A paragraph being quoted this week at least 3 times

quoted in:

http://pjmedia.com/blog/the-educational-mess/

(and requoted from there) 

SATURDAY, JANUARY 26, 2013

Worth pondering …

… PJ Media — Understanding the Educational Mess We’re In. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Everything considered, and allowances made for cultural and historical differences, the Merchant Taylors’ School, in the early to middle period of English pedagogy, was a far superior secondary school to anything our contemporary ideologues and planners, whose ignorance of educational history is impressively catholic, have managed to install today. We no longer teach the classics, those documents — in the words of Melville scholar and Norton anthologist Hershel Parker — that “afford the most rich, complex, aesthetic experiences…most likely to work transforming enlightenment…in all earnest young students.” On the contrary, our current methodology, pursued in a cognitive vacancy, constitutes nothing more than another pedagogical talisman which testifies only to the bankruptcy, or the magical thinking, that has overtaken the culture of education to which we unthinkingly contribute. We have long passed the time, laments Welsh poet Gillian Clarke in her new book Ice, “when the map of the earth was something we knew by/heart.” It is as if we have simply forgotten the central axiom of human development: if you know very little, you cannot do very much. Method can never be a surrogate for substance. You must work to have something there if there is ever to be something there to work with.

 1990 talk (printed 1991):

 

I confess to some wishful thinking of my own, a lingering hope that there can be at least an eleventh-grade high school class and a sophomore or junior college class in which all students will have a chance to read works of American literature which have entered most deeply into the collective American consciousness--the American scriptures.  This is problematical.  Aesthetic evaluation really is, as Barbara Herrnstein Smith says, contingent on many factors; but some literary works really are better than other literary works, and anyone imbued both with a sense of the preciousness of time and a love of literature will feel that he or she is better occupied teaching the best literature most of the time.  In chapter three of Walden Thoreau described popular literature of his time as "Little Reading" which could be consumed without strain by the barely literate, in pathetic contrast to the classics, which students always have to stand "on tiptoe" to read, which can be truly read only by those whose lives are changed by the experience of reading.  In teaching (and anthologizing) I act on Thoreau's assumption--that documents which afford the most rich, complex aesthetic experiences might also be the very documents most likely to work transforming enlightenment--social, cultural, political enlightenment--in all earnest young students.  We may survive as a people without knowledge of a common body of literature, but if we read the casual writings of the day, the Times, as Thoreau says, rather than reading literature meant for Eternity (or if we forsake the pleasures of reading altogether, even Little Reading, for the pleasures of the other media) we lose something that all civilized societies have held sacred, the aesthetic and richly socializing experience of absorbing a set of national classics, an experience that just might be worth passing on to the next generation.  

This is from a talk I gave long ago on what we put into American textbooks as American literature--a talk published in the October 1991 COLLEGE LITERATURE as "The Price of Diversity: An Ambivalent Minority Report on the American Literary Canon."

Paul Seydor's review of MELVILLE BIOGRAPHY: AN INSIDE NARRATIVE

5.0 out of 5 stars Inspired and inspirational, January 26, 2013

By 

Paul Seydor (Los Angeles, California USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is for: Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative (Hardcover)

Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative is Hershel Parker's answer to numerous requests for a one volume version of his magisterial two volume biography of Herman Melville. Reasoning, plausibly, that the moment a single volume appeared, no one would read the original, Professor Parker gives us instead this splendid, wholly new book, which is actually several books in one, among them a biography of a biography; an autobiography of the biographer retracing all the many paths, places, departures, travels, destinations, by ways, swings, and roundabouts, both actual and virtual, by which writers get to know and become intimate with their subject; an odyssey, at once intellectual, spiritual, and deeply personal, of an esteemed literary critic and scholar engaging, grappling, and struggling with some of the largest, most important and central issues of scholarship and criticism of the past century. Parker, a brilliant thinker, can match the most arcane theorists on their own turf, but his is no dry, academic tome: written with verve, style, breathless energy, and unflagging enthusiasm (in the best Emersonian sense of that word), this book is also a stunning critique and stinging rebuke to half a century of critical theory and practice, both inside the academy and outside it in the world of book reviewing and commentary, beginning with the New Criticism and going through structuralism, deconstructionism, postmodernism, to the New Historicism, movements that seek to strip literature and the other arts of every human, social, cultural, and historical context except that of the work itself as an aesthetic object or structure. Arguing against so called "organic unity"--which, as it grew out of the New Criticism, should really be called "hermetically sealed unity"--Parker seeks to restore criticism and scholarship to the study of that far more human and humane, to say nothing of real, unity: that of the artist, his thoughts, his ideas, his feelings, his beliefs, his circumstances, his life and times, and how he transmuted these through the mysteries of talent, imagination, and genius into timeless works of art. Passionate, combative, blazingly eloquent, fearlessly frank and candid, and, yes, there's no sense using lesser words, inspired and inspirational, not least in his celebration of the joys and rewards of old fashioned--that is, patient, dogged, committed, tireless--research, Parker here demonstrates once again that he is a peerless Melvillian, a standard setting scholar, and a truly great critic.
--Paul Seydor,
author of Peckinpah: The Western Films: A Reconsideration

The Elite Education of Richard Brodhead, Whom God Loves the Mostest

http://theamericanscholar.org/the-disadvantages-of-an-elite-education/
This is the link to William Deresiewicz's great article.

Deresiewicz  does not deal with innate characteristics which may influence behavior but trained behavior. But if you ever wonder how Richard Brodhead can ignore other people's pain, read Deresiewicz: "One of the great errors of an elite education . . . is that it teaches you to think that measures of intelligence and academic achievement are measure of value in some moral or metaphysical sense. But they're not. Graduates of elite schools are not more valuable than stupid people, or talentless people, or even lazy people. Their pain does not hurt more. Their souls do not weigh more. Their souls do not weigh more. If I were religious, I would say, God does not love them more."

Brodhead believes that God loves him and Steel more than He loves Michael Pressler. Lesser people do not feel the pain that Brodhead feels. Think of Ekstrand as quoted by KC Johnson and Stuart Taylor on 92 of UNTIL PROVEN INNOCENT: "BRODHEAD'S EYES FILLED WITH TEARS. HE SAID THAT THE CAPTAINS SHOULD THINK OF HOW DIFFICULT IT HAD BEEN FOR HIM." Johnson and Taylor continue: "Ekstrand felt his blood starting to boil. Here, he thought, is a comfortable university president wallowing in self-pity in front of four students who are in grave danger of being falsely indicted on charges of gang rape, punishable by decades in prison."

If you read Deresiewicz you will understand Brodhead as an "entitled mediocrity." You still won't understand the active disdain which emerges in his writing and in his speech: that is partly a product of the elitist education, but its ugly twist derives from something innate in his character, I believe. If we had his Andover essays we would see what was in his Yale essays and his quintessentially New Critical writings. You can be one of the entitled mediocrity without indulging in elegantly phrased but unjustified contempt for lower beings, whether that human being is Thomas Bailey Aldrich or Hershel Parker or James Van de Velde or Michael Pressler or the falsely accused lacrosse players--Dave Evans, Reade Seligmann, and Collin Finnerty. In 2004 Duke needed someone who had a lifelong history of dealing deftly with tough, gnarled issues whether aesthetic, intellectual, social, or political, someone capable of rising up in extraordinary circumstances and by God doing the right thing, right then, out of experience, powerful instinct, or innate majesty of soul. Duke got Richard H. Brodhead.

