Advice from Edith Wharton

Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before; for though one of the instincts of youth is imitation, another, equally imperious, is that of fiercely guarding against it. 

In this respect, the novelist of the present day is in danger of being caught in a vicious circle, for the insatiable demand of quick production tends to keep him in a state of perpetual immaturity, and the ready acceptance of his wares encourages him to think that no time need be wasted in studying the past history of his art, or in speculating on its principles.

This conviction strengthens the belief that the so-called quality of "originality" may be impaired by too long brooding on one's theme and too close a commerce with the past; but the whole history of that past - in every domain of art - disproves this by what survives, and shows that every subject, to yield and to retain its full flavour, should be long carried in the mind, brooded upon, and fed with all the impressions and emotions which nourish its creator.

True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision.

That new, that personal, vision is attained only by looking long enough at the object represented to make it the writer's own; and the mind which would bring this secret germ to fruition must be able to nourish it with an accumulated wealth of knowledge and experience.

To know any one thing one must not only know something of a great many others, but also, as Matthew Arnold long since pointed out, a great deal more of one's immediate subject than any partial presentation of it visibly includes; and Mr. Kipling's "What should they know of England who only England know?" might be taken as the symbolic watchword of the creative artist.

One is sometimes tempted to think that the generation which has invented the "fiction course" is getting the fiction it deserves. 

At any rate it is fostering in its young writers the conviction that art is neither long nor arduous, and perhaps blinding them to the fact that notoriety and mediocrity are often interchangeable terms.

But though the trade-wind in fiction undoubtedly drives many beginners along the line of least resistance, and holds them there, it is far from being the sole cause of the present quest for short-cuts in art.

There are writers indifferent to popular success, and even contemptuous of it, who sincerely believe that this line marks the path of the true vocation.

Many people assume that the artist receives, at the outset of his career, the mysterious sealed orders known as "Inspiration," and has only to let that sovereign impulse carry him where it will.

Inspiration does indeed come at the outset to every creator, but it comes most often as an infant, helpless, stumbling, inarticulate, to be taught and guided; and the beginner, during this time of training his gift, is as likely to misuse it as a young parent to make mistakes in teaching his first child.

There is no doubt that in this day of general "speeding up," the "inspirational" theory is seductive even to those who care nothing for easy triumphs.

No writer - especially at the beginning of his career - can help being influenced by the quality of the audience that awaits him; and the young novelist may ask of what use are experience and meditation, when his readers are so incapable of giving him either.

The answer is that he will never do his best till he ceases altogether to think of his readers (and his editor and his publisher) and begins to write, not for himself, but for that other self with whom the creative artist is always in mysterious correspondence, and who, happily, has an objective existence somewhere, and will some day receive the message sent to him, though the sender may never know it.

As to experience, intellectual and moral, the creative imagination can make a little go a long way, provided it remains sufficiently long in the mind and is sufficiently brooded upon. 

One good heart-break will furnish the poet with many songs, and the novelist with a considerable number of novels.

But they must have hearts that can break.

Even to the writer least concerned with popularity it is difficult, at first, to defend his personality.

Study and meditation contain their own perils. 

Counsellors intervene with contradictory advice and instances.

In such cases these counsellors are most often other people's novels: the great novels of the past, which haunt the beginner like a passion, and the works of his contemporaries, which pull him this way and that with too-persuasive hands.

His impulse, at first, will be either to shun them, to his own impoverishment, or to let his dawning individuality be lost in theirs; but gradually he will come to see that he must learn to listen to them, take all they can give, absorb it into himself, and then turn to his own task with the fixed resolve to see life only through his own eyes.

Even then another difficulty remains; the mysterious discrepancy which sometimes exists between a novelist's vision of life and his particular kind of talent.

Not infrequently an innate tendency to see things in large masses is combined with the technical inability to render them otherwise than separately, meticulously, on a small scale.

Perhaps more failures than one is aware of are due to this particular lack of proportion between the powers of vision and expression.

At any rate, it is the cause of some painful struggles and arid dissatisfactions; and the only remedy is resolutely to abandon the larger for the smaller field, to narrow one's vision to one's pencil, and do the small thing closely and deeply rather than the big thing loosely and superficially.

Of twenty subjects that tempt the imagination (subjects one sees one's self doing, oh so wonderfully, if only one were Merimee or Maupassant, or Conrad or Mr. Kipling!) probably but one is "fit for the hand" of the limited person one happens to be; and to learn to renounce the others is a first step toward doing that particular one well.


-Edith Wharton, The Writing of Fiction

On the Supposed Unsuitability of Fairytales for Adults

My dear Lucy,

I wrote this story for you, but when I began it I had not realized that girls grow quicker than books. As a result you are already too old for fairy tales, and by the time it is printed and bound you will be older still. But some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again. You can then take it down from some upper shelf, dust it, and tell me what you think of it. I shall probably be too deaf to hear, and too old to understand a word you say, but I shall still be

your affectionate Godfather,

C.S. Lewis

– Dedication of The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe

Some time ago I wrote an open letter on the supposed unsuitability of fairytales for children, criticizing the notion that children should be sheltered from fairytales. Another view, even more prevalent, is that fairytales are an exclusively children's literature, the rightful domain of saccharine animated films and kindergarten story-time.

These two views – that fairytales are unsuitable for children, and that they are only suitable for children – are less at odds than you might think. Because they are united by a common failure to recognize the real value of fairytales, adherents of either group are likelier to join forces to ban fairytales altogether, given the opportunity, than they are to haggle about age-appropriate demographics.

According to one view, exposing children to fairytales is likely to scar them psychologically and impede or warp their development. According to the other, adults who read fairytales for personal enjoyment are odd, abnormal, coping with adulthood by clinging to comforting fixtures of their childhood – something like adult thumb-suckers. In both views, fairytales are things which have to be “got over” or “outgrown.”

But I am deeply convinced that we have not outgrown, and shall never outgrow, Faerie.

This may be an unpopular view, particularly with the sophisticates and intelligentsia among us; but no group of minds is more enslaved to intellectual fads than such self-important neo-aristocracies.

