Showing papers in "The Journal of General Education in 1981"

Teaching the Whole Mind: A Developmental-Structuralist Approach.

Abstract: Erik Erikson has said that the chief concern of young people in any age is to find something worth being faithful to.' My own years of teaching in both high school and college attest to the general truth of Erikson's observation; I have been involved for many years in the undergraduate pilgrimage to one holy grail or another. Very slowly in my consciousness there has arisen an awareness that a university campus can be seen as a place of asylum and nurture, a haven where a young man or woman can spend a very profitable period of fruitful delay and exploration.2 Could not a university thus be an ideal place for an imaginative and leisurely discovery of one's own potential and for the gradual shaping of personal commitment that Erikson says young people seek?' Such an idealized picture of a university campus is given logical and rational structure by the empirical work of William G. Perry, Jr., in his study of Harvard and Radcliffe undergraduates during the 1950's.4 Perry pictures Harvard as then a place of intellectual fer ment for undergraduates, among whom the intellectual growth typi cally gave rise to some type of level-headed and measured commit ment in the junior and senior years. Harvard seemed to have been the kind of nurturing institution that Erikson postulates as appropri ate for the advancement of youth to adulthood.' Lawrence Kohlberg's studies of moral development provide an even more rosy glow of optimism for those interested in making a case for the uni versity as a place for nurturing a mature sense of moral commit ment.6 Colleges and universities would seem to provide an ideal local habitation, according to these scholars, for successful passages from childhood to adult life.

Melville and the tradition of primitive utopia

Abstract: complex, the most multi-dimensional, with the most tangled intel lectual history. Those ideographs of society redeemed from the Fall and purified of the ills of the real world, which we call utopias, themselves divide dramatically into two types?what Lewis Mum ford has called utopias of reconstruction and utopias of escape.1 The tradition of the reconstructive utopia begins with Plato's Republic and Laws and includes most of the works that constitute the literary cum-philosophical genre: More's Utopia, Campanula's City of the Sun, Andreae's Christianopolis, Cabet's Voyage to Icaria, Bulwer Lytton's The Coming Race, Bellamy's Looking Backward, Wells' several technocratic futures, and B. F. Skinner's Waiden Two, along with a host of less significant progeny. What unites these fictive projections?as well as numerous political blueprints, such as those of Robert Owen, Fourier and Comte?is a stress on social organiza tion and behavior control. Rational planning is the keynote, with the inevitable result that the imaginary citizens of these imaginary societies appear manipulated, regimented, and fungible?quite ra tional, but rather robotic. The model of the reconstructive utopia I have elsewhere defined as civilization-only-more-so: that is, as a systematic intensification of the restraints upon which all actual soci eties rest.2 The model of the escapist utopia, paradoxically, represents the other extreme: a primitivist rejection of the entangling restraints of civilization. That the same generic term should denote both models is a source of no little confusion. R. W. Chambers, for instance, com

Speaking through the Inarticulate: The Art of Frank Sargeson.

Abstract: Because Frank Sargeson (1903) is a New Zealand writer and not as widely known outside New Zealand as he deserves to be, a short background sketch is necessary It must be stressed that he is pre sented for consideration not because he is from New Zealand, but because he shows a refined sensitivity of ear and a careful precision in writing, qualities that enhance his ability to portray the society he knows No biography, however, can show the impact of Sargeson both as a writer and as a man upon New Zealanders The story of the impact, which this article endeavors to demonstrate, carries with it a moral to all critics, a moral of which Sargeson himself was conscious: one must not allow one's image of a writer to conceal the real writer Sargeson was born in the small country town of Hamilton, then a borough of perhaps 3,000 souls, situated barely north of the King Country?so-called because it was the retreat of the Maoris of the Maori King movement after the land wars of the nineteenth century It was, therefore, a frontier town As in most frontiers, the inhabitants were first-generation settlers and the town itself was rather raw But the difference, and one that can hardly be overstressed, is that it was a Victorian frontier The inhabitants came not from the prairies, or the Appalachian forests, or the Eastern seaboard, but from an England firmly evangelical and moral Sargeson's own family was Methodisti cal, in the worst sense of that word When these characteristics are combined with a firm, clear eye for gain, the resulting society is likely to be materialistic, moralistic, and narrow Born into this society and growing up at a time when its foundations were being threatened, Sargeson was particularly alive to its blindnesses and its excesses, but (as we experience with our parents) regardless of how far he might seek to renounce its values, he remained shaped by them even in denial In a way, his whole writing life has been autobiographical in intent?the building of self-understanding He studied to become a solicitor, but never practiced Instead, he traveled to England and Europe Here he attempted to begin writing, but found himself unable to write in an alien world and returned to

Literature Study and General Education.

