Sometimes in the process of putting a magazine together, a late-breaking idea emerges that seems worth taking a flier on. In the case of our education issue, that idea — to ask all sorts of influential and creative and inspiring people about the formative educational moments of their lives — was very, very late-breaking, indeed. Too late, really, for us to have much faith that it was going to work out. People are busy, after all. They have metropolises to run and rock shows to rock in and explanations for the fabric of the universe to nail down. And yet . . . when they received a call or an e-mail from someone here (in most cases, that person was the great Tony Gervino), many of those we reached out to agreed to sit down more or less immediately and type something out. Fifteen of those submissions are in this week’s issue. What follows below are several bonus tracks, arguments for the necessity of doing your homework (Glenn Beck) and reading Thucydides (David Brooks). Read, enjoy, and feel free to leave a comment describing the educational experience that made the difference for you.
Just like President Obama, I am an Ivy Leaguer. The one minor distinction is that he graduated from Harvard and Columbia, and I went to Yale for one class as a nondegree student. Which I didn’t complete.
But, during my 15 minutes (or so) at Yale, I was actually asked by my professor not to read something. He said the author was wrong, and I shouldn’t bother. Of course, the first thing I did upon leaving the classroom was to go to the nearest bookstore and buy it. Later, I was accused by the professor — correctly — of consuming his specifically forbidden knowledge. I admitted it proudly.
The word of someone who claims to have the answers is not enough. You have to learn why they do or don’t agree. The point is not to learn what to think, but how to find the answers. It’s why I never discourage my audience to read the other side. I beg them to do their own homework, not only on claims made by the president but also on claims made by me.
Intellectual security only comes when you have tested the outer bounds of your belief system. I’m sure my fellow Ivy Leaguer would agree.
–GLENN BECK, commentator
***
My first two years at the University of Chicago, I took the common core — the greatest educational experience I ever had. We were compelled to read Plato, Aristotle, Thucydides, Rousseau, Marx and all the rest. I’ve forgotten most of the contemporary books I chose to read in the final years of college, but those books from the first two years have remained relevant landmarks, every day for the rest of my life.
Freshman year I was assigned to read “Reflections on the Revolution in France,” by Edmund Burke. I loathed it. I wanted to think for myself, and here was a guy saying that our individual stock of reason is small and we should fall back, more often than not, on the inherited wisdom of the ages. I wrote several angry, hyperbolic papers denouncing it, but that anger must have been sparked by some deep unconscious resonance. Later I realized he was right and that became a big book for me.
Now I browse through the curriculum sections of the college bookstores with sadness. Some of the Great Books are still there, but they’ve been scattered like the winds. It’s easy to go through college now without encountering them. I look at some of the specialized books on those shelves, the ones that are being assigned instead, and I think, Two years after this class is over — or two months or two weeks — the students will have forgotten everything about this book, and they will never think about it again.
–DAVID BROOKS, New York Times Columnist
***
Last fall, I taught a class at Bard College, called “Strange Books and the Human Condition.” I picked the strangest books I could think of. The writers ranged widely, from Kleist and Gogol to Jane Bowles, Henry Green, Felisberto Hernandez, Wallace Shawn. Bruno Schulz. Poor Robert Walser, dead in the snow, in 1956, near the mental asylum!
I really hope that my students got something out of the class. But I have to say that it was a hugely educational experience for me. I loved being in direct communication with so many total weirdos, so many of them long dead. And I was thrilled to see that all these “young people,” my students, seemed to have no problem understanding these extremely unusual voices.
For me it was an education in why someone might want to write, to keep tapping out secret messages in the code of words on the page.
–FRANCINE PROSE, author
***
I was mostly educated through books, not through school and university, because I was a bad student. The only thing I can say about learning the hard way is: If more than two guys are willing to fight with you, and if you cannot run, it’s better to have a wall at your back to avoid 180 degrees of danger.
—JEAN TOUITOU, designer for A.P.C.
***
I can identify the exact educational experience that gave me my life. It was 50 years ago, thanks to Sidney Harris, my physics teacher, at Bryant High School in Queens. I had grown up in public housing. No one in my family had attended college. I had no appreciation of reading or cultural activities. Yet Mr. Harris saw something that I hadn’t seen in myself.
