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Wendell Berry and Higher Education: Cultivating Virtues of Place by Jack R. Baker, Jeffrey Bilbro
steveatwaywords's review
informative
medium-paced
2.5
Wendell Berry's hopes for education and learning, for community and place, are compelling and likely necessary. Baker and Bilbro do a fair job of assembling his various speeches, essays, and fiction to form a coherent whole to this vision, and then call for its possible applications to the university.
Even so, while the gathering of Berry's wisdom is a worthy endeavor, even if captured in uninspired chapter-structure templates, the authors' interpretations of his fiction as themes and lessons which apply are often strained, stretched. It is as if, once they decided to use his novels and stories as exemplars of the facets of pedagogy, they then sought long to force a work to fit.
Worse, though, Baker and Bilbro, both from Michigan's Spring Arbor University, have limited Berry's vision in sometimes crippling ways. Part of this is from their seeming "alliance" in Christian thinking: Berry's work is fairly devout, and so the evangelistic authors presume to root his pedagogy almost exclusively in traditional Christian Western models of thinking. I counted, for instance, only two brief references to Buddhism as the only moments where they dared to think outside of their own campus. When discussing foundations of the "tree of wisdom," for instance, they quickly and unreflectively presumed to offer Aristotelian and Socratic structures and Greco-Roman grammars. Well, what else would one ever consider as bringing us to a place of . . . virtue?
Yes, one might claim, they follow Berry's recommendations to knowledge of local traditions; yet over and over again, while pursuing the fraught concepts of Tradition, Hierarchy, Geography, Community, and Service, only the conservative Christian ethic is voiced. In brief, the vision of Baker and Bilbro is quite near-sighted, especially when the global commons and its people are at stake.
It may be that Berry, too, has this limitation in his pedagogy, but the excerpts from his speeches and other works did not lead me to this conclusion. If anything, Berry appears a Christian guided by his personal virtue and love of community, more an ethicist than narrow-minded evangelist.
All of this is most unfortunate, since this is the only book I know of which gathers Berry's work in this way. And the stakes are high: Berry and the authors are quite right to be highly concerned about the materialistic and profit-seeking model which has come to monopolize the testing and production of students, not just at the university but at the public school level, as well. By divorcing students from place, from planet, from relationships, from community, from considering (dare we say it) love as an inherent part of the decision-making process, we have come to produce the past few generations of thinkers as consumers of the worst sort, "entrepreneurs" who think of the short-term profit over the ethic of reflective engagement in the world.
There is room for not merely more scholarship here, but real reach and daring proposals for reform of our schooling. The authors do not have this reach, and all they can scrape up as resolve is hopeful words that instructors attempt such work each on their own.
Even so, while the gathering of Berry's wisdom is a worthy endeavor, even if captured in uninspired chapter-structure templates, the authors' interpretations of his fiction as themes and lessons which apply are often strained, stretched. It is as if, once they decided to use his novels and stories as exemplars of the facets of pedagogy, they then sought long to force a work to fit.
Worse, though, Baker and Bilbro, both from Michigan's Spring Arbor University, have limited Berry's vision in sometimes crippling ways. Part of this is from their seeming "alliance" in Christian thinking: Berry's work is fairly devout, and so the evangelistic authors presume to root his pedagogy almost exclusively in traditional Christian Western models of thinking. I counted, for instance, only two brief references to Buddhism as the only moments where they dared to think outside of their own campus. When discussing foundations of the "tree of wisdom," for instance, they quickly and unreflectively presumed to offer Aristotelian and Socratic structures and Greco-Roman grammars. Well, what else would one ever consider as bringing us to a place of . . . virtue?
Yes, one might claim, they follow Berry's recommendations to knowledge of local traditions; yet over and over again, while pursuing the fraught concepts of Tradition, Hierarchy, Geography, Community, and Service, only the conservative Christian ethic is voiced. In brief, the vision of Baker and Bilbro is quite near-sighted, especially when the global commons and its people are at stake.
It may be that Berry, too, has this limitation in his pedagogy, but the excerpts from his speeches and other works did not lead me to this conclusion. If anything, Berry appears a Christian guided by his personal virtue and love of community, more an ethicist than narrow-minded evangelist.
All of this is most unfortunate, since this is the only book I know of which gathers Berry's work in this way. And the stakes are high: Berry and the authors are quite right to be highly concerned about the materialistic and profit-seeking model which has come to monopolize the testing and production of students, not just at the university but at the public school level, as well. By divorcing students from place, from planet, from relationships, from community, from considering (dare we say it) love as an inherent part of the decision-making process, we have come to produce the past few generations of thinkers as consumers of the worst sort, "entrepreneurs" who think of the short-term profit over the ethic of reflective engagement in the world.
There is room for not merely more scholarship here, but real reach and daring proposals for reform of our schooling. The authors do not have this reach, and all they can scrape up as resolve is hopeful words that instructors attempt such work each on their own.
ivantable's review against another edition
5.0
I love Wendell Berry, and our evangelical culture needs more engagement with his thought. In a culture marked by restlessness and consumerism, this book on “cultivating virtues of place” is an oasis.
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