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Quoting with Comment

From a book that has helped me think more clearly about the moral implications of what I buy at the grocery store:

You want the best ‘organic test’? Go to any farm unannounced and see what is on the bookshelf of the farmer. Because what I’m feeding my thoughts and my emotions dictates how I raise a chicken.”

This gem is from Joel Salatin, founder of Polyface Farm, a family owned, multi-generational, pasture-based, beyond organic, local-market farm and informational outreach in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. You can read about Salatin’s farm in many places; I came across him in Michael Pollan’s arresting book An Omnivore’s Dilemmna: A Natural History of Four Meals. I read a lot of books; few will probably have as immediate and sustained impact as this and Pollan’s most recent, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, have had on my wife and me.

Of course it’s true, but I still find myself surprised at how dramatically one’s worldview shapes the decisions one makes. What’s truly stunning is the way we can be blinded by familiarity. Not only are many of the back-allies of my brain nearly identical with what is floating around the atmosphere, but even many of the thoroughfares. I buy food every week, sometimes every day in a week, but I have never before thought about how price is usually the only piece of relevant information regarding my purchase, aside from the other variable, packaging. As Pollan points out, produce advertisements don’t usually need to waste space with words, a number will suffice. Such a rubric would sicken me when applied to education, or travel, or housing, but when it comes to what I eat, how it was grown, and what informed the grower, I am very content to score the deals. Until recenlty I even eyed the more scrupulious eater with suspiscion. There is a foodie-snobishness that ought be avoided, but for me that’s a long way off. For now, I speak for the trees, and the Cornish/Rock crosses.

Guess the Speaker: Education

I like to invent games, the more variables the better: multiple creators, absurd rules, elaborate procedures, built-in randomizers. One could accuse me of getting more excited about the invention than the actual playing—I have no problem stopping a game just after starting to consider new potential permutations. Today I’ll spare you and keep the game simple: Guess the Speaker.

I believe that the art of thus giving shape to human powers and adapting them to social service, is the supreme art; one calling into service the best of artists; that no insight, sympathy, tact, executive power is too great for such service.”

It is difficult always to be a creative artist. I think, however, that we should get on more rapidly if we realized that, if education is going to live up to its profession, it must be seen as a work of art which requires the same qualities of personal enthusiasm and imagination as are required by the musician, painter or artist.”

Since learning is something that the pupil has to do himself and for himself, the initiative lies with the learner. The teacher is a guide and director; he steers the boat but the energy that propels it must come from those who are learning.”

While the raw material and the starting-point of growth are found in native capacities, the environing conditions to be furnished by the educator are the indispensable means of their development. They are not, and do not of themselves decide, the end. A gardener, a worker of metals, must observe and pay attention to the properties of his material. If he permits these properties in their original form to dictate his treatment, he will not get anywhere. If they decide his end, he will fixate raw materials in their primitive state. Development will be arrested, not promoted. He must bring to his consideration of his material an idea, an ideal, of possibilities not realized, which must be in line with the constitution of his plant or ore; it must not do violence to them; it must be their possibilities.”

These quotes come from this man, a man I have come to realize I need to understand a lot more, not only for his huge impact on America, but also for the way these quotes make him sound much more nuanced than I once believed. I recommend this book to myself (from a great publisher by the way).

Psychology in Education

I just read an expansive article by David Tyack, professor emeritus at Stanford in the history of education. In the article Tyack considers at length the different populations that have been neglected in the American education system. Any student of history would learn something; I was struck by how racism during WWII made it seem natural that white Nazi prisoners-of-war on their way to prison camp in the South should be allowed inside a “whites only” dining room in a railroad station, but their black guards should not. One of the most insightful points Tyack makes is very helpful for understanding the present situation in public education:

Psychology, the academic discipline most influential in the field of education, has reflected and reinforced individualism by using the person as the chief unit of analysis. In this way of seeing, which boasted the label “scientific,” educations have portrayed differences between students—in “intelligence,” interests, temperament, or likely social destiny, for example—as characteristics of individuals rather than as products of class or culture.”

It’s not hard to see the influence of psychology in schools; there are school psychologists, functional behavioral analyses, special education tests for brain disorders, and the psychology-dependent teacher training programs. I like how Tyack connects the monopoly of psychology in education with individualism in the America, something that can be more clearly understood by looking at classrooms in other countries. In Japan, for instance, classes are generally rewarded or punished as a group, which has kept Japanese cleaner, even without hiring janitors. Students recognize that they will all suffer from a dirty school and pick up accordingly. In America, individual students know that if they walk far enough away from their trash it is no longer their trash. Someone else will get blamed, or, more likely, everyone will suffer during the day while paying for janitors to clean at night.

