I also spend
much of the time when I am not writing or teaching reading widely.
I am
inclined especially toward nonfiction of widely diverse subjects, giving me the
knowledge base to write Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts
Education, one of my two nearly complete new books, this one now
providing to my students in the New Salem Educational Initiative an education
of excellence in the key subject areas of economics, psychology, political
science, world religions, world history, American history, African American
history, literature, English usage, the fine arts, mathematics, biology,
chemistry, and physics. And I continue
to read and conduct research in Taiwanese history, the field of my Ph. D.
training.
My tastes in
literature also run heavily to Shakespeare, Greek drama, contemporary drama,
poetry, African American speeches and other expressions of the thespian’s art,
classical fiction, and fiction of specific ethnic groups, especially African
American. I have not as a rule made many
forays into science fiction, but I have read a bit of Robert Heinlein, Ray
Bradbury, Isaac Asimov; a number of Margaret
Atwood’s futuristic works; and have
Ursula Le Guin poised high on my list, upon the recommendation of Ryan and one
Barbara Reed, the other greatest of human treasures in my life.
In a series
of articles as you scroll on down this blog, you will find four speculative
pieces of fiction authored by me, written as if reports issued from the
Committee for the Review of History in the year 2217--- two hundred years from our own time. Thus, these articles as a factual matter must
be classified as fiction; but they are meant
to consider key matters in our own time that are very real, upon which highly
educated people in a time very much more advanced than our own review in a
spirit of constant dismay the crudeness of our lives in 2017.
……………………………………………………………………
Ryan and I
talk often about the future and consider what life will be like two hundred
years hence. Ryan sees only
technological advancement in the course of history; he maintains that humankind has made very
little progress in matters of psychology, ethics, the manner in which human
beings treat other human beings. He has
little hope that the situation will be any different in the year 2217, two
hundred years from our own time. Ryan
has great joy in his own life but is a pessimist as to the prospects for
humankind.
I am an
optimist of a very realistic sort.
I consider
the human past to be an uneven and frequently regressing journey to better
self-understanding, a pattern of general ascent along the low altitudes of the
mountain, with frequent freefalls back into the valley, followed by a scramble
back to those lower elevations to look with cranked neck toward the pinnacle.
As an
activist I expect the worst and find it most of the time.
But I have
the faith of a Mohandas Gandhi or a Saul Alinsky in the human capacity to
change after wrenching efforts, advances, halts, regressions, and resumptions
of progress.
Thus it is as
you read the four articles written as if reports issued from the Committee for
the Review of History in the year 2217 you will consider a time in which
momentous events have marked leaps toward a much more advanced state of
humanity. Look for the Trump Tribulation
of 2017-2025, the partly overlapping Great Debate of 2020-2070, and the
convening of the World Council of Religions in 2125.
As you read
these articles, remember my view that humankind is very young.
The universe
banged into existence almost 14 billion years ago, expanding in those processes
that created the earth almost 10 billion years later. Simple cells took life comparatively
quickly, just under a billion years after the earth formed, but not until 500
million years ago did fish swim in the sea.
Amphibians crawled onto the earth about 360 million years ago, and
reptiles roamed some 60 million years after that; then about 200 million years ago mammals
moved across the surface of this planet.
Birds flew across the skies at about 150 millions years ago, and flowers
bloomed some 20 million years thereafter.
But not until 60 million years ago did the earth know primates, and the
Great Apes did not make their terrestrial entrance until another 40 million
years had transpired.
Not until
2.5 million years ago--- tens of
millions of years after the appearance of those Great Apes--- did creatures of the genus homo appear,
and life ensued another million years before representatives of that genus
walked upright. Our more immediate
progenitors, of the genus homo and the species sapiens,
trod the expanses of East Africa for the first time only about 200 thousand years
counting backward from this year of 2014.
So we are
very young.
No wonder
that we’ve made so many mistakes in this trial and error of a process called
life. We are, as the Lord Hamlet tells
us, “a work of art,” “noble in reason,” “infinite in faculty.” But we are still learning how to shape
ourselves into the works of art that will make us worthy as the “paragons of
the world,” to use our reason for creating conditions of peace, to call upon
our faculties to be all that in our enormous potential we can be.
We have been
so cruel to each other.
Even as we
created marvelous works of early civilization--- the Pyramids of Egypt, the Hanging Gardens of
Babylon, the Great Wall of China, the temple complex at Angkor Wat, the
Colossus of Rhodes, the aqueducts of Rome---
we beat up on each other, calling Alexander and others “Great” for doing
so.
