CULTURE—FITTING IN, BREAKING OUT
I keep wrestling with culture, any culture, with the conventions that tie a group of people together, which gives them identity, which they will fight to preserve while at the same time these cultural conventions that tie people together can seem suffocating. And I think the reason that I keep wrestling with the constraints of culture is because there are two opposing sides of living within a culture, each of which appeals to me. One day my culture seems rich and gives me identity, the next day it seems constraining and alienating and I feel straight jacketed. One day I feel energized by American culture and the next day I shift to feeling immobilized and alienated. There seems to be no resolution to the tension.
The example of cultural conventions that has most impacted me most, because I was a college teacher most of my life, are the conventions of education. On one hand it has seemed to me that the goal of a college education is to fit people into the conventions of a culture and in particular to the conventions of an academic discipline, to ensure that students fit into a standardized body of knowledge that everyone within that body of knowledge agrees with which can be test on SAT tests.
But on the other hand a goal of a college education is to liberate students from narrow conventional ways of responding to the world and instead to open them up to a wide range of possibilities.
The first seems to me to be conservative, the second seems to me to be liberal.
I‘ll give a very simple example. Within a culture people have to agree to drive on either the right or the left. In the United States and most of Europe people drive on the right, in England and India (former English colony) and, I think, Japan, people drive on the left. It doesn‘t matter which side you drive on as long as everyone in that country does it. But like many American drivers I almost got killed when in England, driving on the left, when I had to make an intuitive choice I pulled to the right and almost got wiped out. What felt right was wrong. Most of the time we intuitively do what everyone else does within a culture and that is what feels right.
To a lesser extent the same applies to grammar. In order to communicate with each other within a culture we need a standardized grammar and spelling. There is a right way and a wrong way. It turns out that English is often not phonetic, the way a word is spelled is different from the way it sounds. This not true of a number of other languages. As a result we spend years teaching students correct spelling while in other cultures they don‘t need to bother. Somehow those who always spell correctly are better people than those who make spelling mistakes even when those who make the mistakes are simply writing a word as it sounds, ruff instead of rough. With language we can veer a little away from the norm and still be understood, but if we veer very far we can‘t be understood. So it is important that language and spelling be standardized. It doesn‘t matter how constrained or suffocated you feel, you have to do it.
Those are simple examples of how college education is standardized. But a larger example is that a course in French 101 in any college in the United States is assumed to be the same, and it probably is. French grammar isn‘t different in different classes. But the same is presumed for Introduction to South Asia, which I taught, with similar lectures and textbooks and exams. If Introduction to South Asia was not the same in every college with four hours of credit then pretty soon adding up 120 dissimilar credit hours, apples and oranges, for graduation from different colleges would begin to lose its meaning.
But that is exactly what nearby Black Mountain College did. They didn‘t fit students into academic conventions, they learned through doing, through experimenting primarily in the arts: writing, dancing, making ceramics, painting, sculpting and photographing. In this case what mattered was not fitting into conventions but developing your own way of creating things.
Or one more example. Instead of a standard text and lectures and exams, the introduction to South Asia could come through getting on an airplane and flying to Sri Lanka and being placed in a village for three weeks with a family and keeping a record of what you learned about yourself and that particular Indian village and then being turned loose and exploring India on your own. This couldn‘t be standardized across every college in the United States or even every person in that class. Every person would have a different experience, hopefully a different liberalizing experience, but one that couldn‘t really be evaluated until ten years later.
I taught Introduction to South Asia this second way, in Sri Lanka and India and even in Swannanoa. It wasn‘t the standardized subject matter about South Asia that mattered, the same in every college in America, it was the personal response of students to South Asian perspectives that mattered, kept in a journal. Their own experience was more important than the facts about South Asia.
I am guessing if everyone taught in this nonstandardized way in a college with no clear standards or definition of what students had learned that the institution would collapse, as Black Mountain did. And yet we had rich experiences in India and Sri Lanka and I think the trips were transformative, and the graduates of Black Mountain College might have had trouble getting into standard graduate schools, but many of them went on to be accomplished painters or composers or potters or dancers.
I guess fitting in to conventions is important and breaking out of conventions is important with a constant tension between the two and no resolution to the tension.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 