Reading: "Not for Profit", Part One

Recently, I bought a copy of Martha Nussbaum's relatively new book, Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities, as an echo-chamber kind of not-so-guilty pleasure. Published in hardcover in April 2010 and about to be issued in paperback in March 2012. (Not for Profit was published within Princeton University Press's The Public Square series.) The book's title and subtitle caught my attention because of my beliefs that teaching critical thinking skills to young people is essential to their someday leading thoughtful and hopefully interesting lives and that heavy engagement with the arts and humanities is one vehicle for that kind of teaching. As I considered buying it, I asked myself, Is she likely to make assertions in this book that I will agree with? Yes, probably. Is her book likely to enhance my understanding of what I already believe? Again, probably, and that's why I wanted to read it. Everybody likes it when smart people have ideas similar to their own!

When the book arrived in the mail, I took a look at its stark and matter-of-fact cover, read the front flap of the dust jacket first, and immediately took note of this passage among the copy:


Anxiously focused on national economic growth, we increasingly treat education as though its primary goal were to teach students to be economically productive rather than to think critically and become knowledgeable and empathetic citizens. This shortsighted focus on profitable skills has eroded our ability to criticize authority, reduced our sympathy with the marginalized and different, and damaged our competence to deal with complex global problems.


The passage struck me because, as a teacher myself, I worry when I hear anyone make statements implying that educational goals should be geared primarily toward the attainment of some career. I see it differently: the omnipresence of our multi-faceted liberal-arts education system, which requires courses in math, science, social studies, English, PE and Health, and self-determined electives proves that we value raising our children to be well-rounded people who have a more extensive understanding of the world than simply how to do one specialized occupation that earns them money.


Now, to be clear, I sincerely want for all young people to have jobs in the future that will provide  them a solid economic foundation, but education should be more than just job training. While I sympathize with the immediacy that I sense often from students and their parents about the difficulties of college admissions and the instability of the job market, we all must care more about the knowledge and experiences that can lead to living a good life than about the grades and test scores that signify potential job opportunities. I would argue that with the former comes the latter, but not necessarily vice versa.


I also wanted to read Not for Profit, in part, for some self-affirmation. As a writer, editor and arts educator, I coordinate and oversee a magnet-school program that is intended to nurture, guide and mentor a small number of high school students who express an interest in developing themselves into literary writers. However, I find that most of my graduates do not go on to college majors in anything related to creative writing, almost all of them citing the desire to have better economic opportunities than a writer typically has. Some do go into film, wanting to write screenplays, also citing that they see better economic possibilities in that industry. Some brave ones fess up as seniors that they never really had any intention of becoming a writer, but simply wanted the prestige of a diploma from a magnet school, in order to go to college and have better economic opportunities. Whatever any given student's (or parent's) motivation for attending an arts program then steering away from an arts-related college major and career may be, lying at the bottom of that pool of discarded or purported dreams is my long-term effort to make those dreams come true. I spend years with my students, working as hard as I can to give them what they have asked me for. That part of me wanted to read Martha Nussbaum's book because the description of it declared what I have long declared to many a student and parent: the rewards of a career in the arts and humanities are significant, whether or not they are lucrative.


At this writing, having read only the foreword by Ruth O'Brien and the first chapter, my understanding of the mission statement of the book is clear. O'Brien writes, "Nussbaum reminds us that great educators and nation-builders understood how the arts and humanities teach children critical thinking that is necessary for independent action and for intelligent resistance to the power of blind tradition and authority" (xi). As The Public Square series editor, O'Brien's obvious support of the overall aim of the book seems abundant: "Nussbaum undercuts the idea that education is primarily a tool for economic growth" (xi). That word "undercuts" implies a chopping off at the knees, a meaningful move to "kill it before it grows," as Bob Marley sang. This seems very much like an idea that needs to be discussed in the public square.


