Quotation Of The Day: Goal Of A Liberal Arts Education Edition

From this Michael S. Roth piece in the New York Times:

Liberal learning depends on absorption in compelling work. It is a way to open ourselves to the various forms of life in which we might actively participate. When we learn to read or look or listen intensively, we are, at least temporarily, overcoming our own blindness by trying to understand an experience from another’s point of view. We are not just developing techniques of problem solving; we are learning to activate potential, and often to instigate new possibilities.

Web Comic Of The Day: Othello In Three Panels Edition

Via this IO9.com post, I discover Mya Gosling who, among other things, boils Shakespeare's plays down to their most basic essence. PNR might be interested to not she has a Miscellany section on her blog. I have spent weeks teaching a single play whether it be Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, Hamlet, and Julius Caesar. I wanted the young'uns to appreciate symbolism, irony, and beautiful language. Imagine my chagrin.

Quotation Of The Day: We Have A Moral Obligation To Vote Against Every Politician Who Doesn't Read Fiction Edition

From Neil Gaiman:

Look around you: I mean it. Pause, for a moment and look around the room that you are in. I'm going to point out something so obvious that it tends to be forgotten. It's this: that everything you can see, including the walls, was, at some point, imagined. Someone decided it was easier to sit on a chair than on the ground and imagined the chair. Someone had to imagine a way that I could talk to you in London right now without us all getting rained on.This room and the things in it, and all the other things in this building, this city, exist because, over and over and over, people imagined things.

We have an obligation to make things beautiful. Not to leave the world uglier than we found it, not to empty the oceans, not to leave our problems for the next generation. We have an obligation to clean up after ourselves, and not leave our children with a world we've shortsightedly messed up, shortchanged, and crippled.

We have an obligation to tell our politicians what we want, to vote against politicians of whatever party who do not understand the value of reading in creating worthwhile citizens, who do not want to act to preserve and protect knowledge and encourage literacy. This is not a matter of party politics. This is a matter of common humanity.

Albert Einstein was asked once how we could make our children intelligent. His reply was both simple and wise. "If you want your children to be intelligent," he said, "read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales." He understood the value of reading, and of imagining. I hope we can give our children a world in which they will read, and be read to, and imagine, and understand.

Please, read the whole lecture.

A Minor Musing About Backmasking and Subordinate Clauses

That's how my last class ended. The young'uns had heard that Justin Bieber's song "Baby" allegedly has Satanic messages when played backwards. (I refuse to link to anything Bieber.) I wanted to talk about subordinate clauses, so all of my examples had to deal with backmasking. They'll probably all download Abby Lane and use Audacity to hear whether Paul is truly dead.

Before the trip down memory lane, we discussed the The Life of Pi and wonder, faith, rationality, secularism, and modernity. Earlier young policy debaters researched Mexican narcotics interdiction, assisting Cuba or Mexico in efforts to safely explore for and extract oil, and how to use drop box to store information. The day started with discussions about Midas and Narcissus.

After school, Lincoln-Douglas and public forum debaters started tearing about new resolutions on attorney-client privilege and the NSA.

After a really good day like that, listening to a bunch of politicians making pompous promulgations that they are acting for the good of the country seems more than silly.

A Bloggers' Prayer From Flannery O'Connor

Flannery O'Connor, one of America's best 20th Century authors, sought to "depict the action of grace in territory largely held by the devil." 

No lover of the sanctimonious or shallow, O'Connor frequently used her violent and unethical characters as catalysts for her protagonists' epiphanies. She has a spree killer known only as the Misfit kill a racist, self-righteous Grandmother seconds after she recognized him as "one of her babies.". She also depicts an atheist posing as an Bible salesman stealing an artificial leg from woman who proudly believed in nothing. O'Connor's effort to depict grace is not without bits of crude humor; the Bible salesman takes the pseudonym Manly Pointer.

First Things reports that a prayer journal O'Connor kept while a student at the Iowa Writers Workshop will be published in November. The last two sentences of one of her prayers should be uttered by all of us who hit the publish button and send our thoughts into cyberspace.

“I dread, Oh Lord, losing my faith. My mind is not strong. It is a prey to all sorts of intellectual quackery.