Old Words on Education Revived and Reposted

from BOOKS INQ., THE EPILOGUE

Saturday, January 26, 2013

Worth pondering …

… PJ Media — Understanding the Educational Mess We’re In. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Everything considered, and allowances made for cultural and historical differences, the Merchant Taylors’ School, in the early to middle period of English pedagogy, was a far superior secondary school to anything our contemporary ideologues and planners, whose ignorance of educational history is impressively catholic, have managed to install today. We no longer teach the classics, those documents — in the words of Melville scholar and Norton anthologist Hershel Parker — that “afford the most rich, complex, aesthetic experiences…most likely to work transforming enlightenment…in all earnest young students.” On the contrary, our current methodology, pursued in a cognitive vacancy, constitutes nothing more than another pedagogical talisman which testifies only to the bankruptcy, or the magical thinking, that has overtaken the culture of education to which we unthinkingly contribute. We have long passed the time, laments Welsh poet Gillian Clarke in her new book Ice, “when the map of the earth was something we knew by/heart.” It is as if we have simply forgotten the central axiom of human development: if you know very little, you cannot do very much. Method can never be a surrogate for substance. You must work to have something there if there is ever to be something there to work with.

"Entitled Mediocrity"--Comment on Richard Brodhead by R. Parrish in Amazon review of MELVILLE BIOGRAPHY

The big topic here behind Parrish's comment is the disadvantage of elite education to character development.   What Richard Brodhead learned in his decades in elite schools left him what William Deresiewicz calls a member of the "entitled mediocrity"-- unable to function with instinctive grace and originality and power in any intellectual or moral crisis. 

http://theamericanscholar.org/the-disadvantages-of-an-elite-education/

R. Parrish’s new comment about Richard Brodhead on the review of MELVILLE BIOGRAPHY by Robert Pratt Hastie

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Joining the Chorus of Praise January 22, 2013

By Robert Pratt Hastie

Amazon Verified Purchase

Heartily I join with Jack O'Connell in his chorus of praise for Hershel Parker's marvelous new book Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative. Much of what I would say about it to my friends he has already elegantly enumerated in his review so I won't repeat his points here, with all of which I agree. I would only add that if your subject is Melville, then like the deep-diving writer himself, you have to want more More MORE from his biographer and the only MORE biographer of Melville is Dr. Parker. That he has been attacked by the lesser "researchers" in the field for the archival-based detail-oriented biographic approach (isn't that the essence of scholarship?) is baffling to me and I don't blame him a bit for fighting back in this book with a vitriol equal to that which has been flung at him. (Who can help thinking of Moby-Dick under attack by harpoons?) But what is new here is a rare glimpse of the personal cost of scholarship, not only in regard to inexcusable reviews but to eyes and vertebrae and lungs, day after weary day bending over microfiche machines and difficult-to-decipher documents, seeking out the gold nugget that will increase our understanding of the details of Melville's life. (There is also an update on new information regarding Melville which has been found since the 2-volume biography.) I am especially pleased therefore in this book to learn something of the personal life of this matchless Melville scholar himself. In fact, what is so special about Dr. Parker's 2-volume biography about Melville is that it is all about Melville, not about Parker, whereas in most of the New Criticism biographies the subject of the biography too often is lost in the fog of the self-serving viewpoint of the biographer whose main purpose is to prove some academic/sociologic/sexual thesis. Not so with Dr. Parker who is all Melville all the time. But at least now, with the Inside Narrative, we at last see something of Hershel as well. I am personally delighted.
Robert Pratt Hastie

Initial post: Jan 25, 2013 8:26:04 AM PST

R. Parrish says:

And as an aside...

As someone who followed the Duke lacrosse case closely, it was interesting to also discover within a portrait of Richard Brodhead, and to notice that his earlier attitudes and actions may have foreshadowed the path he was to take a few years later, when confronted with a crisis of another sort, when he was President of Duke University.