In her first chapter, "Silent Crisis," Nussbaum begins immediately decrying the trend toward moving education's chief methods and goals toward meeting the needs of businesses and economic growth. She cites examples of these changes, which are happening on both macro and micro levels, including an explanation of the content of the Spellings Report published during the George W. Bush administration and anecdotes about university and school administrators. The chapter makes several significant assertions, and chief among seems to be this idea that the humanities enhance our lives our lives by improving our ability to empathize with each other, to regard each other as equally human rather than as "a mere useful instrument or an obstacle to one's own plans" (6). We become a community, not by simply living near each other, but by communing, by finding common ground and working toward a common good.


Among her other assertions, I found another that I'm quite fond of pointing out: "Education does not take place only in schools" (8). Parents not only influence their children's ability to learn at school, but also their children's understanding of why they go to school. When parents focus their admonitions on having good or bad grades, in order to get into college and get a job, children take from it that what matters is grades. Children learn at school, but they also learn at home, and one thing that they learn at home is how to perceive what they learn at school. This narrow grades-centered vision thus portrays some subjects, the ones taught in schools but not related to that child's own goals, as pointless. The logic becomes evident in common statements -- I'm not going to be a historian, so why do I have to study history? -- with the underlying rationale that what doesn't relate to our money-earning potential must be irrelevant.


So what are these positive influences of the humanities in our education system? As the term implies, the study of the humanities isn't about money, but about our common humanity. Nussbaum writes,


These abilities are associated with the humanities and the arts: the ability to think critically; the ability to transcend local loyalties and to approach world problems as a "citizen of the world"; and, finally, the ability to imagine sympathetically the predicament of another person. (7)


It is this empathy that is so integral to all of us living together -- the refusal to think not in economic terms, but in human terms. Furthermore, that ability to think critically allows us to question foolish notions and to expose them as foolish, for everyone's benefit. We may be competing for the dollars out there, but in the grander scheme we are truly all in this together.

One of the most difficult ideas for Americans to reconcile is the chasm between our nation having a democratic government and a capitalist economy. Living in a democracy means that we believe all people have the rights to participate in governance and to equal access to the government's power. However, living in a capitalist economy means that we understand that the strongest, richest, most powerful and sometimes most ruthless people thrive. The empathy that Martha Nussbaum describes underpins our democratic ideals and flies in the face of our capitalistic notions, with her idea that education will teach us to care about more about each other than about wealth.

As an arts and humanities educator with some personal stake in this debate, my most vehement objection to a career-path understanding of education's purpose and potential revolves around my understanding of what tremendous value the arts and humanities have. I know what some people are missing when they shut Shakespeare or long-form journalism or art museums out of their lives, and it makes me sad for them. If all we are going to learn is how to earn money, what will we do with the money once we have it? Anyone who watches TV, goes to the movies, reads books or magazines, listens to music, browses websites, or buys a product based on its eye-catching graphically designed packaging is spending their time and money on the arts and humanities!


I'm looking forward to reading the rest of Not for Profit, and  It's not a very long work; short of the end notes and index, the body of book is a little over 140 pages. I'm going to write more as I read through and finish parts of the book. Later in January, look for "Reading: 'Not for Profit,' Part Two," which will discuss chapters 2, 3, and 4, and "Reading: 'Not for Profit,' Part Three," which will discuss the final portions of the book.

New Publication Date: Thursdays

After a bit of research about when people tend to read blogs, I am moving "Pack Mule for the New School" to a publication date of Thursdays, rather than Mondays. The first of the new posts will come this Thursday, December 29. New posts will still come at 4:00 PM Central Time (GMT -06:00).

