June 7, 2004
-
Topic: Why don’t we listen to ourselves???
If we ever look back, look at history, read books, listen to people talk, we’d realize that our culture needs improvement. I write this not as a criticism, since it is my responsibility, like anyone else with complaints, to fix it. I read a great quote by someone, that the beauty of our democracy and freedom of speach is that we can have two-faced values and hypocrisy. And, as American citizens, we’re fortunate enough that if we care enough about something, we can speak out.
Anyways…I just started re-reading Catcher in the Rye, and it seems every book or article I read, tells me that the people in charge of education, have no 3rd person, outside perspective on how they’re running things. It’s like nobody is looking to see what’s not working, and therefor, there’s no creativity to fix the damn thing. Failing test scores is not a problem, just as good test scores is not a solution.
One thing that really bothers me, is Holocaust museums. Their purpose is to remember the injustices of this world, so we can prevent them from happening again. Yet, there are no museums about the present. No museums about the atrocities going on around the world (I can only speak about Zimbabwe, since I spent 6mos. in Africa, but I know there are many others). While I am a Jew, it bothers me that the only atrocity we choose to remember in such a popular way as a museum, is the Holocaust. Anyways…this isn’t a matter of politics. The issue is, what else should we be remembering? What else should we be aware of today?
What exactly is wrong with society? Let’s come up with some ideas, because a problem well stated, is a problem half-solved. What is wrong with our education, our economic policy, our foreign policy? I know we’re not all scholars here, but we can at least ask the questions, maybe together, we can come up with some answers.
Comments (6)
Why don’t we listen to ourselves? As Cat Stevens sings: “From the moment I could talk, I was ordered to listen.” Our education teaches us to be passive, to spend such great amounts of our time listening to others that we never learn to listen to ourselves. We are denied the freedom to think our own thoughts. We are taught that our thoughts don’t matter.
I think museums are such popular educational tools because they place our focus on the past, rather than on the present. They say, “Horrible things happened back then, but we’ve progressed, we’ve learned some valuable lessons, and life is so much better now. We’ve eradicated evil; see, it’s a thing of the past, and we’ve enshrined it so that it can never come back. Now we’re free to rest on our laurels. Examination of the present is unnecessary.”
Progress is a myth that denies the limitations of human knowledge, and denies our propensity toward regression. Life is not linear, a straight line toward truth and goodness; it is cyclical, and history always repeats itself.
Ah!!! Such new perspectives for me. Examination of the present, that’s what’s missing. History, chemistry, biology, math, english. Current events. That needs to be in the curriculum growing up. Not for a grade. There needs to be a period dedicated to discussing the world we live in today.
Somehow, we let history substitute current events. The whole purpose of learning history is to put present day events into context. While adults do all the talking about the world, those in college, who have nothing other responsibilities except learning, should be the loudest voices about examining the present. If students aren’t encouraged and taught to speak out, certainly nobody else will.
I think we need to look beyond even current events, which can be found packaged and prepared for our consumption in each new day’s newspaper. What’s going on between the lines of the stories in the newspapers? What are the things that few journalists want to report, and most of us would prefer not to read, or see, or talk about (like the real state of our educational system)? Those are the very things we should be striving with all our courage to talk about.
I’ve been meaning to suggest a book to you by Jonathan Kozol that he wrote about education back in 1975. It’s out of print now, but I came across it accidentally in the education section at the library. It’s called The Night Is Dark and I Am Far From Home, and it has to be just about the most courageous and self-examining book on what our culture does to its youth that I have ever read.
I am failing, you, Dan. The vision of what I want to say for your book is worlds apart from the mess I have spent hours putting to the page.
WHOA! Okay Dan – I’ve worked in 2 different museums - one of them the Smithsonian – and I think you’re looking at it wrong. Well, maybe not entirely wrong – it all depends on the curator. the point of learning history is not to further the idea that we have progressed. it is not to say “oh look how far we’ve come, we’re amazing”. the point of learning history is to develop a framework of what happened in the past, to be able to spot trends, to be able to learn and grow. to understand the background in order to further the future. for example, you can’t really understand what happened in serbia unless you go way the fuck back and learn about all the history – EVERYTHING, because that conflict was by no means out of the blue.
in reference to museums – there are some curators who are absolutely hung up on the past. the military history section of the national museum of american history most definitely glorifies history. however, the other sections are all about growth – about learning through a case study. the exhibit ‘science in american life’ (which was half of the focus of my second thesis) spends time outlining the history of science, the importance of the labratory, the scopes trial, the worlds fair in 1930s, the a-bomb, the development of plastic, ‘silent spring’. but it’s more than that. it shows you the various ways in which science has developed over time to create the society in which we live in now, in the present. it shows the various ways in which science has fucked up everything. it even has a section on the future – how to improve science for the future of the envrionment, for the planet, etc. needless to say this exhibit was extremely controversial.
i think, dan, that one of the things that people forget when they go to a museum is that they are being exposed to one person’s (or a group of people’s) ideas and what they deemed the most appropriate ways in expressing those ideas. but that is the problem with all history. everything needs to be taken with the proverbial grain of salt.
