What Are We Learning in English Class?

I suspect the taste for self-consciously ironic cliché and the general paucity of intellectual and moral brilliance in the North American media these days has something to do with 20+ years of increasingly bad “language arts” and English classes, among other things. While English inevitably has to be taught as a basic communicative tool at the lower end of the student ability spectrum, the increasing focus at the higher end on “media literacy” and “cultural literacy," i.e. thematically organized “critical thinking” about commercial and political rhetoric, seems to have occurred mostly at the expense of actual literacy, i.e. learning to read and write well by studying the work of a variety of excellent and challenging writers while reading and writing as much as possible. Speaking from my own experience and biases, I'd like to suggest that the latter inculcates a healthy and respectful skepticism; the former, cynicism and paranoia. One helps create an individual who is judicious, imaginative and capable of appreciation as well as critique; the other implicitly associates sincerity with gullibility, and fosters a reflexive (defensive?) attitude of boredom and incredulousness--of having "seen it all" already. One teaches the value of informed opinion and reasoned argument, while the other is incapable of distinguishing between the two, and tends to breed adults who have no time for either insofar as these concern anyone unlike themselves.

Among participants in the North America Media Experience, the only phrase that could possibly be uttered more frequently than "That's offensive!" (which differs from "That hurts my feelings" in subtle but important ways) is "It's funny because it's stupid." Both are hostile to whatever it is that elevates human life above the naked horror of two-thirds of a fairy tale followed by a bloodbath, or, worse, a melodrama in which churlish and self-righteous crybabies live and die in banality, hounded by institutions they are powerless to influence or understand. Whatever the soul is or isn't, a human being isn't much without a brain, a heart and a backbone.

In any event, it's probably a good idea to encourage exceptional students to become exceptional readers and writers, rather than ostensibly average coasters who are exceptionally mad at Dead White Males, Coca Cola and the cosmetics industry. Some of them will probably figure this stuff out on their own, but many of them won't. And if English class must have a political agenda, maybe it ought to be dictated by great books and not the other way around. Shakespeare, Austen, Joyce and Tolkien will be here long after today's "constructivists" and tomorrow's "connectivists" have been buried and forgotten.

(Image from www.urbanarmy.org.)

The Courtesy of Intellectual Debate

Critics of postmodernism and poststructuralism, such as Alan Sokal, Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt, Frederick Turner, Joseph Carroll, etc. have been criticized themselves for making straw men of their opponents' arguments. I think this criticism is valid to some extent: Turner's pointed critique of the postmodern avant garde in Culture of Hope and Carroll's treatment of "textualism and indeterminacy" in "Theory, Anti-Theory and Empirical Criticism" do tend to reduce much of the past 40 years of literary theory to grouchy caricatures. However, after reading some of the Marxist New Historicists on Shakespeare, such as Stephen Greenblatt, Jean Howard, Stephen Orgel, and Richard Levin, I couldn't help but notice that they also rely heavily on constructs such as the bourgeois straw man, the Western metaphysical straw man, the positivist straw man, the formalist straw man, the capitalist straw man, etc. Orgel and Greenblatt, in particular, see fit to mock and sneer at these as well.

Intellectual debate should be conducted like a martial art. Boxers touch gloves before striking their first blows, and often hug when a match is over. Karate fighters bow, showing mutual respect and proud submission to their tradition. Such games involve serious risk, but are as much an art and a dance as a "fight" per se. All martial arts have rules against hitting below the belt, and specify serious consequences for unsportsmanlike conduct. Once upon a time, scholarship had a similar code of conduct, if not camaraderie, that involved disinterestedness, objectivity, self-effacement, and neutrality. In recent years, this has been criticized (sometimes with good reason) as an ideological mystification "naturalizing" racism, sexism, the covert pursuit of class interests, and political partisanship.* Regardless, I think that, at the very least, scholars of all stripes can and should work harder to be courteous, civilized, and to acknowledge their own biases without resorting to demagoguery.

Politics, schmolitics--we're humans first and ideologues second. If the 20th century taught us anything, it's that even the most apparently humane political ideologies can end up machine-gunning each other into a ditch. If humanities scholars, of all people, can't have a civil conversation, then we might as well all give up and go home to pursue biochemistry degrees or sell carpet cleaner and credit cards over the telephone.

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*"Argument," according to a related line of thinking, is symptomatic of patriarchal aggression and ought to be replaced by "discussion," wherein no one, presumably, attempts to advance a logical position with the aim of changing another's mind.

(Image from chas-ma.com.)