Lewis' Narnian dedication correctly infers that the season of life in which we are “too old for fairy tales” is specious rather than mature. The attitude occurs during that age in which we begin wanting to be “taken seriously” by others and feel that, to attain this goal, we must zealously safeguard our fledgling adulthood.

Being “too old for fairy tales” is an adolescent attitude. As a claim to literary maturity, it is analogous to acting macho (a claim to strength of body, mind, and character), or to adopting an air of worldly-wisdom and superiority (a claim to understand matters inexpressible to those of lesser experience).

Just as acting macho is proof of our weakness – just as acting ineffably wise is proof of our inability to explain experiences we ourselves do not yet understand – so, too, is dismissal of “childish” fairytales proof that we are not yet ready for them.

It is possible that the only fairytales we have encountered are those revised to be “more suitable for children,” stories which have had all their depth, layers, and morals stripped from them. In these circumstances the attitude is understandable, innocent... perhaps even inevitable. To discover and benefit from the merits of folklore, sometimes it is not our pretensions to adulthood we must overcome, but rather the poverties of our childhood.

Nor is this challenge solely faced by individuals. From time to time whole societies experience hubristic fits of scientific or religious “enlightenment,” during which people come to believe that they can safely ignore, scorn, and abandon “simple” folk wisdom – only to discover on down the road that they really ought to have spent a few minutes sitting at the feet of the old woman or the uneducated man. It turns out they knew something valuable about life after all.

If we substitute the more accurate term folklore for fairytale, we immediately start to grasp, through sheer intuition, what is worthwhile about this canon of world literature:

• Folklore transmits to us an entire heritage of “common” sense and everyday wisdom in memorable, highly-imaginative parables
• Folklore unites us with our earliest human ancestors and our most distant kin – our neighbors furthest-removed in both time and space
• Folklore convinces us that we are not isolated in our struggle against the human condition, except by choice
• Folklore reminds us that we can choose a better course – for ourselves, for our loved ones, for our world and its people, and for the children whose inheritance we steward during our lives

But because folklore is an academic term, we simultaneously introduce a new misconception. “Ah, well, folklore, of course. Naturally there's merit to academic study of folk literature. But no well-adjusted person past the age of ten reads fairytales for fun.”

This attitude is a Modernist fad. Thanks to the rise of the middle class during the Victorian era, and a corresponding upper-class obsession with fairies and idealization of Childhood, children's versions of folk-stories began to be produced. Up to and through the Victorian era, folk-stories were all-ages entertainment. It was only afterward that fairytales became “old-fashioned,” then “anti-modern,” then “un-scientific,” then “escapist” and “anti-progressive.”

Partly, this was because whether or not fairies actually existed (in a taxonomic sense) was still a raging debate (Terri Windling points out that fairy abductions, for example, were commonly reported in newspapers until well into the twentieth century, when reports of alien abductions replaced them). Modernists wanted us to “face the facts”: science is unable to confirm that fairies exist. Ergo, we should assume they don't. Ergo, literature which roundaboutly claims or assumes the existence of fairies is false. False stories are lies. Lies are harmful. Ergo, fairytales are harmful.

(Funny, isn't it, that we don't take the same reductionist attitude towards the aliens!)

Thus, in certain circles of culture and with a varying rate of infection, opinions about folklore were reduced to “stories which falsely and harmfully claim that fairies are concretely real.” Belief in fairies became the province of the uneducated or willfully ignorant.

As so often happens in such cases, society happily traded wisdom for knowledge. Everyman Jack traded the “magic” beans inherited from his fairy godmother for an ordinary cow – and never met a giant or made a fortune all the days of his life. The dishonest miller's daughter refused Rumpelstiltskin’s offer of assistance on the grounds that it was scientifically impossible for him to hold up his end of the bargain – and starved to death in the king's dungeon. Dismissing his father Edward as a pathological liar, Will Bloom resolved he would never listen to another Big Fish story his crazy old man told. Eventually, their estrangement poisoned Will's relationship with his own kids.

When we ignore fairytales, we find ourselves living inside them: not as heroes, but as byword-characters – chumps whose arrogant misdeeds serve as warnings to those who come after us.

Have you ever wondered why the protagonist of so many folktales is the youngest of three siblings?

It's so the storyteller can highlight the mistakes and consequences experienced by the first two. In folk-stories, as in life, sometimes there is no margin for error.

Once again I must appropriate Neil Gaiman's paraphrase of G.K. Chesterton: reassured by the factual knowledge that dragons do not exist, we disregarded the far more important point, that dragons can be slain. And we paid no attention when the storyteller told us how. If we had, we might have realized that the instructions for dragon-slaying were not, in fact, about slaying dragons; or at least, that they were not only applicable to dragon-slaying.

Fortunately for us – and for the older siblings of those three-sibling tales – some folklorists argue that the three siblings symbolize three versions of the same person. The version who succeeds – typically the only character actually named in the story – is the one who has learned from past mistakes and carries the memory of those lessons forward into the next leg of the journey.

Are you following me?

Or are you caught up in an inability to suspend your disbelief about an older brother getting turned into a bleeding oak tree because he was rude to an elderly woman by the wayside? Because that's not what matters here.

To become the hero of the story, folklore teaches us that we must acknowledge and learn from our mistakes. We will be changed by them. Whether we are changed for the better or for the worse – whether we go on naively repeating them – is up to us.

We can cling stubbornly to the same ideas about adulthood we formed in our adolescence, and be warped by them. We can decide that we've “arrived”, that our character is complete, and stagnate until we rot.

Or we can keep questioning the meaning of success, humbly listening to and learning from others, so that we can keep refining and pursuing our dreams – so that we can keep growing.

A friend of mine, a musician and professional counselor, once remarked that he's seen many, many people get old – but he hasn't seen many grow up.

There's a reason we've always told one another these stories, some with motifs from the dawn of humanity. It isn't dumb luck that has allowed them to survive all the societies, all the centuries, and all the fads that have been. Fairytale wisdom is subtle enough to elude adults, yet palatable enough to delight children. 

