Here are some places you might like to check out around the web, related to Shimer in one way or another (and presented in no particular order). And, thanks to this site for the non-internet web! Did you know when you google web -- images that is, you do not get spider webs? No, you get various images used to announce the inernet/web. Life has changed. What was a metaphor drawn from nature has now pushed nature to the side.)
First: This site is about Liberal Education, across the US and beyond. It is filed with resources and should stimulate your mind. And, then, you can connect these resources to the drive to liebral education containied within great books!
Second: this site is entitled "Why Great Books Aren't the Answer" -- and I think given our emphasis on listening both to those we agree with and those we do not agree with, it deserves a read. (You may be surprised.)
Third: If the phrase repurposed books means anything to you, click here. If not, click anyway. And perhaps try here as well.
Finally, here's a question for you: what is the most Shimerian website you know. Leave an answer in the comments -- and spread the word to start looking for them! Shimerian websites??!??!?!
Great neologism, right? It is not my own, of course, but it has a delightful ring to it. It comes from a book I just finished entitled Being Wrong, authored by Kathryn Schulz. The subtitle is Adventures in the Margins of Error. It has been out for a while, and there is a lot of buzz about it. And, to be honest, I enjoyed the read.
So: wrong is joining other words that nudge us along by seeming so wrong to attach to the best of liberal education -- bewilderment, dead, glee, wrong. Really? Thoughtfulness seems obvious. It even seems right. It belongs. But wrong? Really? It seems so wrong. (Say that aloud in the right tone of voice.) And yet, it seems so right. (Even Bill Clinton agrees. Click here.)
Schulz's book is persuasive and thought-provoking. Wrong is important -- and not just as something to be avoided. It is something from which we learn. Something we need. Something that defines us. All of us. It is, she argues, part of what makes us human. (And thus more than animals in some sense.) She draws on all sorts of intellectual -- and personal -- examples to push us along. And her comments draw on authors from Aristotle to . . . . well, you know.
So, connections to liberal education? To Shimer? There seem to me several.
First, on neologisms per se. I like them -- they remind me that language grows and changes. Yes, there are rules (grammar; my own obsession with the correct use of apostrophes) but yes, things change. English is a living language. Hack no longer is principally a word for a kind of carriage. Nor, did I, in my youth, know what to google meant. [Well, there was a song from well before my time about googly eyes, but. . . . you know my point.) Neologisms build on the past and somehow link that to the new, the future. In some senses, that is what liberal education is about -- connecting us to history, but doing so in a way that imagines (and allows us to build) a future that is both like that past and challenges it. Neologisms, in some sense, face both directions -- to tradition and to invention, as do neologisms. So, too, I would argue, does the best of liberal education and the best of Shimer.
More directly, though -- how are being wrong and being educated, liberal education and Shimer connected? Let me quote from Shultz as I move to a second set of connections for us by offering a few quotations from the book. (My citatons are to the kindle edition).
The feeling of knowing something is incredibly convincing and inordinately satisfying, but it is not a very good way to gauge the accuracy of our knowledge. (kindle location 1103)
How can we square this feeling of rightness with the very real possibility that we are wrong? This is a question that haunts all of wrongology, not just errors of memory. (kindle location 1171)
By discussing confabulators and literature, memory loss and neurological dysfunction, conversion and lying, this author nudges us along to be thoughtful about ourselves -- and yes, to my mind, the role of being wrong in higher education as about cognitive, social, and emotional processes. Are we more error prone when we follow the masses? When we trust a source? Can higher education be groupthink? Or is its role to disrupt groupthink? Is error blindness a moral problem? How do we move beyond the conviction that we cannot possibly be wrong? (And how do we avoid the view that we are always wrong?) Is certainty toxic? Or is uncertainty toxic?
And a third set of reasons we may find this book of interest? Well, the book is profoundly interdisciplinary (or is it multidisciplinary? Transdisciplinary? Antidisciplinary?) In any case, it draws from a variety of intellectual arenas (and life arenas) to think through a topic (and indeed, make an argument) from a variety of angles. As it does so it addresses the complex relationships between being wrong -- moral error, factual error, dramatic changes in our belief systems, etcetera -- and various epistemologies and metaphysics. How do we know? And in what ways do we learn? Is this about multiperspectivalism -- or is it an admision that most of the things we are most interested in are not divided up into the kinds of arenas that academia uses to demarcate intellectual arenas? Hmm. Might she be right as she writes about being wrong? (She cites Montaigne. How can she be wrong?)
