Humans of New York - and Elsewhere

There's a blog I like a lot that's called Humans of New York, where photographer Brandon Stanton posts portraits he has made of people on the street, along with short first-person narratives that give a glimpse into the lives of his subjects. A selection of his posts was published in book form in 2015.

Recently Stanton has been traveling and doing similar portraits of people all over the world. He has for example, been photographing and listening to the stories of Rohingya refugees from Myanmar. And he has a link on his site to group that is raising money to provide temporary housing for the refugees. I encourage you to check it out.

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A week or two ago Stanton posted something that got under my skin when I first saw it and has continued to bother me since that time. (It's one of the great strengths of Stanton's manner of working that he lets people speak for themselves, which in turn encourages us to think about what we might have to say in response.) The post, which you can see here, shows a middle-aged man in Indonesia sitting on a blanket in a park and staring at the camera with a stern expression. The man's comment runs like this:

We must teach religion in our schools. We must start them really, really young. As soon as they know how to point out basic things like ‘rock, milk, tree.’ That is the best time to start. Not too much. Just one hour a day until they are about seven. Enough to teach them the basic prayers and Arabic alphabet. It has to be compulsory. You don’t have to force them to believe. But you must force them to study. It’s the most important thing in life. All of us have animal thoughts and lust. Only with God do you start having rules. Even the Christians have rules. I have a Christian relative. They pray to God as well. And the Hindus, well I don’t really understand Hinduism, but they have something too. You must have a higher power. When a man lives without God, it’s very dangerous. You have no reference, no principles, no precepts. You are almost equal to animal.

I think I understand why the gentleman feels this way. I suspect that many, if not most, people in the world would agree with his thesis. My mother certainly did. She was raised as a Methodist but married a Catholic. The church, in its wisdom, stipulated that my mother must agree to convert to Catholicism before she could be allowed to marry my father; furthermore, she had to agree to raise her children as Catholics. Which she agreed to do, because she believed that the Catholic religion provided a good framework for raising children. And so, as it turns out, my education was placed in the hands of the Sisters of Mercy (elementary school), the Benedictines (first two years of high school, and the Jesuits (last two years of high school and all four years of college.) And what I have come to believe, in part because of my experience with religion-infused teaching, and in part because of my experience of the world during adulthood, is that the gentleman's thesis is not just wrongheaded, it is recipe for disaster.

Certainly it is true that "all of us have animal thoughts and lust." Certainly it is true that human beings are capable of great selfishness and great cruelty to one another. But I don't believe it follows that the only way to have a life with rules is to be a theist, or that the only way we can confront and master our weaknesses is by the appeal to a "higher power." In fact, throughout history it is precisely the fervent belief in a higher power that has served as the smug justification for much of our most inhuman behavior on a massive scale.

It's a very short leap from saying that anyone who lives without God—or without the particular version of God that the speaker may have in mind—is almost equal to an animal, to believing that such people should be treated as animals, leading to the kind of genocide and ethnic cleansing that has been responsible for countless millions of death in the last century alone: Christians exterminating Jews (and Muslims), settlers exterminating native Americans, Hutus exterminating Tutsis, Buddhists exterminating Rohingya, Muslims exterminating Christians and even other Muslims of a different stripe, etc. etc. ad nauseum.

In the course of my education—much of it, as I have said, at the hand of fervent Christians, many of whom were, to their credit, open-minded about other ways of thinking— I have come to believe, along with the narrator of Ivan Klima's novel Love and Garbage, that the people who are most to be feared are not the ones who are given to doubts, but rather the ones who are entirely too sure of themselves:

The most important things in life are non-communicable, not compressible into words, even though the people who believe they have discovered them always try to communicate them, even though I myself try to do so. But anyone who believes that he has found what is truly enduring and that he can communicate to others the essence of God, that he has discovered the right faith for them, that he has finally glimpsed the mystery of existence, is a fool or a fantasist, and, more often than not, dangerous.

Amen, brother. Look no further than the front pages of your daily paper or the latest postings on social media to see the results. Ever since I began this blog twelve years ago, I have had at the bottom of the page a quote from Eric Sevareid that pretty much sums up my feeling: "One asks not only for the courage of his convictions, but for the courage of his doubts, in a world of dangerously passionate certainties."