Abstract: What constitutes an educated person? Beyond the specific proficien cies that a person holding a degree in engineering, accounting, French, German, chemistry, mathematics, history, or musicology normally possesses, what general exposure to culture or civilization should someone have in the course of a college education? There are of course thousands of different answers to this ques tion, but among the recurrent responses has been the belief that in our country, educated people must be exposed to the great literature of the Western world. Some institutions have gone so far as to offer entire baccalaureate programs based on the so-called "Great Books," which consist of a broad range of writing in a great variety of disciplines. Yet the virtually universal answer favoring (if not in fact requiring) literary study leads to further questions. What ex actly constitutes great literature? Few would dispute the centrality of such writers as Homer, Sophocles, Virgil, the Biblical writers, Chaucer, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Donne, Goethe, Pope, Austen, Wordsworth, and Dickens. However, this list, in complete as it is, presents problems. For many students the list is already too long. For many specialists in literature the list must seem absurdly short. What about Whitman? Where is Twain? Faulkner? O'Neill? Racine? Moliere? Lope de Vega? Cervantes? Tolstoy? Dostoyevsky? Camoens? Kafka? We all have our favorite writers; we all can make convincing cases for their inclusion on any reading list for college students. But the canon agreed upon for our students must usually fit into a course that requires no more than one or two semesters to complete-despite the fact that the literature of Western civilization cannot be squeezed into such a brief period any more than the wicked stepsister's foot could be squeezed into Cin derella's slipper. Let me return for a moment to what is really a prior question. Although the members of literature departments and their col leagues in other fields may fairly readily agree that literature is im portant, this vague (although sincere) endorsement is not always sufficient to convince students, or even to resolve underlying dis

' remember me": memory and action in hamlet

Abstract: In The Winter's Tale, Leontes comes to know what it means to live a life dominated by memory. For sixteen years, he daily visits the grave of his wife and son, and weeps for what is lost; he suffers "saint-like sorrow" (5.1.2).1 In the end, though the past cannot be undone, it is partially redeemed. The kingdom, no longer without an heir, is restored to health through the union of Perdita and Florizel; Hermione "descends" to take her place in the world. For Hamlet, however, memory requires something other than a prolonged ritual of penitence. "If thou didst ever thy dear father love," the Ghost adjures him, "Revenge his foul and most unnatural murther" (1.5.23,25). The test of love is vengeance; but love must be kept alive by memory: "Remember me" (1.5.91). What the Ghost commands is, for most of the play, more than Hamlet is capable of doing.2 It is not, of course, that Hamlet fails to remember his father and the vengeance he has promised: the whole play shows us a character who remembers with extraordinary inten sity. In Hamlet's mind the past is given visible form; even before the Ghost appears to him, his "mind's eye" (1.2.185) torments him with images of his father and mother: "Heaven and earth, / Must I re member? Why, she would hang on him. . ." (1.2.142-43). Yet the Ghost calls for a course of action ("howsomever thou pursues this act" [1.5.84]), not merely agony of mind. To remember in the Ghost's sense requires exclusive dedication to the task of vengeance. This Hamlet cannot do. Though he says the Ghost's "commandment all alone shall live / Within the book and volume of my brain" (1.5.102-03), Hamlet's mind?more library than book and volume? will never hold only the Ghost's command. Most crucially, in terms of vengeance, Hamlet also looks beyond the deed to its possible con sequences. Until he ceases to do so, he will, in his own phrase, "lose the name of action" (3.1.88). Hamlet's encounter with the players illustrates what memory means to him, and intimates why he has failed to act upon it. He would hear "Aeneas' tale to Dido," he tells the First Player, "If it live in

The Concept of an Apolitical University.

