Education for Democracy

I have run into some odd ideas of what "education for democracy" might mean during my time here. That makes me think. It can't be just one movement, one example. Democracy is complex, and, most important, it contains tensions as an idea, and it generates tensions, whenever anyone tries to put it into practice. 

I encountered one component last night. I went out to eat in a fine part of the city, near the Kirche am Hof, in an area with wide streets, stately buildings on a human scale, and grand public squares, connected by narrow alleys. By the entrance to one such alley, a young woman in a long gown sang through a repertoire of good contemporary songs - the best of the show tunes. She sang for about two hours and filled about four city blocks. I couldn't judge the quality, though she had to have had some serious training. What struck me was just: somebody wanting to sing and begin willing to take over the public space. Of course, anybody who complained or even harassed her could have shut her up. She had no goons to back  her up, just the tradition of people singing in public plus this IS Vienna plus why not?

I thought: if school children - or adults - see this, they have maybe the most important piece of education for democracy. Beyond that, we have to learn to cooperate, to share, to play nice. But point one is: if you want to sing, you can try singing in public, and maybe nobody will stop you.

The Transvaluation of Values

A dove is not a rat. Perhaps it is helpful if people think this way; they might stop feeding pigeons. 

Turning unwelcome beings into rats and snakes is an old propaganda trick, used before in ways that people here want to forget. But the trick is wrong, not just its uses. Shifting perception is serious, and there are occasions when the shift is accurate. That's just why it shouldn't be done - cheaply.

Here's a real dove:

Education for Democracy

Two artefacts  from prisoners: a dog someone made to cheer up a child and chess pieces carved by a man who was later executed. These are part of museum attached to the Documentation Centre of Austrian Resistance. I went there yesterday to speak to the director, Karl Pfeifer. His assistant put me on to a strange story.

Austrian school children are given some mandatory information about the Holocaust, and many are given a concentration camp tour. During some such tours in recent years, students have been disruptive and deprecating, and this has upset the ministries at the highest levels. They have pushed for more investment in Holocaust education, more empathy, more repudiation of neo-Nazi movements, so that such disruptions can't happen again. The name for this kind of action: "education for democracy."

One associate of the Documentation Centre wrote about this phenomenon in a piece titled roughly: "What is Education For? The Holocaust and Right-Wing Extremism in the Schools" (Andreas Peham, in the archive Yearbook from 2010). He asks one of those splendid simple questions on page 45 of this piece, "How can I teach someone who has to obey me to be disobedient?" 

I can't do better than that question. It states the problem of public education here as Alice in Wonderland states the problem of logic, as the parables of Jesus state the problem of love, as Maya Lin's wall states the problem of war. 

Impressions

In a serious conversation yesterday, someone I'd just met asked me for my impression of Vienna, and I blanked. Having an impression should be easy, but it is really the hardest thing, especially when one is fighting the demon of being nice and the demon of having something acceptable to say that will also be understood. So, like with all good questions I haven't answered in my decades of talking, this question kept burping up all day, "What is my impression of Vienna?" I finally found one of maybe a thousand answers in the difficulty I was having with the question: Vienna is a city in dialogue with its cliches. It has so many cliches: the coffeehouse cliche, the city of Mozart cliche, the Catholic cliche, the Hapsburg cliche, the "first victim of the Nazis" cliche, the "Hitler's most enthusiastic helpers" cliche, the city of ultimate open-ness cliche, the melting pot cliche, the rich and politically irrelevant cliche, and maybe also the Disney theme park cliche. All of these have something to them and also some very big things against them, but one thinks of the city by remembering them and also trying to forget them -- just that movement. And one is always tempted to fall away from one and into another, to just go back and forth among them. 

In that way, traveling here is an intense lesson in a certain kind of personal epistemology, one that Wittgenstein, for one, took to heart.  Knowing is sometimes well described as forging what one wants to say, crafting it out of experience. Maybe Thoreau, a couple of chapters into Walden, does something like that, after he gets the rhetoric out of his system and really looks at his pond. But more often, when one is not in a woods but in an old city of many layers, as we mostly are, knowing is noticing what we are tempted to say and how it doesn't quite work, and also how the opposite of what we are tempted to say also doesn't quite work. That's a reasonable summary, I think, of Philosophical Investigations, for which Vienna was the training ground. 