Only someone anxious to forget the child he has been, yet insecure about the adult he is becoming, could scorn that kind of story.

I fervently hope such a person will be old enough to read them again soon.

On the Supposed Unsuitability of Fairytales for Children

Shortly after supporting a local library event promoting fairytale literature, the folklore department at Lightfoot College received an animated communication from a very concerned mother regarding, in short, the "unsuitability of fairytales for children."  

As this seems to be a rather widespread idea (I might mention the Daily Telegraph article of February 12, 2012) as well as an oddly long-lived one, I take the liberty of public response.



Dear Madame,

Though you may be unaware of it, your email represents sentiments that have been argued ever since people first began to collect folklore into written volumes. As soon as the stories were set down in writing, they became frozen and lost that greatest attribute of oral storytelling: the ability of the storyteller to adapt the story to her audience. Consequently some writers, including such visionaries as Charles Perrault and Andrew Lang, have contended for permanently revising some or all fairytales to make them "more suitable" for children.  

Additionally there have been, and continue to be, modernists who consider fairytales to be too "unrealistic" or nonsensical, and who have proposed or written new stories to replace them. These new stories take their settings and characters from contemporary, everyday adult life and communicate whatever values and ideas their authors believe are particularly suitable to the times.

Others - J. R. R. Tolkien and child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim, for example - have disagreed with this approach. I will attempt to explain why I myself agree with the latter, and not the former. I have two primary objections.

Firstly, it seems to me that those who claim to be revising or producing stories "more suitable" to children than the old fairytales are really succeeding only in making stories more acceptable to the adults of the time, with their particular conceptions of what childhood is, or ought to be.  And this seems a bit presumptuous. It ignores the reality that those adults (especially in the early days of the movement) were themselves - as well as their parents, and their parents, and every generation preceding - raised, as children, on the very same types of folklore they now propose, in their solitary wisdom, to "improve."

Even Christians, Madame - with whom you identified yourself in your email, and among whom I hope to be numbered as well - even Christians throughout the whole world have been, for centuries, brought up on the old "pagan" folklore, without any detriment to their religion; or, if there has been a detriment, it is one that you and I and all who believe with us have inherited.

The whole contemporary world has been founded on a more or less common folklore. Popular stories disseminated just as thoroughly - though not as quickly - in the ancient world as they do in the modern.  

(It is probable, for example, that the "French" story familiar to us as "Cinderella" originated in Southeast Asia. The tale we know as "Beauty and the Beast" evolved from retellings of the Greek myth about Eros and Psyche, which was probably based on older works in its turn. Both the Jews and the Tibetans tell of the Tower of Babel, or a building project quite like it. Etc.) 

Therefore we must ask: What right or standard have we to criticize or reject these stories?

If the movement you represent, Madame, should ever gain the velocity necessary to escape the gravity of the old folklore, what kind of people should we expect to become?

You might justly respond, to my second question, "I don't know," and still say, to the first, "the right of a mother who knows her own children, and what is best for them."  

Very well; to that assertion I can make no objection. But I ask you to observe, Madame, that you cannot by that argument make any prescriptions regarding the suitability of fairytales for anyone else's children. And I direct you to my second point.

It seems to me that the fairytale-content which provokes, in some, the desire to revise or eliminate, is a matter of the details of the stories, rather than their essential structures or themes. It is, in other words, the witches and monsters, the magic and the violence, and the most whimsical or least "natural" elements that spark the controversy, and not what the stories are actually about - not, that is to say, the essential themes or messages communicated by folklore.

For these are the messages of the old fairytales:

• Sorrow is real, and so is joy

• Joy is freely available to all, just as sorrow comes freely to all, whether rich or poor, and without regard to changes in material fortune

• The world is fraught with danger, including life-threatening danger, but by being clever (always), honest (as a rule, but with common-sense exceptions), courteous (especially to the elderly, no matter their apparent social station), and kind (to anyone who has obvious need), even a child can succeed where those who seem more qualified have failed.

I do not have any children of my own; therefore what I am about to say may be hopelessly naïve, and if so I beg you to excuse it, and me, and leave my ideas out of the discussion on those grounds. But at least until the revelation of fatherhood I expect to hold the view I am about to state. Namely:

The messages of these old fairytales are precisely those that children most need to hear.

Is it not so? Ought not children be affirmed in the deepest feelings they, along with all people, experience about life?  

Ought they not be taught that material disparity exists, that fortunes do change for better and for worse, and that wealth cannot shield us from knowing sorrow any more than poverty hold us back from realizing joy - in other words, that possessions are not what matters most?  

Would we not be doing a disservice to them, as well as to society, to let them go on believing that the world is safe; that they will be provided for and achieve worthwhile things even if they should remain stupid, shirk integrity, and ignore courtesy, acting only in self-interest; that they should rely on those stronger, smarter, and more able than themselves to solve their problems?

It is not the details, the fiction, of the stories that really matter; it is the stories themselves. Nobody that I know of has expressed this idea more elegantly than Neil Gaiman, in his paraphrase of G. K. Chesterton: "fairytales are better than true; not because they tell us that dragons are real, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten."  

What better message for a child to understand from her youth? What better medium than a story?

If you can change, or re-write, all of the details of objectionable stories while preserving their essential themes, well and good. Hans Christian Anderson did both very well. But if not - best not throw out that bathwater just yet. 

The story is told by means of its details, and the story should be preserved. There may well be devils in the details (in some stories there most definitely are); but we are told there are devils in the world too, walking about seeking to devour the unwary, and we may certainly hope our children will not be discovered in that group.

Therefore we come to folklore monsters and fairytale violence, which some suggest children should be sheltered from. I do not disagree that stories, and what they contain, should be revealed with discretion. Some stories are beyond the proper grasp of tiny hands, just as some books are above their reading level. But I don't believe that children should never be afraid.

