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GDMWiki: GDM Talk Intentions 2021/12/11

Brian's GDM Talk Intentions

There was a meeting for GDM teachers on December 11, 2021. The teachers saw an example on-line lesson and a talk. For the on-line lesson we did put on after a review of take off. My teaching of the sentences with operations like take, put, give, go, and come is in a five-part structure.[En:5p] With A4 paper and on-screen slides the five-part structure makes it simple to see the changes from will take to is taking to took. The pocket-sized textbook, English Through Pictures: Book 1 (EP1) makes use of a four-part structure, like 起承転結(KiShoTenKetsu),[En:KSTK] but the way of starting and ending is different on pages fourteen and fifteen.(EP1pp14n15) The five-part structure always starts like page fourteen(EP1p14) and ends like page fifteen(EP1p15). I have two ways of seeing the five-part structure: one way is that I put one set-the-scene (場面設定) part before four KiShoTenKetsu parts. The other way of seeing is that there is a put-together (合) part after four KiShoTenKetsu parts.

This five-part structure is like the three-point essay used to teach writing in the U.S.A.[En:SBPC] I see the essay structure as having and introduction before and a conclusion after the beginning (will put), middle (is putting), and end (put). On December 11th, I had great hopes to do a talk with the title Education and Media: Design for Freedom but I was not able to get ready. I was not able to make the ideas go together in a good enough way. I had a desire to do a talk in which the Ends and Means[BG:IarPCE-EaM] were a good match. The ends are freedom in education and media and the means were a libre ("free as in freedom") on-line service and software through which we saw slideshow programs. We did the example lesson and talk on-line with Jitsi[En:JM] which is free software. The slideshows for my lesson made use of pictures from learners (with their permission) and were programmed in the Racket[En:RL] language. DrRacket is free software, like Jitsi, and has a special slideshow[En:RS] language. In a way the ends and means were matched for my lesson and talk. But I was not able to give a good explanation for the aims, books,[En:TlkBks] desires, or principles that should give form to my attempts at lessons, talks, and writings.

I will put some ideas on the page. This writing is an attempt at deep thought about GDM. I see a need for a talk that is able to put together learning from Noam Chomsky's speech Education and Democracy and I.A. Richards's book Design for Escape: World Education Through Modern Media. The ideas from Noam Chomsky's speech and I.A. Richards's book are important for GDM teachers of Ogden's Basic English. The thoughts of Chomsky and Richards give a design to us for teaching English as a Common World Language. The speech from Chomsky covers the whole world. He gives us ideas from John Dewey: that the aim of production(making, or the economy) is "free human beings associated with one another on terms of equality."(Chomsky on Miseducation p37 「チョムスーの教育論」phh80) In this same talk Chomsky also says the words of Bertrand Russel.[En:NC-edu]

Bertrand Russel's statement about education makes use of the same image as the GDM website.[En:GDMtree] GDM teachers see the growth of language and the learner "as a gardener regards a young tree, as something with a certain intrinsic nature, which will develop into and admirable form, given proper soil and air and light." The book from Richards covers "technological advance"(p.5) and how "data-processing is not going to make the role of moral deliberation any slighter—but rather far more exacting…"(p.8) With today's computers and free software[En:FS] it is possible for teachers and learners to do their own data-processsing and make their own media.

By using computers well we are able to act upon our own *choice*s about education and media.[Bg:SI,FoH-exposed] Acting like machines, not persons,[Bg:EP1p37] large organizations (in a pyramid-form) [Bg:ET-teaching] use computers for greater control and manipulation of human beings.[Bg:SI,FoH-crisis][Bg:SI,RiToE-crisis] We are in an attention economy[En:AE] that is also called surveillance capitalism.[En:SC] If we have to make use of computers and screens we should make use of the ideas of Chomsky and Richards for a design for freedom. The areas of mass media, software use and English education are in need of a new, better design. [Bg:SI,RiToE-ordered]

I am putting ideas in writing about design and education. David Graddol in English Next gives an explanation about EFL's "design for failure".[Bg:DGEN-failure] Traditionally English education worked to keep most people away from power, and to keep some people in better positions. Using native-speakers as models is a bad idea, which native-speakers will be the model? The choice of model in most textbooks seems to be shallow middle-class consumers from the U.S.A.[Bg:GUA-food] Douglas Lummis in The Ideology of English Conversation gives an explanation of the shallow substance of Japan's Eikaiwa industry.[Bg:SI,RiTE-Esl] The substance and style(tone) of Eikaiwa and school textbooks[Bg:SI,RiTE-sbks] is not of enough value to take up our attention.[Bg:PC-tone] Japan's school textbooks and commercial coursebooks are full of fast-food and shopping scenes. Such advertising has bad effects for our learners.