MTV's 16 and Pregnant

According to MSN News, MTV is making a reality show called 16 and Pregnant. The programme was apparently inspired by the popularity of Juno (a film I hated) and will feature pregnant teenagers whose experiences are documented on camera and aired on MTV.

As any mother who takes her job seriously will explain, getting and being pregnant are the easiest parts of being a mom. The real challenges (and rewards) come afterward, along with late-night feedings, diaper changes, fevers, diarrhoea, trips to the emergency room, headaches, tears, frustration, a thousand tiny betrayals and reconciliations, frequent disagreements with one's partner (if he's around), disruption, improvisation, constant second-guessing, and, most of all, an often crushing and nearly overwhelming sense of total responsibility for the life of another human being.

A better idea for a show would be to send cameras to document the lives of 19 year old single parents of toddlers, who work all day at dead end service sector jobs while mouth-breathing daycare staff raise their kids for them, or their conversations with patronizing social workers who don't have an iota of genuine feeling for these women or their children. Maybe the show could also interview young fathers who have abandoned their kids and ask them how it feels to know that their children will grow up wondering why their fathers didn't love them, or that they are unlikely to ever meet their grandchildren, who also stand a decent chance of growing up fatherless.

Of course, MTV would never encourage today's teens, pregnant or otherwise, to grow up and take life seriously. Teenagers and childish twentysomethings can be persuaded to buy all kinds of crap they don't need, while hard-nosed adults who actually have to think about where their money goes probably give far less of it to the vacuous, opportunistic fashion peddlers at MTV.

I wonder if we'll see 16 year old girls getting pregnant in order to have a shot at making it onto national television. Let's hope today's young women are smarter than that.

(Image from Jupiter Images)

Juno Was a Lousy Movie

SOAPBOX ALERT: I usually try to avoid both preaching and critiquing movies at TPM, but sometimes a guy's just gotta harangue. So here I go:

Juno is only barely a movie about bringing new life into the world. It's primarily a postmodern moral experiment to see if ironic, near-weightless characters can have their cake and eat it too. To achieve this, it has to abandon the traditional stuff of reproductive drama, like territoriality, responsibility, and the powerful, conflicting bonds that exist between lovers, parents and offspring, in favour of an idealized grrl-topia where men behave like passive, indulgent milquetoasts or sexual predators, and mothers-to-be are somehow empowered by acting like selfish, irresponsible babies themselves.

The infant that arrives at the film's end is passed off to Garner's character with hardly a tear (says Juno in the voiceover: "She was never really ours, anyway"), and comes off more like an afterthought or prop than an actual human being. This child is inexplicably delivered from a promising domestic situation in which both parents are present (and in love!) along with three biological grandparents and a committed step-spouse, and into the hands of a single mother who has demonstrably poor taste in men--the equivalent of this in poker would be to throw out an entire royal flush for a queen and a joker. No one with any real-life childbearing experience could write a movie in which allegedly sane people think and act this way.

Juno tacitly encourages young women to think that pregnancy is all about them. It isn't. Juno also falsely suggests that giving up a baby after carrying it around for 9 months isn't much harder than getting one's appendix out. Whether one is pro-choice or pro-life is irrelevant--everyone should be pro-responsibility and pro-reality, and Juno is neither. It is a travesty, a celebration of narcissism and immaturity, and it's sad that real teenagers who don't know any better are going to take cues from this ridiculous film.

Blinkered selfishness and intelligent self-interest are not the same thing at all. The sooner more feminist-influenced artists figure this out, the sooner they'll stop making shitty movies like Juno.

(Image from www.dorkgasm.com)

No One Wants to Look Dumb

Faze (v.): to disturb, daunt, or unsettle, from the Middle English fesen, meaning to frighten or drive away.

This word is not spelled p-h-a-s-e. If a young child, a supermarket cashier with a grade 6 education or a non-native speaker of English made a mistake like this, I wouldn't bat an eyelash. To find it on MSN News, a site that has recently taken to advertising itself with the arrogant slogan "No one wants to look dumb," is just irritating.

If you don't want to look dumb, MSN, perhaps you should encourage your editorial team to crack a book once in a while.

(For the record, it's not pronounced "fizz," either. Image from thechaly.files.wordpress.com)

The Golden Turd: Philip Pullman, Hide Your Face

I try not to rip up movies too often on my blog. For one, it seems like every dime-a-dozen blogger thinks s/he's a film critic. Also, I prefer to read posts which point out and praise admirable creative efforts (like this week's post at Quammy Blog) rather than those that just growl and complain. However, I've been holding this in for weeks so as not to pollute the Christmas spirit, and I have to get it off my chest.

