I had a chance to visit Margaret and Colin in Paris this summer on my way home from my visit to Tanzania in early June -- a delightful time with them for which I am thankful.
So go out and get the book and read it in time for Thanksgiving!
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
The Gift of Thanks
My friend Margaret Visser's book The Gift of Thanks is featured in today's New York Times. The book was published last year in Canada, and I had a chance to read it when I visited Vancouver earlier this year. It is another remarkable book by her. If you haven't read Sacred Geometry or her other books, do!
So What’s Language School Like?
(originally written on 3 November -- Internet problems abound!)
My sister mentioned to me that for her a lot of my postings have been rather a big yawn. I appreciate her frankness, and can understand why. I haven’t written much really concrete “stuff,” and much of what I’ve posted has been the fruit of my trying to figure some things out for myself.
My anonymous-Winchester, Massachusetts-residing sister suggested that I get more concrete about my experience of language school. I’ll do that here and will post some pictures later.
As you approach Morogoro from Dodoma you see the Uruguru mountains before you. Before actually heading into the town center you go left at a kipilefti (a roundabout – they used to have signs in English “keep left) and head southeast on the road to Dar es Salaam. The sisal fields (what used to be a cash crop and might return to being such with the organic movement) are on your left. Also on the left, just about three kilometers from the campus of the language school is a soko la ng’ombe, a Maasai cattle market (where two cattle thieves had their heads roll down the dirt road a few years back). After passing the Old Morogoro Road on your right, you see the campus of the Lutheran Junior Seminary, on which campus the language school is located. (Many high schools that were founded in the seventies here have the name “seminary” attached. The reason for this, as I understand it, is that the government’s nationalization of private schools did not include seminaries.)
It is a campus that has seen better days, which is to say that there’s a lot of deferred maintenance. The first thing you notice is that the red of the brick is the same red-orange color of the soil – the buildings don’t stand out. The language school is a small part of the school and consists of six or seven blocks of housing, a common room, and a dining hall/kitchen. The rooms are comfortable. I’m in a single room and walk down a few doors for the bathroom; there are some rooms with en suite bathrooms and also larger spaces for couples and families.
My day begins at five o’clock in the morning. After praying for twenty or so minutes, I study for an hour and then take a shower (I can’t get into the wiser practice of a shower at day’s end – though a good foot bath is always in order after a day of walking in sandals through the red soil.) I celebrate Mass before heading to the dining hall for breakfast.
Every day for breakfast there is uji. Uji is a type of porridge made from ground finger millet (the verb used with porridge, incidentally, the verb is kunywa – you drink it, even if it’s in a bowl and you’re using a spoon); the uji here is served with homemade yogurt and granola. There’s also always white bread (called milk bread here). There’s often something else: French toast, scrambled eggs, hardboiled eggs, etc. People tend to sit at the table for about a half hour before heading back to their rooms to collect their things before heading over to sala ya asubuhi, morning devotions at 7:45 a.m.
I used my experience of morning devotions as an example some weeks back during a class on Tanzanian culture. The teacher asked me to describe Tanzanian attitudes toward time. I noted that morning devotions are scheduled to begin at 7:45 a.m. (which is a quarter to two as time is counted in Swahili, incidentally – 8:00 being two hours after sunrise), and that I’d learned that at 7:45 I should begin to think about heading over to the classroom for the prayer. The prayer, most often led by one of the young assistant teachers (though I have led it) usually consists of a hymn at the beginning and one at the end with a piece of scripture (read first in English and then in Swahili) in the middle. The hymns are a highlight for me – some beautiful singing (though I’m not a fan of the sentiment of most of the hymns that celebrate a sort of individualism in faith life).
From morning prayer we head to class. With the exception of the one cultural class mentioned above, all mine have actually been tutorials, with a different teacher each week. My teacher and I head to what can best be described as a thatch-roofed gazebo where we share the three or so minutes of greetings (Habari za asubuhi? –how are things with you this morning?-- Umeamkaje? – how did you wake up?, etc.). Then we get down to business.
The morning kipindi cha kwanza combines the introduction of vocabulary in a given context (places like home, dispensary, shop, game reserve, etc.; and activities like building a house, painting it, cooking, changing a tire, etc.) with some grammar rules. After slogging through reading about just what Rehema, Kazimoto, and Hans (characters in these various settings) are up to and covering the related grammar, we move to mazoezi, exercises.
