The East is a career

I first came upon the statement, "The East is a career," in an epigraph to one of the chapters in Edward Said's Orientalism. 

It's a quote from the 1847 novel, Tancred, by then British premier and writer of novels of social realism, Benjamin Disraeli.

Disraeli was presiding over the British Empire, that had reached a dizzying height in the mid-nineteenth century.

It's a complex quote, and as unraveled by Said, it suggests that the East at that time in the Western imperial imagination existed as a springboard from which a promising young English lad could launch his career in the Imperial civil or military services, or could launch his career as an entrepreneur as well.

The East, in short, was a passive market to be exploited by and for the benefit of the imperial West.

The East is still a career, I think, and I articulate this position in response to an online discussion on the subject matter of the Study Abroad Program, a program that is becoming a silent imperative for American high schoolers and College students today.

The East is a career for many in the contemporary American military-Industrial complex, especially in two of its more obliquely occupied territories like Iraq and Afghanistan (though I can't imagine a career being launched in the terrains of Afghanistan known for hosting missile launches). 

In Dave Eggers novel, A Hologram For The King, a failed American entrepreneur migrates to the land of an Arab despot somewhere in Jeddah, to reignite his economic dreams. 

The Study Abroad Program was conceived to reignite, not the economic, but the cultural part of a young American's being in the world. 

The Program is premised on the ideal that to adapt and adjust to an increasingly globalizing world (though I can't for the world of me fathom how the world can globalize), young Americans need to experience that world first hand, and the best way to achieve that is to live for a brief period of time in a foreign country.

I think the ideal is an empty one; in real terms it's pure balderdash. Young Americans who do the Study Abroad Program do it as a stepping stone toward a fruitful career. In a global economy everything, including culture, is translatable into money if one knows how to.

How many of the sons and daughters of America's underserved can afford to partake in this most expensive of acculturation programs? The mantle of "global citizenship" can be worn, as it were, only by the children of America's privileged class.

A stint in a foreign country is good for the resume, just as a stint with the Peace Core is. Also, an "immersion" in a foreign culture and language (add to that the value system), sits well with prospective employers in American multinationals who prize multilingual employees anyway. But not all multilingualism is equally valued; Mandarin, for instance, is valued over Hindi, in the corporate corridors of transnational corporations. 

China is a career for many young Americans today as a large number of transnational corporations (they are really American in one form or the other) eye China as a magical market in the way Aladin eyed the magic carpet.

Teacher, teacher where art thou?

I remember the names of some of my teachers and a few faces as well. There a Mrs. Sen, a Mrs. Dutta, and a Mrs. Swing, Mrs. Wright and a Mrs. Sen Sharma among others.

To be honest none of these teachers have impacted me on account of their teaching or on account of having inspired me with what they did in the classroom.

These were teachers at the school I attended in India from K through 12.

Back then, I categorized teachers as good or bad. The kind one's--the one's who didn't scold us or discipline us at the drop of a hat, were "good," and the "strict" one's--those who were harsher and used the tactic of intimidation and humiliation as a tactic to establish control over students, were "bad."

All these teachers were however, universally feared regardless of the quality of their teaching.

Upon entering college, I had more of the same: Professors who taught because it was their job to teach; they didn't leave much of an imprint on my mind as inspirational or insightful.

The parameters for judging educators in India, were, I suppose, entirely different.

None match those highlighted by Mark Edmundson in his new book, Why Teach? In Defense of Real Education. 

A good teacher in America and by default in the Western hemisphere, is somebody who sees teaching as a "calling" and an "urgent endeavor" in which the lives and "souls" of students are at stake.

I believe that in India, teachers didn't burden themselves with the task of shaping lives and souls; instead of "shaping" we, the students were merely accompanied through the various levels of education by our teachers, I feel. 

In America teachers are historically said to shape, influence and inspire learners. It's only lately that they are beginning to resemble the Indian teachers.

Real teachers, laments Edmundson, himself an English Professor at the University of Virginia, are an endangered species in the current academic ecology. The conditions of the ecology, argues the professor, are the consumer mentalities of students, their families and those who administer the educational systems. Administrators are bent on giving students, not real education, but a "full spa experience, whereas educators are eager to escape the actual teaching into esoteric research.

I don't recall ever receiving a spa treatment by school administrators in India, but then again I got my education under a socialist regime. These days, I hear, a deep consumerist culture drives private education in India and students with resources receive the spa treatment to an extent that many schools graduate students without needing them to follow a rigorous academic regimen, or any academic regimen at all. Diplomas are to be had in exchange for money.

But nobody laments in India and no voice like Edmundson's arise. Decline is a given in India and people turn a blind eye to it.

Decline is pervasive in American culture as well, but thinkers like Edmundson make a note of it. 

"Pratham" (first) in many ways

Let me declare at the outset that I have a prodigious memory for trivia.

