This and the following article are lectures that Maxine gave at the Lincoln Center Institute. As for all the artistic allusions here to novels, plays, paintings, performance artists, etc, etc, if many of the references are obscure, you could see this as a vital reading/seeing list. The Bibliography to the book where these articles first appeared provides for a life-time of engaged reading.
1. In the opening paragraph there is a fine statement of possibility that comes when we fully engage certain works of art. What might happen? How does what might happen relate to Greene’s vision of freedom? She speaks of "breakthroughs.. the upsurges of the unexpected we may experience at certain moments of engagement with works of art." She speaks in the next paragraph about how such "shocks of awareness" can jolt us into waking up out of our torpor of boredom. This in turn connects to freedom of the imagination that we discussed last week.
2. Note the passage from Camus about frittering away our time for living. What might you put as examples of living in this context? Frittering on twittering? The historically unprecedented timesink that is the Internet? At least at card tables and cafes there is contact with other human beings.
3. Note too the movement from experience to reflection to action on p. 117, the second and third paragraphs.
4. What are some of the revisioned purposes of education identified by Greene? "to invent situations in which young people are enabled to freely make of themselves who or what they are, that they ... engage continually (yes, and knowledgeably) with works of art." (118)
5. What is meant by “open spaces”? How might you go about creating such a space? Has our class been an “open space” this semester? "Spaces where people can appear as who they are and not *what* they are, spaces for action on the part of all those involved... Action, in contrast to behavior, means taking an initiative, embarking on a beginning, setting something in motion." To be honest, I'm not sure this class *has* achieved this (admittedly, high) standard. I don't know, for instance, that a student who believed that some divine power played some kind of role in the universe's creation would feel "free to appear as who she were" in the early weeks of the course. Yet surely a person holding such beliefs (likely, in a Jesuit school) cannot be compared to a person advocating Nazism (which was, rightly, held to have no place in the classroom).
6. Democracy=voting vs. democracy=communities-in-the-making: how does the latter phrase relate to the democratic ideal? We've covered this ground before, I think, with Dewey and Summerhill. If we look small, "democracy" at a systems level is a good bit more than once-every-four-years voting: the multiple frameworks defining and protecting individual rights, the bottoms-up and top-down processes by which legislation is created and modified, the seen and less-seen roles played by different actors within government, market, and opinion-shaping spheres; the (IMHO considerable) individual responsibilities that come along with the privilege of living in a (flawed, imperfect) democratic society. To reduce all that to once-every-four-years voting is, on the one hand, flip; and, on the other, misses the critical imperative to work the "seeing small" systems perspective as well as the "seeing large" personal one. It takes all kinds to effect a revolution: Greene's vision requires not only many personal transformations on the part of individual educators, one by one by one; but also substantial structural transformations, involving money, allocation of finite school hours, assessment tools and procedures, and more.
7. What is the point of the extended analysis of the passage from Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov? It has been a very long time. I believe, though, that Ivan stands for the ethical atheist, struggling to make moral sense of the world without an image of God in apologia. He doesn't believe in God, but if there *were* a God, Ivan would be very cranky indeed with Him, given the amount of unjustifiable suffering in the world.
Greene, “Resistance to Mere Things...”:
8. As I read this lecture, the idea occurs to me that for Maxine, a work of art is relational (analogous to Noddings’ vision of care as relational), that the work consists of the aesthetic experience that is the synthesis between the image (or book, sound, etc, etc) and the perceiver. If this is so, what do we bring to the work that allows for such an experience, such an opening?
Well, everything, isn't it: the hopes, fears, joys and sorrows of our prior experiences; other aesthetic experiences that we connect back, Dewey-style, to the one we're experiencing; our background knowledge of the artistic domain itself; the quality (or not) of our attention.
9. Here too we find the idea that part of what we bring is “aesthetic education.” What does that include? Does such an education address the worries raised by Greene about imagination beginning at the bottom of p. 123: “I need to ponder...two issues having to do with imagination...”? Right. Well, sure. The only way that kids will ever learn to love Shakespeare is to... experience Shakespeare. The only way that kids learn to love museums is to... go to museums.
Greene raises two issues -- she actually does not call them "worries," and I think only the first of them should, properly, rank as one. The first is the observation that "imagination is not always benevolent" (she provides both Columbine and horror films as examples). The second is the observation that Harry Potter and Star Wars have sparked far wider youth enthusiasm than, say, the Brothers Karamazov. I don't think *she* argues that aesthetic education can "solve" the first issue; I think she *suggests* (does not come outright and say) that aesthetic educators might, possibly, draw on HP and SW as entry points to other versions of the classic heroic-quest storylines and mythical elements that they draw on.
10. What lessons does Greene extract from the Marge Piercy poem on p. 125? Wake up! Wake up, you people!
11. Think of all the ways in which “imagination can be corrupted” (p. 127). I'm more persuaded by Morrison's Bluest Eye than by Dewey's Dead Facts. The same mythical motifs that provide my aesthetic context and deepen my encounter with art might be someone else's Dead Facts.
12. In response to the passage from Sartre, Maxine talks about helping “to free teachers and learners to find and use their own voices...” Yes.
10. What lessons does Greene extract from the Marge Piercy poem on p. 125? Wake up! Wake up, you people!
11. Think of all the ways in which “imagination can be corrupted” (p. 127). I'm more persuaded by Morrison's Bluest Eye than by Dewey's Dead Facts. The same mythical motifs that provide my aesthetic context and deepen my encounter with art might be someone else's Dead Facts.
12. In response to the passage from Sartre, Maxine talks about helping “to free teachers and learners to find and use their own voices...” Yes.
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