Then its time for chai! And at chai we move from mazoezi to maandazi! Maandazi are fried doughballs – think jelly donuts without the jelly, and a bit heavier dough. Very good, but not so good for you. Other things served with the coffee and tea available at chai on various days are bananas (you can’t get them fresher than here!), roasted peanuts, keki (I bet you can guess what English word that comes from – but here it is actually a sweetened cornbread), and chips (either banana or potato).
Fortified, we return for another 1.5 hours of study, moving on to kipindi cha pili – the second section of the unit, which includes a dialogue followed by comprehension exercises. We break at noon for 2.5 hours, returning at 2:30 for more exercises. Until about two weeks ago, I was managing to get through about 1.25 units a day. With Unit 31, however, I hit a bit of a wall and have slowed down considerably. I do love grammar, and I do very well with the drills. However, once I get out of my seat it all seems to fall out of my head, and we often end up reviewing what was just covered earlier in the day. (Just to illustrate how bad this can be, let me share the following: On Saturday a lady stopped by the common room looking for one of the workers. I froze when she asked if he was around. I couldn’t manage even a hayupo, he isn’t here.)
Yesterday was an exception – I was for the most part in the groove, and managed to remember most all of the verbs we covered. I’m having difficulty memorizing verbs – and when I do manage to retain them it is mostly passively; i.e., I recognize them but can’t initiate their use.
The food here is good. It is a carb lovers paradise. Take last night for instance: homemade dinner roles served with rice, potatoes, a sort of tomato sauce, and beans. Ugali, the staple, is only served occasionally to us – twice in my months here, both in the past week; I think this is principally because a lot of wazungu find it difficult to eat. What is ugali? My mother and those of her generation would call it mush*, but it is stirred until very, very thick (thicker than mashed potatoes). I don’t quite understand the aversion of non-Tanzanians to this. It must be its consistency because it doesn’t have its own taste, really – it tastes like whatever sauce it is served with. It’s the perfect dish for a place where there isn’t always a lot to eat because it is very, very filling – so filling, in fact, that it is not customary to serve it at the evening meal.
Some days after lunch I take a siesta. Even when I don’t, I usually rest, spending the time reading (when wireless is working I download the New York Times on my iphone and read it – I haven’t read news or heard it or watched it in over a week now) or writing. The half hour before we return for the last session of the day, I review vocabulary in preparation for the afternoon exercises.
Chai follows the afternoon exercises (you can see why I’m not losing weight as quickly as I expected – if snacking is considered eating outside of mealtime I’m not doing it; I just have five meals every day here!). We eat at six o’clock, so I spend the 1.5 hours between chai and the evening meal reading, writing, praying, etc.
After the evening meal I spend 75 minutes reviewing and preparing for the next day’s lessons. Then, when the Internet is in service I’ll also spend time writing emails, stopping by Facebook, posting here, and checking out some news websites (still a news junky, so this Internet/wireless issue is a challenge for me.)
I’m in bed usually by ten, sometimes an hour earlier sometimes an hour later. With the exception of a few nights it has been comfortable sleeping – getting downright chilly about four o’clock in the morning. I do sleep under mosquito netting, and I also have a few small geckos that hang out around my window sills – they help to keep the mosquito and spider population down. There are two things that wake me in the evening: the trucks on the Dar es Salaam – Morogoro Road that is about 75 meters away (there’s a speed bump, so I hear the breaks) and the bush babies. I now know why they are called such – they have a cry that does sound a bit like a crying baby, mwah, mwah, mwah, mwah.
*There’s a funny story about my mother in this regard. I was so proud that I’d become an adequate cook, and even prouder that a certain dish I’d learned to make was a hit among a lot of people: a polenta casserole (make polenta using milk, butter, and parmesan rather than just water in order to make it a little richer; put it in the bottom of a 9 x 11 greased pan; add sweet Italian saugage and tomato sauce; top with mozzarella cheese; and bake at 350 degrees for 40 mins). She watched as I prepared the delicacy. As I stirred the polenta with a proud smile on my face, Marcella burst my bubble: “Dear, I know it has a fancy Italian name, but what you’re making is cornmeal mush.”