You've Got a Point, Mr. Murray

As a teacher of creative writing and English, I constantly question my decisions about what to have my students read. Do they really need to read the classics, or should they simply to be aware of them? Are the classics truly the instruments of power that some politicized critics claim, or are they truly the greatest works of literature ever written? That matter is decided for me, at least on a practical level, by the course of study for 12th grade English, so we spend the year traversing "Beowulf," the Canterbury Tales, Shakespeare's plays and sonnets, Matthew Arnold, and DH Lawrence. In my creative writing classes, however, those questions are more pronounced for different reasons, and there I lean in my curricular decision-making toward William Faulkner's advice, "Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it." If these young people are to be the writers of the future, what kinds of readings will be indispensible to them? For that answer, I have to attempt to look to the future, to what literary progress -- in the light of literary tradition -- might mean and to examine what exactly it is that am I trying to teach them.

Recently, I was re-reading some critical comments by Albert Murray that address this subject. If you've never read anything by Albert Murray, you ought to. I will admit immediately that I was ignorant to his work for a long time, even though I have focused so much energy on learning about the history, culture and people of the state of Alabama. Murray, who was born in 1916 and raised in south Alabama near Mobile, fell in my lap when Fred Whitehead, who wrote the foreword for The Life and Poetry of John Beecher, mailed me a copy of From the Briarpatch File: On Context, Procedure and American Identity, completely unsolicited, just because he thought I would enjoy it.

In From the Briarpatch File, the second chapter, titled "Context and Definition," was derived from a 1997 award-acceptance speech and has Murray's comments on how, despite being an African-American writer coming of the age in the 1930s, the black writers that he found in Alain Locke's New Negro anthology had not inspired him nearly so much as works by "great" writers like Joyce, Proust, Malraux, et al. that he encountered in college readings. Murray discovered the then-relatively new anthology in 1934 as a high school junior, while looking for a piece to recite in his school's oratory contest. However, where a reader might assume that Locke's culturally and historically significant book would impress a young Albert Murray by connecting to the ideas and emotions of a young Southern black man of that time, instead Murray carries the discussion in another direction. Explaining why other writers secured a more significant place in his consciousness and regarding the matter of what makes for truly great literature, he writes:

You, of course, know that the ambition to produce world-class literature involves the matter of processing or stylizing idiomatic folk and pop particulars, which is to say extending, elaborating and refining folk and pop material up to the level of fine art. (9)

Murray could easily have been swayed toward literature that spoke directly to his personal situation, and thus away from "great" literature, but he noted that his recognition of greatness is derived from something larger that similarity to his own personal circumstances.

Then, in the next chapter of the book, titled "Academic Lead Sheet," which is derived from a 1978 Honors Convocation speech given at Howard University, Murray reminds his listeners that the most "successful," educated and dedicated among them are indeed an "elite" -- however out of favor that term may be -- and that the purpose of an elite is not to amass an impressive GPA but to lead the way to positive change, to utilize their abilities to affect a better world. I think his point is particularly appropriate for writers, including student writers. He notes that, in the late 1970s, being a "revolutionary" is a very popular thing to be, but he also offers a caveat.

But the primary concern of revolution is not destruction but the creation of better procedures and institutions. All too often being a rebel means only that you're against something. Whereas being a revolutionary should mean that you are against something because you are for something better. Indeed primarily because you're for something better. (18)

About a page later, in the same chapter, he adds: "The intellectual's very first step should represent an effort to approach life in universal terms" (19). Yes, it is possible to be both of the institution -- receiving an establishment education -- and working to change the institution for the better. In fact, it is more than possible; aligning his ideas with WEB DuBois' "Talented Tenth," Murray proposes that the most capable among us should lead people to genuinely improved living conditions, which is done by understanding not only the current, localized conditions, but the larger, more universal human condition. In the case of writing and reading, this awareness of universality has to be present.

What I like about Albert Murray's critical writings is that hard-nosed optimism and his definite stance on the greatness of "great" literature. He always seems to be telling us,  Hell no, it isn't easy to look around and not given in to sorrow, but we can't do that. We've got to do better than that. Murray's ideas come to me periodically, when I am thinking about what it means to teach twenty-first-century teenagers about writing and literature, especially when I am trying to convince them that canonical works have achieved that status through a process of constant, vigorous engagement and re-evaluation by critics and scholars.

