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From lesson one, exercise question 5. The question and my response.

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Do you agree or disagree with Alston Chase's comment: "Students, whose role models are baseball players or rock stars, are unlikely to cherish knowledge. Those reared in the culture of instant gratification have little patience for the often laborious tasks of learning. A land wedded to wealth and entertainment is infertile soil for the flowering of wisdom."

My initial reaction to Mr. Chase is a tired sigh and tremendous sense of déjà vu. Criticism of the young by the old as being callow, shallow, and generally culturally bereft has been offered more or less constantly for the last four thousand years, and Mr. Chase has offered nothing new on the old complaint. The young people of the Charleston era were decried as impatient, shallow-minded partiers capable of nothing useful, yet their children are now (self) described as the greatest generation—both in terms of political and artistic accomplishment.
As a generational criticism, I think Mr. Chase's comment is both premature and unhelpful. All lands in all times are wedded to wealth—and upon gaining a modicum of wealth all cultures seek expression through both the arts (high art) and entertainment (low art). But art, like culture and politics, evolves over time in ways that the establishment artists find both threatening and alarming (or irrelevant).

In that sense, Mr. Chase has merely fulfilled the role expected of the current cultural elite in any age—to declare the new age as unfit and his own age as the one and true source of wisdom. And in that sense I believe he is just as wrong as the thousands who have gone before him and made essentially the same declaration—including those who declared his own generation as infertile soil for the flowering of wisdom.

As a warning of inaction and a challenge to the broader culture to prove him wrong, it's as effective as any. The gauntlet must be thrown, and this statement performs the task effectively.

As a matter of textual criticism I have to grant the premise—most members of any generation are impatient, and few are inclined toward the often laborious task of learning. But few is not all, and the impacts of those (relative) few who do apply discipline to gaining old knowledge and innovation in gaining new knowledge are felt throughout a culture and a generation.

Still, it is rarely the mass of people who generate either cultural wisdom or its art; it tends to be the few who are drawn despite the broader environment (or even in response to it) who generate the wisdom most appropriate to that age.
As such, Mr. Chase's observation is accurate if distressingly incomplete. In most ages and times the soil is nearly always infertile for the flowering of wisdom. But it is rarely sterile and incapable; only infertile except to those willing to invest the time, effort, and discipline required to make that (or any other) desert blossom as the rose.

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Thoughts or counterarguments appreciated.
]]> Pedagogical xml-rss2.php?itemid=7 Wed, 25 May 2011 08:00:00 -0600 xml-rss2.php?itemid=5
Back when I was in college full time I flitted among specialized majors (electrical engineering, music vocal performance) that had specialized requirements, with the result that even though I have five semesters of college credit, I'm still deficient in the ordinary core requirements that most students handled their first year in school.

So here I am, a 47-year old sometimes pop literary critic, on-again/off-again fiction writer, long time technical communicator, and full time curmudgeon taking Humanities 101, the freshman survey class designed for 18-year olds who haven't thought much about arts, literature, or learning--things I've been writing about for nearly a quarter century.
While I'm only three lessons into the sixteen lesson class, I find myself becoming increasingly perplexed by what I see as either simplistic, argumentative, or cleverly indistinct questions designed to pick fights (and spur structured arguments in response). I blogged on that over on the AML blog, and in the brief discussion that followed, the suggestion was made that I should post some of those questions (and my answers) here for purposes of discussion.

So I will. This section is devoted to a selection of the exercise questions that most got my goat for your entertainment and my edification from your comments/corrections on my assumptions.
]]> Pedagogical xml-rss2.php?itemid=5 Tue, 24 May 2011 16:29:03 -0600 xml-rss2.php?itemid=1
The original idea here was for a small group of friends (who happened to be named Scott) to offer thoughts on a wide variety of topics, focusing mainly on Mormon literature and life. The current practice will be for me to use this space as a personal blog until otherwise notified by my very, very busy friends.

Welcome to The Scotted Line. ]]> General xml-rss2.php?itemid=1 Wed, 6 Oct 2010 08:57:03 -0600