My sister mentioned to me that for her a lot of my postings have been rather a big yawn. I appreciate her frankness, and can understand why. I haven’t written much really concrete “stuff,” and much of what I’ve posted has been the fruit of my trying to figure some things out for myself.
My anonymous-Winchester, Massachusetts-residing sister suggested that I get more concrete about my experience of language school. I’ll do that here and will post some pictures later.
As you approach Morogoro from Dodoma you see the Uruguru mountains before you. Before actually heading into the town center you go left at a kipilefti (a roundabout – they used to have signs in English “keep left) and head southeast on the road to Dar es Salaam. The sisal fields (what used to be a cash crop and might return to being such with the organic movement) are on your left. Also on the left, just about three kilometers from the campus of the language school is a soko la ng’ombe, a Maasai cattle market (where two cattle thieves had their heads roll down the dirt road a few years back). After passing the Old Morogoro Road on your right, you see the campus of the Lutheran Junior Seminary, on which campus the language school is located. (Many high schools that were founded in the seventies here have the name “seminary” attached. The reason for this, as I understand it, is that the government’s nationalization of private schools did not include seminaries.)
It is a campus that has seen better days, which is to say that there’s a lot of deferred maintenance. The first thing you notice is that the red of the brick is the same red-orange color of the soil – the buildings don’t stand out. The language school is a small part of the school and consists of six or seven blocks of housing, a common room, and a dining hall/kitchen. The rooms are comfortable. I’m in a single room and walk down a few doors for the bathroom; there are some rooms with en suite bathrooms and also larger spaces for couples and families.
My day begins at five o’clock in the morning. After praying for twenty or so minutes, I study for an hour and then take a shower (I can’t get into the wiser practice of a shower at day’s end – though a good foot bath is always in order after a day of walking in sandals through the red soil.) I celebrate Mass before heading to the dining hall for breakfast.
Every day for breakfast there is uji. Uji is a type of porridge made from ground finger millet (the verb used with porridge, incidentally, the verb is kunywa – you drink it, even if it’s in a bowl and you’re using a spoon); the uji here is served with homemade yogurt and granola. There’s also always white bread (called milk bread here). There’s often something else: French toast, scrambled eggs, hardboiled eggs, etc. People tend to sit at the table for about a half hour before heading back to their rooms to collect their things before heading over to sala ya asubuhi, morning devotions at 7:45 a.m.
I used my experience of morning devotions as an example some weeks back during a class on Tanzanian culture. The teacher asked me to describe Tanzanian attitudes toward time. I noted that morning devotions are scheduled to begin at 7:45 a.m. (which is a quarter to two as time is counted in Swahili, incidentally – 8:00 being two hours after sunrise), and that I’d learned that at 7:45 I should begin to think about heading over to the classroom for the prayer. The prayer, most often led by one of the young assistant teachers (though I have led it) usually consists of a hymn at the beginning and one at the end with a piece of scripture (read first in English and then in Swahili) in the middle. The hymns are a highlight for me – some beautiful singing (though I’m not a fan of the sentiment of most of the hymns that celebrate a sort of individualism in faith life).
From morning prayer we head to class. With the exception of the one cultural class mentioned above, all mine have actually been tutorials, with a different teacher each week. My teacher and I head to what can best be described as a thatch-roofed gazebo where we share the three or so minutes of greetings (Habari za asubuhi? –how are things with you this morning?-- Umeamkaje? – how did you wake up?, etc.). Then we get down to business.
The morning kipindi cha kwanza combines the introduction of vocabulary in a given context (places like home, dispensary, shop, game reserve, etc.; and activities like building a house, painting it, cooking, changing a tire, etc.) with some grammar rules. After slogging through reading about just what Rehema, Kazimoto, and Hans (characters in these various settings) are up to and covering the related grammar, we move to mazoezi, exercises.
Then its time for chai! And at chai we move from mazoezi to maandazi! Maandazi are fried doughballs – think jelly donuts without the jelly, and a bit heavier dough. Very good, but not so good for you. Other things served with the coffee and tea available at chai on various days are bananas (you can’t get them fresher than here!), roasted peanuts, keki (I bet you can guess what English word that comes from – but here it is actually a sweetened cornbread), and chips (either banana or potato).
