Archive for January 4th, 2006

The Deadline Twilight Zone

Posted January 4, 2006 By Dave Thomer

Today is a day I am so glad I didn’t pursue a career in newspapers. The West Virginian coal mine tragedy was compounded by a lapse in communication that led families and the public to think for three hours or so that most of the miners had survived, when in reality only one did. The timing of the events could not have been worse from a newspaper perspective. The initial word of survivors hit around midnight Eastern time, right as East Coast newspapers were hitting their deadlines. So many of them scrambled to get the news into their Thursday editions; unfortunately for them, they were rather successful. The corrected information didn’t start reaching anyone until around 2:30, 3:00 in the morning, by which point the editions had been printed. All most East Coast papers could do was update their web sites and know that they were sending out a horribly wrong front page.

The Philadelphia Inquirer ran a short piece on its site tonight trying to answer the question How did we get it wrong? It’s a fairly short piece, with less information than I’d like. It does include a link to a larger Editor & Publisher piece, and Inquirer blogger Daniel Rubin has a much more substantial post on the subject which includes a link to an even more critical piece on the Columbia Journalism Review‘s site.

Now, it sure does look like this is a sourcing nightmare, probably compounded by the deadline. But when the governor’s making announcements, there are problems all around. And I do hope that this doesn’t fuel the idea that the media have no business reporting on tragedies like this. I know there are problems of sensationalism and story selection, but those are problems of execution, not concept. Media coverage of these stories help remind us of our connections and show us a glimpse of how people outside our own circles deal with challenging circumstances. It has occurred to me a few times that the energy that lets me write and publish these words is produced in part by men like those miners; in a very real way, their sacrifice was on my behalf. And I’m not sure I, or my fellow citizens, have valued their contribution enough, in terms of the wages we’re willing to support or the safety measures we’re willing to demand – and pay for. The trick will be to keep that in mind once the shock to the system wears off.

Filed in Culture and Media

Dewey Watch: Manners and Education

Posted January 4, 2006 By Dave Thomer

When I was looking for the Dewey misquote that formed the launching pad for the “Think for Themselves� post, one of the places I found the quote was an article by Amber Pawlik advocating home schooling. The author offers a number of quotes from Dewey’s writings – and unlike the “think for themselves� line, the other passages are actually cited. What is lacking is any sense of context.

For example, Pawlik calls Dewey the “father of progressive education,� and then offers a quote from Experience and Education:

Visitors to some progressive schools are shocked by the lack of manners they come across. One who knows the situation better is aware that to some extent their absence is due to the eager interest of children to go on with what they are doing. In their eagerness they may, for example, bump into each other and into visitors with no word of apology.

What Pawlik does not mention is that Experience and Education was specifically written to criticize both traditional schooling and the dominant strains of progressive education of the period. Dewey criticizes both approaches as falling prey to an Either-Or dualism that demands either rigid authoritarian control or completely unstructured indulgence of the child. And the very next lines after the passage Pawlik cites demonstrate this:

One might say that this condition is better than a display of merely external punctilio accompanying intellectual and emotional lack of interest in school work. But it also represents a failure in education, a failure to learn one of the most important lessons of life, that of mutual accommodation and adaptation. Education is going on in a one-sided way, for attitudes and habits are in process of formation that stand in the way of the future learning that springs from easy and ready contact and communication with others. (Later Works, Vol. 13, Page 38.)

I believe that the other quotes Pawlik provides are similarly incomplete, because she makes the same mistake that so many other critics of Dewey do. She assumes that because Dewey criticizes the idea of learning facts by rote, he is also criticizing the idea of requiring students to know anything. Instead, Dewey is making an observation that I think almost every student has from time to time. When education is simply an exercise in memorization, so that you can put the right answers on a test, the odds are pretty good you’re going to forget a lot of the information once the test is over, especially if you can’t see any reason to use the information. Dewey is looking for ways to make the material relevant and intersting to students, so they’ll be inclined to retain more of it. What decent teacher doesn’t think that’s a good idea?

Filed in Philosophy