Juliet Schor in Born to Buy/(子供を狙え)[En:AdsVsJoy] explains how advertising is bad for the health of children's minds. Good teachers love[En:BR-love] and care[En:bh-love] for their students. Our teaching should not make learners' minds even "more exposed"[Bg:SI,FoH-exposed] to the unhealthy influence of advertising. We teachers are not for sale. Our learners are not for sale. S.I. Hayakawa in /Poetry and Advertising[En:SIH-PaA] says that poetry is disinterested while advertising is venal ("available for hire" or for sale). He writes that venal writers use our culture's "value-symbols" for "selling" which is "advantaging the speaker at the expense of the hearer." [Bg:ET-teaching] Hayakawa's writing much like parts of Richards' Responsiblities In the Teaching Of English. I saw Hayakawa's essay (which is from Poetry: A Magazine of Verse/(1946)) in a collection of writings called /Toward Liberal Education: Third Edition/(1957). The /Third Edition came out the same year as English Through Pictures: Book 3. In Towards Liberal Education we can read the General and Special Education chapter of General Education in a Free Society.

I.A. Richards did work with The Harvard Committee for the writing of General Education in a Free Society. My idea is that Towards Liberal Education was influenced greatly by I.A. Richards' work for General Education.[Bg:SI,FoH-teacher] Richards's English Through Pictures: Book 3 is like Toward Liberal Education in putting The Harvard Committee's ideas into the form of a book for reading. Using only a thousand and fifty words the readers of Book 3 can get ideas about William Harvey(EP3p79) and Joseph Priestly(EP3p86) to see how human beings came to discover the knowledge we have today. A good number of the same important areas from Book 3 are covered with "full English" in Toward Liberal Education. With EP/GDM we are working toward a General Education for a Free Society through the good use of language.(EP3p69)

I put some ideas about education in writing. The ideas are from useful books about the liberal arts, the global economy, and our society. A great aim for Ogden's Basic English was for non-native speakers to be able to talk and work with one another.[Bg:LBE-il] My feeling is that our aim is to work with English as a Common(EP3p52) Language for an Earth Democracy (Vandana Shiva).[Bg:VSED-faces] Our teaching of EP and GDM should help the world's people become "free human beings associated with one another on terms of equality" in the ways seen by John Dewey, Noam Chomsky,[En:NC,IE-universal] and I.A. Richards.[En:DE-sharing] A good General Education (or Education in the Humanities, or Liberal Arts Education) helps us to see the purposes that are common among all human beings.

English Through Pictures: Book 3 was Richards's attempt to get learners started in seeing the value of our common treasures (knowldedge, philosophy, art, and play) on this earth. GDM teachers should make use of Ogden's Basic English and Richards's organic principles to make Book 4 from Japan so that learners can see important learning that we did after 1957. Just as in EP3 we see William Harvey's learning about the heart and arteries in England, learners now have to see the Masazumi Harada's learning baby and umbilical cords in Minamata. In 1957, for 'participation in planetary affairs' and an Earth Democracy it was important to get knowledge about how people first came to see physiology (William Harvey) and chemistry (Joseph Priestly). It is now important to get knowledge about how people first came to see bioaccumulation (Rachel Carson) and the effects of chemicals in the ecology (Masazumi Harada). In Design for Escape Richards talks of the aim to produce "effectively capable people."(p. 5) In Practical Criticism Richards aims for the education of the "mind of the future"[Bg:PC-MoF] and how we need to practice making choices.[Bg:PCchoice] We need to make "effectively capable" choices about our media, techonology, and education.

