Reform

This column will be of interest to history teachers only, and I don't think that many of them will like what I have to say. But I've been thinking about this for a decade now, and it's time. If it makes you feel better about me, take note: what I'm about to say is far, far less radical than a lot of what you'll read in most pedagogy journals that are available in your libraries.

If you have not yet read my columns entitled "Teaching", "Learning", and, especially, "Reflecting", or if you have forgotten them, you should read them before this one, as they form part of an extended argument about what I believe to be a much-needed curricular reform in my profession.

I contend that the manner in which history typically is taught to first and second year undergraduates, with its emphasis on "coverage" of the historical narrative, serves neither the purposes of imparting a sophisticated and lasting understanding of history, nor of fulfilling the loftier purposes of a liberal education. Those lofty purposes aren't discussed; the history is forgotten in short order. Such are the consequences of adhering to "coverage" - of demanding breadth over depth.

Most disciplines have survey courses, but in history they are considered the backbone of an undergraduate education – "Plato to NATO" courses, they are sometimes called. Surveys are designed, in theory, to provide students with a foundation upon which further, more specialized studies can be built. In my last three entries I argued that that the unavoidable tendencies towards superficiality in survey course coverage, combined with the well-documented inadequacies of our attention spans, of memory, and of our ability to apply lessons outside of their immediate curricular context, present serious queries against the standard justifications for why and how we teach history.

What, then, is the solution? The first step is to discard the whole notion of the survey with its emphasis on "coverage". Rather than trying to survey a whole field— which will in the case of all but the most unusual student lead to superficial understanding — we should reduce drastically the number of topics covered. A mentor of mine once joked that he had fifty lectures and fifty decades to cover, so it worked out well. I propose, instead, that we examine a very small number of topics in great depth rather than many in surface detail for the sake of doing so.

In American history this might involve, say, a careful, lengthy, multifaceted, and indeed interdisciplinary examination of the American Revolution, the Civil War, the Great Depression, and the social and political upheaval of the 1960s. Everything else would be left aside. In this way, weeks rather than an hour or two could be devoted to each topic. In Canadian history, it might involve the conquest of New France, Confederation, the First World War, and a thematic topic such the creation of a social welfare state or dominion-provincial relations. It needn't be those topics, of course: the point is to promote deep and lasting understanding of a few important issues, as a means of teaching the real lesson. The real lesson is not "the narrative" (this can be learned by anyone willing to a read a textbook.) The point is to teach students disciplinary methodology by exposing them to different approaches to a single subject, to encourage them to approach the subject in an interdisciplinary fashion, and, perhaps most critically, to offer them actual opportunities to apply what they have learned outside of the confines of the classroom.

At this point, I know I have lost many of you. You're wondering, "But what about all the other important stuff that they won't learn if I don't lecture about it?" My response is that they're not really learning it anyway, and I'm willing to bet that you saw ample evidence of this on your last set of final exams. I'm sure that, like most professors, you spend much of your time these days not sure whether or laugh or cry over exam answers such as, "the Emancipation Proclamation was Woodrow Wilton's idea to give women the right to vote." (Yes, I actually got this.)

While the emphasis on coverage will only produce a marginal and short-lasting understanding, an in-depth examination of a few topics could have an entirely different outcome. As Howard Gardner argues in The Disciplined Mind, "Only a rich, probing, and multifaceted investigation of significant topics, makes it reasonably likely that more sophisticated understandings will emerge." If "gaps" between the topics covered in depth really need to be filled — and in some cases they will be — they could be covered by the simple act of having students read from a good textbook. This, too, will produce a surface understanding, but it will be sufficient to support the immediate curricular needs , and the students will graduate from the class better equipped and, hopefully, more willing to explore those other topics in greater depth on their own. The purpose of an education, after all, should be to equip students to go on learning for their entire lives - not just to prepare them for the final exam.

Imagine history classes where we could say, "Next day, we're going to take an hour to discuss how differing historical perspectives on the New Deal might shed light on the Obama's administration's bailout plan" or "One of the stated goals of this institution is the building of moral character - let's go beyond a recitation of the mere facts of the bombing of Dresden, and spend some time assessing them in the light of moral philosophy. Get on your laptops. After the break, I want you to tell me what Utilitarianism is, and why it might be useful for this discussion."

Needless to say, the approach I am proposing will require us to reduce the number and length of lectures that we give in favour of other instructional approaches. This should not alarm us. We have not years, but decades, of research that has by now demonstrated quite conclusively that even well-designed and expertly delivered lectures are only about as good as solitary reading for conveying raw information and not much good at all for engaging higher-order thought processes. Study after study has proved conclusively that students need to be engaged actively in their own learning: at times, listening, but also and predominantly discussing, debating, reading, researching, writing about, and teaching the subject to themselves and others. Much more than lip service needs to devoted to these approaches.

