Diary: A Hell of Screens

At a restaurant we were recently met by a dispiriting sight: almost without exception, the guests were looking at electronic screens of various kinds, not at one another.

One should have known this might happen, yet I was brought up short.  The possibility of attention from someone or something not present prevailed over an interaction, perhaps satisfying, perhaps not - who knows? - with the person opposite.

It is my own vanity that makes me object to all this. I want to be tolerated in spite of my own dullness; I don't want anyone to prefer something over me.

Will that even remain possible in time?

Teacher Waiting For a Suitor

We have chafed at the low regard with which we are viewed by the public.  We have offered ourselves every rationalization one could think of about the importance of our work, lauding ourselves for our doggedness in continuing to carry it out in the face of every kind of discouragement.  Still, the hoped-for vindication has not arrived.  Our illusions have finally cracked; we must take matters more into our own hands.  We realize that, before it is truly too late, we must begin to court those who we thought should be our suitors.

You must appreciate the bitterness of this realization.  We had thought that our role as the transmitters of knowledge might have sufficed to draw our society to us.  We realize that it is we all along who ought to have been doing the courting, and we recognize our vanity and foolishness for ever having thought otherwise.

We will offer ourselves, then, up for rigorous evaluation.  But if you will allow one last impertinence, allow us to suggest the means by which it will be carried out.  We sadly accept that the lexicon of commerce has permanently entered education, and we know that we are henceforth to be measured by "quantifiable" data.  So, rigorously assess our work at least once yearly - we would actually invite it. However only 20% of our overall "score" should consist of test results.  We are cleverer than you think: you will excoriate us for hiding behind tenure protection, for thinking of our jobs more than of "results" for the children.  Then we will, to your astonishment, suddenly compromise and offer 30%, and ask whether it ever occurred to you that while we are obliged to impart knowledge and skills to students, it might be incumbent on those students to take an active part in learning them, or on their parents to provide a suitable environment for their children's educational advancement.

We will take advantage of your momentary silence to suggest a formula for the other 70% of our evaluation.  Fully 10% should depend on our command of the spoken language.  The misuse of grammar and vocabulary, even by our best-educated countrymen, is a constant source of consternation for me and, I would expect, the other members of our profession; as there are few people better placed than we to remedy this, we should be judged on our ability to speak in grammatical paragraphs, using the full richness of our language, with a train of thought that moves clearly forward.  At least 40% should depend on the heart of what we do: our lessons.  We hope you will see a high level of  "energy", along with student oral responses reflecting engagement with and understanding of the material. When the lesson finishes, we would like to show you written "formative" assessments that reflect our students' further understanding of the topic.  We would only ask that adherence to the latest in a long line of educational "philosophies" not be considered as part of our lesson evaluation.  These philosophies come, are replaced, and replaced again many times in the course of one career, so please understand our (uncharacteristic) cynicism regarding them.  We would like the remaining 20% to come from a somewhat intangible, but still essential measure: the "feeling" one gets when entering our room.  This high percentage represents, we feel, the importance of classroom climate.  That is, is there a palpable enthusiasm in the classroom? An appropriate sense of humor? An atmosphere of respect at the same time as there is a sense of order?  Are parents generally pleased with what we are doing with the children?

We know that you will want more than just this evaluation.  But your appetite is too ravenous; you must seek to satisfy it elsewhere.  We will gladly discuss making tenure more difficult to obtain, and once obtained, making its continuation dependent in part on a high quality of teacher performance.  But do not bring up the subject of eliminating it altogether.  Ours is, lest we forget, an academic career, and the protections of tenure benefit good teachers as well as mediocre ones. Also, your argument against defined-benefit pensions needs to be settled elsewhere.  We find this argument to be intellectually empty - effectively, you are saying that since only we public employees still get them, then no one should.  Create a society in which all workers have the right to a pension.  You have been told of your brilliance since birth - we can see this has been justified - and we are sure your rise through the meritocracy was hard-won.  Restoring the middle class should not be beyond your prodigious abilities.