When I think of my school days in Kolkata, India, the one name that pops to my mind is The Radiant Reader—an anthology of short stories written mostly by British writers from the mid-19th to the early 20th-centuries. It was our principal English textbook, which we were forced to befriend in grade two. It continued to bore us for the next four years, until grade six, when we were finally able to bid it adieu.

What’s interesting about this book as well as the vast majority of the later textbooks we read, was that they were foreign imports from British and American publishing houses. Because they were not printed in India, they were expensive.

I still remember how I would guiltily hand the book list to my father at the beginning of the school term, shriveling inwardly at the thought of how it would shrink his wallet. Back then, the indigenous publishing industry was in its infancy and its output of children’s book and those for adults alike, was minuscule. 

Things changed by the time I reached grade seven. The National Book Trust, India (NBT) began rolling out science and history textbooks. They were cheap. But they were also of poor quality. Their text was under-researched and their perspective (especially, in the case of history books) was unambiguously Hindu nationalist, even distorted. The patriotic fervor didn’t move us, really, for we yearned nostalgically for the older books.:

For many generations of middle-class Indians, works by [Enid] Blyton and the popular American books about Nancy Drew or the Hardy Boys were essential childhood reading. Barely a handful of Indians wrote stories for children in English. But that may be changing.

In the past decade, a publishing boom, rising middle-class affluence and creeping cultural guilt among parents have led to a steady growth of Indian books for children with distinctly local characters and stories.

Pratham Books—the book wing of Pratham, a non-governmental organization working to provide quality education to the underprivileged children of India—publishes high-quality, low-cost children’s books. 

Pratham Books, a non-profit trust, was established in 2004 to fill a gap in the market for good quality, reasonably priced children’s books in Indian languages. The mission of Pratham Books is to make books affordable for every child in India.

Pratham Books publishes books in 11 Indian languages. The stories are written by Indian authors and are rooted in Indian culture and people. Each book is beautifully illustrated and the quality of printing is high. Most importantly, the books are priced between Rs. 10 and Rs. 25 (25 cents to 62.5 cents), making them affordable to millions of children.

From real to virtual

The Hunt Library of the State University of North Carolina, has a new library where students can check out laptops and flash drives rather than books.

Reporting on the emergence of digital libraries in college campuses and counties all across the United States, Margaret Rock writes:

In some ways, libraries are doing what they’ve always done: adapting to technology, whether by collecting documents, storing records and videotapes or offering e-books and computer terminals. Today, they’re under pressure to give more and create spaces that connect people to information and ideas.[...] Books won’t fade, but with so many other mediums to explore, libraries, especially those with technology, can enhance skills. Access itself isn’t enough: libraries need to harness the sheer overabundance of information in the digital age and become facilitators to help us sort through the avalanche.

Of Siren Servers and Agnostic Texts

Siren Servers: 

They are giant computers at the core of any ascendant center of power. They are the equivalent of oil and transportation routes, in that in the past power and influence were gained by controlling these. In our digital era, to be powerful can mean having the most effective computer on a network. In most cases, this means the biggest and most connected computer. The new class of ultra-influential computers come in many guises. Some run financial schemes, like high-frequency trading, and others run insurance companies. Some run elections, and others run giant online stores. Some run social network or search services, while others run national intelligence services.
Siren Servers are usually gigantic facilities, located in obscure places where they have their own power plants and some special hookup to nature, like a remote river, that allows them to cool a fantastic amount of waste heat.
[Siren Servers] calculate actions for their owners that reduce risks and increase wealth and influence. For instance, before big computers and cheap networking, it was hard for health insurance companies to gather and analyze enough data to be tempted to create a “perfect” insurance business, in which only those who need insurance the least are insured. But with a big computer it becomes not only possible, but irresistible.

Agnostic Texts: 

Are neutral texts created to be “agnostic” with regard to student interest so that outside variables won’t interfere when teachers assess and analyze data related to verbal ability. In other words, they are texts no child would choose to read on her own.There are already hundreds of for-profit and nonprofit providers of “agnostic texts” sorted by grade level being used in English classrooms across the country. There is also a lot of discussion among teachers over whether lessons align well with the new standards, but far less discussion regarding which texts are being chosen for students to read and why. In a sense the students, with their curiosity, sadness, confusion and knowledge deficits, are left out of the equation. They are on the receiving end of lessons planned for a language-skills learning abstraction.

The names of two means of unprecedented social control, textbooks and computer systems, fascinate me. Both the words "Siren" and "Agnostic" have Greek origins. While Sirens would powerfully, almost insuperably, lure ancient Greek heroes from their designated paths of heroic activities and glory, agnostics were Greek philosophers famous for skepticism. (Ironically, the agnostic texts adopted in the national k-12 curriculum are meant to douse skepticism and doubt).

Brainstorming in Jordan

Yikes!

