Public Broadcasting, Democracy, and Market Economy

Since Plato, our belief has been that a well ordered democracy requires a well-educated public. Part of the project of ensuring one in modern America has been public broadcasting. However, on Wednesday, House Republicans proposed a budget that would end funding to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which receives a tiny .0001% of the federal budget. When I posted a link on facebook to an online petition against the upcoming cut, I aroused the well-meaning and respectful ire of some of my conservative friends who believe that public broadcasting ought to be left to market forces. Their argument is, to wit: if people want the educational programming offered on PBS and NPR, advertisers will pay for it. Therefore, let the market bear it out.

The problem with such a view is that broadcasting paid for by advertising (thus, "the market") inevitably follows the ideological perspectives of the advertisers. Thus, large advertisers with lots of money quickly hold a monopoly of information.

To find evidence of the problems with this, I need look no further than my home in Oklahoma City. During the debate surrounding a recent tax extension the state's largest newspaper, according to a local republican campaign strategist, refused to report stories which held the tax proposal in a negative light because it's largest advertiser (the Chamber of Commerce) was in favor of the proposal. The most interesting thing about this situation is that the newspaper is unabashedly conservative. So, a conservative newspaper refused to publish arguments against a tax because its advertisers wanted it. In this way, the market was able to make a newspaper violate its own ideology, and effectively quash dissenting views. Thus, the supposedly fair and democratic marketplace, which was controlled by a powerful few, effectively censored the press. Public Broadcasting, which hands money to LOCAL stations, allows the stations to base their programming on what it's local viewers and producers feel is valuable, free from the pressure of the large advertiser who may not have the best interest of democracy at heart. (See this blog by Rep. Earl Blumenauer)

What's also true is that what the market wants and what the people need are not always the same thing. The public WANTS American Idol. So American Idol is what the market will bear, but it's hardly what is necessary to ensure a citizenry capable of voting on something other than which seventeen year old singer is the most dreamy.

The assumption that the "market" will always allow what's best to win out (which has oddly become the central tenant of the modern Republican party) is naive at best. This is because the market has constantly shown that it will, if it must, sacrifice the good of democracy for the strength of the bottom line. Though we insist on a system of checks and balances in the federal government, no such system is inherent in the market.

An extraordinary amount of our legislation exists to act as a check to this power. It has often been argued that the consumer serves as the check to the power of industry by choosing what to buy and what not to buy, but this is only partially true. Indeed, a very large percentage of my income is spent on things that I need. I have no choice but to buy them. I must put gas in my car to get home, and the industry that produces that product is controlled by a small handful of people who can and do exert extraordinary control. This is the power that comes with controlling a necessary commodity. So, though in theory, the market polices itself, in practice things happen differently. After all, if a handful of businessmen can do, on a national level, what the Chamber of Commerce did in OKC, what results is known as an oligarchy. Thus, a capitalist market has the same potential to become tyrannical as it does to remain democratic. This is why we write legislation to control business--to provide a check on the power of industry, just as congress checks the power of the president.

Public Broadcasting is a part of that tradition. It ensures that the people with the most money don't get to own information.

Finally, I find the connection between free market and democracy implicit in these arguments a little problematic. Capitalism is a market system; not a system of government. As I hope my earlier syllogistic demonstration of how capitalism can in fact promote tyranny and the anecdotal evidence of the OKC tax debate have shown, democracy and capitalism are not the same thing.

That being said, the institutions that are designed to protect democracy need not and ought not be judged according to their market value, but in their importance in promoting and supporting democracy (Can you imagine if we subjected the US military to market forces? It hasn't turned a profit since WWII). I think people probably assume that the public school system exists to prepare students for the workforce. However, the pioneers of the public school movement (most notably John Dewey) never connected schooling with the market--such a connection is actually a much more recent phenomenon. Instead, they saw education as necessary in a vital democracy. Thus, the public school system is designed for no other purpose than to ensure an educated voter pool. Public Broadcasting was developed as a modern extension of that same project. Public schools exist to foster preparation for democracy through education; public broadcasting exists to foster participation in democracy through education. And if eduation is indeed vital to democracy, it must be protected and supported regardless of its market value.

