Background
A Larger context: toward critical thought
This blog used to be something else. I started it when, teaching a course called “Digital Imaging” at Skagit Valley College, I needed a better way to deal with images and discussion than the “Blackboard” software they were using at the time provided. I asked the school to set me up with something, and they referred me to a certain individual who I will not name. He never responded, so I took it into my own hands; I set up a flickr group with the unassuming (perhaps boring) title Photography/Imaging Groups, Skagit for the images, and this blog for the discussion. We put the course on ice. I will explain that below, because that has a lot to do with what the site is going to be. The flickr site is still going, and there are new people who’ve joined since the course went down even though the site has had no support at all; Many thanks to you! It looks great.
I think that my acting independently like this was not exactly ok according to the regulations because the colleges MUST CONTROL (to their grief and especially to that of the students, actually), but I don’t think they really had much in the way of regulations then. They do now. Anyway, I’m pretty much always in trouble, so it seems normal. Besides, I’m going to retire sometime during this coming year, and I’m too crusty at this point to take advice from folks with agendas imported from the industrial sector.
For a couple of years, this particular site “Circle-of-Confusion” has been mouldering in the grave, so to speak. I’ve done a very small amount of work on it now and then, but essentially, it’s been a mixture of leftover class materials and various other things, and not well organized. Having it available, and since I’ll no longer be using it for a class, I might as well make it my own, and I invite you to participate. There is a wealth of great material there; I just need to get rid of a lot of confusion.
The course was “Art 184″. Students signed on because they believed that they could learn how to use their digital cameras that they got for Christmas, or for other often inappropriate reasons. One had even taken it “to relax” thinking that art courses were, of course, for that. Were they ever surprised! I have noticed over the years that my students were not at all prepared for what I had for so long more or less taken for granted: I realized that My Students Can’t See. This was driven home with a lot of force when I asked my students “well, then, just what IS reality, anyway?” The answer I got was “We get to make it up for ourselves!” Everybody liked that a lot. So, a couple of weeks after a young man in the class became a first time father, I asked “Are you going to allow dirty diapers to be real?” The conversation then became a rather mindless discussion about diapers, veering sharply away from anything to do with the question about reality. Pulling it in line was a lot like levering a derailed locomotive back onto its track.
I saw this as an opportunity to explore the way our vision works. That, of course, means that we need to look at the assumptions that we carry unconsciously, which make it entirely impossible for us to see anything at all as it really is. In doing this, it immediately becomes necessary to look closely at the way the human mind operates; indeed, what IS it to be human anyway? So we looked at material from philosophy, anthropology, sociology, and history. We looked at cultural conditioning which, in our particular culture, is permeated with advertising and entertainment. In other words, we tried to get out of our unconscious context and into a larger and hopefully much more conscious one. We looked at Plato, at the strange and wonderful short novella Flatland by the Victorian mathematician Edwin A. Abbott. That invited a discussion of Abbott’s portrayal of women, who, in a world of two dimensional shapes were represented as simple straight lines – turns out he was chiding Victorian society about its values. We looked at material on the phenomenon of feral children and what they might show us about the basic nature of humanity. Many students simply couldn’t comprehend this, and many chose not to believe (in this way, they reflect the views of a large cross section of society). Oddly, one of those who couldn’t quite accept this idea had actually had experience with such a child, an orphan from Romania who had grown up penned with dogs. This experience was deeply troubling for him, but he had difficulty in translating into the larger context. This kind of thing is extremely hard for us humans; we are inclined to accept what we believe to be real as what actually is real. Of course, discussions of politics, religion, and what we believe (and how that belief originates) also ensued.
The aim of all this is to provide a context in which real education can happen; to that end, everything, no matter how troubling, has got to be open to investigation, and that investigation must be relentless. I fear that this sort of thing is far too disturbing to the Community College as we know it, and I daresay that it may be too disturbing to four year institutions and maybe even many, if not most graduate schools. Anyway, to my way of thinking, anything less is NOT education at all. Real education, in my view, actually can CHANGE a person, not just make them know more facts and proceedural routines.
This is about critical thought. By this, I do NOT mean “Critical Thinking” as is defined in the materials that faculty members at Skagit Valley College are supposed to adopt in our curricula. I need to quote the definition exactly, and I will edit this as soon as I can to do so. For now, allow me to paraphrase: Critical thinking is expressly defined as the ability to discern authenticity of information WITHIN A DISCIPLINE! Wow! Where did they get that? It is a very bad joke.
Critical thinking requires that one stand outside not only of the discipline, but even outside of the society of which it is a component part. It is necessary to stand outside of oneself. The task of critical thought constantly enlarges, because every layer of assumptions, when stripped away, reveals for someone who has the vision and courage to see it, a new layer of assumptions beyond it. In this sense, education is an endless process.
My goal has been to give students an opportunity to develop a taste for the search and hopefully, to get really hungry. I never conceal from the students that I don’t really teach. I just ask questions. Teaching is impossible because I don’t know anything and there is nothing really to know; this contradicts the whole idea that education is about a “subject”. In certain areas, indeed it is, but I’m not teaching rocket science. My job as a student (which is the role I share with my students) is to constantly uncover new layers of ignorance in myself, which of course, gives me lots of skill in asking unbearably irritating questions but never to provide answers. I don’t teach, but the students can learn, if they have the courage to do so. It is up to them.
So, I’m going to drop the charade of teaching altogether and invite like minded people to join with me in this forum. I’ll still be at the college for an as yet indeterminate (short) period; it will be over by one year from today, though, if not sooner. I’m going to put a darkroom in my trailer and hit the road. They make satellite modems, don’t they? I have an appointment with some trout.