I believe that it's a mistake to begin force-feeding children religion when they are too young to understand it ("an hour a day until they are seven"). To do so is to exploit the children in their innocence, to engage in a form of brainwashing that the children are helpless to resist, and, in the worst case, to narrow their vision and lay the groundwork for the kind of self-righteous thinking that results in the dehumanization and demonification of those whose perspective differs from one's own.

So, teach children the value (and the pleasure) of study, yes. Encourage their engagement in the world, their sense of curiosity, their sense of wonder and appreciation. When they are old enough to express an interest on their own, encourage them to explore the many interesting and thought-provoking ways that humans have come to answer such questions as "Where did we come from?" and "Where are we going?" and "What does it all mean?" Let them learn something about Islam, about Christianity, about Hinduism, about Buddhism, about Bahai, about Taoism, about whatever religious stances they find themselves drawn to, including agnosticism and atheism. Let them grow up in a state of respectful uncertainty, make their own choices, and learn to accept that the choices they have made are not the only possible ways of being fully human.

Make Good Art

Here's writer Neil Gaiman's graduation address to the University of the Arts Class of 2012. (Thanks and a tip of the hat to Ronk.)

Two excerpts:

The urge, starting out, is to copy. And that's not a bad thing. Most of us only find our own voices after we've sounded like a lot of other people. But the one thing that you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can.

The moment that you feel that, just possibly, you're walking down the street naked, exposing too much of your heart and your mind and what exists on the inside, showing too much of yourself. That's the moment you may be starting to get it right.

The things I've done that worked the best were the things I was the least certain about, the stories where I was sure they would either work, or more likely be the kinds of embarrassing failures people would gather together and talk about until the end of time. They always had that in common: looking back at them, people explain why they were inevitable successes. While I was doing them, I had no idea.

I still don't. And where would be the fun in making something you knew was going to work?

and

We're in a transitional world right now, if you're in any kind of artistic field, because the nature of distribution is changing, the models by which creators got their work out into the world, and got to keep a roof over their heads and buy sandwiches while they did that, are all changing. I've talked to people at the top of the food chain in publishing, in bookselling, in all those areas, and nobody knows what the landscape will look like two years from now, let alone a decade away. The distribution channels that people had built over the last century or so are in flux for print, for visual artists, for musicians, for creative people of all kinds.

Which is, on the one hand, intimidating, and on the other, immensely liberating. The rules, the assumptions, the now-we're supposed to's of how you get your work seen, and what you do then, are breaking down. The gatekeepers are leaving their gates. You can be as creative as you need to be to get your work seen. YouTube and the web (and whatever comes after YouTube and the web) can give you more people watching than television ever did. The old rules are crumbling and nobody knows what the new rules are.

So make up your own rules.

A is for Autonomy

There was an article in the New York Times some weeks ago about a new book called Draw it with your eyes closed: the art of the assignment, which basically is a compilation of 89 favorite lessons as delivered (or remembered) by various artists and art teachers. It looked like an interesting resource, so I ordered a copy, and quite some time later (the publisher was caught off guard by the publicity and fell behind on getting the orders out) it arrived. Since it's basically a miscellany, I've been reading it in bits, as I find the time. The other day I got to an entry by Justin Lieberman, who, in the middle of a longer piece, had this to say:

In my former post at an art school, I found that my students generally scoffed at assignments. They considered themselves artists rather than students and expected them to meet them on their own terms, which I was happy to do. After all, I prefer a critical conversation in which there is a measure of reciprocity. But in my current job I often find myself working with econ and poli-sci majors who see nothing wrong with telling me they are taking their class in order to raise their GPA. These students often complain to me that I am not giving them clear enough guidelines in my assignments. To this I often respond with a mock belligerence: "I am not your father! Do what you want!" This of course makes it nearly impossible for them to "do what they want," so long as they see me as any kind of authority. Of course, I am extremely uncomfortable with any kind of authority conferred upon me from outside, and this is my way of introducing the reciprocity. I must assume the role of authority in this situation, and I assume this role by rejecting it and handing it back to these poor souls drowning in obedience. Now it is their turn to "assume the role" — that of an artist and independent thinker. I admit that it is a bit of a crash course, but I feel it is necessary in order to prevent myself from becoming a "cult leader"-type professor with a pack of slavering clones at my heels.

