Mr. Ramcat's Poem of the Day

NOW


Straddling Nothing

and Infinity is too much for the brain


Chaos: virgin rapists,

orgies in arenas of global economies,

random motive, unspeakable purpose,

blood ice freezing the mind,

strangling resisting voices


Make good choices.
Save your children.
Burn this world.


Jeremiah Ramcat
August 5, 2011

Quote of the Day

From Robert Butler's unpublished essay "Teaching Richard Wright in Prison" (2011)
The essay is scheduled for publication on the WRIGHT CONNECTION at www.hbw.ku.edu



        All too often when we teach our classes in conventional college settings we find lightly engaged students who come to us with little preparation or conviction and who therefore disappoint us with listless discussions and superficial papers and exams.  This rarely happens in prison classes where students have to overcome a grim prison environment which makes study difficult.  These students see learning as a way of transforming their lives and, when they enter our classes, they have done the reading with care and are ready for debate which is both spirited and productive.  The classroom for these students is not the dead routine it is for so many traditional students but instead a place where they can explore ideas, challenge their teachers and explore important issues.  It is a wonderful setting for human growth.

C. Liegh McInnis on American Education

McInnis' ideas have special relevance for our thinking about the sad state of public education in New Orleans, LA.

The following comments are my response to the article, “Unschoolers Learn What They Want, When They Want,” (http://www.cnn.com/2011/US/08/03/unschooling.sudbury.education/index.html), which was sent to me a couple of days ago.

Mostly, I am not against alternative types of schooling, whether it is homeschooling or any other program that a parent thinks will induce the best from their child. And I also realize that many children do learn many different ways, so I am not quick to minimize any form of learning. However, what often bothers me when alternative forms of schooling, such as homeschooling or charter schools, are presented or celebrated is how very basic facts are omitted for the sake of showing the alternative form in a better light. For instance, “Approximately 90% of Sudbury Valley’s graduates go on to college (compared with 69% of graduates from the public education system).” The problem with this statistic is that it does not consider two variables. One, parents who tend to opt for alternative schooling, such as homeschooling, charter, and private schools, tend to be more affluent with a higher level of education, which translates to their children being exposed to a more constructive or positive atmosphere regarding education as well as having a solid academic foundation developed in the home. (And this is true of most of my friends whose children attend African centered schools also.) Two, the top ten percent of public school graduates tend to perform at or equal to the same level as the top ten percent of alternative schooling graduates, and the common link is that these two groups have parents who invest the proper amount of time and effort. In contrast, then, what lowers the percentage of college enrollment for public school graduates is not the curriculum or the teaching but two very simple facts/variables. One, public schools must admit students with all types of learning and behavioral disorders whereas private and charter schools tend to have a very low number of students with learning and behavioral disorders unless they specialize in this area, and, two, public schools have a higher percentage of parents who, for whatever reason, do not invest the same time and effort with their children as the parents whose children perform in that aforementioned top ten percent. So, if we consider all factors/variables, it seems that the success of alternative schooling is not based on the curriculum or the teachers but on the types of parents who are able to enroll their children in various types of alternative schooling.

A second fallacy presented is that public school “…keeps trying to do what it can’t do, which is make every child learn everything in the whole wide world. It’s like heading toward a cliff.” Maybe I have not attended the same type of public school, but I have never experienced this. If by saying “learn everything in the whole wide world,” one means public school is designed, ideally and for the most part, to make a child a well-rounded being, then, yes, an effective education exposes a child to various aspects of life, working to show the common links in those various aspects, teaching the child how to find “hidden likenesses,” to use a Jacob Bronowski term, in seemingly unlike things, which enhances the child’s critical thinking ability. So, world history should coalesce with world literature or algebraic reading problems should coalesce with basic grammar, syntax, and semantic development. Again, my issue is not to minimize alternative schooling but to show the flaw in the premise that public schooling tends to expose children to needless information that they will never apply. The problem or hurdle for public school is that the focus on “high stakes” testing limits if not impairs the development of critical thinking because the emphasis is often on the answer and not how one arrives at the answer. So, many students graduate high school with some facts but limited knowledge, and knowledge is understanding how to use facts to improve one’s condition or situation. Yet, this emphasis on “high stakes” testing is not something that grew organically from public education but moreso is a reactionary, political element that serves mostly to widen the gap between rich and poor students.