Two notions that often don't bode well with a modern teenage audience are: to stop complaining about the difficulties in order to focus on completing the task and learning from it, and to utilize that capacity for incessant questioning to achieve positive impacts rather using it simply thwart the efforts of some authority figure. Using Murray's terms, being a "rebel" is easy enough and common enough, but being a "revolutionary" is something altogether different. I often retort to my students' plaintive remarks by saying, Now that you've told me what you don't want, tell me what you do want.

On probably a daily basis, some student talks to me about what isn't fair, what is too hard, or what seems pointless, often in regard to some classic work of canonical literature. The complaints that I hear are common enough. According to a 2006 study by the Gates Foundation, 47% of dropouts cited their lack of interest in their classes and 69% "were not motivated to work hard." However, in that same study, 81% understood that graduating was "important to success in life," and 74% would not have dropped out if they had it to do over. Again, Albert Murray's ideas come to mind. Someone -- whether in any student's life it is a teacher or a parent or whoever -- is not looking these kids in the eye and saying, Yes, life is hard to understand, but everything we are teaching you really does relate to you. Too often, I hear the kinder, gentler version, where adults coax students into wanting to succeed, where we trick them with mind games into jumping just one more hurdle in the hopes another adult will coax them past just one more hurdle . . . The problem with that is: too many students learn to regard education as a series of pointless hurdles on the way to a "piece of paper" and never seen the universality in what they are being taught, namely that the hurdles never stop coming. Never. Dropping out may be an option for high school, but it is not an option in life. Which is why I teach literature and writing the way I do.

Albert Murray wrote that timeless works of literature "represent an effort to approach life in universal terms." Trying to teach modern teenagers about Anglo-Saxon literature, for instance, requires a teacher "to approach life in universal terms." The teacher of class literature must tell the students, So you're 17 or 18 years old and you wish didn't have to read "Beowulf"? Well, those people 1300 years ago who struggled against brutal cold and the constant threat of death from many sources were just like us in many ways -- afraid of the dark, trying to explain the unexplainable, and waiting for a hero to save them. Or take The Canterbury Tales, whose "Prologue" mimics our modern world in so many ways -- take, for example, the self-righteous and arrogant bourgeois Guildsmen who believe that their money entitles them to be better than other people. Albert Murray wrote about the "blues idiom" of the "briar patch," an ethic of joyfully (and sometimes sorrowfully) darting and weaving around life's many brambles and tar-pits . . . which sounds an awful lot like Chaucer's characters, or like Rabelais' famous quote: "For all your ills, I give you laughter." To learn from canonical literature, students have to be taught "to approach life in universal terms."

However, when I take such a strong socio-historical approach to teaching literature or writing, somewhere in the back of my English-major brain, I hear the formalists telling me, Stick to the text! Don't bring in all that baggage! And that is where the "revolutionary" in me replies, No. I want to take my students somewhere better than finishing my course with little more than a rough recollection of those formalist explication exercises that the English teacher made me do. I beg my students to see themselves in the every reading, but still they fight me.

In my creative writing classes, whenever we read "Barn Burning" by William Faulkner, students' vapid objections to true engagement circle around an insistence that they can't identify, because their own fathers have never burned down anyone's barn and never tracked horse shit on the landlord's white rug. That isn't the point, I tell them -- what would it be like to know that choosing to doing the right thing would mean that your father, no matter how cruel and objectionable he may be, would likely be either arrested or killed, leaving your family without a provider? Hell no, it isn't easy to look around and not given in to sorrow, but we can't do that. In the end, Sarty makes the choice to do the right thing, and as we leave him, knowing that his father is likely dead, he is exhausted and all alone as the sun is coming up.