He goes on to tell some entertaining stories about specific encounters with students. But I thought this brief passage raises a raft core questions about teaching and learning, about authority and obedience, about the nature of art (and independent thought) and the sociology of school.

This morning I had a brief meeting with a colleague who told a story about a project he had asked his students to attempt that involved them doing some explorations with materials that neither they nor he had used before. He asked them to try things out, share notes with one another about what seemed to work and what didn't, and build on one anothers' successes to build progressively more complex and interesting constructions. It went great; the students were all playing around and having fun and building stuff. Then he made what he thinks was a mistake: he announced to them that since the end of the term was coming up, they were going to have to choose and submit one of their works to be counted toward the final grade, and do a reflection paper explaining what they had done and what they had learned. Immediately the tenor of the class changed. The kids started worrying about time, they started rushing, they started complaining, the fun went out of it, and it became less about the exploration and the learning than about doing what they needed to do to get a grade. I'm not sure it was in fact a mistake, it was just a shift in emphasis that resulted in a shift in perception on the part of the students. After being put into a zone that felt different from what they were used to, they reverted, once the issue of grades was raised, to the kind of "schooly" behavior that schools have inculcated so successfully that it becomes the default, where we go when we hit the reset button.

Lieberman's passage, and my colleague's story, both point to an archetypal dilemma for teachers. It's true that students at times need direction, need instruction, need a structured framework for exploration and feedback along the way. But it's also true that they need openness, they need space, they need room to play around and try things out and fail. Ideally, there would be an approximate balance between those two kinds of learning. But my experience, first as a student myself, later as a teacher, and most recently as an administrator, is that the proportion of work that students undertake, during the course of their K-12 education, that is done in response to explicit direction from the teacher, (as opposed to collaborative investigation or exploration) is somewhere north of 90%. In our legitimate concern to provide scaffolding and support and to make sure that the directions are clear and everyone can succeed, we overstructure every minute of class time and explain exactly what students need to do to get a good grade. It's what we do, with all good intentions. And the teachers who do it best and loudest are adored by the students and lionized by the parents. I've worked with more than one of these paragons, who build a devoted following by telling students what they most want to hear: Just do what I tell you to do the way I tell you to do it, and you'll succeed. No muss, no fuss, no uncertainties, no ambiguities. There is a way, and I know what it is. Do it my way and you'll get perfect 800s on the SAT, 4.0 GPA, admission to the college our your choice. And for most (or if not most, enough) of their students, the promises come true; and the pedestal the teacher stands on gets broader and taller and ever more gilded.

But it's certainly no great wonder then that the students turn out, in Lieberman's words, to be "drowning in obedience." And it's my guess that even teachers who would prefer, like Lieberman (who is, let us not forget, teaching college students), prefer to defer (or avoid entirely) stepping into the role of arbiter or authority figure ultimately wind up there, usually about a week before grades are due.

In my forty+ years as an educator, I've known perhaps half a dozen teachers who have refused, on principle, to go there. Of that handful, there are are maybe two or three who succeeded in creating the kind of learning environment that not only made the students feel good but also resulted in impressive, consistent high-quality work. (And of those two, one of them was not teaching in school at all, but teaching an ungraded adult-education course populated by students who have chosen to be there.) It's not that it can't be done. But there are a lot of factors mitigating against it.

The Genius of Childhood

So here's a video of a news spot featuring five-year-old art prodigy from Australia named Aelita Andre. (For those of you who want to see more, she has, inevitably, her own web site.)

The video raises a host of questions, and I'd like to unpack some of them.

First of all, it has to be asked, is it for real, or is it an attempt on the part of her parents to make a bunch of money by exploiting their precocious child's inclination to play with art materials? I don't know the answer to that question. Her father has made some pretty slick videos of Aelita at work in order to establish her artistic credentials, but we have no way of knowing what instructions she is being given off camera, what choices are being suggested to her, or what the time frame of the art experience is. Is she just copying what she's seen her dad do? Or does she just have some kind of intutive sense of what to do on her own? We don't know. We see her at work, or at play, which amounts to the same thing, maybe, in a messy room with what has to be thousands of dollars of art materials laid out for her to use: primed canvasses, paints, brushes, spray bottles, and various odds and ends that she incorporates into her paintings. Someone is getting those materials ready for her. Some is cleaning up afterward. Someone is feeding here her lines. ("Welcome to my space. Hurrah!")  Could it be a scam? Sure? Is it likely a scam? Perhaps, or perhaps to some degree.

