This is the best of our knowledge, a presentation of national productions.
There's an awful lot of learning and training going on in colleges and universities across
the U.S., but according to a new book, not a lot of thinking.
If you offer them the opportunity to think rather than simply perform, a lot of them take
it very quickly.
And the best of our knowledge will hear why this educator says, why teach?
We'll also hear from the mother of a 14-year-old literal genius who has never expected to be
able to tie his own shoes and spend an academic minute imaging an emotional brain.
I'm Bob Barrett, and this is the best of our knowledge.
Mark Edminson is a renowned professor of English at the University of Virginia.
He would love to see America's colleges and universities transform from what he sees
as the home of high-priced tuition, career training, and interactive online courses back
to the place where serious people go to broaden their minds and learn to live the rest
of their lives.
In his new book, Why Teach, in defense of a real education, Mark uses a series of essays
to convey the picture he sees and the one he'd like to see in American higher education.
I spoke with Professor Edminson recently and asked why he chose to tell his story by
using a group of essays.
How long have you been writing these?
Well, the first of these essays appeared in 1997 when I was a good deal younger than I
am, so my math is shaky, but a little more than 15 years.
Oh, I guess we'll get to the meat of it.
What is fundamentally wrong with education the way you see it?
Well, I guess people expect education to be all about training and pre-corporate preparation
and getting ready for a job.
And if those things are byproduct of education, I don't mind, but I think the humanities are
more about getting to know yourself and figuring out what the world is about, and based on
that, coming to some understanding of what you want to do with the rest of your life.
Do you think that today's students are equipped to think instead of learn?
Most of the students I have have jumped through a lot of hoops on their way to the University
of Virginia.
My buddy Bill Dershowitz quotes one of them saying, we're excellent sheep, but there's an
upside to that.
That is, they're well prepared, they're good readers and pretty good writers, and if you
offer them the opportunity to think rather than simply perform, a lot of them take it
very quickly.
You wrote in one of your essays that the enemy of knowledge is knowing this.
Do a lot of students today think that they already know it all because of all the technology
they're good at?
I think that, you know, the people who come on the nightly news and you see them on YouTube
and they kind of suggest by way of their irony and their confidence that they know everything
that's worth knowing.
And sometimes students are interested in mimicking that pose, but mostly people who are young
now, I mean my students, they want to take the prerogative of being young, and that means
being open to other possibilities.
And knowing this pretty quickly melts away, would you say, well, you know, you feel we're
feeling knowing, but what do you think about Plato here, and then knowing this kind of
melts away?
They got to start talking to the great works, and the best it's been known and thought.
A lot of good things happen based on that.
I'll let you tell this story, but your father gave you some good advice that, well, seemed
to have been good advice when you were trying to choose what to do in college.
What was that?
That's a nice story, at least for me.
When I was about to go to the University of Massachusetts, my father said, well, what
course are you going to sign up for?
And I said, well, I think I'd like to be pre-al-aw.
And my father said, are you interested in being a lawyer?
And I said, well, no, but I heard lawyers make good money.
And my father had some experience with lawyers, and I'd dare say a couple of policemen too.
God, very mad at me.
And he said, but do you really want to be a lawyer?
And I said, I don't really know.
And he said, but you're interested in literature and writing, right?
And I said, I am.
I really am.
And he said, well, why don't we sign up for a few literature courses?
And we did.
And that was very good advice, especially coming from somebody who hadn't been to college.
He didn't really have any advantages at all, but he had a good, good instinct for what
a real education was about.
And he told you that you're only going to college once, so you better make it count.
Yes, he did.
That's right.
That's right.
He said, you know, if you have some secret information, special information, the reincarnation
thing is true, and you're going to be able to go through life 30 or 40 times, you might
as well be pre-lawed.
But since you may only get one shot, you might as well do what you want to do.
In one of these essays, you brilliantly bring together William Blake, Hulk Hogan, and
Satan.
Well done, I have to say.
Thank you.
How did that one come together?
Because that one was really put together in a kind of, I wouldn't say odd, but different
way.
Yeah.
Well, you know, my wife is a fiction writer.
And so I sometimes experiment with bringing a kind of what you might call a semi-artistic
dimension into my writing.
