Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke in Before Midnight Source: U-tube
There are good but troubling reasons to predict a redesign of the K-12 curriculum in the next decade to explicitly teach conversation skills.
It’s easy to imagine that our absorption with digital media will soon require adjustments to school curricula to formally model the process of engaged conversation. With rates of attention to screens at astronomical highs, Americans seem to be spending less time directly conversing with each other in the same physical space. And while it has become a cliché to bemoan “the lost art of conversation”—virtually every parent of a thirteen year old will express this in some form—there are good reasons to expect a redesign of the K-12 curriculum in the next decade to explicitly teach and model the skills of direct engagement. Schools with low teacher-to-student ratios already do this as a pedagogical style. It’s natural to put learning within a conversational frame.
To understand the importance of conversation we need to remember that the central model for communication is the dialogue. From the dialogues of Plato to the advocacy-saturated screenplays of Aaron Sorkin, the act of talking with another is taken to be the generative source of how we discover who we are and what we believe. By comparison, a monologue can seem like an orphan: a living thing withering without its natural counterpart.
The Greeks were among the first to enshrine the truth-testing as a representative purpose of entering into direct discussion. The power of “dialectic”–the give and take of discussion–is not simply as rhetorical decoration for professional philosophers. We know what’s at stake every time our ideas or preferences are challenged by others. Can we successfully respond? Can we defend what we believe? Conversations do not have the sparkling repartee of a dinner with André. But they need the feature of putting two people in the same space to be immediate interlocutors with each other. Anonymous comments added at the bottom of an online post just won’t cut it.
Consider Richard Linklater’s wonderful trilogy of films about love gained and lost—Before Sunrise (1995), Before Sunset (2004), and Before Midnight (2013). All of these popular features are constructed as extended conversations over the life cycle of a relationship. Linklater wrote the films with Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke, the actors who fully embody the couple. A viewer ends up enthralled not because of what they do, but because of what they say. They are alive to the world and the choices they’ve made. They appear to know each other in ways that couples who have become mute cannot match.
Another important writer/director makes the same point by giving us just the reverse: fascinating models of conversation that have metastasized into something more toxic. David Mamet is known to audiences and actors as the creator of encounters crippled by stilted exchanges. His characters typically flounder in a choppy surf of incomplete sentences, corrosive asides and blank stares. In films like Glengarry Glen Ross (1992) and The Spanish Prisoner (1997), they mostly pay the price. Misunderstandings are compounded. Distrust begins to flourish. And characters are unable to complete thoughts without resorting to abusive threats.
By contrast, young kids are natural conversationalists. Most like to talk. They want to exercise their growing curiosity about others. Reading a book with a child is often a delight (unless you are in a hurry) because almost every page is an invitation for commentary and questions. Reading is not the solitary activity it becomes in adulthood. With more age, the conversational impulse isn’t necessarily killed, but it’s smothered in packaged media content that is still mostly one-way. As it is now, a child in a home brimming with screens seems to be pushed to move from early loquaciousness to comfortable spectatorship. Most of my colleagues note that coaxing even high-performing college students into conversational can be a challenge.
This will all need to change if we want to produce a new generation of active listeners and engaged problem-solvers. We are simply going to have to start earlier to teach and model the kind of animated conversational skills that define what it means to be fully alive to the moment.
The pictures are a useful reminder that the sciences are not immune from making choices that will sway supporters and stakeholders.
The Hubble Telescope that was launched by the Space Shuttle Discovery 25 years ago has had a remarkable run as a celestial observer. Almost everyone has seen images that have transformed what we thought was the vast blackness of space into a virtual garden of constellations and stars. The empty sky of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1969) has been replaced by the color and depth of an exuberant expressionist painting.
What many may not know is that NASA and other space agencies “colorize” pictures coming from satellites and probes. They do to our solar system what Ted Turner and TNT television once tried to do to the classic black and white film, Citizen Kane.
Elizabeth Kessler notes in her book, Picturing the Cosmos,1 that NASA has a strong bias for essentially photoshopping their images with the kind of earth-tone colors we associate with the Southwest. Raw images show up first at the space center in what is functionally black and white. One astronomer Kessler cites observes that at the distances involved “true color becomes largely moot, since we can’t perceive it in the first place.”(p. 153). And so NASA loads Hubble pictures with a chromatic palette that reflects our continuing romance with images of the untamed West. The best known reference points are the famous larger-than-life Rocky Mountain and Sierra paintings done a 100 years ago by Thomas Moran and Albert Bierstadt.
Bierstadt’s The Sierras Wikipedia.org
As early as 1983, New York Times writer and photographer Malcolm Browne complained about what was then the fairly new practice of essentially dressing up views of our galaxy:
“Some of the lies perpetrated by astronomical pictures are unavoidable or even useful. False-color images enable scientists to discern all kinds of things that would escape notice in an ”honest” photograph. But there is a trace of deliberate mendacity having nothing to do with scientific purpose in some of those pictures. The very scientists who gave us those great Voyager planetary photographs, moreover, are among the culprits; they have candidly acknowledged that the vivid, enhanced-color pictures we saw of the Jupiter and Saturn flybys were distributed in deference to popular taste. Neon-tinted pictures very likely get better results than drab ones, when budgets come up for review.”2
Gas Pillars of the Eagle Nebula–NASA
To be sure, a professional rhetorician like myself should be the last person to complain about the idea of adornment. And I won’t. A basic presumption of a word-person is that we always construct the world we need using the vast treasure of colorizing language.
The lesson here is simple. The pictures are a useful reminder that the sciences are not immune from making choices that will sway supporters and stakeholders. The presumed black-and-white simplicity of sorting the “subjective” from the “objective” begins to melt into converging Jackson Pollock swirls when the processes of scientific discovery are presented in the interpretive languages of text and imagery. We may aspire to be hard-headed empiricists. But we are all necessarily transformed into advocates when we become narrators of our work to the world.
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1Elizabeth A. Kessler, Picturing the Cosmos: Hubble Space Telescrope Images and the Astronomical Sublime (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012).
2Quoted in Anya Ventura, “Pretty Pictures:” The Use of False Color in Deep Space, InVisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture, October 29, 2013.