Finally, just a personal bit: I find it hard to be wrong. Do you? There are moments when I have been so wrong -- in various ways -- as to been challenged in a very fundamental way. And not just when the theories of religion's disappearance I learned in college and graduate school turned out to be utterly wrong. Because I have, on occasion, been utterly wrong. Have you? Is that part of what it means to be educated?
And yet, as the author of this book notes about many of us, I too enjoy the paradoxical experience of being wrong sometimes -- when it comes to optical illusions, for example. As she puts it: "emotionally, illusions are the gateway drug to humility" (kindle location 1027). Hmmm.
For some of the press on the book, though collected by the book's own website, click here. And for a video that is kind of fun, here. To buy it from indiebook.com try here. Or, try this site for some video that is not TED. Or try this bloggishness from a site with one of the best names I have seen in a while -- the accidental theologist. Or this, from an even more wonderful blog, overweening generalist, whose mission seems oh so Shimerish.
Of course, rich has many meanings -- financially secure and more, deeply textured and full, and related meanings. (Shound you wish, you could check out a dictionary definition here or the wikipedia entry here which is utterly goofy.) But in what is often one of my rhetorical strategies, those meanings are not where I am heading today. Instead, I am heading to Rich as a last name, of well known poet and thinker, Adrienne Rich, profiled here by Chicago's own Poetry Foundation.
Among the topics that Rich addressed across her oeuvre (aka body of works) are motherhood, sexuality, feminism, and education. It is the latter that is relevant for us today. In 1973/74, for example, she wrote as essay entitled "The Woman Centered University", available here. In 1978, she wrote "Taking Women Students Seriously" parts of which are available here.
Here are some of her words from her essay "Claiming an Education," a 1977 piece, originally given as a Convocation address at Douglass College (altered by the addition in the brackets):
Ths first thing I want to say to you who are students, is that you cannot afford to think of being here to receive an education; you will do much better to think of yourselves as being here to claim one. One of the dictionary definitions of the verb "to claim" is: to take as the rightful owner; to assert in the face of possible contradiction." "To receive" is to come into possession of; to act as receptacle or container for; to accept as authoritative or true." The difference is that between acting and being acted-upon, and for women [and men] it can literally mean the difference between life and death. (Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence, New York: W.W. Norton, 1979, p. 231; also available here)
So: do you think that adding the "and men" is apt? Is this still relevant advice?
I think it is relevant advice for all of us, though what makes it difficult for each of us to claim our education is shaped by our social circumstances. It is, as Rich pointed out decades ago, difficult to claim an education if one is at risk physically in some settings (is a late library night putting you at rick of rape, for example?) -- or if one cannot afford education -- or if the presumptions of those around you are that you are not smart enough or capable enough to be educated?
How might we better claim an education? Do you claim yours? How?
So, I recently took a trip to various places. Below is a picture from the trip. If someone -- anyone -- in the comments correctly identifies the locale, I will write a blog entry reflecting on the experience? And, I will include more pictures! Here you go:
Once in a while, there is just a notion that seems like an oxymoron and yet, is really pushing us into a new future. Perhaps a dystopian one and perhaps a utopian one. Perhaps just one of those soon to be run of the mill futures (a kind of future I recognized first when I suddenly realized the amazing idea of the video phone -- from my youthful experience of a World's Fair -- was in my hand and even smaller than they hoped). In any case, NPR did a piece recently on such a notion: A bookless library.
Then, ask yourself about the ways this is -- and is not -- related to higher education and what we do. What does it mean to be a great books college in a world where a bookless library is imagineable.
When I first "met" ShImer, I knew it was a great books school. And I came to know it as a school -- an educational community -- filled with the pursuit of great questions. Hence parts of this blog focusedon questions.
Here are a few to contemplate.
