Daily Archives: August 23, 2015

21st Century – The Age of Chaos

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Dear friend Robert.

All old codgers remember the days… We remember the innocence of youngness. We remember how Grandma washed clothes with a scrub board, Dad cleaned the furnace and Mom ran the wringer washer. We remember in our young years walking innocently through many wooded areas searching for adventure, critters and newly discovered creeks where no child can roam today without parents. We remember food rationing, gasoline rationing, and blackout drills during the big war. We remember music and culture as it was then. We remember school days, friends, and dreaming about the future. The days were filled innocently with rocket launches, thousands of comic books, the Poor Soul, and Enoch Pratt Library. We remember afternoons spent downtown at the Laugh Movie and eating at Read’s and Neddick’s. These memories will never disappear. Our growing years are locked in our memory forever. Even more, we old codgers are our memories!

Thinking back that far, we cannot deny that today is quite different. But until the Viet Nam War and Ronald Reagan, middle-American culture sustained the nation. The culture was firm enough to sustain context as each generation and every worldly change came along. Things changed but they changed without threatening the basic character of the nation.

As the mariner writes posts for “The Blog of the Ancient Mariner,” he reflects on change in a culture which no longer sustains a stable national gestalt. For most readers, the mariner points out substantive shifts in the world that are not typically the fodder of daily awareness. Sadly, because there is no common core in society, change is helter-skelter, e.g, tossing out liberal arts under the pressure of a slipping economy and an oligarchic, every man for himself, philosophy of life; tossing the baby out with the bath. There is no plan for the future. Consequently, change is more an experience of “progress” with a large wake of trashed values. Chaos is existential: live for today; who knows what tomorrow may bring?

The mariner has confessed many times that he is an incarnation of the Old Testament prophet Amos who railed against the laxity of reverence to God and the slipping morals of society. No one liked him either. The mariner also confesses that he is an incarnation of Chicken Little, a child’s avatar for angst. Apologies for the compound effect of being a raging goat herder and a squawking chicken.

You make a valid point that the mariner is quick to judge but does not offer tasks and solutions for his readers. He will make amends. One must note that chaos often doesn’t have solutions. In the midst of global warming, population growth, keeping the Earth sound as well as safe and historic shifts in political power and economy, solutions are hard to come by. The only advice the mariner can offer is to vote wisely, vote spiritually, and vote for the return of stewardship and compassion. Also, do not waste food or water, support those institutions and charities you believe are important to manage change. No matter how ragged and abused, US democracy still works. The people have the power to reign in chaos.

Ancient Mariner

Liberal Arts – A Lost Art

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MOUNT PLEASANT, IA. — Melodies seeped through doors and floated down the hallways last week inside Old Main, the grand, three-story home to Iowa Wesleyan College’s music department.

Despite renovations and fire, this 160-year-old building — the second oldest on campus — has retained its beautiful, historic wrinkles. So the music made here beneath a tiny gold dome isn’t trapped within modern, acoustically sealed studios.

Old Main exhales the sound of its aspiring virtuosos into the world at large.

It’s an apt metaphor for how Iowa Wesleyan music graduates in turn have educated generations of music students around southeast Iowa and beyond.

And it helps demonstrate why beloved Old Main has been a symbol at the epicenter of this college’s financial crisis.

Iowa Wesleyan President Steve Titus announced last month that half the college’s major programs (16 of 32, including music education) would close as the college sheds jobs: 22 of 52 faculty and 23 of 78 staff, for a projected $3 million savings.

Sociology, history, pre-law, studio art, philosophy of religion and communication are among the other programs to be scrapped.

Titus and the board of trustees — which voted unanimous approval — more or less have been able to sell the plan with another statistic: Only 52 students out of about 600 at the United Methodist Church-affiliated school (less than 9 percent) are enrolled in the majors to be cut. And 17 of those students will graduate this year. Popular programs such as business administration, education and nursing will forge ahead. [Kyle Munson, Des Moines Register, Feb 16 2014]

 

What draws liberal arts to the forefront of the mariner’s mind is Fareed Zakaria’s latest book, In Defense of a Liberal Education. Zakaria is one of mariner’s favorite authors. His books are lucid, insightful and easy to read. Zakaria says  liberal arts education is more important than technical training or job-based education. He writes:

“Engineering is a great profession, but key value-added skills you will also need are creativity, lateral thinking, design, communication, storytelling, and, more than anything, the ability to continually learn and enjoy learning – precisely the gifts of a liberal education.”

From the inception of the United States, the keystone that differentiates it from all other countries is that it provides a liberal arts education. This emphasis on broad knowledge and thinking skills produces a nation known for its free thinking, creative, and even futuristic society. The edge the nation holds among nations is the ability of its workforce to capture the latest ideas, to innovate new solutions, and to sustain a free-thinking culture – until now.

The failure of small liberal arts colleges is a bellwether. The small liberal arts college is most vulnerable to financial issues. One cannot blame students for seeking job-enhancing education. For forty years, the nation has been losing jobs for a shrinking middle class, computerization, manufacturing moves to less expensive labor markets and, since 2005, the American economy. In addition, larger institutions have the ability to compete in a dollar race with other institutions because they have large trust funds, government subsidy and a formidable advantage over small colleges in tuition from thousands of students – a tuition that inflates beyond inflation every year.

It may be a romantic notion. Perhaps it’s time to move on to dollar-efficient training of students for jobs that do not require wisdom or creativity. Fareed quotes William Bennett while Bennett was interviewing North Carolina’s Patrick McCrory:

“How many PhDs in philosophy do I need to subsidize?” Bennett asked – a sentiment to which McCrory enthusiastically agreed. (Ironically, Bennett himself has a PhD in philosophy, which appears to have trained him well for his multiple careers in government, media, nonprofits, and the private sector.)

As liberal arts education declines, so will the free thinking element of US democracy. Disappearance of liberal arts is indeed the bellwether behind a significant number of news headlines today. Exclusive boundaries are growing stronger around increasingly narrow minded groups. One example is the creationist battle in Texas for dominance in history books. Because the Texas School Board orders so many books, publishers tend to appease the board even though the history books are bought across the country. Another example is Congress, where virtually nothing creative or inventive occurs – only ideological bickering and blockading of each group’s legislation. This close-minded attitude has been creeping into mainstream society for decades and becomes more established as jobs, income, and pragmatism become the cause for education.

Our national jewel, free thinking and problem solving wisdom, will evaporate. We will be as any other nation that constrains individual discovery to promote fiscal efficiency and nationalistic objectives.

Liberal arts remain a conundrum for the United States. Without the wise insight proffered by a liberal arts education, where will we find those leaders who will sustain a liberal arts education?

Ancient Mariner