Teaching humanities in new ways--and teaching new humanities.

At Nichols College in Dudley, Massachusetts, where I teach, our faculty are part of a generation of scholars, writers, and teachers now living out the dream of tenure. And it is a dream--of job security and freedom of speech and pen. In some ways the tenured professors aging gracefully in our classrooms are the first generation in the United States to do so in the style they do. Many have both their primary homes and a second house on the coast. They enjoy social standing and good salaries. In short, many are in positions where it would be obscene to complain--and still they do.

What do we complain about? Mostly, the tenured ones complain about students who are unable to learn and how things have changed. Why are students listening more to consumer culture than their professors? Why won't they read?

There are two main reasons why there is a widening gap between the aging faculty and the contemporary students: one is biological and one is technological. As far as biology is concerned, since the American high school or common school was founded in 1890 the average age of physical maturity has dropped an average of three to four months per decade. Students who entered high school in 1860 were by and large unable to conceive or bear children. Today most students entering high school have this capability.

Leon Botstien has done a fine job researching this in his 1997 book Jefferson's Children: Education and the Promise of American Culture. Children entering high school are physically adult. They seek adult knowledge and, regardless how their families or schools treat them, they are biologically driven to gain that adult knowledge--primarily about sex but also about such adult concerns as violence, money, knowledge, power, and death. What is the result? The students consume knowledge from popular culture. They buy the knowledge they feel they need and aren't getting in school.

The effect of this on our lives in the colleges and universities is profound. For one thing, the students have been taught that their teachers won't tell them what they need to know. And they in turn have trained themselves to get knowledge--good, bad, and ugly--from video, television, film, music, advertisements, and the like. Coming to us, the students who used to know something of William Butler Yeats' The Second Coming are more inclined to bust a rhyme about "gettin" jiggy with it."

There is another reason why our students are speaking a different language than their professors: the natures of learning and cognition, and the design of knowledge, have changed. Students learn more readily from the filmic design of the screen than they do from text, and it's more a matter of form than content. According to R. R. Hassin, J. S. Uleman, and J. A. Bargh in The New Unconscious (2005):

   Our senses can handle about 11 million
   bits per second (Zimmerman 1989; see
   Norretranders, 1998, for a detailed
   analysis). This whopping number is
   largely the result of our sophisticated
   visual system, which can handle about
   10 million bits per second. The processing
   capacity of consciousness pales in
   comparison. The exact number of bits
   consciousness can process depends on
   the task. When we read silently, we
   process about maximum of 45 bits per
   second (a few words); when we read
   aloud, it drops to 30. When we calculate
   (e.g., when we multiply two numbers),
   we can handle only 12 bits per second.
   Compared to our total capacity, these
   numbers are incredibly small.

Colleges and universities are admitting what we might call multiliterate students--students literate in many media. This new multiliterate student clashes with the reality of schools in the West where, until recently, it has been regarded as self-evident that the road to education lay through books.

In The Great Conversation: The Substance of a Liberal Education, an introduction to the Great Books of the Western World series of 1952, Robert M. Hutchins writes:

   The goal toward which Western society
   moves is the Civilization of the Dialogue.
   The spirit of western civilization is the
   spirit of inquiry. Its dominant element
   is the Logos. Nothing is to remain
   undiscussed. Everybody is to speak his
   mind. No proposition is to be left unexamined.
   The exchange of ideas is heralded
   to be the path to the realization of
   the potentialities of the race."

As we know, this canonical approach has been replaced by political and economic groupings. Higher education is no longer "Do you know what I am saying?" but, rather, "You must know this!" The effect has been that everyone in higher education assumes a parallel stance: the black professor teaches black literature, the Hispanic teaches Hispanic, the white tries to balance the race's difficult past by blending the canon with the new. And while being called the culture wars by William Bennett and Jerry Falwell, it seems both sides of the debate want the same thing: that the ideals of education--honesty, virtue, tolerance, technical and literary excellence, open-mindedness--are well worth preserving no matter how they are achieved. But some major aspects of contention in the culture wars have changed.