Quotation Of The Day: Why English Majors Edition

From Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker:

So: Why should English majors exist? Well, there really are no whys to such things, anymore than there are to why we wear clothes or paint good pictures or live in more than hovels and huts or send flowers to our beloved on their birthday. No sane person proposes or has ever proposed an entirely utilitarian, production-oriented view of human purpose. We cannot merely produce goods and services as efficiently as we can, sell them to each other as cheaply as possible, and die. Some idea of symbolic purpose, of pleasure-seeking rather than rent seeking, of Doing Something Else, is essential to human existence. That’s why we pass out tax breaks to churches, zoning remissions to parks, subsidize new ballparks and point to the density of theatres and galleries as signs of urban life, to be encouraged if at all possible. When a man makes a few billion dollars, he still starts looking around for a museum to build a gallery for or a newspaper to buy. No civilization we think worth studying, or whose relics we think worth visiting, existed without what amounts to an English department—texts that mattered, people who argued about them as if they mattered, and a sense of shame among the wealthy if they couldn’t talk about them, at least a little, too. It’s what we call civilization.

Is Annette Bosworth Channelling Willy Loman Or Sally Field?

Pat Powers points to an Annette Bosworth email appeal in which she boasts about her popularity. Bosworth points out that doctors have a 70% approval rating while claiming her patients give her a 95%. Willy Loman, protagonist of Death of a Salesman, told his sons that it's not enough to be liked; one must be well liked. Life didn't turn out so well for Willy.

If Bosworth is attempting to avoid being Loman's political equivalent, she may just be channeling her inner Sally Field. For those who are young or who have forgotten:



I disagree with Willy every time I read Arthur Miller's play. I've like Field's work as an actress but that doesn't mean I'd vote to elect her to the U.S. Senate. It'll take more than the fact that Bosworth's patients not only like her but they really like her to make me vote for her.

Quotation Of The Day: English Majors Praised And Contrasted Edition

From this Mark Edmundson essay:

The businessman prattles about excellence, leadership, partnerships, and productivity. The athlete drones on about the game plan, the coach, one play at a time, and the inestimable blessing of having teammates who make it all possible. The politician pontificates about unity, opportunity, national greatness, and what's in it for the middle class. When such people talk, they are not so much human beings as tape loops. . . .

The English major wants to use what he knows about language and what he's learning from books as a way to confront the hardest of questions. He uses these things to try to figure out how to live. His life is an open-ended work in progress, and it's never quite done, at least until he is. For to the English major, the questions of life are never closed. There's always another book to read; there's always another perspective to add. He might think that he knows what's what as to love and marriage and the raising of children. But he's never quite sure. He takes tips from the wise and the almost wise that he confronts in books and sometimes (if he's lucky) in life. He measures them and sifts them and brings them to the court of his own experience. (There is a creative reading as well as a creative writing, Emerson said.)

Has Bob Ellis Become A Relativist? Or Bad Things Happen If You Trust Brainy Quote But Didn't Listen To Your English Teacher

Stopping by Bob's RSS feed blog yesterday, I noticed a post leading off with this quotation:

“I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”—James A. Baldwin

Grad school was a long time ago, but I didn't remember Baldwin as the ideal Ellis conservative. I also remember this quotation as being part of his identity as a person of color in the United States. The entire quotation bears me out:

I don't like people who like me because I'm a Negro; neither do I like people who find in the same accident grounds for contempt. I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually. I think all theories are suspect, that the finest principles may have to be modified, or may even be pulverized by the demands of life, and that one must find, therefore, one's own moral center and move through the world hoping that this center will guide one aright. I consider that I have many responsibilities, but none greater than this: to last, as Hemingway says, and get my work done.

I had forgotten about the bolded sentence, however. Does Bob really believe that situations, "the demands of life," can justify pulverizing one's "finest principles" like, oh I don't know, maybe the Republican Party platform? That certainly would be a news flash to get the South Dakota blogosphere in a whirl.

Let's be clear, I'm not attributing Baldwin's world view and atheism to Ellis, but this incorrect application of a quotation serves as an example. Writers should know who expressed the sentiments they quote and the entire context of the quotation before they use it to prove a point that the original writer never intended.

A Minor Musing On The Politicization And Practicality Of Literature

One of the frequent commentators at the Madville Times is a person who has adopted the pseudonym grudznick. Grudznick assumes the persona of a grumpy old man, but for all I know the commenter may be a pre-teen girl with a crush on Justin Bieber. Grudznick frequently posts comments asserting that things and people must be be useful. A recent example involves the arts: "we all know the arts are a dead end."

