Social Reform and Folk Dancing

Now that I'm done with my last paper, I've been looking at random papers and books in the archive. I'm about to go look at the Book of Kells (squee!), but until then, here's an excerpt from The English Folk Dance Society's journal, which had two issues in 1914-1915:

If it appears to you, therefore, as certainly as it appears to me, in watching
country people dancing, that their Folk Dance is genuine self-expression,
our part in the movement must be clear. We cannot stand aside from a
distribution, as it were, of keys to a spiritual kingdom. God knows there are
people now in the coun-try
to whom any life of the spirit is denied for want
of decent housing and clothing and food. None the less the prevailing
starvation of the countryside to-day is starvation of soul. Many causes have
brought this about, not the smallest among them being the unimaginative
sabbatarianism of Wilberforce and his friends, which, arising in a class
possessing abundant diversions, stultified the labourer's only playtime.
These men's eyes-the eyes of our grandfathers among these sabbatarians-
were set upon the noblest ends. Only they did not understand the winding
ways of the spirit. Their thoughts were too short-cut and too business-like.
So, on the heels of their belittling of human instincts, followed, in our fathers'
youth, an arrogant, individualistic materialism. To my mind the Country
Dancing movement is one of the signs that our grandfathers', our fathers',
and our own, thoughts have come the full circle-encompassed a truth, the
separate sides of which Puritan piety and reactionary atheism attempted
to grasp.
"We feel we are nothing-for all is Thou and in Thee;
We feel we are something-that also has come from Thee" (3).

There's far more than that, about finding some way to prevent the loss of hard-working peasants to the metropolitan areas like Manchester and London. But I found it interesting how they justified folk dancing in these terms.

Play and Paradox

Play: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/20/AR2009112002391.html

Favorite quote: "That proficiency is measured on tests, but the far-reaching effects of play don't show up in answers to multiple-choice questions. They show up in life."

I'm quite critical of systems of evaluation that make test taking high-stakes to the point where they determine school funding. Where the test ought to be a suitable evaluation of a student's skills from which a teacher can determine whether they need to change their teaching habits, they become an end in themselves, as teachers teach to the test. They are forced to teach in an even more rigid fashion if they do not improve the students. There is no room for variation. The better ones hope that a student learns something incidentally through the process, but learning as an activity takes a sideline to the demonstration of it in a single number.

Cheating, in such a field, actually seems natural. If a teacher is already teaching to the test, why not just teach the test and cut out the last little room for substantial skill-building. No, it does not quite make sense in the long-term, since if you want to train a generation of good test-makers, better to teach them strategies for taking such tests, so that they can adapt without the added effort.

Play seems like one way out of the narrowing attention in the classrooms. Montessori goes to public school. I could write more, but I still have the paradox part to get to.

I post the most when I have the least time to post. ;)

Back to work!