Isaac Asimov Laments the “Cult of Ignorance” in the United States (1980)

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Paint­ing of Asi­mov on his throne by Rowe­na Morill, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

In 1980, sci­en­tist and writer Isaac Asi­mov argued in an essay that “there is a cult of igno­rance in the Unit­ed States, and there always has been.” That year, the Repub­li­can Par­ty stood at the dawn of the Rea­gan Rev­o­lu­tion, which ini­ti­at­ed a decades-long con­ser­v­a­tive groundswell that many pun­dits say may final­ly come to an end in Novem­ber. GOP strate­gist Steve Schmidt (who has been regret­ful about choos­ing Sarah Palin as John McCain’s run­ning mate in 2008) recent­ly point­ed to what he called “intel­lec­tu­al rot” as a pri­ma­ry cul­prit, and a cult-like devo­tion to irra­tional­i­ty among a cer­tain seg­ment of the elec­torate.

It’s a famil­iar con­tention. There have been cri­tiques of Amer­i­can anti-intel­lec­tu­al­ism since the country’s found­ing, though whether or not that phe­nom­e­non has inten­si­fied, as Susan Jaco­by alleged in The Age of Amer­i­can Unrea­son, may be a sub­ject of debate. Not all of the unrea­son is par­ti­san, as the anti-vac­ci­na­tion move­ment has shown. But “the strain of anti-intel­lec­tu­al­ism” writes Asi­mov, “has been a con­stant thread wind­ing its way through our polit­i­cal and cul­tur­al life, nur­tured by the false notion that democ­ra­cy means that ‘my igno­rance is just as good as your knowl­edge.’”

Asimov’s pri­ma­ry exam­ples hap­pen to come from the polit­i­cal world. How­ev­er, he doesn’t name con­tem­po­rary names but reach­es back to take a swipe at Eisen­how­er (“who invent­ed a ver­sion of the Eng­lish lan­guage that was all his own”) and George Wal­lace. Par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­est­ing is Asimov’s take on the “slo­gan on the part of the obscu­ran­tists: ‘Don’t trust the experts!’” This lan­guage, along with charges of “elit­ism,” Asi­mov wry­ly notes, is so often used by peo­ple who are them­selves experts and elites, “feel­ing guilty about hav­ing gone to school.” So many of the Amer­i­can polit­i­cal class’s wounds are self-inflict­ed, he sug­gests, but that’s because they are behold­en to a large­ly igno­rant elec­torate:

To be sure, the aver­age Amer­i­can can sign his name more or less leg­i­bly, and can make out the sports headlines—but how many nonelit­ist Amer­i­cans can, with­out undue dif­fi­cul­ty, read as many as a thou­sand con­sec­u­tive words of small print, some of which may be tri­syl­lab­ic?

Asimov’s exam­ples are less than con­vinc­ing: road signs “steadi­ly being replaced by lit­tle pic­tures to make them inter­na­tion­al­ly leg­i­ble” has more to do with lin­guis­tic diver­si­ty than illit­er­a­cy, and accus­ing tele­vi­sion com­mer­cials of speak­ing their mes­sages out loud instead of using print­ed text on the screen seems to fun­da­men­tal­ly mis­un­der­stand the nature of the medi­um. Jaco­by in her book-length study of the prob­lem looks at edu­ca­tion­al pol­i­cy in the Unit­ed States, and the resis­tance to nation­al stan­dards that vir­tu­al­ly ensures wide­spread pock­ets of igno­rance all over the coun­try. Asimov’s very short, pithy essay has nei­ther the space nor the incli­na­tion to con­duct such analy­sis.

Instead he is con­cerned with atti­tudes. Not only are many Amer­i­cans bad­ly edu­cat­ed, he writes, but the broad igno­rance of the pop­u­la­tion in mat­ters of “sci­ence… math­e­mat­ics… eco­nom­ics… for­eign lan­guages…” has as much to do with Amer­i­cans’ unwill­ing­ness to read as their inabil­i­ty.

There are 200 mil­lion Amer­i­cans who have inhab­it­ed school­rooms at some time in their lives and who will admit that they know how to read… but most decent peri­od­i­cals believe they are doing amaz­ing­ly well if they have cir­cu­la­tion of half a mil­lion. It may be that only 1 per cent—or less—of Amer­i­cans make a stab at exer­cis­ing their right to know. And if they try to do any­thing on that basis they are quite like­ly to be accused of being elit­ists.

