Children At Play

Slate posted a good article yesterday about children, learning, and the effect of the Law in early learning environments: i.e. an Authority Figure telling you what is right and true and interesting rather than you discovering that on your own.

It's a good piece and I really agree with everything it says. (Full disclosure: I spent much of my early and mid-20s working with children, and have been thinking about learning and school ever since I was 9 and discovered teachers were crazy.)

What I find most striking, though sadly familiar, is the timidity with which the Slate columnist approaches her piece. She thinks this really needs to said -- for kids under the age of six, that is. But of course, once you hit first grade it doesn't apply any more: that's when lining kids up in desks and having them lectured to by "teachers" suddenly becomes the ideal way to learn. In short, a complete lack of awareness of how we are all children inside.

That said, the article is good as far as it goes. Here are a few excerpts (but read the whole thing to find out about some really fascinating experiments):

"Anxious parents instruct their children more and more, at younger and younger ages, until they're reading books to babies in the womb."

"Shouldn't very young children be allowed to explore, inquire, play, and discover...?"

"Direct instruction made the children less curious and less likely to discover new information."

"Adults often assume that most learning is the result of teaching and that exploratory, spontaneous learning is unusual. But actually, spontaneous learning is more fundamental."

The Race to Nowhere, Nowhen and Nothing

Following up on yesterday's documentary list, a relevant article in the NY Times about the encouraging response to the new film Race To Nowhere: The Dark Side of America's Achievement Culture. Lots of great stuff about performance, pressure, and the increasingly cracked-out meritocracy of America's prep-schools. I'm personally not sure how much of an effect the film can/will have on the absurdity of today's college-admissions process (Oprah's endorsement notwithstanding...), but at least it's giving exhausted parents and burned-out students a chance to vent. Of course, one could make the argument that such an oppressive system actually "serves the cause" by putting such a premium on Grace. Supply and demand and all that... Just saying (ht BH):

“Everyone expects us to be superheroes,” one high school senior in the film says. Another tells of borrowing her friends’ prescription for Adderall to juggle her many commitments. “It’s hard to be the vice president of your class, play on the soccer team and do homework,” she says.

The movie introduces boys who drop out of high school from the pressure, girls who suffer stress-induced insomnia and worse, and students for whom “cheating has become another course,” as one puts it. “When success is defined by high grades, test scores, trophies," a child psychologist says in the film, “we know that we end up with unprepared, disengaged, exhausted and ultimately unhealthy kids.” 
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While Waiting for Superman lionizes urban reformers who embrace standardized testing as a necessary yardstick to hold schools and teachers accountable, Ms. Abeles believes that the testing movement is what has caused education to go off the tracks.

“You would not believe what reactions you get from other parents when you mention what colleges your children are looking at — you’re so judged,” Tara Vessels, a mother at New Canaan Country School, told about 40 other parents and staff members who discussed the movie last Friday in the school cafeteria.

“Imagine if a sign out front of school says ‘Mistakes Are Made Here Often,’ ” mused one teacher, echoing a theme in the movie that schools should accept failure as part of learning. “No one would come here! But why not?” 

Another Week Ends: Seminarian Plagiarism, Disney's Decline, DCAU, Mad Men, MJ

1. Our Pensacola mini-conference is underway! If you live in the area, don't be afraid to drop in unannounced... We would love to see you. And those of you that don't live in the area, don't be afraid to say a prayer in support.

2. An unsettling firsthand account of professional plagiarism over at The Chronicle of Higher Education, entitled "The Shadow Scholar", the most arresting portion for us being (ht AZ):

I do a lot of work for seminary students. I like seminary students. They seem so blissfully unaware of the inherent contradiction in paying somebody to help them cheat in courses that are largely about walking in the light of God and providing an ethical model for others to follow. I have been commissioned to write many a passionate condemnation of America's moral decay as exemplified by abortion, gay marriage, or the teaching of evolution. All in all, we may presume that clerical authorities see these as a greater threat than the plagiarism committed by the future frocked.