I admire the contributions of Eugene Lang, who has written
much about liberal education; his questions include
In view of their acknowledged
problems, have liberal arts colleges lost their relevance and do they, in terms of their traditional mission as
liberal arts colleges, face extinction? If so, and the ‘natural selection
process’ is allowed to proceed, does it matter? If it matters, why? What are
the options for survival? And would ’responsiblecitizenship,’ as an active
ingredient, contribute significantly as a force for breathing new life and
vitality into the liberal arts mission? (p. 133, “Distinctively American: The
Liberal Arts College"; click here for the article; click here for the innovative undergraduate institution named after Lang)
As I have noted elsewhere in this blog, I also admire as well the work of Sharon Parks
How might the academy maintain
its commitment to truth, proceed with integrity in the light of the relative
character of all knowledge, and serve the formation of young adults. . . ? Is
the epistemology assumed in the modern academy true? Is there an alternative
epistemology, a more adequate way of perceiving the relationship of human
understanding to the apprehension of the whole of reality? (Sharon Parks, The Critical Years: Young Adults and the Search for Meaning, Faith and Commitment (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1986), p. 136)
As a teacher, I often think that confusion is a good thing. It is not the aim of education, of course, but it is a place along the journey which ought not be frightening. If education is, in part, about rendering the complex simpler in order to think about it, it is also about rendering the simple more complex in order to think about it. Like the oft-repreated saying about making hte familiar unfamiliar (and vice versa), these are stages along the sometimes wandering journey of education.
What made me think about bewilderment as connected to education was a book entitled Bewildered Travel: The Sacred Quest for Confusion(University of Virginia, 2007). Authored by Frederick J. Ruf, I admit to having stumbled upon this book only because a co-edited book of mine was also published by the University of Virginia Press. And, it was one of those reads that lingers and tumbles through one's mind for quite some time. In my case, Ruf's ideas lingered not because of the focus on travel but because of the focus on bewilderment. (In fact, I may just read Ruf's other works which include disorder and chaos in their titles!)
In some ways, the role of bewilderment in higher education is most obvious when one is teaching (and learning). All too often students think this is a sign of failure -- to be confused, bewildered, lost. All too often I felt that same worry. And yet, this may also mean we are struggling with important matters in significant ways. To believe one must find ideas easy, that struggling means one is not smart, or that confusion is an insoluble end rather than an opening for exploration, are feelings that appear in office hours and probably as temptations for all of us. And yet, our route to inspiration, to comprehension, to learning, may be enabled by this very sense of bewilderment.
Are you bewildered? Confused? Is it helping you learn?
I have been calling Shimer a community of inquiry, criticism, generosity and hope almost since my arrival in July 2012. Much of Shimer's literature focuses on the notion of a community of criticism, so that is the focus today; and yet, I think remembering to be generous and hopeful is also crucial.
I was reminded of this matter by our "social reading" of Utopia, by Thomas More. Stephen Duncombe, Associate Professor of Media and Culture at New York University, created Open Utopia, a project perhaps best described by Duncombe himself:
When Thomas More’s Utopia was published in 1516 it included copious marginal notes, some profound, others silly, likely contributed by More’s friend and co-conspirator in the Utopia project, Peter Giles. Since then, and with the exception of a few scholarly editions, the practice of reproducing marginalia has fallen off. Using the Institute for the Future of the Book’s SocialBook platform, the Open Utopia is an effort to restart the tradition — and open up the practice.
Here is part of what Dumcombe writes about criticism in his introduction, after describing horrific examples of Utopian dreams gone bad through totalitarian and fascist pursuits of political ideals at the expense of human life and meaning :
But without political illusions, with what are we left?Disillusion, and its attendant discursive practice: criticism.6 Earnest, ironic, sly or bombastic; analytic, artistic, textual, or performative; criticism has become the predominant political practice of intellectuals, artists, and even activists who are dissatisfied with the world of the present, and ostensibly desire something new. Criticism is also Utopia’s antithesis. If Utopianism is the act of imagining what is new, criticism, derived from the Greek words kritikos (to judge) and perhaps more revealing, krinein (to separate or divide), is the practice of pulling apart, examining, and judging that which already exists.