Why did I "yike" upon reading that "brainstorming" as a mode of creative thinking is being introduced in Jordanian classrooms? Because, to begin with, I don't think highly of brainstorming, at least of the institutionalized form of it, in an American classroom setting.

Secondly, it's not that the Jordanians have discovered for themselves the virtue of brainstorming as a learning method. It's being foisted upon them, as it were, by Americans.

I'm not sure how American brainstorming will work in a Jordanian class.

Think Unlimited is an educational non-profit started by two Peace Corp workers, Shaylyn and James Garrett, whose mission is to teach creative thinking and problem solving in Jordanian classrooms.

An afterthought: The American system of K-12 education is excellent and a sophisticated scientific approach has gone into the making of it. However, it can become, at times, too rigidly dogmatic and insistent on prioritizing certain approaches to teaching above other.

"Creative" thinking has, in my opinion, settled into a dogma rather than a real, meaningful and dynamic activity in the American classroom. It's morphed into a trendy thing for teachers.

Nobody can define what it actually is, but an elite corp of decision-makers insist, like propagandists of a particular system, that it's the next best thing in learning to inventing a new alphabet.

At best, the mandate to "think creatively" simply means "be as quirky as you can."

Besides, what's wrong with a bit of rote memory as a learning method?

As a college English Professor, I tinge my ideas of effective learning with a bit of a belief in the virtue of old-fashioned memorizing and re-writing of what's been said by a culture's "best" and the "brightest" (forgive me for, not only, reverting to an Arnoldian dictum in an era of the Internet, but also mis-quoting Matt Arnold).

I believe learners can learn something valuable from a contra-brainstorming exercise now and then, especially what constitutes a "good" thought, a sentence, an idea.

Alternative view of poverty

"If the multigenerational poor are to make the leap out of poverty, it will require a new kind of thinking--reflection." So opined Earl Shorris, the author of the 1968 novel The Boots of the Virgin, about the antihero Sol Feldman, a Jewish bullfighter of little talent known professionally as El Sol de Michigan.

Shorris, however, is not primarily known as a fiction writer. He was a social critic who wrote tirelessly  against the tendency in Western culture to slide toward plutocracy and materialism. He advocated alleviation of poverty, not through skills-for-jobs training programs, but through the introduction of a Humanities-heavy curriculum to the poor, the unemployed, low-wage workers, ex-convicts and addicts.

Shorris is the founder of the Clemente Course in the Humanities, the core of which is overseen by Bard college these days. The curriculum offers the disadvantaged a 10-month curriculum of philosophy, history, art, literature and logic.

In 1997, while researching a book, Shorris interviewed inmates at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women, in Westchester County, N.Y. He solicited opinions on why poor people were poor. An inmate told him it was because they lacked "the moral life of downtown," meaning an absence of exposure to "plays, museums, concerts, lectures."

Shorris cites this as an epiphanic moment in his life. Poverty, he argued, was an absence of reflection and beauty, not an absence of money. He compared the experience of the poor with the experience of people chained to the walls of Plato's allegorical cave (in Plato's Allegory of the Cave). Stuck in a cave, Plato's cave-dwellers see shadows on the walls, and assume that is all there is in the world.

The Wasteland

Tough to teach T.S. Eliot's "modernist" epic, The Wasteland, to a class of today's young men and women.

And I won't even pare the class down to its (the other) class and demographic.

Nonetheless, I have started the process.

Day 1: The title and expectations raised by the title. A dumpster, a landfill, a death, a sterility...

From the previous Eliot poem, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, I borrow a line and would like to ask this to the learners as well: Do I dare disturb the universe?

Do I dare disturb the learner's "universe" by saying The Wasteland is indeed an anti-homage paid to post-war European culture. However, it is also produced during a time of acute personal distress for the poet.

Eliot wrote The Wasteland as a result of his terrible marriage with his terribly unsuitable wife Vivienne. It's his wasteland. He has externalized his interior garbage spewed by his nagging, bordering on the insane, Vivienne.

Nah, that would reduce the poet's gravitas and I'll be left with nothing to pad it with except biography.

What is Diversity, Really?

German intelligence: The story of Miriam and Christian Rengier, German expats in New York City, is heart-warming.

The Rengiers are affluent and highly educated and wanted to provide their kids with the best possible education money can buy. After shopping around for schools in Manhattan, they chose a Public over private schools on the following grounds: Private schools did not have diversity, whereas public schools abounded in it. Being white and “Germanic”, the Rengiers didn’t want their sons to experience more of the same.

They scoffed at the token diversity on display in private schools—in the choice of cafeteria food:

The kids were able to choose between seven different lunches: sushi and macrobiotics and whatever, […] And I said, What if I don’t want my son to choose from seven different lunches? And she looked at me like I was an idiot.

The Rengiers said they wanted “real” diversity in the lives of their children, not simply a gastronomic one.

This isn’t just about how smart the Germans are in differentiating between “real” and “cosmetic”, but about how illuminating this whole ability to make fine distinctions is.