One might in some respects charge Asi­mov him­self of elit­ism when he con­cludes, “We can all be mem­bers of the intel­lec­tu­al elite.” Such a blithe­ly opti­mistic state­ment ignores the ways in which eco­nom­ic elites active­ly manip­u­late edu­ca­tion pol­i­cy to suit their inter­ests, crip­ple edu­ca­tion fund­ing, and oppose efforts at free or low cost high­er edu­ca­tion. Many efforts at spread­ing knowledge—like the Chatauquas of the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry, the edu­ca­tion­al radio pro­grams of the 40s and 50s, and the pub­lic tele­vi­sion rev­o­lu­tion of the 70s and 80s—have been ad hoc and near­ly always imper­iled by fund­ing crises and the designs of prof­i­teers.

Nonethe­less, the wide­spread (though hard­ly uni­ver­sal) avail­abil­i­ty of free resources on the inter­net has made self-edu­ca­tion a real­i­ty for many peo­ple, and cer­tain­ly for most Amer­i­cans. But per­haps not even Isaac Asi­mov could have fore­seen the bit­ter polar­iza­tion and dis­in­for­ma­tion cam­paigns that tech­nol­o­gy has also enabled. Need­less to say, “A Cult of Igno­rance” was not one of Asimov’s most pop­u­lar pieces of writ­ing. First pub­lished on Jan­u­ary 21, 1980 in Newsweek, the short essay has nev­er been reprint­ed in any of Asimov’s col­lec­tions. You can read the essay as a PDF here. There’s also, one of our read­ers reminds us, a tran­script on Github.

via Aphe­lis

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Isaac Asimov’s 1964 Pre­dic­tions About What the World Will Look 50 Years Lat­er

How Isaac Asi­mov Went from Star Trek Crit­ic to Star Trek Fan & Advi­sor

Isaac Asi­mov Explains His Three Laws of Robots

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

21 Artists Give “Advice to the Young:” Vital Lessons from Laurie Anderson, David Byrne, Umberto Eco, Patti Smith & More

Nev­er meet your idols, they say. It can put a cramp in your appre­ci­a­tion of their work. There are always excep­tions, but maybe Bill Mur­ray proves the rule. On the oth­er hand, you should always learn from your idols. There’s a rea­son you admire them, after all. Find out what it is and what they have to teach you. In the series we fea­ture here, Advice to the Young, many an idol of many an aspir­ing artist and musi­cian offers some broad, exis­ten­tial advice—ways to absorb a lit­tle of their process.

Lau­rie Ander­son, above, tells us to “be loose.” Widen our bound­aries, “make it vague,” because “there are so many forces that are try­ing to push us in cer­tain direc­tions, and they’re traps…. Don’t be caught in that trap of def­i­n­i­tion. It’s a cor­po­rate trap…. Be flex­i­ble.” Good advice, if you’re as eclec­tic and loose as Lau­rie Ander­son, or if you seek artis­tic lib­er­a­tion ahead of sales. “I became an artist because I want to be free,” she says.

Just above, Daniel Lanois, super­star slide gui­tarist and pro­duc­er of Bob Dylan, Neil Young, U2, Peter Gabriel, and Emmy­lou Har­ris, tells us what he learned from work­ing with Bri­an Eno. His advice is impres­sion­is­tic, allud­ing to the impor­tance of atmos­phere and envi­ron­ment, as one might expect. It’s about appre­ci­at­ing the process, he sug­gests. He does get con­crete about a dif­fi­cul­ty near­ly every artist faces: “if you have a finan­cial lim­i­ta­tion, that might be okay. You don’t have to have every­thing that the oth­er peo­ple have. I think a finan­cial lim­i­ta­tion or a tech­no­log­i­cal lim­i­ta­tion may free up the imag­i­na­tion.” In an age of home stu­dios, that’s always wel­come news.

David Byrne has always told it straight, in his cul­tur­al crit­i­cism and song­writ­ing, and in his seg­ment, above, he steers hope­ful musi­cians and artists away from the dream of Jay Z‑level fame. “Often the artists who are very suc­cess­ful that way” he says, “they don’t have much flex­i­bil­i­ty. In achiev­ing suc­cess, they lose a lit­tle bit of their cre­ative free­dom. They have to keep mak­ing the same thing over and over again.” Byrne’s advice solid­ly under­lines Ander­son­’s. If you want cre­ative free­dom, be pre­pared to fly under the radar and make much less mon­ey than the stars. End­ing on a stark­ly real­ist note, Byrne admits that in any case, you’ll prob­a­bly need a day job: “it’s very, very hard to make mon­ey in the music busi­ness.”

