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Finish up strong

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"Finish Up Strong"

Projecting Asymptotic Hope
2024-20??

(We read and write in the first person, introspectively;
please do that here.)

I've been living my life with the sense that I can and should achieve a purpose through it, one that I can and should give to it, even though I'll never be sure what that purpose is, or whether I'll fulfill it, and finally whether attaining it will actually have the meaning I hope for it.

Thus, I live by constructing my futures in purposeful ignorance. Uncertainties are intrinsic to living, for living consists in attempting to form and realize goals without knowing how things will turn out. Living comprises many partial failures to achieve its intents and some incomplete success, all somersaulting on until a final failure, death. As age advances, I've got to keep doing that, still unsure where I'm going but sensing movement looking back, a sense of something to work with in what's taken place as I wonder what I can and should do next.

In looking back, I pause, now and then on my experience in boarding school, Deerfield Academy in the mid 1950s. Memories of Sunday evenings, sitting uncomfortably on the floor, with all the other 450 students, to sing several hymns and songs, and to hear the headmaster, Frank Boyden, then a wise old man, talk about the past week, the one to come, and his genial sense of life. He could talk at once to all of us with his words having personal meaning to each, to me then and now in living memory. When he sensed a letdown, he would deftly rally spirits, concluding that whatever happens, "however it goes, boys, finish up strong." I'm still a boy — callow, hesitant yet intrepid — but now an old one, the resolve to finish up strong has stuck with me. That's my project now.

OK. So I intend to finish up strong — that's an good goal. But what do I want to finish up, strongly? That's a hard question, especially when it comes late in a long life, for after a while the chronology of life has seemed to narrow my horizon of possible purpose. Looking back on what I've done, I notice an urge to back off, to feel that I've had my run. But growing older can and should have a better, more positive purpose than merely fading away. I mustn't loose sight of it, but it gets obscured by the presentism of contemporary culture.

Information about the present state of things overwhelms informed awareness. News! Discoveries! Talents! Media hype neuters legal process. Everything's a contest with this season on the heels of last season. Polls package opinion as of the moment just past. Cascades of lists tell us what's best, who's in, and the lists tumble over themselves according to their rating schedule — annual, quarterly, or best of all, that very modern measure, The News Cycle. At my age, perhaps at any age, spitting into this wind just messes up my face. I'm going to finish up strong by doing something else.

I've written quite a bit, and published it over the years poorly. It didn't catch on very well, always ahead or behind the wave. But consider, does culturally enduring work need to catch the wave? At its creation, all work originates in a context of time and place. With a well-timed move between trough and crest, the creative context may catch the wave and have an exhilarating ride. But the wave will break, dumping the rider to paddle back out, a Happy Sisyphus, searching again for the creative context between trough and crest. It is the rhythmic churn of culture, forever transitory, an eternal recurrence. may give present context quickly proves transitory while some has a varying degree of historical staying power as documentation of significant things that took place in the past or as creative resources for the formation of worthwhile intentions in posterity. What's important to me is the relation of the present keys at the time of creation to the keys that enable work to be relevant in posterity. Let us simply say that the relation is not necessarily tight.

A little reflection will show why that it will often be very loose. Consider childhood. Even in cultures where the primary mode of education takes place through immersion in the flow of adult activity. The child's engages in the activities as a participant observer, taking part unobtrusively and standing aside at moments when the activity becomes intense for the adults conducting it. In this participant observation, the child will not primarily gain experience doing the activity, but will instead form an understanding about how the activity can and should be done.

This difference differentiates possibility from predictability, possibilities that can and should be versus predictions that putatively will be. People are succumbing to moods of nihilistic despair, feeling shorn of human agency, because we are all flailing in an ooze of countervailing predictions about what will be with little attention and care for their possibilities that can and should be. Predictions aren't especially important for persons paying attention to possibilities, for they will be doing what they care about because they believe it is what they can and should do, not because they have been told it will succeed or come to pass.

To finish up strong, I want to renew my concerns in a spirit of hope, not to prognosticate, but to concentrate on what makes sense, what can and should be worth our effort. I am not ready to let my corpus of existing work go. As it stands, it has latent in it the spirit of hope, a conviction that it makes sense whether or not things turn out the way it anticipates. But an excessive sense of foreknowledge weighs it down with false promises that do not happen, deflating the hopes embedded in it. I want to rewrite the whole to state the hopes in it as hopes, extracting from a lifetime of experience the human possibilities included in it.