I love Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass series, and everyone knows that the movie is never as good as the book. So when I went into the cinema, I was expecting to be a little bit disappointed. Instead, I was disgusted, enraged, and insulted. I hope Pullman got paid well to let Chris Weitz molest and butcher his beautiful story, because molest and butcher it he did.

Almost everything that makes the book believeable--all the subtle and clever touches, the wonderfully realized characters, the politics, the intrigue, and the philosophy are completely left out. Weitz is an inept writer and a lousy director. He also obviously thinks the average moviegoer is an imbecile.

Take the film's depiction of the Magesterium, for instance. In the book, the master of Jordan College at Oxford tries to poison Lord Asriel because he (Asriel) is a dangerous megalomaniac, and the aleithiometer has indicated that his actions will have dire consequences. In the film, a snivelling representative of the Magesterium tries to poison a far more heroic (and physically dimunitive) Lord Asriel, played by Daniel Craig at his most smug, because he's heroically insubordinate and they're craven and power hungry. Realpolitik has nothing to do with it--instead, we get a simplistic, cooky cutter villain/hero relationship that we've all seen a thousand times.

In the book, Iorek Byrnison's armour is hidden in the basement of a local priest's house. In the movie, it's hidden in the basement of the local office of the Magesterium. This would be splitting hairs if the Magesterium represented the church, the heart and soul of any community, like it does in the book (it doesn't). Rather than contrasting the innate honour of one species (armoured bears) with the opportunism of another (humans), Weitz inexplicably lets the baaaad Magesterium take the moral fall for the townspeople, sparing his audience from having to ask itself any questions about human nature, right or wrong.

The role of the Magesterium in the film is much like that of Snidely Whiplash from Dudley Do-right, or of Shredder and Krang in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon: if it's bad, they're behind it, and they're behind it because they're the bad guys. In the book, the Magesterium are convincing because they honestly think that they're protecting humanity from itself. Their actions are politically and morally complex, unlike in the movie, where they're just greedy and evil. This is essential to the problematizing of authority that forms the backbone of the books' argument, including its critique of organized religion (it's still a little postmodern for my taste, but Pullman is such a good writer that it just works somehow). The movie dumbs all this down until it's unrecognizable, and by making the Magesterium generally responsible for every bad thing that happens in the film, Weitz removes the emphasis on human free will that is so important in a story supposing to be about the Fall of Man.

Another example: Iorek Byrnison is supposed to have been banished from Svalbard (the kingdom of the Panserbjorne, who throughout the movie are annoyingly referred to as "ice bears") for murdering a fellow armoured bear who was drugged by Iofur Rakinson, resulting in his refusal to back down from a fight to the death over a female bear. In the movie, Iorek is banished because he was defeated in single combat by Iofur Rakinson himself (with a different name, more on that in a moment). Not only does this make Iorek out to be a weakling, it doesn't even make sense--a society in which rank were determined by single combat and all the losers were banished would quickly end up with only one member. Would it have been all that hard to take an extra 20 seconds to get the back story right? They could have easily shaved the time off the silly, predictable 10 minute ice bridge crossing scene.

Changing Iofur Rakinson's (the evil bear's) name to "Ragnar Sturlusson" in order to avoid confusion with Iorek Byrnison (the good bear, voiced by an Ian McKellan who sounds like he should be put to sleep) insults the audience's intelligence further. Imagine if the Hollywood developers of Lord of the Rings had changed Sauron's name to "Beastor" in order to avoid confusion with Saruman. Any child who is morally and cognitively able to handle a character's jawbone getting ripped off and sent flying through the air in slow motion can probably manage the task of keeping track of that character's name, even if it does happen to start with the same letter as another character's name.

TGC cost $180 million to make. That's more than The Fellowship of the Ring, which was a far better movie. The two films are at polar opposites of the fantasy adaptation spectrum: the developers of LOTR cut corners by using a director and actors who were talented but (then) relatively unknown, and spent their money instead on state of the art special effects and a fantastic script that was accessible but faithful to its source. New Line spent what looks like their entire budget on an attempt to subdue TGC's viewers with the eminence of its cast, resulting in what may be the most expensive and star-studded B movie in cinematic history. The cheap CGI effects therein make Garfield 2 look like a cinematic masterpiece.

