."

A stray thought comes to mind here. Pinar talks about teaching history using an autobiographical approach and I think that's a wonderful way to teach it. But then how do we apply Zinn's approach? Do we ask the students to talk about their own abuse? My students live with violence every day. Should they be talking about it in class as prelude to a social studies lesson on the cruelty of the Spanish explorers?

A Small Place by Jamaica Kincaid

According to the official Antigua-Barbuda website, "most Antiguans are of African lineage, descendants of slaves brought to the island centuries ago." The island was settled by agricultural Arawaks who were then displaced by the aggressive Caribs in c.1100 (note the word "displaced" -- not conquered). It wasn't for another few centuries before Columbus and then the English invaded and colonized the country. The fact is, invade and conquer is the way of the world -- one need only look at thousands of years of British history or the exploits of Alexander the Great and Caesar to know that men (and I don't mean "mankind") need to conquer. It's in their DNA -- a woman, a country, it's all the same.

What is terrible, and will always be terrible, is slavery. It is the shame of our nation. In a world of relativism -- it's OK to murder in self-defense, for example, but not for personal gain -- slavery is never OK. Kincaid rages about her countrymen's enslavement, and then about their inability to improve their lot in life after they were freed and the British left. Here in America, our African-American population feels this same rage, and also seems unable to get past the effects of that evil. I teach in a school that is 88% African-American and what is most curtious is that this is more true for the men than the women. At this year's graduation, 75% of the class was female, 25% male. The guys just don't get it yet.

Kincaid herself, however, did not evoke any empathy in me. An odd thing to say, I know, but consider this. She came here at the age of 16, went to a progressive college, caught the eye of the revered William Shawn of the New Yorker magazine, married his son -- a white man! -- and now lives in the rarefied atmosphere of the WASP-y Bennington College in relative luxury. I belileve her rage is external -- a tool to fuel her writing for without it, she'd have nothing to say (a problem, incidentally, that South African playwright Athol Fugard had after the collapse of Apartheid).

Trevor Blanchette, a wise science teacher in my school, and a black man, commented that the same is true for our male students. "If they gave up their rage," he asked, "what would they have? They'd have nothing and then maybe they might decide to become educated."

As Kincaid said at the end of her book, to be a slave is to be "ennobled." When you are freed, then you are an ordinary person. If Kincaid gave up her rage, she'd just be ordinary. And so would my male students.

Shame of a Nation by Jonathan Kozol

Shame of a Nation is a compelling book, and could easily make someone want to reignite the snuffed-out flames of Schwerner, Goodman and Chaney, but there is much that Kozol doesn't address, and this has left me with many questions. Speaking as one who has spent eight and a half years toililng in all black schools, I will do as Thomas Merton said and "say what things are and…give them their right names."

1. Many of "my kids" are primarily middle-class blacks in that they live in private homes and have parents who have steady jobs. They come to school with $150 Nike sneakers, $400 video iPods, the latest Baby Phat fashions, yet they (mostly the boys) indulge in ghetto behavior -- listen to gangsta rap, dress like homeys (a style appropriated from the prisons because they think it's cool), and use the F-word in every sentence. Worse still, they come to school unprepared to learn -- no paper and pens, no homework, and then cut classes. The parents don't visit during Open School, but they complain the schools aren't doing their job of educating their children. How do we fix this?

2. Kozol cites a Gallup poll done for Newsday and I question its validity. The poll showed that in NYC, only one in 10 blacks wanted to live in all black areas, but precisely how was the question asked? Was it, "Did you want to move to an all black area?" or was it, "Why did you choose to live where you live?" The first question requires only a "yes" or "no" answer. The second is open-ended, requiring a pollster to do a lot of writing, and tabulators to code the answers -- time-consuming and more expensive. I don't trust this statistic. I believe we all create our own ghettos. When I grew up in Brooklyn there were Jewish ghettos, Italian ghettos, Irish ghettos -- you get the idea. People need to be with their "own kind" because it's comfortable. Does the comfort factor outweigh the benefits of living in an integrated community? If so, how do we make integration comfortable?

3. Shelby Foote, a man of mixed race and author of The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race in America, blames blacks themselves for their plight. During the civil rights movement in the '60s, blacks took charge of their fate; afterward, they then put their fate into the hands of society. "We just kept saying, 'Well, you guys haven't given us a good enough school yet. You haven't given us good enough this, or good enough that.' We had this wonderful excuse." Bill Cosby echoes this same opinion. How does the black community now take back their power?