3. A worthy look at Disney's conflicted relationship with its religious past over at First Things, through the lens of Armond White's review of Disney's current PC-schlock-fest Tangled. The always provocative White employs Mbird faves Carl Dreyer, Hans Christian Anderson, and The Pet Shop Boys among others to make his point. He writes:

We’ve accustomed ourselves to the formula by which a family movie designed to pacify children is considered innocuous, but we cannot ignore the ramifications of entertainment concepts that move away from profundity or that deny audiences the persuasiveness and the confirmation of epiphany.

Religion offers a way to understand our human impulses; popular culture has become a way to muddle them. That’s the theme the Pet Shop Boys identify in [their new project, a musical adaptation of] Hans Christian Andersen’s “Most Incredible Thing”; it’s also exemplified by the commercial corruptions that Tangled performs on the tale of Rapunzel. In his classic study The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, psychologist Bruno Bettelheim argued that readers “find folk fairy tales more satisfying than all other children’s stories” because “fairy tales carry important messages to the conscious, the preconscious, and the unconscious mind, on whatever level each is functioning at the time.” As pop culture gets away from faith, it also abandons its most important social function, confusing rather than uniting our humanity. It will take faith to raise corrupted pop culture from the dead. 

4. New York publishes two curiously affirming profiles of evangelical figures in one week!
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Application Inflation and the College Admissions Arms Race

Fascinating article by Eric Hoover in Sunday's NY Times entitled "Application Inflation: When Is Enough Enough?" about the ever-falling admissions rates at our nation's top universities. Depicted here as an "arms race," the whole educational marketplace seems to function as quite the microcosm of human contradiction, esp when it comes to the whole measurement question. It's also always a hoot to watch people in this context do acrobatics of semantic justification around the inconvenient reality of exclusivity:

Such announcements [of exploding applicant pools] tell a story in which colleges get better — and students get more amazing — every year. In reality, the narrative is far more complex, and the implications far less sunny for students as well as colleges caught up in the cruel cycle of selectivity. To some degree, the increases are inevitable: the college-bound population has grown, and so, too, has the number of applications students file, thanks in part to online technology. But wherever it is raining applications, colleges have helped seed the clouds — by recruiting widely and aggressively for ever more applicants.
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“Colleges are there to educate you, but they make it all about who’s the best college,” [applicant Shaun Stewart] says. “They make it too stressful. Then we make it too stressful on ourselves.”
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The scale of rejection worries Karl M. Furstenberg, dean of admissions and financial aid at Dartmouth from 1992 to 2007. “When people keep hearing that they’re not good enough, this has an undermining psychological effect,” he says. Over the last 15 years, he says, growing applicant pools reflected an earnest push for greater diversity among the wealthiest institutions. Yet he believes many have reached a point of diminishing returns.  “It’s a classic arms race — escalation for not a whole lot of gain,” he says. “I don’t think these larger applicant pools are materially improving the quality of their classes. Now what’s driving it is the institutional self-interest factor, where bigger pools mean you’re more popular, you’re better.” [CONTINUE READING]

Grace in Education? The Manhattan Free School

A fascinating little snapshot in the NY Times of a school in Manhattan that really swallows the whole loaf, grace-wise. Some might see it as hopelessly naive, others as an honest attempt to take the inside-out approach as far as it can go. One has a strong suspicion that the Manhattan Free School caters to students for whom obligation has proven totally insufficient as a motivation for learning, i.e. the kids with the most severe allergies to the Law, even in its most innocuous and civil forms. It will be interesting to hear what they are up to in 20 years (ht TM).

[Manhattan Free School principal Pat] Werner’s dedication to opening young people’s minds might better be described as utopian than idealistic — which is only appropriate at a private school where students do not receive grades, take tests or have to do anything, really, that they do not feel like doing.

For parents exhausted by New York’s numbers-oriented, lottery-driven public school system or its hierarchical, hypercompetitive private schools, the Manhattan Free School represents another way to go: equally wacky, but at the opposite extreme.

In the cafeteria of the church one recent day, lunch, like much else at the school, was happening in a fashion that could generously be described as fluid. The art teacher was offering her hummus to a wary 5-year-old who seemed hungry. The boy ate the hummus eagerly; followers of the free-school philosophy might posit that this was partly because no one was forcing him to. (Pizza was also an option.)

