Flower

From ice,
wind blows,
swirls clouds,
forms snow,
then rain,
to crack
hard ground.

Sky smiles,
shoots rise,
bud grows;
sun-kissed
flow'ring
shows truth:
whole world.

© 2011 by Elisabeth T. Eliassen

This poem revealed itself to me as I read Chapter 59 of Dōgen's Shōbōgenzō

Fluidity

Simply allowing time
to roll through my fingers
would not as finely
sieve all being
as the pouring of self
through the soul journey
expresses the fluidity
of eternity’s song.

© 2011 by Elisabeth T. Eliassen

The Gift of Conversation

When was the last time you had a great conversation?

An hour ago? A few days ago? Last week? Last month? Or, is not lately more accurate?

How can it be that we live close to family, friends and neighbors, but seem to have a paucity time for companionable contact? Can we be that busy? Do we allow ourselves to be so overwhelmed and over-scheduled by endless lists of duties and activities that we put off until never our friendships?

Well, I confess. Yes, I have allowed myself to be overwhelmed and over-scheduled. The lists of tasks that managed to go undone, despite all of my efforts and planning, grow like weeds on my bureau and desk. Everything takes so much longer than it would if I didn’t get phone calls, emails, or strangers coming to the door. I think to myself, if I just don’t answer the phone, I’ll be able to get out the door and go for a walk; but that seldom, if ever, happens.

Now that I have made my confession, perhaps you have one to make to yourself. Be honest.

Don’t you crave real talk with a real person?

Yesterday, I was fortunate to have a couple of friends drop by. We live all of six blocks from each other, but it has been months since we sat down for a nice cup of tea.

So starved for conversation, were we three, that we fairly tripped over one another. There is so much to say, and we were only too aware that there is little time for giving voice to our thoughts, innermost or outermost. Too many thoughts leave trails that the mind will follow and fix upon. One person will say something to change the direction of the conversation, and who knows if we will return to the place where we have been. Talks like these are uncharted territory; they need to be explored if we are to find that oasis of refreshment and mind expansion that lurks in the shadow of the soulful bond of friendship. Book titles, connections to other people, recipes, philosophies, histories and music become focal point of all our talk and meeting, bringing more to the shared experience than we could have imagined.

We did not nearly have enough time to catch up before my friends had to leave.

And then, there was that list of things that needed to have gotten done in that precious hour and a half, staring me in the face.

Well, who knows any of that will ever get done!

I wouldn’t trade a full day full of accomplishment for that slim, yet cherished, hour of talk with dear friends.

Would you?

A Quiet Revolution

At sometime clipped,

by studied hand or wind,
winter-shorn branches,
in defiance of rain and cold,
stick out shoots and buds
like saucy little red tongues.

A green fringe soon arrives,
to dawn and then to crest,
with a hint of passion’s hue
blushing from unfurling tips;
daily, yet unhurried, arrives
some new, impish posture.

From ever entwining green,
flower buds arise, carelessly
insinuating most contrary beauty,
here,—within our noise and need—
even here,—from our crumbling rubble—
staging a popular dissent.

Wherever a war-mad world
breeds destruction and death,
a counter-insurgency rises,
peacefully demonstrating,
affirming life’s supremacy,
in brightly arrayed revolt.

© 2011 by Elisabeth T. Eliassen

Education Electronic, Like the Dissolution of Monasteries

There is much discussion about how to “save” education costs by making more classes and degrees available online. Advocates, such as Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, have been aggressively pushing this notion. One claim is that it is cheaper and more interesting for students to learn online, than to have to drag into a lecture hall and listen to some stodgy professor drone on. Students would have more access to education in an online setting, and it the education would be of a higher quality.

How interesting.

The US Department of Education even released a study claiming that higher education students studied online “performed better” than students who physically attend classes. Never mind that the Community College Research Center later found the analysis to be flawed, due to an improper selection of student populations used in the assessment, the USDE study is cited all over the place as evidence that online education is better. The CCRC study did not find in the USDE study any evidence to support the notion that students learn better in an online environment. In fact, the CCRC study found that students were more likely to withdraw from an online course than from one offered in a  traditional classroom setting.

How interesting.

In Britain, meanwhile, Lord Browne et al put out a report, last October, with the windy title “Securing a Sustainable Future for Higher Education: An Independent Review of Higher Education Funding and Student Finance.” Stefan Collini reviewed this document for the London Review of Books November 2010 edition. Collini is disturbed by many assertions in this so-called independent review. I quote from the article:

Essentially, Browne is contending that we should no longer think of higher education as a provision of the public good… Instead, we should think of it as a lightly regulated market in which consumer demand, in the form of student choice, is sovereign in determining what is offered by service providers (i.e., universities)… Britain’s universities, it is proposed, should henceforth be operated in accordance with the tenets of perfect competition theory.”

How interesting.

There is a lot to be said about all of the above. There are many pages to read of reports. But here is what I will say, in short, on all of this:

The gutting of higher education is underway. The rhetoric is hot and furious, and coming mostly from people who either benefited from publicly funded education or who are independently wealthy or who are capitalists on the prowl for the next drill down site.

Education costs money. Does it cost less money to attend class online? Well, that depends on whether you are getting the class through a for-profit “university” or a state funded institution. University of Phoenix has probably set the bar in for-profit education, and we are now seeing the idea spread like an infection.