The allegation will be made that I am saying that students have no responsibility for their own education, and people will protest that the old methods worked just fine for them. I'll leave aside the obvious observation about anecdotal evidence, and merely note that the approach that I am proposing hugely increases students' responsibility for their own education by reducing the emphasis on the professor as the fountain of all knowledge. But it also involves a proportional and somewhat intimidating increase in the responsibility of the professor. No longer a sage upon the stage, the professor becomes a fellow traveler, pointing the way ahead, as Shaw put it in another context, ahead of ourselves as well as of our students.

Food

People eat the most abominable food, and in my misbegotten youth (d. 2005), I ate a good deal of it myself. Fast food, frozen food, food served in chain restaurants where, three or four times an evening, the waitstaff emerge half-heartedly to sing a happy birthday song that is not actually "Happy Birthday." I've eaten white bread that claims to be wondrous but that has no taste at all; "Chinese take out" that no person from China would recognize as Chinese food; edible oil products that are dyed orange, sliced thin, wrapped in plastic, and called "cheese"; and even Minute Rice. The passage of time has taught me the virtues of brown bread and authentic ethnic cuisine; that cheese is not orange; that all rice can be made in minutes, and that moreover Minute Rice is not rice at all. As near as I can tell, it is some sort of Styrofoam that tastes vaguely like soap. "Minute Rice," says Mark Bittman, the brilliant New York Times food writer. is "the stupidest food ever invented."

People will, in the supposed name of convenience, eat an astonishing array of truly repugnant edible consumer goods that I won't dignify with the title "food." An alarming number of these products seem to be manufactured — that is the right word, by the way — by Kraft. Consider these gastronomical hand grenades, marketed as a quicker alternative to bagels, in order to spare frequent bagel eaters the anguish of toasting real bagels and then having to spread cream cheese for themselves. How did we ever survive before our bagels were produced in factories, crammed with chemical goop by machines, flash-frozen, wrapped in plastic, dropped into a cardboard box, and shipped thousand of kilometers to our breakfast counters? The wonders of modernity never cease. Why, next somebody will think of pouring tap water into plastic bottles, trucking it across continents, and selling it for four times the cost of gasoline!

If the development of an eating disorder is among your life goals, I highly recommend that you spend some time on Kraft's website, checking out their recipes. Consider this burnt frozen hamburger served on a bed of pasta (and tell me that it doesn't look exactly like the killer robots from The Matrix.) Yum. Yum. And for those parents who truly despise their own children, the good people at General Mills market Pizza Pockets, which are made with the same loving care for children's health that Big Macs are.

If I sound slightly evangelical about all this, it's because I turned 39 today, and birthdays are occasions for reflection. The 90th Psalm allows that the number of our years are "threescore and ten" or, "by reason of strength" fourscore - this upper extremis being a mere twenty-nine thousand days. Of those, there are about fourteen thousand behind me, and I'm resolved that I will not spend any of the remainder eating food that reduces the number of my days and that tastes bad, to boot.

So, listen up, you students! (I know you're reading this.) This is the most important lesson I'll ever teach you. Tonight, you'll pick up that phone and chalk up another $25 on your VISA for a soggy pizza from some crappy place that sells "2 for 1" to students who don't know any better. Don't. Stop at the supermarket on the way home. And when you get home, follow these directions:

Heat some olive oil in a big frying pan. Chop up some onions, celery, carrots, and a couple of gloves of garlic. Throw them in. Add some salt and pepper and, if you've got it, a bit of oregano or thyme (in the summer, use the fresh stuff.) Cut up some peppers or mushrooms, if you want. Again, in summer, get the locally grown kind. Add some diced tomatoes and their juice and let it simmer while you boil some water for pasta. By the time the water is boiled and the pasta is cooked, your tomato sauce will be done. Grate some real parmesan on it (not the kind that comes in a green cardboard shaker.) If you're either totally alone or trying to impress somebody, get a bottle of this on the way home, too.

There. The whole thing (minus the optional wine) will cost less than the pizza, will be ready in the same time as delivery, and you'll have plenty of ingredients left over for future meals. It will taste better, too, and in no small measure because you made it. Next time, experiment. Serve it with a little salad or some bread from the local bakery.

If you can read, you can cook. There's no reason to buy and eat tasteless, high fat, high sodium, nutritionally worthless "food" manufactured according to same principles that Henry Ford used to build cars. Because the fact is that it is not cheaper; it is not faster; it is not more convenient. What it is, is just another product marketed by people who, in another lifetime, with a different spin of the wheel, would probably be tobacco lobbyists.

I mentioned the brilliant but down-to-earth and highly pragmatic Mark Bittman before. Here's his column at the New York Times, and the next time you even think about eating a meal that involves a cardboard box and a microwave oven, dip into this article instead.

Oh, and do the dishes before you go to bed.