A solid-enough student, I was most likely on my way to a nearby public college but not especially interested in learning. Mr. Harris stayed after school to introduce me to Einstein, teaching me the joy of struggling to master complex material.
I was given curiosity and confidence by a New York City public-school teacher. He helped me get a National Science Foundation scholarship to a summer physics program and then a full scholarship to Columbia College. Education opened my world and gave me a life I had not imagined as a kid in the Woodside Houses.
My experience with Mr. Harris inspired me to become the New York City schools chancellor. I realized, through him, that the potential of students in inner-city schools is too often untapped. We can fix that. Demography need not be destiny. Sidney Harris taught me that as well.
—JOEL KLEIN, former chancellor of the New York City Department of Education
—JOEL KLEIN, former chancellor of the New York City Department of Education
***
During the opening days of my freshman year at Bryn Mawr College in the fall of 1964, I joined my classmates in a large Gothic hall to be greeted by President Katharine McBride. After 22 years at the helm of the college, she was an intimidating presence, as well as a then-still-rare example of female accomplishment and leadership. In emulation of British scholarly tradition we all wore black academic robes, as did Miss McBride herself as she stood on the stage before us. We knew this was a serious occasion. She began by talking about “our work.” I had expected to be taking classes and eventually choosing a major, but I had not previously thought of my studies as a kind of oeuvre, a vocation with such implied coherence and purpose. And she told us something else I have not forgotten. “Knowledge,” she said, “begins with humility — with wonder and with appreciation for what you don’t know. The more you learn, the more you see how much you want and need to learn.” I was beginning four years of college, but I understood as I listened to Miss McBride that the search for knowledge consumes and defines a lifetime. —DREW GILPIN FAUST, president of Harvard University
***
Kathe Kowalski was my photography professor at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania. I remember the first moment we met. She was hanging examples of her students’ work in the hallway. I offered to help and began holding the prints as she tacked them up one at a time. The moment we exchanged our names, I knew that our meeting was a divine appointment. Kathe Kowalski led me to my lifelong personal-documentary project “Notion of Family” in my hometown, Braddock, Pa. Kathe devoted her photographic practice to documenting her mother, women in prison and underserved families in rural areas. She instilled in me the value and commitment to honor the lives of underrecognized individuals in our society. Kathe’s unexpected death in 2006 was a devastating loss, but her impact on my work and life has become the revelation that keeps pushing me to work harder everyday. —LATOYA RUBY FRAZIER, photographer
***
Deciding to go to the N.B.A. and pass on being a part of what University of Memphis had to offer was the hardest choice I have made in my life. I am not sure if I’ll get my degree or not. I have taken college classes during my summers off, but it’s tough to fit traditional learning into my work schedule so I take classes on the Internet when I can. And I am very focused on continuing to learn new things. My foundation and most of my charitable work focus on creatively inspiring youth to get an education. I think education is the key for people to avoid poverty.
With my children, we talk a lot about what it means to have an education and what they want to be when they grow up. I also try to set a good example and make sure reading is a priority in their lives. Knowledge is power. What you don’t know can kill you. —AMAR’E STOUDAMIRE, N.B.A. star
***
My future rewrote itself one afternoon in eighth grade, when my American history teacher made a casual remark about Ancient Egypt. Some stray synapse fired, and I raised my hand and paraphrased an entire Boogie Down Productions song, in service of the argument that Moses was black. The ensuing back and forth morphed into a referendum on the Eurocentricity of the school’s curricula and continued until the bell rang.
I staggered outside, dizzy with the realization that I could “battle” my teachers — that the ethos of the hip-hop rhyme cipher translated perfectly to the classroom, and I didn’t have to wait until after school to use verbal dexterity, improvisational acuity and unexpected knowledge to try to bust somebody’s ass.
On my home planet of hip-hop, such skills were de rigueur; possessing them didn’t make me special, just functional. But in the thinner atmosphere of a junior high school class, they became superpowers. I stopped playing the back of the room, letting education wash over me. I became an intellectual troublemaker. That day, I began to understand that a person’s life might be dictated by the facts and the eloquence he marshaled, that who and why we battle are moral choices, and that I’d better get in as much practice as possible.—ADAM MANSBACH, author of “Go the F*ck to Sleep”
Nenhum comentário:
Postar um comentário