Paradigm Shift
Aug. 18th, 2009 10:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerLiberal arts colleges - one of which I attend - like to say that they're in the business of teaching people how to think. I like to think this is true (I'm paying a lot of money for the privilege, after all); I'm not entirely sure that it's so.
One of my favorite non-fiction books is Stephanie Levine's Mystics, Mavericks, and Merrymakers: An Intimate Journey among Hasidic Girls. It's wonderful for a lot of reasons, but one of the most interesting parts the contradiction between what Levine expected to find when she studied the Hasidim (teenage girls whose personalities were squashed by the strict gender roles of Orthodox Judaism) and what she did find: teenage girls who knew their own minds and desires a hell of a lot better than the average secular girl.
Levine suggests that one cause of the strength of Hasidic girls is that they learn a paradigm through which to judge the world around them and grapple with their own minds, where secular girls are left to flail in the darkness. Secular girls, she says, could benefit if they had more opportunities to figure out their own paradigms: art, music, history, the possibilities are endless...
Or not; it seems to me that saying "Go forth and find your own paradigm!" to a fourteen-year-old is unhelpful and will result in just as much flailing in the darkness as not.
So that was interesting, but (as I'm not planning to convert to Hasidism) not particularly helpful in my own quest to become totally awesome at thinking. But just last week I read Rapture Ready!, Daniel Radosh's book about American evangelical pop culture (think the Left Behind books, although those are quite the low end of it). Radosh comments in passing that evangelical kids, unlike secular kids, don't just passively accept their entertainment; they have to evaluate it to make sure it isn't subliminally teaching them evil messages.
(I realize this sounds a little funny, because an evangelical list of subliminal evil messages wouldn't match a secular list. But the spirit of the idea seems to me close to an implicit goal of![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
50books_poc: don't just lie back and accept the imbedded biases in books, or other forms of entertainment; be mindful of these things.)
Which got my attention, because - evangelicals? This is of course blatantly stereotypical, but it never occurred to me that American Evangelicals of all people taught their children a critical paradigm by which to judge, well, anything. (One of the implicit points of Rapture Ready! is that, as with any other group, there are thoughtful Evangelicals, and Evangelicals who would allow themselves to be led by the nose into a snake infested swamp rather than think about anything.)
The point I'm leading to is not that religious groups have a monopoly on paradigms of critical thought; it's that they do a better job teaching their paradigms than anyone else does. Public high school don't even try; indeed, they can't. What kind of interpretive perspective could a public high school teach its students? Any kind of religious is right out, of course. Feminist, Marxist, postcolonial? In a public school? The parents might riot.
In my AP English class (the only class that even attempted an analytical framework, because you have to have one in order to write a thesis-driven essay) we used New Criticism - criticism based exclusively on a close reading of the text. This drove me crazy (treating the text as a closed system makes it damn hard to argue that the text is wrong), but it's the only system that doesn't impose some potentially objectionable paradigm on the work.
Unfortunately, any paradigm worth learning is going to be objectionable to someone. These are frameworks that teach you how to judge - not just entertainment but actions - and in a diverse society, no one is ever going to agree beyond the broadest principles; and no paradigm will ever work for anyone, anyway.
A liberal education - at my school, at least - means flitting from paradigm to paradigm. Different classes use different frameworks, and perhaps when I've settled into a major this will settle down, but at the moment it all seems like snippets of many lovely pieces of cloth, none of them large enough to sew into a whole dress.
I can't entirely object to this flitting. One of the reasons I left the government department is because I found the paradigm objectionably pessimistic - a self-fulfilling prophecy, even; teach everyone who studies government that peace is impossible, and it will become impossible. (I am for related reasons not in the econ or psych departments.) It's a strength of a liberal arts education that it is possible to reject a paradigm that doesn't work.
I just wish there was less flailing involved.
One of my favorite non-fiction books is Stephanie Levine's Mystics, Mavericks, and Merrymakers: An Intimate Journey among Hasidic Girls. It's wonderful for a lot of reasons, but one of the most interesting parts the contradiction between what Levine expected to find when she studied the Hasidim (teenage girls whose personalities were squashed by the strict gender roles of Orthodox Judaism) and what she did find: teenage girls who knew their own minds and desires a hell of a lot better than the average secular girl.
