Jeffery Fisher
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I read the article and then googled Daniel Willingham, and got a copy of his book for on-line reading. He asks why students don't like school and provides an answer by analyzing thought as problem solving. These problems are of the general logico-mathematical kind. He later qualifies the general approach to include history and poetry.
Here is a Willingham article from the Washington Post (Sept 2009):
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/daniel-willingham/willingham-reading-is-not-a-sk.html
It's good and worth reading.
I confess, I stopped worrying about education and what should be done, because frankly, nothing will be done. And worse, the state budgets will cut costs by laying off teachers and closing schools, no matter what the tests show. They are merely a pretext. This view doesn't mean people shouldn't directly fight this battle. It is a critical necessity.
But I started thinking in different directions, mostly thinking back on the person who most influenced me. It was my first step father. Technically he didn't graduate from high school because he got in an argument with one of the priests in his Catholic school and they with held his diploma. I think they were Jesuits. After he got back from serving in the Navy during WWII he got on the GI bill and went to college in art, first at USC in LA, then Jepson Art Institute and then Uni Guadalajara. When we got back from Mexico, he took up other studies at the main branch of the LA Public Library on his own. His native talent was the ability to learn foreign languages. He became fluent in Spanish, Italian, French and in later life Japanese when he moved to Tokyo. He went around with the art and literary crew in LA, then after a divorce moved to NYC and the big league version. We kept in contact by writing letters, exchanging recommended books, arguing art, literature, politics, and then I met some of his friends in LA and SF and continued the basic influence through them.
The reason for sketching this history is to show that an active intellectual life can be had in a completely informal and non-institutional way. Until about the mid-1950s this was the only way to lead such a life in the US, since most of US institutional culture sucked in almost every non-technical field. Most of these alternatives were trivialized as a bohemian `life style'. But a more careful review of my stepfather's generation (1920s-90s) will reveal the best known and best accomplished people of the period had very similar backgrounds.
They were the Working and blue collar class kids who mounted the big ride of the european enlightenment. You see the same pattern, especially in the immigrant kids of the big US cites before WWII, and they finally come of age in the 50s and 60s.
I discovered this pattern in my own life, since I went to school in all the completely useless subjects that comprise this world. In my fifties, after about twenty years of living within this counter-culture, my step father and I reversed roles and I got to lead him into domains he never explored. He was a reluctant and resistive kid, but he would come around as the richness grew on him. What a fucking kick in the ass. To give back to the old man, what the very young man I knew as boy had given me. You gotta get a load of this, Mike... God damnit all, Charlie... It was almost always beautiful to hear that resistance, like the errant boy he had been, and still was.
He would come to the states to renew his papers about once a year in the last decade of his life. It was always like an intellectual cultural conference between the US and Japan. He had transferred his loyalties and interests completely into a Japanese context. His attraction toward Japan, came from his experiences in the Pacific theater during the great naval battles of WWII. His destroyer was sunk in Guadalcanal. His next ship was anchored in Nagasaki harbor at the end of the war, where he could survey the nuclear waste of the port city. Twenty-five years later, his last wife was a fascinating and interesting woman about my age. She worked for the Japanese Ministry of Education, in the language and culture division. This gave her and my stepfather an almost unlimited access to travel, since most of the large embassies have such a division as part of their foreign service mission, and most of these are in the great cities of the world. The last time I saw them, I took them on a tour of San Francisco, in pure joy... We talked and drank our way into oblivion that night...
This life was quite an adventure for a dirt poor kid born in Kentucky and grown up around the white gambling and prostitution houses of the Mississippi in the 1930s where his father worked as a semi-professional gambler. His mother of course held the bothers together with waitress jobs, when the old man was gone, which was thankfully often. This was something out of Mark Twain and American folklore, but it was also a real and lived life. He got essaies and semi-fictional stories published in Esquire and Playboy about some of this. You just go down the list of black and white R&B and read the same histories. So the soul of America comes from these places. In Japan he joined the ex-pat writing to publish in a columns in English language newspapers and teaching English in business night schools.
It was an admirable journey, and it may be, we have to live it for another round without the institutions that are supposed to support it. That is not a bad fate. Other people around the world know this, and respect it as we regard each other with wary souls... The word, Comrade, is also a prayer. Salude.
May 2an and after thoughts.
CG