Tellio: Reflections of A Mid-Career Teacher: November 02, 2008

What enabled all of this to happen? Three factors come to mind:1. Increasingly, after World War II, a college education in the US became little more than preparation for a job. "Learning for learning’s sake" came to be regarded a kind of luxury.2. American universities adopted the model of the corporation, and teaching was in turn modeled on the corporate-client relationship: the professor is there as a "provider" of a "commodity," which the students "purchase" from the institution. Once education became commodified in this way, respect for it basically evaporated. It became purely instrumental, rather than being seen as a way of life, or a way of deepening one’s understanding of the world and of oneself.3. As the humanities lost respect, many teachers of the humanities lost respect for their own discipline. By the 1970s, a curious phenomenon known as "postmodernism" emerged, in which professors not only abandoned the search for truth, but began to argue that it didn’t even exist. This was a formula for academic irrelevance, if not suicide.The humanities exist to ask–and answer–the question, What are we living for?, or What is the meaning of human life?

DARK AGES AMERICA -- Blog for Morris Berman

The trial over, the judge sentences our heroes to a year in jail, commenting that “your callous disregard for other human beings threatens to rock the very foundations of society.” But which society? Larry and Jerry make it quite clear that in their view, callous disregard for other human beings is the foundation of society–American society, that is. And so the subtext finally breaks through in no uncertain terms: Seinfeld was A Show About Something, after all.

DARK AGES AMERICA -- Blog for Morris Berman

Take a gander at the story of Seinfeld--it is a modern day morality tale about how little we care about each other in this country. I stand indicted along with everyone else. (continue reading &aquo;)

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Periwinkles of Memory

"Not an aristocracy of power, but an aristocracy of the sensitive, considerate and the plucky. Its members are to be found in all nations and classes and through the ages, and they know each other when they meet. ... Authority, seeing their value, tries to net them and to utilize them. ... But they slip through the net and are gone; when the door is shut they are no longer in the room; Their temple is the Holiness of the Heart's Imagination, and their kingdom, though they never possess it, is the wide open world."In this they are deathless.Like periwinkles.

Joe Bageant: The Audacity of Depression

Slave graves marked by periwinkles. Alive and unmarked by ugly headstones. I want my grave to be unmarked save for periwinkles because I have been a slave in my own way.

Tags: hope, the future, leadership

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Joe Bageant: The Audacity of Depression

Compounding everything is the fact that it is quite human and even pragmatic to passively accept reality as it is. Until it's too late to do anything. As my late friend Virgil the philosophical backhoe operator summed it up: "If we fucked everything up so bad tryin' to do our best, maybe we oughtta just leave'er be for a while. Quit thinking about it so much."

Joe Bageant: The Audacity of Depression

Even on the verge of history, I cannot help but think that maybe Joe's friend is right. I don't want to feel that way, but I am so tired. So very tired. Where can I gin up the energy once more?
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Twitter Updates for 2008-11-01

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