“It comes down to trust,” Ms. Werner said, “the trust that given time, they’ll find their passions, and when they do, they’ll be eager to learn.”

Some students had rebelled elsewhere; some, like Amylin Di Dario, a 15-year-old from South Plainfield, N.J., needed a break from self-imposed pressure. “The stress was giving me stomach problems,” Amylin said.

One of the school’s favorite sayings: The flip side of freedom is responsibility.

The Blue Movie and the Old Story - David Browder

Continuing with our series of entries from Judgment & Love, here is David Browder's chapter. Again, J&L is a collection of 35 true-life stories illustrating the powerful truth that when love is shown in the face of deserved judgment, lives are changed. To order your copy at the reduced price of $10, go here or click on the button at the bottom of the post.

I did not realize this as a young boy, but my family broke the stereotypical mold in Alabama with their real and palpable agnosticism. As any child would do, I followed their lead and Christianity remained an afterthought in my progressive, south Birmingham neighborhood. Due primarily to my parents’ divorce, I found myself in a boys’ preparatory boarding school named The McCallie School in Chattanooga, Tennessee at the age of 15.

It was there that I providentially came under the influence of a Christian man and football coach named Terry Evans who (I would later find out, but not in so many words) embodied what I would later come to understand as the interplay between the Law and the Gospel (M. Luther). He was an ordained Presbyterian minister and my dormitory head for two years at McCallie. The man would stay up until all hours of the night, making sure the students under his charge were not engaged in any mischief. Most of the time, we were. When we were found out, consequences were swift and sure. So terrified were my roommate and I of Coach Evans that we actually planned to move out of “Bible Belk” (the derisive name all the kids had for the dorm) into another dorm where we were sure we could get away with more. Sounds like a good plan, right? Well, Coach Evans somehow talked us into staying in Belk, and it was one of the best decisions I have ever made in any phase of my life.

One particular time (never give teenage boys too much free time. . . a poor idea is likely to ensue), my roommate and I figured out that we could hook a camcorder to a computer monitor, get our hands on movies of ill-repute, and charge admission for the viewings in our dorm room. Coach Evans, a veteran of many long years in the dorm wars, was on to us in a very short time. The punishment could have been severe at a place like McCallie. My roommate and I were convinced it was the end of the line. But, when it seemed sure the ax would fall, it did not.

In fact, Coach Evans selected us to be prefects, senior leaders in his underclassman dorm, the following year. The idea that swift justice would not accompany a great misdeed was an utterly foreign concept. A place of honor instead of a ticket home? Perplexing. Astounding. At that point in my life, Coach Evans represented God to me. Previously I had expected strict, ethics-based exhortation. Suffocating and binding rules. He showed me something different. His incredible pardon planted a mustard seed in my heart that (after some trying times) I could look back on and recognize. I could see that Christ was the Friend of sinners and the Balm of Gilead. It probably saved my life quite literally.

This is not to say that I no longer failed Coach Evans. Au contraire, mon frère. Like Jean Valjean who quickly repaid the bishop’s grace with another grave sin in Les Misérables, I let him down in major ways at least twice more. But, that is not the point. My feelings toward him were positively and substantially reoriented. Because he represented God to me, I felt I could trust God in what would (a couple of years later) turn out to be the darkest period of my life. With no conditions or expectations. Not an emphasis on making me better but an emphasis on going from dark to light. Death to life.

Another Summer Ends: ITunesU Playlist

It has been a while since I've updated our ITunesU Mockingsyllabus, so consider this some last-minute beach listening pleasure for all of you who are looking for a way to pass the time putting the finishing touches on your tan. For all of you who want to broaden the repertoire of your innocuous Cocktail banter by adding "relative successes of the Vietnam War" to Original Sin, Law/Gospel and the bound will, this collection is for you.

1. History of the International System: James Sheehan, Stanford
In our polarized world of sound-bite partisanship, it is instructive and humbling to actually learn about how complicated and difficult the modern political system has become. This class will make you think twice (or for the first time) the next time you read Nicholas Kristof or Glen Beck.

