The Teeming Brain

From time to time I check out the latest activity at Education Conversation, a blog by Tammy Brennan about the problems in America’s current state-run education system. Today I stopped by and found a post from February 17 titled “The End of Literacy” that describes a situation and an experience that I have personally encountered an appalling number of times in my public school teaching career:

I tutor and here’s what I find among many of my students, as well as the host of other young people I talk to when I’m out and about: They’re bright — and ignorant. Sometimes it hardly seems worth the effort to try to talk to them about anything substantial, because I have to provide a phenomenal amount of background information before there can be any comprehension (much less conversation) — and most of them don’t have the attention span to listen to all the background.

My response: Exactly. Ms. Brennan is talking about the problem of self-compounding and self-reinforcing ignorance. In order to learn some things, you first need a basic knowledge of other things that will provide the intellectual, emotional, and cultural context to enable comprehension of the new things. Presently a great many Americans make the unconscious assumption that life at large, the American culture, family life at home, television, the Internet, church activities — something — is giving America’s young people the basic background to understand the things they’re supposed to be learning at school.

But in point of fact, the culture and so on are not providing this crucial background knowledge. The ability of kids to learn the things they’re expected to learn at school has always been predicated on the assumption that their participation in family, society, and the culture outside the school will complement the schools’ efforts. Currently this assumption is false. As I’ve argued many times here at The Teeming Brain, not only the content but the basic tenor of life outside the schools these days is either apathetic or actively hostile toward academic learning.

In my own case, I frequently feel that it’s virtually impossible to talk about meaningful issues and academic content with my high school English students on a proper high school level because I discover about two sentences into our one-sided conversation that I have to backtrack and explain a number of prior points first. Then I find that even those points draw blank stares, so I have to backtrack even further, at which juncture the situation repeats and compounds itself yet again. You get the idea. It’s all but paralyzing to the academic classroom experience, as I wrote last year in “Anna Nicole Smith Is the Fourth Horseman“:

Whenever I speak to my students, if I want to make reference to any sort of common object of knowledge in order to illustrate a point about the dramatic structure of stories, or about irony or other literary techniques, or about anything else having to do with books and literature – and it’s a daily necessity to refer to a common fund of knowledge in order to illuminate something we’re studying – I find lately that the only thing I can mention with any reasonable expectation of group familiarity is the Harry Potter phenomenon. Almost all of the teens have seen the movies. Several have read one or more of the novels. I can also refer to The Lord of the Rings, but that’s because of the popular movies; only a tiny minority of students so far (as in, two or three of them) has actually read Tolkien’s books. I do have a student who has read a couple of Robert Jordan’s “Wheel of Time” books, so he has a minor grounding in literary fantasy.

But anyway, I simply can’t expect these kids to know much of anything, not even — and here’s the rub — about pop cultural stuff! It’s astonishing to find how many of them are oblivious to mass media culture. Not that they don’t know the names and faces of actors and bands and other celebrities, but if I mention the name of any movie director besides Rob Zombie, there’s a general look of blankness. I tried it with Spielberg once and had a couple of students respond, none too confidently, “Isn’t he the guy who made Saving Private Ryan?” I’ve also been shocked and dismayed at how many of them are functionally ignorant of Stephen King. Sure, they know some of his movies, but when it comes to the man himself the overwhelming consensus is an attitude of dull, suspicious disinterest, expressed in questions such as, “Stephen King – he’s really weird, right? Like, he’s that horror guy.” So even on the level of the pop culture crap that many of us decry, these kids’ frame of reference is shockingly narrow.

As I clarified in the op-ed “Media obsession with trivial hurts our nation,” which I boiled down from the Anna Nicole post, “It’s not that they don’t know the names of the actors and singers and other celebrities who populate their sliver-thin slice of cultural awareness. But I’ve been shocked to discover just how thin and fleeting that slice really is.”

For an extra dose of stark, staring hopelessness, consider that this isn’t a problem with just the current crop of young people but is rather one that’s been growing in American society over the course of two or three generations now. Writing exactly 50 years ago, in his 1958 essay “Our Age among the Ages,” John Crowe Ransom described declining levels of student knowledge and motivation at the university level:

It is as if a sudden invasion of barbarians had overrun the education institution. . . . We should not fear them; they are not foreigners, not our enemies. But in the last resort education is a democratic process, in which the courses are subject to the election of the applicants, and a course even when it has been elected can never rise above the intellectual passion of its pupils, or their comparative indifference. So with each new generation of students, Milton declines in the curriculum; even Shakespeare has lost heavily; Homer and Virgil are practically gone. The literary interest of the students today is 90 percent in the literature of their own age; more often than not it is found in books which do not find entry into the curriculum, and are beneath the standard which your humble servants, the teachers of literature, are trying to maintain.

Do I even need to point out the obvious fact that, as far as book literate knowledge goes, things are worse today than when Ransom wrote his essay? He said the students’ literary interests in his day were “90 percent in the literature of their own age.” At both the high school and college levels today, the reading of books at all is in decline, regardless of their content or time period. For the huge majority of teens and twenty-somethings – and I know this for a fact from several years of daily contact with average Midwestern teens — books have been partly or wholly replaced by movies, television shows, video games, YouTube videos, cell phone chats, text messaging, MySpace, instant messaging, and so on. Is it any wonder in the face of this loss of a literate focus and a common fund of literary-cultural knowledge that America’s public schools have watered their curricula down to a bare-bones minimum of technicized efficiency? How else can they deal with the stark, staring background of ignorance among their students that prevents real education, in its traditional sense, from happening?

Of course, all the schools have managed to accomplish through this intellectual/academic self-castration is to render themselves utterly tedious and irrelevant. The students know, most of them only subconsciously, that they’re just biding their time in those spiritually sterile government institutions until they can get out and pursue their real needs and wants. Which brings me back to the Education Conversation blog. I recommend a relaxed browsing of its contents for some very stimulating thoughts about the dead end that state-run schools represent. The page of quotations is particularly valuable, as evident from the following three offerings, with which I’ll end this post:

That erroneous assumption is to the effect that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence, and so make them fit to discharge the duties of citizenship in an enlightened and independent manner. Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all, it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians, pedagogues and other such mountebanks, and that is its aim everywhere else.

– H.L. Mencken

I feel ashamed that so many of us cannot imagine a better way to do things than locking children up all day in cells instead of letting them grow up knowing their families, mingling with the world, assuming real obligations, striving to be independent and self-reliant and free.

- John Taylor Gatto

The millions of dollars which we devote every year to high-school education are, for the most part, money spent for the retarding of intelligence, the discouragement of efficiency, the stunting of character.

– Bernard Iddings Bell (1949)

U.S. accountant-in-chief: ‘We’ve never seen the likes of what’s coming’ - Financial Times, Jan. 29

An influential US official on Tuesday hit out at his country’s “addiction to debt,” warning that the federal budget was on an “imprudent and unsustainable path” due to ballooning healthcare costs.

David Walker, US comptroller general, warned a Senate budget committee hearing that while recent falls in the budget deficit were encouraging, the long-term fiscal outlook was grim.

….”If there is one thing that could bankrupt America, it is runaway health costs. We must not allow this to happen. This is our addiction to debt.”

Mr Walker’s comments echo a warning he made last year, in which he urged the US to “learn from the fall of Rome” and deal quickly with a “burning platform” of unsustainable policies, including fiscal deficits.

….Mr Walker conceded that current deficit and debt levels were “not a major problem.” But he said the difference this time was that the US would be unable to grow its way out of a long-term fiscal crunch. “We’ve never seen anything like what we are headed into.”

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U.S. in real economic trouble - Time, Jan. 24 (Feb. 4. print issue)

Say what you will about today’s global economy, it ain’t dull. In a cascade of worry on a single trading day, Jan. 21, Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index plunged 8.6%, Tokyo’s Nikkei 5.7% and Mumbai’s Sensex 12.9%. It was a worldwide mini-meltdown, and the Federal Reserve Board wasn’t about to let that go unanswered. Before the U.S. markets had even opened, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke — not a man known for dramatic gestures — slashed a key interest rate three-quarters of a percentage point. The surprise move arrested the rout, and the markets have since rallied, but investors are left to absorb an unavoidable truth: the U.S., still the world’s biggest market for exports, appears to be in real economic trouble.

….And so whatever happens in the markets this year, you probably will not feel as house-proud as you did two years ago. Someone you know will be looking for a new job. And gas won’t be getting much cheaper. The Fed can’t magically make all that go away. Neither can Congress or the White House. The best they can do is keep it from getting any worse than it has to be.

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Darker Days Ahead? Robert Reich warns a recession, or worse, may be coming - Newsweek, Jan. 23

Think the last few days have been bad for Wall Street and the rest of the world’s markets? Hang on, things are probably going to get worse, says Robert Reich, President Clinton’s former secretary of Labor and author of the recent book Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy and Everyday Life. According to Reich, who currently teaches public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, the United States might even be headed toward a depression.

[Excerpts from Newsweek's interview with Reich:]

The Fed is clearly becoming aware of the serious potential of an economic meltdown. The size of the [recent interest-rate] cut is larger than anyone expected because the Fed usually moves in [increments of] .25 or .50 percentage points.

….[Bernanke's decision to surprise the market] underscores the seriousness of the current economic problems

….The fact is that no one knows anything. Investors are flying blind. Even experienced Wall Street hands have no idea whether we’re near the bottom. We can expect even more violent swings in the stock market. The reason for all the uncertainty is that the big banks and lenders simply have no idea how many bad loans they’re holding. [During the housing bubble] credit markets evolved such complex ways of reselling and repackaging debt that even many top Wall Street professionals simply have no idea of the risks and costs they’re involved with.

