Summer 2010 US Tour

This has been posted on the Rosetta blog, but I figured I would put it here for good measure. Probably some of you who look at this don't follow Rosetta's activities. If you see a date where you're in the same city as me this summer, please get in touch and we can hang out. You might even see me with a mustache (bit of a gentlemanly wager within the band).

I'll most likely pick up the pace and blog through the tour too. 2010 so far has brought a lot of upheaval and change (in addition to what came before) and I haven't had the leisure time to write hyper-technical explanations or grumpy, abstract diatribes. And there's usually more happening on the road than can fit into 140 characters for the Twitter feed. I'll put crappy phone pictures there, and nice real-camera pictures here.

July 5th to July 10th are with Battlefields. All shows are with City of Ships.

July 3rd Detroit, MI @ Club 309
July 4th Fort Wayne, IN @ 1624 N Harrison St. (House show for 4th of July)
July 5th Chicago, Ill @ Metal Shaker
July 6th Wasau, WI @ Hangar Lounge
July 7th Minneapolis, MN @ Triple Rock Social Club
July 8th Fargo, ND @ The Aquarium
July 9th Moorhead, MN @ House of Wang (all ages)
July 10th Sioux Falls, SD @ Nutty’s North
July 11th Lincoln, NE @ Bourbon Theatre
July 12th Denver, CO @ High Dive
July 13th Salt Lake City, UT @ Burt’s Tiki Lounge
July 14th Boise, ID @ Gusto Bar
July 15th Spokane, WA @ The Boulevard
July 16th Portland, OR @ Plan B
July 17th Seattle, WA @ Rendezvous
July 18th Eureka, CA @ Little Red Lion
July 19th Santa Rosa, CA @ Northbay Film & Art Collective
July 20th San Francisco, CA @ The Knockout
July 21st Chico, CA @ Cafe Coda
July 22nd Pomona, CA @ Glass House
July 23rd Los Angeles, CA @ Vacation Vinyl (early: Rosetta at 7pm!)
July 23rd Los Angeles, CA @ The Blvd (all ages)
July 24th Phoenix, AZ @ Rogue Bar
July 25th Tucson, AZ @ Skrappy’s (with our buds in NORTH)
July 26th Albuquerque, NM @ The Fusion Factory
July 27th San Antonio, TX @ Nightrocker
July 28th Austin, TX @ Red 7
July 29th Oklahoma City, OK @ The Conservatory
July 30th Wichita, KS @ Eagles Lodge (ICT FEST)
July 31st Columbia, MO @ Cafe Berlinv
Aug 1st Saint Louis, MO @ Fubar
Aug 2nd Newport, KY @ Southgate House
Aug 3rd Columbus, OH @ Carabar
Aug 4th TBA

Romance about education

Stanley Fish writes in the NYT about classical education, a qualitative paradigm to counterbalance our outcome- and test-based models (via Ohbadiah).

As someone who was actually educated in precisely the way Fish is suggesting (home-schooled all the way through in classics, Enlightenment, and Modern/Postmodern thought; comprehensive ancient, medieval, and modern world history and politics; plus historically- tied math/sciences), I agree in principle with his valuation of that education. Unfortunately, it only prepares you to be exactly what Fish is: an overeducated, undersocialized, snobbish, elitist academic. And more unfortunately, there are vanishingly fewer openings with that job description every day. There are no jobs anymore for the Renaissance Man. The ones we see and celebrate are leftovers from a previous era, mostly held by gray-haired white men, born of privilege.

So I find myself with a world-class education from both a serious home schooling background and serious theory training at an Ivy League university. And basically, I can't make a buck doing anything related to anything I have ever studied. Some of my current job and financial situation is of my own choosing, based on values I hold (ironically, given to me in large part through my educational background), but a lot of it has to do with having no skills that are in fact meaningfully marketable without some meaningless additional credential. I could probably have polished myself up and gotten a "consulting job" before the crash, but I'd know deep down I was a fraud in an industry of frauds. Now even that option is gone.

Fish says of current standards-based educational paradigms:

A faith in markets produced gamesmanship, entrepreneurial maneuvering and outright cheating, very little reflection on “what children should know” and very little thought about the nature of the curriculum.

Unfortunately again, this is how the adult world works, particularly at the elite levels that everyone is presumably being educated toward. This is how kids are best prepared for what their work will largely consist of in America. People trained in this way can get work and can get ahead and make more than a few bucks. Learn to beat the system at a young age, and you can probably keep beating it for the rest of your life.

So much of the emphasis on outcomes and testing is based on America's envy of its better-educated neighbors. But how do we know they're "better-educated?" Test results. So it's kind of a no-brainer why that's our current yardstick. Quantitative is always easier than qualitative, especially at scale. The real question for classics education in this time is: Is it worth living in anxious wage-slavery for your whole life, just so you can know you're "more enlightened" or "more cultured" than someone with a more rote education? Seems like an overly-romantic and hyper-nostalgic notion from someone who's been in academia for too long. If there's a true benefit to classics ed, it's the inculcation of values that go beyond cost/benefit. And that's probably achievable through some other means.

Of course, there's David Brooks to respond to these objections.