"'excellence, however, is rather simple.' Ummm... no it's not. Excellence is elegant. Elegance can make excellence appear simple. But excellence is never ever simple. Excellence is always preceded by years of toil: deliberate, intense, comprehensive study and carefully reflected upon experience.
More and more we seem to believe in notions of instant gratification. Knowledge and skill is just a download away...not. Sorry to break it to ya kids, but for the foreseeable future there are certain things that our meatrix can and can't do.
And no it's not just hard work. Everyone works hard (except for maybe the richest, as there's no way they could ever work hard enough to justify their wealth).
Patty you go on to prove my point. To take your example:Tired: Mac vs. PC commercials and lacking the creativity to communicate in your own tropes.Wired: You figure it out. Oh, and realizing that just bitching is part of the problem. Bitching is easy. Bitching is simple. Bitching is not excellence.Cotton candy spinnery is all fluffy sweet, but it's a nutritional desert. It's all just clever trash. What a life waste that is." (James Burns)
James, Your way of narrating the development of excellence is one many readers may be familiar with, but they ought to know that many people believe genius, great creativity, emerges only when people look at life with an attitude of spirited play. Progressive educators like Alfie Kohn and Stanley Greenspan have the same end as you do -- they want kids to grow up truly creative, but they see this end as coming through getting kids to relax, take chances, being more than willing to look stupid, take delight in what they do: the care-free approach. They avoid the kind of talk you're offering -- that is, of taking care, being deliberate, of comprehensive study -- because it makes learning seem "tight" and arduous, with pleasure not as something that arises naturally enough from -- because it is inherently part of -- the doing, but as something you get after many years, and only after much pain and frustration. Personally, I find your attitude toward rewards a bit calvinist: where creativity MUST be seen as emerging from toil because any other kind of life MUST be judged as about instant gratification, lazyness-- as about bad stuff, for bad people, heading nowhere at all good.
I think to show me up as unimaginative (and not just as someone que n'est pas au current), rather than argue that my turning to the P.C. vs. Mac trope by itself showed I couldn't have much of a mind, you would have done better (or at least have reached me more effectively) if you had shown how I used the Mac vs. P.C. trope with little imagination. Poets/rhetoriticans can show great creativity when they fashion new tropes or other poetic forms/devices, but they can show their stuff just as well when they make effective, imaginative use of the materials already at hand. The tropes in pastoral poetry are familiar to all who use them, for example: the fun is in seeing how they tease and twist their shepherds, lovers, flowers, and nymphs, in novel ways that delight, surprise, and convince.
For me, turning kids on to the possibilities of itunesU isn't about instant gratification. It's about getting kids to know that THEY can be the ones in charge of their own education, about not being so ready to bow their heads to the powers that be. It's about empowerment, the nurturance of self-belief and self-esteem: for me, the kinds of things that engender creative exploration. I think that if they nurture this attitude toward their world, their development will become worth our demarcation and study -- that is, I think my cotton-candy talk can lead to the enterprises you would like to see more of in society, and when table-talk turns to the post-secondary.
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