Of course it's very inconvenient for parents when their child develops an irrational fear of the dark or of the bedroom closet. That struggle, to exert rationality against unwarranted instinct, unfounded imagination, and overblown emotion, lasts long into adulthood. To act on what we know, when what we know is contrary to how we feel, can be just as difficult for adults as for children; but such discipline, at the very core of what it is to be human, must be learned, and somebody must guide children to learn it.  If we never knew fear, we have never learned to be brave in order to do what is right - and what better thing to practice and hone bravery against than an imaginary monster, in the closet or under the bed, before we are confronted by a real one?

There are other lessons, lost lessons, that might have been communicated to us through the common wisdom of past peoples, had we not given in to this instinct to revise and censor their stories. For example:

I can't help but wonder whether, if children grew up being told how Cinderella's evil stepsisters cut off their big toes and heels in order to fit their feet into the glass slipper in an attempt to deceive the prince's herald (effectively trying to look like somebody else in order to become somebody else, through dishonest and self-destructive means), we would have such an epidemic of eating disorders and self-harm.  

I can't help but wonder whether, if entire generations had not forgotten the story of how "simpletons" - somebody who thought differently than everyone else, someone whose accomplishments were not easily measured by normalized standards - gained their fortunes through unusual means or by heeding shrewd advice (one even became the crown prince through a cleverly-performed, out-of-the-box comedy act that cheered up a depressed princess), we might not have gotten ourselves into our current factory-inspired, standardized-test-driven educational mess.

Once upon a time, there was a saying: "it takes a village to raise a child." Whether that was considered so because a well-rounded child needs a diversity of perspectives to grow by, or because parenting is simply too big a job for one or two people to undertake alone, or both, you may take your pick. The fact remains that the old fairytales are the child-rearing stories rigorously selected and rigorously polished by the commonsense and everyday wisdom of a thousand thousand villages in a thousand thousand nations over a thousand thousand years.

So let us have done, Madame, with this silly notion that my fairytales are unsuitable for your children - as if it were the children who have stood the test of centuries, and need no proving. Say rather, if you must, that your children are unsuitable for my fairytales, and pray do not leave them in that sorry state for long.


Sincerely,
J. Aleksandr Wootton

The Backslid Bachelor's

www.thebestcolleges.org recently numbered the college from which I undergraduated, William & Mary, among the overall “Top Five” in the United States. W&M normally ranks highly, but this is our highest unqualified ranking to date for quite a number of years – not counting ye olden days when it was just us and Harvard.

Normally, alums greet such news with cheering – but I was disappointed with the education I received there, and to me, this ranking simply provides further confirmation of how far the quality of U.S. higher education has slumped.

It's no secret that our colleges and universities, along with our K-12 schools, are failing us, unable to deliver on their prime objective. I can't count the number of articles I read over the past few years that all basically made the same point: that a college degree alone is no guarantor of employment. Employers need additional proof that a college graduate has the skills to make productive contributions to their companies.

Sorry, additional proof? Isn't that proof precisely what a college degree is supposed to be? And if it isn't, if it can't demonstrate that those who hold it are ready for jobs, what good is it?

“But the recession!” some are tempted to cry. Yes, yes, the recession... certainly it's not helping the unemployment figures, but neither is it fully to blame for them. Prior to the recession employers had the luxury of hiring new graduates despite their educational shortcomings; they could afford to waste time and money bringing them up to speed on-the-job. Now they can't, and the increasingly fantastic equation, College Degree = Better Job, is beginning to be exposed.

Even for several years before the recession began, we were seeing articles and studies on how far behind U.S. students are in math and science when measured against students from comparable nations. As if that weren't enough, we have a far more basic problem – one most people acknowledge and yet hardly anyone seems to be admitting: college graduates can't write.

I don't mean that they can't write the Great American Novel (how many people can?); I mean they can't be trusted to consistently write grammatically decipherable emails. Business day-to-day doesn't get much more fundamental.

Literacy is the foundation of all learning. If we encountered elementary school students who weren't fully literate, that might be expected; in middle school students it's perhaps forgivable; in high school students it ought to be inexcusable. But college graduates? I'm all but reduced to spluttering incoherence at the sheer absurdity.

No wonder companies are hesitant to hire college students with nothing but a bachelor's degree to their name. No wonder the average income boost from having a degree provides less for your retirement than if your parents had simply invested cash equal to average tuition over those four years instead of sending you to college, and you had gone straight into the workforce, starting when you turned 18.

Products of a failing K-12 system, students head off to college unprepared for it – and then graduate college unprepared for the real world. This is rapidly becoming common knowledge, but we've made attending college so much a part of the American Dream we don't want to face up to it.

It's long past time we did. Here's what's going on:

• Colleges and universities have built remedial English, writing, and math courses into their programs for the least-equipped of their students. Individual departments now offer dumbed-down versions of the classes that satisfy core and major requirements. The 'Renaissance man' ideal of liberal arts has consequently become a sham, and the liberal arts degree has become deservedly undervalued by job recruiters.

• Professors and teachers have lowered their expectations for the quality of work students are capable of. They've shifting the emphasis of assignments away from concept comprehension and independent study skills towards “busy work” and memorization. In an age where everyone can access the most comprehensive and most quickly searchable information library in human history from their mobile phones, memorization is an increasingly irrelevant skill – and yet it's the skill that students are most incentivized to practice. The opportunity cost of emphasizing this skill at the expense of those that would enable students to continue educating themselves outside the classroom and excel at on-the-job training is unaffordable.
  
  
• Lowered expectations for students seems also to have translated into lowered expectations for the educators themselves. I can't speak to the K-12 system from experience, having been homeschooled through the lower grades and then largely self-educated through high school, but the number of college professors I encountered who functioned as little more than human study guides was shocking. I know first-hand how far a reasonably intelligent person can get with just a textbook; I expected considerably more from people who've made careers of studying their subjects. Even more widespread than human-study-guide phenomena was a lack of basic public speaking skills among professors. A higher-learning institution's primary role is to teach, so one would think its teachers would be expected to be good at teaching. Not so, at least in my experience at a 'top-five' school.
  