2. Reading the Decalogue: Wheaton
God knows that this will not be the last word on His (in)famous 10, but this collection of differing interpretations of the 10 Commandments within different theological systems is required listening for anyone who is interested in the way the concept of the Law has been utilized in theology throughout history. Of particular interest to us are the lectures on Luther, Calvin, Lancelot Andrewes and Barth. On the whole, and for what it's worth, it confirmed my suspicions of Calvin, further confused me about Barth, deepened my appreciation of Luther and gave creedence to the argument that "morality" is the real (and unfortunate) Anglican heritage. Listen to it and see what you think!


3. Aesthetics: Jeffrey Wattles, Kent State University
From Plato to Derrida, this class helps illustrate that there is neither a spoon nor a line between the questions raised by theology and philosophy.


4. Christ and Human Thought: Cornelius van Til, Westminster Theological Seminary
This is an example of the way the word "theologian" used to be synonymous with "polymath." The audio is a little weak, but this is well worth the effort.

5. Worldview Everlasting: Revd. Jonathan Fisk
Ever been embarassed by your inability to explain the theological and pastoral significance of the Genus Maiestaticum? If so, there is good news: you no longer have to live in fear or shame. While not technically an offering from ITUnesU--yet--Rev. Fisk (whom some of you may have met at the recent Mockingbird conference) has a 10 minute video podcast that will make all of your wildest dreams come true.

Well, that's about it. I would love to hear of any classes you all have found helpful and/or interesting. Day-by-day, you too can atone for the time you spent perfecting your foosball goalie shot (see below) instead of applying yourself to more "traditional" educational opportunities.

Another Week Ends: Summoned Lives, Dwight Gooden, Anne Rice, Getting Low, Swimming the Tiber, Kurosawa and Rossellini

1. A few bits from the editorial "Summoned Lives" by David Brooks last week, in which he compares two ways of life: The Well-Planned Life (endorsed, ironically - or not so ironically - by a "serious Christian") and The Summoned Life. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out which one we gravitate toward:

"People who think in this [Summoned Life] mode are skeptical that business models can be applied to other realms of life. Business is about making choices that maximize utility. But the most important features of the human landscape are commitments that precede choice — commitments to family, nation, faith or some cause. These commitments defy the logic of cost and benefit, investment and return. 

The person leading the Well-Planned Life emphasizes individual agency, and asks, “What should I do?” The person leading the Summoned Life emphasizes the context, and asks, “What are my circumstances asking me to do?” 

In America, we have been taught to admire the lone free agent who creates new worlds. But for the person leading the Summoned Life, the individual is small and the context is large. Life comes to a point not when the individual project is complete but when the self dissolves into a larger purpose and cause. 

2. In the Wall Street Journal, 1986 Mets pitcher Dwight Gooden, a childhood hero of mine, reflecting on his career and the problem of internal and external expectations (ht WDR):
[CONTINUE READING]

god is Law

On May 24, 1728, John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, wrote:

In the evening, I went very unwillingly to a society in Aldersgate Street, where one was reading Luther’s Preface to the Epistle to the Romans. About a quarter before nine, while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation; and an assurance was given me that he had taken away my sins, mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.

If Wesley were to read today's news, then somewhere (or, more appropriately, somewhen:) he would be crying. In an article entitled Claremont Seminary Reaches beyond Christianity, the LA Times reports: In a bow to the growing diversity of America's religious landscape, the Claremont School of Theology, a Christian institution with long ties to the Methodist Church, will add clerical training for Muslims and Jews to its curriculum this fall, to become, in a sense, the first truly multi-faith American seminary.

In a similar article in USA Today, Rabbi Mel Gottlieb helpfully clarifies: "God is the God of all people, and we want to get back to the notion of treating people the way you'd want to be treated,"Gottlieb said. "That is the basic principle of all religions, instead of an entity that divides people and creates friction and acrimony."

Where to begin? Well, from a purely sociological perspective, this and other movements attempting to increase awareness among the world’s “great religions” are wholeheartedly welcomed. People should continue to strive for that gold star we all coveted in kindergarten next to “gets along well with others.” However, from a theological perspective, there is a tragic irony that underlies this move; while we would affirm with Gottlieb that “God is the God of all people,” following Luther, “to seek God apart from Jesus Christ—that is the devil.” This is why we endeavor with the Apostle Paul, “to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified”(1 Cor. 2:2), because as much as we may want to believe that it "comes in peace," outside of Jesus, this abstract god is, in fact, our enemy.

