Once Upon a College: Herman Daly

Friday, October 17, 2008

Herman Daly

My PhD advisor and former teacher Herman Daly posted an interesting essay at The Oil Drum blog, which was then written up by Andrew Revkin at the NYT, and so appeared on my regular morning blog rounds. Herman generally doesn't do blogs, so this was a nice surprise.

Herman was the chief economist at the World Bank in the early 1990s, before teaching at the Maryland School. That was two financial crises ago, for those of you who are reckoning time in the new fashion. Apart from being what my sainted Welsh farm-girl Grannie would have called "a real gentleman" and extremely nice guy, Herman is one of very few people I've met in my life who totally mastered the English language, as well as economics, philosophy and metaphysics/spirituality, and united them all coherently.

A Zen master.

Enjoy. (This is assigned for students in Environmental Sustainability.)

Warning: It's long for a blog post. But be Zen. You'll get through it. And by the time you're done, maybe the crisis will be over.

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3941#more

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What this is about

A long time ago, in an educational universe far away and almost certain never to return, the professors of a certain small college experimented with experiential learning and taught their students not just to "read, write, think, and figure", but also to do practical things with that learning. Educational theory and research results from Kurt Hahn to modern scholars suggests strongly that experiential learning works better, particularly for active young people. It also matters greatly that young people have the physical and mental confidence to do something positive with their learning, particularly to make social and environmental change, in other words, to lead. This kind of confidence comes with physical challenge and being made to defend your ideas out loud, among other things. The small college was built around these ideas, deliberately, by a group of determined and innovative educators. With this success, along came the inevitable bean-counters who believed such a valuable education was way too expensive for those students. Wanting to keep more of the students' money (to pay their six figure salaries, of course), they cut the programs the first chance they got and went all-online where the teaching help is way cheaper and less demanding of budgets for tools and materials. I happen to think it was well worth the investment for any student who really engaged with the opportunity, but... bean counters gonna count beans. So the college is, for all useful purposes, gone, or at least changed beyond all recognition and not any good at teaching anyone anything practical at all. But the memories remain. And, despite the best efforts of the new administrators to erase them, so does quite a bit of open-source computer data to remind us of those memories, in the form of this and several other blogs and video pages online. In the case of this blog, the blog data were mine, not the college's, all along, even though they tried many times to get their cold dead bean-counter hands on them. So fuck 'em. Oh, and yes, this particular professor cusses more now that I don't have to worry about pointy-headed supervisors. Fuck them too. Enjoy. And remember, llegitimi non carborundum. If you're one of our former students and looking for stories you wrote or photographs or records of projects you worked on, just use the keyword search function or the chronological record to find your projects. They're all still here. Drop me a line using the comments section. I'd love to hear from you.

Once Upon a College

Friday, October 17, 2008

Herman Daly

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What this is about

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