In the preface to The Substance of Liberal Education, Hutchins further writes:

   We do not believe that any of the social
   and political changes that have taken
   place in the last fifty years, or any that
   now seem imminent, have invalidated or
   can invalidate the tradition or make it
   irrelevant for modern man."

Hutchinson couldn't have foreseen the rise of cyber technology. He also couldn't foresee demographic changes that have restructured higher education.

Louis Menand divides American higher education into two distinct periods. The period from 1945 to 1975 he calls the golden age. During this time our curriculum stayed fairly stable but the whole system of education increased dramatically, with the number of students rising nearly 500 percent. During the second period, beginning in 1975, the college age population stopped growing, the value of a college degree began to drop, and the percentage of people going to college began to drop as well. At the same time, colleges began to diversify. In 1965, 62 percent of students were men and 94 percent were white; by 1997, 45 percent were men and 72 percent white.

Part of the result of this was the work of what Menand calls the anti-disciplinary. Feminists, students of colonialism and post colonialism, nonwhites, and gays began to question the assumptions of the great conversation and of academic work in general. Menand writes:

   The Golden Age vocabulary of disinterestedness,
   objectivity, reason and knowledge
   and talk about scientific method,
   the canon of great books, the fact-value
   distinction, have been replaced in many
   fields, and particularly English studies,
   by talk about interpretations, perspective
   rather than objectivity, and understanding
   rather than reason or analysis.
   An emphasis on universalism and greatness
   has been replaced by an emphasis
   on diversity and difference.

Following suit, English studies have become not so much a set of titles but an intellectual approach, a style of inquiry, a set of broad concerns rather than a body of knowledge.

The distribution of wealth and power in global society has also undergone tremendous shifts over the last fifty years. According to the United Nations Human Developments Report of 1999:

   Poverty trends have worsened. The
   number of poor people living on less
   than US$1 a day rose from 1,197 million
   in 1987 to 1,214 million in '97, which is
   20 percent of the world's population.
   Another twenty-five percent of the
   world's population survives on between
   US$1 and US$2 per day.

Combine this with the fact that, according to the World Bank, the indebtedness of the developing world has gone up over 500 percent since the 1980s, and we get a picture of the failure of global capitalism to distribute wealth with any sense of a just or fair deal.

This inequality is seen both globally and economy by economy, even in the United States. According to Frank Ackerman, data show a near constancy of the distribution of family income in the United States from 1947 to 1970, and then clear growth in inequality since that time. From 1973 to 1997 there's been a hollowing out of the middle class. At the same time that Menand sees a shift in curriculum and approaches in high education, there is also a shift in wealth distribution. And my feeling is that the two are not just related but profoundly related.

Since the early 1970s real wages for middle- and low-income workers have gone down while real wages for people in the upper strata of society have increased. Between 1970 and 1997 the number of people in the middle ranges of income shrank by nearly 12 percent. Those in poverty increased 5 percent while the wealth of the richest elements of society during these same years rose nearly 6 percent. There are many reasons given for this dramatic rise in the inequality of our wealth distribution--including the decline of unions and the increase in individual worker productivity--but what concerns us here is that, despite the fact that more people are being educated, incomes are going down. The main reason cited by Frank Ackerman in his 2000 book, The Political Economy of Inequality, is: "Wage inequality has risen in modern economies because rising demands for skills have made talented people more scarce."

The effects of this new class structure in American and global society have profound implications from our civic participation, which has declined precipitously, to our family structures, which reflect the challenges to the middle and working classes in dramatic divorce numbers. These new social realities play on how we learn and what we learn.

How do we renew the ideals of liberal education when teaching the children of a hollowed-out middle class who turn to higher education to revive the dreams of their parents? What authentic artifacts can we use to teach children who arrive at school physically adult, sexually savvy, and from this new economic class structure?

When I began to use rock and roll in the classroom, the difference between a traditional humanities course like American Literature and a nontraditional one, The History of Rock and Roll, astounded not only me but our dean and other faculty as well. There was a buzz. Where American Literature students were in a near revolt against the material from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it seemed that only punitive action would get them to consider, say, the works of William Appes or Phyllis Wheatley. Contrary to this, The History of Rock and Roll experienced (and continues to experience) near perfect attendance and eagerness on the part of the students not only to learn the requirements of sound research but to complete their research on time.