  
• Colleges and universities try to make themselves stand out from the glut of higher-learning institutions with low acceptance rates and high graduation rates. By accepting the smallest practical percentage of total applicants, while graduating the highest possible percentage of those accepted (preferably with high GPAs), colleges appear to be attracting and successfully educating a better-than-average caliber of student. It's a paradigm that pressures colleges to invest in campus amenities that are only tangentially related to education – luxury dorms, extracurriculars, athletic facilities and programs, on-campus entertainment – in order to attract higher numbers of applicants, and pressures professors to prioritize passing students over educating them. Does anyone think that colleges and universities are investing in their faculty proportionately to the rocketing price of tuition? No? Then to what more deserving cause is the money going?

What we've got, folks, is runaway inflation of the value of a bachelor's degree. We are being ill-prepared for college by a school system that is lagging behind the performance of other leading nations. We're paying more money to go to college than ever before, but the degree we receive upon graduation represents less real education and less earning potential than it used to. However, because the U.S. job market creates fewer and fewer positions available to those without college degrees every year, students seem forced to settle for whatever they can get. It is a losing scenario for everyone:

• Households are footing an ever-bloating tuition bill, or else deferring it onto students via loans. The cost of going to college is outpacing the corresponding elevation in expected income that results from holding a bachelor's degree, even as the availability of jobs for those without some form of post-high school education declines annually. In short, students are being coerced into paying higher prices to obtain the minimum credentials needed to be considered for under-compensated employment. The problem is typically not that the positions now being classified as entry-level are worth more than what they pay; it's that bachelor's degree holders ought to be overqualified for them, but often aren't because of societal and political pressures that short-circuited their education.

• Employers, who ultimately drive the demand for degrees, have learned from experience that a college education is no longer a reliable indicator of quality among prospective new hires. Recruiters, fully aware of the declining relevance of the four-year degree, are faced with an increasing number of job applicants whose only substantive qualification for work is that very degree. Identifying those who are worth risking the investment of initial hiring on is a more difficult and time-consuming task than ever before, and getting new graduates up to speed within the company might well take longer and cost more than what was needed for recipients of a more robust education from decades prior.

• Colleges and universities, although able to cash in on the increased demand for degrees, have chosen to focus their investments on marketing themselves to prospective students rather than improve the quality and depth of the education those students receive. Because of the average undergraduate's underwhelming professional abilities, higher education institutions are faced with eroding reputations. It's only a matter of time before traditional higher-learning institutions feel the effects of the business world's diminishing support and are no longer able to justify their hefty price tag. The liberal arts degree cannot hope to compete against other programs of study that will soon be viewed as more practical – certainly not when it can't even live up to its own image. It will have to be strategically revivified, or it will have to be de-emphasized, and either direction means expensive changes and upheaval for institutions that are firmly entrenched in their ways.

• Meanwhile, taxpayers subsidize higher education through government programs for everything from direct financial assistance to tuition tax breaks to subsidized loan programs and more – and, of course, the salaries and expenses associated with administering those programs. Moreover, everyone ultimately shares some part of the cost of societal pressure towards, and widespread access to, underperforming college degrees. As a nation, we're heavily invested in undergraduate education and our whole economy is impacted by its diminishing returns.

How did we get to this point? 

Decades of small backslides, slow changes of attitude and outlook, cheap political solutions, outside meddlings and internal compromises.

How do we fix it?

Teachers.

No matter which way you slice it, education depends on educators. Policies that attract new teachers, retain experienced teachers, weed out bad teachers, reward good teachers, provide teachers with plenty of resources, shelter teachers from job-related stress, invoke teaching ability, and continue to develop teaching skills, must become the top priority for every educational establishment. Any educational establishment that does not do this does not deserve our support. Period.

Rather than remodeling their campuses to appeal to students' wants, colleges and universities can also restructure their degree programs to better serve students' needs:

• Divide degree programs into a professional track and an academic track, focusing requirements towards equipping undergraduates for what they will do with their degree after they graduate. Departments should also create opportunities each semester for students to engage in field-specific professional networking.

• Update core requirements to include in-depth office software training and internet proficiency. Aggressively foster internships and other business opportunities among all students... which means embracing highly flexible scheduling options so that students can take advantage of these opportunities.
  
  
• Turn the 4-year degree into a 3-year degree by eliminating the 30 (or so) credits of required “elective” courses liberal arts programs are needlessly padded with. This would allow decisive, single-major students to save a considerable amount of money and enter the workforce a whole year sooner, degree in hand, without taking away the options of those who want to earn a minor, double-major, or who want more exposure to classes before they declare a major. Accelerated degree tracks would be a welcome alternative to the status quo.

What about today's students?

What can they do to avoid getting the increasingly short end of the stick?

No matter what happens in the next few years and decades, it's unlikely that avoiding higher education will become a winning strategy. You've still gotta go to college; the good news is that there are a number of excellent options for mitigating the problems with higher education and avoiding post-commencement resume slush piles. Here are some of them:

1. Don't spend four years at a four-year school. The best-kept secret of higher education is the community college, at which you can earn fully transferable credits, professional certificates, or even an associate's degree, all before you graduate from high school. If you then transfer to a four-year school to complete your bachelor's degree, you'll have saved yourself a significant amount of both time and money (in tuition as well as room and board). If you're not sure yet what you want to major in, this plan is definitely for you: you can satisfy core requirements and earn elective credit while exploring fields that interest you, all for a lower cost and under less pressure than you'd incur doing the same thing at a four-year school. You can take advantage of community college almost anytime: you can dual-enroll while still in high school (or forget high school and enroll outright after you turn 16); after you get your diploma, you can put off going to a four-year school and attend community college first; if you've already enrolled at a four-year school, but need to take a step back to re-evaluate, you can probably arrange to study away for a semester or two and come back later. Creative strategizing and a careful eye to your four-year school's transfer credit program are the key.

