Out on the discussion boards (like this one ), as well as in the media, people are heaping scorn and outrage on Newsweek for its apparently unfounded, riot-inducing report that Gitmo interrogators had flushed copies of the Q'uran down the toilet. The mag deserves it. True, they were fed the info by a "trusted Pentagon source," but an item so potentially inflamatory ought to have some solid grounding under it before it goes public. Would you announce in public that someone you knew was beating their spouse simply because the allegation of one person who had no proof to offer and was unwilling to make the charge publicly himself? I disagree with those who think Newsweek broke the story as part of a political vendetta against the Bush administration; I'd say they were just undone by the lure of sensationalism. This scandal is more a product of the current media marketplace than of partisan antagonisms.
Of course, this isn't the first recent instance where bad intelligence leads to deadly actions that are later proved unwarranted. The public at large has a right to dress down the staff of Newsweek. The architects of the Iraq war can only sympathize.
Tomorrow I'm going to Kalamazoo to visit my family and also attend the final concert of my high school choir director, Mr. Wierda. People who sang under him in the past have been invited to join the choir on stage for the final number, which is a traditional piece at the school. Supposedly, this is being kept secret from him, and I hope it's stayed that way.
Mr. Wierda was probably one of the more inspiring teachers I had. He was--and, I expect, remains--an intense personality in his own right, and obviously devoted to the arts of music and teaching. Both those facts earned him the respect of students. The combination of the man plus the subject influenced my understanding of learning in ways that continue to this day. Choir class gave me one of the rare opportunities I had then to learn actively. To participate in what I was learning instead of simply having knowledge dispensed to me in lectures. Mr. Wierda's enthusiasm and competence made it seem worth the effort to pursue excellence in performance. In leading us to sing well, though, he also gave us a sense of what it means to actively seek understanding. Good music is a kind of wisdom.
Other classes tended to present subject matter as a preexisting wall that you had to learn to climb. In choir, the ideal performance was more like a vision you tried to realize. There was an openess in the kind of education Mr. Wierda offered. Other disciplines offer possibilities for that kind of work--you can research almost anything--but that's difficult for neophytes. Music--and art, and drama, among other things--offers a kind of guided practice that leads to results relatively soon.
So choir may have been better preparation for my academic career than most of the humanities classes I took in school. It gave the confidence to study and write independently, along with a sense of what it should FEEL like when doing it well. In the courses I teach now, I try to maximize student participation; not a class goes by where I don't have students writing, reading collaboratively, presenting, or doing something other than listen to me. According to student evaluations, that participatory element is one of most helpful aspects of class.
A lot of pundits mourn the fact that few American students seem to love learning for its own sake, undermining our democracy, our culture, and our economy. If they're serious about reversing that trend, they ought to be screaming for continued and increased funding for arts in the schools.
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