….[S]everal managing directors on the Street, whose opinions I trust, have said to me that the chances for a depression are 20 percent. That matches my sense. In other words, it’s still low, but 20 percent is nonetheless far higher a probability than anyone should be comfortable with. Even absent a depression, it seems likely that the coming recession will be deeper than the last several.

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Jim Rogers: This recession will be really, really bad - Fortune, Jan. 31

You might expect Jim Rogers to be gloating a little bit. After all, the famed investor has been predicting a recession in the U.S. economy for months and shorting the shares of now-tanking Wall Street investment banks for even longer . . . . But when I reached him by phone in Singapore the other day there was little hint of celebration in his voice. Instead, he took a serious tone.

“I’m extremely worried,” he says. “I have been for a while, but I just see things getting much worse this time around than I expected.” To Rogers, a longtime Fed critic, Bernanke’s decision to ride to the market’s rescue with a 75-basis-point cut in the Fed’s benchmark rate only a week before its scheduled meeting is the latest sign that the central bank isn’t willing to provide the fiscal discipline that he thinks the economy desperately needs.

“Conceivably we could have just had recession, hard times, sliding dollar, inflation, etc., but I’m afraid it’s going to be much worse,” he says. “Bernanke is printing huge amounts of money. He’s out of control and the Fed is out of control. We are probably going to have one of the worst recessions we’ve had since the Second World War. It’s not a good scene.“

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Driving Towards Disaster - Newsweek, Jan. 28

If you want to see what hard times look like, come to Michigan. Last week’s manic markets fueled fears that America, or perhaps even the global economy, is tumbling into recession. But Michigan has been an economic wasteland for virtually the entire decade. Its fortunes riding shotgun with America’s ailing auto industry, Michigan has lost more than 400,000 manufacturing jobs since 1999. Its unemployment rate, 7.6 percent in December, has been at or near the highest in the nation since 2003. FOR SALE signs dot the landscape, even in the neighborhood of GM chairman Rick Wagoner. But there are few buyers: Foreclosures have quadrupled in the last two years, according to the Web site RealtyTrac.com. The Sunday Detroit Free Press recently printed a 121-page section listing thousands of homes facing foreclosure. And in the last year, 30,500 people have left Michigan, Census officials estimate.

“Michigan is the worst economy in the country, by far,” says economist Mark Zandi of Moody’s Economy.com. “But the financial pain Michigan is suffering now will become evident in many other parts of the country by this summer.”

Indeed, these days Michigan is looking more like the canary in the coalmine, than the isolated “one-state recession” native son Mitt Romney spoke of during his primary victory there . . . . [M]any of the factors that drove Detroit into the ditch — $100-a-barrel oil, the credit crisis, globalization — also are preying on the rest of the nation.

….”I worry about this every day,” says [financially distressed autoworker Sean] Gurskey, who has taken to plowing snow for extra money. “You wonder if you’ll have a job, if you can make your house payment. I don’t want to feel like I’ve failed my family.” It’s a feeling the rest of the country could become familiar with soon.

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Former Morgan Stanley chief strategist advising the rich to buy a farm and stock up on seed, food, clothing, medicine, etc. - Bloomberg.com, Jan. 29

Barton Biggs has some offbeat advice for the rich [in his new book Wealth, War, and Wisdom]: Insure yourself against war and disaster by buying a remote farm or ranch and stocking it with “seed, fertilizer, canned food, wine, medicine, clothes, etc.”

…. Biggs is no paranoid survivalist. He was chief global strategist at Morgan Stanley before leaving in 2003 to form hedge fund Traxis Partners. He doesn’t lock and load until the last page of this smart look at how World War II warped share prices, gutted wealth and remains a warning to investors. His message: Listen to markets, learn from history and prepare for the worst.

….The “wisdom” in the alliterative title refers to the spooky way markets can foreshadow the future. Biggs became fascinated with this phenomenon after discovering by chance that equity markets sensed major turning points in the war.

….Mankind endures “an episode of great wealth destruction” at least once every century, Biggs reminds us. So the wealthy should prepare to ride out a disaster, be it a tsunami, a market meltdown or Islamic terrorists with a dirty bomb.

….”Events move much faster than anyone expects,” he says, “and the barbarians are on top of you before you can escape.”

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New report: U.S. economy much weaker than expected - CNNMoney.com, Jan. 30

Economic growth nearly ground to a halt in the last three months of the year, according to a government report released Wednesday that showed the sharpest decline in growth since 2003.

The report raised fears of a recession and increased hopes that the Federal Reserve will make another significant interest rate cut.

Gross domestic product, the broadest measure of the nation’s economic activity, grew at an annual rate of 0.6%, adjusted for inflation, in the fourth quarter, according to the Commerce Department. That’s down from a final reading of 4.9% growth for the third quarter. Economists surveyed by Briefing.com had forecast GDP would slow to a 1.2%.

The anemic growth in the fourth quarter matched the slowest expansion in the economy in the last five years. The report comes amid rising concerns that the U.S. economy is falling into a recession, with some economists arguing the downturn started in the final month of 2007.

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Bubble-based U.S. economy is like a rampaging killer robot - Paul B. Farrell, MarketWatch, Jan. 28

What’s so scary is not that the subprime bubble was happening so fast on the heels of the dot-com bubble, not that the pundits, the public and the policy makers all appeared to be ignoring it. What’s really scary is that our best and brightest leaders in Washington, Wall Street and Corporate America wanted to create a bubble! They even threw jet fuel on this raging fire with cheap money, favorable taxes and minimal oversight.

Of course the Treasury and the Fed will never admit it, but they saw the housing bubble as a healthy economic necessity in their warped ideology! In their myopic minds, the housing bubble was the messiah “saving” America from a big, bad bear/recession.

Publicly they denied the bubble’s toxicity, dismissing it as “regional froth.” Privately, they conspired to create a massive new bubble driving America deep into debt.

This new ideology is extremely dangerous: It assumes the American economy can no longer be managed by politicians or Wall Street quants. The “new economy” has a life of its own, a “Terminator” from a dark future, an “I, Robot” from Asimov’s sci-fi world.

Yes, our economy has become a self-sustaining “bubble-blowing machine” inventing new bubbles at warp-speed even before the last is buried….

….There’s a higher truth: The best (not worst) strategy would be to let the “bubble-blowing machine” implode, live with the absence of a new bubble for a while, then quietly step back and reassess our unsustainable “growth-at-all-costs” economic policies that are secretly designed to benefit the self-interests of Wall Street’s insiders who profit by endlessly blowing bubble after bubble … after bubble … after ….

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Housing Downturn Squeezing Schools - The Washington Post, Jan. 30

The rapid cooling of the Washington area’s real estate market has hit school systems with force, abruptly ending years of plenty and compelling superintendents to ask their teachers, bus drivers and custodians to do more with less.

….Because school systems rely mainly on state and county government funding, and those governments draw most of their revenue from property taxes, a regional 7.7 percent drop in home values during the third quarter of last year has stopped the rapid growth of education budgets. And as can be seen with jittery stock markets across the world, it is unclear whether the storm is over.

For school administrators, the economic instability could not have happened at a worse time. The federal No Child Left Behind law, with its mandate that all students show proficiency in reading and math by 2014, threatens schools that fail to comply with restructuring and state takeover.

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U.S. homebuilders face growing bankruptcy threat - Financial Times, Jan. 29

The risk of bankruptcies among the big US homebuilders has risen sharply as the economy has weakened and an end to the housing slump remains distant.

Credit default swaps on homebuilders, which act as insurance on corporate debt, suggest some of the biggest are at risk of failing to keep up debt payments.

….”They are at the epicentre of what…is going to be a pretty bad recession,” Mr. [Byron] Douglass [an analyst at Credit Derivatives Research] said. “The first companies we are going to see defaults on are homebuilders.”

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Foreclosures up 75% in 2007 - CNNMoney.com, Jan. 29

The number of foreclosures soared in 2007, with 405,000 households losing their home, according to a report released Tuesday.

Total foreclosure filings soared 97% in December alone compared with December of 2006, according to RealtyTrac, an online seller of foreclosure properties. For the year, total filings — which include default notices, auction sale notices and bank repossessions — grew 75%.

….The rise nationally has confounded some community advocates. “Last December, we thought the national numbers were bad, and now they’re up almost 100 percent,” said John Taylor, CEO of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition.

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Home ownership in record plunge - CNNMoney.com, January 29

The housing and mortgage meltdown caused the biggest one-year drop in the rate of homeownership on record, according to government figures released Tuesday.

….The report also also showed a record 2.18 million homes vacant and available for sale in the fourth quarter, up from the 2.07 million in the third quarter and the 2.1 million a year earlier.

….The glut of vacant homes is a sign the evaporation of demand for home sales, which has hammered housing values. It also signals bad news for homebuilders, who were stuck with a record inventory of 195,000 completed homes at the end of December. A separate Census Bureau report Monday showed the biggest drop in new home sales on record in 2007.

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Recession puts Florida housing market in a death grip - The Dallas Morning News, Jan. 26

FORT MYERS, Fla. – Here, people don’t ask whether we are headed for a recession. They know a recession is here. For those who live here, the questions narrow down to two: How much worse will it get? How long will it last?

For some residents, everything hangs in the balance. And I mean everything.