Those brief chapters in From the Briarpatch File, taken from speeches given about twenty years apart, provide me with a range of lessons that I want my students to learn, chief among them that anything worth having is worth working for, that true leaders move people in positive directions, and that the value of truly great literature is found in its discussions of universal human truths, not in its resemblance to our own lives. After this holiday break, my 12th grade English students will take exams, then get into the Renaissance, during which we will begin to study works like Robert Herrick's "To the Virgins," which resembles their lives very much in substance and content, even if not in diction and style, and and William Shakespeare's "MacBeth," one of the greatest existential guilt-ridden backstabbing stories of all time.

Also in From the Briarpatch File, in his chapter "Art and Such," derived from an address given in 1994 to the Alabama State Council on the Arts, Murray again insists that literature that could be considered "fine art" is directly tied to the "human consciousness." He differentiates "folk art," which he defines as art produced by people with the lowest levels of training and skill but which may nonetheless have some appeal, from "pop fare" and at the top, "fine art," those "aesthetic statements" that represent the best that humanity is capable of. This idea of universality and refinement of style smacks of the ideas expressed by Harold Bloom, in his book The Western Canon, in which he explains why William Shakespeare is the best writer of all time. Like Bloom who decries politicizing literary criticism and who warns against using criteria other than aesthetic skill as the measure of quality, Murray seems to take a similar stance, wondering out loud whether some writers are accepted for different reasons -- presumably cultural or political agendas -- than actual artistic skill. He states, to end his remarks:

If any of this sounds the least bit elitist to any of you, ask yourself if you really prefer anything but the most competent craftsmen, doctors, dentists, lawyers, teachers, or even servants, etc. Most people obviously prefer all-star quality of mediocrity in sports. Why not in the arts?

Having a bachelor's degree in English and a master's degree in Liberal Arts with an emphasis in English, I can admit that Murray's (and Bloom's) statements do make some sense to me, yet I still hold on to my insistence that politicized criticism is not all bad, and is often quite necessary. Since I've had the luxury of reading many of the great Western writers, and the luxury of having been guided through by my college professors, I have a pretty solid understanding that the most widely read writers in Western history have achieved that status for their universality and their transcendence of temporality, and that politicized criticism and ideals have allowed some really pitiful writing to reach the public sphere. However, having students to read the canonical greats can also be enhanced by politicized criticism, by allowing for more than a canonical perspective of the works.

Although I agree with some of their assertions, I have to stray a little bit from Murray (and a lot from Bloom) and be that "revolutionary" who believes in taking us somewhere better, somewhere that cannot be reached through formalism alone. Teaching literature survey courses, like most high school English courses, has to be done within a socio-historical context, connecting the works to the cultures who created them, and though it must begin there, it cannot end there. Coming back to Murray, the questions have to be asked in class -- and the students must participate in asking it -- why do we still read this work? why do scholars proclaim that this work stands the test of time? why do editors include this work in the textbook? and who are these scholars and editors who make these determinations? The teacher must utilize and exploit that questioning aspect of the youthful personality in order to continue to re-examine concepts like the canon and universality, even in a survey course. A work may contain some quality that succeeds in "extending, elaborating, and refining folk and pop material up to the level of fine art." -- call that quality archetypal or "universal" or any synonym you wish -- but to connect with students, or with anyone, it's got to be an aspect of the discussion to question it, not to simply accept it.

The Next (Big?) Thing

After a lot of thought about what to do next, I think I'm ready to begin work on a new book, something in the genre of creative nonfiction this time. The last five or six years have been slam full of projects, mostly nonfiction, Southern-related and/or student-written. I haven't lacked for something to do since about 2004--- especially since my kids were born in 2005 and 2008. With Children of the Changing South coming out last month, and with work on "You Can't Know Where You're Going" winding up for the February performance at AUMLAC, these questions of what to do next are finally arising.

