On Stealing Ideas

I like art and literature, and therefore I also like remixes and adaptation. I've been hearing a lot of Picasso's T.S. Eliot's "good artists borrow, great artists steal" maxim. Also, I've been teaching Milton, who in Paradise Lost not only adapted Genesis but also blatantly stole from Ariosto.

The problem with that quote is that "borrow" seems good, and "steal" seems bad. The quote makes it sound as if the True Geniuses of Mankind are all jerks, and that only by being jerks can they exert their Geniusness.

That's missing the point entirely. Stealing ideas is better than borrowing ideas. If I borrow a book, I have to give it back. If I steal a book, it's mine. However, like Cory Doctorow on "buying" licenses to DRM'd digital works vs stealing those digital works—the one you steal will never get arbitrarily deleted if the DRM company goes bankrupt—borrowing and stealing ideas is different. Contrary to public opinion, there is no shortage on ideas. There is no idea deficit. Ideas come out of the ether, they sublime from books and movies and human interactions. They just pop in your head and you can't control them. That's ideas for you. If I use your idea, you aren't suddenly without it any more. No, now we both have it. Ideas are not zero-sum.

So how do "borrow" and "steal" even apply? OK, here we go. If I "borrow" an idea, just like when I borrow a book, I know in every waking moment that it's not mine. It's not a part of me, and I'll be very careful around it because I see it chained to someone else. Whenever I talk about that idea, I'll reference someone else not simply to preserve attribution and good faith and all that, but because I'm uneasy around that idea. It's not mine, in the same way that to me a given funny story will never be mine, but always my father's. If I tell my daughter, though, she'll assume it's mine unless I tell her where it came from. I do that now, with my students. I tell them where I get a lot of stuff, because I'm uncomfortable claiming any (fleeting, transitory, meaningless) honor of "I came up with that."

When I get beyond that, if I get beyond that—when I realize that ideas and apothegms and proverbs and metaphors are just floating around, I can get it and use it. That's not your book, that's my book—I borrowed it years ago, but I've possessed it ten times as long as you did, and it has my notes in it and it's been a major part of my life, not yours. Those creases in the spine are mine, not yours. If you want it back, my duty is not to return it but to buy you another copy.

This works not only horizontally across friendship, but vertically, across generations. I have some books that are mine that used to be my dad's. They're mine in a way they never were his. He gave me ideas that live in my head, ideas that he tossed off one day that will stick with me forever. In a sense, I've stolen myself from him. I was his son, and now I'm my own man. In a non-zero-sum world, relationships don't change, information doesn't abandon its source—it just finds a new place. If I steal it, I make that place a home.

Teachers and the Quest for Meaningful Pedagogy

A fellow student in class just asked me a question in response to a discussion we were having about Kohlberg's Stages of Moral Development. Here is the relevant tail-end of my initial post:

"Finally, I think that teachers should emphasize imaginative literature that forces such moral questions upon the characters and upon the reader, so that children can begin to understand what certain choices mean, and can begin to place themselves in others' shoes when viewing moral disagreements."

An excerpt from the well-reasoned response I was given is as follows:

"...I can appreciate your opinion that students can be presented with imaginative literature that poses moral dilemmas that encourage them to understand consequences of choices and will also help them to learn empathy for the plight of others who have to deal with moral dilemmas. The whole concept of helping students learn to think instead of just presenting a set of facts for them to memorize and pass a test is certainly a more challenging task for educators, but a concept that will spill over into all areas of learning." [emphasis mine]

This got me to thinking. Is it a more challenging task for educators? Learning to teach the high-school way, or, I guess, the education-degree way, has been daunting for me, used to the college way of teaching: lecture, discussion, essay. The repetition, memorization, and testing of material seems so baroque, so antiquated. And, I must admit, I always had the niggling feeling of "college is better," even though college teachers don't for the most part receive actual instruction in, you know, pedagogy. Still, I say, why bother with all that? Aren't US high schools very poorly ranked, and yet US universities very highly ranked? Sure--but if teaching is a skill, it can be taught, it can be learned. As long as we don't get too caught up in the old ways of doing things. And a lot of education theorists we've discussed agree. Here's my response to my classmate:

"The thing is, though, that I don't know if it is more of a challenge. We learn easier if we have a meaningful connection to our learning. That "meaningful connection" can be seeing something useful, as we see things in this class that helps us in the classes we teach, but that "meaningful connection" can also be a connection that provides, allows, strengthens meaning. Across the board you'll find that straight memorization fails most of the time: students commit something to memory, test over it, forget it, and then have nothing to build on for the next test. Because they're not interested, because they aren't forced to think, evaluate, decide, they have no connection to what they're learning. On the other hand, if we can get our students interested in something by showing just how cool or weird or interesting it is, the students on their own look for it.

And I don't really think that's challenging for educators. We wouldn't be doing anything harder. Because this is the way humans naturally learn things for themselves, we don't have to work as hard past the initial point of engagement. The biggest obstacle is getting kids interested in learning in general, and after that, showing them that one particular area, whether it's math or science or 1870s century German poetry, is fascinating when you get right down to it.

This style doesn't involve making giant lists of things to discuss. It primarily uses essay questions, not true/false, matching, or fill-in-the-blank. And instead of lecture-response, class discussions often bring about greater truths than one single teacher can provide. The problem with it is that it's anathema, completely the opposite of how a lot of people think of teaching, of what teaching should be, because with all the subjectivity, there's a certain lack of objectivity, the source of all grading and evaluation. But I would willingly sacrifice easy-to-determine grades for authentic learning any day of the week."

I stand by that. We in university need to learn pedagogy--skills to actually help our students learn. Especially in testing methods, for crying out loud--true/false tests are patently lousy, by almost anybody's judgment. But those in high school need to learn as well that some methods don't actually work, and they're only the easiest methods because they're the ones that people already know. Teaching can be easier through guided class discussions, even though testing is harder through grading essays. I'm fine with the tradeoff: less mind-numbing lecture, more exploration of personal relevance and meaning.

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