It goes without saying but is worth repeating: what goes for public education is only a reflection of society as a whole. As Paula Fass, whose recent collection of essays considers how history can inform contemporary trends in education around the globe, explains:

The shape of American education in the twentieth century…is crucially related to the problems with American diversity.”

Quinceañera is a Good Movie About Los Angeles

If you are full deep yearning, and I hope you are, it’s fair to assume you have two dogmas regarding cities. (Those with very deep yearning won’t bring it up, but they actually have two “dogmata”) These axioms help inform all other urban value judgments. They are:

#1. New York is good.

#2. Los Angeles is bad.

Armed with these two dogmas, its easy to deduce what to wear, how to get around, who to be friends with, what to live in, and which expressions should adorn your countenance. Cardigans, subways, Puerto Ricans, lofts, and angst are sexy, being characteristic of New York. I’ll leave you to fill in rest regarding velour, city buses, Mexicans, ramblers, and stupefaction.

Given your yearning, I don’t need to tell you about a recent movie that makes Los Angeles a look a little less bad. In light of that film, however, I thought I’d recommend another made in Los Angeles.

Quinceañera, released in 2006, tells the story of Magdalena, a pregnant 15-year-old; Carlos, a gay cholo; and Tio Tomás, a 70-year-old street vendor. I was interested in watching it because it was filmed in the neighborhood I live in and love, Echo Park, by two men from the neighborhood. Even with only a $400,000 budget, the film did remarkably well at Sundance, I assume because it is a moving story told plainly.

Quinceañera portrays the interaction between two groups that are interacting more and more in the hearts of our nation’s cities: low-income minorities and white artists/homosexuals. The movie doesn’t demonize anyone or exposit the many concerns of gentrification; it also doesn’t try too hard or try hard at trying to look like it’s not trying too hard, both rare among indie movies.
So if you live in Los Angeles or have lived in Los Angeles, I recommend you don’t miss this charming film that is local but delightfully absent that star of most of our local films: the LAPD. Watch it in a velour tracksuit.

C.S. Lewis was True to Himself

In 1954, C.S. Lewis was asked by the Milton Society of America to comment on his own life’s work. In his statement, Lewis insists that the explanation for such a span of genres, topics, and formats is found in the development of his own personality:

The imaginative man in me is older, more continuously operative, and in that sense more basic than either the religious writer or the critic…It was, of course, he who has brought me, in the last few years to write the series of Narnian stories for children; not asking what children want and then endeavoring to adapt myself (this was not needed) but because the fairy-tale was the genre best fitted for what I wanted to say.”

Two things are worth noting. First, at least with Narnia, Lewis began with identifying what he wanted to say, not to whom he wanted to say it. Second, his “message” was a story, because the story-telling part of him was the most fundamental part. In fact, the picture of a Faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood was a product of Lewis’s sixteen-year-old imagination.

Lewis’s example is instructive for any Christian who aims to use her talents, whether for writing or something else. Lewis employed his imagination in the explicit defense of the Faith, in implicit promotion of the Faith, and in ways that had no clear connection with the Faith. To put it another way, Lewis was imaginative when he was in church, walking to church, and skipping church. There were, however, self-imposed limits to his work. Lewis best shows this in a letter to a priest who asked him to write an apologetics book for the working class. He first flatly refuses: “I can’t write a book for workers. I know nothing at all of the realities of factory life.” He then explains his deeper frustration:

People praise me as a ‘translator,’ but what I want is to be the founder of a school of ‘translation.’ I am nearly forty-seven. Where are my successors? Anyone can learn to do it if they wish…I feel I’m talking rather like a tutor—forgive me. But it is just a technique and I’m desperately anxious to see it widely learned.”

Clearly Lewis did not consider popular apologetics to be the exclusive domain of professional scholars, otherwise no one could meet his criterion for writing a book for the working class. He is confident anyone could learn his “technique,” which, while an exaggeration, displays appropriate humility. Taken in isolation, Lewis’s work in each particular genre is very good, but not world-class. What makes him so powerful is his ability to combine often disparate elements: analytical rigor with fantastic imagination, depth with clarity, pagan myths with Christian orthodoxy. Perhaps this generalist quality contributes something to Lewis’ far greater popularity in the US than in the UK, where the boundaries between vocations and expertise are more sharply defined. Whatever the case, Lewis shows how one can be a genuinely interdisciplinary thinker (some might prefer to say “balanced”) without abandoning one’s native talent. As Barfield put it:

There was something in the whole quality and structure of his thinking… If I were asked to expand on that, I could say only that somehow what he thought about everything was secretly present in what he said about anything.”