2. Know what you want out of college. Start your research into prospective careers early in high school, and really knuckle down to it. Don't hesitate to invest a little money on reputable aptitude assessments and career placement tests; it's far less costly to begin with a career placement test than to end by switching majors. Try to determine, as best you can, what it is you want to be doing five years after school; then, find out what it takes to obtain a job doing that and work backwards from there to identify your program of study and the schools that offer it. Not only will careful research and planning simplify your college decisions and save you potential frustration, it will excite you and provide you the motivation you'll need to get through tough assignments and classes. Didn't start the research process early enough? Then put on the brakes. Going straight to a four-year school right after high school because you don't know what else to do or because "that's what everyone does" is an expensive, inefficient, and often dissatisfying way to figure why you're getting a degree. You need to have a reason in hand before you set foot on campus.

3. Be willing to say "no" to a four-year school. There are plenty of careers for which it makes very little sense to get a liberal arts degree before you start. Part of this country's push towards the universal bachelor's degree has been to unfairly stigmatize those whose higher education comes solely from community colleges and vocational schools, but the reality is that people who pursue technical degrees or professional certifications in specific skills valued by their chosen field are often more eligible for hiring and are able to begin their careers sooner and more smoothly than their counterparts at liberal arts colleges and universities. Again, the key here is research: know what you want to do and what education and experience is necessary to make you qualified to do it. However, and this is very important: before you decide against getting a bachelor's degree, make sure your chosen field is growing and likely to be hiring by the time you're ready to send out your resume. Liberal arts degree holders may not be as well-prepared for work in any one specific field, but their credentials do have the advantage of being much more flexible and applicable to a wider array of career choices than vocational degrees.

4. Always be looking for ways to supplement your education. Just as the awareness of slipping high school grading standards has driven college admissions officers to rely more heavily on other factors like test scores and extracurricular involvement in making admissions decisions, so recruiters have had to rely more heavily on industry-relevant coursework and real-world business experience obtained along with the bachelor's degree in making hiring decisions. Get this into your head: "my bachelor's degree will not be enough to get me the job I want all by itself." Do internships that are relevant to your career choice in the summers after your sophomore and junior years, or better yet, try to get yourself hired short-term by a company that does business in your chosen field. Work for free if you have to, and use college loan money to support yourself. Take a semester off if you have to. Be resourceful – make it happen. Relevant internships and work experience go lightyears beyond your bachelor's degree in getting you noticed and hired.

5. Have a plan for what to do with yourself while you are applying for jobs. On average, even in a good economy, it takes six months of steady job-hunting before new college grads get hired. That's enough time to also pursue continuing education in your chosen field. Attend seminars and conferences, earn a professional certificate... don't just sit back and wait for the phone to ring. Pursue ways to make yourself stand out among your peers.

6. Don't discount graduate school. You were sick of high school; you'll be sick of college; you may think you'll never want to see another textbook or the inside of another classroom, and you may be right. Or, you may become excited about going on for more, or you may determine that a graduate degree will give you a competitive edge in the job market. You may realize you want to go back to school after working a few years. While most job interviewers won't ask or care about your undergraduate GPA, you need a B-average (3.0) or better to be considered for grad school. Don't accept anything less from yourself while you're in college, lest you find you've shot yourself in the foot. Give your class assignments the attention they need so you can put them to work for you later.
   
   
7. Get know at least three of your professors. Participate (intelligently) in their classes, go to their office hours, email them questions about how other things you're studying or reading relate to their subject, talk to them outside of class. If they host students for dinner or arrange for the class to meet for drinks or attend additional lectures or events not on the class syllabus, go! Not only will it improve your grades in their classes and give you a better grasp of the subject, you'll make some good friends and earn willing references for jobs or grad school applications later.

Higher education cannot be expected to ferry passive students all the way to a good job, but it's not yet a sinking ship. However, with a creative and proactive approach, students can still disembark prepared for real life.

As for me, well... one of these days I'll figure out what to do with the B.A. in Bureaucracy Navigation I earned in order to complete the requirements for a degree in English.

Long Meals Together

Written for - though not currently appearing on - Lea Hannah's blog Eat.Grow.Live.


Once upon a time,

People held the idea of hospitality in such high esteem that if, say, your sworn enemy came to your home in disguise, and you invited him in (which you would do, of course, because you would invite in any and every traveling stranger in need of food and shelter) and then, say, your best friend showed up at your doorstep with an army and exposed the disguised enemy, you – as the host – would refuse to deliver your enemy-guest to your best friend. If your best friend threatened to capture the enemy-guest by force of arms, you and everyone in your household would prepare to fight to the death defending him. (Of course, your best friend would know you are honor-bound to do that, so you were about to find out which he valued more – the life of a friend or the death of an enemy).

There was a time, in short, when guests were sacred and a host's courtesy was a matter of the highest honor. When the code of hospitality was among the highest social and moral laws, capable of resolving ethical dilemmas in a way that now feels totally alien.

I'm not about to argue for a return to that time. But I begin there to illustrate how far human society has departed from one of its former values – and whenever we do that, it's worth asking whether we have maybe gone too far... whether we've left something behind along the way that's worth going back for.

The “slow foods” movement exists because of a similar line of questioning. We've recognized that, over the last century in particular, modern mainstream food production has undergone radical changes at every level. Yes, we've made food cheaper, easily distributable, widely available without regard (on the consumer end) to its local growing season or natural production cycle – “but,” people began to ask, “at what cost?”

And so, here we are: a small but growing group of people who desire to be more connected to the foods we consume – to be more aware of where it came from, how it was grown, what was involved. Who prefer, masoch istic as it may seem to fast-pace-of-life addicts, to chop, mix, cook, and even grow our own food to pealing off a round of plastic wrap and tossing a “disposable” plastic tray into the microwave. Who would really like it if Big Farm and Big Pharma had a lot less to do with one another, thank you very much.

What I'd like to suggest is that this desire, to be more connected to the foods we eat, has even more to offer than health and well-being: that it can help us become more connected to other people as well.

i.e., hospitality – and what that under-appreciated word means for us, and our friends, today.

I think of my friend Derek, who has recently taken to growing tomatoes in buckets on the back deck of his townhouse, for the express purpose of being able to make his own spaghetti sauce when he has people over. I picture a bunch of people sitting around his kitchen, talking and playing games, while the tomato sauce simmers in thick, aromatic bubbles in a giant pot on the stove behind them. The scent of basil and oregano tinge the evening, rousing guests' appetites for the feast to come.

