Dr. Worthen is a historian at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, who writes frequently about higher education.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/25/opinion/college-students-monks-mental-health-smart-phones.html
Thursday, June 8, 2023
Mark Van Doren on the magic of teaching; the "secret" between teachers and students
If I speak of the students last it is not merely because they were the crucial persons with whom I spent my time, as must be true in any college; it is also because no way exists of describing what really goes on in a classroom once the door is closed. What goes on is a kind of secret between him who stands and those who sit. I knew this from the first; it was my secret even more than it was theirs. They had their own responses which I could hear or see them make: they raised their hands, they talked, they shook their heads, they laughed, they looked bored; and special approval or disapproval they expressed -- the custom is now obsolete -- by stamping or shuffling their feet on the floor. But even then I could believe that if anything of true moment was happening in their minds there was no immediate way for them to show it, any more than I could show, except by talking in the maturest way I could, and following any new idea as far as it would take me, how much our conversations interested me and how much I learned from them.
Mark Van Doren, My Columbia: Reminiscences of University Life, ed. Ashbel Green (New York: Columbia University, 2005), 110.
Sunday, June 4, 2023
NYT Opinion "When X = Literacy" Jan. 6, 1993
Malcolm X taught himself to read and write in prison, the hard way. He copied the dictionary, page by page, struggling to pronounce the words and to commit the definitions to memory.
In his autobiography he writes: ". . . as my word-base broadened, I could for the first time pick up a book and read and now begin to understand what the book was saying. Anyone who has read a great deal can imagine the new world that opened. . . . I never had been so truly free in my life."
New worlds continued to open, but none would have if Malcolm hadn't first transformed himself this way. This crucial point has been missed in the recent reappraisals of the Malcolm X legacy.
Malcolm X's newly acquired reading skills allowed him to transform himself from hustler to disciple of the Black Muslim separatist, Elijah Muhammad. Eventually the disciple saw through Black Muslim racism and embraced a more inclusive humanism. The metamorphosis had yet to be completed when Malcolm was murdered in 1965.
In the wake of the movie "Malcolm X," newspapers and journals have carried reassessments and speculations about what he would be doing if he were alive today. Black conservatives, focusing on Malcolm's insistence on black self-sufficiency, call him the founder of their movement. But black liberals say Malcolm's nationalism would have kept him forever apart from those conservatives who doubt the need for civil rights laws.
It's striking that this debate ignores the central transformation of Malcolm's life. In prison he came to see illiteracy as a second, inner jail that could confine him forever. His autobiography is most moving when it shows him breaching those walls and making contact with the world of ideas. This example remains crucial because African-Americans still suffer alarming illiteracy rates.
What would Malcolm X be doing if he were alive? Politics, perhaps. But surely he would be among the fiercest literacy advocates that the nation has ever known.
A version of this article appears in print on Jan. 6, 1993, Section A, Page 20 of the National edition with the headline: When X = Literacy.
https://www.nytimes.com/1993/01/06/opinion/when-x-literacy.html
Imam Malcolm on Reading
“I have often reflected upon the new vistas that reading opened to me. I knew right there, in prison, that reading had changed forever the course of my life. As I see it today, the ability to read awoke inside me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive. I certainly wasn’t seeking any degree, the way a college confers a status symbol upon its students. My home made education gave me, with every additional book that I read, a little bit more sensitivity to the deafness, dumbness, and blindness that was afflicting the black race in America. Not long ago, an English writer telephoned me from London asking questions. One was, “What’s your alma mater?” I told him, “Books.” You will never catch me with a free fifteen minutes in which I’m not studying something I feel might be able to help the black man.”
― Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X
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