Carpe Cakem!

The latest junk degree: Interdisciplinary Studies

Matthew — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 20:55:37 +0000

Yes, you too can have a degree in anything you want! Enjoy music, political science and yoga? How about math, Shakespeare and welding? Change your major too many times? Have we got the ticket out for you! Get a degree in Interdisciplinary Studies. Come up with your own study plan – have a couple of your favorite profs sign off on it and you’re on your way! It sounds cooler than a General Studies degree too.

PLUS, if you still can’t get a job when your done, you can always go back and get a GRADUATE degree in interdisciplinary studies! Woo hoo! Add some French and a thesis on the intersection of the Beatles White Album with Finnegan’s Wake. Cool! Now that you’re $100k in debt, you’re sure to find that dream job.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m actually ALL FOR interdisciplinary studies. I think nearly all of the most interesting scholarship AND productive work out there intersects many disciplines.

Can you write a killer application with only raw computer science chops? No. Creative graphic design powers? No. A deep understanding of user interfaces and lots of intuitive empathy? No. You need all three! Yes, you can have a team of people working on a project, one of each, but the really genius folks have all three working together in their own heads. You won’t learn this stuff in school either, though school will help parts of it.

I like reading Girard and he dabbles in philosophy, anthropology, psychology, literary criticism, theology, and more to come up with some truly original ideas.

The problem with our kings and politicians today is that they are hyper-specialists in getting elected with (occasionally) some background in law. This is not a good mix for actual creative problem solving.

It’s well-known that some of the world’s greatest musical performers are lousy teachers. Teaching well has almost nothing to do with your ability to practice 10 hours a day without your head falling off. It requires a lot of thinking about cognitive psychology, communication, and even a certain set of sharp social skills.

The world has had many great inventors, but all the ones you probably know about (folks like Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Steve Jobs) also knew a thing or two about economics.

I could go on and on. All the best stuff is “interdisciplinary”. But you got to figure that out on your own. The degree won’t really help. It could mean anything, or nothing.

Young Man Luther

Matthew — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 16:18:16 +0000

I’m having a good time reading the (apparently) controversial biography of Martin Luther by Erik Erikson. Erikson was a secular psychologist and the one who coined the phrase “identity crisis” in the 1950s. A lot his talk on what was going on in Luther’s head is probably conjecture, but portions of it make a lot of sense. Never a dull moment. Other than the textbook summary, I actually know very little about Luther, so I feel like this is filling an appropriate void.

From the introduction:

Luther has been both vilified and sanctified, and both by sincere and proven scholars, who have spent a good portion, if not all, of their lifetimes reconstructing him from the raw data – only to create, whenever they tried to encompass him with a formula, a superhuman or a suprahuman robot, a man who could never have breathed or moved or least of all spoken as Luther spoke. In writing this book, did I intend to do better?

-Erik Erikson, Young Man Luther, p.13

Redeemed humanity is young

When is preaching from the bible not?

Matthew — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 06:58:40 +0000

Overheard recently (can’t find the link):

I spent 13 years working in and going to churches where you didn’t have to bring your Bible. They put the 28 prooftexted verses up on the screens for us. (4 verses for each of the speaker’s 7 points, each containing a word found in his points, even if he had to use several different translations to find one.)
It was “awesome.”

Have you experienced something like this before? Uh huh.

Our Father

Matthew — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 01:53:13 +0000

This is a stunning rendition of the Lord’s prayer, sung in the original Aramaic by none other than the fascinating Lisa Gerrard.

Abbun d’bishmayya
yitqadesh shmakh
titey malkhutakh
tihey re`utakh
heykhma debishmayya
keyn af be’ar`a

lachman deme’ar`a
hab lan yoma deyn umachra
ushbaq lan chobayn
heykhma de’af shebaqnan lechayyabayn
we’al ta`eylan lenisayuna
ela atseylan min bisha

(Translation:
Our Father, who is in heaven
Sanctified be your Name!
May your kingdom come;
May your will be done,
Just as it is in heaven,
So also upon the earth.

Our Bread, which is from the earth,
Give us day by day.
And forgive us our sins,
Just as we should forgive our debtors.
And do not bring us to trial,
Rather deliver us from evil.

Wounds from father to son

Childhood regrets

Matthew — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 22:29:06 +0000

In a rare analysis (including lots of Aristotle) of the humor of Beavis and Butthead and it’s creator Mike Judge, the Mockingbird Blog writes:

While many of us may have wished we spent our summer days learning Latin or playing the cello, the reality is that MTV and bathroom humor consumed a lot of attention and energy.

While I was strictly forbidden from ever watching Beavis and Butthead and actually DID spend the summer 1996 doing things like working on the Haydn trumpet concerto and getting the DirectX 3.0 .dlls to link and compile in Borland C++ (what a mess), I must admit I also sang along with “Damn Feels Good to Be A Gangster” from one of Judge’s other creations.

Poetic knowledge and “unschooling”

Matthew — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 05:29:36 +0000

Poetic Knowledge is a book about how books aren’t particularly helpful for teaching poetic knowledge. Ironic?

Good ideas, just a bit hard to follow at times and with very little suggestions about how to practically implement it. It contains several long philosophical discourses that essentially boil down to the fact that EXPERIENCE is really important in education.

“One does not know the content of a desire unless one knows what ultimately satisfies it. By its satisfaction [pleasure] we learn what the desire is desire for.” – Jonathan Lear on Aristotle

I’m certainly cheering when he proclaims:

[without] the judgment of the senses, all higher learning tends to become dehumanized and increasingly destructive.