Even as we
asked searching questions and as compassionate thinkers conceived of
philosopher kings, enlightened beings, a King of Peace, we--- those same beings--- slaughtered each other by the millions. We fell before the legions of Caesar, the
armies of the Great Khan, the banners of white and red roses, the marauders of
the Aztec empire, the invaders of European colonizers, the ship captains of the
Middle Passage, the despotic purveyors of genocide in Germany and Cambodia, the
lynchers posing as citizens in what otherwise we have claimed to be the
greatest democracy on earth.
But we have
also done much good.
We have
created alphabets, aesthetically pleasing written characters, presses that
produce books. We have imagined
ourselves at our best--- in prayer,
meditation, and good works. We have made
peace after war and established institutions for promoting human
understanding. We have sought the truth
of earth’s place among the planets, revealed the laws that govern motion and
light and sound, discovered the relativity of time in space. We have probed the depths of our own mental
processes and built machines that see into our very brains. We have made such technological advances that
at any instant in this year of 2017 we can call forth facts on any given
subject of our whim. We communicate with
our fellows in a multiplicity of ways.
We must now go
to work on ourselves.
…………………………………………………………..
Remember my
conviction that humankind will progress ethically and spiritually through the
power of education.
As things
stand now, many young people in the Minneapolis Public Schools are not
graduating as a technical matter, which denies to them important certification
in the workaday world via a high school diploma; almost as bad is the prevailing circumstance
that those who do walk across a stage at the end of their senior year to claim
that formal certification lack the knowledge base that a diploma should
signify.
Many of our
students graduate without understanding fractions, decimals, or
percentages; much less, then, do they
understand algebra, geometry, trigonometry, statistics, or calculus.
Many
graduates of the Minneapolis Public Schools have no ability to read
Shakespearean literature, most have never heard of August Wilson, and in fact
even the mere names of Jane Austen, Mark Twain, Herman Melville, F. Scott
Fitzgerald, Lorraine Hansberry, Ernest Hemingway, Claude McKay, Langston
Hughes, William Faulkner, Gwendolyn Brooks, John Steinbeck, Pearl Buck, James
Baldwin, Toni Morrison, or Maya Angelou echo faintly if at all. Most graduates cannot write an acceptable
essay, nor do they have the ability to conduct research or to produce papers
with proper citations (footnote, endnote, or internal).
Most
graduates cannot tell you how long ago the Big Bang occurred, and they do not
know when the Earth was formed or anything about the processes that formed our
planet. They cannot trace the
evolutionary development of plant and animal life on Earth, and they cannot
identify the importance of Australopithecus, homo habilis, or homo
erectus. They could not tell you
about the importance of neural synapses, chemical bonding, or the difference
between nuclear fission and nuclear fusion.
Mention the names Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, and Curie and
you’ll see a lot of dazed eyes and hear confused mumbling. They may know that Albert Einstein had some
wild hair and said something about “E” being equal to “MC-squared,” but they
could tell you little about the physics of energy, mass, and velocity, or the
relativity of time in space.
Graduating
seniors cannot as a rule separate out very clearly the defining features of the
great river valley civilizations or tell you much about Egypt--- other than that the latter had some cool
pyramids and
some ruler-types called pharaohs. Ask
students to explain clearly why the civilizations of ancient Greece, the Roman
Republic and Empire, Han Dynasty China, the Mauryan Emperor Asoka, Charlemagne,
the Abbasid Muslim Empire, empire of Songhai, or Mayan civilization are of such
importance to humankind’s past--- and they’ll be hard-pressed to give you
anything resembling an acceptable answer.
Many would struggle to distinguish a meteorite from a Shi’ite.
Our
graduates typically walk across the stage to claim a piece of paper that does
not signify any understanding of Classical Roman versus Gothic
architecture; the style of the
Renaissance master painters versus those of the Impressionists, Expressionists,
Cubists, Surrealists, or abstract Modernists.
They most likely could not identify whether a recording played for them
is Mozart, Bach, or Beethoven; Muddy
Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, or John Lee Hooker.
They would be at a loss to explain how exactly the disparate traditions
of Ma Rainey and Hank Williams gave us Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly. Ask them to describe the contributions to
architecture made by Albert Suger, Fillipo Brunelleschi, and Frank Lloyd
Wright--- and those puzzled expressions
would grow more intense.
…………………………………………………………………………………………
But my
optimistic realist’s projection of progress by the year 2217, after the
momentous leaps engendered by the 2020-2070 Great Debate and the 2125 World
Council of Religions, is that the human ascent will have gained great force and
the voyage will be within clear view of the summit.
As you
scroll on down to read the observations that I render as if from the Committee
for the Review of History, consider how crude we are, then make your own
determination as to where we will be two hundred years hence.
If you take
my optimistic position over Ryan’s less sanguine view, know that you and I will
only overcome my remarkable son’s interpretation of humanity as at best stuck
in an ethically neutral gear if we persistently work successfully to complete
the K-12 revolution.
No comments:
Post a Comment