In the lacrosse case, he seemed to exhibit a primary concern for public reaction (otherwise known as PR), to the extent that he appeared (at least to this observer) to be willing to sacrifice even innocent students for the sake of a university's image. For example, he stated, when interviewed near the case's end (Jan. 2007), "Why didn't I join with the defense team and file motions with them? Because it was essential that we not be seen as a partisan player in this..." --which is pious-sounding; but it a catch-all excuse which just as easily could have been uttered by a bystander at any lynching; and on reflection, seems (when taken in connection with other examples of Brodhead's indifference or even outright hostility to his falsely-accused students) to suggest a kind of callousness on his part towards the unjustified suffering of others. (Perhaps he was in agreement with Duke's Board Chair, Robert K. Steel, who said it would be "best for Duke" if the falsely-accused went to trial, and even if they were convicted; and when asked to explain his failure to defend them, replied, "Sometimes individuals have to suffer for the good of the organization.")

Towards the author of the Melville biographies, and even towards Melville himself, we seem to see a similar frame of mind exhibited: "Brodhead's false accusations against me must be in some way a consequence of his New Critical training and practice, I decided. In sober truth, if your training leads you to dehumanize Melville, to be blind to his agony, how can you not carry your training over to the way you treat real living people...? If you think that facts about authors are not real and authors are not real, then you may come to see living people outside your own private circle as unreal. Cut them and they do not bleed, or if they do bleed their suffering can never be of the significance of your own discomforts of the discomforts of your class...Some of the behavior of the Melville critics who refuse to look at documentary evidence is innate in their character, I assume, but some of their actions, I would think, must be a consequence of lifelong practice of a dehumanizing literary approach, the New Criticism. Their nature is subdued to what it works in, like the dyer's hand." (p. 173)

Alas, the committee searching for a new president for Duke could not avail itself of the discussions about Brodhead's nature as presented in this volume; otherwise its considerations might have turned in another direction; and its ensuing disgrace (which forever tainted the university for its role in "Scottsboro II") might have been averted.

This is the David Weddle who reviewed MELVILLE BIOGRAPHY: AN INSIDE NARRATIVE

David Weddle is an American television producer and writer, best known for episodes of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1996–1999), The Twilight Zone (2002–2003), Battlestar Galactica (2004–2009), and CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (2009-2011) with writing partner Bradley Thompson. They also wrote for the short-lived series Ghost Stories (1997) and The Fearing Mind (2000). Weddle and Thompson are currently writing and producing for the TNT series Falling Skies.

And he wrote a biography of Peckinpah! I am honored and thrilled to re-reprint his review here:

David Weddle - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)

This review is from: Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative (Hardcover)

Over the past 40 years a virus has invaded the cloistered enclaves of academia. A virus called "theory" -- literary theory, film theory, art theory, architectural theory, Semiotics, and New Criticism to name just a few strains. Each version boils down to the same thing: a secret language created by inbred academics permeated with multisyllabic nonsense words, and tortured incomprehensible syntax that does not seek to communicate meaning, but to obscure it to all but a chosen few. These phantasmagoric theories do not teach students how to write a novel, a work of nonfiction, or how to paint, or sculpt, or build a house. It is an astounding fraud perpetrated on unsuspecting university students and the parents who have to mortgage their homes to pay for this carnival midway malarkey.

In his groundbreaking new book, Melville Biography - An Inside Narrative, Hershel Parker goes to war against the theorists with an Old Testament wrath. I say, bravo! Parker brilliantly portrays how the rise of theory has degraded academic standards and slowly strangled the art of original research. The apostles of New Criticism argue that it is not important what Herman Melville intended when he wrote his masterworks; nor is it important what impact social events and commercial pressures had on his work. All that matters is the marvelous web of theories the New Critics can spin around his work. Parker calls this out for what it is: a rationalization for laziness, and a supreme act of narcissism.

Behind Parker's rage is a passionate plea for academics not to cede the field of original research to journalists. He fervently hopes they will shake off the fever that has gripped them for almost half a century and embrace once again the fundamentals of scholarship. Anyone concerned about the state of our universities and the quality of our social discourse must read this outstanding book.