And I like to weave together stories about my own life and stories about what I've been
reading and stories about people that I know.
And in this case, it was a story about William Blake's great poem Milton and some events
that were going on at the John Paul Jones Arena.
And my own perplexity about how to defend the humanity.
It's a bit of a long story, but I was glad to be able to bring those things together.
But not for nothing is at the last essay in the book.
It's the most demanding and I'm really glad that you got there.
Well, and it brings to light the two that universities do have to become profit centers
at this point, sometimes to the detriment of teaching.
Yeah.
Well, they surely feel the economic pressure upon.
There's no doubt about that.
And I think students feel it.
And as a father of two students or the one of whom is in the process going to school,
I surely feel it because I'm paying the bills.
And of course, I would like to see us think about some ways to cut college costs in the
process of enhancing education.
I might like to see us questioned how many administrators we need and how many varsity
football teams we need to put in the field and how many sports centers and gymnasiums we
really require.
I think there are some ways to go ahead and also, I dare say, how much faculty members need
to be paid.
So I think we've got to ask all of those questions on the way to making education a little bit
more affordable for the people who are most needed.
Is the education that many of the students are getting today actually worth the price
tag?
Well, I can say with confidence that the education that my Virginia students get up
the University of Virginia for $10,000 worth of tuition per term is about the best buy
in the United States of America.
It hurts me that our out of state students pay as much as they do.
I would like to see ways that we could make them have to pay less.
One of the problems is that my state, which has many good things going for Virginia, has
been decreasing its support of public education for the last 20 years.
They used to pay a large segment of our bill and really, you know, enforce Thomas Jefferson's
dream.
That's the founder of my school of Thomas Jefferson.
And now it's unpopular.
The legislators don't want to do it.
And more of the burden falls on the students.
Where do we go from here?
What's next for education in America?
Is it just going to plot along the way you see it going or are there a new generation
of teachers and administrators who are going to bring it forward and back to thinking instead
of just memorizing?
We're going to have a struggle.
And it's starting right now.
It seems to me.
And the struggle is going to be between, and this is the distinction of the great philosopher
John Dewey made, education for society, as against education for the individual.
And education for society means getting people ready to fill rules that they may or may
not want to fill for the betterment of collective life.
Education for the individual means getting people in a position to decide what they want
to do with their lives, what they hope to be rich or poor, what they want to pursue
success, what they want to pursue, what the road called voluntary poverty.
And I'm clearly on what you call the latter side.
And I think one of the good things about these educational debates that have been come
out recently is that we're going to have to fight this out now.
And I'm hoping that my side wins.
But victory is not assured.
Again, the name of Mark Edmonds' new book is Why Teach.
In defense of a real education, it's published by Bloomsbury.
Christine Barnett's son Jacob has an IQ higher than Einstein's, a photographic memory,
and he taught himself calculus in two weeks.
At age nine, he started working on an original theory in astrophysics that experts believe
someday, mainly to a Nobel Prize.
But at age two, experts said he would never be able to tie his own shoes.
But the story of Christine's journey with Jacob is all the more remarkable because his extraordinary
mind was almost lost to autism.
Christine Barnett's new book is called The Spark, a mother's story of nurturing genius.
She recently spoke with the best of our knowledge is Joe Donahue, who asked when she realized
she actually was nurturing genius.
Well, you know what's funny is when Jacob was a very young child, back when he was still
talking to us, still looking us in the eyes before he really fell into this dark world of autism.
At that point, there were these little highlights, things that he did that I thought that were
remarkable.
He was able to recite the alphabet forwards and backwards when he was one years old.
He was able to play music by ear from a little toy piano in a music store by our house.
So he was doing remarkable things as a baby.
When he was two years old, Jacob was diagnosed with moderate to severe autism.
He stopped talking, he stopped looking us in the eyes, and we were told at that time by experts
that the most we should expect for him was just life skills, things like buttoning his code
and tying his shoes.
To worry about what to do when we were gone someday, to worry about what he would be like
as an adult and what support he would need to live.
When you have that kind of diagnosis and that is told to you, I'm curious because you get
this idea in the book that you learned what was possible for him through him.
