But talk to me about that as something that is a tension in our culture and even in the culture of our schools. And you also have written a lot about that strain, which takes different forms in probably different regions of the country, different socioeconomic groups. Tippett: If I think about the culture of my childhood in terms of education, I was very much in the thick of an anti-intellectual, frontier America. And so when you ask me the question about when did I begin to think about, or understand in some kind of way this spirit of education, it had to be there.Īgain, I certainly wouldn’t have expressed it like that, but there was something about what he was doing with us that caught me in a very deep and powerful way. And for some reason, some complex set of reasons, it caught my fancy. And so, suddenly, after all those years of sort of drifting around and not knowing what was up, we hit this guy who is giving us, every other week, a new book to read, starting with Homer and working his way down to Hemingway. Tippett: And that was Jack McFarland, right? And I was as ill-prepared for that as I was for playing the defensive tackle on the football team, you know? I was so in the deep end of the pool.Īnd so I drifted through all that, and in my senior year had the sheer dumb good luck of getting an English teacher who himself had just left Columbia University and came out west and wanted to teach for a few years. And so, suddenly, in my junior year, I find myself in this college preparatory track. Somebody found out that somewhere along the line, my entrance tests to high school got confused with somebody else whose last name was Rose. Those were the days when schools were pretty rigidly tracked, right? And then a remarkable thing happened. I just didn’t do that well in school.Īnd so then when I went to high school, I ended up in the vocational track. o I could read, and that was immensely helpful, but I was horrible in mathematics I couldn’t diagram a sentence if you held a gun to my head. I could read, which was really fortunate, since that’s the sort of meta tool. I’ve got to say that it began, for me, in my senior year in high school. And you’re right, I wouldn’t have talked about it that way at the time. How would you start to tell the story of how and when you became attentive to what you would call the “spirit of education” - maybe you wouldn’t have called it that then, but what you now think of as the essence of education? ![]() His father was chronically ill, and his mother supported their family as a waitress. He grew up in Pennsylvania among Italian immigrants. He authored several books, including The Mind at Work and Back to School: Why Everyone Deserves a Second Chance at Education. Mike Rose was a professor in the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. ![]() Tippett: I’m Krista Tippett, and this is On Being. You know, the miserable lawyer, the unhappy neurosurgeon, right? Meaningfulness is a more fluid and rich and variable concept, I think, than we tend to imagine. Mike Rose: You and I both know people who are doing work that the culture at large, from a distance, would say is really meaningful, and they’re miserable. culture, and the deepest meanings of intelligence and of vocation. His insights from our 2010 conversation, a conversation I cherished, offer much to enlarge our civic imagination on big subjects that are newly alive about the heart of who we are, including class dynamics we still scarcely know how to speak about in U.S. He argued with care and eloquence that we risk too narrow a view of the way the physical, the human, and the cognitive blend in all kinds of learning and in all kinds of labor. Yet the particular way he saw the world resonates more than ever before, as our debates about standardized testing, the information economy, and the future of school only intensify. ![]() This, then, is something I know: the thought it takes to do physical work.” Mike Rose died after a short illness, in August. Krista Tippett, host: Mike Rose once wrote this: “I grew up a witness to the intelligence of the waitress in motion, the reflective welder, the strategy of the guy on the assembly line.
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