Abstract: The campus unrest of the late 1960s and early 1970s cut sharply and deeply into the sensibilities of those who had believed that colleges and universities should stand apart from the vicissitudes of everyday affairs. After all, they had argued, was there not in American life?in deed, in our tradition of Western civilization?an institution par excellence, the Academy, which, like the image of blindfolded Jus tice, represented the nonpartisan, impartial quest for truth? Little enough did the haranguing students and faculty members of the picket lines, the classroom trashers, the villifiers of most things established, fit this image. In the troubled times of a decade ago, the doomsday sayers gathered to pronounce the end of a grand tradition: the univer sity had gone political. It had become a weathervane for every ideo logical wind or breeze blowing across the land. But as doomsday sayers usually are, these were premature. Reports of the university's demise were greatly exaggerated. Not only had doom not arrived, but the universities subsequently seemed actually to have strengthened themselves. Barely a one did not see its curriculum opened up, or failed to experience a new alertness in student awareness of social and political problems and possibilities; even in many of the so-called "establishment faculty," the new socio-political orientation to knowledge produced a freshness that was welcomed. Yet with the new visions there resulted lingering doubts: how much of the political (here, including "social") influence was desirable? Around the ques tion of desirability the debate continues, although the specific politi cal issues have changed; we now hear less about foreign affairs, more about domestic topics. The position of this paper is that there is not now, nor has there ever been, an apolitical university. The objectivity of individual scholars and the objectivity of the university which harbors them are funda mentally different concepts. Among the treasures of our heritage from the Greeks (if we dis count the contributions of the pre-Classical Near Eastern scribal schools, royal libraries, and the like) is included the notion of the individual seeker for truth, the person whose master is the trained inquisitive mind. From Tha?es through Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle,

A Vision of Dystopia: Beehives and Mechanization.

Abstract: When discussing "the Elizabethan World Picture," scholars usually make much of the Tudor Homily X, Part II, on "Good Order and Obedience," and of Ulysses' magnificent speech on "Degree" (Troilus and Cressida, I.iii).1 We should recall, however, that Shakespeare has another presentation of the conservative view of a well-ordered commonwealth: the Archbishop of Canterbury's speech on the honeybees in the second scene of Henry V. Falstaff has been rejected and, we soon learn, lies dying (II.i.80f.). King Henry and his court know nothing of this and probably wouldn't much care if they did know; they are engrossed in strategic consider ations that would either permit or prohibit an upcoming war in France. Canterbury momentarily digresses, it seems, from the imme diate military issue to present a bit of pious lore, developing Exeter's point that a well-managed state "doth keep in one consent, / Con greeing in a full and natural close / Like music."

Freshman english against itself

Abstract: I take my title from Gerald Graff's indictment of postmodern litera ture and criticism,' and my text is vaguely analogous: we have made a colossal blunder in removing literature from the freshman course. Since our present condition is rooted in recent history, perhaps it is best to start there. Lately, composition courses have become increasingly popular (to faculty members and employers, at least) because of the often voiced complaint that Johnny can't write. The factors leading to Johnny's (and Jane's) problem-factors that are numerous, com plex, frequently rehearsed in professional journals and the popular press-need no restatement here. The gloomy fact is, however, that far too many entering students can't compose a literate paragraph, let alone a coherent essay. Hence, colleges all over the land have reinstituted the freshman requirement they so foolishly dropped in the sixties, and faculty members in engineering, science, and busi ness have sent their students to the English department to take tech nical and business writing as well. All to the good? Yes-and no, for Freshman English, at least. The focus on composition has led to the elimination of literature, except perhaps for the essay, from the freshman program, and this for a variety of ostensibly sound reasons. There is only so much time, advocates claim, only a limited number of classes; to try to teach both composition and literature is to fail to give either subject the attention it requires and deserves. To a large extent, this is an argument about aims. Is Freshman English to be solely a writing course, or is it to have broader educational goals? Those who want to limit the scope to instruction in writing have a certain logic to their position. Yes, it is easier to do a few things well rather than several, and yes, the risk of superficiality is increased as the objec tives multiply. But something is also lost when we restrict our selves. By tradition, the course in Freshman English has, as one of its unwritten aims, the introduction of students to the university, to the life of the mind, and it has to do as well with helping to civilize students by exposing them to good books. When we abandoned

Egalitarian Promises and Inegalitarian Practices: Women's Roles in the American Owenite Communities, 1824-1828.

Abstract: The idea of the intentional community based on concepts radically at odds with society's common beliefs is an age-old one. During the early nineteenth century in the United States, communitarianism found a particularly fertile intellectual soil. The liberation and perfec tion of the individual seemed imminently attainable, especially through small model societies set against the increasingly more in dustrialized mainstream culture. By the 1820's, the juxtaposition of Enlightenment optimism with the mechanization and poverty devel oping in the wake of the industrial revolution created a need for a secular communitarianism that emphasized economic and social re form. The first large-scale secular communities in the United States were inspired by the ideas of Robert Owen, a British factory owner dedi cated to establishing a "new moral world." Communal living, Owen believed, would create far more happiness than "selfish" living in the "old, immoral world." Moreover, this happiness, said Owen, was possible only in an egalitarian atmosphere. Like Robert Owen, most of the reformers who emigrated to the Owenite communities in the United States spoke enthusiastically for all types of equality, but sexual equality particularly captured their interest, primarily because they were interested, as was Robert Owen, in exposing and correcting woman's unequal and "false and vicious" place in traditional fami lies.1 New Harmony, the most famous Owenite community in the United States, established in January, 1825, became America's first "Com munity of Equality," where sexual inequalities were to be eliminated. The constitution of the New Harmony community specified clearly that the first principle of association was "equality of rights uninflu enced by sex or condition in all adults" as well as "equality of duties." In New Harmony, each member was to "render his or her best services for the good of the whole."2 This constitution has