In the sense of you were not introducing him to things, he was just sort of naturally
moving from one thing to another and mastering things like calculus in a matter of weeks.
Right, well, you know what's funny is, surprise about my story, is that what I found at work for Jacob
actually works for every child. I was running a little daycare at the time that I was working
with Jacob and I applied some of these principles to all of the children.
And so in a sense, I actually have more experience with typical children than I do with,
you know, with Jacob who is a prodigy, but every single time, in every single child that I
worked with, I saw them do something amazing. And it's all very simple. The key is in how
children learn. The key is just a shift from focusing on what children can't do to what they
love and what their innate gifts and talents are. So it's not just Jacob's story, it's actually
story that is about all of our children and the brilliant potential that occurs in each of them.
So what do you feel you were able to give Jacob and these other children that put them at an
advantage? Well, what saved my son when he was deep in this world of autism was to stop focusing on
the things that were difficult for him and the things that he was struggling with.
He was enrolled in a very intensive therapy program where he had over 40 hours a week of therapy.
He had a therapy team consisting of an occupational therapist, a physical therapist,
a developmental pediatrician, a speech therapist. These were just maybe not even a third of the
team of people who were working with him at the time. And all of the people who were working with
him had this checklist of skills. And it was a checklist of things like looking people in the eye,
small motor skills like backing rings, large motor skills like putting one foot in the
front of the other going up a set of stairs. And with their focus on all of these things that
were difficult for Jacob, taking up so much of his day, what I realized was the things that Jacob
was actually good at, things that I had seen in him before he disappeared into that world of autism.
Things like the alphabet, they were being completely ignored. And what I think is very important
and why I'm so glad you have me on the show today is I think we're doing this to our children,
all of our children. And I think we worry about what is the future of the children in our country.
We compare their test scores to other children in other countries. And we worry that they might
be lagging behind. And I feel like there is a brilliant potential in our children. And we are doing
exactly what we were doing, what the therapist were doing with my child in a special ed setting.
We're doing that to all of the children in our school system. We're giving them a checklist
every year. A checklist of things they need to do. A checklist of their math skills. A checklist of
their reading skills. And what we're failing to do is believe in the things that they are each
brilliant at. The things they were doing as a young child, taking apart the backs of their
TVs as little boys with screwdrivers. Little girls going off today care and telling brilliant
magical stories. We're not focusing on it. We're just focusing on things that I think
are not reflecting the true potential with the needs of our children.
Still to come, Joe Donahue's conversation with Christine Barnett continues with the Look in
Jacob's Future. That's next on the Best of Our Knowledge.
Got any questions or comments about the Best of Our Knowledge? Send them in. Our email address is
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800-323-9262. Be sure to ask for the Best of Our Knowledge number 1195.
This is The Best of Our Knowledge. I'm Bob Barrett. Our guest today is Christine Barnett,
mother of a 12-year-old son who is working on his doctorate in physics. She's speaking with
the Best of Our Knowledge's Joe Donahue about her son and her new book, The Spark, a mother's story
of nurturing genius. And Joe asked if she still considers Jacob a child with autism.
Well, you know, Jacob has struggled with autism throughout his life. And the remarkable thing
about Jacob is he is able to take that label and just shatter it. And I think that the danger when
we put a label on any person is that it will set a ceiling for what they're able to do.
So Jacob has definitely exceeded anybody, even world experts' opinions of what a person with
autism should be able to achieve. However, still faces that disorder every day. He has a lot of
trouble with, for example, the lights in the classroom he's in. If it's a cloudy day, the way
that reflections bounce off the things his senses don't process things the way that other people
do. So the courageous thing about Jacob is that he still does face autism every day and he
overcomes it every day. And what you're saying is that while that exists, you still have to take
what he is able to accomplish and harness that energy and that spectacular skill and use it for
to the advantage of not only him, but for us as a culture. Yeah, I think that the autism is not
for a friend anymore. The label of autism is not what people think of when they think of Jacob.
They think of this brilliant scientist. He's the youngest published astrophysics researcher.
His works in the Smithsonian and NASA. People don't look at him and just only see autism anymore.