In The Twilight Zone, astronauts are greeted affectionately when they arrive on a new, familiar planet, are escorted to strangely familiar suburban living quarters, then discover, the next morning, that they are a new zoo exhibit. Vienna has a very good zoo, old and yet progressive, well organised. There are enough tourists that one shows up every five minutes or so, almost anyplace. One gets the feeling of being a zoo animal. One begins giving one's own tour, as a running commentary on one's life. That is a strange existential problem just because animals in a zoo are not part of a real eco-system. They exist to be looked at. Historical exhibits, palaces, most monuments are not part of real political life. They are splendid leftovers. So, one finds oneself saying, "My life does SO have a meaning," and then wondering what that's all about. This is one way that philosophy is close and touchable here. The place sets a problem.

The Oddities of Travel in 2014

The bottles of apricot schnapps are pretty, but they wouldn't have trumped the palaces, the white horses, the blue Danube, the monuments of Vienna, as subjects for a photograph in 1972. You didn't waste film, and you brought back the picturesque European stuff. Now, by what would surely seem like magic to the 1972 version of me, my camera takes unlimited numbers of clear photographs, and anything famous has thousands of searchable images on the web. I find myself photographing anything that interests me, as a kind of record of my interest, and emphasising ephemera: posters, graffiti, things in cars, juxtapositions. Casual photography has become, quite recently, a new activity.

Similar, quite recent, changes have changed most of the constraints of travel in 1972:

*I can talk to my friends and family for free, anytime they're awake. In 1972, I never called home. It was too expensive and too intimidating. I got cold just thinking of the electrons passing through that long cable.

*Anything I know the name of, I can find, or find out about. If it's a place, I can get there. If it's a name, I can find the Wikipedia article. If it's an idiom, somebody's done a discussion of it. 

*The Vienna subway is finished and integrated with busses, streetcars and trains. No place within a city of a million people is very far away, and the fares are cheap enough that one just doesn't worry about them. The mapping technology is so good that, even without a constantly working smartphone, I can get where-ever I want to go.

*With a Kindle, I can bring all the books I need, without adding more than the weight of electrons.

*Local media - television and radio - are available streaming for free, in some version. That means that I can learn to understand the spoken language faster and that I can keep up with the minutiae of life in the city for years after I return home.

*I can work from any place I am living. I don't need an office or a desk or an assistant. 

All of this was unthinkable in 1972. I could say something now about how this is a sort of mixed blessing, and it probably is, since most blessings are mixed, but I can't think seriously of a downside to these developments, for my preferred kind of travel. Rick Steves, in his excellent advice to travellers, is concerned to help them get into casual, comfortable relationships with local people and to show them the country beyond the stereotypes. What the new developments mean, for me, is that, on an extended visit, I can go beyond that admirable ideal, can understand enough of where I am to have serious conversations and engage in persistent inquiries -- following up on the hints that are around me about what might be going on. This just wasn't possible before.

Subways are astonishing teaching machines. You learn a route: a number, an end station, and a stop, and you get an instant reward. The system is totally reliable and endlessly repetitive in structure. Every line works the same way. The attachments - busses and trains - work the same way, with small differences. One orients oneself to one system, then expands one's reach to an analogous system as one develops new needs and desires. 

Subways are also meta-teaching machines. They teach about teaching and learning, about what kind of structure should be there: repetitive patterns, systemic analogies, immediate response to obvious needs and desires. You expect of a theory what a good subway map shows, and you learn theories because you want something like a subway map for some part of life.

Here's another teaching machine, a slack line. You get on. You fall off. You see somebody walk across. You try again. You still fall off. You get the hang of it, eventually. From this, you generalise: confidence and trying until you get it right.

This is also a meta-teaching machine, with a much less definite message than the subway system.

So, a city, a culture, teaches you and also teaches you what learning means, and if it does that in enough ways, you are ready to learn the various things you need to learn. 

Getting Over Good Advice

This might be my favourite photo so far. The Hund was a spaniel, very low to the ground, and my preferred translation of the sign is: "If you rob us, the spaniel will watch you intently." This might deter a self-conscious thief. 

When I was here the first time, I got a piece of good/bad advice from the teacher leading the group: "You all have no feel for the language." This was directed at a group of people with varying exposures to German: they'd been exchange students, they'd lived in German-speaking countries, they'd taken classes, including her classes. The point was not at all stupid. When faced with a communications challenge, things occur to you to say. In English, it's ok just to say what occurs to you because its basis is a whole life of hearing English. In Germany, those intuitions have no such basis. One needs to look up the idiom or learn the idiom. There's no short-cut in one's intuitions. 