I know the arts neither bake bread nor build houses. And yet, as a literature teacher, I'm unwilling to dismiss the arts as useless much less as a "dead end." Greater minds than mine have attempted to defend literature and have punted. Alan Jacobs took up the issue recently; he concludes the task is impossible:

It is not possible to come up with an adequate “defense of literature,” because “literature” doesn’t exist: too many wildly different kinds of plays and stories and poems and songs fall under that useless rubric. Defenses of specific works, or specific authors, or even specific ways of reading specific works or authors, might be possible and useful; but nothing broader than that.

And maybe we should remember also these words from George Orwell: “There is no argument by which one can defend a poem. It defends itself by surviving, or it is indefensible.”

Perhaps Jacobs is correct, but grudznick and those who agree the arts are pointless seem to indicate that no poem, story, painting, or sculpture ought to survive. It's as if they feel threatened by the arts. Perhaps those of us who teach literature are to blame; we often force the young'uns to look for symbols and synecdoche to the point that students lose the excitement inherent in the story or the beauty of the poem.

There may be another reason that grudznick and his art-is-useless cronies my dislike literature in particular. Olivia Senior points out that literature is political because "the creators of literature, are political animals; it is part of accepting our responsibility of being human, of being citizens of the world."

Literature is above all, storytelling. And, as Chinua Achebe has said, storytelling is a threat. Storytellers, poets, writers, have always found ways of confronting tyranny, especially in spaces where such actions are dangerous and deadly. Throughout the ages, writers have developed and employed myriad literary devices and explored the fullest limits of language through satire, magical realism, fantasy, fable and so on. Writers over the ages have found ways of talking about issues – like politics – without seeming to talk about them. The function is not to present the world as it is, but to present it in a new light through the narrative power of art. Literature does not ask "What is it about?" It asks "How do we tell it to make it real?"

The idea that subtext, symbol, and satire allow literature to exist as "threat" may be why conservatives dislike it, especially in the age of red meat  talk radio and Fox News. E.D. Kain points out that contemporary conservatives prefer the overt:

And it’s not as though no good conservative art or literature has ever been produced. It’s just that today’s conservatives have lost any sense of proportion or subtext. Everything is so overt and over-stated. I think that The Lord of the Rings is a basically conservative text. It’s just not explicitly conservative and doesn’t say anything nasty about Obama.

Today’s conservative pop culture is reactionary, which is fitting I suppose. There was a mockumentary conservatives made a couple years ago that attempted to not very cleverly spoof Michael Moore. But an attempt to beat Moore at his own game is probably going to fail, if only because it’s little more than preaching to the choir (and this isn’t even to say that Moore isn’t deserving of his own criticism – the left is actually very good at leveling its own critique at Moore.) It’s the same in politics: conservatives aren’t so much interested with their own ideas about governance as they are about responding to and obstructing the ideas of their opponents.

And perhaps that’s the crux of the issue. Conservative art mimics conservative politics rather than the other way around. And so it can never really be art.

The idea of use or that art, especially literature must be as overt as a sermon seems to be an effort to dilute its ability to speak truth to power. Like Senior, I don't want literature to be overtly political, students ought to see the world as political and react to it.

So, since I have to answer the question: "Should literature be political?" I will say, yes, but not in an explicit way. The purpose of literature is not to represent but to re-present, to hold up that mirror in a light that enables us to see reality both reflected and refracted. And that applies to politics or any subject that we choose, or in the best case scenario, in the subject that chooses us. As writers we live lives that are not navel-gazing but conscious, fully engaged with the world.

My favourite quotation is Gauguin's statement: "Art is either plagiarism or revolution." So let me end by taking issue with the title of this debate, especially with the prescriptive should. Should the subject matter of literature be prescribed by anyone? I say no. So let's end by revolting against those who would apply the word "should" to art. Even in a question. 

One Poem For National Poetry Month 2013

It's National Poetry Month, so I thought it might be a good idea to post at least one poem. I have always enjoyed teaching this one.