This debate ultimately stems from the notion that to be "conservative" means that one supports saving tax payer money while prodding the market. But the word itself suggests that to be conservative is to hold on to our past ideals, one of the oldest and most important of which is that a well-educated people can govern itself. Public broadcasting is part of that tradition. It exists to educate those who would self-govern and it thus helps to protect democracy. And I happen to think that protecting democracy is a much more conservative ideal than protecting the market.

Questioning Art: Who Gets to be Called Artist?

Today was date day for Charissa and me, the gloriously rare day when we leave our kids somewhere and spend the day running around doing things. Not having gotten many chances to go since the boys were born, we decided on a trip to the Oklahoma City Museum of Art, one of our favorite and most frequented places before the boys came.

The museum has re-arranged since we were there last as it has some new collections, and seeing some of the new items, along with my criticism of some of the old has led me to some of the open theoretical questions concerning art, what it is, and who gets to make it.

These are famous modern questions of which art students and critical consumers of art will already be familiar. Indeed, as I suggested in my recent post regarding Duchamp, much of the work of modern artists has been to ask these questions as a way of critiquing their own artistic traditions. This has been a modern and post-modern concern in all the arts. Theatre has Grotowski, Brecht, and Artaud who played with theatre conventions by disentegrating the fourth wall, deconstructing the spoken word, and aboloshing elaborate sets in favor wharehouses and street corners. Literature has Pynchon who broke the conventions of space-time, Vonnegut who destroyed any illusion of the death of the author, and Saporta who destroyed the convention of linearity altogether. And visual art had of course Duchamp, Pollock, and so on. So the questions that I ask here are not new, but I am asking them anyway, in response to my own confrontation with these questions in my little hometown museum.

The centerpiece of the OKC-MOA is it's large Dale Chihuly exhibit. Chihuly began his career in stained glass and accidentally discovered the ancient art of glass blowing while fooling around with some of his glass. Henceforth, he has become world renowned for his work in blown glass. The reason Chihuly fits into my questions here is that many years ago, just as his work was getting larger and more complex, he was involved in an accident which rendered him blind in one eye. Having lost his depth perception, he gave up entirely doing the hands-on work involved in creating his own work. Instead, his sculptures are actually formed by a large number of apprentices, based on rather abstract paintings that Chihuly paints. The paintings are not schematic at all, and therefore do not serve as any type of blueprint for the actual glass sculptures, Instead, they seem to act more as inspiration for the apprentices who will make the sculptures as Chihuly stands behind them pleasantly shouting orders.

For years I've thought of this as an interesting extension of the work of other 20th century artists. Modern artists have asked the question of "who is the artist" in interesting ways. Duchamp critiqued the notion of an inspired genius when he began arranging things found in everyday life and calling them found art sculptures. Others have done similar things in their art. But in each of these cases, artists put their hands on objects not typically considered artistic and asked, "does it make it art that I, an artist, touched it." Chihuly extends this questioning even further because he doesn't touch anything. Instead, in his work, he is not the artist because he crafted the actual piece, but because it came from his mind. The actual building of the sculptures is performed by apprentices who are, we pressume, craftsmen and not artists.

Of course, as I've grown more sympathetic to the Marxist complaint, this definition of the artist has come to bother me. Chihuly hires an extraordinary number of young artists, they create magnificent sculptures, and he gets to put his name on the work. And so, with little physical input of his own, he has grown to world renown on the backs of people we've never heard of. In this system, the artist is the one who gets credit as the "idea man," while his workers, the artistic proletariat if you will, languish in obscurity and in the heat of the glass kiln.

I continue this question of who gets to be called artist as I move on to the work of Alfonso Ossorio. His bizarre collage sculpture INXIT is the centerpiece of a new collection of his work at the OKC-MOA. The piece is a door and door frame with an extraordinary Hodge-podge of strange stuff glued to it including animal bones, plastic birds, and a human skull, all of it creepily encrusted with glass eyeballs. The interesting thing about it is that it looks like every road-side oddity created by any local crazy man who ever donned greasy overalls. Upon seeing this piece, I turned to Charissa and asked, "do you suppose that artists sometimes trick us by saying 'I'm going to throw some bull-crap together and you have to take it seriously because I have an MFA.'"