Fortified, we return for another 1.5 hours of study, moving on to kipindi cha pili – the second section of the unit, which includes a dialogue followed by comprehension exercises. We break at noon for 2.5 hours, returning at 2:30 for more exercises. Until about two weeks ago, I was managing to get through about 1.25 units a day. With Unit 31, however, I hit a bit of a wall and have slowed down considerably. I do love grammar, and I do very well with the drills. However, once I get out of my seat it all seems to fall out of my head, and we often end up reviewing what was just covered earlier in the day. (Just to illustrate how bad this can be, let me share the following: On Saturday a lady stopped by the common room looking for one of the workers. I froze when she asked if he was around. I couldn’t manage even a hayupo, he isn’t here.)
Yesterday was an exception – I was for the most part in the groove, and managed to remember most all of the verbs we covered. I’m having difficulty memorizing verbs – and when I do manage to retain them it is mostly passively; i.e., I recognize them but can’t initiate their use.
The food here is good. It is a carb lovers paradise. Take last night for instance: homemade dinner roles served with rice, potatoes, a sort of tomato sauce, and beans. Ugali, the staple, is only served occasionally to us – twice in my months here, both in the past week; I think this is principally because a lot of wazungu find it difficult to eat. What is ugali? My mother and those of her generation would call it mush*, but it is stirred until very, very thick (thicker than mashed potatoes). I don’t quite understand the aversion of non-Tanzanians to this. It must be its consistency because it doesn’t have its own taste, really – it tastes like whatever sauce it is served with. It’s the perfect dish for a place where there isn’t always a lot to eat because it is very, very filling – so filling, in fact, that it is not customary to serve it at the evening meal.
Some days after lunch I take a siesta. Even when I don’t, I usually rest, spending the time reading (when wireless is working I download the New York Times on my iphone and read it – I haven’t read news or heard it or watched it in over a week now) or writing. The half hour before we return for the last session of the day, I review vocabulary in preparation for the afternoon exercises.
Chai follows the afternoon exercises (you can see why I’m not losing weight as quickly as I expected – if snacking is considered eating outside of mealtime I’m not doing it; I just have five meals every day here!). We eat at six o’clock, so I spend the 1.5 hours between chai and the evening meal reading, writing, praying, etc.
After the evening meal I spend 75 minutes reviewing and preparing for the next day’s lessons. Then, when the Internet is in service I’ll also spend time writing emails, stopping by Facebook, posting here, and checking out some news websites (still a news junky, so this Internet/wireless issue is a challenge for me.)
I’m in bed usually by ten, sometimes an hour earlier sometimes an hour later. With the exception of a few nights it has been comfortable sleeping – getting downright chilly about four o’clock in the morning. I do sleep under mosquito netting, and I also have a few small geckos that hang out around my window sills – they help to keep the mosquito and spider population down. There are two things that wake me in the evening: the trucks on the Dar es Salaam – Morogoro Road that is about 75 meters away (there’s a speed bump, so I hear the breaks) and the bush babies. I now know why they are called such – they have a cry that does sound a bit like a crying baby, mwah, mwah, mwah, mwah.
*There’s a funny story about my mother in this regard. I was so proud that I’d become an adequate cook, and even prouder that a certain dish I’d learned to make was a hit among a lot of people: a polenta casserole (make polenta using milk, butter, and parmesan rather than just water in order to make it a little richer; put it in the bottom of a 9 x 11 greased pan; add sweet Italian saugage and tomato sauce; top with mozzarella cheese; and bake at 350 degrees for 40 mins). She watched as I prepared the delicacy. As I stirred the polenta with a proud smile on my face, Marcella burst my bubble: “Dear, I know it has a fancy Italian name, but what you’re making is cornmeal mush.”
Monday, November 16, 2009
At Last!
Seems our Internet problems might be taken care of, so expect some posts -- even some less "yawn, yawn" ones, as one straight shooting sister referred to some of the recent ones.
Saturday, November 7, 2009
An Aha Moment
My study of Kiswahili has provided me with an “aha” moment.