 In Praise of Feeling Bad About Yourself
by Wisława Szymborska

The buzzard never says it is to blame.
The panther wouldn't know what scruples mean.
When the piranha strikes, it feels no shame.
If snakes had hands, they'd claim their hands were clean.

A jackal doesn't understand remorse.
Lions and lice don't waver in their course.
Why should they, when they know they're right?

Though hearts of killer whales may weigh a ton,
in every other way they're light.

On this third planet of the sun
among the signs of bestiality
a clear conscience is Number One.

Translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh

Being Human: Why Great Literature Still Matters

I rant quit a bit about the STEM uber alles mindset that seems to dominate contemporary American thought. That thought seems to dominate certain circles of education reform. Cindy Haven quotes a David Foster Wallace book review to show that great literature is necessary to remind one what it means to be human:

“The thing about Dostoevsky’s characters is that they live.  And by this I don’t mean just that they’re successfully realized and believable and ’round.’ The best of them live inside us, forever, once we’ve met them. …

[Dostoevsky'] concern was always what it is to be a human being – i.e., how a person, in the particular social and philosophical circumstances of 19th-century Russia, could be a real human being, a person whose life was informed by love and values and principles, instead of being just a very shrewd species of self-preserving animal. …

So, for me anyway, what makes Dostoevsky invaluable is that he possessed a passion, conviction, and engagement with deep moral issues that we, here, today, cannot or do not allow ourselves."

Wallace's review also points to a reason that condemnation of "dead white males" is overblown. The young'uns need to read a few of the old books* every year:

Part of the answer to questions about our own art’s thematic poverty obviously involves our own era’s postindustrial condition and postmodern culture.  The Modernists, among other accomplishments, elevated aesthetics to the level of metaphysics, and ‘Great Novels’ since Joyce tend to be judged largely on their formal ingenuity; we presume as a matter of course that serious literature will be aesthetically distanced from real lived life.  Add to this the requirement of textual self-consciousness imposed by postmodernism, and it’s fair to say that Dostoevsky et al. were free from certain cultural expectations that constrain our own novelists’ freedom to be ‘serious.’

But it’s just as fair to observe that Dostoevsky operated under some serious cultural constraints of his own: a repressive government, state censorship, and above all the popularity of post-Enlightenment European thought, much of which went directly against beliefs he held dear and wanted to write about.  The thing is that Dostoevsky wasn’t just a genius – he was, finally, brave.  … who is to blame for the philosophical passionlessness of our own Dostoevskys? The culture, the laughers? But they wouldn’t – could not – laugh if a piece of passionately serious ideological contemporary fiction was also ingenious and radiantly transcendent fiction

I may be reading too much into this advertisement, but it strikes me that it points to a strong undercurrent in American culture that asks Americans to seek answers in tech rather than in their own humanity.



HT: This Andrew Sullivan post

*I will stipulate that they should read some more recent works as well. Many on this list would work in a high school classroom

Jesus Saves! Science And Growth Ain't Jesus

(It's Sunday, so I can use that for a headline.)

I'm not going to dispute Bob Mercer's implication that Dr. Ken Blanchard is a deep thinker. Blanchard's posts on virtue ethics at Natural Right and Biology are indeed thoughtful and serious. The climate change post that earns Mercer's commendation is found on both sites.

I haven't checked to record to confirm or refute Blanchard's claims about his skills as a prognosticator. I share his skepticism that governments are unable or unwilling to undertake the necessary changes to limit climate change.

Like Cory at Madville, I take issue with Blanchard's conclusion:

If we really want to solve the problems that our environment poses, the only hope lies in new technologies.  The only way to get those is to promote economic growth.  This is a lesson that the environmental left desperately wants not to learn [emphasis mine].

I feel a bit inadequate to engage the bolded assertion on my own, so, to paraphrase a Capulet servant from Romeo and Juliet, I must go to the eloquent, in this case Marilynne Robinson. "In Freedom of Thought," the first essay in her collection When I Was a Child I Read Books, Robinson notes human nature has not been conquered:

Of course science must not be judged by the claims certain of its proponents have made for it. It is not in fact a standard of reasonableness or truth or objectivity. It is human, and has always been one strategy among others in the more general project of human self-awareness and self-assertion. Our problem with ourselves, which is much larger and vastly older than science, has by no means gone into abeyance since we learned to make penicillin or to split the atom. If antibiotics have been used without sufficient care and have pushed the evolution of bacteria beyond the reach of their own effectiveness, if nuclear fission has become a threat to us all in the insidious form of a disgruntled stranger with a suitcase, a rebuke to every illusion of safety we entertained under fine names like Strategic Defense Initiative, old Homer might say, "the will of Zeus was moving toward its end." Shakespeare might say, "There is a destiny that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will."