Third, I return to the notion that education must be seen as a joint effort between parents and teachers. “They have, and I think this is true of [Sudbury] alumni in general, an incredible sense of who they are and how they work, and confidence in their abilities,” Sadofsky said. “Not that they know everything, but they know how to find what they need.” It seems that Sadofsky does not realize that this “sense” of knowing oneself and having “confidence” in one’s “abilities” is a trait that is planted and nurtured at home first and then affirmed through organized activities in the school. Therefore, I would argue that the reason the Sudbury alumni “in general” have “an incredible sense of who they are and how they work, and confidence in their abilities” is because, in general, they are the children in that top performing ten percent who would have had these traits developed initially by their parents regardless of attending public school or an alternative school. Accordingly, the second part of Sadofsky’s statement, “they know how to find what they need” is a trait/skill mostly developed by schooling, but teachers can only be effective in developing this trait or skill if the student has a constructive attitude, focus, and understanding of the academic process, which must be developed by the parent. So, again, this “incredible sense of who they are and how they work, and confidence in their abilities” is not unique to alternative schooling but is a trait that most students develop if they have parents who make the proper time and effort investment, which allows the teachers to develop and teach the child how to use those personal characteristics in developing academic and professional characteristics.

Let me be clear. Parents have a role, and teachers have a role in the effective development of a child’s academic being. However, the academic institution is being asked to fulfill the role of parent and teacher, which puts more responsibility and weight on the academic institution than it was designed to carry. Or, let me put it another way. In many inner city, high poverty areas, dilapidated housing exists for three reasons. One, the houses are old. Two, the people living in those houses are unable to afford proper maintenance. Three, which relates to this discussion, often there are more people living in the houses than the houses were designed to accommodate. A three bedroom house is not designed to accommodate seven to ten people. Those extra bodies are asking that house to do something it was not designed to do. This is the primary issue with our public schools. Yes, they are severely underfunded. I would argue that they are purposefully underfunded, but the main problem is that society is asking underpaid and overworked teachers to be parents as well. No matter how much of a great role model our favorite teacher was, that teacher was mostly affirming the values and sensibilities that the student was bringing to the classroom. If the student is not bringing certain values and sensibilities to the classroom, then the teacher is forced to spend valuable time teaching these values and sensibilities, which limits the amount of time spent exposing the student to the academics.

Finally, the four major issues for public schools are low teacher wages (which keep the schools from attracting highly qualified and invested teachers), not enough funding to decrease the classroom size as well as to add an assistant teacher to each classroom, poor funding and management of special education services for both special needs and gifted children, and an increasing number of uninvolved and uninvested parents that have negative attitudes (for various reasons) toward education, which is passed to the children, creating an adversarial relationship between parent and teacher as well as parent and child and is made worse by the employment of underpaid, overworked teachers. Even in a situation where a charter or private school states, “Give us your worst performing students from your worst areas,” often three of the four variables or hurdles facing public schools are removed. Again, because private and charter schools only admit a small percentage of the students that public schools must admit, there is a smaller classroom size, which provides more effective services to identify and service gifted and special needs students. Secondly, the teachers are less stressed, which creates improved morale in the classroom and between parent and teacher. Yet, where charter schools are concerned, this is done with public funds. Oh yeah, they don’t just want your children; they want the your tax dollars also. However, if one checks the statistics, one will realize that most charter schools do not achieve greater success than public schools, especially as it relates to the top ten percent of the public school students. So rather than creating these voucher systems for private and charter schools that only serve a select few students, how about cutting funding to prisons, defense, law enforcement, and the expense accounts of our elected officials and invest that money in education because every study proves that proper education not prisons decreases the crime rate. I don’t want every child properly educated because I love young people. I want every child properly educated because each child properly educated is one less person likely to rob me.