But let's run with it. Suppose this what Aelita does, something she has a talent for and and a desire to do, and her parents are just doing what good parents do: feeding the fire. New questions:

• Is it art?

She's got a way of working, the inclination to work, and, judging from the paintings on display, a pretty impressive sense of what looks good. So sure, I've got no problem with classifying it as art. In fact, my own tastes in art of late have been running toward exactly the kind of play-oriented, nonobjective art that Aelita seems to be doing. (If any of you would like to see examples of work of this nature, I've been posting a ton of it lately on my tumblr blog, which for a long time was an archive for videos I liked, but has turned into an archive of art, due mostly to the influence of Beverly Shiller, whose blog Datura consists of dozens of new images that she culls from the web every day. I find I like her taste, and frequently cull from her blog to feed my own.) Watching Aelita "at work" in the film reminded me of many other artists I have watched in action, making what are essentially spur-of-the-moment decisions about gesture and color, about what goes next to what, about how the composition is going to unfold.

• But what about background knowledge and skills? Doesn't an artist have to learn stuff first?

One of the commentators in the film notes that Aelita's work seems to resemble that of conceptual artists, and then asks what is conceptual art if it is not based on concepts, of which five-year-old Aelita presumably does not have a superabundance? My own feeling is that concepts are overrated, and that frontloading concepts before engaging in work is largely a waste of time.  (To take one example from my own experience, the summer before I began teaching I took nine credits of graduate school coursework in education, of which I remember not a syllable. But once school began in September and I had kids in front of me, everything that was discussed in class was of interest, and I knew which material was of immediate use, what was not, what questions to ask, and how to go about applying the answers.) If you think that this is an implicit indictment of most of what has been going on in schools for a very long time, you're correct. We run our schools on the assumption that students have to learn a bunch of stuff — pick a list, anybody's list — before they get to actually do anything "in the real world." That's a highly debatable assumption, and one which twelve-year-old Adora Svitak seized on in her justifiably famous TED talk. If you haven't seen it, now might be a good time to do so:

At one point, Adora has this to say:

As history points out, regimes become oppressive when they're fearful about keeping control. And although adults may not be quite at the level of totalitarian regimes,kids have no, or very little say in making the rules, when really the attitude should be reciprocal, meaning that the adult population should learn and take into account the wishes of the younger population.Now, what's even worse than restriction is that adults often underestimate kids abilities. We love challenges, but when expectations are low, trust me, we will sink to them.

I think she's right. I think that in schools we regularly underestimate what kids are capable of doing and insist that they go through the motions of proving themselves by "mastering" an arbitrary set of preselected competencies which we believe will serve them well in a future we cannot even begin to predict. Those competencies rely heavily on hierarchical, rationalistic models of learning, which perhaps used to make complete sense. It still makes some kind of sense, but maybe as not as much as it once did. Much of what I have been reading on brain research and what it tells us about how our minds work, from Dan Ariely and Jonah Lehrer and David Eagleman, among others, has been making the case that although we like to think of ourselves as conscious, rational, deliberate creatures, more than 90% of what goes on in our brains — and that shapes the decisions we think we are making rationally — is hidden from us and is based on non-verbal, non-rational, and often inexplicable neurobiological processes. I think that one of the valuable and liberating functions of art as a discipline is that it provides us with the opportunity to turn off or at least put aside the rational, hierarchical thought processes we most often employ and tune in instead to those mental functions that are underused despite the fact that they are much more powerful: processes like impulse and intuition and holistic attention. All of which are prominently on display in the videos of Aelita at work.

• Finally, coming at this whole enterprise from another angle, I'd ask, "What does the structure and tonality of this news report say about the conventions of storytelling in broadcast journalism?"

The second half of the interview is almost comically inept. Tempted as I am to fire up the blowtorch, I'm going to content myself to one question posed by the interviewer, and poor, befuddled John Turan's inane response. They're talking about Picasso's assertion that "Unlike in music, there are no prodigies in painting. What people regard as premature genius is the genius of childhood." The interviewer asks "Why can you not achieve at that young age, you just need to practice over years, if not decades..." That's an assertion that deserves some serious discussion. Instead, what we get from Turan is "Well, you definitely need to practice, but I think it's all in your mind."

Say what?