The Brain-Washing, Indoctrinating, Socialism-izing Speech--Better Not Read This!

DO NOT READ the following speech (verbatim from the White House website) unless you actually WANT your children to think it's important to work hard, pay attention in class, set goals, and prepare themselves for a successful adult life. And who could possibly want THAT??????

Prepared Remarks of President Barack Obama
Back to School Event

Arlington, Virginia
September 8, 2009

The President: Hello everyone – how’s everybody doing today? I’m here with students at Wakefield High School in Arlington, Virginia. And we’ve got students tuning in from all across America, kindergarten through twelfth grade. I’m glad you all could join us today.

I know that for many of you, today is the first day of school. And for those of you in kindergarten, or starting middle or high school, it’s your first day in a new school, so it’s understandable if you’re a little nervous. I imagine there are some seniors out there who are feeling pretty good right now, with just one more year to go. And no matter what grade you’re in, some of you are probably wishing it were still summer, and you could’ve stayed in bed just a little longer this morning.

I know that feeling. When I was young, my family lived in Indonesia for a few years, and my mother didn’t have the money to send me where all the American kids went to school. So she decided to teach me extra lessons herself, Monday through Friday – at 4:30 in the morning.

Now I wasn’t too happy about getting up that early. A lot of times, I’d fall asleep right there at the kitchen table. But whenever I’d complain, my mother would just give me one of those looks and say, "This is no picnic for me either, buster."

So I know some of you are still adjusting to being back at school. But I’m here today because I have something important to discuss with you. I’m here because I want to talk with you about your education and what’s expected of all of you in this new school year.

Now I’ve given a lot of speeches about education. And I’ve talked a lot about responsibility.

I’ve talked about your teachers’ responsibility for inspiring you, and pushing you to learn.

I’ve talked about your parents’ responsibility for making sure you stay on track, and get your homework done, and don’t spend every waking hour in front of the TV or with that Xbox.

I’ve talked a lot about your government’s responsibility for setting high standards, supporting teachers and principals, and turning around schools that aren’t working where students aren’t getting the opportunities they deserve.

But at the end of the day, we can have the most dedicated teachers, the most supportive parents, and the best schools in the world – and none of it will matter unless all of you fulfill your responsibilities. Unless you show up to those schools; pay attention to those teachers; listen to your parents, grandparents and other adults; and put in the hard work it takes to succeed.

And that’s what I want to focus on today: the responsibility each of you has for your education. I want to start with the responsibility you have to yourself.

Every single one of you has something you’re good at. Every single one of you has something to offer. And you have a responsibility to yourself to discover what that is. That’s the opportunity an education can provide.

Maybe you could be a good writer – maybe even good enough to write a book or articles in a newspaper – but you might not know it until you write a paper for your English class. Maybe you could be an innovator or an inventor – maybe even good enough to come up with the next iPhone or a new medicine or vaccine – but you might not know it until you do a project for your science class. Maybe you could be a mayor or a Senator or a Supreme Court Justice, but you might not know that until you join student government or the debate team.

And no matter what you want to do with your life – I guarantee that you’ll need an education to do it. You want to be a doctor, or a teacher, or a police officer? You want to be a nurse or an architect, a lawyer or a member of our military? You’re going to need a good education for every single one of those careers. You can’t drop out of school and just drop into a good job. You’ve got to work for it and train for it and learn for it.

And this isn’t just important for your own life and your own future. What you make of your education will decide nothing less than the future of this country. What you’re learning in school today will determine whether we as a nation can meet our greatest challenges in the future.

You’ll need the knowledge and problem-solving skills you learn in science and math to cure diseases like cancer and AIDS, and to develop new energy technologies and protect our environment. You’ll need the insights and critical thinking skills you gain in history and social studies to fight poverty and homelessness, crime and discrimination, and make our nation more fair and more free. You’ll need the creativity and ingenuity you develop in all your classes to build new companies that will create new jobs and boost our economy.

We need every single one of you to develop your talents, skills and intellect so you can help solve our most difficult problems. If you don’t do that – if you quit on school – you’re not just quitting on yourself, you’re quitting on your country.

Now I know it’s not always easy to do well in school. I know a lot of you have challenges in your lives right now that can make it hard to focus on your schoolwork.