Towards that end, I've drawn together the elements of that existing corpus, and I am divvying them up under tentative headings, in part reminiscent of their earlier form, in part suited to informing what I have to say with a stronger spirit of hope. This adumbration points to an extended undertaking, and here, I must recognize that that spirit of hope has to pervade the effort from its inception. The time requisite for the task exceeds the time I can expect to have in which to carry it out. How might that work?

I should proceed with hope, with a sense of the whole, recognizing that the effort may cut short at some time before I can complete it. Given the whole scope of the project, I want to break it into reasonable pieces, the first piece identified with a commitment and a plan to work on it to the best of my ability. Should I complete that piece, I reexamine the whole remaining task, formulate the next piece, and go to work. With each iteration of surviving sentience, I will repeat until. . . . There follows the adumbrate whole and the point of initial work.

Hope — Questing How We Can and Should Live

A) Historical Pedagogy & Communications Technologies
Main texts
Ancillary texts
B) Study and Liberal Learning
Main texts
Ancillary texts
C) The Critique of [Educational] Scholarship
Main texts
Ancillary texts
D) Exemplary Thinkers — My Canon
Main texts
Ancillary texts
E) Hope — An Orientation of the Spirit
E.1) Educative Politics — Power and Pedagogy
Main texts
Ancillary texts
E.2) Recognition & Education
Main texts
Ancillary texts
E.3) Emergent futures & the Commons
Main texts
Ancillary texts
Z) Miscellaneous
Main texts
Ancillary texts


2024
Power and Pedagogy
Essays On Education and Information Technologies, 01/2025
A Place for Study
Essays on Study and Liberal Learning, 07/2024
2025
On [Not] Defining Education
Essaying a Critique of Educational Scholarship, 07/2025
The Educators Manifesto
Renewing the Progressive Bond with Posterity, 01/2026
2026
Exemplarity and Aptness
On Constructing "My Canon", 07/2026
"I am I and My circumstances"
On José Ortega y Gasset and the Task of our Times, 01/2027
2027
Utopic Proposals
Seeking Education as It Ought to Be, 07/2027
Emilia
Or Going to City, 01/2028
2028
Formative Justice
Questing What We Can and Should Become, 01/2029
2029
Enough—A Pedagogic Memoir
"Hope is an orientation of the spirit", 01/2030