The design of education for English was trivial[Bg:SI,RiTE-sbks], confusing[Bg:SI,RiTE-Esl], and a failure.[Bg:DGEN-failure] Good teachers do not feel good about using bad style[Bg:ET-teaching] and bad designs.[Bg:DGEN-failure] But I.A. Richards made a design for escape from bad style and shallow values. We now make use of EP/GDM's organic principles and Book 3's ideas about the growth human knowledge to keep seeing our earth and our humanity clearly. It is time to make use of free software[En:FS] to make free learning materials so that education will help everyone to see clearly our knowledge about ecology and justice. From South Kyushu my hope is to make learning materials based on experiences in Minamata and writings by Rachel Carson ( Silent Spring 「沈黙の春」) and Masazumi Harada 「水俣病」、「水俣病は終っていない」. Working for education about social justice and the ecology is a way to go on with the work I.A. Richards His work was an the attempt to proctect ourselves[Bg:IarNaP] with the humanities[Bg:bhTC,S-humanities] from the "suicidal forces"[Bg:SI,RiTE-takepart] of marketing and pollution.[Bg:SI,FoH-protect]

Endnotes

ことばは生きています。ことばの学習は, 木の成長にたとえることができます。 初めがよければ根が生え, 枝が伸び，強く高く成長し続けていきます。 英語も, よい土台つくりからはじまります。

2017年、Netflixのリード・ヘイスティングスは、睡眠が彼の最大の敵であると語りました。

あなたの行動を変えるための[オンラインIT]技術は日進月歩で進んでいる…

人間は自由意志はなく操作可能な存在…

… この利便性とトレードオフになるもののひとつが「自由意志」である。…

人間の思考は必ずしも自分が思うようには働いていないのだ。西欧の市民社会は人の感情や選択は何者にも侵されない聖域であることを前提としている。

The teacher should love his children better than his State or his Church; otherwise he is not an ideal teacher. [See Poetry and Advertising by S.I. Hayakawa and see if today's teachers lover their 'socio-economic system' more than their children (En:SIH-PaA) ]

  • [En:bh-love] Please see bell hooks's book Teaching Community (2003), Heart to Heart: Teaching with Love and:
    • In How Can We Serve on page 86:

At its best, teaching is a caring profession. But in our society all caring professions are devalued.

… in November 1989, Father Ignacio Ellacuria, rector of the University of Central America, addressed the West on the underlying issues. You “have organized your lives around inhuman values,” he said. These values "are inhuman because they cannot be universalized. The system rests on a few using the majority of the resources, while the majority can’t even cover their basic necessities. It is crucial to define a system of values and a norm of living that takes into account every human being."

  • [En:DE-sharing] In Design for Escape I.A. Richards writes on page ten:

What is needed, of course, is a practicable and compelling technique for this sharing.

Background: Sources and Quotes

  • [Bg:IarPC-EaM] Aldous Huxley wrote a book called Ends and Means, Yuzuru Katagiri talks about 「目的と手段」 in his translation of Huxley's Island 「島].(p. 337) Here is a line about ends and means from Practical Criticism by I.A. Richards.

… in no compex field of human activity is the distinction between means and ends easy to draw. (. 276)

  • [Bg:EP1p37] English Through Pictures: Book 1 by I.A. Richards

Men and women and boys and girls are not things. They are persons. You are a person.

This little book is an example of the free use of Basic English. In addition to about 365 of the words on the Basic List of 850, some 25 other words are at work here. And it does not everywhere keep to the letter of the Basic English rules.

  • [Bg:PCchoice] in /Practical Criticism/(1929)

… a firm sense of the importance of the critical act of choice, its difficulty, and the supreme exercise of all our faculties that it imposes.(p. 286)

Only by penetrating far more whole-mindedly inot poetry than we usually attempt, and by collection all our energies in our choice, can we overcome these treacheries within us. That is why good reading, in the end, is the whole secret of "good judgment."(p. 287)

… we must find means of exercising our power of choice.(p. 328)

Let us be clear about some political essentials from the outset. However desirable a common language for all the world may be, as a means of communication between peoples who in their homes speak different tongues, it neither can nor should be imposed by one nation or group of nations upon others. It must come into use freely, as a general convenience, under the urge of the everyday motives of mankind. It must be taken up because men see it to be useful to them—too useful to be neglected. It must serve, and serve immediately, their economic, cultural, and social nepds. It must give them, right away from the start, a reward in increased possibilities and power. It must spread as the automobile, the electric light, and the telephone or airplane have spread. Only so can it get behind it the drive required to carry through such a gigantic stride toward increased rationality in human affairs.