A doctor friend once told me of an eerie feeling he got. Tending a dying patient, he’d look out the hospital room window for a moment. Outside, life went on without a pause. The automobile traffic never stopped; people were still in a hurry.

I feel the same way as I drive down U.S. 41, which connects Cape Coral, Fort Myers, Bonita Springs and Naples. The roads are still busy. The cars are still shiny. Massive new shopping centers greet the snowbirds, the early retirees setting up house and the usual vacationers escaping the cold of Minnesota, Michigan, Massachusetts and Maine.

But something is wrong in paradise.

….According to Fort Myers MLS Board figures, it would take 44.5 months – nearly four years – to work off the current inventory of homes for sale. That doesn’t count the discouraged sellers who have taken their houses off the market but still want to sell.

[Cardin comments: This column about the situation in Fort Myers, Florida gives a picture of what the current recession looks like in a relatively wealthy area of the U.S., one that was riding high on the bubble before it burst. For a sharply contrasting glimpse at what it looks like in a poorer area that got caught up in the bubble in its own way, read the next story below.]

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U.S. mortgage crisis creates ghost town - Breitbart.com, Jan. 27

The streets are empty. Trash rustles down the road past rusted barbecues, abandoned furniture, sagging homes and gardens turned to weed. This is Shaker Heights, a suburb of Cleveland and a town ravaged by the subprime mortgage crisis roiling the United States.

Faded “for sale” signs sit in front of deserted houses. The residents are gone, either in search of new jobs after the factories shut down, or in shame after being evicted for missing their mortgage payments.

….Laura Johnston, 50, says that her street — about 10 minutes away by car — was alive two years ago. Today, half the houses are abandoned.

“Folks could not afford their payments. They were asked to pay loans which doubled. They could not afford it, some lost their job. Lenders were greedy. They threw them out of their homes,” she told AFP.….

For county treasurer Jim Rokakis, the greed of the banks is to blame for this man-made disaster. “All you needed was a pulse to buy a house. Some loans were written with no money down, no proof of buyer’s incomes. They did not even check what people were saying. Most of those folks were jobless,” he said in an interview. “Shaker Heights was the perfect storm: poor folks, unemployed and a desire to get a piece of the American Dream.”

Note: This is part two of a three-part post. Also sees parts one and three.

A number of passages from the things I read last month stood out as particularly memorable. I wanted to share them and decided to do it outside the boundaries of the reading log proper, in order to avoid extending its already gargantuan length.

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From John Michael Greer, “Religion and Peak Oil: The Twilight of Fundamentalism,” The Archdruid Report, May 2, 2007

The contemporary predicament of industrial society, as I suggested in last week’s post, is among other things a religious crisis. The religion of progress, the defining faith of today’s industrial nations, staked its claim to the allegiance of the human spirit on the material benefits it offered its votaries. For the last three centuries, that offer was backed up with an astonishing expansion of wealth that left few lives in the western world unchanged, and gave the religion of progress a strength none of its rivals could easily match.

With the coming of peak oil, however, the religion of progress is headed for a pitfall of its own digging. As cheap abundant energy becomes a thing of the past, the material gifts the great god Progress has heretofore given his votaries will likely be in short supply from here on. As living standards slide, wages fall ever farther behind prices, and whatever technological advances still find their way to the market are restricted by cost to an ever smaller fraction of society, the religion of progress may have little to offer the majority of its current adherents.

Thus the likelihood of major shifts in the religious allegiance of the industrial world, it seems to me, is a factor that needs serious assessment in any attempt to make sense of the deindustrial future. As the aspect of human society that relates our lives to the realm of ultimate concerns, religion sets out the narratives that members of a society use to make sense of the world. As the religion of progress crumbles, its narratives will crumble in turn, and the new faith or faiths that seize its current place in the western imagination will likely have a dramatic impact on how we and our descendants respond to the challenges of a world after oil.

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From Graham Strouts, “Preparing for Powerdown,” Energy Bulletin, May 29, 2007

Just to sum up so far and show how we get to this point:

1) Our culture and economy is extraordinarily dependent on an ongoing supply of oil and natural gas;

2) This supply is drying up. Oil discovery peaked in 1964 and we are now using oil 3-4 times as fast as we are finding new fields;

3) This isn’t just an oil peak—it is an all-time energy peak for humanity. Renewables and even nuclear are fundamentally dependent on a functioning fossil-fuel base. With currently only 5% of global energy supplies coming from renewables and a lead-in time of probably decades needed to switch to any new fuel source, we can be sure that the growth economy is coming to an end. Resistance is futile! Any attempts to keep the unsustainable system going for a little bit longer will only make the crash worse when it comes.

Therefore we can conclude:

1) Whatever we do, we will have less energy in the future;

2) A mass public education campaign is urgently needed;

3) Solutions are to be found by creating small-scale, local communities;

4) Each community needs to work towards self-reliance in food, energy and essential trades and services.

We should be investing the still high-quantities of fossil energy that we have to invest in infrastructure that will require very low energy to run; that we need live more locally in every way possible; and that we need to re-invent the economy to be in line with natural systems that are inherently limited by available energy.

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From James Atlas, Book Wars (1990), chapter 7, “We Are What We Read”

Our culture is beset by an epidemic of collective amnesia. I know less than the generation of college students before me did, and the generation after me knows even less. We’ve suffered what novelist Cynthia Ozick, lamenting the decline of T.S. Eliot’s reputation, describes as a “cultural lobotomy.” Not only is the literary tradition Eliot represented gone from the scene, but the very idea of tradition has become obsolete. Who cares about “approaches to knowledge” in such a situation? If we as a society can’t agree that there is a body of knowledge to be mastered, much less what that body is, our very continuance as a literate culture will be in doubt. “If we do not provide adequate knowledge to fill those hungry minds and empty schoolroom hours, something else will,” warns [Roger] Shattuck. “That something else may well be deadening or corrupting—estrangement, anomie, idle vandalism, drugs, crime, suicide. These things cannot be said too often.”

Saving our schools isn’t just a matter of improving test scores or teaching children to read. There has to be a vision of what it is we wish them to know.

. . . . It’s pointless to sit around wishing that everyone would just get down to work and read the classics. Things have gone too far. The curricular revolution is entrenched; the students are militant; the class of educated citizens that once prided itself on a knowledge of European culture has dwindled to nothing. No one has described the situation with more elegiac fervor than Cynthia Ozick: “High art is dead. The passion for inheritance is dead. Tradition is equated with obscurantism. The wall that divided serious high culture from the popular arts is breached; anything can count as ‘text.’”

In the generation to come, there won’t even be an audience for this art.

. . . . America is foundering because Americans no longer get a proper education. In their attempts to redress injustice, the radicals of the 1960s unwittingly helped to perpetuate it; the assault on the curriculum has undermined the foundation of learning on which our society rests. The problem could be simply put: What we don’t know will hurt us. And it has.

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From Fritjof Capra, Uncommon Wisdom (1988), chapter 6, “Alternative Futures”

The key point of [Hazel Henderson’s] critique is the striking inability of most economists to adopt an ecological perspective. . . . All goods and services are reduced to their monetary values and the social and environmental costs generated by all economic activity are ignored. They are ‘external variables’ that do not fit into the economists’ theoretical models. Corporate economists, Henderson points out, not only treat the air, water, and various reservoirs of the ecosystem as free commodities, but also the delicate web of social relations, which is severely affected by continuing economic expansion. Private profits are made increasingly at public cost in the deterioration of the natural environment and the general quality of life. ‘They tell us about the sparkling dishes and clothes,’ she observes with wry humor, ‘but they forget to mention the loss of those sparkling rivers and lakes.”

To provide economics with a sound ecological basis, Henderson insists, economists will need to revise their basic concepts in a drastic ways. . . . The gross national product, for example, which is supposed to measure a nation’s wealth, is determined by adding up indiscriminately all economic activities associated with monetary values, while all non-monetary aspects of the economy are ignored. Social costs, like those of accidents, litigation, and health care, are added as positive contributions to the GNP, rather than being subtracted. Henderson quotes Ralph Nader’s incisive comment, ‘Every time there is an automobile accident the GNP goes up,’ and she speculates that those social costs may be the only fraction of the GNP that is still growing.

. . . . Henderson also shows with numerous examples how the concepts of efficiency and productivity have been similarly distorted. ‘Efficiency for whom?’ she asks with characteristic breadth of vision. When corporate economists talk about efficiency, do they refer to the level of the individual, the corporation, the society, or the ecosystem?

. . . . Contemporary economists, in a misguided attempt to provide their discipline with scientific rigor, have consistently avoided acknowledging the value system on which their models are based. In doing so, Henderson points out, they tacitly accept the grossly imbalanced set of values which dominates our culture and is embodied in our social institutions. ‘Economics,” she contents, ‘has enthroned some of our most unattractive pre-dispositions: material acquisitiveness, competition, gluttony, pride, selfishness, shortsightedness, and just plain greed.’

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From James Howard Kunstler, “The CNU,” Clusterfuck Nation, May 21, 2007

The final blowout of cheap oil is now ending, and the suburban juggernaut is entering its death throes. . . . There will be no more suburban subdivisions (or the accessories and furnishings of them—the strip malls, Big Box pods, and fried-food out-parcels).

. . . . .We will be inhabiting the terrain differently from now on. Whatever intact farmland remains will have to be reserved for feeding ourselves, and the “countryside” that has been regarded as having only scenic or recreational value for so many decades, will have to be both productive and carefully tended by human hands. Our big cities will certainly shrink, contract, and the fortunate ones will redevelop and re-densify at their old cores and around their waterfronts. The part of Philadelphia that we were in last weekend may be about as big as a sustainable city can get—minus the skyscrapers, which, alas, will be obsolete.

The demographic shift to come will be a shocking reversal of what has been going on since the start of the industrial revolution. The small towns and small cities of America—the places that have moldered in desolation and squalor for decades—will be coming back to life, surrounded by an agricultural landscape shaped by human attention.

* * * * *

From Carolyn Baker, “The Spirituality of Collapse,” Speaking Truth to Power, May 8, 2007

For most Americans, heads anchored firmly in the sand, shrugging off anything they are now hearing about “Peak Oil,” still driving their gas-gulping SUVs, reveling in suburban sprawl, and gullibly counting on their pensions and 401Ks to be there when they need them, the notion of civilization’s collapse is still largely relegated to the lunatic fringe. Whatever the problem, they cluelessly argue, technology will find a solution. But millions of those same individuals are far deeper in debt than they were one year ago, and during that year, they have seen the prices of gas, food, and virtually everything else dramatically increase. Some of those Americans have in the past year had to face the reality that they are part of the rapidly-vanishing middle class who are only one paycheck or one catastrophic illness away from financial oblivion—who between mortgage, car payments, monthly bills, childcare, medical expenses, gas prices, and doubling monthly credit card bills, now realize that not only will they not be able to pay for their kids’ college education but that every new day necessitates walking more precariously over an economic tightrope across a gaping precipice with a thousand-foot drop. Those folks know in their bones the reality of collapse—they feel it, smell it, taste it, but may not yet be able to allow the words to pass from their lips. It’s still too horrifying to fully contemplate.

For both groups of Americans, collapse is very bad news. It will mean the end of lifestyles they cannot imagine living without. They have become their lifestyle, and in its absence, they believe they will have no identity—that literally, they will cease to exist. For these folks, collapse will be extremely painful, and worse. Since they have isolated themselves in their hermetically-sealed suburban “dormitories,” they are not likely to survive unless they are willing to radically alter their behavior, and by the time they are, if they are, it may be far too late to do so.

Unquestionably, collapse will be brutal and agonizing. It is, in fact, the cessation of life based on fossil fuels, weather and climate as we have known them, and the money system to which we have become accustomed. It will be physically, economically, emotionally, and spiritually excruciating. It will test human beings, particularly those individuals who are not members of the ruling elite but who enjoy privileged, comfortable lifestyles devoid of sacrifice and inconvenience, beyond anything they could imagine in their worst nightmares. Some will endure; others will perish; in fact, some experts speculate that at least one-third of humans on planet Earth will not survive. Whether collapse occurs slowly or quickly, it will be torturous.

. . . . Paradoxically, collapse may bring meaning and purpose to our lives which might otherwise have eluded us. In our linear, progress-based existence, we rarely contemplate words like “purpose.” With civilization’s collapse, we may be forced to evaluate daily, perhaps moment to moment, why we are here, if we want to remain here, if life is worth living, if there is something greater than ourselves for which we are willing to remain alive and to which we choose to contribute energy. These decisions probably will not be made in the cozy comfort of our homes, but in the streets, the fields, the deserts, the forests, in the eerie echoing of our voices throughout abandoned suburbs, and beside forgotten rivers and trails. Purpose will rapidly cease being about what we can accomplish and will increasingly become more about who we are. In a collapsing world, the so-called “purpose-driven life” will no longer exist. Humans will be “driven” by only one issue: the determination to survive and assist loved ones in surviving. From that quest for survival will emerge authentic purpose, which will undoubtedly not resemble anything we can imagine today.

. . . . Spiritually, we can now begin preparing for the collapse of civilization as we have known it by opening ourselves each day to the “lesser collapses” of civilization that we see around us, such as the loss of a viable, uncorrupted electoral process, the demise of centralized systems and corporations that no one ever thought would go bankrupt, the decay of infrastructure, and the deterioration of institutions such as education, religion, health care, and the legal system. Human beings have had several thousand years to create functional societies, and in many cases, they have. Those civilizations have also collapsed because all civilizations ultimately do. The United States has had 231 years to fashion a sustainable nation. With the death of Abraham Lincoln at the end of the Civil War, corporations and centralized systems triumphed in controlling every aspect of American life, and they have been doing so until the present moment. Thus, not surprisingly, in the 1970s when corporate America knew very well that U.S. oil production had peaked and that within three decades, the nation and the world would be confronting a catastrophic energy crisis, it did absolutely nothing, choosing rather to wallow in the profits of hydrocarbon energy and suppress alternative technology rather than assist the nation in building lifeboats.

For millennia, many indigenous people have described the demise of civilization we are now witnessing as a purification process—a time of rebirth and transformation. Their ancient wisdom challenges us to face with equanimity the collapse that is in process; that is, to hold as much as humanly possible in our hearts and minds, the reality of the pain the collapse will entail, alongside the unimaginable opportunities it offers. As Pema Chödrön would say, “Get to know collapse well.”

Last November when I was at the World Fantasy Convention in Austin, I attended a panel discussion about the current state of the horror genre. One of the panelists was anthologist and editor Stephen Jones, who needs no introduction to anybody who’s paid serious attention to horror fiction for the past twenty years or so. As the longtime editor of one of the industry-standard annual anthologies, The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror — as well as literally dozens of additional books — Steve has helped both to gauge and to establish horror fiction’s constantly shifting identity. His stature is only enhanced by the string of high-level credits he’s amassed over the years as a publicist and consultant for various prominent horror films (e.g., Hellraiser, Nightbreed).

Given all this, I was thrilled when my boldness in introducing myself to him after the panel led, via a series of post-convention emails, to his agreeing to be interviewed by me. The interview stretched over a long series of emails spanning several months and, I’m pleased to say, will be appearing in a future issue of Cemetery Dance magazine (issue #59, which I believe may be published late in 2007). I’m also pleased to say that Steve was quite happy with the way the interview turned out, and in fact said he felt it was one of the best he’d ever done.

What led me to crave an interview with him was the things he said during that WFC panel discussion about the precipitous decline of reading and literacy in contemporary society. Readers of The Teeming Brain will know that this parallels a concern I’ve been pursuing for quite some time. But I was previously unaware that Stephen Jones shares many of my thoughts. It goes without saying that his status in modern publishing lends an extra weight to his views on such matters.

Below is a snippet from my interview/conversation with him. If you find it interesting, then I urge you to keep an eye out for Cemetery Dance #59 later this year.

* * * * *

MC: I was absolutely riveted at WFC when I heard you talk about the declining levels of readership across the board in Britain and America, and about the way this is affecting the writing and publishing industry. Then just a week or two after I returned from the convention, I read your year’s-end summary in the new edition of The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror and was again riveted when I saw you take up the same theme. You even speculated there that given current trends, the profession of “writer” might one day, in a logically foreseeable future, become a quaint historical curiosity along the lines of other defunct professions like the lamplighters in gaslit cities of a bygone era. Obviously, this is an issue that’s of great concern to you, and it’s a concern that’s shared by many other people as well. Would you please share your thoughts about these matters? Maybe restate what you said in your year’s-end summary? Or even just quote yourself wholesale if you want, since your words deserve the largest possible audience.

SJ: It’s simple, really. You only have to do the math. Most kids are leaving school sub-literate these days, whatever the official figures claim. Exams are being dumbed down. The days when I left school with a solid grounding in Shakespeare, Dickens, Jane Austin and Geoffrey Chaucer are, apparently, long gone. How many kids read Mark Twain anymore, let alone L. Frank Baum?

Almost nobody reads these days. There are too many other distractions: cell phones, Playstations, reality TV. It’s exactly what Aldous Huxley predicted in Brave New World: it’s all a form of “soma” to keep the masses happy so they don’t complain while the troops are sent off to fight pointless wars—which seem to be planned like video games themselves—crime rates rocket out of control, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, animals are driven to extinction and the planet is gradually destroyed by a couldn’t-care-less mankind.

In the old days, we used to get our information from words. For instance, we would read a book about global warming and understand its implications. Or, at the very least, we would look at an article in the newspaper that would present the salient facts, which we could think about and maybe discuss with others. Nowadays, in Britain, at least, newspapers have become part of the “dumbing down” process. Here we now have “lite” newspapers that are more like MTV newsbites for people who don’t want to read about anything in-depth. And what they read about is the latest gossip surrounding such empty vessels as Paris, Britney, Lindsay or Angelina. They aren’t actually learning anything—except how not to behave in public and what the latest fashion accessory is. Television is no better, with most major news programmes now presented as if they were a coffee afternoon.

Now apply all that to fiction. With successive generations leaving school unable or unwilling to read, progressively fewer people are buying books—except, of course, much-needed self-help volumes and witless biographies about people who have barely lived a life yet. That attrition applies to all books. Now remember that horror is just a very, very small part of the overall industry, so the percentage of people who actually pick up a horror title—and, God help us, anthologies account for an even smaller percentage of that figure—is probably miniscule compared to worldwide sales. To make matters worse, figures seem to indicate that publishers on both sides of the Atlantic are publishing more titles in a vain attempt to capture that elusive reading public. So now you have the publishers dumbing down their books for a dumbed-down readership. Add to that the fact that corporate takeovers have consolidated the number of major publishers into a handful of mega-corporations around the world, which means that choice is ever more limited, and the book chains will only discount those titles that are pre-ordained to be “bestsellers.” And you can see how it’s all a recipe for a disaster waiting to happen.