What does it communicate when you show up to a holiday party with a platter of store-bought cookies or corporate-cut fruit and veggies? I didn't have time, but I wanted to contribute.

Okay, that's fair – no judgment here. We all get busy, and we'd much rather you showed up than that you stayed away out of embarrassment for lack of time to prepare something yourself.

But on the other hand, what does it communicate when you show up with a steaming made-from-scratch quiche, or a six-pack of home-brewed beer as my friends Nate and Margaret have often done? Considerably more:

-You care about what you eat and drink, and you care about your friends... so you care about what your friends eat and drink, too.

-You took time, effort, and energy to craft something personal for your friends, or your friend's guests... something everyone can enjoy.

-You planned ahead (probably. But if this is a lifestyle for you, not necessarily: a little while ago my wife and I decided at the last minute to attend a potluck, and because we bake our own beer bread two loaves at time every week, we had a suitable contribution waiting to be shared.)

When you're the one hosting, you have an even greater opportunity to invest – both in the future of the slow foods movement and, more importantly, in your friends.

Next time you have people over for dinner, try this:

1. Plan to eat at 7pm, but tell your guests to come at 5pm.

2. Don't stress about trying to get everything done before they come. Your friends don't expect a restaurant experience when they go to one another's houses for dinner; it's okay for them to see your cluttered kitchen. You're making their food, and they don't mind the process – they're grateful.

In fact – pro tip – if you succeed in conveying the “I'm a perfect homemaker” vibe, with a delicious dinner in the oven and a perfectly clean kitchen, you're actually less likely to get a return invitation. Why? Because you've given your friends the impression that that's what you expect, that's your standard, and they won't invite you over unless they feel like they can meet it in their own home.

3. Instead, be working on dinner when they begin to arrive and be ready to involve them in the cooking process whenever they get there. Even if it's just chopping ingredients (maybe cut the onion yourself, though), there's nothing more satisfying than working with your hands and having something great to show for it as a result... except maybe having something delicious to eat!

(If you don't have a kitchen you can comfortably host from, make do as best you can for now and write that down as a criteria for your next lease/remodel/home purchase.)

What's the purpose of doing dinner like this?

Well, first and most basically, it gives everyone something to do. Especially if you're making new friends or catching up with long-lost acquaintances (or an ex...!), it fills up the awkward gaps when you're figuring out what to talk about, and lots of people are more comfortable when they're doing something, rather than just sitting or standing, drink in hand, while waiting for dinner to finish cooking.

Second, you're putting yourself and your guests on the same level. You're making them feel at home in your home by having them do something homey with you. You're inviting them to share your position as host – when you and your guests cook together, you're all investing in your evening; now everyone has a greater interest in its success. And when your food is a smash hit (pro tip: don't use guests as guinea pigs for culinary experiments without prior consent – taste-test recipes on your own first!), you're allowing them to take pride for their part in preparing it... rather than intimidating them with how delicious it is. Again, you're far less likely to get a return invitation if your guests come away thinking, I could never pull that off.

And third, you're passing on some of the philosophy of the slow foods movement without having to say a word about it. You could be introducing people to home cooking who may not have grown up with it, almost like hooking kids' interest in a school subject with a hands-on activity. Or you could be reminding people of how good it can be – not just the eating, but the whole experience – who may not have gotten much of it since they left for college.

I titled this post “Long Meals Together.”

Just what do I mean by that?

It can be hard, when we talk about being part of a movement like slow foods, to avoid coming off as pretentious as Irish comedian Dylan Moran's friends talking about their weekend:

“We went to that really cool place, you know the one you haven't heard of, it's called The Cellar, it's on the top floor of the building, well, it's not really called The Cellar, it's called Umlaut, well, it's not really called Umlaut, it's just two dots over a 'u' that isn't there. Yeah, it's great, they make their own tomatoes out of vodka...”

But by mixing hospitality with slow foods – and the two really are natural allies – we have an opportunity to show and not tell. We can give a taste, literally and metaphorically, of what we're about.

A long meal together is exactly what it sounds like. You begin by involving your friends in the food, letting them experience it with all their senses as it is prepared into a tasty meal. You have a natural opportunity to talk about where you get your ingredients – whether it's a local farm, co-op, market, backyard, or grocery store. Moreover you communicate, non-verbally, something you're passionate about while you discuss something they're passionate about. Sharing a meal is the ostensible purpose of your get-together... so share the whole meal, beginning with pulling the ingredients out of the fridge and cupboard.

Oh, and – pro tip: Pause between the main course and dessert. Reconvene on the couches with some drinks, carry on the conversation, digest for fifteen or twenty minutes. Then break out the dessert. Remember, you invited them for dinner. If dinner ends too soon, they may start feeling like you want them to leave.

(On that note: don't, Don't start doing the dishes while your guests are still there. They'll feel like they have to help, or they'll leave to avoid helping. The best way to spoil their satisfaction at having contributed to an excellent meal is to confront them with the cold dishwater of reality. Cleanup can wait. They might be new to this, remember.)

Hey, talking of long meals together – when are you free? Wednesday next week?

Time, Tolstoy, and Two Irish Poets

Published at http://www.firstprinciplesjournal.com/print.aspx?article=1121&loc=b&type=cbbp

Enjoy!

Glamour, March 2008

Normally I don’t go for ‘checkout aisle’ magazines. At their best, they manage to be tragically amusing. The same 30 (or so) articles rotate from cover to cover: better sex, Hollywood gossip, fashion do’s, fashion don’ts, better sex again, lose weight fast this way, [gain it right back again with this] tasty recipe, better hair, relationship advice. Maybe there’s some good stuff between the pages; most of the time, I wouldn’t know – and when I have bothered to investigate, I’ve never been impressed. Beyond the low quality of the ideas and poor underlying philosophy they seem to propagate amongst an already-misguided culture, my complaint is that they all contain the same content. People I know who subscribe to one or another of these magazines have all been able to offer me reasons – often well thought-out – as to why their periodical of choice is “better” (by which they usually mean “less trashy”) than the rest, but take it from someone educated in the analysis of words: They. Are All. The Same.