C. Liegh McInnis

Poem 68

So innocent is the blindness

Of chaos, its syllables

A slow music floating to a grave

Matter disintegrating

Like the taste of expensive time.

Observe. Supernatural explosions.

Dying is a dull progress

An impatient process

Of recovering

Moons as yet unborn.

Supernatural implosions.  Observe.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

July 28, 2011

Prelude to "Poem 68"

You want something

                                To play                                                                 riff on

                                Go play                                                                 “If you want something

                                Do play                                                                 to play with”

Psychopanting

Entity/Entergy

Ready/Really

Willing/Whaling

Empowered                                                                                       “go find yourself

Bonehouse                                                                                           a toy”

July 26, 2011

ON SEEING REALITY

 Wright, Ellison, and Plato’s Allegory of the Cave

In his observations about the films The Birth of a Nation and Intruder in the Dust, Ralph Ellison points indirectly to the truth about shadows, one of the main ideas in Plato’s dialogue with Glaucon regarding perception and the knowledge of what is true.  The essay “The Shadow and the Act” (The Reporter, December 6, 1949) places a serious philosophical problem within the context of mid-twentieth-century entertainment and the practice of ideology.  It is easy enough to see a correspondence between the chained prisoners in Plato’s allegory of the cave and the filmwatchers in the “cave” of the movie theater. One remembers James Baldwin’s telling us that the devil finds work in the darkness of the cinema. And although technology has enabled film to relocate itself from the cinema to the home, the “caveness” of watching remains intact. Spectators are enslaved, however briefly, by the shadows that pass before their eyes, shadows that are the product of someone’s designs.

Seven years before Ellison published his essay, Richard Wright had published an early version of “The Man Who Lived Underground” in Accent 2 (Spring 1942): 170-176. Ellison was indebted, despite his later protests, to this novella in conceptualizing his masterpiece Invisible Man (1952).  Like Plato, Wright was concerned with the vantage of the cave, the possibility of discriminating appearance from reality. Plato, Wright, and Ellison are motivated to enlighten us about the fragility of perception.

Concerned with invisibility as a topic for literature and sociology, Ellison proposed in his essay that

To direct an attack upon Hollywood would indeed be to confuse portrayal with action, image with reality.  In the beginning was not the shadow, but the act, and the province of Hollywood is not action, but illusion.  Actually, the anti-Negro images of the films were (and are) acceptable because of the existence throughout the United States of an audience obsessed with an inner psychological need to view Negroes as less than men.  Thus, psychologically and ethically, these negative images constitute justifications for all those acts, legal, emotional, economic and political, which we label Jim Crow.  The anti-Negro image is thus a ritual object of which Hollywood is not the creator, but the manipulator.

(“The Shadow and the Act” 267)

Ellison’s words foreshadow those pertaining to invisibility in the prologue of Invisible Man and provide a gloss on Wright’s investigation of appearance, reality, and the underground.  It is no surprise that Wright and Ellison should both have been interested in Dostoevsky’s cynical “Notes from Underground.”  Ellison refers to this work in the 1981 introduction for the Vintage International edition of his novel; Wright, as we know from studies of his life and work, had a profound interest in Dostoevsky and other Russian writers.

Ellison’s remarks about “inner psychological need” apply to D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915) and that film’s reduction of black people to the status of brutes and buffoons and to the retention in the film version of  Intruder in the Dust of William Faulkner’s belief that the Negro, however noble and human, must be seen as a person in need of white affirmation and salvation.  At the core of these films is perception and the nature of reality, the primary subject of Plato’s allegory in his discourse about the theoretical Republic; perception is the act being critiqued in Wright and Ellison’s use of race-based social interaction in the practiced American Republic. The three authors would have us question where the site of truth and knowledge should be located.