Master List of Texts

  1. An Excerpt from My College Journal 1960
  2. Flâneurs of the Fields, 2011 (on 1958-1961)
  3. Review of Other Schools And Ours 1964
  4. The Philosophy of Culture: A Study of Humanistic Pedagogy, 1964
  5. Machines and Vitalists: Reflections on the Ideology of Cybernetics, 1966
  6. Architecture and Pedagogy, 1968
  7. Purposes: Eight Reflective Essays, 1968-69
    1. Purposes 1: Towards the Separation of School and State, 1968
    2. Purposes 2: A Message on the Media, 1968
    3. Purposes 3: In Praise of Humble Heroes, 1968
    4. Purposes 4: On Pedagogy and Student Power: A Proposal, 1968
    5. Purposes 5: Pedagogical Praxis, 1969
    6. Purposes 6: Of Privacy and Public Schooling, 1969
    7. Purposes 7: Competence, 1969
    8. Purposes 8: The Ides of March, 1969, 1969
  8. Nettleship on Plato's Pedagogy, 1968
  9. The End of an Order, 1969
  10. The Spanish Press, 1969
  11. Book note on Science and the Federal Patron, 1970
  12. Ortega y Gasset, Rediscovered, 1970
  13. Review of The Degradation of the Academic Dogma
  14. On the Liberality of the Liberal Arts, 1971
  15. Toward a Place for Study in a World of Instruction, 1971
  16. Man and His Circumstances: Ortega as Educator (1971), 1971
  17. Man and His Circumstances: Annotations (1971), 1971
  18. Design with Nature, 1971
  19. The Humanization of Science, 1972
  20. José Ortega y Gasset's The Revolt of the Masses, 1972
  21. Giambattista Vico, 1972
  22. Beyond Anarchy, 1972
  23. Imagination in History, 1973
  24. Universal Voluntary Study, 1973
  25. Diderot, 1974
  26. Pestalozzi, 1974
  27. Rousseau and the Dilemma of Authority, 1974
  28. Some Personal Reflections on German Higher Education, 1975
  29. Proposal for Man and Judgment1975
  30. Über Horace Mann, 1975
  31. The Executive as Educator, 1976
  32. From Problems to Predicaments, 1976
  33. Humane Learning, 1976
  34. Toward Renewing the Social Policy Agenda, 1976
  35. Enkyklios Paideia: The Fifteenth Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1976
  36. Man and Judgment: A Prospectus for Studies of Educational Experience and Aspirations, 1977
  37. The Imperative of Judgment , 1977
  38. The Citizen and the Subject, 1978
  39. In Defense of Ideas, 1978
  40. The Dynamics of Decline, 1979
  41. Citizens and Subjects , 1980
  42. Rousseau and American Educational Scholarship, 1980
  43. A Self-Review of My Work, 1980
  44. Eros and Education, 1980
  45. Ortega, Quixote, and the Dream of Europe, 1980
  46. Education and Social Thought: Intellectual Mobilization. 1980
  47. Notes on Education and Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, 1981
  48. On Spanning, 1981
  49. From the Ought that Is To the Is that Ought To Be, 1983
  50. On the Priestly and the Prophetic in Technical Innovation, 1984
  51. Memorandum to P. Michael Timpane, Dean, 1984
  52. Liberal Learning, 1984
  53. Two Projects. 1984
  54. Into the Starting Gate, 1986
  55. Peabody: A Contemporary Communication Curriculum, 1986
  56. Beyond the Book in Education, 1987
  57. Marking the Second Frontier, 1988
  58. CAL: The Civic Agenda and Logotechnics, 1988
  59. Kant in the Culture Factory, 1989
  60. The Cumulative Curriculum, 1991
  61. Power and Pedagogy, 1992
  62. The Murdoch Center for Advanced Media in Education at Columbia University, 1994
  63. An Interpretation Construction Approach to Constructivist Design, 1995
  64. Eiffel Project, 1995
  65. Memorial for Martin S. Dworkin, 1996
  66. Educating for the 21st Century, 1997
  67. A look ahead at the future of ICT in education—the American experience, 1997
  68. The Study Place: Developing on-line engagements with cultural experience, 1998
  69. New Media Center for Teaching and Learning at Columbia University, 1998
  70. Educating America for the 21st Century, 1999
  71. Technological Change and the Pedagogical Problem, 1999
  72. The Educators Manifesto, 1999
  73. Graduate Studies in Educational Informatics, 1999
  74. Cities, Youth, and Technology, 2000
  75. The Internet and Education, 2000
  76. The University and the School, 2000
  77. Experience and Innovation: Reflections on new media in education, 2000
  78. Smart Cities: New York , (Executive summary) 2000
  79. Social History through Media History, 2002
  80. Education and the New Science of Networks, 2002
  81. New Media, New Democracy?, 2002
  82. Towards the Global City, 2002
  83. Relevance and Scale: Challenges to the Institute for Learning Technologies, 2002
  84. Some Thoughts on Graduate Study, 2003
  85. Homeless in the House of Intellect, 2005
  86. Is the Trouble with Ed Schools?, 2006
  87. Educational Research, 2007
  88. On (Not) Defining Education, 2008
  89. Rob Prepares a Tome and a Talk for Toronto, 2009
  90. Utopic Studies: A Proposal, 2009
  91. Oral History of Teachers College Interview, 2010
  92. A Valediction 2011
  93. Possibility, Not Prediction: An Interview about Enough, 2012
  94. Enough: A Pedagogic Speculation, 2012
  95. The House of Intellect , 2013
  96. Reading Ben Barber, or Rousseau as Educator , 2014
  97. The Pedagogy of Cultural Despair , 2014
  98. Owls of Minerva, 2015
  99. Dewey in His Skivvies, Annotated: The Trouble with Reconstruction, 2017
  100. Buck Naked ... And Not Abashed, 2017
  101. Kant in the Culture Factory -- Fall 2018, 2018
  102. On the Free Will that the Free Will Wills, 2018
  103. Let’s Put Liberal Learning into Action, 2018
  104. Formative Justice , 2019
  105. Formative Justice Annotations , 2019
  106. Formative Justice Bibliography , 2019
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