  • [Bg:SI,RiTE-takepart] In Speculative Instruments, Responsibilities in the Teaching of English by I.A. Richards (p. 93)

Experiment shows that a year of ordered English can give the beginner an entrance into the language hitherto rarely achieved in five. And with that a medium is available for truly world-wide communication and participation in planetary affairs. If parallel improvements were worked out in the ordering of higher level materials we could then develop what man[humankind] so urgently needs: a common purpose jointly understood. And this is the only remedy powerful enough to protect him from his suicidal forces

  • [Bg:SI,FoH-exposed] In Speculative Instrutments, The Future of the Humanities (pp. 58-59)

Minds have become more exposed than ever before (p. 58)…

… how are we to get teachers able to give their pupils any power to select from among the influences to which they become every more open.(p. 59)

  • [BG:SI,FoH-protect] In Speculative Instruments, The Future of the Humanities (pp. 66-67)

Manipulation and exploitation… is the chief danger man incurs through the decline of the humanities. The humanities are his defence agains emotional bamoozlement and misdirection of the will.

  • [Bg:bhTC,S-humanities] In Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope, Standards on pages 78 and 79 bell hooks writes:

Teacher and poet Nikki Giovanni believes that a liberal arts education, and particularly one in the humanities, can a should be a location where students and teacher are able to unlearn racism. in Racism 101 she writes: "It is clear to me that if there is any one crying need in our educational system, it is for the humanities to assert themselves… We must reclaim the humanities to remind us that patience is a human virtue; we must intergrate racially to show ourselves fear cannot always determine human possibilities."

  • [Bg:ET-teaching] In Beautiful Evidence,(2006) Edward Tufte compares a corporate slideshow programs with good teaching. I.A. Richards and C.K. Ogden too gave much thought to metaphor.

The metaphor for PowerPoint is the software corporation itself… a big bureaucracy enganged in computer programming (deep hierarchical structures, relentlessy sequential, nested, one-short-line-at-a-time) and in marketing (advocacy not analysis, more style than substance, misdirection, slogan thinking, fast pace, branding, exaggerated claims, marketplace ethics)…

A better metaphor for presenation is good teaching. Practical teaching techniques are very helpful for presentations in general. Teachers seek to explain something with credibility, which is what many presentation are trying to do. The core ideas of teaching— explanation, reasoning, finding things out, questioning, content, evidence, credible authority not patronizing authoritarianism — are contraty to the cognitive style of PowerPoint. And the ethical values of teachers differ from those engaged in marketing. (p. 161)

    • To get more support for the EP books and against corporate books see also Edward Tufte's Visual Explanations (1997), especially page 74 about minimal contrasts and this on page 148:

… information architecture mimics the hierarchical structure of the bureaucracy producing the design. This also occurs in the desing of magazines, [and EFL textbooks like Sunshine, Impact Intro, Icon…] as strongly colored frames delineate each sub-editor's turf. Those accented borders and running heads, sometimes the strongest visual statements on the page, are not there to help the reader [English language learner] but rather to replicate the organizational form.

The physcial and social sciences alike… conceive men as units subject to forces playing upong them from without… a man's desires and opinions and beliefs, the springs of his action and sources of his triumphs and sufferings, are … for science, to be studied from without… they must be public adn the must be manipulable… It is the modes of such manipulation and the resultant behaviour which are really being studied…

In contrast, the humanities pin a faith… on the ideal autonomy of the individual.. He[She] is happiest who is least able to be changed from without, as Socrates averred(Republic, 38I). Man[A person] is not a thing[Ep1p37] to be pushed about, however kindly… He is a spirit who learns—not as a slave learns (Republic, 536E) but by exercising the freedom which is his[her] being.

