Finish up strong
"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
- An Excerpt from My College Journal 1960
- Flâneurs of the Fields, 2011 (on 1958-1961)
- Review of Other Schools And Ours 1964
- The Philosophy of Culture: A Study of Humanistic Pedagogy, 1964
- Machines and Vitalists: Reflections on the Ideology of Cybernetics, 1966
- Architecture and Pedagogy, 1968
- Purposes: Eight Reflective Essays, 1968-69
- Purposes 1: Towards the Separation of School and State, 1968
- Purposes 2: A Message on the Media, 1968
- Purposes 3: In Praise of Humble Heroes, 1968
- Purposes 4: On Pedagogy and Student Power: A Proposal, 1968
- Purposes 5: Pedagogical Praxis, 1969
- Purposes 6: Of Privacy and Public Schooling, 1969
- Purposes 7: Competence, 1969
- Purposes 8: The Ides of March, 1969, 1969
- Nettleship on Plato's Pedagogy, 1968
- The End of an Order, 1969
- The Spanish Press, 1969
- Book note on Science and the Federal Patron, 1970
- Ortega y Gasset, Rediscovered, 1970
- Review of The Degradation of the Academic Dogma
- On the Liberality of the Liberal Arts, 1971
- Toward a Place for Study in a World of Instruction, 1971
- Man and His Circumstances: Ortega as Educator (1971), 1971
- Man and His Circumstances: Annotations (1971), 1971
- Design with Nature, 1971
- The Humanization of Science, 1972
- José Ortega y Gasset's The Revolt of the Masses, 1972
- Giambattista Vico, 1972
- Beyond Anarchy, 1972
- Imagination in History, 1973
- Universal Voluntary Study, 1973
- Diderot, 1974
- Pestalozzi, 1974
- Rousseau and the Dilemma of Authority, 1974
- Some Personal Reflections on German Higher Education, 1975
- Proposal for Man and Judgment1975
- Über Horace Mann, 1975
- The Executive as Educator, 1976
- From Problems to Predicaments, 1976
- Humane Learning, 1976
- Toward Renewing the Social Policy Agenda, 1976
- Enkyklios Paideia: The Fifteenth Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1976
- Man and Judgment: A Prospectus for Studies of Educational Experience and Aspirations, 1977
- The Imperative of Judgment , 1977
- The Citizen and the Subject, 1978
- In Defense of Ideas, 1978
- The Dynamics of Decline, 1979
- Citizens and Subjects , 1980
- Rousseau and American Educational Scholarship, 1980
- A Self-Review of My Work, 1980
- Eros and Education, 1980
- Ortega, Quixote, and the Dream of Europe, 1980
- Education and Social Thought: Intellectual Mobilization. 1980
- Notes on Education and Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, 1981
- On Spanning, 1981
- From the Ought that Is To the Is that Ought To Be, 1983
- On the Priestly and the Prophetic in Technical Innovation, 1984
- Memorandum to P. Michael Timpane, Dean, 1984
- Liberal Learning, 1984
- Two Projects. 1984
- Into the Starting Gate, 1986
- Peabody: A Contemporary Communication Curriculum, 1986
- Beyond the Book in Education, 1987
- Marking the Second Frontier, 1988
- CAL: The Civic Agenda and Logotechnics, 1988
- Kant in the Culture Factory, 1989
- The Cumulative Curriculum, 1991
- Power and Pedagogy, 1992
- The Murdoch Center for Advanced Media in Education at Columbia University, 1994
- An Interpretation Construction Approach to Constructivist Design, 1995
- Eiffel Project, 1995
- Memorial for Martin S. Dworkin, 1996
- Educating for the 21st Century, 1997
- A look ahead at the future of ICT in education—the American experience, 1997
- The Study Place: Developing on-line engagements with cultural experience, 1998
- New Media Center for Teaching and Learning at Columbia University, 1998
- Educating America for the 21st Century, 1999
- Technological Change and the Pedagogical Problem, 1999
- The Educators Manifesto, 1999
- Graduate Studies in Educational Informatics, 1999
- Cities, Youth, and Technology, 2000
- The Internet and Education, 2000
- The University and the School, 2000
- Experience and Innovation: Reflections on new media in education, 2000
- Smart Cities: New York , (Executive summary) 2000
- Social History through Media History, 2002
- Education and the New Science of Networks, 2002
- New Media, New Democracy?, 2002
- Towards the Global City, 2002
- Relevance and Scale: Challenges to the Institute for Learning Technologies, 2002
- Some Thoughts on Graduate Study, 2003
- Homeless in the House of Intellect, 2005
- Is the Trouble with Ed Schools?, 2006
- Educational Research, 2007
- On (Not) Defining Education, 2008
- Rob Prepares a Tome and a Talk for Toronto, 2009
- Utopic Studies: A Proposal, 2009
- Oral History of Teachers College Interview, 2010
- A Valediction 2011
- Possibility, Not Prediction: An Interview about Enough, 2012
- Enough: A Pedagogic Speculation, 2012
- The House of Intellect , 2013
- Reading Ben Barber, or Rousseau as Educator , 2014
- The Pedagogy of Cultural Despair , 2014
- Owls of Minerva, 2015
- Dewey in His Skivvies, Annotated: The Trouble with Reconstruction, 2017
- Buck Naked ... And Not Abashed, 2017
- Kant in the Culture Factory -- Fall 2018, 2018
- On the Free Will that the Free Will Wills, 2018
- Let’s Put Liberal Learning into Action, 2018
- Formative Justice , 2019
- Formative Justice Annotations , 2019
- Formative Justice Bibliography , 2019