Radical shift

I arrived here in Akron late Saturday afternoon. My mom is having some medical tests run. Everything sure is different without our dog Murray around. Very quiet—TOO quiet.

Of course, today, for people like my mom who keep Fox News running in the background, it was all about the mass shooting inside Washington. My mom and I were actually at the kitchen table eating breakfast this morning when the news first broke about a gunman (possibly two) inside the Naval building.

The coverage was (and still is) NON-STOP! I always tell her she should at least turn on the national network evening news at night to see what else is going on in the world!

I am working on some new articles. In the meantime, there was an interesting piece in the Sunday New York Times about the emotional intelligence of school children and how it weighs into their overall educational growth. Here’s a passage:

“Though Anthony was still upset, his acknowledgment that not all the kids were snickering — that some may just have been laughing nervously — felt like a surprisingly nuanced insight for a 9-year-old. In the adult world, this kind of reappraisal is known as “reframing.” It’s a valuable skill, coloring how we interpret events and handle their emotional content. Does a casual remark from an acquaintance get cataloged as a criticism and obsessed over? Or is it reconsidered and dismissed as unintentional?

“Depending on our personalities, and how we’re raised, the ability to reframe may or may not come easily. Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, notes that while one child may stay rattled by an event for days or weeks, another child may rebound within hours. (Neurotic people tend to recover more slowly.) In theory, at least, social-emotional training can establish neurological pathways that make a child less vulnerable to anxiety and quicker to recover from unhappy experiences.”

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On the same topic of education, I read an enlightening article in the Sunday Chicago Tribune the other week (by Troy Jollimore) reviewing the new book, “Why teach?” by Mark Edmundson.

A passage read: “The fact that most universities, and most students, now focus on job training and show little interest in exploring perpetually perplexing questions and trying to impart deep values strikes Edmundson as disturbing and wrongheaded. ‘What does it mean,’ he asks, ‘for a university to stop seeing itself as having something like a spiritual mission and begin acting like a commercial venture?’

“Regardless of what it means, there is no question that universities have undergone a radical shift in the way education is perceived. The people who run universities — and many of the people who teach in them — no longer believe in the value of learning for its own sake, let alone such hoary ideas as truth, virtue or wisdom. What they care about is pleasing the students so that those students will continue to enroll and pay the tuition that funds the university's operations, and so that those students will give high evaluations now required of professors for retention and promotion. And, as Edmundson points out, students who have been raised in a consumption-based society in which the fundamental values are monetary, the most respected virtues are agreeableness and speed, and the highest conceivable end is to be constantly diverted and entertained are unlikely to demand to be challenged, made uncomfortable or forced to confront and critique their basic beliefs.

“Yet it is those students who suffer. ‘The quest at the center of a liberal arts education is not a luxury quest: it's a necessity quest,’ Edmundson writes. ‘If you do not undertake it, you risk leading a life of desperation — maybe quiet; maybe, in time, very loud — and I am not exaggerating. For you risk trying to be someone other than who you are, which, in the long run, is killing.’

“Unfortunately, Edmundson asserts, most university education is concerned with making us other than who we are. ‘Current schooling, from the primary grades through college, is about tooling people to do what society (as its least imaginative members conceive it) needs done. We are educated to fill roles, not to expand our minds and deepen our hearts.’

“Some will find it easy to scoff at such lofty sentiments. Indeed, scoffing — particularly when lofty sentiments are the target — has become something close to an automatic reflex in our society, and I think Edmundson is on to something when he points out how much harm is done by the desire to look cool, to avoid showing enthusiasm, to appear above sincere expressions of genuine feeling. It used to be that professors were willing to display a passionate interest in the subjects to whose studies they had devoted their lives. If this alienated some students, or invited a certain degree of easy mockery, it also served as an encouraging example and role model for those students who were potentially capable of passionate interest and commitment. To avoid such displays, as so many professors do now in the interest of trying to look cool (or at least relevant), is to rob students of this opportunity.”