If we willingly propose to be more rigorously evaluated, it must be in exchange for greater pay, and almost as importantly, greater acknowledgement from the American public for the service we perform.  Your attitude is full of contradictions: you want us to maintain discipline in our classrooms, but you are ambivalent about the exercising of authority in actual fact, so you have taken away the tools we need to keep order; you want us to impart meaningful knowledge, yet you are in disagreement about what that would constitute; you pay lip service to the importance teachers play in our society while undermining their efforts in myriad ways: starving them of resources, ignoring the discouragements teachers face that prevent them from committing to the profession, and, most damningly, in many cases not considering teaching a suitable long-term commitment for your products of "selective" colleges and universities.

We see that this courtship, even though just starting, is bereft of tender feeling so far.  But if you care about us, you will bear up under this effusion of bitterness and accept us for who we are - this is the lot of any suitor.  Your forbearance might one day be richly rewarded in the form of a uniformly well-educated, economically competitive population; your love, when you begin to feel it, will not have been in vain.

Toxic Ideas: how both the right and left have undermined our national culture and what we can do about it

There is an aspect of the American schism between the "right" and the "left" that has, believe it or not, not received enough attention.  As we know, each side not only can not admit that there might be merit in the other side's arguments, but goes on to hold the other responsable for damaging the very fabric of American life, while seeing itself as more or less blameless.

This is partly understandable. When the right accuses the left of undermining discipline, manners, and the institutions of society, it does so with a great deal of justification.  The weakness of our social fabric has much to do with social forces unleashed by the left wing of American thought. Eating habits, respect for the law, academic standards, personal behavior, family commitments - the standards for maintaining all of these have been weakened or lowered since 1960, and the left is mainly responsible.

This, however, can not excuse the very real damage that ideas from the right have also done to the American conscience.  The left never tires of pointing out the harm caused by certain conservative ideas, mainly those having to do with wealth acquisition - but it would be right to do so. The perversion of capitalism that has done much to harm not only our civic but our personal lives stems from neo-liberal (alternatively known as "conservative") economic ideas.

It may be the right moment, however, to explore further how so-called "right" and "left" ideas have combined to cause much more harm to our society than perhaps we even realize, and certainly than they ever could do separately.

We can begin with the fetishization of free markets by conservative economic thinkers. One can argue over whether deregulation, lower tax rates, and so on have been good policy.  What no one can defend is the social consequences of conservative economic ideas filtering down into the popular consciousness, with the influence on personal behavior that has resulted.  In teaching Americans that the profit motive is always virtuous and that personal economic enrichment is an end in itself, conservatives have damaged our ethical and civic core.  It used to be most important for us to be citizens; now we are consumers foremost.

We are not the first materialistic society obviously.  What we are is the first successful bourgeois society to have removed social constraints from so many facets of life.  We are besotted by material, and now electronic comforts (I am aware there is a class of people in our country that fancies itself untouched by American materialism; they have much more in common than their less glamorous compatriots than they realize.)  There is nothing the matter with this inherently.  However, with no "social inhibitors" to govern our use of our multitude of consumer goods, I am afraid sometimes we are swirling down a kind of cultural drain.  (If you take a moment to read some of my earlier essays, you will see I define culture in a somewhat different way from what you might be thinking). If ever fewer families are eating together around a table, discussing topics at length and taking the trouble to enjoy one another's company, it is because we have given ourselves permission to be excused from dinner, as it were, to pursue interests that are, in large part, narcissistic (I could list what these are, but I trust that you will be able to guess).  If there are ever fewer intact families to begin with, it is because, apart from the things that make living together inherently stressful, there are so few social inhibitors to hold the family structure together, combined with a generalized material longing that robs us of the forbearance that is occasionally necessary in marriage.  In this case, the left is responsible for the former condition, and the right, as I have suggested, is more responsible for the latter one.