Nov­el­ist Umber­to Eco also brings us down to earth in his inter­view, say­ing “not to think you are inspired,” then sly­ly drop­ping a cliché: “genius is 10% inspi­ra­tion and 90% per­spi­ra­tion.” The old wis­dom is truest, I sup­pose. He also urges writ­ers to take their time with a book. “I can­not under­stand those nov­el­ists who pub­lish a book every year. They lose this plea­sure of spend­ing six, sev­en, eight years to tell a sto­ry.” Eco’s advice: rise through the ranks, “go step by step, don’t pre­tend imme­di­ate­ly to receive the Nobel prize, because that kills a lit­er­ary career.”

Pat­ti Smith, com­fort­ably address­ing an audi­ence from an out­door stage, urges them to “just keep doing your work” whether anyone’s lis­ten­ing, read­ing, etc. To those peo­ple who crit­i­cize her suc­cess as sell­ing out her punk rock roots, Smith says, to laughs, “fuck you.” She then trans­mits some advice she received from William S. Bur­roughs: “build a good name. Keep your name clean. Don’t’ make com­pro­mis­es, don’t wor­ry about mak­ing a lot of mon­ey or being suc­cess­ful; be con­cerned with doing good work.”

Easy per­haps for Bur­roughs the adding machine-heir to say, but good advice nonethe­less, and con­sis­tent with what each artist above tells us: do it your way, don’t get pigeon­holed, work with what you have, don’t wor­ry about suc­cess or mon­ey, keep your expec­ta­tions real­is­tic.

You can watch more inter­views with Mari­na Abramović,  Wim Wen­ders, Jonas Mekas, and many more on this Advice to the Young playlist assem­bled by The Louisiana Chan­nel. All 21 talks in the series can be viewed below:

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ray Brad­bury Gives 12 Pieces of Writ­ing Advice to Young Authors (2001)

John Cleese’s Advice to Young Artists: “Steal Any­thing You Think Is Real­ly Good”

Walt Whit­man Gives Advice to Aspir­ing Young Writ­ers: “Don’t Write Poet­ry” & Oth­er Prac­ti­cal Tips (1888)

Ursu­la Le Guin Gives Insight­ful Writ­ing Advice in Her Free Online Work­shop

Aki­ra Kurosawa’s Advice to Aspir­ing Film­mak­ers: Write, Write, Write and Read

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

New Handbook for Educators Explains How to Produce & Distribute Free Video for the World

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The chick­en-and-egg, forest/trees ques­tion for those who pro­duce edu­ca­tion­al and pub­lic ser­vice media is real­ly who are we pro­duc­ing our con­tent for. MIT’s Direc­tor of Dig­i­tal Learn­ing San­jay Sar­ma has said that “we” – uni­ver­si­ties in par­tic­u­lar (but also muse­ums, libraries, and oth­er edu­ca­tion­al and cul­tur­al insti­tu­tions) – “are all sort of Dis­ney, and Sony, and MGM – we pro­duce movies.” But who are we pro­duc­ing our movies for?

The answer is – per­haps obvi­ous­ly – that we are pro­duc­ing for mul­ti­ple stake­hold­ers, but that many of us are real­ly pro­duc­ing these pro­duc­tions for the world. At a time when so much crap is hap­pen­ing around the globe, it is ever more clear that our real respon­si­bil­i­ty is to improve the plan­et while we are on it, and if we can help effect that by shar­ing our knowl­edge, so much the bet­ter.

Much as U.S. and oth­er nation­al indus­tries of research and schol­ar­ly pub­lish­ing have begun to man­date some form of open or free licens­ing for the out­put of grant-fund­ed writ­ten work, so now the ques­tion aris­es should video and edu­ca­tion­al video in par­tic­u­lar find its way, too, into the com­mons. Here, too, the answer is: of course.

On the occa­sion of the third LEARNING WITH MOOCS con­fer­ence at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia, Intel­li­gent Tele­vi­sion is releas­ing a new guide: MOOCs and Open Edu­ca­tion­al Resources: A Hand­book for Edu­ca­tors. The guide is a step-by-step man­u­al to how to pro­duce and dis­trib­ute edu­ca­tion­al video con­tent under the freest of licens­es, with an empha­sis on Cre­ative Com­mons.

