This week we started chapter six which describes the Integrated Humanities program instituted by professors Quinn, Nelick, and Senior at the University of Kansas during the 1960's. This gets to the nitty gritty of how they tried to return poetic knowledge to the university system which was lacking then as well as now. Forty years ago these professors realized that their students had been deprived of a poetic childhood and were in need of poetic experiences. The program they began seems a model of gentleness to me. To quote Taylor," The professors knew that a materialist society, with all its utilitarian goals that suffocate the poetic nature of the human being, had rushed many of the students through childhood, that time of leisure in which the wonders of reality are encountered simply as wonders." The pragmatist in me understands why parents would complain that the classes provided in these programs were hardly necessary for a college degree but the romantic in me would loved to have attended!
As the discussions between the professors about various classics (carried on during a leisurely lunch, pg. 149) was described I was reminded of listening in to conversations conducted by my parents and aunts and uncles around the dinner table when I was a young girl. Not that they discussed the great books! But, they were all raised in a time before electronic media (my mother was born in 1917) and they were all expert conversationalists and were filled with stories of a childhood that moved mostly at horse speed. A ride in the rumble seat was still fondly remembered in the 1970's! I think we have TV to blame as well as Dewey's ideas for the mess our national education is in. We just don't know how to converse anymore. Our story telling abilities have atrophied.
I will end with this quote by Professor Quinn,"Mistake me not: wonder is no sugary sentimentality, but, rather, a mighty passion, a species of fear, an awful confrontation of the mystery of things." This program was bold as well as gentle. We can't recreate it in our homes but it is a valiant example to us for what can be done!
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4 comments:
Fascinating! First Kelly, then you and me...all promoting dinner conversation. Who would have thought that something so simple could end up being so important after all. Hmmm...
Wow, you really put it in a nutshell! I think that gentle can be bold, witness Our Lord...
I like the point about listening to earlier generations tell stories, too. My grandpa would tell stories -- it taught me so much, including being courteous when he told the same story more than once! It was really an education in relationship as well as continuity. The stories gave me a way to reflect upon my own experience.
Thanks for sharing this. It's a true encouragement.
I speak from the other experience, that of being deprived of dinner stories or stories of any kind at any time, and having to cling to fragmented memories.
The only one who has this and tells the girls, is my husband. His father tells him stories non stop, for which I'm very grateful.
My grandfathers died before I was six, and my grandmothers did not last much longer. They never knew how to share, I did not know how to listen. (I still don't know very well).
But there is optimism. We have always known the bonds of having a meal together so we have one at least every day, and of course, we converse (more or less, since they are still 4 and 6 and at times restless), and here we are, my husband and I, starting that tradition of telling the girls what we remember from our childhood and conversing.
And we have the visits often, and those are revitalizing, and as the girls are growing and as Kelly says, dinner gets more civilized, conversations are growing too, and they are getting this poetic experience as we are given another chance in life to enjoy this forgotten pleasure.
"Mistake me not: wonder is no sugary sentimentality, but, rather, a mighty passion, a species of fear, an awful confrontation of the mystery of things" -- that is a great quote to pull out. It's so easy to interpret things as the extremes rather than the reality or the intent.
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