Blessed Disillusionment: Bonhoeffer on Community

German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) wrote a book that had the alternative title How to Philosophize With a Hammer.  I’m reminded of this when I read Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who could have just as easily written a book with the alternative title How to Theologize with a Pneumatic Drill. Maybe it has to do with being German. Whatever the case, Bonhoeffer can take apart half-baked speculation and flimsy Christianity in half a paragraph.

In my church small group we have been reading Life Together, a work Bonhoeffer completed while teaching at a clandestine seminary in Nazi-dominated Germany. Early in the short book Bonhoeffer considers the pre-conceived ideal we each fabricate of what community ought to look like. He says these “wish dreams” stand in the way of real fellowship for two reasons. First, such dreams puff their dreamers up. Second, these dreams cause us to enter common life as demanders instead of as thankful recipients. Bonhoeffer is quite clear of what needs to happen:

“Just as surely as God desires to lead us to a knowledge of genuine Christian fellowship, so surely must we be overwhelmed by a great disillusionment with others, with Christians in general, and, if we are fortunate, with ourselves.”

What strikes me about this quote is the sequence of disillusionment: first with other people, then Christians in general, then, if we are fortunate, ourselves. I have a deep concern about my and many others’ honesty in facing disillusionment with ourselves. As Bonhoeffer later notes, however, there is a risk of not completing the cycle of disillusionment. If we do not become utterly convinced that our own pictures of community are destined for total failure, we will not embrace God’s. The reorientation that occurs, from demanding to thankfully receiving, changes the way we think about the hassles of real fellowship. And here, before one can silently assuage the sting of hard duty with token gestures or self-glorify in a kind of suffering martrydom, Bonhoeffer explains:

“Is not the sinning brother still a brother? … Will not his sin be a constant occasion for me to give thanks that both of us may live in the forgiving love of God in Jesus Christ? Thus the very hour of disillusionment with my brother becomes incomparably salutary, because it so thoroughly teaches me that neither of us can ever live by our own words and deeds, but only by that one Word and Deep which really binds us together—the forgiveness of sins in Jesus Christ.”

99 and 1

Hi, I’m a new contributor to Mere O. I understand you (“the reader”? How formal are we here?) have a civil but guarded relationship with new contributors, I get that. I’ll do my best to win you over. As a start, read the following to get an idea of how I spend my days and why.

For the last year I have been teaching at a public middle school in inner city Los Angeles with the program Teach For America. In and around my school campus, a sprawling collection of graffitied buildings just west of Koreatown, lots of things demand attention: the noise, the skateboards, and the quick bursts of violence. The aspect of my experience that is presently most vivid, however, is the daily life of those students in the first percentile. These are the students with special needs I teach in room 407. They will most likely not graduate high school—most read at roughly a second grade level in eighth grade—but they are bright enough to fool the casual passerby. In one way, their deficits are more agonizing than those of the oblivious jokesters with mental retardation who sit in the back of my homeroom. When talking to my students with less severe special needs, who look like they should be able to solve simple math problems, I have to remind myself to soften my confused exasperation when time after time they just don’t get it: negative three plus two is not five!

Toward the end of the year, as I was browsing the cumulative folder of one student, I paused a moment to try to empathize with her experience. I’ll call her Sarah, and she has never scored higher than the seventh percentile. After fourth grade, a string of ones completes her record. What if, May after May, with watermarked seals, bar graphs, and statistical norming tables it were shown that you were the dumbest of every hundred people? Heck, maybe even dumber than that for all we know with our stubby bar graphs—it becomes hard to measure. The main message of the other eleven months doesn’t come in an embossed envelope, but the entire community delivers it daily: you don’t have any friends.

I’m made some small progress coming to grips with the day-to-day implications of such a life, but in the classroom it looks like a lot of frustration, odd mistakes, forgotten rules, misunderstood test directions, and terrible behavior. My students have met failure after failure, and there are few opportunities for dignity apart from the respect young people reserve for those thrown out of school.

In room 407 we are trying to change some of these things, and I’ve found frequent and sober reflection on the work of Christ serves the effort. How blessed we are to serve a God who does not rest with the ninety-nine, but goes out to find the last forgotten sheep. Let us go and do likewise.