The Hand­book sit­u­ates edu­ca­tion­al video pro­duc­tion in the con­text of more than 100 years of mov­ing-image work at uni­ver­si­ties and beyond. Indeed, the book­let draws on the work of edu­ca­tion­al pro­duc­ers from the ear­ly 1900s – works such as Charles Urban, The Cin­e­mato­graph in Sci­ence, Edu­ca­tion, and Mat­ters of State and the 1920s jour­nal Visu­al Edu­ca­tion.

The impulse to share knowl­edge in a free envi­ron­ment also is not new. In many ways MOOCs and Open Course­ware and Wikipedia and Cre­ative Com­mons and Google/YouTube are all part of the same project – envi­sioned by vision­ar­ies such as Richard Stall­man, media pro­duc­ers behind the start of pub­lic broad­cast­ing here and abroad, much ear­li­er, even, by pub­lish­ers active cen­turies ago in the Enlight­en­ment, and even ear­li­er, in ancient Alexan­dria under the Ptole­ma­ic kings. The vision? A giant rich resource: a gigan­tic glob­al ency­clo­pe­dia, or Ency­clopédie, or library or muse­um, con­tribut­ing to uni­ver­sal access to human knowl­edge. With the Inter­net upon us now, we can help real­ize it.

Does the rest of the world have any right to the knowl­edge that we pro­duce at uni­ver­si­ties and oth­er cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al insti­tu­tions? And do we have any oblig­a­tion to share it? We live once, but our prob­lems live on. And if the work of Richard Hof­s­tadter (an expert on “anti-intel­lec­tu­al­ism” and what he called “the para­noid style in Amer­i­can pol­i­tics”) and Edward Said (so wise on the col­lapse of colo­nial­ism and media bias), just to pick two Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty exam­ples, could have been record­ed and shared – and shared open­ly – we’d be the rich­er for it. Dis­sem­i­nat­ing knowl­edge now through the world’s most pow­er­ful medi­um could be our high­est call­ing.

Start read­ing MOOCs and Open Edu­ca­tion­al Resources: A Hand­book for Edu­ca­tors here.

Peter B. Kauf­man is an author, edu­ca­tor, and film pro­duc­er and the founder of Intel­li­gent Tele­vi­sion in New York. Twice serv­ing as asso­ciate direc­tor of Colum­bia University’s Cen­ter for Teach­ing and Learn­ing, he pro­duces films and edu­ca­tion­al video in close asso­ci­a­tion with uni­ver­si­ties, muse­ums, and archives, and he pub­lish­es, pro­duces, and orga­nizes numer­ous projects at the inter­sec­tion of video, edu­ca­tion, and open edu­ca­tion­al resources. He is exec­u­tive direc­tor of a foun­da­tion to pro­mote Russ­ian lit­er­a­ture and cul­ture and runs a sum­mer doc­u­men­tary film­mak­ing insti­tute for high school stu­dents every year in Con­necti­cut.

A Master List of 800 Free Classic eBooks for iPad, Kindle & Other Devices

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Maybe you’re an eBooks hold­out, a late adopter, a dis­dain­er of the book as a brand­ed “device”? I get it. Is there any­thing more ridicu­lous than putting down a book because its bat­ter­ies have run out? No amount of crow­ing about the suprema­cy of tech will make me love the smell and feel of paper less…

And yet…

With­in the charm­ing heft of print­ed books reside their lim­i­ta­tion. Trav­el­ing stu­dents, researchers, or avid read­ers must lug sev­er­al pounds of bound paper along with them on long jour­neys, or to work ses­sions at the local cof­fee shop. An eRead­er or smart­phone can hold an entire library—which one can expand ad infini­tum, it seems, on the fly.

This feature—along with the ease of copy­ing quotes and pas­sages and send­ing them across platforms—eventually sold me on the eBook as a robust sup­ple­ment to print. And if it sounds like I’m mak­ing a sales pitch, I am: for hun­dreds of free books, avail­able to read on the device of your choos­ing. Entry-lev­el Kin­dle, bud­get smart­phone, or lat­est, fan­ci­est iPad—most all will accom­mo­date the range of for­mats avail­able in our col­lec­tion of 800 Free eBooks.