Philip Pullman should be ashamed, and Chris Weitz should be fired. The Golden Compass movie is vapid, tedious, confusing, violent, melodramatic, and dumb. It is poorly scripted, poorly conceived and poorly edited, and its sense of time is so badly out of synch with its sense of space that it feels more like a ride at Universal Studios than a theatrical release. It's the Cutthroat Island of children's fantasy: it misses the mark in every possible way. It mangles a beautiful and serious story to the point where it comes across as a cut-rate Harry Potter knockoff, and it is in no way worth the fuss kicked up by religious groups at the time of its release.

Anyone who decided to boycott this movie did Phillip Pullman a favour.

Baby Einstein, Hack Journalism

There's a short, terrible article by Alice Park in Time magazine this month. I will quote it here in full:

"How Not to Raise a Genius: Is Baby Einstein doing your child more harm than good?

"There are no shortcuts when it comes to learning, and that applies to becoming a prodigy as well. Popular videos such as the Baby Einstein and Brainy Baby series have attracted millions of parents eager to give their babies an intellectual leg up. But a recent study shows that these products might be doing more harm than good. Experts at the University of Washington reported early in August that for every hour each day that infants watched the kaleidoscope of changing images and music on these DVDs, they understood an average of seven fewer words than babies who did not use such products. 'The assumption is that stimulation is good, so more is better,' says Dr. Dimitri Christakis, a pediatrician and co-author of the study. 'But all the research to date shows that there is no such benefit.'

"That's hardly reassuring to parents who last year spent 200 million on the Baby Einstein series. They might consider instead the advice of the American Academy of Pediatrics, which recommends that infants under 2 not watch anything on a screen and instead just interact with parents."

If Alice Park had actually read the study mentioned in her article, instead of skipping right to the University of Washington's press release on it, she would understand that it did not specifically evaluate any Baby Einstein products at all. The authors of the study asked questions pertaining to the general category of "baby videos," rather than Baby Einstein in particular. Regardless of whether Park did not read the study or she simply did not understand it, this is still piss-poor journalism. I've come to expect nothing less from Time, which has disappointed me with every issue I've picked up in the last several months.

Additionally, there are a few other problems with the article worth pointing out. The pompously phrased idea that "there are no shortcuts when it comes to learning" is basically incoherent. It's not even possible to conceive of a "shortcut to learning" that would not itself warrant the description of "learning," albeit of a more efficient kind. Consider, for example, a sci-fi scenario in which babies have USB ports installed in their skulls allowing Disney to simply jack information directly into their brains via a neural-cybernetic interface. It's hard to imagine a shorter "shortcut" than this, but if the information were absent at first and then present afterward, the act by which the brain acquired it would still be called "learning."

My family owns one Baby Einstein video. I have watched My First Signs: See and Sign with Baby from beginning to end with my son, Jack, several times. Park's description of the video as a "kaleidoscope of changing images and music" hardly does it justice, except insofar as this might apply to any commonplace multimedia presentation (as seen, perhaps, by a time-travelling visitor from the 18th century). This mischaracterization further reveals the lack of care and attention with which the author has reviewed her source material.

A co-author of the study, Dr. Dimitri Christakis, is quoted as saying, "The assumption is that stimulation is good, so more is better." To whom does this assumption belong? To Disney? To parents? To the researchers who designed the study? It is not clear whether Christakis or Park gets credit for the irresponsible ambiguity of this statement, but when it is combined with the article's murky, unqualified use of data and the idea of a "kaleidscope of changing images" the impression made on the reader is like something out of A Clockwork Orange--a harrowing, psychedelic experience so unwholesome that it actually causes children to unlearn language at the rate of 1 word every 8.5 minutes.

Alice Park and Dr. Dimitri Christakis are right to claim that children are better off being spoken and read to by attentive mothers and fathers rather than plunked in front of the television set all day. To any thoughtful parent, this information should be self-evident and accessible by plain common sense. People who require an opportunistic, manipulative and ill-informed magazine article to convince them of its validity should probably think twice about having babies in the first place before they start worrying about raising geniuses.

I don't particularly care for the garish theme parks and neutered fairy tales of the Walt Disney corporation, but I have even less time for bad writing and bad thinking. I don't think Baby Einstein is going to raise our son in lieu of his mother and me--it's basically Sesame Street with classical music. Speaking more generally, I don't think watching a "baby video" once in a while is going to hurt him, either.

I would be more concerned if he wanted to start reading recent issues of Time magazine.

Saruman Does Not Approve

"Your love of the halflings' leaf has clearly slowed your mind."