This theme continued when we watched a film introducing the MOA's temporary exhibit of the constructivist sculptures of Jill Downen. In the film, she discusses how she became obsessed with texture while being placed in time-out by her mother. She notice a crack on the wall and became so excited by it that her mother no longer used time out as a punishment, making her wash dishes instead. The film then goes on to show her walking around an empty New York apartment with a small video camera gushing over the textures of the interesting apartment. The film shows a clip of one of these videos, which she uses as inspiration. The shot is zoomed in unnaturally closely and the video is shaky, and the whole thing is dubbed over by Downen as she said odd, artsy things. It's strangely reminiscent of "the Blair Witch Project."

It occurred to me that, in both the cases of Downen and Ossorio, this art is being produced by people who, if they were anything but artists, would be taken as mentally ill. I told Charissa at this point that the only difference between an artist and a lunatic is which side of the river the person went to school. If she is studying at MIT, she is a maniac. If he is at Harvard, he is an artist.

This is, of course, a joke, but it makes a serious point. That is, the label of "artist" is perhaps a great deal more arbitrary than we have often assumed. The difference between Ossorio and the goofball in Memphis who painted his house pink and glued bizarre stuff to it is a Harvard degree. The difference between Downen and a troubled kid with a penchant for taking strange videos is a Danforth Scholarship at Washington. In the case of Duchamp's "Fountaine," the difference between a urinal and a sculpture is where in the art gallery is stands.

This is not to say that these are not talented artists. They are, without a doubt. This is to say that who gets to become an artist and who goes unnoticed forever has as much to do with the relatively arbitrary forces of access and educational opportunity as it does with artistic "genius." It bears repeating here that this idea is not new to me. Many artists themselves feel this tension and play with these concerns in their own work. But, having been confronted with these truths, I had to make something of them.

Writing Students (and teachers) Take Heart; What we're asking you to do is really hard

Writing terrifies students.

Many of us who have been writing for a long time, or are "talented" writers, see writing as a relatively natural process. It's only putting language down on paper, after all. Yet our students shriek, shake, and cry with fear when we give them even "simple" writing assignments. Indeed, the act of writing paralyzes our students.

Flower and Hayes have explained the cognitive processes involved in the writing of actual written language, and their explanation helps to explain why the act of writing so befuddles our students. They explain that "the information generated in planning may be represented in a variety of symbol systems other than language." The ideas that generate writing often come in the form of images, sense memory, emotions and "even when the planning process represents one's thought in words, that representation is unlikely to be in the elaborate sytax of written English" (1981). The act of writing, to Flower and Hayes, is an act of translating ideas (which are non-linear and jumbled) into linear written English.

Writing, therefore, is an extememly complex cognitive process which requires our students to produce formal written English for discourses with which they are still infamiliar out of the jumbled mess of human cognition.

It's no wonder then that many of our students are overwhelmed by the task of writing. What we are asking them to do is difficult stuff--difficult stuff that we ourselves have often taken for granted. This is something to remember when we are frustrated that our students "just aren't getting it." We are asking them to lift heavy weights.

Since this is true, we must be careful not to assume that good writing just is. Instead, good writing is a carefully developed skill. We should see ourselves less as gurus or shamans, guiding them through the spiritual and mysterious process of writing, hoping that their exposure to our gods will magically enlighten them. Instead we should see ourselves as physical trainers, helping them learn to isolate their writing muscles. Though the act of writing is complex and recursive, the processes that make up this complex act can be isolated and trained. If we can help our students do this, then the act becomes easier and more natural (as it is for us) when they must put these processes back together to complete acts of meaningful writing.

But this requires careful work and patience on the part of both the teacher and the writer. So take heart, if it seems like this stuff is really hard, that's because it is. But just as you wouldn't give up working out the first time your muscles are sore, so you must not give up the first time your brain hurts. This includes both you students and you teachers.

