humanism – EduCommunicate

A fun episode of On Point with Tom Ashbrook recently featured some writers of fantasy-style fiction novels that have received great acclaim from reviewers. As a not-so-secret science fiction geek, I was stirred a bit by the shock of Tom Ashbrook as he navigated the waters of fantasy creatures in literary fiction, proclaiming that the likes of John Updike would never stoop to such levels before being reminded by his guest of The Witches of Eastwick. Underlying my not-so-secret SF love is my fantasy geekiness, my readings of all of Ann Rice’s novels as a teenager, to say nothing of The Lord of the Rings, anything by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, and a series of role player fiction novels from England as a child.

Given this context, it is gratifying to hear the subject of genre being discussed in the mainstream media and the blurred margins between genres, or subgenres, like literary fiction and fantasy fiction. I have been particularly interested in the mutable nature of prose since the A Million Little Pieces debacle and subsequent meltdown by Oprah – why did she care so much about the classification of a text she found moving, a text now described by Wikipedia as a “semi-fictional memoir?” While Oprah was clearly run over by this semi, betrayed and hurt, I see opportunity for telling the story-truth explored by writers like Tim O’Brien for decades. While it may have been more honest for James Frey to portray his life story as a fiction piece, I don’t think it matters much if the audience walks away with the message in the end. Additionally, I see all fiction as life experiences twisted and woven into something more true and distilled than the original, broken chain of events. So, if Glen Duncan explores the human landscape through the prism of werewolf character in The Last Werewolf, that’s literature. Nonfiction is also literature. Literary giants like Kurt Vonnegut, Updike, Shakespeare, Toni Morrison, and Philip Roth all explored science fiction and fantasy elements as ways of uncovering truth about the human experience. As we explore what genre is and isn’t, fuzzy boundaries allow more individual freedom to choose what we love to read and write while still stretching our philosophical conceptions of humanity’s struggles, mundane and timeless.

David Brooks, in his latest piece in The New York Times has covered a fascinating piece outlining the basis of my philosophies of living, learning, and teaching: “The New Humanism.”

Brooks exposes the individualistic, materialistic, uber-rational philosophies of the past and present as single-faceted paradigms which ignore much of what is true about human nature. Brooks notes that this focus “has created a distortion in our culture. We emphasize things that are rational and conscious and are inarticulate about the processes down below,” to our collective detriment. In particular, Brooks recognizes that “When we raise our kids, we focus on the traits measured by grades and SAT scores. But when it comes to the most important things like character and how to build relationships, we often have nothing to say.” The message to students, which often becomes internalized, is that you are the sum of the numbers, or letter grades, and your worth is tangibly related to the outcomes. This message takes years to unwind, and that’s only for the lucky ones. Some people wind up tangled in the web of conflicting messages between innate human desires for social success or pleasing loved ones and their internal feelings of boredom, hatred, or disinterest in what they have been told makes them valuable. Who likes taking the SAT, and what happens when it’s over (answer: the GRE)? Who is motivated endlessly by a score; everyone gives up on Galaga eventually, because the numbers begin to look alike, or be meaningless. In fact, intrinsic motivation is identifiable most often in non-measurable forms.

In particular, Brooks points out that

research illuminates a range of deeper talents, which span reason and emotion and make a hash of both categories:

Attunement: the ability to enter other minds and learn what they have to offer.

Equipoise: the ability to serenely monitor the movements of one’s own mind and correct for biases and shortcomings.

Metis: the ability to see patterns in the world and derive a gist from complex situations.

Sympathy: the ability to fall into a rhythm with those around you and thrive in groups.

Limerence: This isn’t a talent as much as a motivation. The conscious mind hungers for money and success, but the unconscious mind hungers for those moments of transcendence when the skull line falls away and we are lost in love for another, the challenge of a task or the love of God. Some people seem to experience this drive more powerfully than others.

Equipose and metis are essential “talents,” or, more appropriately, learnable skills for most people. Courses like Advanced Placement Literature & Composition are arguably useful not because they make learners smarter, but because they lead learners to reflect and monitor their own understandings and skills, changing as they individually must: equipose. Or, useful because the course demands higher order thinking skills and integration of complex sets of data in the form of texts for synthesizing new understandings: metis (at least partially, or within a given set). If taught correctly, a course builds a sense of honest, authentic engagement, possibly limerence: loss within the challenge of a task, questing for Phaedrus’s Quality. But, the AP falters badly in May, testing, assigning a number. I love my task, I’m playing the game, and questing for improvement, but I’m not going to score perfectly on the AP test, so how likely am I to give myself to the task? To experience limerence?

If it were me, and it has been, the answer is not bloody likely. So the tests, the measurements, don’t help honest, prolonged engagement, but rather feed into our “rational,” materialistic selves. The symptoms are cramming, learning disposably, and widespread misery. Oh, how I wish for schools in which humans teach humans, explicitly, in which we respect our different strengths, foibles, blind spots, and in which we all seek to become more happy, healthy, and complete humans together through this shared process called school.

Written with limerence.

Tag: humanism

Fiction, Genre, & Language

On Limerence