Subject: Re: [lit-ideas] Re: What's wrong with Campus Watch for all? From: John Wager <johnwager@xxxxxxxxxxx> Date: Thu, 01 Apr 2004 10:56:33 -0600 To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Robert Paul wrote: > . . .I'm not oblivious to the financial straits of many who would like > to attend > and do attend college. I know of them not only by description but by > acquaintance. However, what this has to do with the question isn't at > all clear. > (I've asked independently for clarification, but have received none.) > On the one > hand we have people suffering at the hands of Maoists, professors > obsessed with > archaic Greek sculpture and Duchamp, and on the other--? Truth, light, > justice, > fairness, every 'view' balanced by an opposing view, no matter how > absurd? Who > could be against that? It might occur to people that students are > engaged by, > attracted to, the forceful expression of views (theories, positions) > that are > not only false, but palpably so. It's the spectacle that attracts > them, the > passion, the experience of seeing someone committed to something for a > change. > An education which didn't include some taste of this would be a drab, > pedantic > wasteland. > THIS is the kind of thing I was trying to elicit a while back in asking about the "aesthetics" of teaching. Surely there is a place for "passion" in teaching as well as clarity--But on what grounds do we make the choice of how much of each? This isn't just an "instrumental" question about which is the most effective in "educating" students; it's a question about our own aesthetic preferences and our desire to help students see the value of those preferences as well. Asking Franz Klein to paint like Mondrian would be impossible, and yet they are both interesting painters. Asking Malcolm to respond to the student's questions with a more rational response would likewise be unwise; there is an aesthetic dimension to teaching that we don't seem to deal with explicitly, and yet it controls much of how we teach and how we organize our courses. > I'll go farther. I'll say that a perfectly balanced intellectual menu is > implicitly an insult to students, who are on my view far more capable > than Eric > may believe at spotting nonsense and sorting things out, and who might > like to > take part in the messy fun of doing so. Of course, this will vary > according to > discipline and subject matter--or would seem to. I remember though > watching a > very bad film--Italian, I think--years ago on public television. > Galileo walks > into a lecture hall in which the galleries are packed with students. > He begins > to lecture on Copernicus. Boos, jeers, catcalls. They know a priori > he's wrong, > right? Maybe not a priori. > "MESSSY!" That's a great way to organize a class: Deliberately organize it to BE more "messy" so that students have to deal with the mess. But organize it so that the mess is periodic, and controlled. It would be boring for a teacher who likes messes to try to be a Mondrian lecturer, even though Mondrian does have a different "aesthetic" that has its own charm. So when teachers start to "create," whether it's in the design of a course or the delivery of an hour's worth of content, how much do they think about the aesthetic dimension of this? SHOULD they be more conscious of these kinds of choices, or is it better left up to the unconscious, creative spark that's behind much creativity? [This message was originally returned to me with an error message and not delivered; my ISP mail error was: Action: failed Status: 4.4.7 Unable to contact host for 1 days, Diagnostic-Code: smtp; Persistent Transient Failure: Delivery time expired Last-Attempt-Date: 1 Apr 2004 16:56:22 +0000 Anybody else having similar problems? I wrote three messages at the same time; one was accepted, the other two failed.] ------------------------------------------------------------------ To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off, digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html