This is like the advice given to people who have been singing casually when they get serious about singing: you need to relearn how to sing, if you are to do it really well. Otherwise, your bad habits set a limit to how good you can get.

Coming back, I have fallen into a situation in which this advice just does not apply. After almost 40 years of not speaking the language, I simply have to compose complex notes and I don't have time to check every idiom. So, if I am to work at all, I have to rely on what occurs to me. And so the way that this advice is false also shows up. English is in the family of languages in which German also lives, and so one can sometimes be understood in a very annoying way with just English. As one gains information about grammar, vocabulary and so on, it becomes likelier that one will be understood if one just says what it occurs to one to say. One is, however, often clumsy and annoying. 

There is a way of proceeding that consists in finding out how to do things right, and there is a way of proceeding that consists in doing them somewhat wrong but well enough: in the case of language, well enough to be understandable but annoying. The problem for the second approach: to gradually get less annoying. The point about bad habits, across a broad range of activities, is a good point. The point about not taking forever to do what one needs to do is also a good point.

I think these two approaches are quite general educational approaches, across a range of disciplines. People freeze when they have to do what they don't know how to do even when they know something about how to do it. The problem of a teacher is generally not addressing the situation of the totally ignorant but rather addressing the situation of the person with promising but unreliable intuitions. 

My solution thus far to the problem of getting better is Harry Potter in German. I had never read it in English, and find myself compelled to rip through it. I don't know whether the idioms stay with me: ask me when I meet my first troll. 

(Afterword: what I actually find, since this is my book-to-take-along, is that all sorts of situations show Hogwartesque dimensions, especially, the university departments.)

This oddity of language

Sometimes, one has to stop cringing and lead.

Before I came here, I transcribed 20 interviews with Minnesota cultural leaders: poets, historians, journalists, a major arts administrator. You can say about people at this level: "They know the language." On any imaginable standard, they are competent speakers. And yet, when I actually entered their sentences, I sometimes found rules very different from those I had been taught -- or virtual anarchy in areas I'd regarded as rule governed. It struck me that they were speaking quite different languages and that what we encounter in formal grammars is some kind of compromise among the idiolects.

That experience gave me courage when I came to Vienna, where many novices need to speak. One basically invents a language, puts it out there as a gambit, and hopes that it will be accepted well enough to make one, for one's particular purposes, competent. At the same time, one keeps trying to learn new tricks. My main technology for that is the German  Harry Potter. If I encounter a dragon, I'm prepared. So far, while people may have laughed at my emails or even posted them on the office wall, annotated, they have mostly responded to me in ways that got things done.

One other experience though showed me where the unbridgeable gap might lie. I went to a Gasthof for supper; three slavic guys were there, speaking their own language. As I watched, I was transported back to the supper table at my grandmother's on the farm - everybody talking at once, very fast. Both kinds of conversation seemed to me like dances. There wasn't information to  convey. There were familiar interactions to rehearse, roles to re-establish, prejudices to cement, reassurances to be given that everyone had his accustomed place. This level of stuff a foreigner has trouble with, and also, this level of stuff gets pretty easily squeezed out by people with simpler conceptions of language who can't make space for it. Xenophobia may be wrong, but it's not crazy.

I think there is such a thing as a national treasure. When I am on the subway, most people alone are tired, withdrawn, mildly agitated, sometimes angry. Occasionally, two people are talking and it is like a concerto: a very fast, very happy interchange of a thousand hints. One can actually see where Mozart came from. This interchange is the most valuable thing I've seen here.

So far as I can tell, the statuary here conveys several insistent public messages: making out is fun, war is  glamorous and sometimes cute, and somebody much smarter and harder-working than you is doing the thinking: have another cup of coffee. These are messages from another time, from Hapsburg time. They still echo. It is strange to live in a place where there is such a consistent monumental container, with consistent messages. 

The stuff about making out can be sinister: the objects of erotic attention are not always totally enthusiastic, and some of the pursuit statues are right next to the Schönbrunn maze, which would be a  place for all sorts of liberties.  One remembers the literary stories about peasant girls ruined by heartless aristocrats on a spree.

On the positive side, some people in Vienna know how to kiss. They do free demonstrations on the U-bahn. We in Minnesota should get them to make us instructional videos. We are primitive in that activity, at least in public. 

There's one other message, perhaps not intended. There are downsides to being a public figure; one may have to spend eternity holding one's pants up:

Also, if one sits for a bust on a grumpy day, one may spend a long time looking grumpy: