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Copyright © Louis Schmier and Atwood Publishing.
Date: Sat 10/4/2003 4:56 AM
Random Thought: Hardwired To Connect
I just finished going through a recent report called "Hardwired To
Connect." You should read it. It's more than interesting; it's
thought-provoking. I first heard of it in a George Will Column. The
report is the result a mixture of neuroscience, developmental psychology,
the psychology and sociology of religion, social theory, moral and
political philosophy. These researchers partner "nature" and "nurture,"
biology and social convention, family and society, and the individual and
community. These partnerships, according to the researchers, impacts on
the way in which genes are switched on, how brain circuits develop, and
ultimately, on mental, emotional, and spiritual health. The research was
sponsored by the Dartmouth Medical School, the YMCA, and the Institute for
American Values.
The researchers conclude that Rousseau, not Hobbes or Locke, was
more on target when he said people are by nature social beings and that
Donne was right when he penned "no man is an island." According to the
findings in this report, basic biology and the operation of our brains
indicate two fundamental human imperatives: (1) people are born to bond
having an innate need to be close to other people; (2) they long for
purpose and for some transcendental experience. These needs for
connectedness and meaning are more than mere conveniences. When they are
not met the result is not only stifling of abilities and talents, but it
creates an inner imbalance and is mentally pathological. These supposedly
natural social needs are best met through supportive and encouraging
communities that articulate a clear and inspiring vision of the good life
and help people to bring that vision into their own lives. The emphasis
of the report is on renewal of family life and the social utility of
religious affiliation.
Whether the report is based on good science, whether it reflects a
bias view promoted by the Institute for American Values' devotion to
"renewal of marriage and family life," I cannot say. Nevertheless, it
gives me a cause to pause because the logic of the report would extend
beyond our families and places of worship.
By logical extension of this report's findings, maybe the problems
in education are the result of both an intellectual and emotion failure to
meet our and our students' most basic needs of connectedness with other
people and a connectedness with a purpose and meaning beyond merely
getting a grade and diploma. Maybe what is missing in our educational
structures is a vibrant environment of deep connections with nurturing
people and ennobling sources of meaning.
Aside from parents, teachers play premiere roles in the lives of
our developing youth. It is in the classroom where connectedness, shared
meanings, mutual purposes should be promoted, reinforced, and sustained.
Yet, they are played down. We introduce by word and deed, and continue to
foster throughout a student's educational experience, almost an isolating
solitude that has trained students to feel an anti-social "I don't want to
depend on anyone for my grade." We focus almost everything we have on
earning a good living and focus very little on living the good life.
As I told a colleague yesterday, somehow I get the feeling that we
educators in this capitalist country have violated the basic Smithian
capitalist Law of Supply and Demand. On one hand, the biological makeup
of human beings demand connectedness, cooperation, collaboration, mutual
support and encouragement while on the other hand our classrooms do not
supply connectedness to other people and moral and spiritual purpose and
meaning.
Maybe, just maybe, our students' educational problems are not just
personal and individual, but are social and communal as well. Maybe, it's
not just them, but us as well. Maybe the way we have structured our
classes is unnatural and therefore unconsciously unsettling. The
scientific fact of this report, if it is valid, undermines any vindication
of rampant, isolated, and totally self-centered, competitive
individualism.
Majorie Savage, in her YOU'RE ON YOUR OWN, observes that when
students come on our campuses they are not looking for information or
wisdom or even guidance. They are looking for friends. They're looking
for connections. They're looking for bonds. They're looking for
community. They are looking for a cure to their aloneness and loneliness
and "strangerness." They want to be less the stranger and less isolated.
They want to be more the friend, more noticed, and more valued. They may
find all that in going along and getting along when it comes to sex or
alcohol or drugs, or being fashionable in dress and behavior, or in
joining the brotherhood of a fraternity or the sisterhood of a sorority,
or in going out for a sports team, or in running for office, or in joining
a club, or in just "hooking up." It's tragic that they seldom find these
needs satisfied in our supposedly all important academic classrooms.
In our classrooms, the students are so often like blurred images
in an out-of-focus picture. Students commute not just between classes,
but between two worlds. Their souls are split no less are ours and they
are confused about it. Part of them has been trained to chase after
achievement and do questionable things along the way. Yet, part of them
yearns for community. The former is the competitive world, the world of
comparisons, the world in which they need to be successful and need to be
important. It's the world that places emphasis on the grade, the GPA, the
scholarship, the Greek bid, and election victory. It is a world that
confuses honors, award, selection, appointment with importance. The
latter is the world where they reach higher, and demand greater and deeper
things. It is the world where the need is to be a good person, to care,
to be generous, to matter, to be significant, to make a difference, to do
the right thing. It is the world where the goal is to become a beautiful
person, to fashion one's life as a work of art as inspiring and lovely to
look at as is any great work of art.