I get it. I know what that’s like. My father left my family when I was two years old, and I was raised by a single mother who struggled at times to pay the bills and wasn’t always able to give us things the other kids had. There were times when I missed having a father in my life. There were times when I was lonely and felt like I didn’t fit in.

So I wasn’t always as focused as I should have been. I did some things I’m not proud of, and got in more trouble than I should have. And my life could have easily taken a turn for the worse.

But I was fortunate. I got a lot of second chances and had the opportunity to go to college, and law school, and follow my dreams. My wife, our First Lady Michelle Obama, has a similar story. Neither of her parents had gone to college, and they didn’t have much. But they worked hard, and she worked hard, so that she could go to the best schools in this country.

Some of you might not have those advantages. Maybe you don’t have adults in your life who give you the support that you need. Maybe someone in your family has lost their job, and there’s not enough money to go around. Maybe you live in a neighborhood where you don’t feel safe, or have friends who are pressuring you to do things you know aren’t right.

But at the end of the day, the circumstances of your life – what you look like, where you come from, how much money you have, what you’ve got going on at home – that’s no excuse for neglecting your homework or having a bad attitude. That’s no excuse for talking back to your teacher, or cutting class, or dropping out of school. That’s no excuse for not trying.

Where you are right now doesn’t have to determine where you’ll end up. No one’s written your destiny for you. Here in America, you write your own destiny. You make your own future.

That’s what young people like you are doing every day, all across America.

Young people like Jazmin Perez, from Roma, Texas. Jazmin didn’t speak English when she first started school. Hardly anyone in her hometown went to college, and neither of her parents had gone either. But she worked hard, earned good grades, got a scholarship to Brown University, and is now in graduate school, studying public health, on her way to being Dr. Jazmin Perez.

I’m thinking about Andoni Schultz, from Los Altos, California, who’s fought brain cancer since he was three. He’s endured all sorts of treatments and surgeries, one of which affected his memory, so it took him much longer – hundreds of extra hours – to do his schoolwork. But he never fell behind, and he’s headed to college this fall.

And then there’s Shantell Steve, from my hometown of Chicago, Illinois. Even when bouncing from foster home to foster home in the toughest neighborhoods, she managed to get a job at a local health center; start a program to keep young people out of gangs; and she’s on track to graduate high school with honors and go on to college.

Jazmin, Andoni and Shantell aren’t any different from any of you. They faced challenges in their lives just like you do. But they refused to give up. They chose to take responsibility for their education and set goals for themselves. And I expect all of you to do the same.

That’s why today, I’m calling on each of you to set your own goals for your education – and to do everything you can to meet them. Your goal can be something as simple as doing all your homework, paying attention in class, or spending time each day reading a book. Maybe you’ll decide to get involved in an extracurricular activity, or volunteer in your community. Maybe you’ll decide to stand up for kids who are being teased or bullied because of who they are or how they look, because you believe, like I do, that all kids deserve a safe environment to study and learn. Maybe you’ll decide to take better care of yourself so you can be more ready to learn. And along those lines, I hope you’ll all wash your hands a lot, and stay home from school when you don’t feel well, so we can keep people from getting the flu this fall and winter.

Whatever you resolve to do, I want you to commit to it. I want you to really work at it.

I know that sometimes, you get the sense from TV that you can be rich and successful without any hard work -- that your ticket to success is through rapping or basketball or being a reality TV star, when chances are, you’re not going to be any of those things.

But the truth is, being successful is hard. You won’t love every subject you study. You won’t click with every teacher. Not every homework assignment will seem completely relevant to your life right this minute. And you won’t necessarily succeed at everything the first time you try.

That’s OK. Some of the most successful people in the world are the ones who’ve had the most failures. JK Rowling’s first Harry Potter book was rejected twelve times before it was finally published. Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team, and he lost hundreds of games and missed thousands of shots during his career. But he once said, "I have failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed."

These people succeeded because they understand that you can’t let your failures define you – you have to let them teach you. You have to let them show you what to do differently next time. If you get in trouble, that doesn’t mean you’re a troublemaker, it means you need to try harder to behave. If you get a bad grade, that doesn’t mean you’re stupid, it just means you need to spend more time studying.

No one’s born being good at things, you become good at things through hard work. You’re not a varsity athlete the first time you play a new sport. You don’t hit every note the first time you sing a song. You’ve got to practice. It’s the same with your schoolwork. You might have to do a math problem a few times before you get it right, or read something a few times before you understand it, or do a few drafts of a paper before it’s good enough to hand in.