Do you have a computer? Do you have internet access? All of these things cost money. When I attended university, I did not have a computer. I read books; I listened to lectures; I wrote papers. Amazingly, none of this happened with a computer! I paid for music lessons, books, paper, pens and pencils, as well as student and course fees. Today, you cannot even attend college classes without a computer. Why is that? Because it is “so much easier to do the work with computer access.” Well, that is as may be, but I have a friend who is a college professor; she spends most of her office time battling with her own computer set-up because the network is constantly down. If it is a time saver, it is an expensive one, not to mention a troubleshooting time suck.

Choice, do you like choice? Do you know what you want? If you are an 18 year old college bound youth, do you have any idea what you want to do with your life? HA! "Consumer driven education" has got to be the wackiest capitalist myth ever! The brains of most undergraduates have not fully developed to the point where critical thinking is possible, and most people need to be taught how to think critically through a course in the Philosophy or Psychology Departments.

Quality education, how is it to be determined or regulated? Can one teach Socratic Dialogue by email? Biology Labs from home? Does one learn better without benefit of group discussion or even the barest human contact?

The gutting of higher education could be compared to Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries, which, under the cover of Reformation, slid a great deal of wealth into a relatively small number of undeserving pockets, but did not benefit the average person one whit.

Look for more noise about choices in education. Expect fees to skyrocket. Expect your education "service provider" to be raking in a lot of money, but don't expect that you will be able closely examine who might be teaching your internet courses or that you will be able to "critically assess" whether your class is doing to do you any good. 

This feigned concern about how best to "deliver" education is not about providing a lasting cultural gift or benefiting society; this is about greed and it is about money. Once the universities (indeed, all bastions of public education) are dismantled, and once the unions are broken, drill down begins and the great divide continues. Those who can afford to will pay, because there will be no other choice. As for the rest of us…

Well, now, that should be interesting.

//

http://childmyths.blogspot.com/2009/04/critical-thinking-and-mastery-of-child_2194.html

http://www.independent.gov.uk/browne-report

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/06/17/pawlenty

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/07/16/online

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v32/n21/stefan-collini/brownes-gamble

Big Money Peddling Mediocrity: Arts in the 21st Century

Today, a friend alerted me to an article in the Huffington Post, which is now a puppet of AOL, entitled, "What Is Wrong With The Arts?" I read it and chuckled to myself. The author, Michael Kaiser (who is the President of the Kennedy Center), laments that there is just not enough inventiveness in the serious arts scene. There is more inventiveness, he says, in popular culture.

I say: We get what we pay for. Period.

We are not paying for inventiveness--that is one of the primary reasons that we are left with what people will broadcast on YouTube, for free. Jaron Lanier said as much in his searing manifesto, "You Are Not A Gadget." Lanier's slant on this is that the Internet has not produced jobs for artists. He is correct. Those of us who live in and for the arts are all freelancers, these days--with an unsought emphasis on free. We, the artistically inclined, all pay a higher price for living our lives for the individual stake we hold in the arts.

The larger performing arts concerns are not taking risks, in these low flying days of staving off bankruptcy. Boards and investors are more interested in running a business than perpetuating culture.  Philanthropists are dying off at an alarming rate, and they are not being replaced by the next generation. The universities in the United States and Britain are being turned into corporate money machines that soon will no longer offer liberal arts, of any sort. Fancy that.

The big money concerns in music and film keep as busy as possible with rehashes and remakes. This is less true for dance, but not by much. And even less so for fine arts, where artists have always been starving. But, big money hammers us with sameness, festooned with special effects, or "reality" programming that is not any sort of art at all. Cute animal shows, idiotic home videos, pack-rats, and the like, with hosts that vapidly react to the subject matter they are paid to peddle. The message is loud and clear: we don't like deep art; deep art doesn't sell.

Someone on the inside, like Kaiser, knows only too well how all this works. He worries, in his article, that his facile comments will anger the arts community (does he mean artists or boards of arts organizations?), but artists aren't the people to whom his message needs to be broadcast--and he should know better. Have some backbone, man! You are blaming the wrong people. Look to the suits that hold the purse strings, not the poor artists, who would dearly love the opportunity (and funding) for their own work (to which you won't give the time of day) to find a wider audience. If you want an artistic renaissance, you must become a patron ($$$$!) to the arts, and look for art where it is happening, not within your boardroom. If you want to promote culture, you need to stop thinking like a business.

Small groups and individuals are doing what they always have done: keeping the flame of creativity and excellence alive, even while going in the red. Small groups and individuals are the risk-takers in the arts; they have nothing to lose.

As I said in a previous entry, if you want to free the arts to be inventive, deep, ground-breaking and engaging, you need to PAY! If you pay only for the same-old-same-old, that is your problem, and we the ticket buying public are sure to get bored. Bored, bored, bored. What a surprise! So, we will go home and strike up our garage band, because we know we can do better.

The geniuses are all peddling their wares in the streets. Soon, that is where all true art will reside. More's the pity.

//

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-kaiser/what-is-wrong-with-the-ar_b_822757.html

Renewal

Can we wash away the darkness
of our long winter’s night?

Fitful sleep cannot shut out
the sounds of blowing wind
and flowing water.

These dream-works quicken clarity
toward an apprehension
that serenity is close at hand.

Dawn must give birth to new day;
new life will be revealed in its light.

© 2011 by Elisabeth T. Eliassen