Why is this? One reason is found in a famous October 1813 letter from Thomas Jefferson to John Adams in which Jefferson writes that democracy should be a natural aristocracy whereby, through merit of talent, beauty, or sheer force of will, a person can rise in a society that constantly erects snow fences around its gaudy treasures. He argues against Adams' idea that the rich should be, by their wealth, automatically a part of society and government. He writes, "The artificial aristocracy is a mischievous ingredient ... and provision should be made to prevent its ascendancy."

Jefferson's argument for the natural aristocracy is played out in rock and roll and popular culture time and time again. I can hardly describe what a bundle of nerves Joan Jett was at twenty years of age, or the Pretenders' Chrissie Hynde. But my students are well aware that these women, and other singers like Jewel and Kurt Cobain, have risen from states of homelessness or broken homes, from lives as teenage delinquents or living in poverty, to find their voices and identities, to assert their beauty and humor and win influence (and money) by virtue of their natural talent. In the spirit of both inquiry and survival, students eagerly look to narratives in which a poor girl from British Columbia or a poor boy from Tupelo, Mississippi, or the poor boy from Red Bank, New Jersey, rises up and gives voice to the hope and passion of her or his people and land.

Composer Roger Sessions wrote, "Bach and Mozart and Beethoven did not reflect Germany, they helped create it." The same might be said of rock and roll. Rock and roll began as an American folk art form in the post-World War II, urban American conundrum as an attempt by artists to make a joyful noise and lift the spirits of a country exhausted by two world wars and economic depression. Rock has since spread throughout the world as pop, hip hop, rap, punk, fusion, synth pop--all forms of music generated, by necessity, by the poor and lower classes. In its most authentic form, rock and roll is political speech and political art--art that has expressed the contradictions of life in consumer society, art that doesn't try to harmonize with the goals of oppressive or militarized structures.

The risks and dangers in our failure to grip the imaginations of our young citizens are familiar. The consequences of not engaging our students and not facilitating their intellectual awakening have profound implications on our political and social process. And as we have seen and heard, and as Botstein writes in Jefferson's Children, "The fanaticism and solidarity that fueled the Nazi movement were forged in the crucible of adolescence."

Rock's ascension from Soul Train dance parties to an art form with social and political force comes about in part because it is a musical form traditionally generated by the poor and lower classes. It has what we might define as cultural authenticity. Its primary themes are freedom, love, rebellion, pleasure, peace, and understanding. From these themes at the very least we can draw a connection between rock and roll's social influence and the fact that its themes ring true to the majority of the world's people. As opposed to classical music or even jazz, rock is an expression that authentically bears some urgent message from the populace. It is a democratic art, an arena that has been and is open to the poor and middle class, and it is, at present, the art form that is the closest and most promising thing we have to a democratic art that can, as Walt Whitman enjoined his readers in the original (1855) preface to Leaves of Grass,

Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward people.... Go freely with powerful uneducated persons, and with the young and with the mothers of families--reexamine all you have been told in school or church or in any book and dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency, not only in its words, but in the silent lines of its lips and face, and between the lashes of your eyes and every motion and joint of your body.

Our human needs for the original precepts of education remain. We need to convey the values of tolerance, virtue, wisdom, and a love of truth. My hope in literature's ability to convey these things isn't diminished. But in changing times, with new technologies and changing class structures, we need to preserve the ideals of education in progressive and innovative ways. Bringing the new rebels of rock and roll into the classroom, sorting through the hyper-promoted and the shock and schlock, we can find and appreciate the authentic utterances of the people. We can also grip the imaginations of our students. In an era when global capitalism reverts to inequality, war, and crisis, rock and roll is one of many ways to reinvigorate the pressing teachings of the humanities. This is because it continues to create the means by which people--anyone--can gain a better understanding of their world.

Mark Wagner teaches at Nichols College in Dudley, Massachusetts. He is currently completing his Ph.D. in language, education, and community relations with Dr. Mary Kalantzis at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Melbourne, Australia.