Don’t be afraid to ask questions. Don’t be afraid to ask for help when you need it. I do that every day. Asking for help isn’t a sign of weakness, it’s a sign of strength. It shows you have the courage to admit when you don’t know something, and to learn something new. So find an adult you trust – a parent, grandparent or teacher; a coach or counselor – and ask them to help you stay on track to meet your goals.

And even when you’re struggling, even when you’re discouraged, and you feel like other people have given up on you – don’t ever give up on yourself. Because when you give up on yourself, you give up on your country.

The story of America isn’t about people who quit when things got tough. It’s about people who kept going, who tried harder, who loved their country too much to do anything less than their best.

It’s the story of students who sat where you sit 250 years ago, and went on to wage a revolution and found this nation. Students who sat where you sit 75 years ago who overcame a Depression and won a world war; who fought for civil rights and put a man on the moon. Students who sat where you sit 20 years ago who founded Google, Twitter and Facebook and changed the way we communicate with each other.

So today, I want to ask you, what’s your contribution going to be? What problems are you going to solve? What discoveries will you make? What will a president who comes here in twenty or fifty or one hundred years say about what all of you did for this country?

Your families, your teachers, and I are doing everything we can to make sure you have the education you need to answer these questions. I’m working hard to fix up your classrooms and get you the books, equipment and computers you need to learn. But you’ve got to do your part too. So I expect you to get serious this year. I expect you to put your best effort into everything you do. I expect great things from each of you. So don’t let us down – don’t let your family or your country or yourself down. Make us all proud. I know you can do it.

Thank you, God bless you, and God bless America.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/MediaResources/PreparedSchoolRemarks/

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Good-Bye, Sarah Palin; Hello, Reality?

I started this blog last summer as a reaction to the horror I experienced at the idea that anyone could think Sarah Palin was a serious candidate for a position that might land her in the presidency. I find her endless capacity for re-writing reality to be absolutely stunning, and that doesn't even get us started on her garbled speech. Her strange and melodramatic (not to mention completely incomprehensible!) exit from Alaskan politics (at least for the time being) has only validated all my previous ideas of her. It was my intention to wrote a blog on the subject, by way of fitting tribute to the woman who inspired it in the first place, but Conan O'Brien and William Shatner have provided an un-toppable epitaph (see video below), which I will, therefore, not attempt to top.

Instead, I'll say a few words on the whole subject of reality. I have, in the past year or so, encountered an inordinate number of people--adults out in the real world--who seem to function quite happily (if not successfully) on the unexamined and unstated (and possibly unrecognized) belief that there is no external reality, and that, therefore, whatever they think or believe or say is true in that moment. These people seem to exhibit an astounding capacity for living with different "truths" in different moments, feeling no need whatever to reconcile contradictions. My husband's word to describe the phenomenon is "solipsistic," and I have to agree wholeheartedly. For a pithy and pointed essay on this subject with regard to the absolute lunacy over Barack Obama's citizenship, read this.

Awhile back, I posted an essay I wrote on the greatest threat to science; I would have to say that this, in a nutshell, is it: the refusal, or failure, to believe that in order to live successful lives, in order to be free in any meaningful sense, we must operate on the assumption that there is a reality, that it is knowable, and that we ought to attempt to know it. I teach a course called "Theory of Knowledge" (aka TOK)), the central goal of which, it occurs to me, could be described as being the dissemination of this idea. The course curriculum demands that students start thinking about everything they "know" and everything they hear, and start assessing its validity. It requires students to learn about the strengths and shortcomings of our means of making knowledge and gives them the power to respect reality and our ability to know it. One of the two culminating assignments is an essays. The International Baccalaureate (IB) provides a list of 10 titles for the TOK essay, and students must choose one. I try to write one myself every couple of years as a means of keeping in mind the true demands of the task, and this year I wrote the following essay on the title: "When should we trust our senses to give us truth?"

I think the essay is revealing both in terms of what has been on my mind this year (note the positive assumption in the question--we can and must trust our senses to give us truth--a reaction to the lunacy I see around me!), and in terms of why the IB is the best thing going in education: it expects of students actual knowledge, not just the facsimile of it, a temporary and disposable veneer lasting only until the end-of-course test has been passed.