Imagining alternative futures: the polarities of contemporary utopian thought

Abstract: Futurists generally assume that something popularly called the fu ture, with an elaborated set of events and characteristics, cannot be predicted Even the limited, quantitative forecasts made by trend assessors in the national economy, in business and industry, enter tainment, politics and population growth, more often than not prove wrong However thorough, ingenious and complex the forecasting technique, however copious the data, no type or amount of cyber netic activity has yet been able to account for the unmeasurable, the unknowable, the unthinkable event Forecasts, once widely aired, may, in fact, become the principal invalidating causes for the future they project In the 1972 study Limits to Growth, for example, Meadows et al concluded that unchecked exponential growth (in population, indus trialization, pollution, etc) would lead to near planetary collapse by the end of this century But that assertion, in itself, greatly affected the "future" in which we are now living The publication of Limits to Growth activated policy-makers, citizens' groups, and social critics all over the world to various and disparate ends On the one hand, it intensified the ecology movement and encouraged the advocates of decentralization On the other hand, it moved American blacks and third-world spokesmen to charge the promoters of "no growth" with racism or even genocidal intentions It inspired social scientists like Robert Heilbroner and LS Stravrianos to hypothecate "the promise of the coming dark age," which would be characterized by a shrink age of both personal freedom and material prosperity In contrast, a Princeton physicist named Gerard K O'Neill constructed a workable design for space colonies as a future means of expanding human potential and accelerating industrial growth Thus, it has become a common adage among futurists that though we cannot accurately predict the future, we are continually inventing plausible alternatives, and in the process of invention and counter-invention we can and do

Sharing Mr. Sammler's Planet: Intellect and Conscience in Science and Technology.

Abstract: Artur Sammler, the protagonist of Saul Bellow's novel Mr Sammler's Planet, is a Polish Jew who early in his career as a correspondent in London was caught up in the excitement of the Bloomsbury group He knew John Maynard Keynes and was fairly well acquainted with H G Wells Later in the forties, after he had returned to Poland, he fell victim to the Holocaust, surviving by a quirk of fate?in a concentration camp, he, his wife, and seventy others, forced to dig their own grave, were fired upon and fell in For him somehow the bullets missed, and late at night he crawled out beneath the weight of corpses and loose dirt to escape into the nearby woods By luck, wit, and the passing kindness of a cemetery caretaker, who hid him in a mausoleum, he survived the war Twice resurrected (from his real and borrowed graves), under the sponsorship of a generous relative, finally he has come to live in New York City, where he works fitfully on a biography of his old friend Wells Sammler has risen from the grave, been given a second chance, but for what? Here, in the refined technological organization of New York City, now in his seventies, he surveys his disheveled society "Is our species crazy?" he thinks "Plenty of evidence" The prom ise of the Enlightenment has gone sour, he concludes, leaving us a society without discipline, confused about license and liberty Bellow writes:

TEACHING COGNITIVE-MORAL DEVELOPMENT IN COLLEGE (A Generalist Approach)

Abstract: This is an article concerned with presenting a way for teaching moral development to undergraduate college students. It takes as its pri mary base the research on moral development done by Lawrence Kohlberg.1 William G. Perry, Jr.,'s study of intellectual and ethical development among Harvard and Radcliffe undergraduates will be used to lay the ground for understanding Kohlberg;2 Erik Erikson's work will be used to study moral development during the crisis of identity;3 and Elisabeth Kubler-Ross' theory will be used to deepen and apply the insights gained from Kohlberg, Perry, and Erikson.4 My approach seeks to be faithful to Kohlberg's theory, but it seeks as well to take the stance of the generalist. I do not hesitate to make use of disciplines other than developmental psychology. In fact, strong emphasis is laid on the use of literature as a vehicle for posing moral dilemmas as well as for shedding light on moral development and, in turn, I incorporate the religious and philosophical elements that come into play in the literature I use. I will open this essay with a brief presentation of Kohlberg's position on moral development.

