This deceptively simple question is guaranteed to open a can of worms.
In Charles Dickens’ ‘Hard Times’, the severe school board superintendent Thomas Gradgrind expresses the view that “facts alone are wanted in life”. Schooling in Victorian times typically followed the view that young captives in the classroom were little more that vessels to be filled.
In our supposedly more enlightened age, decent-minded folk are scathing towards such blatant child abuse. The robotic process of memorizing and reproducing information is rightly dismissed in favor of an educational model that encourages students to, in the words of Noam Chomsky, “shape the questions worth pursuing”.
In a talk to teachers, James Baldwin followed the Chomskyan line when he said “The purpose of education is to create in a person the ability of to look at the world for himself”. But Baldwin was also aware of how problematic a well-informed, critical populace could be and added that “no society is really anxious to have that kind of person around”.
In ‘Educated’ by Tara Westover , the author implicitly asks readers to consider where instruction ends and indoctrination begins.
In a note to readers, she advises: “This is not a book about Mormonism. Neither is it a book about religious belief”. Yet the fundamentalist of her survivalist parents and their rigid application of principles prescribed by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints have a huge and primarily negative impact of her upbringing.
A weaker, less stubborn personality would have been broken and submitted to a conventional life mapped out for her. As it is, she not only survives to tell her remarkable tale but thrives against all odds to become an esteemed scholar and to exemplify the virtues of individual thought and creative enquiry. Continue reading →
Canadian troubadour, Scott Cook writes folk songs for sharing. He’s not a big name and he’s never going to get rich from making music.
He survives by the kindness of friends and strangers; from those who come to his shows and from the small number of folks who still buy CDs.
If you do purchase a physical copy of his fourth album – One More Time Around – you are rewarded with a full lyric sheet together with the chords for anyone who wants to learn how to play his songs.
You’ll also find a long, impassioned essay arguing why people should always come before profit. Continue reading →
Noam Chomsky’s lecture at the University of Arizona entitled ‘Education For Whom And For What? should be required viewing for educators, learners and open-minded world citizens.
In it, Chomsky exposes the way the minority who seek to maintain wealth and power have consistently worked against more enlightened principles of education. They are essentially enemies to the idea that learning should be an active process of discovering and questioning in the quest for creative and independent thought.
Corporations and political parties have a vested interest in keeping the population passive and apathetic. Educated, active and curious citizens have a worrying tendency to question authority. Continue reading →
SLEEP FURIOUSLY directed by Gideon Koppel (Wales, 2008)
The title of this beautiful and poetic film is a reference to Noam Chomsky’s sentence “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously”.
This phrase was given as an example of a grammatically correct, but meaningless, linguistic construction. Chomsky’s intention was that people would recognise that the language we use cannot be glibly reduced to tidy formulas. Ironically, it has been proven that the phrase he chose to illustrate his point can actually make perfect sense given the right context.
Gideon Koppel’s film is set in Trefeurig, a farming community in Wales where he lived from the age of 12; a place of peace and refuge for his Jewish parents after fleeing Nazi Germany . Koppel’s mother features as one of the key characters in the village.
Koppel’s unique film goes beyond the scope of a straight documentary in that it neither lectures nor explains, but simply asks audiences to observe and draw their own conclusions from the images of ordinary lives and the natural landscape. By these means, his visual language has a function that is more than just for communicating information or affirming a specific point of view. Like Chomsky’s sentence, the context.is what gives it meaning<!
Perhaps the recognition of the limits of language also influenced his choice of music for the project. He uses several ambient electronica pieces from Aphex Twin’s Drukqs, an album where many of the track names are invented words or amalgamations of Cornish and Welsh.
It should be noted that Richard James (Aphex Twin) admired the film but wasn’t too enamored about the way his music was edited. The abrupt cuts to Avril 14th, a track that is used as a repeated refrain throughout, are made because Koppel didn’t want the music to be used as conventional soundtrack but needed it to denote “an accentuation of the emotional dynamics of drama”. He justifies the crude editing of the music by saying that “throughout the film we are asking the audience to listen to the silence” .
One of the most striking aspects of the film is how unobtrusive the camera and production team are. The inhabitants are not directly interviewed and there is no voiceover to explain how we are supposed to read the scenes. A great strength is that there is never any sense that the conversations are rehearsed or scripted. It is as if we are merely eavesdropping on the working and domestic lives of a range of local inhabitants, young and old, whose point of connection lies in the fact that they all live in the same place.
The camera often remains static and rarely follows the source of sounds. For instance, we hear, but don’t see, a jet plane flying over a field and, in a choir rehearsal, we hear the singers but the camera remains fixed on the woman conductor throughout.
The natural setting is vividly evoked, showing the subtle changes of the seasons and how the precision of the farming methods have a poetry of their own. It was shot on super-16mm film to enable Koppel to capture all the subtle changes in light and textures.
Following the progress of a mobile library gives a framework to the film, this van is literally a vehicle of stories but otherwise there is no narrative link to connect the other scenes in the school, the homes, the farms or on the land. Koppel has spoken about an influential meeting with the Austrian writer, Peter Handke. who encouraged him to set aside the idea that all movies must have a big dramatic arc.
If the film can be said to have a message or purpose it is to remind us how the notion of ‘community’ should be viewed as something that affects people’s daily lives rather than as a political concept. One issue that unites the community of Trefeurig is the threat to the future of the village’s primary school and we see a meeting where the locals criticise the council’s short-sighted decision to close the school.
Change is inevitable but does not always bring improvements, something neatly encapsulated in a witty poem about replacing a wooden signpost with a metal one. The new one is sturdier yet proves unreliable whenever there’s a strong wind. Wood may rot but a least the indicators remain in the correct position.
The spectre of modernity is always present and means that you can’t watch this film without the sad reflection that the inevitable march of progress will sweep away the old traditions and values depicted.
Sleep Furiously preserves for posterity moments and memories that will fade in time. The lines that appear on-screen near the end of the film remind us of the limitations of language when it comes to articulating what this means in human terms : “It is only when I sense the end of things that I find the courage to speak. The courage, but not the words.”
I would recommend buying the DVD as this includes a one hour pilot film called ‘A Sketchbok for The Library Van’ where, in a series of straight to camera monologues, the people talk about their lives. As in the main feature, the ordinary becomes extraordinary.