* * * * *

I can easily generate a long list of examples of sensory failure—failing to hear my mother call me (this happened on a regular basis when I was a teenager, especially when I was lost inside my current book), thinking I smell gas when no one else can detect any such thing (this experience is actually quite common with me for some reason—perhaps I suffer from some sort of olfactory paranoia), or not being able to feel the ends of my fingers when it gets really cold outside. When I take my glasses off, I can see very little that is further than two feet from me, and the older I get, the less I can hear. When I recently got a new cell phone, and was testing all the ringers, I got to one that made no noise at all. I was just on the verge of complaining that it didn’t work, when I realized that this must be the “mosquito” ring tone that I’ve been hearing about that pretty much no one over a certain age can hear.

Despite all these ready-to-hand examples of sensory failure, it is nevertheless true that our sense perceptions are the ONLY means by which we get any kind of information which can subsequently be adjudged either true or false, and so in some sense, we have no choice BUT to trust our senses. Given the paradox—we can’t trust our senses and we must trust our senses--I conclude that the basic answer to the question as to when we should trust our senses to give us truth is that we should trust our senses to give us truth whenever there is some means to hand of checking our first sensory experience for validity, or whenever we have no other choice but to trust them.

We trust the truth of our senses for thousands of everyday tasks--we perceive that the floor is in a certain place, we put our foot down, and we are capable of walking; we taste the soup, add more salt, and find that it tastes better; we act based on what we heard someone say, and the action achieves the desired result. In myriad everyday cases, not only DO we rely on our senses, we SHOULD rely on them, because if we DIDN’T rely on them, we couldn't function. We should accept as true those things which cohere, at least until we have good reason not to, because if we refuse to do so, then we mire ourselves in a no-man’s-land of permanent stagnation, constantly questioning every “fact” or proposition made to us.

The problem, so far as sense perception goes, is that although we function perfectly well most of the time operating on the assumption that our sense perceptions are correct, there are inevitably those moments when our sense perception presents us with a reality that doesn’t make sense. In those cases, however, we are not left at the mercy of the foibles of our senses. When we experience those “That cannot be right!” moments in which our mind revolts against what our senses seem to be telling us is true, we can, and in fact have already begun to use reason to help us know whether or not to trust our senses and to what extent, in that moment. Monday morning, for example, I heard the grandfather clock downstairs chime 6:00, but because I had been awake awhile and had looked at the alarm clock not long before and had seen that at that time it was 4:30, I reasoned that I must have heard wrong and that the actual time must be 5:00 rather than 6:00. I verified the rational conclusion simply by turning the alarm clock on the bedside stand around so I could see its face; it was, indeed, 5:00 and not 6:00. Had the alarm clock said 6:00, then my sensory perception based on the chiming of the Grandfather clock would have been verified instead, and I would have had to come up with some other explanation for the discordance: perhaps I would conclude that I had fallen back asleep without realizing it, and that, therefore, another hour had gone by without my noticing. Either way, reason and sense perception together would have allowed me to solve the problem, and I would, therefore, have been able to trust that I know what the reality of the situation was.

Sensory data can, is, and should be trusted in the countless moments that constitute our daily living. We also rely on sensory information, however, in more formalized ways within various areas of academic endeavor, and so we have had to work out systems by which we can ensure the reliability of that data for our knowledge-making endeavors. Within the area of Natural Sciences, this process is highly structured. The objective of the Natural Sciences is to determine the physical nature of the universe, which is presumed to exist. If we are trying to find out about something outside ourselves, we must observe it closely. The essential means of making knowledge, then, is empiricism. In order to compensate for failings of our sensory apparatus, scientists have implemented a number of strategies: they build equipment that extends the range of human perception—telescopes, microscopes, sonar, radar, infrared photograph, NMR (nuclear magnetic resonance) imaging, and so on. Scientists also rely on replicability to ensure that an observed phenomenon wasn’t either mis-observed, mis-interperted, mis-reported, or anomalous. Finally, since the essential process of knowledge-making in the natural sciences involves falsification and, ultimately, paradigm shift, science functions in essential ways to ensure that “bad” information is constantly weeded out and the structures of science are designed to ensure that we come ever closer in our refinements of our understanding to absolute certainty--to truth. We can, and should, therefore, trust our senses within the realm of the Natural Sciences so long as we are vigilant about identifying and denouncing fraud, and so long as we continue to make every honest effort to adhere to the standard practices of the sciences.