Robinson realizes what Blanchard seems to ignore: each scientific advance carries unintended consequences, few of which can be considered wholly benign. As Robinson rightly concludes, "Science can give us knowledge, but it cannot give us wisdom."

The second bolded sentence implies that Adam Smith's invisible hand is as true as any gospel. I suspect Smith would neither recognize nor applaud what is currently being done his name to produce "economic growth" in the United States. Once again I return to the more eloquent Robinson:

On both [political] sides the sole motive force in our past is now said to have been capitalism. On both sides capitalism is understood as grasping materialism that has somehow or other yielded the comforts and liberties of modern life. Capitalism thus understood is seen on one side as providential, so good in its effect that it reduces Scripture with its do-unto-other to shibboleth. The other side sees it as more or less corrupting and contemptible but beyond human powers to resist.

And no one offers a definition of it. But in these days when its imperium is granted by virtually anyone who attends to such things, our grand public education system is being starved and abandoned, and our prisons have declined to levels that disgrace us. The economics of the moment, and of the last several decades, is a corrosive influence, undermining everything it touches from our industrial strength to our research capacity to the well being of our children. [When I Was a Child I Read Books, xiv-xv]

In short capitalism seems to be directing American's away from developing the research capacity and industrial infrastructure necessary to develop the answers Blanchard suggests economic growth will provide. Like science, capitalism is limited; in this case, it may produce growth but not the wisdom to lessen greed nor the wisdom to use gains well.

Like Macbeth, all humans are guilty of every sin that has a name: hubris and greed, however, may be the source of our ultimate undoing. As Robinson notes, faith in science and the market makes us prone to those tragic flaws.

A Minor Musing About Politics And Realism And Short Sightedness

Alan Jacobs, who writes better and thinks far more deeply than I do points to a reason that politicians might be so in love with STEM; those "hard sciences" are realistic and politicians love nothing more than poltical realism. That realism is usually concerned with short term gain:

What people call political realism often seems to me a kind of short-sightedness. The idea that valid political action requires us to choose from among the most prominent current alternatives — in short, to decide whether you’re going to be a Republican or a Democrat and then work to bring your chosen party more closely in line with your convictions — makes sense if your chief goal is to gain a political victory and to gain it now. Or soon.

Some politicians might take offense at being charged with caring only for short term political victories. The STEM loving realists may also take offense that Jacobs's reasoning begins in a novel:

We are too prone, I believe, to think that voting is the definitive political act. That would be true only if politics simply belongs to the government. There is a far vaster sphere of politics — the life of the polis — that belongs to everyday acts of ordinary people. In this maybe Gandalf is a pretty good guide: “Yet it is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.”

Offering true comfort instead of empty promises, actually uprooting evil instead of accusing one's opponent of  evil, and admitting that there's a greater sphere of politics than the government should be common sense but this political season those concepts seem radical and unrealistic.

Quotation Of The Day: Definding The Liberal Arts Edition

From this Alan Jacobs post:

those of us who love the liberal arts don’t have to take a single line of self-defense — indeed we shouldn’t, because if the artes liberales really do liberate, they free us to make many varied choices. The person whose liberal-arts education serves him best as a father of children offers as strong a testimony to that education’s value as the person who instead devotes herself to a life of solitary scholarship; and even astonishingly rich entrepreneurs may justifiably celebrate the marriage of technology with the liberal arts. It’s all good.

Quotation Of The Day: Literature Matters Edition

Admiral James Stavridis, the Supreme Allied Commander Europe and Commander, U.S. European Command, discusses what he reads as part of an ongoing Atlantic series. After listing numerous news sources, he gets to fiction and poetry:

I am also a big reader of fiction, and enjoy accurate historical fiction, which affords a chance to learn history painlessly. Generally, make time to read at least one novel a week. Lately I've read The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach, and The Age of Miracles, by Karen Thompson Walker, both coming-of-age novels by young American novelists. I also like the sea-going novels of Patrick O'Brian, like any Navy officer. Other authors I enjoy and read repeatedly include George MacDonald Fraser, Cormac McCarthy, John Updike, Ha Jin, Gary Shteyngart, Elmore Leonard (going strong at 85) and Ian Fleming, among many others.