Among the things I have used in my in my scholarship on teaching and learning has been the metaphor of wayfarer. The work of Tim Ingold, a British anthropologist, has been especially important in this regard.
The wayfarer has no final destination: “Wherever he is, and so long as life goes on, there is somewhere further he can go” (Ingold, 2007, p. 77). Ingold (2007) distinguishes the navigation associated with wayfaring from transport, an activity that is destination-oriented. As it relates most especially to transport, navigating concerns carrying people and goods across from one place to the next in such a way that they remain unaffected. With transport every destination is a terminus, a point of re-entry after having been temporarily “exiled” while in transit from the last port. For the wayfarer on the other hand, the journey is the end as well as the means: Wayfaring is a development along a way. It is not that wayfarers never use the efficient means of travel associated with transportation but that they never allow their perception of the environment to be decoupled from their traveling through it. The wayfarer, “watches, listens, and feels” while proceeding through everyday life, with his or her “entire being alert to the countless cues that, at every moment, prompt the slightest adjustments” in his or her position relative to the surroundings” (p. 78).
The difference between these two ways of proceeding through the world has to do in large part with the traveler’s bond with the moment-to-moment perception of the world as it unfolds. The wayfarer actively engages the emergent world that reveals itself along the path, monitoring it for what might be useful. Transport dismisses the skills of the wayfarer, relying instead on fixed points within a system of coordinates and the instrumental calculus of point-to-point navigation; in its concern for destination, transport pays little attention to the path as it relates to the unfolding world.
One of Ingold’s points is that the travel between destinations is judged as secondary, being on the way is really being on the way to somewhere and is itself a kind of being nowhere.
(If you’re wondering what wayfaring has to do with teaching and learning, you might enjoy reading this piece I wrote for Catholic principals and teachers.)
Let me explain how this relates to my current study of Kiswahili. Nouns concerning place can take on prepositional form. So, for instance, nyumba (house) becomes nyumbani (at the house, in the house, around the house, etc.), and mji (town) becomes mjini (in the city), etc. Now here is where it gets interesting for me: Guess what happens to the word for trip – the best-known Kiswahili word in English, I’m betting – safari? It becomes safarini. Travel is not a sort of time out between places; it is considered in and of itself a sort of place.
An aha, yes; but it has led to all sorts of new questions – a lot to think about when I need a break from studying yet another infix: the relative clause.
This is cool stuff. Consider the clause “the clothes that I will wear”: Nguo nitakazozivaa…
nguo = clothes
ni = I
taka = will
zo =relative
zi = object
vaa = verb stem: wear
So: “the clothes that I will wear” is accomplished with two words in Kiswahili (but one of those words has seven syllables! – no dipthongs in Kiswahili, so the “aa” at the end counts as two syllables).
And here’s another: Fimbo aliyoichukua kiongozi inafaa sana
fimbo = stick
a = subject prefix for animate 3rd person singular
li = past tense infix
yo = relative
i = object
chukua: verb stem: carry
kiongozi: leader, guide
i = subject prefix agreeing with “fimbo”
na = present tense infix
faa = verb stem: to be suitable
sana = adverb: very
Thus: The stick that the leader carried is very suitable. (Notice that the subject of the sentence – kiongozi – actually follows the verb in this sentence.)
Pretty amazing stuff. Of course, one can be both amazed and struggling to learn to actually use these constructions at the same time. (Oh, one = I!)
Why OLQP Matters for Tanzania, or What’s Jesuit Education All About? (Cont.)
So now – at least in my head – I can return to where I began: If there’s no direct causal relationship between education and development, why start a school in a developing country to help its development?
Why? Because we’re not starting a school founded on the progressivist myth. Instead, we’re starting a school founded on a commitment to faith and justice. Let me explain – and I’ll return to N.T. Wright in a moment to help me to do so.
I mentioned above that the progressivist myth has a hard time dealing with the reality of sin. What if a school’s aim was not to churn out folks to be used as objects for progress but instead had as its aim the formation of virtuous people who are knowledgeable about the world they live in, capable of analyzing situations, and ready to address the needs of society as they encounter them? And, again echoing what I wrote in the earlier post, what if its other equally important goal was to form men and women to behold God’s grace?