Within the realm of the arts, however, there is no such formalized structure for regulating sensory data. In the era when mimesis was the paramount objective of art, failures of sensory perception would have posed a problem for the artist and viewer similar to the problems that scientists must deal with, because the goal would have been very much the same thing: the accurate depiction of a world external to us. More recently, however, since creation, rather than copying has been the goal of art, empiricism is still the mechanism by which knowledge is conveyed and received, but "errors" in sense perception become irrelevant or even, perhaps, part of the message. With the arts, understanding happens integrally to the sensory experience. I love Mozart's Sinfonia Concertante for oboe, clarinet, horn and bassoon, but I love it because of the sensory experience of it. The lyricism of the horns is almost like flying. I love Frederick Church's painting, Coast Scene: Mount Desert 1863 because of the feeling of being immersed in rich sensory data--in that case, a spectacular sunrise over a sea whose spray is so vivid that the sea almost seems to move. One of the main reasons, then, that art appeals at all is that the direct sensory experience results in rich emotional experience, so whether that sensory data has any factual relationship to the external physical world or not is completely irrelevant.

This is not to say, however, that there is no possibility of the failure sensory experience to provide artistic truth. In a recent, very famous, incident, Susan Boyle, a middle-aged and rather frumpy Scotswoman created an international sensation because, it turned out, she sings with a beauty and power that very few people possess. The universal first impression, largely determined by sight, was that this woman was kidding herself to suggest that she might be another Elaine Paige. That sensory-based judgment, however, turned out to be sensationally wrong. In Blink, Malcolm Gladwell describes a similar failure of senses: he talks about how until conductors agreed to audition classical musicians from behind screens, it was nearly impossible for women to get hired to play in symphony orchestras, but as soon as the screens went up, the number of women hired--even for instruments like trumpet or French horn, long considered the purview of men only--increased dramatically. The sight of the woman actually caused a failure to hear accurately; the suppression of the sight allowed for a truer judgment of the quality of music (Gladwell 248-254). Sense perception, then, can and must be trusted if we are to experience the full power of the arts, but, as with any other field of endeavor, we must remain vigilant that we aren't misled by false or irrelevant information.

Ultimately, sensory learning is as valuable as the learning garnered via any other way of knowing. We should, therefore, trust our senses as much as we trust any of those other ways of knowing. We should go about our business sensing and learning, but we should always be alert to the fact that we could, at any moment, be misled by our senses--just as we can be misled by emotions run amok, by flawed reason, or by misused language. By trusting all the mechanisms by which we come to know, but by trusting them not in isolation, but rather in tandem, we have the best chance of refining our experience to something that comes ever closer to truth.

Works Cited

Gladwell, Malcolm. Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2005.

NOTE: For further, and quite excellent, commentary on the nature of truth, see Harry Frankfurt's books On Truth, and On Bullshit. (He wrote the former second; you may wish to read them in that order.) These are very short treatises on the nature of truth and the utter disregard of it. I recommend them highly!

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In Which My Students Encounter Susan Boyle, Some Are Perplexed, and I Respond in a Great Many Complexities

This week, I thought I’d join the legions before me who have written about the Susan Boyle phenomenon. (If you have been on top of the Himalayas or down checking out the Titanic for the past two weeks and so are the last person alive who has not yet seen the Susan Boyle audition for Britain’s Got Talent—as of Friday afternoon, not quite two weeks after the original audition, there had been more 88 million plays of the several videos of the audition on YouTube[1]—then you can see it here.)

I got to thinking in more detail about the current media wonder because one of my students asked me the other day, “What’s the big deal about Susan Boyle? Why is everyone so excited?” My first reaction was to ask her if she had seen it, as the excitement seemed intuitively obvious to me, but she had, and so a less cavalier answer was called for. I expound here on the short version I gave her. The answer that I was able to produce on the spot is that the reaction is archetypal: Susan Boyle is the living breathing embodiment of one of the most emotionally attractive of all narratives: the Cinderella Story.[2] She went from utter hopelessness to absolute victory in the space of four minutes—less, actually: as my sister pointed out, the audience was on its feet before she got through the third line. The hopelessness, furthermore, turned out to exist only in the eyes of the beholder, which meant that as audience members, we unexpectedly and abruptly found ourselves in the position of having our own cynicism shattered by incontrovertible evidence that there is, in fact, hope even when hopelessness seems the only possible rational position. While Susan Boyle herself won the full joyful force of transformation, everyone watching also got to experience something of the effect of an emotional slingshot.