The Right Hand is High School English; The Left Hand is College Composition

My freshmen often express disillusionment in their transition from high school English to college composition. Many of them feel (and I agree) that their high school English classes have left them unprepared for college writing in general, and my composition classes in particular. As a teacher, it is easy for me to suggest that such culture shock is a natural part of the learning process. As students advance both educationally and cognitively, it makes sense that the pedagogies upon which they once relied and within which they once thrived will seem inadequate. My students, on the other hand, have no such benign perspective. Many of them feel cheated or even led astray by high school teachers who would often justify hard or tedious assignments by claiming that they were "preparing them for college."

Thus, when my teaching points out the inadequacies of the five paragraph essay, or when I challenge often overly-pedantic views of first person writing and so on, my students respond bitterly about a secondary education that was supposed to "prepare them for college" but that has failed to do so. My students often hyperbolically express their desire to injure, maim, or kill their high school teachers for their false teaching. In fact, a student once told me that when he had gone home for a visit, he ran into his high school English teacher at Wal-Mart and he told her, right there in the store, that she owed him an apology.

On one hand, our students' feelings are natural to the educational experience and we need not worry about them; I remember having these same feelings as an undergraduate who had excelled in my high school English classes and had tested out of Composition I. But there is also a real and legitimate criticism couched in the responses of my students. At least from my perspective as a composition teacher, there is little curricular alignment between high school English programs and the college English departments their students are entering. There are, unfortunately, some unavoidable reasons for this.

Most high school English programs combine both the teaching of writing and of literature. And because most English teachers enter the field because of their love for literature, teaching about the history and interpretation of literature becomes the primary focus of the class. In fact, writing instruction in most high school English classes takes place while students are writing about the literary works they are reading. Thus, even in the English classroom, writing is treated as more of a skill set necessary for but peripheral to the real subject of the class. Writing is an activity that supports the teaching of literature, rather than being a subject of its own.

More significantly, though, is that high school and college teachers don’t seem to know what the other is actually doing. This should not be particularly surprising. Many high school teachers do not have the educational credentials and few have the time to teach as adjuncts in college composition programs. At the same time, only a few of the composition teachers I know have taught in secondary English programs. Though it’s an ever-present mantra in high school English classes to say that the class is “preparing students for college,” teachers of high school English know very little about what we actually do in the composition classroom.

To our shame, many first year writing programs have done little in the way of supporting secondary English programs. There are many researchers in the universities who are studying the writing habits, rhetorical prowess, and language usage of high school writers and proposing pedagogies based on their findings. But the lessons we are learning from this research seem too often to be getting lost in the ether. High school teachers aren’t reading our journals, and we’re not visiting their classrooms.

It is my admittedly un-researched argument here that there is a palpable disconnect between first-year composition programs and secondary English programs. It is also my assertion that this is a problem that we ought to work toward fixing. Without a doubt, true curriculum alignment will not be possible. The two enterprises are different enough to prevent this. Though high schools do indeed make it their goal to prepare students for higher education, they also have the burden of universal education. So it is also their goal to prepare students who will not and, perhaps, cannot go to college. Furthermore, high schools do not simply send students to the nearest state university, but instead send students to the four winds. Therefore, high schools cannot hope to account for the numerous pedagogical approaches at different institutions.

But even without some form of specific curriculum alignment, we can improve our teaching in both high school and college by fostering better communication between college English departments and high schools programs. We can help high school teachers better prepare their students for us by making clearer what we do, and what types of writing we privilege. We can also find ways to make sure that the research we do about their students gets back to them, so that the latest research a teacher has won’t be what they learned in their English education program while they themselves were in college. Furthermore, if we hate the five paragraph essay, we ought to be searching for and implementing new techniques to teach organization and invention. We are, after all, the research wing of the educational enterprise. And if teachers need these forms that we so hate because they work, it falls upon us to find something else that works and that isn’t antithetical to what we teach.

Ultimately, we must recognize that we are not involved in mutually exclusive projects, but rather we are indeed colleagues whose work can and should influence one another’s practices.