Archive for April 1st, 2004

Thinking About Learning

Posted April 1, 2004 By Dave Thomer

Education was a paramount concern for John Dewey during his career, as can be seen from some of his book titles: The Child and the Curriculum, The School and Society, Democracy and Education, and Experience and Education all concerned themselves chiefly with the topic. At the University of Chicago, he taught not only in the Philosophy department, but in Pedagogy as well. With his wife, he ran a model school at the university in which he could implement and test his theories; it was the removal of his wife from her position that led Dewey to leave Chicago for Columbia. Today, Dewey’s theories are still debated in professional academic literature, discussed in education programs, and even occasionally remarked on outside purely academic circles. Unfortunately, both in Dewey’s time and now, those positions are frequently mischaracterized and set up as straw men.

Dewey’s education theory was not merely focused on technical questions of curriculum and formal schooling. In Democracy and Education, he uses education in its broadest sense, as the fundamental activity of individual and social life. To understand this, it is necessary to explore the manner in which Dewey defines life. That which is living engages in an active effort to sustain and perpetuate itself, making use of its surroundings in a continuing attempt to achieve this goal. Nonliving objects are passive – they do not respond to changes in their environment with an expenditure of energies designed for self-preservation. If a force is bearing down on a rock, and the force is great enough to break the rock, the rock simply breaks; it does not attempt to shift or redirect the force so that its continued coherence is no longer at risk. Plants will send out roots to seek for water and move their leaves toward light sources; animals will seek out and even store food. Dewey describes growth as the restructuring of experience and the use of available resources in a process of self-perpetuation and self-renewal. Life strives to grow; it changes itself to overcome obstacles and take advantage of available opportunities. When growth stops completely, life ends. For human beings, growth is not merely a question of physical survival, but of intellectual and emotional flourishing – we grow in our ability to understand our surroundings, in our capability to act on and alter our environment; in doing so we develop and fulfill new potential not just for ourselves, but for the community to which we belong. For the individual, preparing for and experiencing these opportunities for growth is education.
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Not the Brightest Bulb

Posted April 1, 2004 By Dave Thomer

If you, for some reason, have found yourself wondering about the state of my gardening skills, let me try and sum it up for you:

I am such a rotten gardener that the plants I try and kill end up thriving.

A little stage setting is perhaps in order. When we moved into this house last year, the front walk had a small garden to the side of it, in which numerous plants were converting carbon dioxide to oxygen and generally having a merry old time. These plants didn’t totally appeal to Pattie and me, and quite frankly we weren’t sure exactly how each one was supposed to be maintained, but as new homeowners we had many, many other fish to fry – not least of which was that the back yard contained some truly tenacious plant forms that I am still unconvinced did not originate from another planet. (I’ve been checking the Mars Rover pictures very closely to see if I can find any of these things’ forebears, let me tell you.) So we neglected that front yard for a month or two.

This was exactly the opportunity a battalion of weeds had been waiting for. They started sprouting, and pretty soon they were starting to crowd us off that front walk. Another week or two, I think they would have evolved legs, crawled out of the dirt, and body-blocked us from getting into the house. So one morning I dutifully went out and yanked every piece of greenery I could find. I pulled, I dug, I yanked, and when I was done I sprayed that dirt repeatedly with Super Duper Weed and Plant Killer. Then, and only then, I replanted the ground with grass seed.

And not any grass seed, mind you. No, I consulted experts like my parents. Now, the house I grew up in had, and I am being totally honest here, one of the nicest back yards on my block. It damned well better, since my mom kicked us out of the nice air-conditioned house on many a summer day to cut grass or pull weeds or prune hedges or whatever the heck one does in a garden. So I thought I was on pretty safe ground getting a recommendation from them. “Get ryegrass,â€? they said. What the heck, I said, if the lawn doesn’t work out, I can toss the leftover seed in my bread machine. Read the remainder of this entry »

Opening the Barn Door

Posted April 1, 2004 By Earl Green

It’s easy for city folk like us to laugh heartily at the antics resulting from taking a couple of millionaire heiresses and dropping them into the middle of a farm community. I have to admit, I passed up my opportunity to watch The Simple Life on Fox, but it had more to do with my general dislike of reality shows than anything. I didn’t know who the show’s two stars were, but I was more than aware of the nearby city of Altus.

Where the actual so-called simple life is concerned, though, I can more than relate to being a fish out of water. The thought of being a part of that life never occurred to me until one evening in 1998, when the woman who wasn’t even yet my fiancee’ asked me if I wanted to be part-owner of a horse. Quite innocently, my response was, “Which part?” Curiously enough, she didn’t press the matter further. (I thought it was a valid question.)

Now, six years later, I’m married to her. And I’m not the part owner of a horse. I’m the owner of four horses. And our four horses live on my in-laws’ farm with about sixteen or seventeen other horses. On Sundays, to pay off the “debt” incurred by having my wife’s parents board and feed our critters, we show up early in the morning and often stay until late that night to feed the horses, haul hay, clean stalls, do some grooming, and generally admire their beauty. Read the remainder of this entry »

The Law on Terror

Posted April 1, 2004 By Dave Thomer

One of the themes you often hear from the Bush Administration and its supporters regarding their homeland security policies is a criticism of those who would emphasize the role of law enforcement in fighting terrorism. For example, Vice President Dick Cheney said in a March speech:

Senator [John] Kerry has questioned whether the war on terror is really a war at all. … In his view, opposing terrorism is far less of a military operation and far more of an intelligence-gathering, law-enforcement operation. That approach has been tried before and proved entirely inadequate to protect the American people from the terrorists who are quite certain they’re at war with us.

The implication is that these law enforcement proponents are not as serious about terrorism as the current administration, who recognize the need for decisive military action against those that would harm American citizens. As someone who agreed with the post-September 11 military action against the Taliban in Afghanistan but opposed the invasion of Iraq, I am unsurprisingly ambivalent about our current aggressive approach. I am unambivalent in thinking that Cheney and others are far too dismissive of the role of a law enforcement approach to counterterrorism. Read the remainder of this entry »