Most of my students had no trouble responding to the rags to riches story at least to some degree. It was a student, in fact, who first brought the video to my attention: she used it in our IB Philosophy class to exemplify some of the features of chapter 5 of Charles Taylor’s Ethics of Authenticity. The student (rightly) thought that the video served to exemplify Taylor’s claim that in our effort to realize our potential selves as fully as possible, it is necessary both that we have the recognition of others as a form of validating that our opinion of ourselves is not mere delusion, and that we simultaneously consider the validity of that recognition so that we do not make the mistake of allowing the opinions and values of others to distort reality and thus keep us from something essentially ours. My student could hardly have chosen better. Susan Boyle was all about recognition: the dowdy, unattractive almost-48-year-old never-been-kissed spinster presented the perfect vision of completely self-delusional visions of grandeur. The audience had NO trouble recognizing in her all the American Idol contestants who had come before and who had made complete fools of themselves during widely televised (and perhaps even more widely ridiculed!) auditions. William Hung and his infamous rendition of “She Bangs” positively leapt to mind.[3] Before she started singing, Susan Boyle had already been recognized as a failure.

The expectation of impending humiliation was heightened by Miss Boyle's proclamation that she wished to be as successful as Elaine Paige, an apparently outrageous aspiration which my students were universally unable to appreciate, as, though they are universally familiar with the musical oeuvre of Mr. Hung, none of them had ever heard of Elaine Paige. I, however, have been fortunate enough to have encountered Ms. Paige before (particularly in the original cast recording of Andrew Lloyd Weber's Whistle Down the Wind). Elaine Paige is a giant of the musical stage and a household name in England. I tried to help my students draw a parallel by suggesting that it would be like someone in America proclaiming that she wanted to be as good as Barbra Streisand, but all that accomplished was the underlining of my own generational distance from the kids, as none of them had ever heard of her, either. So I asked them to provide me with the name of the biggest female star in contemporary American music, to which importunity they offered Celine Dion. I had at least heard of her, and the general point was made, but I did feel that they were still missing something by the comparison, as Ms. Dion is not known for leading roles on Broadway, for instance. (Having learned from my abortive Barbra Streisand attempt, I knew better than to try Sarah Brightman or Betty Buckley. Perhaps Kristin Chenoweth would have gotten me somewhere, since she has television experience, but she hardly has the stature of Elaine Paige.)

The thing that’s too bad about our failure to arrive at a meeting of the minds over effective exemplars is that those who don’t know who Elaine Page is lack the ability to appreciate in a visceral way the true extent of the audacity with which Miss Boyle approached her audition. The judges got it, of course (as did the British audience), and the television editors, sensing an impending bloodbath, took care to leverage for all it was worth the eye-rolling and eye-brow raising and sidelong glances and general expressions of incredulity (lip reading helps!) in the moments preceding the audition. Worldly and cynical recognition positively leaps off the screen.

That kind of recognition, however, would not be the kind of recognition that Charles Taylor wishes for us all to experience as a means of helping us become fully-realized, successful human beings. Miss Boyle however, and rampant cynicism notwithstanding, went on to demonstrate the second part of Taylor’s claim and, in so doing, ultimately got all the positive recognition that one would wish.

Susan Boyle knew what to do with the eye-rolling skepticism of the judges and the audience: she ignored it altogether and proclaimed, in fact, that she was going to “…make that audience rock!” This confidence, ironically one of the many factors that actually contributed to the viewers’ sardonic and scornful expectation, was in fact a quintessential demonstration of Taylor’s theory. Miss Boyle had, over 36 years, developed what everyone who heard her sing on April 11th came rapidly to understand is an accurate and balanced assessment of her own abilities. Better still, she had the self-possession necessary to allow her to keep the scorn of the disbelieving masses from shaking her judgment. She just smiled and sang. When she sang, she did, indeed, rock the audience which, despite its rapid leap to cynicism, knew a phenomenally talented singer when it heard one. The wonder that arose from the sheer rapidity of the change is, perhaps, part of what my student couldn't quite appreciate: since she had no idea what Elaine Paige represented--and, I might add, no earthly idea in advance of how difficult the song itself is--she couldn't understand the magnitude of Susan Boyle's claim, didn't, therefore, formulate the level of scorn others did, and thus also failed to experience the full potency of the contrast between expectation and production. Much of the impact arises directly out of that contrast and the speed with which the transformation from scorn to awe was executed. (One of the great joys of the video is the reaction of those present—who knew Simon Cowell could exude real pleasure and admiration??? My personally favorite bit is the moment when the two guys backstage register the fact that Miss Boyle did, indeed, hit with perfect control that high note that they, and everyone intimately familiar with the song, knew was coming. It’s a fabulous moment of pure vindication for the singer no one thought could sing--no one except Susan Boyle, of course.)