I also read poetry, especially from countries I am visiting in my current job (about 80 over the past several years). For example, before a recent trip to Madrid I went back and read some of the work of Frederico Garcia Lorca. I just read a book of poetry from a decade ago by Carl Dennis called Practical Gods which impressed me. W.B. Yeats still amazes me with the freshness of his vision a century after much of his work was published.

Looking at Stavridis reading list, I would love to see a discussion between Stavridis and the Common Core advocates who want to reduce the amount of fiction and poetry that high school students read. The discussion could also include those hard-nosed business people who claim that literature has no benefit. I have the feeling the Admiral has a far different point of view.

Quotation Of The Day: Today I Really Like Google Edition

Marissa Mayer, Goggle's "vice president of local, maps, and location services—and the driving force behind more than a hundred of Google’s products and services, including search, news, gmail, earth, books, and toolbar" just made my school year seem worthwhile.  In a Daily Beast interview, she asserts,

"One of the more interesting things they’ve found is that programming aptitude and excellence is more tied to verbal SAT scores than to math SAT scores,” she explained. “Beyond basic mathematical aptitude, the difference between good programmers and great programmers is verbal ability.”

Clarity of expression is something Mayer prizes so dearly that she uses it as a litmus test when evaluating new ideas. Disruptive technology should solve big problems and have widespread applications, but it should also be easy to understand. “I think about my mom,” she told Brown. “She’s very smart. She’s a little intimidated by technology. So when a new idea comes up, I think, ‘How would I explain it to her?’”

Pop Culture Literacy: Yet Another Reason To Promote The Liberal Arts

I probably should limit my Daily Show clips a bit more than I do, but in this clip Jon Stewart unwittingly makes the case for teaching mythology.  At about 2:10, Stewart uses Renaissance art and myth in a brilliant take down of Rupert Murdoch.

Cultural literacy is always a dicey argument, but I think it's safe to argue that any culturally literate American of the 21st Century should be aware of Stewart and the Daily Show.  If Stewart and his writers believe they can get a laugh from Zeus seducing (euphemism alert) Leda in the form of a swan, perhaps they expect their viewers to know at list a bit about the story.

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
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A Succinct Summary Of Something Important About Literature

Rod Dreher, writing at The American Conservative, sums up something I frequently tell my students:

A good story is a good story. I don’t care if explores the hidden lives of paraplegic Tibetan lesbians. If it’s a well-told story, we all see ourselves in the characters and the lives they lead, no matter what their race, what their class, what their culture. What kind of parochial nitwit reads Tolstoy and complains that they don’t see themselves in the story?

Judging by the looks my students give me when I make the point in a manner slightly less colorful than Dreher's, I must be a really old English teacher.

Why Corporations And Politicians Want Teachers To Teach To The Test

Claire Needell Hollander sums up how the current focus on testing reading destroys students' experience of reading literature.

We cannot enrich the minds of our students by testing them on texts that purposely ignore their hearts. By doing so, we are withholding from our neediest students any reason to read at all. We are teaching them that words do not dazzle but confound. We may succeed in raising test scores by relying on these methods, but we will fail to teach them that reading can be transformative and that it belongs to them.

She correctly points that standardized tests like the Dakota STEP "are complex only on the sentence level — not because the ideas they present are complex, not because they are symbolic, allusive or ambiguous."

Hollander quotes Franz Kafka who claimed “a book must be the ax for the frozen sea inside us.”  Therein lies the rub.  Helping students have a richer inner life doesn't fit with the purpose that corporate America believes that they should perform.  That purpose is succinctly and humorously summed up in this tweet:

"Oh, nooes!!! It's 'economic change'. What should we do? We won't be able to sell enough McShit!!"
— umair haque (@umairh) April 21, 2012

Diane Ravitch correctly sums up the stakes with this tweet:

Education is increasingly a race between civilization and a system of accounting that has no brain and no heart.
— Diane Ravitch (@DianeRavitch) April 21, 2012

I fear the battle for hearts, minds, and souls may be already lost; McShit has won.