Solitude is something with which I am very familiar, or at least I thought I was, so when someone posted the link to Deresiewicz's address to class of West Point cadets on Twitter ( http://www.theamericanscholar.org/solitude-and-leadership/ )I was intrigued. While solitude may seem like such a normal part of my daily existence, the thought of solitude influencing leadership was not.
I found Deresiewicz's lecture to be challenging on many levels, the first and foremost being the way I view solitude. When you spend large amounts of time on your own you begin to see yourself as an expert at it. You are able to find all kinds of ways to fill your time, to stay busy, to distract yourself from the aloneness. In Deresiewicz's view, solitude should instead be embraced as the opportunity to think away from the multitude of distractions that life has to offer. "Thinking means concentrating on one thing long enough to develop an idea about it. Not learning other people's ideas, or memorizing a body of information...I need time to think about it [his first thought on a subject], too, to make mistakes and recognize them, to make false starts and correct them, to outlast my impulses, to defeat my desire to declare the job done and move on to the next thing," This kind of thinking, concentrating, devoting your focus to one idea, is difficult, but I think the difficulty is imperative because we never fully recognize the value of things that come too easily.
The second challenge (in order of importance to me, not as found in the reading) is that of friendship. Deresiewicz links the ideas of solitude and introspection with friendship in a way that most of us probably overlook. He feels that friendship is a crucial component to developing this kind of deep and meaningful thought life. He is very careful to make clear the distinction between what he calls "the deep friendship of intimate conversation" and the "968 'friends' that we never actually talk to; instead we just bounce one-line messages off them a hundred times a day." He places so much importance on friendship because it is though these realtionships that we "feel safe enough ... to acknowledge things - to acknowledge things to yourself - that you otherwise can't. Doubts, you aren't supposed to have, questions you aren't supposed to ask. Feeling or opinions that would get you laughed at by the group or reprimanded by the authorities." This was a challenge to me because while I stuggle with developing these kind of friendships, I very much sense their importance in our lives.
The final challenge I found in the lecture was in how I, as a teacher, and education, as a system, are seeking to prepare students for the world. Deresiewicz is delivering this address at West Point and spent ten years as a professor at Yale, so he has seen some of the best and brightest that our nation has to offer, and while he doesn't doubt their ability to become successful, he also isn't too terribly impressed. He claims that what we are producing, as an educational system, is a bunch of "great kids who have been trained to be world-class hoop jumpers. Any goal you set them, they could achieve. Any test you gave them, they could pass with flying colors." While as a middle school teacher, who often wishes her students could meet more of her goals and pass more of her tests, there is some appeal in this image he paints. The problem, according to Deresiewicz, is that "We have a crisis of leadership in America because our overwhelming power and wealth, earned by earlier generations of leaders, made us complacent, and for too long we have have been training leaders who only know how to keep the routine going. Who can answer questions, but don't know how to ask them. Who can fulfill goals, but don't know how to set them in the first place. ...What we don'e have are leaders. What we don't have, in other words, are thinkers." What am I asking of my students, to become the next generation of leaders and thinkers, or the next generation of "technocrats"? Can I ask something of my students that I'm not sure I'm all that successful of doing myself?
No comments:
Post a Comment