The publishing industry simply cannot sustain its current level of output forever. More books and less readers means that, eventually, the industry will implode. They can’t keep throwing money at “celebrity” biographies or facile how-to books in the hope that one title may become a best seller. In the end, the whole pack of cards will come tumbling down and that’s when the cutbacks will begin. And guess where those cuts will happen first? That’s right, not with the bloated volumes of disposable garbage that they have over-hyped and over-paid for, but with the genre titles, the new writers, the collections and anthologies. All those areas that they perceive to be losing money on because they’ve never supported them as they should have.

It’s a depressing scenario, but more than likely to happen at the moment. Of course, the small presses can and will pick up some of the slack but, let’s face it, most writers and especially anthology editors can’t survive on the kind of money paid by the smaller publishers. And you can forget print-on-demand—there’s no money in that at all. So I can foresee a time when the writing of genre fiction will have reverted to a “gentlemanly” hobby, much as it was in the 19th century, to be indulged in only by the independently wealthy or a dedicated few who can squeeze it in after work or while bringing up a family.

Of course, it could be worse. You could be a poet!

For most of this week I’ll be tied up with professional development training at my job. To tide over my high school classes during the interim (and to help prevent a nervous breakdown on the part of the substitute teacher), I came up with an assignment that should take awhile for my students to complete. Hell, it took me a couple of hours just to type up the description for them, which printed out at nine single-spaced pages. So I know it should take them awhile to read it, let alone respond to it.

And that is, in fact, the nature of the assignment. They’re supposed to read a loooong letter from me, and then respond to it in writing. For this week’s Teeming Brain post, I thought I could do no better than to share this letter. Maybe it’ll provide a window into what life is like in my classroom.

Or maybe it’ll just prove how ill-suited I am for this job.

Either way, I hope you find something interesting in it.

* * * * *

TO: All students in my high school classes

FROM: Matt Cardin

DATE: May 7, 2007

RE: You and me

Dear everybody,

As I told you last week, I’m going to be involved in some required professional development training this Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, so I thought I’d leave you something to do while I’m away. I mentioned this assignment to you last week as well.

To get the grading part out of the way right up front: the assignment is worth 100 points. These are test points. You will get all of them simply for doing what I ask you to do. That will necessarily involving your reading this letter from me to you. I’m talking about every last word of it. If you stop reading it before you’ve finished it and start asking someone else, “What are we supposed to be doing?” then you’re just proving a point that I make later in the letter. Please don’t do that.

As many of you, or most of you, or maybe all of you, already know, I’ve been fairly frustrated with some of my classes this year. Maybe you’re a student in one of those classes, or maybe you’re not. In any case, you know that I’ve been variously annoyed and frustrated and angered and depressed at the way much of this school year has gone. A couple of my classes have been more difficult and unruly in their behavior than anything I’ve previously encountered as a teacher. You’ve seen how I’ve handled it. I’ve complained a bit, withdrawn a bit, shut down a bit, shrugged my shoulders, overlooked various things I probably shouldn’t have, and in general have just rolled with the punches. We’ve still had fun together. That’s simply the way I do things. Ask anybody who’s had me as a teacher in the past, and they’ll confirm it.

I’m happy that we’ve all reached a point where we’re now getting along personally here at the imminent end of the school year. I honestly like every one of you on a personal level. I hope you like me in return. Somehow I achieved the status of being a “cool” teacher back when I first started working here in 2001, and I sense that this reputation has survived the current school term. I guess this is good. I’m certainly not complaining.

But I do fear that I haven’t exactly done many of you a service by being so compliant and unassertive these past many months. I don’t think you’ve gained as much as you otherwise might have from your time in my class if I had forced the issue by becoming more authoritarian, clamping down on immature and rude behavior, and generally running things with greater strictness. Maybe I’m too hung up on the idea that getting along with you personally is more important than accomplishing the academic work that could be accomplished under conditions of stricter discipline. The thing is, I know there’s a wide variety of opinions and inclinations among you when it comes to English class. Some of you like to read and write. Others of you don’t. Some of you are naturally good at it and drawn to it. Others of you aren’t. Personally, I think the current American high school system is unrealistic and unfortunate in the way it forces teens to take classes they don’t want in subjects they don’t like. So I have a hard time convincing myself to force the issue when some of you express a complete disinterest in my class.

On the other hand, maybe I should force the issue. After all, it’s hardly the case that you should never be expected or required to do things you don’t want to do. It’s just part of life to do some things simply because you have to do them. In the issue at hand, maybe you really would benefit from a more authoritarian approach on my part. I just don’t know.

The controversy itself leads into a wider question that I’ve been preoccupied with lately, namely, the question of who and what I should be as a teacher. And my mentioning this begins to lead into the part of this letter where you’ll find out what task I’m wanting you to complete in order to earn your 100 points. But first, you’ll have to read some more.

As we near the end of this school year, I feel very much the way a college professor named Mark Edmundson described in an essay he wrote entitled “On the uses of a liberal education: as lite entertainment for bored college students.” It was published in 1997 in a hugely influential magazine that you’ve probably never heard of called Harper’s, and it raised a firestorm of controversy across America because of what Edmundson said about the students and the administrators on America’s college campuses. In a nutshell, he said the students are eaten up with an attitude called “consumerism,” that is, the idea that the whole point of life is for people to buy and use up things they enjoy. He said America’s college students have absorbed this attitude from the social environment around them, which has been defined from their earliest childhood by television, video games, advertising, shopping, and so on. And he said this attitude has infected their view of education, so that they graduate from high school thinking that a college education is just something else to buy, and since they are paying for it, it’s the job of the colleges to give them what they want. As for the administrators at these colleges, Edmundson said they have given in far too quickly to this insane demand that the modern generation of students is making, mostly unconsciously, on America’s higher education system, and that as a result our colleges and universities are in awful shape, since they’re awarding more and more degrees to people who are not truly educated, people whose college classes have been watered down and reshaped to make them less difficult and more entertaining.

The part that I identify with the most is the part where Edmundson describes his feelings about the way his students view him. In most colleges it’s standard for students to fill out an anonymous evaluation form at the end of every class they take. This form represents their chance to rate the jobs their teachers have done. In his article Edmundson describes his feelings upon reading the comments his students left at the end of a semester course he taught about the writings of Sigmund Freud. As usual, the comments were extremely positive. His students loved him because of his humor, his tolerance, his references to movies and other pop culture items, and more. In all of these things, he reminds me of me. As you know, I joke all the time in class with you. We horse around a lot. I like many of the same movies and a lot of the same music that you like, and I talk about these with you. I’m casual and tolerant about pretty much everything. And for the most part I feel like we get along well because of it.

But Edmundson, instead of feeling good about his students’ nice words, said he was conflicted over their collective response to his class. He said he felt like the only thing they had gotten from him was the jokes, the casualness, and the easy attitude he brought to the subject he taught, when in fact what he had wanted was for them to be deeply affected by what he was teaching. So he hated the image of himself that emerged from his students’ comments on those evaluation forms.

I’ll let him speak for himself, since he does it better than I can. I ask that you read the whole quoted passage below very carefully. FYI, for those of you who don’t know it, the indented paragraphs contain Edmundson’s words. This type of indentation is a standard format to indicate extended quotations from somebody else’s writing. When it goes away and the left margin returns to normal, that’ll mean Edmundson’s words are over and it’s me talking to you again.

Here’s what Edmundson said:

I have to admit that I do not much like the image of myself that emerges from these forms, the image of knowledgeable, humorous detachment and bland tolerance. I do not like the forms themselves, with their number ratings, reminiscent of the sheets circulated after the TV pilot has just played to its sample audience in Burbank. Most of all I dislike the attitude of calm consumer expertise that pervades the responses. I’m disturbed by the serene belief that my function—and, more important, Freud’s, or Shakespeare’s, or Blake’s—is to divert, entertain, and interest. Observes one respondent, not at all unrepresentative: “Edmundson has done a fantastic job of presenting this difficult, important & controversial material in an enjoyable and approachable way.”

Thanks but no thanks. I don’t teach to amuse, to divert, or even, for that matter, to be merely interesting. When someone says she “enjoyed” the course—and that word crops up again and again in my evaluations—somewhere at the edge of my immediate complacency I feel encroaching self-dislike. That is not at all what I had in mind. The off-the-wall questions and the sidebar jokes are meant as lead-ins to stronger stuff—in the case of the Freud course, to a complexly tragic view of life. But the affability and the one-liners often seem to be all that land with the students; their journals and evaluations leave me little doubt.

I want some of them to say that they’ve been changed by the course. I want them to measure themselves against what they’ve read. Why are my students describing Freud’s dangerous and disturbing ideas as being interesting and enjoyable to contemplate? And why am I coming across as an urbane, mildly ironic, endlessly affable guide to this intellectual territory, operating without intensity, generous, funny, and loose?

Because that’s what works. On evaluation day, I reap the rewards of my partial compliance with the culture of my students and, too, with the culture of the university as it now operates.

Okay, this is me, Cardin, speaking to you again. If you read and understood what Edmundson was saying, then you’ll understand a significant part of how I feel about my performance as a teacher this year. And every year.

So what is all this leading up to? What’s the 100-point thing you’re supposed to do for me?