I don’t think these two goals can be separated. We Jesuits talk a lot about the service of faith and the promotion of justice; usually – to be honest – we talk around them. (I’m mostly talking about myself in this regard, but only mostly because I know how much we struggled at Loyola Marymount University to clearly articulate the relationship between the two in ways that were meaningful.)
A passage from Wright has helped me clarify the relationship between them. Wright writes about idolatry and its social implications (again, I don’t have the exact page reference – shame on me for not taking better notes):
When human beings give their heartfelt allegiance to and worship that which is not God, they progressively cease to reflect the image of God. One of the primary laws of human life is that you become like what you worship; what’s more, you reflect what you worship not only to the object itself but also outward to the world around. Those who worship money increasingly define themselves in terms of it and increasingly treat other people as creditors, debtors, partners, or customers rather than as human beings. Those who worship sex define themselves in terms of it (their preferences, their practices, their past histories) and increasingly treat other people as actual or potential sex objects. Those who worship power define themselves in terms of it and treat other people as either collaborators, competitors, or pawns. These and many other forms of idolatry combine in a thousand ways, all of them damaging to the image-bearing quality of the people concerned and of those whose lives they touch.
Issues of morality and justice cannot be disentangled from issues of faith; or to put it slightly differently, a commitment to justice is a commitment against idolatry, a commitment to the worship of the one true God (or in still another way: orthopraxis and orthodoxy implicate one another – involve one another in a necessary way). (And unless Jesuit institutions are willing to speak of faith in terms other than the comfortable, therapeutic ones designed and defined for our use by late modern industrial society, any attempt to describe the relationship between faith and justice in any meaningful way will continue to elude them.)
It is no secret that corruption is a huge issue in here Africa. This rampant corruption has deleterious effects on development. President Obama spoke about it during his visit; the pope spoke about it during his visit; the African bishops spoke about it during the recent synod in Rome, and I read about it every day in the newspapers here. Corruption is the result of a sort of idolatry that combines the worship of power, riches, and glory with an attitude of invincibility. (I might add here that the colonizers were certainly not paragons of virtue in this regard! They held sway over the colonized oftentimes in the most ruthless ways, enriched themselves to the detriment of native populations, and “collected” territories as signs of national prestige.) The formation at OLQP of virtuous citizens concerned about the common good rather than their influence on people and processes, their own wealth, and their own fame will help a great deal in the development of this country and this continent, I am certain.
A final, related quotation from Wright in this regard (this time with a page citation!):
We have traditionally thought of knowing in terms of subject and object and have struggled to attain objectivity by detaching our subjectivity. It can’t be done, and one of the achievements of postmodernity is to demonstrate that. What we are called to, and what in the resurrection we are equipped for, is a knowing in which we are involved as subjects but as self-giving, not as self-seeking subjects: in other words, a knowing that is a form of love. (p. 239)
(As one kind elderly lady at Our Lady Gate of Heaven [“The Gate,” as it was called] in Detroit used to remind me when I went too long in my preaching, “Bring it home, Father.”)
So…
The Society of Jesus is not starting a school in Dodoma to hasten the way to development as popularly conceived. We are starting a school with a very particular purpose in mind, to form young men and women “to learn, to love, to serve” (the school’s motto) – for the improvement of their own condition, yes, but also for the welfare of others and the common good of all to the greater glory of God. This approach has been tried (though not so frequently since the modern era, really); and I think this way is true.Why OLQP Matters for Tanzania, or What’s Jesuit Education All About?
(29 September 2009. The Internet hasn’t worked in over twenty-four hours, so I don’t know when it will be that this will get posted.)
In my last post, I mentioned that folks shouldn’t fall into the progressivist fallacy that there is a necessary causal relationship between formal education and development. That is, it’s pretty clear that formal education does not necessarily cause economic development, contrary to popular believe. It doesn’t necessarily even contribute to it. It can contribute to it, but not necessarily so.