However, the March 2008 issue of Glamour differentiated itself a little, in a good way. Several pages in it caught my eye, over the shoulder of the girl (JMU alum, class of 03) sitting next to me on the plane ride back from Portugal in mid-March. By that time stores were selling the April issue already, and it’s taken me until now to track down a copy, courtesy of my local library.

Let’s start with the cover. Mostly, it looks like any other ‘checkout aisle’ mag – obligatory female celebratory in mildly suggestive pose, titles like '99 Juicy New Secrets of Hollywood' (I didn’t read that article, but I bet they’re not new, and how could they possibly be secret if they’re published?) and ‘Sexy Hair in 10 Minutes or Less’ (‘Believe it! Achieve it!’), but the article that caught my eye was titled thusly:

‘Why Guys Love Your Body Exactly As Is’

Unbelievable. A magazine that gleans most of its income from advertising that works by creating or playing on personal insecurities is carrying an article about how women don’t need to change themselves in order to be attractive? Now that’s noteworthy.

The article – written by actor Gabriel Olds – is about plastic surgery. Within the magazine itself, it’s titled ‘Why Men Crave Real (Not Perfect) Bodies’ and contains some really worthwhile quotes. Gabriel describes dating in LA, “a town that seems overrun with silicone” and his discomfort with discovering – at various points in his relationships – that the women in his life were “surgically enhanced.” After a few such encounters, he figured out why he was uncomfortable: “Almost all of the women I’d met who had changed their bodies through surgery had either done it to bandage some adolescent body issue or to make themselves more attractive to men. I didn’t like that – it didn’t seem like a celebration of beauty…”

I couldn’t agree more. While I think that cosmetic surgery isn’t all bad, and while I agree with Gabriel’s later assertion, “choosing to have surgery doesn’t [necessarily] make you a dishonest person,” the motive and type of work done is critical to how that surgery is perceived by others. And that’s not just because people are slow to accept change – it’s because every fantasy we entertain is merely a disguised yearning for the genuinely real.

In the article ‘The Glamour of Being Yourself’, which appeared earlier in this same issue, Poppy King wrote: “Lots of beauty icons no longer have the features they were born with… I recently heard that the vast majority of women don’t get plastic surgery to fix something… they do it so they’ll appear ‘more normal.’ The shame of it is women feel like freaks for looking at all different.”

Does that thought scare you as deeply as it scares me? I hope it’s not true – because this, Gabriel’s closing line and most poignant statement, is true: “This is the part I think women don’t understand. When a guy falls in love, his lover’s body parts become bewitching… When we fall for you – really, really fall for you – you hijack our sense of beautiful. What’s sexy to us? You – in the ‘before’ picture.”

Shockingly, Gabriel’s article wasn’t the only worthy mentionable between Glamour’s oh-so-mockable covers. The aforementioned ‘Glamour of Being Yourself’ by Poppy King (whose book Lessons of a Lipstick Queen came out in May) is subtitled “Too many women – even famous ones – are caving in to a cookie-cutter standard of beauty” and wonders, “whatever happened to playing up what you’ve got?”

Poppy continues, “Celebs themselves are looking like they were churned out from the same Hollywood factory… they’re so generic it’s almost alien!”

I’ve said to friends on more than one occasion that knowing how to wear (and not wear) makeup is a great skill to have. Women look best when they use makeup to show off their faces (rather than the other way around). By the same token, a girl who is most readily pointed out of a crowd by the words “the girl who looks like ___ [insert celebrity name here]” should be alarmed. Imitation is not the sincerest form of self-flattery.

Unsurprisingly, my favorite piece in the issue turned out to be ‘Your Race, Your Looks’, a six-page roundtable on women’s struggles to overcome preconceptions about what is beautiful. The opinions and experiences shared on those pages are unutterably valuable. I’ve chosen not to quote it here, but if you can get your hands on the article I highly recommend reading it. Its main theme is the discovery of beauty and style as expressions of the self. This may seem obvious, but our culture describes beauty as pressure, the pursuit of an image of someone or something outside of the self, some distant ideal or standard, deceptively couched in the language of self-discovery. “Become your best self” is the copy text, but the actual message often conveyed is that your best self looks like someone other than you. Breaking out of that often-harmful influence is the journey shared by women contributing to ‘Your Race, Your Looks’ and as I’m sure you can imagine, it’s well worth the read (even if you’re a guy. If I was unashamed to check the magazine out of the library, you should be willing to go read it there for yourself).

Finally, several other articles featured similar positive themes:
· The fashion section includes a couple of ok pages for the ‘pear-shaped’ and the ‘plus-sized’ featuring models of those descriptors.
· ‘Hollywood Sex Myths’ advised against letting ‘silly ideas’ like ‘instant orgasms’ and ‘perfect bodies’ into your bedroom (“the real thing can be a whole lot more satisfying”).
· One article exposed dangerous diet techniques “no sane woman should try.” Useful, quality-of-life-preserving information for the size-conscious.
· The exercise and fitness section featured body-shaping techniques for a “higher, rounder” or “tighter” butt – rather than the sadly typical proclamation to “banish your butt” (along with your belly & thighs, as if the female form would somehow look better if it lacked this triad).
Granted, these aren’t great. But they are important steps towards championing genuineness and diversity in beauty and, as such, I found them laudable.

I wish I were able to speak such praise of the magazine as a whole. Regrettably, the remainder of this issue’s 366 pages not taken up by those articles I mentioned were typical checkout-aisle-mag fare, replete with problematic advertising (see Killing Us Softly) and shallow articles building into an already bad system. It may be worth the reminder, as a closing thought, that one of the original meanings of the word glamour was a bedazzling enchantment cast by fairies and witches to trick mortals into seeing gold coins, sumptuous feasts, and unearthly beauty where there was truly nothing more than acorn caps, wild mushrooms, and ugly stepsisters. However, I do commend Glamour for running these stories, and sincerely hope to see more like them in it and similar magazines in the months and years to come.