Can you freely down­load the lat­est New York Times best­sellers? Not here, and I’d hope—for the sake of those hard-work­ing writers—that you’d pay to read new releas­es. Can you car­ry along with you on your next busi­ness trip or vaca­tion the works of Aris­to­tle and Freud, sev­er­al nov­els by Jane Austen and Joseph Con­rad, the mas­ter­works of Hegel, Hume, and Kant, the com­plete Shake­speare, and Proust’s mul­ti-vol­ume À la recherche du temps per­du? Quite eas­i­ly. Here’s a small sam­ple of what’s on our list:

See the full list of 800 offer­ings here. They may lack the sen­so­ry plea­sure of print, but the abil­i­ty to car­ry an entire library of clas­sic lit­er­a­ture in your pock­et has its advan­tages, to say the least. And if your trav­els include long dri­ves, you’ll also want to check out our mas­ter list of Free Audio Books.

Note: If you need help upload­ing .mobi files to your Kin­dle, you might find it use­ful to watch this video.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Audio Books: Fic­tion & Lit­er­a­ture 

A Mas­ter List of 1,200 Free Cours­es From Top Uni­ver­si­ties: 40,000 Hours of Audio/Video Lec­tures

Book Read­ers Live Longer Lives, Accord­ing to New Study from Yale Uni­ver­si­ty

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Pete Seeger Teaches You How to Play Guitar for Free in The Folksinger’s Guitar Guide (1955)

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Image by Josef Schwarz, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Along with earnest polit­i­cal pop­ulism and a renewed inter­est in region­al cul­tures, the folk revival of the fifties and six­ties brought with it a lib­er­at­ing sense of pos­si­bil­i­ty, as young writ­ers, singers, and artists dis­cov­ered that, tru­ly, any­one can play gui­tar. Or rather, any­one can pick up most any stringed instru­ment and, with a few fun­da­men­tals, enjoy the expe­ri­ence of writ­ing and play­ing music in a way that seemed unavail­able or for­bid­ding before peo­ple like Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan appeared on the scene.

Both pop­u­lar­iz­ers of Woody Guthrie’s Depres­sion-era bal­lads and of obscure blues and folk artists, Dylan and Seeger took very dif­fer­ent approach­es to their art. The for­mer cul­ti­vat­ed a mys­tique that seems impos­si­ble to pen­e­trate, and that has made him seem—as Todd Haynes’ mas­ter­ful film I’m Not There dramatizes—like a series of dif­fer­ent peo­ple. But Seeger has always been Seeger, from his gen­tle, aw-shucks demeanor and warm acces­si­bil­i­ty to his staunch­ly pro­gres­sive mes­sages that speak to chil­dren and reg­u­lar folks as well as to those with more sophis­ti­cat­ed tastes and tal­ents.

So it seems only nat­ur­al that Seeger released an album of gui­tar instruc­tion, The Folksinger’s Gui­tar Guide, addressed to both begin­ners and more advanced play­ers. “I guess any musi­cal instru­ment can be as hard to play as you want to make it,” Seeger begins, in one of his char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly flu­id tran­si­tions from song to speech: “If you want­ed to be a per­son like Andres Segovia or Mer­le Travis, why it would take a life­time of train­ing. But for most of us, play­ing a gui­tar can be about as sim­ple as walk­ing.” After that reas­sur­ing com­par­i­son, he does remind us, how­ev­er, that “it took us all a cou­ple years to learn how to walk.”

Seeger begins with first steps—tuning the instrument—and patient­ly leads his lis­ten­ers through some basic chord shapes, strum­ming tech­niques, and then more advanced pick­ing meth­ods, alter­nate tun­ings, and styles like Fla­men­co, “Rhum­ba Rhythm,” and “Mex­i­can Blues.” You can lis­ten to the album track-by-track on Spo­ti­fy, fur­ther up. (You can also find it kick­ing around on YouTube.) Like the great edu­ca­tor he was, Seeger also includes some help­ful visu­al aids in the album’s lin­er notes (see them here), includ­ing draw­ings of chord fin­ger­ings, musi­cal nota­tion, and gui­tar tab­la­ture for those who don’t read music. In addi­tion to his read­able instruc­tions, he also includes the lyrics to all of the folk songs ref­er­enced through­out.