And that's so important for people, all people who have autism or any type of developmental disorder
to not allow that label to define who they are and become this overwhelming thing that sort of
tells you what your potential as a person is. And then further, for all of us,
we cannot let our fears about our children define our children. We need to start believing in these
teachers who have gone to school and who have educated themselves. We instead of giving them
this little checklist every year and saying, this is our only expectations for our children.
And I say our only expectations because we think, oh, by doing this, we're going to make sure that
everybody meets everything. Everybody is going to be a little bit good at everything. And nobody's
going to be great at any one thing. And we're not letting our teachers be great at what they
are capable of. We're not leaving them as professionals. And we're just, we're losing hope,
much like I lost hope for my child when he was a little boy under the autism diagnosis. We're
losing hope for our children and for our country's future. And you and we don't have to.
You end the book by quoting one of Jacob's physics professors who says he can do anything he wants.
And that's the takeaway really from the book, right? That anything he wants to do, he can do.
Yes, I mean, it's so simple. I want people to go out and get the book and read it. And you don't
have to be wealthy. You don't have to pay special tutors. You don't have to do, you know, intensive
programs or take classes. I want people to go and just kind of get this little shift,
a little change in how we look at things. That's all it takes. It's very simple. And it can really
change the potential for each of our children. I want a world where people are not just looking at
Jacob as a child who's loving and doing math and physics. But we're looking at our culture as
full of children who are each able, not maybe to necessarily rise to the level of of
prodigy, but each able to make unique and wonderful contributions to the world of math and science and art.
And I think by doing what we love, that's the key.
Again, the name of Christine Barnett's new book is The Spark, a mother's story of nurturing genius.
She spoke with the best of our knowledge is Joe Donahue.
Brain imaging is telling scientists a lot about human emotions. That's the topic of today's academic
minute. Welcome to the academic minute. I'm Lynn Pascarella, President of the Holy of College.
Improvements in brain imaging technology have taught us a great deal, but will they ever be
able to tell us what a subject is thinking or feeling? Karim Kasam, Assistant Professor of
Social and Decision Science at Carnegie Mellon University, describes efforts to create brain
activity signatures for a range of emotional states. Emotional experience pervades every aspect of
mental life. Emotions influence our memories and perceptions as well as our decisions and actions.
When emotional processing gets out of whack, a number of problems result. Everyone agrees that
emotion is important. Surprisingly though, researchers don't have a solid grasp of precisely what
emotion is. We don't know what processes give rise to emotion. We're not sure how different
emotions relate to one another, and we don't know how emotion is represented in the brain.
In order to address these gaps in our understanding, my colleagues and I conducted an FMRI experiment.
We recruited professional actors and had them imagine being in different emotional states while
we scanned their brains. Why actors? We wanted to study a broad range of emotions and actors are
adapted rapidly entering and exiting emotional states on Q. The results tell us a lot about emotion.
We found that the neural signatures of emotion were common across people and across different
types of emotional experience. And we were able to inspect those neural signatures to see how the
brain represents emotion. We found that anger looks more similar to happiness than any other
negative emotion, possibly because both angry and happy individuals tend to approach the source of
their emotion. And we found that lust looked unlike any other emotion. It was represented by a
unique pattern of neural activation that was hard to confuse with anything else. Beyond what they
tell us about the structure of emotion, the results also suggest a method of measuring it.
Existing methods, like looking at people's heart rate or blood pressure, examining their facial
expression or simply asking them how they feel, all have their flaws. Our research suggests for the
first time that we can use neuroscience to accurately measure people's emotional states.
That was Karim Kasam of Carnegie Mellon University. You can find this, other segments, and more
information about the professors at academicminute.org. Production support for the academic minute comes
from Newman's own foundation in partnership with Mount Holyoke College.
That's all the time we have for this week's program. If you'd like to listen again,
join us online at our flagship stations website. Go to www.wamc.org and click on the
program's link. And if you have any questions or comments about the program, send them in.
Our email address is knowledge at www.wamc.org. I'm Bob Barrett. Be sure to join us next time
for another edition of the Best of Our Knowledge. Bob Barrett is producer of the Best of Our Knowledge.
Dr. Alan Shartock is executive producer. The Best of Our Knowledge is a production of WAMC
Radio's National Productions, which is solely responsible for its content.
Hear more at www.wamc.org.