It pains me to say that to visit most public places in America is to subject oneself to a visual assault.  At no time in our history has the American people been so uncaring about its physical condition and appearance.  I am even convinced that, in many cases, we take a perverse pride not only in being slovenly, but in offending the strangers in our presence.

I bring this up only because the decline in our public deportment is an excellent example of where pernicious ideas from the whole spectrum of American popular thought have converged and have become magnified in force. From the left has come the notion that our right to personal expression outweighs all other considerations, with the potential revulsion on the part of one´s interlocutor held in particularly low regard. Hence our feeling that we are entitled to wear any clothing, however ill-considered, regardless of the occasion.  We have also given ourself permission to eat any type of foodstuff, again with little regard to the appropriateness of the time or place.   The wretched condition of our bodies, which should be a spur to personal renewal, is instead a perverse badge of honor for a disturbing number of our countrymen.  The right has contributed to the problem also, just as powerfully if more subtly; it is far from blameless here.  Our exaggerated self-confidence, our disinclination to question our own attitudes and conduct, our feeling that whatever we are doing in the moment is perfectly justified are aspects of the American character that have received undue encouragement from the right wing of the national discourse.

I'm sorry to say I don't think I can keep the promise I effectively made in the title to offer a solution. I am realizing that other commentators with more credentials, authority, and potential for reaching an audience have, so far, failed to affect our conduct significantly, whether in the personal domain or elsewhere.  On an individual level, one could attribute this to the natural resistance we all have to suggestion. Or we could ascribe it to our disinclination as a people to engage in introspection, an aspect of our national character which historically has been to our advantage, but now poses a threat, if not to our survival then at the very least to our prosperity.

America and Food

Culture suppresses our instinctive urges, instead favoring rituals and codes; it devalues our subjective, inner lives so as to maintain the primacy of the rules of behavior that are imposed from the outside.  Where there is a strong external culture in a society there is naturally a strong sense of conformity.  Most members of society adhere to its norms, and the more elaborate the codes, forms, rituals, etc. of a society, the more dramatic the effort required to break away from them.  (Western literature until 1945 was inspired by -- as much as by any other circumstance, I am convinced -- the dramatic possibilities offered to the imagination by individuals struggling against the traditions, hierarchies, and religious tenets of the societies in which they happened to live.)
 
In this country we are embarking on an experiment in which we are leading our lives with only the minimum of cultural norms needed to hold a technically advanced society together.  The results so far have been disastrous generally, but here we will focus on the impact of dismantling our national culture on the consumption of food.

There are no longer any restraints about what may be eaten and when.  It is socially acceptable to eat the most dreadful food one can imagine at all points during the day, while engaged in practically any activity.  These relatively new norms have spread through every part of society, with little regard to wealth or even education.

The public health consequences of living without, in essence, any rules having to do with eating have been well documented.  I am unfortunately not optimistic about addressing the food-related health issues that beset us, because the cultural structures that would discipline and refine our eating are largely absent.  The notion that eating is a highly civilized act is one that our society has roundly rejected.

Proof that how we satisfy our hunger is of no importance can be seen everywhere.  Convenience and availability the greatest virtue food can possess.  Again, it would be wrong to think that the most favored groups of society do not also hold this view to some extent.

I applaud the efforts of those who are reintroducing good food and eating practices back into American life.  That they have not made significant inroads beyond the upper-middle class does not in any way invalidate these efforts.  I will strive to remain hopeful that an authentic American food culture will one day rise out of the ashes.