To expose the typical, problematic imagination of many non-black twentieth-century Americans, Wright and Ellison invert Plato’s ideas about knowing the difference between appearance and reality. They swerve pass Plato’s invisible realm of Ideas and punch material Reality in the face.  Truth appears in the underground, the basement, the cave not on the sun-lit surface of our world.  Wright and Ellison turn Plato’s absolutes into American instances of social relativity. Invisible Man, Jeffrey B. Leak argues, “has become an urtext, the literary point of origin for questions regarding twentieth-century African American cultural discourse and the formation of black masculinity” (31). Nevertheless, the urtext of that urtext is “The Man Who Lived Underground.”

According to Robin McNallie, we should recognize that the cave in “The Man Who Lived Underground” “is the opposite of Plato’s  ---that it is, in fact, connected oddly to both truth and renewal of life”(80).  For Ellison, the basement is a place of hibernation and pondering the uncertainty of the “truth” gathered from adventures in the upper world of reality.  McNallie claims Wright’s cave is “a womb in which Daniels begins a new and embryonic existence” (82), but we ought to remember that Fred Daniels gathers information about what might be true from the vantage of the underground.  He is killed in the womb. His ultimate undoing is his belief that people above ground wish to know the truth.  The nameless invisible man is far more canny; he knows truth is to be negotiated in the glare of 1,369 lights underground.  His hibernation is more embryonic and womblike; it is a covert preparation for the overt action Fred Daniels takes prematurely.

Navigating among Plato, Wright, and Ellison can be a most remarkable odyssey, a rewarding journey in interpretation.

References

Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. New York: Vintage, 1995.

___________. “The Shadow and the Act.” Shadow and Act. New York: Signet, 1966. 264-271.

Leak, Jeffrey B. Racial Myths and Masculinity in African American Literature. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2005.

McNallie, Robin. “Richard Wright’s Allegory of the Cave: ‘The Man Who Lived Underground.’ ” South Atlantic Bulletin 42.2 (1977): 76-84.

Plato.  The Republic.

Wright, Richard. “The Man Who Lived Underground.” Eight Men. New York: HarperPerennial, 1996. 19-84.

A Meaningful Life

I CHOSE TO TEACH AT HBCUs

                Whether I chose or was chosen to teach at HBCUs is an American knot, one that those who delight in philosophical problems might untie.  Near the end of my tour of duty in Vietnam in 1970, I received an invitation from Dr. N. J. Townsend, chairman of the Department of English at Tougaloo College, to join the faculty as an instructor.  I accepted it.  The opportunity to teach at my alma mater and give back four years of service in exchange for the four wonderful undergraduate years (1960-64) I spent there was more than merely attractive. Tougaloo College had instilled in its graduates a strong sense of obligation.  In the 1960s, as the 1960-61 catalogue informed us,  “great social ferment and rapid change” was occurring worldwide and there was “growing need for young men and women with intellectual ability and breadth of vision, with Christian motivation and discipline and with a spirit of outgoing goodwill toward all men.”  In the 1970s, there still existed a need to help in “an awakening of people who have been denied the privilege and opportunity for the good life.”  I felt obligated to help.

                Armed with a M.S. in English from the Illinois Institute of Technology, two years of courses at the State University of New York at Albany where I focused on the literature of the English Renaissance, and the discipline my serving in  the United States Army provided, I began  to teach courses in composition and literature.  My students, unlike those of my generation, were strongly influenced by what was left  unfinished in the declining years of the Civil Rights Movement and by the assertiveness implicit in the idea of Black Power.  They boldly challenged me to make whatever I taught them relevant.  Many of them thought my regard for Edmund Spenser and Shakespeare was an act of treason or a sign of slavish deference to their enemies. I understood, more than they guessed, that defiance was an integral and noble part of the learning process at Tougaloo, and I was beginning to understand the value of the pedagogy of the oppressed.  I quickly became the subversive instructor.  If my students rejected John Milton, I would teach them to write well and to think critically by close reading of LeRoi Jones’s essays in Home and his historical discourse in Blues People.  If The Scarlet Letter had nothing to say to them, Alice Walker’s The Third Life of Grange Copeland anchored them in the very heart of relevance and made them attentive.