My ruminations on what to write next have revolved around not only my interests but also around the massive changes in levels of technology, types of media devices, and the book business in general. Should the next thing be a book or something to be published on the web, I have wondered. Did I want to write a play or a screenplay, something that would be performed, not read on paper? As for subjects, ideas that I have mulled over have included writing a book about Auburn football or about life on Lake Martin, two of my more recently adopted pastimes. I also have considered focusing my effort again on something student-centered, like coordinating a student-written web project on Alabama writers in the vein of the Mississippi Writers & Musicians web project originally created by students at Starkville High School. On a completely different note, I have thought about researching something related to Catholicism in the mostly Protestant South, since I am now in the process of joining the Catholic Church. Finally, some part of me has considered spending some time just doing interviews, instead of writing, to alleviate the matter of what to write; yet another part of me has considered focusing solely on academic work, like literary criticism, which would provide the basis for the content of the work.

Some people have suggested that I write novel, too. (It is often assumed that, when I say that I have five published books, I mean that I have published novels, which isn't the case. I have zero published novels to my credit.) I tried to write a novel once, in the late 1990s, and it didn't turn out very well. I was trying to write something unique, and I succeeded at that -- there was nothing else like it . . . but it wasn't any good. After several rejections from a variety of presses, one very detailed rejection came that finally helped me realize (and admit to myself) that my first attempt at being a novelist hadn't worked out. Normally, accepting rejections is difficult, but I was actually thankful for that one, because it helped me move on to write something else. I doubt if I'll ever fool with writing novel-length fiction. I find real life, especially life in the South, far too interesting.

For the next book, I've got a subject and a title in mind already, a little kernel that is focusing my thinking, for a work of creative nonfiction, something contemplative, a mix of experience, research and reading that will explore and consider manifestations of power and its uses in the South, including portrayals in literature. After all, works of fiction are almost as real to many Southerners as reality itself, especially since a lot of "reality" in the South involves some pretty intense fictions. My friend Sonny Brewer once told my students, "Never let the truth get in the way of a good story."

I expect that this new book will take a few years to complete. Most of the others have taken about five years from starting to make notes to holding a book in my hands. So, with any luck, I'll have an announcement to make in 2016 or thereabout . . . Wish me luck!

Arts & Humanities for Young People

As an arts and humanities teacher, I was glad to read this article, "An art-felt gesture" by 16-year-old Zulmarie Nazario, which was published about a month ago on philly.com. (I received it more recently as part of an e-mail newsletter from the Arts Schools Network.) It explains in very general terms what "Fleisher" is, what going there has meant to her, and that she got to meet Michelle Obama because the Fleisher Art Memorial (its full name) had received the National Arts and Humanities Youth Program Award. The award is given to an outstanding out-of-school arts program. On its web page about receiving the award, the following explanation is given about what Fleisher does:

Each Year, Fleisher Art Memorial's Youth Arts Programs provide over 2,000 young people in Philadelphia with creative and transformative arts experiences. Fleisher engages youth ages 5-19 in free, high-quality art-making classes, workshops, and residencies that emphasize inquiry, experimentation, and appreciation, providing each student with a positive means of self-expression.

Ask any young person who has ever engaged the arts about its impact, and the story is always similar: it made a difference in their life. Nazario's short article is no different, and I recognized a lot of the sentiments.

Working with teenagers at an arts magnet high school for the last eight-and-a-half years has given me a constant opportunities to engage young people with the arts and humanities. I teach creative writing and now, in the last two years, 12th grade English too. In my creative writing classes, I don't use prompts, for instance, because I want the students, who range in age from 14 to 18, to pull out of themselves what they keep tucked away in there. I also almost never give anything like a "test," and I never use objective formats like multiple choice; the closest I get are short answer questions. We read and then talk about what we read, and we write and then give feedback to each other on what we've written. We hold up student-written texts and published texts that have been edited, and we ask of both: what was done well here and what could have been done better? I teach the students that they aren't wrong if they can back up their ideas with evidence from the text, and I teach them separate their likes-and-dislikes from their understanding of craft, merit and value.