In answer, I give you—(drum roll)—something else to read! It’s on the next page. You just may recognize the author. The piece is an editorial that was published in the Springfield newspaper, the News-Leader, a little over two months ago. It talks about me and it talks about you. And I don’t just mean that metaphorically; I mean it really talks about me and you. Turn the page and you’ll understand. And after that, I’ll tell you what I want you to do to earn your 100 points.

[Note to Teeming Brain readers: At this point in my letter, I provided a photocopy of the editorial I wrote back in February for inclusion in The News-Leader, the large daily paper based in Springfield, Missouri. The title the editor gave it is "Media obsession with trivial hurts our nation." I've mentioned it previously here at my blog.]

Okay, so now you know a little bit about what I think of my job, and my students, and the entertainment culture that virtually saturates the very air we breathe. I hope you understood as you read the editorial that I wasn’t attacking any of my students here at this school, but was instead attacking the culture you’re growing up in. I view you mainly as a symptom of that culture, not a cause. And I myself suffer from the very same disease that I diagnose in you.

Again, what does this all mean? What are you supposed to do to earn your 100 points? It’s simply this: You’re supposed to write me a letter in which you respond to that editorial, and also to everything I’ve said in this letter to you, and tell me what you think and how you feel about it all. Tell me whether you agree or disagree with the point I made in my editorial. Tell me whether you agree or disagree that you and your fellow teens today are being zombified by television, movies, video games, popular music, and an all-pervasive attitude of consumerism. Tell me whether you agree or disagree with Mark Edmundson about the attitude and outlook that he thinks young people have today. Tell me whether you think I’ve done you a disservice by running your class so casually this year. Have I short-changed you? If you say no, then it must mean you think you’ve learned some valuable things in here. Tell me what they are. Or if you say yes, then please explain to me what you wanted to learn in here that you didn’t.

While you’re at it, if you want to talk about anything else that comes to mind as you think about these matters and write your letter, please write it down, because I’ll be more than happy to read it. I’ve gotten really personal with you in these pages by sharing some of my private thoughts. I ask you to do the same with me, in your letter, to whatever degree you feel comfortable doing so. Nobody will read what you write except for me. And I’ll give you a hundred points for your efforts. I want you to start your letter with either “Dear Mr. Cardin” or “Dear MC” (I’d really prefer the second one) and end it by signing your name. I’d prefer the whole thing to be typewritten. That’s why the substitute teacher is taking you to the computer lab. But you can handwrite it if you really want to, as long as your writing is legible.

Be advised that a mere few sentences, or even a mere few paragraphs, simply won’t do. I’m talking about a substantial letter that clearly shows evidence of your careful thought and honest emotion. Write it as well as you can, in terms of both what it says and how eloquently it says it. If you wonder just how long it should be or how in-depth it should go, take my own letter here as an example.

In the interest of fostering further personal-ness between us, I thought I’d finish this letter by reprinting something from my blog, The Teeming Brain. I started the blog last year in June, and it’s become quite popular in the months since then. Many of you know that I’m a published writer. There’s a crowd of people who are interested in me and my creative works. This can be seen in the fact that the blog is currently averaging about 3100 hits per month. My first post last year was a kind of “About Me” entry that was intended to give readers an indication of who I am. It’s reprinted for you below. Maybe reading it will give you a better idea of what’s really important to me, and why I struggle so much with this teaching gig.

And hey, that gives me another idea for the letter you’re supposed to write me: At the end of it, after your signature, please include a section titled “About [your name.]” Mine, for instance, would be titled “About Matt Cardin.” I want you to write up a miniature statement of who you are. You can say whatever you want in it, as long as it’s honest. Consider the “About me” section that’s found on MySpace pages as a good example of what I’m looking for. I’d really love for you to use this part of your letter to tell me about your view of life in general, as in, what type of things you think are important and valuable, what you think about the purpose or “meaning” of life, how you’ve come to believe these things, and so on. You’ll see that I’ve said a little about this kind of thing in my own self-description below. But whether or not you talk about such matters in your own “About Me” description is entirely up to you.

So, to repeat, you need to write two things:

1) A letter to me in which you respond to my letter and editorial

2) An “About Me” section at the end of the letter, after your signature

The assignment is worth 100 points. It needs to be full of depth and detail. It’s not extra credit. You’ll get a zero if you don’t do it. It’s all-or-nothing—100 points or 0 points. You’ll get all of them as long as you do what I’m telling you to do. The assignment will be due at the end of the hour on Wednesday, May 9^th, so plan and pace yourself accordingly.

Okay, that’s it. Get to work.

[Signed]Matt Cardin

[I finished by pasting in the text of my inaugural post to this blog from last June 13, 2006 titled "Welcome to The Teeming Brain."]

It’s time for another reading log. I haven’t counted the number of items on this one, but it seems longer than the previous reading logs I’ve posted. That may have something to do with the fact that I’ve been reading for a specific project. Among the usual items relating to peak oil, the current economic situation, etc., you’ll see lots of items on the list below that relate to the question of technology’s role in education. A glance at my post from April 23 titled “School Meets the Matrix” will explain why.

The increased length of the list may also have something to do with the fact that I’ve taken to including more and more key snippets and excerpts from the items on the list of articles and essays. This is mostly for my own satisfaction and convenience, so that I can look back over my reading lists and be reminded of the overall gist of their contents.

Interestingly enough, I was freed up, as it were, to pursue the technology-and-education tangent by the unfortunate conflagration mentioned in my previous post. All of this work-related reading (which has also turned into a passion in itself) occurred at the expense of my ability to progress through the queue of Holy Horrors submissions. It’s always something, I guess. For now, it’s back to work on the anthology, which of course provides many peculiar pleasures in its own right.

* * * * *

BOOKS (and reports)

• W. Norton Grub and Marvin Lazerson, The Education Gospel: The Economic Power of Schooling (2004)—Preface, introduction, ch. 1
• Kim Paffenroth, Gospel of the Living Dead—Chs. 3, 4, 5, conclusion, notes, bibliography (finished)
• William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Julius Caesar—Acts II, III, IV
• Tech Tonic: Towards a New Literacy of Technology (2004) [Report from the Alliance for Childhood]—Introduction, chs. 1, 2, 3
• Toward a New Golden Age in American Education: How the Internet, the Law and Today’s Students are Revolutionizing Expectations, 2004 [The 2004 National Education Technology Plan from the U.S. Department of Education]
• Visions 2020.2: Student Views on Transforming Education and Training through Advanced Technologies, August 2005 [Report from U.S. Department of Commerce, U.S. Department of Education, and NetDay to supplement 2002 report Visions 2020: Transforming Education and Training through Advanced Technologies]

SHORT FICTION

• Fiction submissions for Holy Horrors (fewer than usual, due to unforeseen circumstances)

ARTICLES, ESSAYS, etc.