In journal entry after journal entry, in small talk after small
talk, in deep conversation after deep conversation, I find students
struggling. They're told to be hungry for that grade and that honor.
Yet, they are hungry for community and meaning. They're told that it
doesn't matter how they get that grade, that it's "cool" to cut moral
corners and take ethical shortcuts. They sense they want to know how to
live so that their lives matter. They're told to blame wrongdoings and
mediocrity on the pressures around them. Yet, they truly want help to
develop the moral will to resist temptation and to strength of character to
deal with demands on them. They're told to sit down, be quiet, and go
along. Yet, they want to stand up and be different so they can make a
difference. They're told to be fashionable and hide their identity.
Yet, they want to reveal their uniqueness. Deep down, when things come
out, when things are allowed to surface, when they feel safe, they want
want their precious personhood, what is loveable and admirable about each
of them, to be seen in their substance rather than in their image.
Maybe I'm prejudiced, but when I see students in the community
world, when they are with people who share those treasured moments with
them, when they are noticed, cared about, respected, trusted, valued, when
they have a sense of purpose and meaning and worth and accomplishment
beyond getting a grade, they have a greater sense of themselves and they
accomplish so much more. Only this past week, I saw that incandescent
power of community in one class as the students presented their Dr. Seuss
Project, in another class as the students presented their Bruce
Springsteen Project, in still another class as the students presented
their Rodin Project, and in a fourth class as the students presented their
Dali Project. This past week in seismic conversations with students, I
saw how empathy allows us to see the connections between us, making
strangers less strange, isolated people less isolated, alone people less
alone, depreciated people less devalued.
In an academic culture that values independence, we create such
dependence. In an academic culture that values individuality, we create
such anonymity. We so often forget that our ability and the ability of
students to thrive depend on interrelationships, not on isolation. We
throw students into a competitive rat race with each other rather than in
cooperative community with each other. We teach them critical thinking
skills and generally ignore communication and people skills. We have an
unnatural classroom architecture and tradition that barks like a drill
sergeant, "Eyes Front!" We line students up in rows, looking at the backs
of napes, making them feel like islands, disinclines them to turn their
heads to the left or right, directs their attention forward to the
professor on center stage, makes it difficult to forge acquaintances much
less friendships, reinforces the sense of self-consciousness, isolation,
vulnerability, aloneness, and strangeness. In the classroom,
connectedness is weakened or thinned out, strangeness is accentuated,
aloneness is increased, and, contrary to John Donne's assertion,
unnaturally turns each student into an island.
Why is it so hard for so many of us academics to acknowledge that
we have a role to play in establishing that sense of connectedness and
that search for meaning for beyond getting a job? Why do so many of us
harp on "success" and play down or ignore "significance?" Why do so many
of us put making a good living center stage and leave living the good life
in the darkened wings?
A lot of academics loudly defend themselves by saying they are not
clergy or councelors or parents. They don't have to be. They can be just
teachers who teach that there's more to teaching than mere information
transmission and more to learning than information acquisition and grade
getting and more to getting an education than getting a job. They can
find ways to "educare," to call forth, and to stuff in simoultaneously.
Certainly they can teach that while we can devote ourselves to a life of
accomplishing worthy and satisfying personal goals, we can be enormously
enriched when we consciously use our talents and time to improve the lives
of others. Isn't that the noble mission we each have embarked upon when
we became teachers? Is that why teaching is one of the few "noble"
professions? Teaching is a sacred deed in which we humbly offer ourselves
as servants of something or someone greater. In so doing, we transform and
are transformed.
Why do so many of us deny teaching's nobility? Why don't we pass on
that nobility of purpose to our students? Why can't our campuses and
classes live out connectedness as what may be called "learning
communities" or what I would call "connected communities" or what in
classes I teach we call "communities of mutual support and encouragement,"
that treat students rather than subjects as an end in themselves, that are
warm and nurturing, that are loving and caring, that connect people, that
put people ahead of research and publication, that focus on people rather
than on tests and grades, that focus on life outside the classroom as well
as the future beyond the classroom and campus, that transmit a shared
vision of what it means to be a good person and live a good life, that
foster moral and ethical and spiritual development, that promote the
ideals of the dignity of each and every individual, that reveal to each
student what he or she can be?
Some of my colleagues are really hot under the collar about
something they call "corporatization" of education or the "business model"
of education. If they want a business model for education, here's mine:
The customer IS always right; sell the students the products THEY truly
want: community and meaning and purpose along with and beyond
credentials.
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