In his book, Martin Luther's Theology: A Contemporary Interpretation, Oswald Bayer explains: [outside of the Crucified One] God is at enmity with me as the dark, utterly distant and, at the same time, utterly close power—consuming, burning, oppressively near. God hides himself within that almighty power that works in life and death, love and hate, preserving life and removing life, fortune and misfortune, good and evil, in short, working everything in everyone, and we cannot extricate ourselves from having a relationship with him.”(4)

[CONTINUE READING]

I've Been Consulting My WWJD Bracelet All Day And It Just Won't Answer Me!

From a USA Today article entitled "Choice Bus Shows Students Two Sides Of Education":


Anderson says, "I want to be somebody who makes something out of my life and not be in prison. I tell kids to think about what kind of child you want your mother to have, a prison child or someone who makes good choices in life." (Yikes. Good luck, kids!)

Superhero Undergraduates And The Culture Of Overachievement

From a rather frightening article in the recent Harvard Alumni Magazine entitled "Nonstop: Today's Undergraduates Do 3,000 Things At 150 Percent". We talk a lot on this site about the perils/realities of achievement-based identity (justification by works), yet after reading this article, one honestly wonders how much further we as Americans can take it. While the article approaches the "crackberry" phenomenon from an understandably Harvard-centric perspective, we could easily substitute "New Yorker" for "Harvard undergraduate" - or "undergraduate at any remotely competitive college" or "high school student" or "30something suburbanite" or almost anything else, for that matter. Ernest Becker would have a field day... The entire thing is worth reading, but here are a couple of excerpts (the section on "snowplow parenting" is particularly insightful/alarming):

“I’m more terrified of being bored than busy,” [one Harvard undergraduate student] explains. “Though I’m scared I’ll work myself into a pile of dust if I don’t learn when to stop.”

[CONTINUE READING]

Interesting Quote from Alfie Kohn

From the prominent author/education expert's 2001 book Punished By Rewards: The Trouble With Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise and Other Bribes (great title! ht Ethan Richardson):

"Letting [students] know their performance is going to be evaluated is sometimes said to provide 'accountability'--a buzzword in both the public and private sectors--and to push people to do their best. Once again, however, control backfires. When people think they will be evaluated, their intrinsic motivation suffers--even if no reward is offered for doing well, and even if the evaluation turns out to be positive. Performance too, declines, especially on tasks demanding creativity. In fact, anytime we are encouraged to focus on how well we are doing at something, it is less likely that we will like the activity and keep doing it when given a choice."

Offended by Jesus

I was offended by grace last night.

My wife was reading the story of Jesus interacting with Zacchaeus from the Jesus Storybook Bible to our 6 month-old daughter. Usually, children’s bibles are filled with simple moralistic truisms, but this particular bible is spectacular in its ability to point to Jesus and his Gospel in every single story. I highly recommend it to parents who aren’t trying to raise mean little fundamentalists.

Back to the offense. As my wife read the story I found myself hating Zacchaeus because he was exploiting the poor. I was imagining him taking double taxes from elderly couples, letting his buddies off the hook of their taxes, and wasting the hard-earned money of hard-working people so he could live in luxury. It’s no wonder that people were shocked when Jesus went to his house for dinner.

No Christian wants to be on the side of Pharisees. They are the poster-children for cranky, up-tight, legalists who got Jesus killed. But there I was last night siding with the Pharisees against the tax collectors: “Jesus, you can’t associate with this man who exploits the marginalized. You have to preach against him, not eat dinner with him. This is your chance to really show that God is FOR the oppressed and beaten-down. Attack their oppressor."

I thought of Madoff going to prison for 150 years. I wanted the equivalent of that for Zacchaeus. That would be justice.

And then Jesus's message got through: grace is for the oppressed AND the oppressor, God gives me mercy and NOT justice, and God resists the proud BUT gives grace to the humble.

Thanks, Jesus Storybook Bible, for making Jesus’ message so simple and clear: "Salvation has come to this house because I have come to seek and to save what was lost."