One of the political advantages of criticism–and one of the reasons why it has become the preferred mode of political discourse in the wake of twentieth-century Utopian totalitarianism–is that it guards against the monstrous horrors of political idealism put into practice. If Utopianism is about sweeping plans, criticism is about pointed objections. The act of criticism continually undermines any attempt to project a perfect system. Indeed, the very act of criticism is a strike against perfection: implicitly, it insists that there is always more to be done. Criticism also asks for input from others. It presupposes a dialogue between the critic and who or what they are criticizing–or,ideally, a conversation amongst many people, each with their own opinion. And because the need to criticize is never-ending (one can always criticize the criticism itself), politics remains fluid and open: a permanent revolution. This idea and ideal of an endless critical conversation is at the center of democratic politics, for once the conversation stops we are left with a monolithic ideal, and the only politics that is left is policing: ensuring obedience and drawing the lines between those who are part of the brave new world and those who are not. 7 This “policing” is the essence of totalitarianism, and over the last century the good fight against systems of oppression, be they fascist, communist or capitalist, has been waged with ruthless criticism.
You can join a debate about this -- and more (pun intended) by seeking out Duncombe's Open Utopia project. For details read on!
SocialBook is a new publishing platform based on the idea that "a book is a place" where readers can congregate. SocialBook makes it very easy to annotate a text and to follow a conversation in the margins. Using SocialBook, Open Utopia allows for readers around the world to annotate the text in the margins and comment on the annotations of other readers, creating a conversation that is both dynamic and preserved for future participants. SocialBook also makes it possible for us to create a specific reading group composed of Shimer faculty, staff, students, and alumni: Shimertopia. Others may join in the more genral groups reading Utopia as well. Regardless of where you may find yourself over winter break, you can still share in a text-centered conversation with other Shimerians.
If you would like to participate in this experience, please first sign up for SocialBook here. SocialBook is entirely free, and in addition to Open Utopia, you will find dozens of other texts that you may read “socially”. Please note that SocialBook works only with Safari or Chrome browsers. It will not function properly with Internet Explorer, Firefox or other browsers. If you do not already have a compatible browser, you can download Safari for Windows here or Google Chrome here. If you use a Mac or I-Pad, Safari should already be installed on your device.
After you have signed up for SocialBook, please email SocialReading@shimer.edu and ask to be added to the Shimertopia Group. You will soon receive an email from SocialBook with a link to the Open Utopia text with a tab for My Group.
When you click on the My Group tab, you will be able to follow the comments of other Shimerians in the margin. You may add comments of your own by highlighting a passage in the text and typing your comment which will then appear to all of us in the margin. You may also click “reply” on others’ comments and continue the conversation they have started. Once someone has replied to a comment, that comment cannot be deleted. It becomes part of a permanently preserved conversation about the text.
What do we mean by criticism? Is that something we ought to discuss? Please join us.
No. I am not insulting Shimer – for its aesthetics or its
size. Nor would I be insulting liberal education if I simply replaced the word Shimer with that phrase. Rather, I am asking a very important educational question. Sugata Mitra’s work on education may seem entirely dissimilar from that of Shimer (or many other small liberal arts college). The phrase links to a well-known, if somewhat sentimental, representation of
Mitra’s work, the Oscar-winning film
‘Slumdog Millionaire.’ And,
yet, to speak about Mitra’s work is, I would argue, to speak about Shimer (and excellent liberal education more broadly) in
many ways – at the very least
there are significant parallels.
Here’s why I think that.
Let me begin by noting what Sugata Mitra’s “Beyond the Hole
in the Wall” describes. (The essay is available as a kindle single.) Then, I will get to the subtitle of this short work –
for it is in large measure where I see the parallels.
Mitra’s work began when he, quite literally, installed a
networked PC (aka a personal computer) in a hole in the wall in a slum near New
Delhi. Over time, he learned that he needed to ensure that the computer was accessible only to children (by placing the screen at a certain level, and installing it in such a way that
taller people could not use it, for example). And, he learned to consider
children’s safety by ensuring that
the locations were out in plain sight and the computers could not access
pornography. He located these
computers in holes in walls where literacy ran low and poverty ran high. He placed
them where schools fail and where people all too often thought no learning
could take place. He did so over and over again.