“Prac­tice each small sec­tion over and over,” he writes in his intro­duc­tion, “until it comes easy. Actu­al­ly, if you enjoy play­ing the gui­tar, you shouldn’t think of it as prac­tic­ing, in the for­mal sense. Rather sim­ply play for your own enjoy­ment and that of your friends.” He also rec­om­mends that his lis­ten­ers “beg, bor­row, or steal” the records he ref­er­ences in the book­let, for “they will be of help to you in giv­ing you an idea of the scope and pos­si­bil­i­ties of the instru­ment.” I can’t think of a music teacher more invit­ing than Seeger, nor a method more relaxed.

A sec­ond vol­ume fea­tur­ing Jer­ry Sil­ver­man appeared soon after, and upped the ante a good bit. “Musi­cal stan­dards are on the rise,” Sil­ver­man says in his intro­duc­tion, “the vir­tu­oso folk gui­tarist is on the scene.” He promis­es to help the “strum­ming pop­u­la­tion… keep pace with the upward spi­ral.” You can be the judge of how suc­cess­ful he is in that effort. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, we don’t have Silverman’s sup­ple­men­tary mate­ri­als avail­able, but you can lis­ten to the com­plete Folksinger’s Gui­tar Guide: Vol­ume 2 above.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

James Tay­lor Gives Free Acoustic Gui­tar Lessons Online

Learn to Play Gui­tar for Free: Intro Cours­es Take You From The Very Basics to Play­ing Songs In No Time

Paul McCart­ney Offers a Short Tuto­r­i­al on How to Play the Bass Gui­tar

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Helen Keller Had Impeccable Handwriting: See a Collection of Her Childhood Letters

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Image by Flickr, cour­tesy of Perkins School for the Blind

The inspi­ra­tional blind and deaf activist and edu­ca­tor Helen Keller learned to speak aloud, but, to her great regret, nev­er clear­ly.

Her care­ful pen­man­ship, above, is anoth­er mat­ter. Her impec­ca­bly ren­dered upright hand puts that of a great many sight­ed peo­ple—not all of them physi­cians—to shame.

Keller learned to write—and read—with the help of embossed books as a stu­dent at Perkins School for the Blind. The Unit­ed States didn’t adopt Stan­dard Braille as its offi­cial sys­tem for blind read­ers and writ­ers until 1918, when Keller was in her late 30’s. Pri­or to that blind read­ers and writ­ers were sub­ject­ed to a num­ber of com­pet­ing sys­tems, a sit­u­a­tion she decried as “absurd.”

Some of these sys­tems had their basis in the Roman alpha­bet, includ­ing Boston Line Type, the brain­child of Perkins’ Found­ing Direc­tor, Samuel Gri­d­ley Howe, an oppo­nent of Braille. Stu­dents may have pre­ferred dot-based sys­tems for tak­ing notes and writ­ing let­ters, but Boston Line Type remained Perkins’ approved print­ing sys­tem until 1908.

There’s more than an echo of Boston Line Type in Keller’s blocky char­ac­ters, as well as her spac­ing. Devi­at­ing from pen­man­ship forms learned at school is a lux­u­ry exclu­sive to the sight­ed. Until for­ma­tion became instinc­tu­al, Keller relied on a grooved board to help her size her char­ac­ters cor­rect­ly, an exhaust­ing process. Small won­der that she end­ed many of her ear­ly let­ters with “I am too tired to write more.”

Perkins has pub­lished a Flickr album of let­ters Keller wrote between the ages of 8 and 11 to then-direc­tor Michael Anag­nos, includ­ing 3 pages in French. Leaf­ing through them, I mar­veled less at her abil­i­ty and deter­mi­na­tion than my (sight­ed) 16-year-old son’s lack of inter­est in devel­op­ing a respectable-look­ing hand.

Keller’s hand­writ­ing is so above reproach that it quick­ly fades to the back­ground, upstaged by her charm­ing man­ners and girl­ish pre­oc­cu­pa­tions. A sam­ple:

If you go to Rou­ma­nia, please ask the good queen Eliz­a­beth about her lit­tle invalid broth­er and tell her that I am very sor­ry that her dar­ling lit­tle girl died. I should like to send a kiss to Vit­to­rio, the lit­tle prince of Naples, but teacher says she is afraid you will not remem­ber so many mes­sages.