That’s right! Increasingly abstract knowledge becomes ever more not-human. Then, when we swing that knowledge around like a sword, it cuts up and disfigures our own brothers and sisters. One only has to look at much modern economic theory or even systematic theology to see this at work. Some disciplines, such as pure math can occasionally escape the orbit of earth without falling back to cause a crater, but nearly all the sciences, and especially the humanities, cannot.

What does this have to do with education? In the last chapter James Taylor recounts a personal anecdote I could relate to. He remembers teaching a high school literature course in years past:

When I saw three of [my old students] about twelve years after their graduation, they were eager to tell me how much they had enjoyed my class. When I asked them why and what they remembered, they all said they only remembered that we read the Iliad and The Count of Monte Cristo together, and that they were the best books they ever read. The remembered very little of what I had said. I realized, seeing their sincerely happy faces at recalling this class, that it was fine, and good for my vaity as well, that the recalled little of what I had said but that their memory of the experience of the class was one of overall great fondness. I think this was possible because those books were read in an atomosphere of pure enjoyment – no notes were to be taken, no pop quizzes. We read a great deal aloud and would talk whole hours about one scene, recreating it in our minds, savoring some moment or event that seemed true to us.

What do you remember from your school days? Probably something similar to this and not a heck of a lot else.

“Everything teaches”

Everything teaches. This idea comes up a lot. I was struck at how much of his educational philosophy overlaps with the “Unschooling” method of homeschooling. Though anathema in many traditional circles, I think it has a bunch to offer, at least when tempered with a bit of parenting common sense and when not carrying too much hippie baggage. My wife has written some good thoughts on that.

My friend who lent me this book went through it with a study group of teachers from the local classical Christian school. He scribbled down some possibly helpful notes in the margins.

What might the school that Poetic Knowledge advocates look like?

Great books
no notes
no lectures
memorized orally
literary approach
calligraphy
stargazing outings
traditional songs
waltz
classics taught ‘poetically’
Latin taught orally
rhetoric taught from literature
travel to Europe

Nice work if you can find it. Or if your kids can handle it.

Christ the crutch (or not)

Matthew — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 17:05:36 +0000

I spoke with an acquaintance not long ago who told me they weren’t a Christian because “it’s just an emotional crutch” they didn’t need.

This is a very myopic view of religion (what can I get out of it?). It’s the same type of myopia that Joel Osteen preaches though too, just in the other direction.

This argument has other problems too, as Fr. Ernesto is quick to point out:

When I was young, one of the favorite arguments against Christians was to argue that Christianity was simply a psychological crutch to help one deal with life. Of course, there was an obvious counter-answer. One simply responds to the critic that he/she rejects Jesus because they have psychological hang-ups that prevent them from being able to trust an authority figure. Can you see the circular nature of the argument? When one begins ascribing psychological (or cultural) motives to someone else, there is no guarantee that you yourself are not the one who is having either psychological (or cultural) motives for using that charge on someone else.

This is where the post-modern social deconstruction jabber is a two-edged sword. It can just as easily be used to trash your own non-faith. Better start somewhere else instead.

Wonder as rational fear

Matthew — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 16:49:54 +0000

Here, in his book Poetic Knowledge, author James Taylor quotes an interesting passage on the nature of wonder. Here, wonder is “consciousness of ignorance”. For anyone of you particularly curious folk out there, you know there is a dimension of this that is NOT a pleasant experience!

Wonder, always considered a passion, was classified by Aquinas and many before him as a species of fear. This is bound to strike the modern reader as out of tune with his experience of the emotions of both fear and wonder…Fear, we must remember, is one of the emergency emotions: it arises when we perceive some evil that seems to be insuperable…There are, of course, many kinds of fear…[and] it is helpful to distinguish wonder from some passions in its immediate family. When we do so, we see that wonder is the most rational form of fear.

Wonder intensifies…pleasure…because wonder increases desire and therefore the joy of discovery. It seems at first that the pleasurable character of wonder is at odds with its being a form of fear, which is usually unpleasant. It is true that wonder arises from something that is unpleasant, consciousness of ignorance, and that until one knows, one remains in this condition. But the only way that one can profitably flee from ignorance is by desiring and attempting to know, and these are pleasant activities. A man imprisoned will find his condition unpleasant, but he wll take delight in planning his escape.

-Dennis B. Quinn, Iris in Exile: A Synoptic History of Wonder (via Poetic Knowledge, p.25

You see that? Wonder intensifies pleasure because it increases desire and therefore the joy of discovery. This is why the person who visits Europe after reading about it expectantly for 30 years of there life is probably going to have a much more exciting time than a business man travelling there to make a sale, his mind on other things, or even a vacationer who has only become excited about the sights to see while reading up on them in the past month.

Escaping fatherhood

Matthew — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 05:36:52 +0000

In a worthwhile article by Andrew Peach at First Things, Wendell Berry is paraphrased:

Marriage—like friendships, families, and neighborhoods—“is a form of bondage, and involved in our humanity is always the wish to escape. . . . But involved in our humanity also is the warning that we can escape only into loneliness and meaninglessness.”

No related posts.

Merton on the wrong way to isolate yourself

Matthew — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 06:19:33 +0000

False recollection occurs when we try by our own efforts to block out all material things, to isolate ourselves from people and nature by main force, hoping that there will be nothing left in our soul but God. When we attempt this, we usually divide our being against itself, call one half (the one we like) God, and call the other our “nature” or our “self.” What madness, what a waste of effort, to try to rest in one half of our being, calling it “God,” and lock the other out of doors! Our being resists this division, and engages in what we think is a war between light and darkness. But this struggle is only the battle of an illusion against an illusion. Such battles are too often waged in monasteries, where God calls men not to embrace illusion but to abandon it, that they may discover what is real.

-Thomas Merton, No Man is an Island, Ch.12 Sec.14