Levine suggests that one cause of the strength of Hasidic girls is that they learn a paradigm through which to judge the world around them and grapple with their own minds, where secular girls are left to flail in the darkness. Secular girls, she says, could benefit if they had more opportunities to figure out their own paradigms: art, music, history, the possibilities are endless...
Or not; it seems to me that saying "Go forth and find your own paradigm!" to a fourteen-year-old is unhelpful and will result in just as much flailing in the darkness as not.
So that was interesting, but (as I'm not planning to convert to Hasidism) not particularly helpful in my own quest to become totally awesome at thinking. But just last week I read Rapture Ready!, Daniel Radosh's book about American evangelical pop culture (think the Left Behind books, although those are quite the low end of it). Radosh comments in passing that evangelical kids, unlike secular kids, don't just passively accept their entertainment; they have to evaluate it to make sure it isn't subliminally teaching them evil messages.
(I realize this sounds a little funny, because an evangelical list of subliminal evil messages wouldn't match a secular list. But the spirit of the idea seems to me close to an implicit goal of
50books_poc: don't just lie back and accept the imbedded biases in books, or other forms of entertainment; be mindful of these things.)Which got my attention, because - evangelicals? This is of course blatantly stereotypical, but it never occurred to me that American Evangelicals of all people taught their children a critical paradigm by which to judge, well, anything. (One of the implicit points of Rapture Ready! is that, as with any other group, there are thoughtful Evangelicals, and Evangelicals who would allow themselves to be led by the nose into a snake infested swamp rather than think about anything.)
The point I'm leading to is not that religious groups have a monopoly on paradigms of critical thought; it's that they do a better job teaching their paradigms than anyone else does. Public high school don't even try; indeed, they can't. What kind of interpretive perspective could a public high school teach its students? Any kind of religious is right out, of course. Feminist, Marxist, postcolonial? In a public school? The parents might riot.
In my AP English class (the only class that even attempted an analytical framework, because you have to have one in order to write a thesis-driven essay) we used New Criticism - criticism based exclusively on a close reading of the text. This drove me crazy (treating the text as a closed system makes it damn hard to argue that the text is wrong), but it's the only system that doesn't impose some potentially objectionable paradigm on the work.
Unfortunately, any paradigm worth learning is going to be objectionable to someone. These are frameworks that teach you how to judge - not just entertainment but actions - and in a diverse society, no one is ever going to agree beyond the broadest principles; and no paradigm will ever work for anyone, anyway.
A liberal education - at my school, at least - means flitting from paradigm to paradigm. Different classes use different frameworks, and perhaps when I've settled into a major this will settle down, but at the moment it all seems like snippets of many lovely pieces of cloth, none of them large enough to sew into a whole dress.
I can't entirely object to this flitting. One of the reasons I left the government department is because I found the paradigm objectionably pessimistic - a self-fulfilling prophecy, even; teach everyone who studies government that peace is impossible, and it will become impossible. (I am for related reasons not in the econ or psych departments.) It's a strength of a liberal arts education that it is possible to reject a paradigm that doesn't work.
I just wish there was less flailing involved.
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no subject
Date: 2009-08-28 01:55 pm (UTC)Now, I have a question that immediately struck me upon reading the related paragraph: did I get it wrong or do your High Schools seriously not discuss marxism, feminism etc? I mean, seriously?
In both schools I went to we usually discussed several paradigms in at least one class, usually two, maybe three (that's Ethics, History, Sociology, Social Studies, German, English, Religion (both Catholics and Evangelic, but I didn't attend these; I went to Ethics instead) and Geography, sometimes). It's... I really hope I misunderstood; a school should teach its students about several different views that exist in the world. It'd be very apalling otherwise.
no subject
Date: 2009-08-29 02:16 pm (UTC)We did discuss Marxist & feminism etc., but not in a "Now children, we are going to inflict Marxist analysis on Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and WATCH THE PLAY SQUIRM" sort of way. The problem, I think, is that we touched on a lot of paradigms, but if the class is based around touching on a lot of paradigms then you learn how to think broadly but not deeply.
There's nothing wrong with thinking broadly, but if that's all the system teaches then it's giving everyone an incomplete education. Thinking deeply is important too.
By deeply I mean being able to delve into something and come up with a logically/ethically consistent position you actually believe, as opposed to being able to say "the Marxists would think X" without being able to formulate a position oneself.