Why Is Poetry Difficult

Abstract: Of course, Pound did find something in it, but the question remains as to why the Mr. Nixons, why much of John Q. Public, find poetry unrelated to the "real stuff of life." Its purposes seem unfathomable and its meanings "difficult" to ascertain. For some time now, our approach to reading has reflected the modern utilitarian bias. We have been conditioned to find poetry difficult or strange because it often appears to have no concrete or ulterior purpose. The printed word is expected to convey informa tion, but poetry seems not to meet this expectation; nor does it provide an easy escape into fantasy as perhaps other artistic forms, such as dance or drama, might. Thus, a common defense is to con struct difficulties in the reading?or non-reading?of it. Poets continue to find it distressingly ironic that the would-be or could-be audience is so estranged from the life of poetry, when, in fact, ordinary lives and everyday situations are the source material for the tensions and realities that are poetry's concern. It is doubly

A Sequential Sextet (Portraits of Faith Stages in One Family).

Abstract: The heart of this paper is a description of the faith of six different people. The first description is that of a six-year-old child. The last concerns the final months of a terminally ill woman of seventy-five. The studies are of real people. They are members of the same family group, spanning three generations. If my concern is to study the faith of each of these people, that in itself needs some explaining. I am studying faith from the theoretical vantage point which regards it primarily as a way of knowing that follows a developmental sequence. This essay owes its theoretical inspiration to the empirical studies of faith done by James W. Fowler.1 It is not my intent here to defend Fowler's structural and developmental approach. Rather, I propose to use his theory to shed light on my own observations of a single family. Let us begin with the notion of faith. Fowler does not regard faith as something that one has, like money in the bank or a head of hair. It is not so much an attribute as a way of doing something, a way of knowing.2 Fowler sees knowing as a unique process for each person, and yet he finds in his research sequential patterns of knowing among people. He is not the first to do this, of course. For the past nearly fifty years Jean Piaget has been studying how people know, finding among children patterns of knowing that change and become complex as they grow older in their active experience of the world around them.3 Piaget's experimental studies have helped the world to understand that children are not just small grownups. They think differently, and their patterns of thinking are constantly developing. Lawrence Kohl berg is another developmentalist who is concerned with thinking.4 His primary concern is how people develop in their thinking about right and wrong. Like Piaget's, his studies reveal an invariant se quence in the way people develop moral judgment. Erik H. Erikson is a third developmental thinker whose work is at the roots of Fowler's synthesis of faith.5 Erikson has for fifty years studied the typical patterns of concern at different periods of human life, from birth until

General Education: Bode and the Harvard Report.

Abstract: The publication in 1945 of General Education in a Free Society: Report of the Harvard Committee1 has been widely hailed as an important moment in the history of general education. And indeed it was. The Report received almost universal acclaim. Even those who criticised it were generally united with its authors in their concern for the health of general education. Most disagreements arose not so much over the need for major revision, as over the question of what exactly would be the appropriate revision. Such was the criticism directed at the Tepori by BoydH. Bode (1873-1953). At the time of its publication, Bode had recently retired from active teaching after twenty-three years as Professor of the Philosophy of Education at Ohio State University. He had gone to Ohio State at the conclusion of twenty-one years in the departments of philosophy at the University of Illinois and the University of Wisconsin. While at Illinois (1909 1921), he had begun to build a reputation as a spokesman for the pragmatic position in philosophy. But it was in the specialty of educa tion that he was to have his most significant impact. In 1938, Time Magazine, for instance, called Bode "Progressive Education's No. 1 present-day philosopher."2 At the time of Bode's death, John L. Childs thought his work of such importance that he "really should be counted among the founders of [the experimentalist] movement in contemporary philosophy."3 Bode came to education because, as he related the story to H. Gordon Hullfish, he was "tired of philosophy that makes no differ ence and [believed that] education is a field where it may do signifi cant work."4 He found Dewey's view of the relationship between philosophy and education compelling: "the most penetrating defini tion of philosophy which can be given is . . . that it is the theory of education in its most general phases."5 Like Dewey, he came to speak of democracy and education in the same breath. He thought that a society committed to the continuous growth of its members, to learning as the "reconstruction of experience," was a society com mitted to realizing democracy. If philosophy were to have any impact

The varieties of pedagogic experience

Abstract: I am sure, when I think of the fellow now, my blood rises against him with the disinterested indignation I should feel if I could have known all about him without having ever been in his power; but it rises hotly because I know him to have been an incapable brute, who had no more right to be possessed of the great trust he held than to be Lord High Admiral or Commander-in-Chief-in either of which capacities it is proba ble that he would have done infinitely less mischief. Miserable little propitiators of a remorseless idol, how abject we were to him!'