September 4th, 2016

09-03-2016

Shakespeare as Teacher

Scott Newstok bemoans the way newly entering college students have been cheated by the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act, “which ushered in our disastrous fixation on testing.” He worries that “unrelenting assessment has stunted your imaginations.” In response, he suggests that students open themselves to thinking like Shakespeare.

“The most fascinating concept that Shakespeare’s period revived from classical rhetoric was inventio, which gives us both the word "invention" and the word "inventory." Cartoon images of inventors usually involve a light bulb flashing above the head of a solitary genius. But nothing can come of nothing. And when rhetoricians spoke of inventio, they meant the first step in constructing an argument: an inventory of your mind’s treasury of knowledge — your database of reading, which you can accumulate only through slow, deliberate study. People on today’s left and right are misguided on this point, making them strange bedfellows. Progressive educators have long been hostile to what they scorn as a "banking concept" of education, in which teachers deposit knowledge in passive students. Neoliberal reformers — the ones who have been assessing you for the past dozen years — act as if cognitive "skills" can somehow be taught in the abstract, independent of content. And some politicians seem eager to get rid of teachers altogether and just have you watch a video. You, having been born when Google was founded, probably take it for granted that you can always look something up online. But knowledge matters. Cumulatively, it provides the scaffolding for your further inquiry. In the most extreme example, if you knew no words in a language, having a dictionary wouldn’t help you in the least, since every definition would simply list more words you didn’t know. Likewise, without an inventory of knowledge, it’s frustratingly difficult for you to accumulate, much less create, more knowledge. As the Italian novelist Elena Ferrante said, “There is no work ... that is not the fruit of tradition.””

Form more information visit: http://www.chronicle.com/article/How-to-Think-Like-Shakespeare/237593/

The Beauty of Belief

[caption id="attachment_18324" align="alignleft" width="289"] By Ourslerstudio - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0[/caption] Francine Prose reflects on beauty as it emerges in the idiosyncratic art of Tony Oursler.

“It’s been a beautiful summer, at least in the Northeast, but much about the current election cycle has made it something of a challenge to have any sort of fun at all. How doubly grateful we are, then, to find distraction, humor, entertainment, and pleasure in two museum shows devoted to so much funny, engaging, and ultimately moving evidence of our search for instructive or simply comforting messages from the beyond. The shows—“Imponderable” at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and “Tony Oursler: The Imponderable Archive” at the Hessel Museum at Bard College’s Center for Curatorial Studies—reveal the intriguing connections between the work of video artist Tony Oursler and his encyclopedic and obsessive collection of over 2,500 images and objects. Nearly all of these objects touch on some aspect of the occult or, perhaps more accurately, on beliefs and belief systems that cannot be supported by (or that run counter to) science. They provide evidence of the (often misguided) power of faith, and of our longing to believe in—or our compulsion to disprove—the existence of phenomena that we know to be unlikely, irrational, illogical, or physically impossible.”

Form more information visit: http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2016/08/29/the-beauty-of-belief-tony-oursler/

The Land of the Free

The musicologist Mark Clague who is writing a book on the Star Spangled Banner agrees that Colin Kaepernick's protest of the song is a “productive call for Americans to make this "land of the free" serve all its people.” But Clague argues that those arguing that the Star Spangled Banner is racist have their facts wrong.

"The Star-Spangled Banner" in no way glorifies or celebrates slavery. The middle two verses of Key's lyric vilify the British enemy in the War of 1812, what Key refers to in Verse 3 as "hirelings and slaves." This enemy included both whites and blacks, largely British professional soldiers (hirelings) but also the Corps of Colonial Marines (slaves). The Colonial Marines were escaped black American slaves who joined British forces because of the promise of freedom in return for fighting their former masters. Fortunately, Britain honored this promise after the war, relocating the former slaves and their families to Halifax and Trinidad. For Key, however, the British mercenaries were scoundrels and the Colonial Marines were traitors who threatened to spark a national insurrection. The graphic language of Key's denunciation of this British enemy led to the removal of Verse 3 in sheet music editions of the song in World War I, when the United States and Britain became staunch allies. Yet in 1814 Key's lyric honored American soldiers both black and white. "The Star-Spangled Banner" celebrates the heroes who defended Fort McHenry in the face of almost certain defeat against the most powerful gunships of the era. America's soldiers included mainly whites, but also free and escaped blacks. Escaped slave William Williams served in the US infantry at Fort McHenry and was killed by a fragment of a British bomb. Another escaped slave, Charles Ball, writes in his memoirs of being among the American soldiers of the Chesapeake Bay Flotilla who courageously repelled a night attack and saved the city. "The Star-Spangled Banner" thus honors American military heroes, black and white, without regard to race. In this respect, "The Star-Spangled Banner" is not racist.

Form more information visit: http://www.cnn.com/2016/08/31/opinions/star-spangled-banner-criticisms-opinion-clague/index.html