in reference to the holocaust museum – there is absolutely no reason for there to be a holocaust museum in the united states. none. there have been many articles written on this (and this is one of the main reasons the building is not located on the national mall – i did a lot of research on this). however – saying that, i think it’s crucial to educate the idiots who think the holocaust didn’t happen and that people are justified in killing others. i think it was at the yad vashem museum in israel where, at the very end, they had a huge movie thing about the current genocide (i went during the whole bosnia thing) and they were trying to raise money to help. holocaust museums are case studies. they are saying – “here, this is the most talked about atrocity of this kind. apply what you learn here.” my friend worked at the united states holocaust memorial museum and she was helping a curator do research for an exhibit and a book on comparing the bosnian situation with the armenian genocide (i think it was slightly more complex than that – but i don’t remember exactly).
i think the problem with the presentation of history in school (and in museums) is not that we learn history, but that we don’t know what do with it. we aren’t given the tools to use history. and we aren’t taught how to scrutinise it. we don’t learn about contextual discourse – the idea that we can’t separate ourselves from ourselves in order to write or research objectively. i didn’t learn that until college. and i think that’s the saddest thing about our education system. we are merely taught facts. even the tools supposedly provided are merely told to us in factual format.
i have no idea if that made sense. sorry – i have a lot to say about history and museums. it’s sort of my passion.
Ok… here is my attempt at saying something logical and meaningful:
Museums…… I think the main purpose set forth by the existence of museums is to, as you said, educate the public about the past. While we certainly should be aware of the goings-on of today, I think it is crucial that we understand our past, where we have emerged from, and what we can do differently in the future. The main reason the holocaust museums seem to exist is not only to educate the masses but to pay reverence to those who were heartlessly murdered during one of the low points of our history as a human race. It would be disgusting and downright despicable if society refused to acknowledge those who died and scorn those would cold-heartedly did the murdering.
One of the Buddhist Three Marks of Existence is anicca or “impermanence“ which strives to put forth the idea that nothing, from moment to moment, is ever the same. Our lives and the world around us are transient. I am attempting to convey to you the idea that it would be quite an effort to make a museum about the present. Exhibits would have to be taken out and added every few minutes and it would eventually get to the point where so much information would be floating into, out of, and through every square inch of the museum that peopel would avoid going so as to preserve their last bits of sanity.
I do, however, wholeheartedly agree that there is something wrong with the way children are taught and what they are supposed to believe is important. I have just finished the 11th grade at al all-girls Catholic school and believe that I failed 4 of my 5 final exams. It came to the point where I was sitting at 12:30 am, studying cell division during mitosis nad meiosis and, suddenly, I didn’t care anymore. I didn’t care because it didn’t matter. How would the knowledge of cell division help me make the world a better place? I didn’t care about the finals or the grades (I’m sure I did care deep down as they would affect my college admissions) and pretty much gave up on studying. The problem is that wew are being tested on the wrong material. World Religions was one of my favorite classes this year… until it came to the tests. I loved learning about the world around me and felt htat I had a good grip on the material and then the test would throw a question at me that I would stare at until only 5 minutes remained. History–one of my most seemily useless classes–was not my forte, either. I only now realize that i had been tested on the battles of the revolutionary war instead of the war with Iraq we were stuyding social nonrms of the 1920s rather than the social norms of today, we examined the election of Rutherford B. Hayes instead of discussion the important political issues surrounding the current campaign between Bush and Kerry. Then the infamous SAT came along to taunt me of my lack of “important” knowledge. Good schools (or at least what I believe to be “good” schools) would be judging me on my ability to relate analogies, my competence when forced to solve for “x”, and my stamina that forces me to stay awake during the pointless reading passages, rather than judging my character, my mind, and my drive. Last year, while studying European History as a sophomore, we constantly asked our teaher if we could take about the war on Iraq that had just gone into full effect. To our dismay, we had to follow the “curriculum” and after we covered everything that we “needed” to, we could speak about the war on terror. There should be a class based on discussion–disscussion of events, ideas, politics, society, etc. No grades, no homework, no essays, no interims, just discussion and focus on what is really imporant.
You ask me what I believe is wrong with society. I could write a book on this topic but I will try to keep it to a bare minimum as I have already written enough to constitute a farily long short story. Social Norms – Society expects a little something from each and every one of us, something to make us the same as the person on our right. A while ago, I posted an entry (you can go to my xanga and go to May 8, 2003 on the posting calendar. It is near the bottom under the stubtitle Randomness) about conformity and how homework leads to communism. I meant it to be purely satirical and first but as I though about it morea dn more, had I not hyperbolize it, it would have truly made sense. I know call upon the wisdom of Ralph Waldo Emerson who, in his absolutely fabulous essay Self-Reliance, says that “Society everywhere is in the conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members… The virtue in most request is conformity. Self reliance is its aversion… Whoso would be a man must be a non-conformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself and you shall have the suffrage of the world.” (In reference to the last paragraph on learning the wrong things in school, we studied in English this year the transcendentalist movement and read the works of the greats Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman. This is what we should be learning in our schools: how to think, and how to be independent.)
I could say much, much more but I must go before I hurt myself.
Keep posting
-Danielle
just thought you’d like to know that i’m talking to ed online – and he’s talking to vadim online. and i’m writing to you online. it’s like a fucking astor chain of internet connectivity!