• Aijaz Ahmad, “Imperial Sunset?” MRZine (online version of Monthly Review), April 18, 2007 [“The ‘decline of U.S. hegemony’ has been a favorite theme among many circles of the left since the early 1970s. . . . Is that ‘decline’ now becoming a real ‘sunset’?”]
• Bart Anderson, “Mini-review: Energy Crossroads, PO documentary,” Energy Bulletin, April 24, 2007 [“How do you get your older Midwest relatives to swallow the Red Pill and understand why you're obsessed with peak oil? Or your scientific and engineering friends who wrinkle their noses at the mention of eco-villages and collapse? Tiroir A Films has just released a DVD for when End of Suburbia just won't do.”]
• Brett Arends, “All the World’s a Bubble,” TheStreet.com, April 27, 2007 [“Legendary value investor Jeremy Grantham. . . says we are now seeing the first worldwide bubble in history covering all asset classes. . . . ‘The bursting of [this] bubble will be across all countries and all assets, with the probable exception of high-grade bonds,’ Grantham warned. ‘Since no similar global event has occurred before, the stresses to the system are likely to be unexpected.’”]
• Douglas Brinkley, “Vonnegut’s Apocalypse,” Rolling Stone Volume 1, Issue 1007 (August 24, 2006) [“He survived being captured by the Nazis and the suicide of his mother to write some of the funniest, darkest novels of our time, but it took George W. Bush to break him.”]
• Joe Carroll, “Gasoline at $4 Coming to a Pump Near You, Unfazed by Rising Tab,” Bloomberg.com, April 23, 2007
• Michael T. Charles, “Where are we going as we leave no child behind? La Technique and Postman, Papert, and Palmer – Part One,” Interface: The Journal for Education, Community, and Values Volume 4, Issue 1 (February 2004)
• Michael T. Charles, “Where are we going as we leave no child behind? La Technique and Postman, Papert, and Palmer – Part Two,” Interface: The Journal for Education, Community, and Values Volume 4, Issue 3 (April-May 2004)
• “Computers in Education – Introduction,” eNotes, no date given
• Rick Crawford, “Techno Prisoners,” Adbusters #11 (Summer 1994)
• Martin Crutsinger, “Factory Jobs: 3 Million Lost Since 2000,” Yahoo! Finance, April 20, 2007 [“Those lost manufacturing jobs are fueling an intense debate over globalization -- the increasing connection of the United States and other economies.”]
• Hugh Mercer Curtler, “A plea for humanistic education,” Modern Age, Fall 2006
• Erik Curren, “Stay in the City and Don’t Buy Guns or Gold,” Conserve Magazine, April 1, 2007 [“Intentional community pioneer Albert Bates talks about surviving peak oil.”]
• Ellen R. Delisio, “Author Says Technology Brings False Promises to Schools,” Education World, March 18, 2004 [Interview with Todd Oppenheimer, author of The Flickering Mind: The False Promise of Technology in the Classroom and How Learning Can Be Saved (2003)]
• “The Distractions of Imagery,” MANAS Volume XXXIX, No. 22 (May 28, 1986) [Review of Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985)]
• “An Educational Ideal,” MANAS Volume VI, No. 28 (July 15, 1953) [“The institutional practice of education. . . may be in direct opposition to the theory of education which insists that education must be wanted.”]
• Larry Elliot, “When the lights go out,” The Guardian, April 14, 2007 [Review and comparison of David Strahan’s The Last Oil Shock and Duncan Clarke’s The Battle for the Barrels (both 2007). “There's not a lot of love lost between the two camps. Strahan says Clarke and, indeed, the whole of the mainstream global oil industry is in class-one denial about the looming energy crisis. Clarke's view is that the peak oilers are using a flawed methodology to come up with unfounded and alarmist conclusions. There's clearly a market out there for both books: an internet search for ‘peak oil’ comes up with more than six million hits.”]
• Randall K. Engle, “The Neo Sophists: Intellectual Integrity in the Information Age,” First Monday Volume 6, Number 8 (August 2001)
• Joe Essid, “‘Cobwebs in the Sky’: Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi as Hypertext,” Kairos 6.2 (Fall 2001)
• Elizabeth Farnsworth, moderator, “Keyboard Debate,” PBS Online NewsHour, December 27, 1995 [Two perspectives on technology in the classroom from Damon Moore and Clifford Stoll]
• “The Failure of Moralists,” MANAS XXXIV, No. 19 (May 13, 1981) [“Writers with underlying faith in human beings do not preach. They do not tell other people what to do. They do not, in the ordinary sense, try to persuade.”]
• “Gasoline prices: up, and rising,” CNNMoney.com, April 22, 2007
• Hannah Goff, “Too much technology in the classroom?” BBC News, January 15, 2007
• Peter Gow, “Technology and the Culture of Learning: How Our Digital Tools Change the Nature of School,” Independent School Magazine, Summer 2004
• John Michael Greer—Weekly blog posts at The Archdruid Report
• Krishna Guha, “Stark warning about rising Medicare costs,” FT.com [Financial Times], April 24, 2007 [“The warning, required by law, came as new projections showed the share of Medicare costs paid out of general taxation would exceed 45 per cent by 2013. More realistic assumptions suggest this threshold could be breached as early as 2010. . . . Monday’s projections show Medicare’s hospital insurance trust fund will be exhausted in 2019. The trustees project that Medicare costs will rise from 3.1 per cent of gross domestic product last year to more than 11 per cent of GDP in 75 years.”
• James Harkin, “Death in cyurbia,” The Guardian, April 16, 2007 [“Our celebration of the virtual world must be balanced by research into its psychological effects.”]
• Eugene W. Hickok, “Higher Education Needs Reform, Too,” The Chronicle of Higher Education Volume 52, Issue 27 (March 10, 2006)
• David R. Holmes, “The Computer Beast at the Schoolhouse Door,” Independent School Magazine Spring 1998
• Rob Hopkins, “A Film Review: Little Miss Sunshine,” Transition Culture, April 16, 2007 [“For me, how this overlaps with energy descent is that once the cheap oil that has allowed our social relationships and community bonds to fracture starts to dwindle, we will need to start learning how to communicate again, we will come home to each other.”]
• Susan Jacoby, “Blind Faith: Americans believe in religion – but know little about it,” The Washington Post, March 4, 2007 [review of Stephen Prothero’s Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know – and Doesn’t (2007)]
• James Howard Kunstler—Weekly blog posts at Clusterfuck Nation
• Bernard Lagan, “Threat to food crops as Australia prepares to turn off farmers’ water,” The Times, April 20, 2007 [“John Howard said that an expert panel had advised the Government that the worst drought in the nation’s history left it no choice but to turn off irrigation systems in the agricultural heartland of the Murray-Darling basin in the east.”
• Marvin Lazerson, “The Education Gospel: Loud Music, the Lone Ranger, Playing Within Your Game, and It’s Hard to Learn When You’re Hungry,” Almanac Vol. 52, No. 25 (March 14, 2006)
• Pamela Mang, “What Is Education For?” Independent School Magazine, Spring 2005 [Essay about the “need for education to take center stage in the race for a sustainable future”]
• Marc Marenco, “Glowing Glass Islands, Invisible Musicians and the Brave New World: Accommodation and Critique in the Age of Access,” Interface: The Journal for Education, Community, and Values Volume 2, Issue 5 (June 2002) [“What I am looking for, what I am committed to, is a robust, open, sustained conversation about the psychological, social, economic, moral and spiritual impact of ICT that is just as robust as the evangelical fervor with which ICT is being embraced in our schools and homes.”]
• Marc Marenco, “Pedagogy, Ubiquity, Opacity: ICT (Information and Communication Technology) in Higher Education,” Interface: The Journal for Education, Community, and Values Volume 1, Issue 3 (December 2001) [“My conversion to ICT was not an easy one. . . . I find myself in the peculiar position of being a Luddite permeated with the technology I seem to reject.”]
• Kathy Marks, “Australia’s epic drought: the situation is grim,” The Independent, May 2, 2007 [“Australia has warned that it will have to switch off the water supply to the continent's food bowl unless heavy rains break an epic drought -- heralding what could be the first climate change-driven disaster to strike a developed nation.”]
• Wendy McElroy, “Nock on Education,” Ideas on Liberty (formerly The Freeman), Volume 50, No. 1 (January 2000)
• Leland Miles, “Liberal Arts in an Age of Technology,” American Education, June 1984
• “Mortgage ‘meltdown’ hits auto sales: GM’s Lutz,” CNNMoney.com, April 23, 2007 [“Vice chairman sees entire sector hit by problems in home financing market, truck sales to suffer.”]
• Peter J.M. Nicholson, “The Intellectual in the Infosphere,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, Volume 53, Issue 27 (March 9, 2007) [“What qualifies as intellectual authority today is changing fundamentally.”]
• Albert Jay Nock, “American Education,” Atlantic Monthly, May 1931
• Albert Jay Nock, “The Value of Useless Knowledge, Atlantic Monthly, May 1934
• “Pickens: $80 a barrel this year,” CNNMoney.com, April 24, 2007 [“Legendary oilman, investor predicts high price will begin to kill demand.”]
• Peter Relic, “The Trouble with the Standards Movement,” Independent School Magazine, Winter 2000 [“The effort to improve education nationally with tough standards and state-generated assessment tests, ironically, is as much cause for alarm as for celebration.”]
• Jan M. Rosen, “Ready for the Worst: Here Come the Bears,” The New York Times, April 8, 2007 [“The bears burst out of hibernation on Feb. 27, erasing the stock markets’ year-to-date gains and raising investors’ fears that the road ahead would be rough. ‘I’m very pessimistic and very convinced that there will be very hard times -- equal to the 1930s,” said David W. Tice, perhaps the most prominent bear fund manager. ‘This has been an incredibly long bull market,’ he said, one fueled by a ‘credit-induced boom’. . . . Investment managers and analysts generally disagree on several counts with Mr. Tice.”]
• John Paul Russo, “The Humanities in a Technological Society,” Humanitas Volume XI, No. 1 (199
• Linda Starr, “And in This Corner. . . the ‘High-Tech Heretic’!” Education World, May 30, 2000; updated June 9, 2005 [Interview with Clifford Stoll, author of High-Tech Heretic: Why Computers Don’t Belong in the Classroom and Other Reflections by a Computer Contrarian (1999)]
• “Study: No benefit going high-tech for math or reading,” CNN.com, April 6, 2007 [“The study on the effectiveness of education technology was released late Wednesday by the National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance, a research arm of the Education Department. The study found achievement scores were no higher in classrooms using reading and math software products than in classrooms without the new products.”]
• Stephen L. Talbott, “A New Assessment of Computers in the Classroom,” NetFuture #151 (October 30, 2003 [Survey of major points in Todd Oppenheimer’s Flickering Minds: The False Promise of Technology in the Classroom and How Learning Can Be Saved (2003)]
• Stephen L. Talbott, “Aphorisms on Computers in Classrooms,” NetFuture #147 (July 15, 2003)
• Stephen L. Talbott, “How to Teach in a Post-Modem World,” NetFuture #126 (December 18, 2001)
• Stephen L. Talbott, “On Constructivism in Education,” NetFuture #96 (October 4, 1999)
• Richard Norton Taylor, “Revolution, flashmobs, and brain chips. A grim vision of the future,” The Guardian, April 9, 2007 [“This is the world in 30 years’ time envisaged by a Ministry of Defence team responsible for painting a picture of the "future strategic context" likely to face Britain's armed forces.”]
• Transcript of interview with Kurt Vonnegut, NOW (website for PBS series), October 7, 2005
• Jeffrey A. Tucker, “Albert Jay Nock, Forgotten Man of the Right,” LewRockwell.com, August 22, 2002
• Stephen Voss and Tara Patel, “Total, Shell Chief Executives Say ‘Easy Oil’ Is Gone,” Bloomberg.com, April 5, 2007 [Editor at Energy Bulletin comments, “End of ‘Easy Oil’ = beginning of the peak oil era.”]
• Stefan Wagstyl, “Russian boom will end in pain,” FT.com [Financial Times], April 23, 2007 [“After seven years of growth, Russia is reaching its capacity limits in an expansion fuelled by credit, much of it from foreign markets, said Hans-Joerg Rudloff, chairman of Barclays Capital, the investment banking arm of Barclays.”]
• Bryan R. Warnick, review of C.A. Bowers, Let Them Eat Data: How Computers Affect Education, Cultural Diversity, and the Prospects of Ecological Sustainability (2000), in Education Review: A Journal of Book Reviews, July 6, 2001
• William L. Watts, “Medicare fund to run dry by 2019: trustees,” MarketWatch.com, April 23, 2007 [“Report also says Social Security fund to be exhausted by 2041.”]
• Tom Whipple, “The GAO report,” Falls Church News-Press, April 5, 2007 [“The real dilemma of coping with peak oil, for a while at least, is really quite simple. If the government should lay out the full ramifications of peaking in hopes of rallying the people to make preparations, the most immediate consequence is likely to be serious economic setback triggered by an unambiguous announcement itself.”]
• Armstrong Williams, “Americans Experiencing Technology Overload,” NewsMax.com, Maty 19, 2006
• Naomi Wolf, “Fascist America, in 10 easy steps,” The Guardian, April 24, 2007