Browse Perkins’ col­lec­tion of Keller’s hand­writ­ten let­ters to Michael Anag­nos here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Helen Keller Speaks About Her Great­est Regret — Nev­er Mas­ter­ing Speech

Mark Twain & Helen Keller’s Spe­cial Friend­ship: He Treat­ed Me Not as a Freak, But as a Per­son Deal­ing with Great Dif­fi­cul­ties

“A Glo­ri­ous Hour”: Helen Keller Describes The Ecsta­sy of Feel­ing Beethoven’s Ninth Played on the Radio (1924)

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and wine­mak­er who played Annie Sul­li­van in her high school’s pro­duc­tion of The Mir­a­cle Work­er. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

David Byrne & Neil deGrasse Tyson Explain the Importance of an Arts Education (and How It Strengthens Science & Civilization)

Unless you’re a pol­i­cy geek or an edu­ca­tor, you may nev­er have heard of the “STEM vs. STEAM” debate. STEM, of course, stands for the for­mu­la of “sci­ence, tech­nol­o­gy, engi­neer­ing, and math­e­mat­ics” as a base­line for edu­ca­tion­al cur­ricu­lum. STEAM argues for the neces­si­ty of the arts, which in pri­ma­ry and sec­ondary edu­ca­tion have waxed and waned depend­ing on pre­vail­ing the­o­ry and, per­haps more impor­tant­ly, polit­i­cal will. Andrew Carnegie may have donat­ed hand­some­ly to high­er edu­ca­tion, but he frowned on the study of “dead lan­guages” and oth­er use­less pur­suits. Indus­tri­al­ist Richard Teller Crane opined in 1911 that no one with “a taste for lit­er­a­ture has the right to be hap­py” because “the only men enti­tled to hap­pi­ness… are those who are use­ful.”

It’s a long way from think­ing of poets as “the unac­knowl­edged leg­is­la­tors of the world,” as Per­cy Shel­ley wrote in his “Defence of Poet­ry” 90 years ear­li­er, but Shelley’s essay shows that even then the arts need­ed defend­ing. By the time we get to STEM think­ing, the arts have dis­ap­peared entire­ly from the con­ver­sa­tion, become an after­thought, as ven­ture cap­i­tal­ists, rather than wealthy indus­tri­al­ists, decide to trim them away from pub­lic pol­i­cy and pri­vate invest­ment. The sit­u­a­tion may be improv­ing, as more edu­ca­tors embrace STEAM, but “there’s ten­sion,” as Neil DeGrasse Tyson says in the excerpt above from his StarTalk inter­view show on Nat Geo. In the kinds of fund­ing crises most school dis­tricts find them­selves in, “school boards are won­der­ing, do we cut the art, do we keep the sci­ence?”

The choice is a false one, argues for­mer Talk­ing Heads front­man and some­times Cas­san­dra-like cul­tur­al the­o­rist David Byrne. “In order to real­ly suc­ceed in what­ev­er… math and the sci­ences and engi­neer­ing and things like that,” Byrne tells Tyson above, “you have to be able to think out­side the box, and do cre­ative prob­lem solv­ing… the cre­ative think­ing is in the arts. A cer­tain amount of arts edu­ca­tion…” will help you “suc­ceed more and bring more to the world… bring­ing dif­fer­ent worlds togeth­er has def­i­nite tan­gi­ble ben­e­fits. To kind of cut one, or sep­a­rate them, is to injure them and crip­ple them.”

The idea goes back to Aris­to­tle, and to the cre­ation of uni­ver­si­ties, when medieval thinkers tout­ed the Lib­er­al Arts—the Triv­i­um (gram­mar, rhetoric, and log­ic) and Quadriv­i­um (arith­metic, geom­e­try, music, and astronomy)—as mod­els for a bal­anced edu­ca­tion. Tyson agrees that the arts and sci­ences should not be sev­ered: “Sup­pose they did that back in Renais­sance Europe? What would Europe be with­out the sup­port and inter­est in art?” He goes even fur­ther, say­ing, “We mea­sure the suc­cess of a civ­i­liza­tion by how well they treat their cre­ative peo­ple.”

It’s a bold state­ment that emerges from a longer con­ver­sa­tion Tyson has with Byrne, which you can hear in the StarTalk Radio pod­cast above. Tyson is joined by co-host Maeve Hig­gins and neu­ro­sci­en­tist and con­cert pianist Dr. Móni­ca López-González—and lat­er by Pro­fes­sor David Cope, who taught a com­put­er to write music, and Bill Nye. Byrne makes his case for the equal val­ue of the arts and sci­ences with per­son­al exam­ples from his ear­ly years in grade school and art col­lege, and by build­ing con­cep­tu­al bridges between the two ways of think­ing. One theme he returns to is the inter­re­la­tion­ship between archi­tec­ture and music as an exam­ple of how art and engi­neer­ing co-evolve (a sub­ject on which he pre­vi­ous­ly deliv­ered a fas­ci­nat­ing TED talk).

