Blake’s “Newton”, 1795
The 18th century poet, William Blake, imagined the 17th century mathematician and scientist, SIR ISAAC NEWTON, to be a role model for the “Disconnected Rationalist”— the measuring man suppressing his immeasurable passions.
Today, we could say that our society has taken Blake’s “Newton” to the extreme, using exclusively the impersonal, Left Hemisphere of the Brain to validate— from statistical data, of course— whatever we accept as True.
The Shifting Truth of Statistics
In South Carolina, about 81 percent of elementary and middle schools missed (No Child Left Behind) targets in 2008. The State Legislature responded by reducing the level of achievement defined as proficient, and the next year the proportion of South Carolina schools missing targets dropped to 41 percent. (New York Times, March 9, 2011)
For Blake, Truth is not validated by statistics, but by instinct and passion.
He was temperamentally what we might call a fundamentalist, except that he adhered to a very unique and personal Christianity.
Blake held Newton responsible for ushering in an Age of Scientific Materialism.
In every cry of every man,
In every infant’s cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forged manacles I hear.
London, William Blake, 1794
As the Industrial Age was beginning to take hold in England, Blake raged against the linear-sequential, analytical MIND-SET necessary for industrialization. Like sociologists much later, and prescient about the underclass that Charles Dickens would come to describe in illustrative detail, Blake felt dark economic and social forces being released into the human Spirit.
He was more profoundly alarmed by the effects of industrialization upon thinking and perception.
He represented those effects as Mind-forged manacles.
As this grasp on industrialization grew and spread, the artists, of course, came to rebel openly. They changed the Classical forms that exalted reason over passion and that favored the educated aristocracy over the instinctual common man.
The Romantic poets: Byron, Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, 1798
We see how cable TV’s Mad Men dramatizes the transition from the staid, oppressive, black-and-white, materialistic, conformist and hypocritical 1950′s re: The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit into the flowering of a new consciousness and expanded freedom, The Dawning of the Age of Aquarius.
Artistic, social and educational movements which pressed passion over reason, freedom of expression over mechanistic thinking, political freedom over political repression, re-emerged with new energy in the 1960′s.
Forty years ago, political action, artistic expression and open education were moving together at once. The Right Brain, as we now call it, had asserted itself into our politics and culture, and it was getting legitimized in the classroom.
This was the time of Visual and Performing Arts from Andy Warhol, John Cage, Allen Ginsberg, Samuel Beckett, Jackson Pollack, guerrilla theater, street theater, happenings, be-ins, Marshall McLuhan’s the medium is the message and Archibald MacLeish’s a poem should not mean, but BE.
Pollack
Ginsberg
Art is a sort of experimental station in which one tries out living.
John Cage, circa 1962
Within this zeitgeist, in public education, we were actively considering the ideas behind the movements for free schools, open classrooms, and A.S Neil’s Summerhill. We were reading Postman and Weingartner’s Teaching as a Subversive Activity. We were immersed in pedagogical questions and experimental practices seeking to re-define the traditional purpose of education.
Because of the prevailing spirit of that time— child-centered, socially conscious, freedom-loving— we embraced innovation in our classrooms. We changed group dynamics with Cooperative Learning. We stood writing instruction on its head with the Writing Process. We used Portfolio Assessments. We played Simulation Games to teach History. We transformed the subject-driven junior high school into the child-driven middle school. We incorporated Community Service Learning into the instructional cultures of our classrooms.
All this is to say that an artistic/social Constructive Irrationality has motivated opposition to existing mind-forged manacles, and has given visual and performing artists positive forms of expression from the full-orchestra Romanticism of the 19th century to the bands at Woodstock, 1969.
CONTINUED:
GUERRILLA TEACHING 7/ The Basics of Guerrilla Lesson Planning