In fact, it was in part because her judgment was hard-nosed and completely justified that Miss Boyle has commanded so much admiration. A lot of the commentary online (and there is a TON—between the blogs, mine included, the news pages, and the fan club sites, the web is crawling with Susan Boyle references) focuses on how “brave” Susan Boyle was. Part of the answer for my student, then, is that we can all relate, on some level and to varying degrees, with the feeling that some part of us is too ugly to be overlooked by others, and most of us go to great lengths to hide those aspects of ourselves in fear of what we know must be inevitable rejection. Few of us have the nerve to stand up in public and proclaim to the world that those bits absolutely don’t matter in the face of other bits of great value, and fewer still, having found that nerve, turn out to be right. Susan Boyle’s triumph is, in a way, a triumph on behalf of everyone who has ever been laughed at or picked on, or been chosen last for softball in 5^th grade PE. Susan Boyle revealed that she is endowed with the fortitude not to care what the naysayers will think; she showed that she has mastered a way of valuing herself grounded in solid, rational awareness of her own nature and abilities, rather than in hubristic, stubborn delusion—and I never met anyone who wouldn’t be glad to have that ability.

But courage in the face of universal incredulity wasn't the whole story and, I think, wasn't even the main story. The real reason for the widespread adulation of Susan Boyle, the reason I would have given my student had I had time to think it over and to explain in detail in the three minutes before class started, is that in four minutes Susan Boyle went from laughingstock to human being. Before she sang the audition, Miss Boyle was not a person, but rather a stock character, an abstraction, a type: "self-delusional loser," but almost the moment she started singing, a cog shifted inside the brains of all the listeners, they traded one perceived reality for another, utterly different one, and by about six bars in, they cared what happened to this person they had never seen before. In the space of those six bars, the audience went from wanting Susan Boyle to fail, because that failure would provide a satisfying, if mean-spirited, sense of superiority, to wanting Susan Boyle to succeed, because success is vastly more satisfying than failure. Once success became a real possibility on the stage of Britain's Got Talent, everyone started hoping. Hoping meant risking being let down, and when Miss Boyle didn't let anyone down and, in fact, surpassed the wildest possible expectations, the ensuing joy was the reaction to a promise fulfilled. That's the archetype I was trying to tell my student about: in a world littered with disappointments, the universe came through with a massively fulfilling surprise. The hero, against all odds, negotiated the road of trials and came home with the ultimate boon.

The nice thing that this suggests is that, cynical armor notwithstanding, people are mostly more generous than our day-to-day interactions sometimes suggest.

My students can understand that, because, as they have demonstrated to me through their discussion of the literature we have studied this year, they know how to empathize. They might perhaps best understand the Susan Boyle phenomenon in terms of Cyrano de Bergerac, which we recently finished studying. Un-Susan-like, Cyrano compensated for his ugliness in the eyes of others not by raising himself up on a deep assurance of the true worth of his real talent with words, but rather by developing a persona--the swashbuckling hero--in whose essential truth he didn't believe, but the appearance of which, he believed, would fool the world into according him a measure of respect that allowed him to function in society. The value of that persona, in other words, was not intrinsic to itself, and Cyrano didn't value himself the more or feel himself more successful and more human because he could manifest it. The value of that persona lay solely in its instrumental capacity: he was able to get what he wanted from others because they valued it. The commitment to the persona came with a very high price, however: to keep it up, he sacrificed any chance he might have had of a life with the woman he professed to love, and to whom he devoted himself, Lancelot-like, in the role of platonic champion for more than 15 years. My students understood in nuanced ways what those choices meant, and they recognized that Cyrano’s deep suffering over the ridicule he reaped as a result of his monstrosity of a nose kept him from becoming the person he might otherwise have been.

