Today Dan asked me why I no longer enjoy music classified as "pop." I responded that it is cliche, overproduced, and "bad for you" i.e. not thoughtful, beautiful, creative. *Quick moment of truth - I still dance to "Girlfriend" by Avril Lavigne.*
This spurred on a conversation about America. We sell and buy a lot of things that are overproduced and bad for you: fast food, poorly made films, clothes, cars, the latest gadget I don't need (which version of ipod are we on now?)
Why? They are fast and efficient. They, temporarily, get the job done. Then they break, or are replaced, or go right to our hips (in the case of fast food). Now we have identified the symptoms of a creatively challenged culture, but not why they exist. So Dan and I asked ourselves the question of why we like fast and efficient things and value them over quality, creativity, truth, and beauty.
The Greeks valued Beauty so much they capitalized it all the time and called it a virtue. One of my philosophy prof.s in college would pensively pace back and forth and refer to "Truth with a capital t." So, if beauty is no longer a virtue we value, but virtues still exist, what virtue under girds our American way of life?
The answer we came up with: Efficiency, which has been born out of pragmatism (note the capital E). If, indeed, Efficiency has become so important that we rank it a cultural virtue, then it should be infused into all our systems - politics, education, health, etc. Do you ever feel like politicians are more about campaign slogans and promises then communicating actual plans and ideas? As a teacher, it makes me think of the way we educate. There must be a practical outcome, measurable results (which logically leads us toward teach-to-the-test). I think I would rather go back in time and, with Socrates, question with my students what is truly Beautiful, True, and Good. Perhaps this would enable my students to ask any question, realizing that we are not out to find one, limited answer, but rather to journey onward into a quest for that which is truly worthy. What do you think?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
As for me and my house . . . we value creativity. But I am a fan of efficiency, too. I often catch myself trying to impose all my "procedures" on the kids. I have an efficient way of packing a grocery cart, of cleaning a bathroom, of doing the laundry---anything I regularly do. But I didn't have my mom telling me how to do things like that---I had to figure it out myself in my own home. So I should let my children's creative minds figure out their own paths. As far as music goes, it's always been the good and the bad combined, and the good will last (on your local 80s station), and the bad fall by the wayside.
I think another American attribute (that inhibits our abilities to take time for the Beautiful, True and Good) is squeezing as much activity into as few minutes as we can. We then have more free minutes, but we fill the minutes up with more activity! I feel like we're losing quality in these hurried activities. At least that's what's going on around here.
one of the main problems i have often found with an emphasis on efficiency is the lack of an appreciable outcome. theoretically, people want to do something efficiently so they have more time to do other things. the nice thing about a quicker product-X is that it makes a task take less time.
where this goes wrong is that as a result of efficiency, we don't have more time. instead of taking the extra time gained to relax, we usually just try to shove MORE tasks in. and i'm not convinced that completing more tasks in a given amount of time is useful, AT ALL.
at the risk of being incredibly lengthy for a comment, an example from my field of work. it used to be a LOT of work to run one statistical model (in the era of when my parents and professors were in graduate school and starting their careers). you had to think through things very carefully, choose the way to do it you thought the absolute best, and then run it. one model took a full day to run. with the software we now use, one model can run in a few seconds. in the course of one day i sometimes literally run HUNDREDS of models. this does not mean i actually come up with better models, because instead of thinking things through, i (and everyone in my field) just run dozens and dozens of models to see what comes out. careful thought often gives way to just doing more, more, more models. i would venture to say the quality of work in our field has gone down quite a bit as a result of this.
changing gears, i have always viewed myself as a very un-creative person. i would love to hear what you (krista and dan, and other readers) can suggest to help nurture creativity in ourselves every day.
My thought sparked by the "teaching to the test" comment. When this phrase first came into popular use as a complaint about the school system, I thought "why is this a problem?" After all, if the test material is what the kids are supposed to know, then isn't that exactly what should be taught? Of course we should be teaching to the test! Teach the kids what they should know, then test them to prove whether they actually learned it.
Not until I had school-age children did I learn that "teaching to the test" has little or nothing to do with subject matter, but instead actually means "teaching how to take tests." Suddenly I both understood and shared the frustration.
Thanks for all of your insight!
Post a Comment