George Soros is the billionaire Hunagrian-Jewish-American who spent millions of dollars in trying to defeat Bush, but he's also quite a remarkable philanthropist, a man who didn't start giving away his money into he was well into his sixties. For many years he had been interested in philosphy, even writing his own books on the subject, but after a certain point in time he came to realize that the real self, his true self, was, indeed, a philosophical, contemplative one -- but it wasn't enough. All of that thinking and pondering had created a vacuum, he said, and by doing he escaped from the vacuum and into the realm of the actual. (Or something along those lines.)
Right now there's a boom, an explosion of universities in Phnom Penh, and all of the schools are trying to figure out, hmm, what exactly do we, um, teach, so that these kids can move beyond the thinking realm and into the actual realm? And so there's lots of business classes and computer classes and English classes because this is what the kids will need, goes the common currency of thought. And they're right. But these are the future leaders of Cambodia, these people, and this is a new age in this country, and so we have to be careful, even cautious, about what is taught to them and how it is presented. How it is framed.
I thought of this recently while reading this book THE CLOSING OF THE AMERICAN MIND that caused an academic sensation (if that's not an oxymoron) in the mid-eightites, mostly because it took to task the rather dismal state of education in the elite universities in the States -- your Harvards, Yales and Stanfords, all of which had begun to slowly drop of all the old-dead-white-guy stuff and replace it with it multicultural, possibly revisionist approaches to learning and education.
I'm not going to get into that that here. That's been argued to death a thousand, million, trillion times, by people much smarter and much dumber than me. (There's a lot of the former, a few of the latter.)
But what a university is for is a good question, an obvious question, and one that isn't necessarily asked a lot anymore. Higher education simply is; universities simply are. Next?
And yet...
At the risk of sounding like someone who doesn't have any original ideas of his own (which is pretty much close to the truth), I read a book a few years back (or most of the book; it was pretty tough going, it being a 1950's-British-Marxis-feminist tract and all, so cut me some slack, okay?) called THE GOLDEN NOTEBOOK, by Doris Lessing. There was an introduction at the start of the book, a long one, a good one, actually a great one, in which Lessing basically ripped into the state of modern university systems the world over. She is one of the world's most erudite, respected novelists -- and she never went to university. High school dropout, like Einstein and Quentin Tarantino and Robert DeNiro and Peter Jennings. No-name schmucks.
A few points she made that I remember.
1) Universities, especially liberal arts programs, are set up in a very either/or, competitive fashion. Meaning, if you like author X, then you shouldn't respond to author Y. If you like both, something's wrong with you. At a very young age, students learn that there is the Canon (cue the sound of thunder and ominous music), and these are the books contained therewithin, and this is the kind of literature that should be read about and written about.
Got a problem with that? I did, and I still do.
What's lacking is any kind of personal, authentic response to the books in question; the self is left out of the equation. Meaning, we are taught, to a certain extent, to think of books as having this almost mystical 'validity', or 'value', or even 'worth', that exists above and beyond are own perceptions of the text itself.
Hogwash, Lessing says, and I agree. There are books and your responses to them. Period. You may hate a book at age eighteen and love it at twenty-eight and find it decidedly mediocre at thirty-eight. The book has changed nada. You have changed much. The book and you have crossed paths a few times, and you have emerged, altered. The book just sits there, waiting for your response. (I read John Irving's THE CIDER-HOUSE RULES every few years and am always amazed at how different it is.( Waiting for your emotions.
But what's happened? We have a world now where books, and certainly films, are judged as if they are part of a sporting competition. People write movie reviews, especially, that rarely have any authentic representation of the author's feelings.
No, no, no, you say, the author has to be objective. This ain't Oprah. This is literature. He has to view the work for what it is. Personal feelings have nothing to do with true, authentic criticism.
And I say no, no, no, that's b.s. Because if you are a boxer, then you are going to have a different view of ROCKY than if you are an accountant. If your parents divorced at age eight and you remember every little bit of it, then you will respond differently to KRAMER VS.KRAMER than I will. If you were a high school basketball player, not great, no, not giving Jordan a run for his money, uh-uh, but not bad with the ball, then you will respond differently to the Gene Hackman classic HOOSIERS than a non-sports fan will. If you have a particularly keen interest in history and ancient civilizations, then you will view ALEXANDER one way, and the McDonald's manager working the late shift, the one with the receding hairline and whacked stubble dotting his cheeks, will view it another way. (Not that those two people couldn't be the same guy, come to think of it.)
This is not to say that there are not books and films that are better produced, more diligently stitched together than others. Of course. That's what quality and craftsmanship are about.
But art is not produced in an aesthetic vacuum, or emotionless vacuum. It is created by strange, loner-like people with weird, wild impulses that are hungering to express the sentiments inside themselves. And hey -- guess what, kids? To deny that you are a similar person with identical longings when judging such work robs art of its true purpose. It makes you a liar and a cheat, too.
2) The other point Lessing makes, and this is a good one, has to do with people who leave. People who exit. The teachers who stop teaching after a year. The cop who gives up the beat six months in. The student who stops attending classes after a year and a half.
We do not pay enough attention in society, she argues, to people who stop. These are the people who cannot fit into the system. These are the people who do not respond to the system. And these are the people who usually have the most constructive, instinctive things to say.
Instead, what happens is we have thousands and thousands of people who are trained in a particular way of thinking and reacting -- and so is it any wonder that most book reviews and film reviews sound so similar, as if they were all written by the same computer programme? Of course not. This is how the system trains people. This is how the system operates. The people who couldn't fit into the system, who for some reason or another couldn't adapt, have moved on. The world has lost their voice. The neighbourhood has lost that cop. The classroom that needs that kind of teacher has been replaced by the formulaic, institutionalized one.
Point is, as Soros points out, there is great wonder and satisfaction in contemplation -- ess -
entially, that's what university does for you. It gives you four, five, eight years to sit around and think about stuff and write about stuff.
And then at a certain point you have to get out into the world and do stuff, and so what we think about during those years, and how we think about it, does not remain in a vacuum. It is released, to intoxicate or poision the masses. How we think, and how we train others to think, needs to be addressed.
So next time you're teaching a Cambodian, the slow, shy one at the back of the class in the ripped, dirty slacks, or talking to the late-shift manager at Mcdonald's, the heavy guy with the raggedy stubble who doesn't look that bright, truth be told, ask them about what they're reading. Find out if they've seen any good movies lately. Ask for their opinion. Listen for their emotions. The tremor and excitement in their voices.
These are the ones that don't fit into the system, see.
These are the ones to ask.
These are the ones you listen to, carefully.
Before they go.
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I am pleased to bring to your attention the writing of Brian Gibson, a fellow survivor of the York University Creative Writing program and fellow cross-country teammate of mine on the York Yeomen team that placed third at the Ontario championships in '96. (Brian was the strong, lean, fast guy who placed in the top ten, if I recall; I was the, um, weak, not-so-lean slow guy who placed, uh, nowhere-near-the-top-ten.)
You should go to www.bleedingdaylight.ca and check out the latest novel from one of Canada's brightest young writers, a murder-mystery set at our old alma mater, York University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
(Oh, and last time I saw him he looked a little different from the author's photo -- but I'm betting he still wears Darth Vader t-shirts.)