Food in New York City

"We owe a debt to our immigrants" is not just an empty phrase from some mayoral campaign speech.  For without them, New York City would have exactly two culinary strata: on the top, restaurants to match, or at least compete with any in the world; on the bottom, fast-food and chain restaurants, which, in the last 15 years, have increasingly crowded out the more authentic traditional staples of New York dining, such as the diner and the European ethnic (Jewish, German, Italian, etc.) restaurant.  Some examples of the Chino/Latino, Polish/Ukrainian, "Red Sauce" Italian restaurants and so forth that thrived between 1945-85 still exist, but are endangered.

New York dining, excepting the famous old steakhouses and a few other establishments, has in fact almost always been synonymous with ethnic dining. As the cuisine brought over by the immigration of 1880-1930 became part of mainstream city life, the changes brought to it by the passing of generations and exposure to other influences imparted a unique flavor (if you will) to the food that made certain ethnic cuisines inseparable from New York's identity.

Now, however, if one were put at random into one of the thousands of eating establishments of present-day New York, and then were served an order, also at random, one would be likely receive a plate occupied half by French fries, with the other half containing either a hamburger or some variation on the chicken breast.  The cost of the meal would not be exorbitant, but still would seem a bit too much given the quality of what was served. 

In recent years some restaurants have opened which, while still being too expensive for most people to go to often, are within the budget of a middle-class couple, and have superb offerings conceived and prepared by some of the finest young chefs in the country.  Some grocery stores and food purveyors catering to the patrons of such restaurants have also appeared on the scene.  However, the best affordable food is coming from recent immigrants.  Brooklyn's Chinatown, the Pakistani enclave on Brooklyn's Coney Island Avenue -- for that matter, any neighborhood where there has been a recent influx of immigration -- are the places to go if one wants a very good dinner for $30 or less.

Still, much of the food of New York is, in my opinion, not worthy of the "world-class" city we are always claiming to be.  It is too easy here to spend $70 on a meal  that afterward just makes one regret not having cooked at home.  Ten percent of the food available in the city is brilliant (from the Salvadoran food trucks, to the farmers markets, to Vinegar Hill House Restaurant), 30 percent is dreadful, and the rest merely edible.

The Prestige of Teachers

(This was in response to an Atlantic Monthly article on the Finnish education system).  Here is the link:
What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's Educational System

The Conversation We Aren't Having About Education

If American visitors to Finnish schools are returning without having learned the real reasons for Finland's educational success , this is because reforming our education system is not just a matter of electing new policies.  It has to do rather with making fundamental changes to our national culture.

The author connects the inequality of our society to our uneven educational outcomes - fair enough.  This is the main thrust of her argument.  But she also mentions, somewhat in passing, that in Finland, prestige is conferred on teachers.  This is decidedly not the case in the United States.

A study that was just published  concluded that teacher quality was the main factor not just in educational achievement, but in students' success over the course of their lifetimes.

Yet teaching does not attract the best college graduates, as measured by G.P.A. Yes, there is Teach For America, the program that draws graduates of elite colleges and universities into public-school teaching.  But, tellingly, the great majority of teachers from that program leave the classroom within two to five years.  As a 22-year educator, I feel I can state with confidence that no one, not even a Harvard graduate, becomes a properly-seasoned educator in that length of time.  And even on the assumption that Teach For America participants master the craft of teaching during their first year, once departed, their new-found expertise is obviously no longer of any use.

Though Teach For America teachers have been accused of dilettantism, I am sure the majority of them are not blameworthy.  They simply get tired of the low pay, lack of resources, and most of all the lack of public regard for their work.  Though we like to think we celebrate our nation's teachers, we really do so only in theory.  In practice, we think teaching is "not a fit profession for a gentleman (or woman)."  It is for the person who is seen as not being able to succeed in a more prestigious profession.  In the popular culture, the teacher is a risible figure, exercising authority futilely or incompetently.  The sexual peccadilloes of teachers are covered with lurid enthusiasm by mainstream news outlets. And so on.

Until the profession of teaching below the college level becomes more prestigious, we simply won't attract the sort of person who could spark young minds over the span of a career, which is the real remedy for our educational deficit.