However, what I find, especially among students that I teach for four years, is: the students who thrive on a vivacious kind of critical thinking love this kind of learning, and the ones who just want to memorize a few facts for a short period of time and pick the correct answer from A, B, C or D do not. We all know people who say, "Just tell me what to do so I can do it that way." The industrialized world needs worker bees, lots of them. Yet, for those who don't want to live that way, and moreover for young people -- and I was one of these -- who resent even the idea of being told how to live or what to think, an education that is rich in critical thinking about the arts and humanities is an irreplaceable in-road for showing them that life doesn't have to be that way!

In September 2011, The Chronicle on Higher Education published the article, "Let's Get Serious About Cultivating Creativity", which discusses the very kinds of offerings I am describing. (Unfortunately, the option of reading it for free on the Chronicle's website has expired.) The authors state unequivocally: "we are undermining creativity in K-12 education through relentless standardized testing and the marginalization of subjects like art and music." Why exactly would that matter that we are "undermining creativity"? Because, as my father used to tell us, if you ain't the lead dog the scenery never changes. Being at or near the bottom strata, which is where an inability or a refusal to think will land anyone, sucks.

Even though I teach creative writing and English, I have no delusional misconceptions that my students will go on after high school to study literature like I did. In a show-of-hands poll last year, of the 63 seniors I taught, only one was going on study English -- and she was one of my creative writing students. Of the 84 seniors that I teach this year, none are planning on being English majors next year. So how do I handle that ego-crushing scenario? I employ a Writing Across the Curriculum approach to giving assignments, which roots the principles in critical thinking exercises rather than in strict literary study, and I utilize a socio-historical approach to teaching literature that has students connecting the literature to the society that produced it -- the very kind of "School of Resentment" approach that would make Harold Bloom squirm in his big leather chair. Relevance, my good man, it's called relevance. Maybe if I can help them to see that the culture produces the literature, they may well begin to think critically about the "literature" that our culture is producing. (I use the term "literature" loosely here, because the cultural artifacts that may be relevant to modern teenagers might include TV shows, movies, video games, apps, and more.)

An education -- whether inside or outside of a school or a classroom -- that is steeped in the arts and humanities can help to cure what Marianne Moore wrote about in her often-referenced poem, "Poetry": "we do not admire what we cannot understand." It really bothers me when my students can't chuckle at the bawdiness of the "Wife of Bath's Tale," for example. For my part, I want my students to read and to think . . . and consequently to understand--- and to care enough because of that understanding that they may want to read and think about and understand even more!

Zulmarie Nazario's expressions about her experiences at Fleisher and the ideas in that Chronicle of Higher Ed article are factors that I beg people to understand, people who don't envision raising their children to be artists or scholars. The very noble but flawed logic tells them, I should help my child gain useful skills that will help him get a job. He can paint or play saxophone or be in a play later if he wants to. Many parents who encourage their children to play sports for the indirect benefits -- learning teamwork, discipline, competitiveness and sportsmanship -- cannot seem to see the indirect benefits of  engaging the arts and humanities: problem-solving, divergent thinking, analytical reading, self-esteem, and communication skills. There's no way those skills could be useful in a "real job." (cough, cough)

For all of the love that politicians and educational administrators have for data to support instructional practices, I must remark that there are some things that are worth more than numerical scores that can be plotted on graphs and in columns. Creativity is one of them, and self-esteem is another. Happiness is yet another. And all three of them have more value than any standardized test score ever will. Ask me if I would rather have a 34 on the ACT . . . or have happiness. Am I trying to say that studying the arts and humanities will lead to happiness? Maybe . . . for some young people. Yes, I believe so. It has for Zulmarie Nazario, and it also has for me.