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The basics of language, and therefore the basics of communication, are words and symbols, and the grammar into which they fit. Skill words is measured by vocabulary and understanding the proper word, and then the proper definition for that word in any usage.
With the Wundt/Rockefeller emphasis on chemicals as the source and remedy for life and with the loss of morals, we became a society of instant gratification.
What may not have been seen is that education could then evolve into teaching drug-heads how to perceive emotion in literature -- as the final goal of reading good literature.
Since authors have become increasingly dumb, because of drugs, and because there are fewer and fewer students, with drug histories, who are skilled with language skills (vocabulary and grammar) the educational system had to evolve a technique by which drug-headed students could get high emotional inspirations from lousy literature, written by other drug-heads.
Thus, we now have teaching, even in college, which asks the student to describe the emotion they "feel" from literature, and would never teach them what to look for, but how to feel.
It is like getting drugged up. You can feel emotions easily then. Since many students are drugged up the teachers might as well validate the drugged condition by asking them for what emotion they feel when they read some prose or poetry.
The emotion they "feel" is drug-based, but this new teaching technology can't admit that, so the teacher then validates ANY emotion that the drugged student "feels."
John feels the "anger" in the piece. Jane feels the "sadness," while Mary gets off on the mysterious "joy." They are all reading the same material, each finding some "deep" emotion, based on their drugged state, and furthered by drugged teachers who, themselves, FEEL the emotions so easily in that state.
All the while the prose need not use language skills with any skill. In fact they would get in the way of the wide variety of emotions that different people can get out of the same peice.
So, literature is now "appreciated" on the basis of a drugged haze. And universities now praise their professors for dumbing down their teaching to the drugged level of the students' abilities.
November 16, 1998 - VOL. 26, NO. 5Betty Sue Flowers leads students to the treasures of literature |
Mary Lenz
Dr. Betty Sue Flowers is a poet, an editor, a consultant to international corporations and an author who has collaborated with Bill Moyers to produce four books emerging from several of Moyers' PBS television series.
[Karl Note: She looks drugged to me, and the "class" looks like what has become far too common in society -- a class of dud-heads who "feel" the emotions, but who suffer from tiny vocabularies and no sense of grammar.]
Flowers also is an English professor, spending most of her time with freshmen and other undergraduates as a teacher of writing and literature. A member of UT Austin's Academy of Distinguished Teachers, she is one of 41 academics recognized for their personal commitment to motivating students and their outstanding contributions to the teaching profession.
"The goal I have is to give people the tools they need to appreciate literature ‹ and to enjoy it for the rest of their lives," Flowers said. "I am not trying to produce English professors. I am trying to produce joy. Literature heightens life."
Flowers said that when students enter college, many of them come to be trained for a specific job. "If I were teaching accounting, it would be my job to graduate very fine accountants," she said. In contrast, her role as an English professor involves showing students that literature can be of lasting personal value to them.
"What I teach is material for living ‹ not for a livelihood, but for life," Flowers said. "It's my job to get them interested. When I'm teaching literature, I am interested in their knowing what riches are out there and how, for example, to invite poetry into their lives."
Flowers said literature is one of the ways through which people can get in touch with their feelings and emotions, and it is an especially good way to do so.
[Drugs are the more common way -- any university teaching technique which parallels drug usage will be very popular with druggie students.]
"I do think that literature is a way of educating the emotions," Flower said. "Every literary work has something different in it. There are just all kinds of ways that poetry puts together thought and feeling and organizes emotion.
"Literature is quite good for helping us see how it is that we feel ‹ and how we think about feeling ‹ and how feeling is connected to our thought."
[Karl: Another important part of this dead-head technology is that you cannot possibly flunk this type of course. All you have to do is express your emotions. If you can't write, we'll have the professor listen to your ramblings. We'll find a way to validate your drugged emotions.]
Flowers is former associate dean of graduate students and has served as director of UT Austin's Plan II Honors Program. She is a native of Texas who earned her Ph.D. degree at the University of London. She has worked as a consultant for NASA, General Motors, Shell International and the World Business Council in Geneva, mainly helping executives draft global scenarios for the future.
Flowers is the author of Browning and the Modern Tradition and two volumes of poetry titled Four Shields of Power and Extending the Shade. She has written numerous poems and pieces of short fiction, plus articles on writing, poetry as therapy, and such writers as Donald Barthelme, Adrienne Rich and Christina Rossetti.
Her books with Moyers include Genesis, Healing and the Mind, A World of Ideas and Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth.
Her most recent book, Synchronicity, written with Joseph Jaworski, deals with the inner dimensions of leadership.
Asked to discuss her teaching methods, Flowers said she encourages students to do a lot work in groups both inside and outside the classroom. She likes her students to ask a lot of questions and "to do a lot of the talking. I am not interested in their hearing me lecture and digesting what I've said.
Drugged students learning from other drugged students. What do they learn? They learn what drugged emotions other drugged students are "feeling," and then get a high grade and graduate with honors, but then can't use anything they "learned" on any job.
'I try to shape each class period for a particular outcome of learning and not for a particular outcome of knowledge. It's very interactive. "
Sounds like conditioned responses to me! In the old fashioned school, the teacher knew something (vocabulary, grammar, etc.) that the student did not -- and delivered it to the student. As schools got more and more "progressive," they allowed the students to teach one another -- out of their drugged experiences.
Flowers said in teaching poetry, "I sometimes have them try writing sentences and turning them into lines (of poetry) based on a model of a poem that we are reading. I say create an image of this. Or I tell them to write something that is a sound and turn it into a feeling.
"I try to link poetry analysis to dream analysis so that they see what there is in common. I teach them analytical methods they can use for all kinds of things, not just poetry."
Dream analysis is particularly "good" when there are the drug-induced euphorias that our modern schools try to create -- the "good experience can be achieved in the class room without street drugs, but it is no better than a drugged experience.
Her classes include a number of classroom exercises and assignments, including what she refers to as "thought assignments" to prepare them for class discussions. For example, she asks students to spend ten minutes thinking about their own deaths, or to imagine what they would write if they were to produce a personal Genesis myth for their own lives.
Need you look further for the Godless nature of this approach. Consider "Genesis" a myth, and create your own. Make "god" a homosexual, if you wish, or a dog. It is all myth, anyway, so just do your thing!
In classes this semester, Flowers said she is emphasizing a theme of willingness to play, to not take oneself so seriously. She also is asking students to experiment with the idea of form and destiny, or loving your fate.
Asked to compare students today with students who came through her classes two decades ago, Flowers said: "They are more serious. They are more committed to their communities. They are much brighter, partly because the university has higher standards.
She added that students seem to be "less daring and less imaginative, but that may be because they're scared of not getting a job. They are much harder working much more committed as students."
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