  • [Bg:SI,RiToE-crisis] In Speculative Instruments, Responsibilities In the Teaching Of English

This is not a political, it is a cultural crisis…

On the one side are those who see men as particles push about by external forces, and their desires, opinions, adn beliefs as mechanisms which may be manipulated…(p. 105)

  • [Bg:GUA-food] Yuzuru Katagiri translated another important book by Paul Goodman: Growing Up Absurd (1956) 「不条理に育つ」(昭和46) but the Appendices are not in the translation. There are important ideas about classics 古典 for helping us think about GDM, and this part about food (and school books?):

… they[Young people] eat franks and beans… hamburgers, malted milks… the drink-down quick-sugar foods of spoiled children, and the pre-cut meat for lazy chewing beloved of ages six to ten. Nothing is bitten or bitten-off, very little is chewed; there is a lot of sugar for animal energy, but no much solid food to grow on. (Appnedix E, p. 283)

  • [Bg:PC-tone] In Practical Criticism on page 198 I.A. Richards writes:

For by the tone in which a great writer handles these familiar things we can tell whether they have their due place in the whole fabric of his thought and feeling and whether, therefore, he has the right to our attention. Good manners, fundamentally, are a reflection of our sense of proportion, and faults of tone are much more than mere superficial blemishes. The may indicate a very deep disorder.

  • [Bg:SI,RiTE-sbks] In Speculative Instruments, Responsibilities in Teaching English:

… a sound complaint now that children's school books, in the United States at least, have recently been far too… trivial in content. They have been made so in the interests of quantity and rapidity of perusal, which pays the publisher… a mind which meets no problems worthy of it does not learn how to handle them when they come. The effects of this underloaded early reading are often perceptible thoughout life…

  • [Bg:SI,RiTE-Esl] in Speculative Instruments, Responsibilities in the Teaching of English:

Most beginners in English as a second language are exposed to a miscellany of words and structures which might be selected for the purpose of inviting confusion rather than avoiding it… [to avoid wasting beginners' time and lowering their morale EP/GDM presents] a sequence of steps into English which seems most widely and deeply instructive to the learner… with two principles in control: the postponement of… anything.. liable to be mistaken for… what has already been learned; and the maximum and most varied exercise of past gains in new tasks. The sequence in brief is organic…

EFL, as we know it today, is a largely 19th- century creation, though drawing on centuries of experience in teaching the clas sical languages. EFL tends to highlight the importance of learning about the culture and society of native speakers; it stresses the centrality of methodology in discussions of effective learning; and emphasises the importance of emulating native speaker language behaviour…

The target language is always someone else’s mother tongue. The learner is constructed as a linguistic tourist—allowed to visit, but without rights of residence and required always to respect the superior authority of native speakers.

'DESIGNED TO PRODUCE FAILURE'

…

Although EFL has become technologised, and has been transformed over the years by communicative methods, these have led only to a modest improvement in attainment by learners. The model, in the totality of its pedagogic practices, may even have historically evolved to produce perceived failure. Foreign languages, in many countries, were largely learned to display social position and to indicate that your family was wealthy enough to have travelled to other countries… — David Graddol

  • [Bg:SI,RiToE-ordered] In Speculative Instruments, Responsibilities in the Teaching of English by I.A. Richards

  • [Bg:SI,FoH-teacher]

… modern scholarship… requires… training of a sort which is of hardly any value to a teacher in general education. It is training… too extensive and diverse to form, in any mind not of a very rare order, any coherent, much less any directing or confirming, view of essential human purpose… It doesn not give him what he needs as a teacher of the humanities—reasonably rich and considered views of a person's human relations to other persons… it is intensive distraction fomr the hard essential task of maturing such views…

It is preventing us from supplying our greatest need—teachers able to help humanity remain humane.

Literature—a deep enough and leisurely enough familiarity with what the best minds have thought and felt about people—used to produce such teachers. Modern scholarship positively gets in the way.(pp. 60-61)

  • [Bg:LBE-il] In Learning Basic English: A Practical Handbook for English-Speaking People by I.A. Richards and Christine Gibson, p. 14

Basic… was designed by Mr. Ogden to be an international language, and it is naturally there that its greatest field of use is to be seen. It is those of us who have to do with foreign learners limited in their knowledge of our language who will benefit most obviously from Basic in their efforts to meet their correspondents halfway. As a writer in The Hindu (Madras) puts it, "For the Anglo-Americans its spread is a call for self-conquest and the service of others."

  • [Bg:PC-MoF] In Practical Criticism on page 322

The mind that can shift its viewpoint and still keep its orientation, that can carry over into quite a new set of definitions the results gained through past experience in other frameworks, the mind that can rapidly and without strain or confusion perform the systematic transformations required by such a shift, is the mind of the future… The whole linguistic training wer receive at present is in the other direction…

The goal is, and must always be, justice. —Arundhati Roy with John Cusack