[Barbara Rogoff in her study of cognitive development, Apprenticeship in Thinking: Development in Social Context, writes the following about this issue:
It is easy for middle-class American and European researchers to focus on skills that are important in our own daily lives and in our community no only because as humans we all tend to be ethnocentric, but also because in many other nations, skills such as literacy (and the arbitrary skills associated with a particular form of literacy and schooling) are adopted as national priorities in the attempt to change the countries’ economic position. Researchers’ judgments of the importance of literate (or other technological) skills for intellectual development can be misled by the worldwide export of these tools to other nations…and by attempts to convert their inhabitants to a Euroamerican view of the natural world and literate ways of thinking and acting. We must be careful not to confuse the specific uses of the skills with the economic power of their users. The point is clearer when we consider the respect that is now given to socialization practices and cognitive processes of the Japanese, apparently because to their success in beating Americans at their own game (i.e., economic power and excellence in mathematical and technological skills). (pp. 106-107; emphasis added)]
But here’s the kicker: This is the very reason that this country needs the sort of education provided by the Society of Jesus. That seems a contradiction, I know, but bear with me: I hope it is less so at the end of this post.
We are enthralled by the myth of progress. The myth of progress simply states that the human project necessarily (there’s that word again!) can and will continue to march toward utopia, step-by-(more/better/improved)-step. A certain sort of functionalist and technical rationality serves this myth in our present era, and it informs what we now think is the purpose of schooling. In Surprised by Hope (which I read some months ago and which informs some of what follows), N.T. Wright notes the following about this myth (I’m sorry I don’t have the exact page reference in my notes):
The world is ours to discover, exploit, and enjoy. Instead of dependence on God’s grace, we will become what we have the potential to be by education and hard work. Instead of creation and new creation, science and technology will turn the raw material of this work into the stuff of utopia.
Here’s the problem with the myth, however: It can’t deal with the existence of evil in the world. It is powerless to deal with evil and the problems it wreaks in any meaningful way.
Education does not inevitably have to serve the myth. What if we structured education in ways other than those proposed by the progressivist myth, in ways that serve other purposes than the creation of cogs and levers for the gears of the capitalist vehicle making its way through time to some neo-liberal Utopia?
What if education were, instead, considered in terms of liberation? In this regard Mwalimu Nyerere got it right (again!):
The purpose of education is therefore liberation through the development of man as a member of society. The purpose is not the development of objects – whether they be pyramids, or irrigation ditches, railways or palaces. The development of things – what is usually called economic development – can be used in the development of man. It is so involved in Africa. But the purpose of education is not to turn out technicians who can be used as instruments in the expansion of the economy. It is to turn out men who have the technical knowledge and ability to expand the economy for the benefit of man in society.
The care for/of the individual student as a human person, as an end in herself or himself, is the starting point. We refer to this as cura personalis in Jesuit-speak. We would be doing the opposite if we began to see our students as commodities, if we believed that the mission of OLQP were to convert students “into objects – into repositories of knowledge, like rather special computers.”
One important goal education is to help students engage what it means to be human; we Christians would its purpose is to help them engage what it means to bear the very image and likeness of God. In this regard, education is liberation/celebration because it engages what genuinely and authentically makes us who we are, who we are meant to be. At its best, education frees not only the intellect but also each student’s talents, creativity, energy, etc.
We are concerned with the care of each individual, but the goal of Jesuit education is to form “men and women for others.” This theme simply recognizes that education is a social activity, with a social purpose. Again, Nyerere:
The first essential of the liberated person is an awareness of two things: his or her own humanity, and the power of the human person to use circumstances rather than to be used by them. He or she must overcome any ingrained feelings of inferiority, or superiority, and therefore be able to cooperate with other people, on the basis of equality, for their common purposes. (language changed re: gender; emphasis added)
In my two months at language school I have had numerous conversations with Tanzanians about these “ingrained feelings of inferiority,” a vestige of colonialism (as are the “ingrained feelings of superiority” wazungo feel, if we’re going to be honest, no?). The answer is not to educate for selfishness, though; education has to be at the service of the community, “common purposes,” as Nyerere calls them.
To be continued
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
No Internet
We haven't had Internet for a week, and we still don't have wireless.
I'd written an email to friends about the blog on my iphone, waiting for the time when wireless returned. It must have "slipped out" when I passed wifi somewhere in town!
I have some new posts waiting for when wireless returns.
I'd written an email to friends about the blog on my iphone, waiting for the time when wireless returned. It must have "slipped out" when I passed wifi somewhere in town!
I have some new posts waiting for when wireless returns.
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