Beyond the wonder of seeing children create small
communities of learners and teach themselves how to use the computers, came
also the wonder that they learned more – including languages and skills. While they might label the cursor something else entirely, they knew what it did and how to use it. And, they came to know how to navigate the net, gather and evaluate knowledge, and more. Hence, the subtitle of Mitra’s essay: “Discover the Power of
Self-Organized Learning.” This is the conceptual result of his repeated
experiments with these “holes in the wall.” And, perhaps most crucially, for
many of us, his project tells us not merely about learning computer literacy –
or even language or math literacy – but also about how such groups learn what some might call
“subject matters” as well. Among the crucial views Mitra arrived at through his
project:
Learning to learn is more important than rote
learning
Learning is collective and conversational
Learning is intergenerational, but not a process
of the elders dispensing wisdom to the younger, but of learners working
together across generations
Deep learning is an emergent phenomenon
He summarizes his conclusions, as all too many thinkers do, in acronyms – SOLE (“self-organized
or self-organizing learning
environment”) -- and new phrases, such
as minimally invasive learning, for example. And yet, in challenging the ways education has been
institutionalized, in which learning and teacher satisfaction, for example, are
inversely correlated, Mitra returns us to much that we ought already have
known. To quote from his work:
. . . the teacher’s role becomes
bigger and stranger than ever before. She must ask her ‘learners’ about things
she does not know herself. Then she can stand back and watch as learning emerges. (kindle location 586-590; Mitra,
“Beyond the Hold in the Wall”)
Where else can you learn about this? The work of Paulo Friere,
and of others, who have challenged prevailing models of education across centuries and
cultures.
For Shimerians, this is a familiar model -- for what is Shimer
if not a self organized learning environment? Through the strength of conversation and dialogue, the role
of students and facilitators, here too is the power of SOLE, reaching across
generations. For other liberal educ ation institutions, this may also be true -- or an aspiration.
Right?
Want to know more? Try the official site or
this sample TED talk by Mitra or try Mitra's own blog, here. Or, ask yourself Mitra's question: Is education obsolete? (Read related material here.) More importantly, let us know how your experience of education is or was -- like or unlike what Mithra has to teach us all.
I have been referencing the kindle single “Gutenberg the
Geek” by Jeff Jarvis on and off since my official arrival at Shimer College as
the new president. So, I thought I would write just a bit about why I have been
doing so. Of course, it is not
because I am trying to raise Jarvis’s royalties, though I am thrilled to learn
he is a pal of a Shimerian (or so rumor has it). I read it before I arrived to start working as President of Shimer College –
and truly like it. Plus, I think it pushes us to ask new questions.
What is “Gutenberg the Geek” about? Well, it describes
Gutenberg’s inventiveness in several ways. The essay reveals the many ways that
his inventiveness was not a single individual’s but in some major sense social.
And, it draws an analogy between that inventiveness and the inventiveness we
now associate with the word “technology.”
Gutenberg, Jarvis indicates, was the Steve Jobs of his era. Thus, the
technology of book creation associated with Gutenberg is rendered similar to
that of creating computers and their attendant innovations within today’s
culture. In fact, Jarvis argues that Gutenberg’s challenges can be understood
as parallel to those of a Silicon valley start up.
Why do those of us in liberal education care? Why might we especially care at places like Shimer?
As Shimerians, we may care because Gutenberg was, in
Jarvis’s language, a great disruptor. He was an entrepreneur. While some
critiques of the essay (and it is truly a short one) argue that there is not much
there, what is there is the reminder
that analogy is rooted in similarity and dissimilarity. Therein lies one of our
major routes to intriguing questions. For Shimer, these questions include:
What is a book? Is it a technology of
information storage and cultural memory? Is it an artifact of an
entrepreneurial culture? Is it a static entity or is it one of many
technologies that allow us to encounter enduring questions and both enduring
and new answers?
Perhaps the following queries are the same questions, but
they feel and sound different?
Is reading a book the same as reading a screen?
Is the social revolution of accessibility
associated with Gutenberg’s work (remember, the idea of vernacular access to
books was revolutionary for many, for example, as was the free exchange of
ideas through a capitalist form of book production) similar to or different
from today’s social revolution of accessibility of ideas and information?
And, for us, another question: If Gutenberg was a Geek, if
books must be understood within the context, among others, that Jarvis offers,
what then is a Great Books College? For that matter, what is college? what is education?
For other commentary on Gutenberg the Geek, try here or, for a perspective fro Inside Higher education, here. And, if the phrase "patron saint of Silicon Valley" seems to intrigue you, click here.
