Inklings, Imagination, and Storytelling- bell hooks and the mythmakers

"When we lose our myths, we lose our place in the universe." -Madeleine L'Engle

Text selection from bell hooks’ (2010) Teaching Critical Thinking- Practical Wisdom:

“…by telling stories I had entered a redemptive space. I had entered a world of soul retrieval. Slowly, I was taking broken bits and pieces of my psyche and putting them together again, creating in the process new and different stories- liberating tales” (p.51).

“Without the ability to imagine, people remain stuck, unable to move into a place of power and possibility” (p.61).

Response to the text:

In bell hooks’ series of essays, I’ve found a rich and provocative cultural critique which inspires and challenges my own assumptions at times. Her perspective of teacher openness and student engagement reminds me of the work of Parker Palmer (2007) in which Palmer calls upon teachers to engage authentically with students in creating an environment in which everyone contributes to the learning through the use of reflection or introspection and the telling of one’s own story. Hooks uses storytelling to engage students in creating a space for transformative learning.

This reminds me of some of my favorite heroes in literature and academia in the 1930s-1940s; the Inklings group, a group of Oxford scholars like C.S. Lewis, JRR Tolkien, Dorothy Sayers, and others who met once a week to read each others’ work and to build community. Along with Madeleine L’Engle, these scholars defended the role that myth and storytelling plays in interpreting our world, making meaning of our experiences, and the vital role of imagination in academia. Tolkien and Lewis both wrote essays on the importance of storytelling. Not only did they write about stories, but their epic tales, like The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia, were a type of meaning-making for interpreting their own experiences with World War I and World War II.

Hooks (2010) writes that stories connect us to the larger world. When we recount our own stories, we find relationship with others’ stories. This storytelling and interpreting of stories (data, facts, information, and emotions) is what ties our experiences to the global community, to the human experience. Stories, myths, and legends are not only a way of knowing, but of nourishing the possibilities held in imagination. Lewis (1966) writes:

The Fantastic or Mythical is a Mode available at all ages for some readers; for others, at none. At all ages, if it is well used by the author and meets the right reader, it has the same power: to generalize while remaining concrete, to present in palpable form not concepts or even experiences but whole classes of experience, and to throw off irrelevancies. But at its best it can do more; it can give us experiences we have never had and thus, instead of ‘commenting on life’, can add to it.

Hooks alludes to this ability to add to our academic experience and the richness of academic literature when we begin to use our imaginations to tell new stories. In my own work on mythmaking in international service-learning, I am intrigued by stories. How can we use myth (that is, our own hidden truths and assumptions) to make sense of our world while at the same time embrace a new perspective such as one might find in an inter-cultural exchange or study abroad program? Tolkien (1966) suggests that stories allow us to view our world and our hidden assumptions from a different perspective.

Stories, and our telling of them, have the ability to empower the oppressed, to expose inequities in our educational systems. Through imagination, stories can heal, liberate and create new possibilities, new endings. L’Engle (1963) said it this way in her Newbery Award acceptance speech,

Because of the very nature of the world as it is today our children receive in school a heavy load of scientific and analytic subjects, so it is in their reading for fun, for pleasure, that they must be guided into creativity. These are forces working in the world as never before in the history of mankind for standardization, for the regimentation of us all, or what I like to call making muffins of us, muffins all like every other muffin in the muffin tin. This is the limited universe, the drying, dissipating universe that we can help our children avoid…

I apologize for the use of another long quotation, but really did not want to rob you of the richness of these ideas as so aptly expressed by their authors. I think bell hooks, Paolo Freire, and Stanley Aronowitz would all agree that we must become storytellers in order to be agents for societal transformation.

Have we relegated imagination to the non-academic world? I close with my own poor attempt at an apology for myth and stories, In Defense of Fairy Tales (Garner, 2009):

Have you ever seen a rainbow
with a pot of gold at its end?
Have you ever heard the whispers

at night of the fairy folk, friend?

Did you ever catch a glimpse,

in a secret vale, of the fauns?

Perchance upon a moonlit night
see the dance of the leprechauns?

And when you were drifting to sleep
did you ever happen to spy
the Sandman or pixies or trolls?
Or perhaps hear the elves' lullaby?
I've trembled with fear at the sound
of the hooves of the great minotaur
and fell to my knees in awe
of the proud, majestic centaur.