Advice For Theological Students: 10 Steps To A Brilliant Career

I couldn't resist sharing this post (from another blog) with the M'bird community. I feel it rings a little too true as far as my life is concerned.

1. As a theological student, your aim is to accumulate opinions – as many as you can, and as fast as possible. (Exceptional students may acquire all their opinions within the first few weeks; others require an entire semester.) One of the best ways to collect opinions is to choose your theological group (“I shall be progressive,” or “I will be evangelical,” or “I am a Barthian”), then sign up to all the opinions usually associated with that social group. If at first you don’t feel much conviction for these new opinions, just be patient: within twelve months you will be a staunch advocate, and you’ll even be able to help new students acquire the same opinions.

2. At the earliest possible opportunity you should also form an opinion about your favourite theological discipline: that is, you should choose your specialisation. To communicate this choice to others, you should dismiss as trivial or irrelevant all other disciplines: the systematic theologian should teach herself to utter humorous remarks about the worth of “practical” theology, while the New Testament student should learn to hold forth emphatically on the dangers of systematic theology; and so on.

3. As far as possible, you should try to avoid all non-theological interests or pursuits. All your time and energy should be invested in reading important books and discussing important ideas. (Novels in particular should be avoided, as they are a notorious time-waster, and they furnish you with no new opinions.)

4. Every successful theological student must master the proper vocabulary. All theological conversations should be peppered with these termini technici (e.g. “Only a demythologised Barthian ontology can subvert the différance of postmodern theory and re-construe the analogia entis in terms of temporal mediation”). The less comprehensible and more sibylline the sentence uttered, the better. There are some stock-in-trade terms that are de rigueur (e.g. perichoresis, imago Dei, Heilsgeschichte, Bullsgeschichte), but the really outstanding student should find creative ways to deploy a wide range of foreign polysyllabic words. Phrases of Latin, Greek or German derivation are particularly prized. (Those of Hebrew of Syriac extraction should be used more sparingly – they are usually greeted with some puzzlement, or with cries of “Gesundheit!”)

5. Now that you’re a theological student, you will discover that the world is filled with people who don’t share your new opinions. Every conversation should thus be viewed as an opportunity to persuade others of their simple-mindedness and to convert them to a better understanding. If you’re feeling shy about this, you should start by practising on your family and closest friends. And it’s not always necessary to engage in a full-blown discussion; at times a single Latin term or a knowing smirk is all that’s required to demolish another person’s argument.

6. Were you raised in a conservative Christian family? If so, your theological education provides you with the perfect opportunity for rebellion. The benefits of theological rebellion should not be underestimated: rejecting all your parents’ religious opinions allows you both to assert your independence and to imply that your parents are backward and naïve. In this respect, theological education can be every bit as effective as smoking cannabis or moving in with your boyfriend: but without all the bad smells.

7. Every true theologian is an avid collector of books. The day you became a theological student, you entered a race to amass a personal library larger and more impressive than those of your peers. Books should be acquired as quickly and as indiscriminately as possible; second-hand books are even better, since they give the appearance of having been read, which can save you a great deal of time.

8. When you are asked to preach in a parish, you should take the opportunity to display the advantages of theological education. Every good sermon should quote the words of some great theologian (a “great German theologian” is even better). And the phrase “the original Greek says…” should be used sparingly but effectively – perhaps just two or three times in a sermon.

9. The goal of theological education is a good career: preferably an academic career, although in some cases you might have to settle for pastoral ministry (or worse, just a regular job). It’s never too early to get your career on track: every essay, every conversation with a professor, every question you ask in class – these are the opportunities to show the professor how deeply you share their opinions, and how superior your own insights are to those of your classmates. In all circumstances you should revere, admire and emulate your professors. Even if they are neither wise nor virtuous, your goal is to become their perfect reflection, mirroring back to them their own opinions, preferences and prejudices. To show that you are the professor’s true protégé: this is the beginning of wisdom, and the bedrock of any good career.

10. Under no circumstances should you resort to old-fashioned pieties like daily prayer and Bible-reading. There are far too many important things to be thinking about, and far too many important things to be reading. (Church attendance is acceptable, however, since it gives you the opportunity of improving your pastor’s theological education.)