You won’t find much debate here among the par­tic­i­pants. Every­one seems to read­i­ly agree with each oth­er, and I can’t say I’m sur­prised. Speak­ing anec­do­tal­ly, all of the sci­en­tists I know affirm the val­ue of the arts, and a high per­cent­age have a cre­ative avo­ca­tion. Like­wise, I’ve rarely met an artist who doesn’t val­ue sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy.  We find exam­ple after exam­ple of scientist-artists—from Albert Ein­stein to astro­physi­cist Stephon Alexan­der, who sees physics in Coltrane. The cen­tral ques­tion may not be whether artists and sci­en­tists can mutu­al­ly appre­ci­ate each other—they gen­er­al­ly already do—but whether school boards, politi­cians, vot­ers, and investors can see things their way.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

David Byrne: How Archi­tec­ture Helped Music Evolve

An Ani­mat­ed Neil deGrasse Tyson Gives an Elo­quent Defense of Sci­ence in 272 Words, the Same Length as The Get­tys­burg Address

The Secret Link Between Jazz and Physics: How Ein­stein & Coltrane Shared Impro­vi­sa­tion and Intu­ition in Com­mon

The Musi­cal Mind of Albert Ein­stein: Great Physi­cist, Ama­teur Vio­lin­ist and Devo­tee of Mozart

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Robin Williams Uses His Stand-Up Comedy Genius to Deliver a 1983 Commencement Speech

Law school grad­u­ates always ask them­selves the same ques­tion: after all this, what have I learned? The com­mence­ment speak­er at Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, Hast­ings Col­lege of Law’s class of 1983 told them exact­ly what they’d learned. “You’ve learned to hear at twice the speed of sound, lis­ten­ing to the crim­i­nal law lec­tures of Amy Wil­son,” he said, to loud applause and laugh­ter. And “who will ever for­get pro­fes­sor Rudy Schlesinger? They say the man is a won­der­ful com­bi­na­tion of Wal­ter Bren­nan and Otto Pre­minger.” He then launch­es into not just an impres­sion of the pro­fes­sor call­ing on one of his stu­dents, but the stu­dent as well.

Few com­mence­ment speak­ers can keep their audi­ence in stitch­es, much less throw out a wide range of cul­tur­al ref­er­ences at the same time — and do all the voic­es. Robin Williams could, and while the stu­dents to whom he deliv­ered the ten-minute talk above receive it as a tour de force, the rest of us can study it as an exam­ple of how to craft a speech with your audi­ence in mind. Not only did the young San Fran­cis­can come­di­an, then just out of his career-mak­ing role on Mork & Mindy, quick­ly estab­lish his local cred­i­bil­i­ty (at one point refer­ring to the school as “UC Ten­der­loin”), he filled his remarks, swerv­ing from high to low and dialect to dialect, with jokes only a Hast­ings stu­dent would get.

“ ‘He spent sev­er­al days on cam­pus prepar­ing,’ remem­bers one alum­na,” accord­ing to the video’s notes, “and offered up flaw­less, hilar­i­ous par­o­dies of both stu­dents and fac­ul­ty mem­bers as part of a mes­sage about the val­ue of edu­ca­tion and the impor­tance of the legal sys­tem in soci­ety.” Hast­ings’ grad­u­at­ing class­es get to choose their own com­mence­ment speak­ers, and 1983’s chose Williams with vir­tu­al una­nim­i­ty. Know­ing his com­ic per­sona from tele­vi­sion, movies, and stand-up, they sure­ly knew he’d turn up and make them laugh. But how many could have imag­ined that he would so hand­i­ly demon­strate that knowl­edge is, indeed, pow­er? All of them can now rest assured that Williams, who died two years ago today, has become the most in-demand speak­er in that great San Fran­cis­co Civic Aud­to­ri­um in the sky.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Steve Mar­tin & Robin Williams Riff on Math, Physics, Ein­stein & Picas­so in a Heady Com­e­dy Rou­tine (2002)

Robin Williams & Bob­by McFer­rin Sing Fun Cov­er of The Bea­t­les’ “Come Togeth­er”

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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