Cyrano died before he found a way to transcend people's attitude toward his nose. Susan Boyle didn't have to die before people looked past her hideous, if metaphorical, nose, but for whatever reason, something kept her, too, from becoming the person she might have been for nearly 48 years. The opportunity provided Miss Boyle by Britain's Got Talent, then, is that much more poignant. Most of us are a good deal more like Cyrano than we are like Susan Boyle, and so a great deal of the wonder over Susan Boyle arose from encountering the rare exception: someone becoming, despite the odds and long after all expectation would seem to be past, the person she might have been. That the world can experience such pleasure in that simple fact speaks better for human nature than our behavior often suggests we deserve: in this case the widespread furor suggests that in great numbers we believe that nobody should have to die without ever casting off the Ugly Duckling.

The general public at large, lacking the technical vocabulary, wouldn't express that desire in terms of a belief in an ethic of Authenticity, but my Philosophy students could. Whether the public at large is familiar with the formal terminology of Charles Taylor's ethical theory or not, I think Taylor is right in his claim that the underpinnings of Western culture in general and American culture specifically lie in just such a belief. The ideal of opportunity for all, which formed the basis of the American constitution and the framework of the American dream, toward which generations of immigrants have traveled, inheres the idea that every individual deserves equal chance to discover and create a unique self. Taylor argues further that our social institutions--governmental and legal systems in particular--have been designed to accommodate that belief. Taylor does not mention schools, but it seems to me that just as the government and the judicial systems ought to support and protect the ability of each member of our society to work on becoming his or her best self, so should the schools promote authenticity. My objection to No Child Left Behind and its consequent state programs of testing (about which I have written in detail in past posts on this blog) arises from the fact that those structures are designed to steer schools away from the service of the individual and toward a herd mentality.

The title "No Child Left Behind" is rather painfully ironic, as, though it appeals directly to that same desire for individual self-realization that sparked the Susan Boyle revolution, it actually works against any ability to attend to the true nature of each individual child. No Child Left Behind leaves all children behind, because it forces schools and educators into a gristmill of testing, bureaucratic record keeping and bean counting that discounts entirely any question of individual student's gifts might be. No Child Left Behind leaves all individual children behind, because it requires that all children be forced into the same mold and mandates a system in which all students are shaped to know the same things, posses the same skills, and think the same thoughts as all others. No Child Left Behind proscribes an anti-authenticity, anti-individualistic program better designed to churn out unthinking clones than it is designed to generate diverse minds. Students who are mandated by law to spend all their energies on the four core subjects, who are schooled in places which have to eliminate the arts (and a slew of other elective subjects) in favor of double-blocked remediation periods will find that their opportunities to explore options, and thus discover whatever it is that speaks uniquely to their most essential selves, have been greatly curtailed. Given that lack, it is to be hoped that my students, and all students, will be able to find some other path to their Susan Boyle moment, and that that moment won't be delayed until they are nearly 48. As much joy as the world found in Susan Boyle's eleventh-hour rescue from obscurity, I would trade the community pleasure for the longer-lived individual pleasure of finding recognition for one's essential talents at an early age, that that recognition might serve better and last longer. I find it a terrible contemplation to consider the possibility that we have cast our lot behind a school system which, in its subjugation of individual development to the fulfillment of societal needs is essentially instrumental, leads, ultimately, to a generation comprising many more Cyrano de Bergeracs than Susan Boyles.

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[1] I added the numbers up myself from the totals posted for the dozen or so videos, so if the estimate is wrong, it is my math skill and not simple unchecked hyperbole which is to blame. Note that this does not count the myriad video responses, video biographies, Susan Boyle fan club websites, and so on. The Washington Post reported on Tuesday that the total hits on all video sharing sites, as tracked by some company that tracks these things, was greater than 116 million. At that pace, she's probably over 200 million now. I Googled "Susan Boyle" at the same time as I did the adding up, and I got more than 19 million hits. She qualifies as a bona fide phenomenon.

[2] Online access to this article requires membership in http://www.questia.com. The reference is:

Waters, Jen. "Cinderella: Biography of an Archetype; Enchantment of Fairytale Spans Centuries." The Washington Times. 31 May 2003.

[3] For those of you so unfortunate (?) as to have missed Mr. Hung’s fleeting time in the spotlight, you can see it here.

Education and Creativity--From TED