Not much original content to post today. As the school year enters its terminal phase, I’m engulfed in that ominous fourth-quarter weariness that translates into a creeping internal silence. It’s a great time to listen to Current93 and read Ligotti, Cioran, Amiel, Lovecraft, Robert Frost, and other prophets of the void. It’s also a great time just to sit outside or before a window, remain motionless, and contemplate the essential serenity — or maybe it’s better characterized as a perpetual, limpid exhaustion — of nature. But it’s not such a great time to talk (whether verbally or textually) or be active.

One thing that has still managed to catch my attention lately is the relationship between education and cutting-edge digital technology. This isn’t a purely theoretical interest; the school where I teach has applied for a grant to transform itself entirely into an eMINTS school. Part of the school was converted a couple of years ago. The hope is for the conversion to be completed over the next two years. If you’re not familiar with eMINTS, just visit their Website to learn more.

The term itself is an acronym for “enhancing Missouri’s Instructional Networked Teaching Strategies.” In a nutshell, it’s a program that remakes traditional schools into computer-centered ones. For each classroom it provides one computer for every two students, plus a computer control center for the teacher and an electronic white board (as in a SMART Board). But it’s more than just a passel of technology. The eMINTS people come in and provide 200 hours (!!) of initial professional development training for faculty to teach them how best to integrate the technology into their classroom instruction. The entire edifice is built around a “student-centered” approach to education and predicated upon the constructivist theory of learning, all of which is entirely in keeping with well-established trends in American educational practice that reach as far back as the progressive education movement of the 1920s and 30s, and even farther.

Since all of this promises to work radical changes on the nature of what I do here at my job, if indeed I stay on at it, I’ve thought it prudent to learn as much as I can about these matters. So for several weeks now I’ve positively inundated myself with articles, essays, and reports about constructivism, student-centered learning, and the use of computers and other digital technology in education.

Thus far, the result has been to turn me into a naysayer, or even a mild doomsayer. (Big surprise, that.)

Among the mountain of materials I’ve read and am still reading, a handful of essays, papers, and articles stand out as particularly illuminating, intelligent, and helpful. Below are links to three of them, along with relevant excerpts. Be advised that all of this research I’m performing has spontaneously evolved into a work in progress; I may well have a whole lot more to say about the issue of computers and digital technology in education as the weeks and months go by. For now, suffice it to say that while I think the integration of computer technology and Internet access into education offers some undeniably attractive, useful, and truly beneficial capabilities — such as a recent circumstance in the Great Books class that I teach, where I had students download portions of Plutarch’s Lives instead of being forced to buy new books or forego Plutarch entirely — in general the whole push seems founded upon two less-than-honorable and less-than-beneficial motivations: first, the further subsumption of formal education in America under the rubric of consumerism, vocationalism, and the rest of the Ellulian scenario that makes technical efficiency and economic gain the be-all, end-all of life; and second, a wholesale desire, which is framed by techno-evangelists as a simple necessity, for schools and teachers to capitulate to the outlook, mindset, sensibility, and worldview of an entire generation, or two, or three, of people who have been shaped from earliest childhood by a mass media-saturated environment. In other words, it’s education as framed and conducted for economic slaves who demand that everything they do be entertaining. And it’s being aided and abetted in ferocious fashion by the U.S. government via the No Child Left Behind Act and other such measures.

If this characterization sounds more like a caricaturization, I urge you to look up and read various recent publications by the U.S. Department of Education that address the issue of technology and education. Relevant reports and documents include, e.g., 2002’s 2020 Visions: Transforming Education and Training through Advanced Technology and 2004’s Toward a New Golden Age in American Education. The latter was released in late 2004/early 2005 to serve as the official federal education technology plan, and is subtitled “How the Internet, the Law, and Today’s Students are Revolutionizing Expectations.” If you read through these and other such government publications, you’ll find not a whit of restraint or self-awareness regarding the double-edged nature of what digital technologies and Internet access have to offer schools. You’ll find nothing in the way of examination, or even an acknowledgment, of the fact that the benefits of these technologies to education are hardly a matter of settled consensus or established fact. Instead, all you’ll find is a blatantly cheerleading-toned promotion of the transformation of schools into high-tech centers, all of it justified by repeated references to “the global economy” and “economic competitiveness” and “the knowledge and skills needed for the 21st century workplace.” If you think I exaggerate, I urge you to read these materials for yourself. And while you’re at it, don’t fail to notice the science fiction-sounding tone that enters in when surveyed students and technology experts wax enthusiastic about the future educational uses of virtual reality and computer-generated tutors.

The overall uber-optimistic tone of things is captured in a passage from the latter of the above-named documents that I find to be fascinating for its combination of hubris and heedlessness: “Within 10 years [No Child Left Behind] aims to abolish illiteracy and bring millions of children currently ‘lost’ to the educational system into the mainstream of learning and achievement. It is comparable in many ways to this country’s 1960s quest to put a man on the moon. Combined with the increased use of new technologies and the motivated expertise of today’s students, it means that 10 years from now we could be looking at the greatest leap forward in achievement in the history of education.” The implications are most visible in the context of the opening line of the report’s executive summary, which makes clear its primarily economic focus: “Over the next decade, the United States will face ever increasing competition in the global economy.”

As an aside to all this, I’ll point out that it’s been interesting and refreshing through the course of all this reading and research to rediscover Jacques Ellul, whose work I first discovered through my reading of Theodore Roszak’s Where the Wasteland Ends in 1991, and which exercised an enormous influence over me.

* * * * *

And now for a few extended quotations from some of the things I’ve been reading lately in relation to all of the above. If the following excerpts interest you, I urge you to follow the links and read the essays/articles in their entirety, since they do a wonderful job of articulating some of the issues that should — but currently don’t — occupy centerstage in a lively national dialogue about the pros and cons of re-visioning and restructuring America’s educational institutions according to the technological imperative.

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Michael T. Charles, “Where are we going as we leave no child behind? La technique and Postman, Papers, and Palmer — Part One.“

“NCLB represents a watershed mark in a century-long movement to think of education as a production task. Standards are established for all students — analogous to a set of product specifications for a production assembly line. Curricula are written for teachers to use to build those products. Standardized exams function as quality control checks of those products on that production line. NCLB mandates that all products from the line be raised to a certain quality standard — i.e. all students must pass the exam. No child should be left behind. It is difficult to argue against this notion of higher quality once one views education as a production task. My suggestion is that this idea is fundamentally wrong, and that education is instead a profoundly human endeavor.

….”The phenomenon that lies behind the NCLB legislation was described by Jacques Ellul as la technique in his book of the same name in 1954, translated into English as The Technological Society in part because of the recommendation of Aldous Huxley, the author of Brave New World in 1932. Ellul (1964) defines la technique as the ‘totality of means, rationally arrived at and having (for any given stage of development) absolute efficiency.’ (xxv). He argues that the effect of this phenomenon is the consumption of all human ends by increasingly technological means.

“Ellul’s writing can be a challenging read, and many of his examples are from postwar France and world events which many of us today may not find so compelling. The contemporary American writer Neil Postman revisits much of Ellul’s argument in his book Technopoly – the monopoly of technical thinking. In this book he describes the surrender of culture to technology. His premise is that the uncontrolled growth of technology destroys the vital sources of our humanity. In the field of education I would restate his argument to say that the fundamentally human character of education is being increasingly invaded by the same technological thinking that dominates in our culture. NCLB is an embodiment of that invasion.”

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Michael T. Charles, “Where are we going as we leave no child behind? La technique and Postman, Papers, and Palmer — Part Two.“

“Thus if one is concerned about the invasion of technopoly into education, then the critical thing to oppose is not, for example, the use of computers in K-12 education or the possibility that computers will one day replace teachers in schools. The thing to oppose is the kind of technical thinking embodied in legislation like NCLB which suggests that improved school productivity is synonymous with better student learning. Postman is particularly skilled in arguing against a ’sleepwalking attitude’ against using computers in the schools in ways that might ‘distract us from more important things.’ What I am suggesting is that we need to guard against this same sleepwalking attitude regarding the larger invasion of technical thinking into how we help students learn. The triumph of technical thinking is best embodied in the mechanism of NCLB and not in the presence of computers in classrooms.

….“Ironically [Seymour Papert’s] argument for school reform is ultimately that our current schools are inefficient. According to Jacques Ellul, efficiency is the sole value of our technical system. Thus Papert proposes to undo technical thinking using technology. But the reason that he