But what I fear most is the throng,
with banner held high called "Progress",
as they vanquish all mythical things,
spurning magic they do not possess.
Heedless of things they cannot see,
they're blind to the grace of the naiads.
But poorer yet the ears must be
which ne'er have heard strains of dryads.
How miniscule the world must be
which lacks imagination
and where the soul's ascent
from cave to illumination?

Small minded men would impugn us.

"Great intellects" might accuse
that we hide in Atlantic polity
"which can never be drawn into use."*
How tragic a world unpeopled
with angel or hero or demon.
And this, greatest threat of all-
the real world's devouring dragon-
a fragile world sans mystery,
whose glory is in banality.
A world so un-apocryphal
with hopelessly un-epic beauty.

Where are the prophets called artists
like L'Engle and Lewis and Milton?
Where are the mythmaker-poets
like Stevenson, Homer, and Tolkien?
They fashioned a world of romance
from fragments of ancient rune,
where memories of "Once upon a time"
still transform the night without moon.

(* from Milton's Areopagitica )

References

Garner, J. (2009). Imagination’s Door and other silly rhymes. Retrieved November 7, 2010

from http://imaginationsdoor.blogspot.com.

hooks, b. (2010). Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom. New York: Routledge.

L'Engle, M. (1963). The Expanding Universe: Newbery Award Acceptance Speech. New York:

Crosswicks Ltd.

Lewis, C.S. (1966). ‘Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s to Be Said’ as printed in Of

Other Worlds: Essays and Stories. London: Geoffrey Bles.

Palmer, P. (2007). The Courage to Teach. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Tolkien, J.R.R. (1966). The Tolkien Reader. New York: Del Ray.

Down with the Man!

Selected text from Aronowitz' Against Schooling: For an education that matters (2008):

"But schools do not transmit a 'love for the world' or 'for our children,' as Arendt suggests; instead, contrary to their democratic pretensions, they teach conformity to the social, cultural, and occupational hierarchy. In our contemporary world, they are not constituted to foster independent thought, let alone encourage independence of thought and action." (p.19)

Reflection:

As I read Aronowitz' text, I was stunned by his abrasive, arrogant, and judgmental tone and use of language. Claiming a lack of "tolerance for boredom" (p. 5), Aronowitz goes on to claim that though he didn't need credentials, he got them and on his own terms, thanks to no one but himself. He boasts about skipping undergraduate school and getting his PhD without the interference of any professors, whom he obviously deemed as moronic influences and beneath him intellectually.

Thinking about some of my own experiences in action-learning labs and co-intelligence, I was saddened that Aronowitz was so arrogant that he didn't think that he could benefit in the least by trying to learn in a community of students and professors. I'm not saying that formal schooling is the only way to learn. I just think that Aronowitz robbed himself of an opportunity to learn independently and with others, the very thing he rants about as the great evil in our school systems today. I began to ask myself “Where is the love that Aronowitz spoke of?” His writings seem devoid of love, but seem to be rants and raves against every order or perceived authority.

The more I read, the more disenchanted I became with Aronowitz and his hypocrisy…and my own. He rails against credentialing, but certainly used it for his own gain. Though I am against credentialing for the sake of driving an economic, consumer machine, I also am in the credentialing industry. He claims to represent the working poor, but has used his privilege to pull himself up by his own bootstraps, climbing the social ladder he denounces. I don’t claim to be from working class intellectuals, but I have touted the “pull yourself up by your own bootstraps” mentality at times. He rails against authority, yet sets himself up as an authority in alternative schooling. Though I have benefited from the existing authority system in public education, I have also praised the benefits of alternative education programs from garden-based education to environmental schools. So, I began to ask, "What is Aronowitz saying that he's not saying with words? Where is he coming from?"

Aronowitz came out of the 1960s counterculture movement with its anti-authoritarian “Down with the man” slogan. His mistrust of authority is evident in his glorification of his own alternative school experiences (until “the man” came in and laid down some rules) and in his praise of music and media which rebel against societal norms and middle class morality. However, Aronowitz lauds the music and media scene in order to prove his point that students learn from a variety of sources, the least effective of which is the public school system in its present form.

Finally, at the end of chapter two, Aronowitz offers up a spark of hope in an abysmally dark rant against social class, culture, and education. He proffers an outline for changing both societal structure and our educational system; changes which will, hopefully, spawn creativity and independent thought in our children.

References

Aronowitz, S. (2008). Against Schooling: For an education that matters. Boulder:

Paradigm Publishers.