On steamy summer days such as this one, when the education news is reduced to a trickle, one must seek other sources by which to slake his eduthirst. The Harvard Educational Review arrived last week in the mail, and today I decided to read it.
My first selection was "The New Outspoken Atheism and Education" by Nel Noddings, who Wikipedia tells me "is an American feminist, educationalist, and philosopher best known for her work in philosophy of education, educational theory, and ethics of care." Undaunted by this description, I forge ahead, letting the beneficence of doubt be my guide, and run smack into this first sentence: "We live in an age of great contradictions."
That is true, insofar as it has been true of every "age" in which humankind has lived. But why the compulsion to note such a self-evident thing at the start of an essay that ostensibly hopes to address the topics of atheism and education?
I further forge and encounter, beyond the dubious introductory line, what is meant to be evidence bolstering it. "On the one hand," Noddings tells us (and you can bet there's an other hand where that one came from), "religion is playing an increasingly significant role in world politics" viz. all the stuff going on in the Middle East and in Danish cartoons and in the American presidential campaign. She continues: "On the other hand [told you so], for the first time in Western history, books by openly avowed atheists have made the best-seller lists."
Perhaps you can see where this is going--Noddings's contradiction, which she so labored to introduce by summoning up sweeping statements about the "age" we all inhabit, isn't even a contradiction at all. In fact, her second bit about the atheist tracts doesn't contradict her first bit about religious politics insomuch as it??reinforces it.
Now just how is a reader, after stumbling through that mess, supposed to continue on through the bramble; how can he be expected to do so, especially when the bramble is in this case 21 pages long, and when the introductory part of the essay ends with a paragraph that begins, "Readers should keep in mind, however, that I am talking about the theoretical possibilities"? So let's see:??The opening salvo was a total mess that began with a prima facie pronouncement for which supportive evidence was unnecessarily provided and which evidence, when provided, was not, in fact, supportive but destructive, and??the entire article is not meant to be digested in any actual, real, practical way, but the words should be interpreted only theoretically, and??the author has??gone ahead anyhow and written 21 pages of them. Well, it sounds like a whole lotta fun, but I'm afraid I'll be, er, washing my hair for the rest of the afternoon.