Jobs

Most people hate theirs, and for good reason. I worked for eight or nine years in the corporate sector, and it was hard to generate much enthusiasm for it. To listen to my bosses — I had about eight of them when I worked for the paper — you would think that they spent every waking minute thinking up new ways to make the fantastically rich people who owned the newspaper fantastically richer. This usually involved "going the extra mile" and putting in unpaid overtime for people who did not know you existed and who eventually were going to lay you off. Yeah, that's smart. But people did it anyway, and, yup, they got laid off just the same.

"I believe there is far too much working being done in the world," Bertrand Russell wrote in 1932, "and that immense harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous." He called for an "organized diminution" of work - an expansion of leisure time brought about by the rational allocation of resources and the mechanization of certain kinds of inescapable toil. If this sounds like some sort of utopian socialism it's because it is, but the basic point is a good one: for most people, their working lives are a form of tyranny - they do their jobs not because they want to but because the alternative is poverty. A choice between work one hates and starvation is not a free choice, however much corporate propaganda might tell us otherwise. Our time is the most precious resource we have — it is also the one we have less of with every passing second — and no society is truly free that compels its members, en masse, to sacrifice their time to work that they hate merely in order to survive.

Work is part of life, and, as such, the key to being happy in it is to do things that you find interesting and important, and to have a healthy degree of autonomy in how you're permitted to go about doing them. In the 10th grade, my English teacher instructed us to write a letter to our future selves, a letter that would include a prediction of what we'd end up doing for a living. We were told not to open them until our 40th birthday. I cheated and opened mine a couple of years back. I predicted that by age 40 I would be teaching and be a "big time novelist". Well, damn. Neither a novelist nor "big time", but I do teach and write, and that's not a bad prediction for a 15-year-old who was adamant that people would never give up vinyl for CDs because they liked album covers too much.

I can therefore count myself among the lucky few whose working life functions harmoniously with their leisure time. Most days I look forward to my "work" with renewed pleasure, because it entails doing many of the things I would pursue in my leisure hours if I had some other job. Oh, there are stresses and strains and sacrifices to be made; and, of course, there's petty politics and pressure to publish, but, in effect, I get to do my hobbies for a living. Not many telemarketers, cab drivers, or nursing home laundry workers can say the same.

But with great jobs come great responsibilities - especially when those jobs are paid for by the community. Above all, such jobs entail a responsibility to do them well and to give something back to the people who make them possible.

Abstraction

That's me, in New York's Museum of Modern Art, last Monday. The painting is by Jackson Pollock. New Yorkers, I notice, take pride in and are slightly defensive about their abstract expressionists, who seemed to capture the beat and tempo of that big, weird, and wonderful city's frenetic way of life. But many others have more difficulty appreciating such art, and, in fairness, the artists themselves wanted nothing less: their work was part of a quite self-conscious act of effrontery to mass taste and mass opinion.

At the National Gallery of Canada a few years back, I heard a woman remark about a Kandinsky, "I just can't get into the new stuff." New stuff? Had she read the little label next to the painting she would have discovered that it was executed in 1911 - probably around the time her grandmother was born. Still, I understand what she was getting at. There is something not merely difficult to appreciate but actually mildly threatening about art since, say, 1907, when Picasso did this. One experiences a slight fear in an encounter with Cubism, futurism, surrealism, and abstraction - not to mention some of the more peculiar forms of postmodern art. It's the same fear that a traveller feels in a foreign country where he does not speak the language. One feels no such fear in familiar surroundings - which in artistic terms means the more readily comprehensible world of portrait painting and landscapes. I have witnessed it myself a hundred times in the National Gallery of Canada: people hustle through the abstract galleries, averting their eyes, like somebody walking through a bad neighborhood, until they come to the comfort and familiarity of the Group of Seven gallery. "Oh," they exclaim. "It looks like the lake at our cottage." And it does: familiar and safe.

Do not think that I am arguing for the primacy of abstraction over realism. Rather, I am arguing that the really meaningful cultural experiences in our lives demand something of us. Great art — like great music and great literature —rewards us in proportion to our efforts to come to terms with it over time. Abstraction, however, confronts us with an additional challenge, for it suggests the possibility that it is just painting - that there is no content, only form, that, like the night sky or a flower garden, it is beautiful but has no meaning.

Or am I wrong – about the night sky and flowers, I mean? In the most memorable of all the lines in Conan Doyle's works, Sherlock Holmes, happening upon a rose, muses: "Our highest assurance of the goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers. All other things, our powers, our desires, our food, are all really necessary for our existence in the first instance. But this rose is an extra. Its smell and its color are an embellishment of life, not a condition of it. It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers."

That's a remarkably unHolmesian leap in logic, but the basic point, I think, is a good one. The presence of beautiful things in what is, at times, an ugly world, can furnish us with much to hope for.