                 My embracing the ideas the students had about relevance did not lead to my abandoning belief in standards of excellence in performance which transcend race or ethnicity or class; it did not lead to minimizing my interests in the works of Plato, Kenneth Burke and Michel Foucault; it led to demanding that students should digest Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Machiavelli.  Relevance changes as the conditions of American society change.  For teachers, the desire to truly empower students and the effort to devise effective way of doing so must remain constant. Change is inevitable, but it is not to be embraced without severe questioning.

 My students knew that I had high expectations of them. As I grew as a teacher, I began to appreciate the importance of being at once demanding and compassionate. A good teacher does not love his students. He simply refuses to allow them not to love themselves.  It has been rumored that one of my students told another he would take my courses “… even if I earn a ‘D.’ At least I will learn something.”

                From my thirty-two years of teaching at Tougaloo College and eight years of teaching at Dillard University I have learned much about American higher education, my colleagues in the profession of English, and the insidious idea that African American students who choose to attend Historically Black Colleges and Universities are innately less intelligent than those students who opt to attend other kinds of institutions.  The fact that we speak rarely of Historically White Colleges and Universities is a clue about what has continued to develop in the total  history of education in the United States.  In higher education in America, the hegemony of confirmative action prevails against any justice that might be discovered, through full disclosure, in affirmative action.              

                Two instances from my life history cast light on what is a central and continuing problem.  Once when I was driving him from Tougaloo College to the Jackson, Mississippi airport, A. Leon Higginbotham  asked me where I wanted to be in ten years.  I replied that I wanted to still be teaching at Tougaloo.  He was much disappointed in my answer, because he said he thought I would at least want to be at Harvard or Yale. Some years later after I had earned my doctorate at the University of Virginia, a historian who had earned his degrees at Yale asked why anyone with a prestigious degree from UVA would want to teach at Tougaloo.  I retorted with signifying anger: “Why do you with your prestigious degrees teach at so third-rate a school as the University of Southern Mississippi?”  On the one hand, it seems I was betraying the race and insulting the aspirations of the integration-drunk black upper middle class.  On the other, I was squandering the investment Mr. Jefferson’s university had made in me by teaching niggers and  untouchables.  Despite the promise contained in the election of Barack Obama, I am not convinced we should hastily conclude that the need for having HBCUs and exceptionally well-prepared scholars who desire to teach at such places has vanished from the American historical process.  Talk about a “post-race society” is only a clever and enslaving use of language. And all Americans have a pathological and patriotic love of being enslaved by the great God Capital in whom they trust.

                I never thought of teaching as merely a matter of employment or as a launching pad for ascent into fame as a critic and scholar.  For me, teaching had to be a more profound investment.  Nor have I been a missionary in quite the sense we associate with those who labored and taught in the nineteenth century when many HBCUs were established.  Despite attractive offers to teach elsewhere, I chose to remain within the orbit of the HBCU.  Until I joined the Dillard faculty in 2002-2003, I never earned a salary commensurate with my years of teaching experience and the scholarly and creative contributions I produced despite heavy teaching duties.  Thanks to a regulation in the old Tougaloo College Faculty Handbook, I had to wait for fourteen years to be granted tenure; only 69% of the faculty members in any department could be tenured. As I near the end of my career as a teacher, I realize the rewards most worth having cannot be reduced to money and things. They can only be measured in terms of how deeply and how  well a teacher has made a significant difference in the lives of others.

                Whether I chose or was chosen to teach at HBCUs, I have no regrets about the choice. The choice was right. The students I have taught since 1970, particularly those I mentored in the UNCF/Mellon Program, have assured me time and again that I did the right thing. I was pragmatic. Obviously, many teachers and scholars in our country’s institutions of higher education have done and continue to do the right thing by way of helping young people to discover and maximize their intellectual capabilities and to become productive citizens of the world.  Nevertheless, HBCUs are unique sites for such work.  To be sure, the fate of educational institutions is determined, more than we often want to acknowledge, by  irreversible changes in the world order. Few of them shall survive in the 21^st century. So be it. It is sufficient that once in time HBCUs enabled me to use my “intellectual ability and breadth of vision” to become a better person as I remained, as some black folk might say, in the tradition.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.