The Reader Bytes Back

“The ethics of criticism requires pointing out the faults in a colleague's thinking.” (Jeffrey R. Di Lio, 2010)

In the digital era one of the tasks facing teachers of the art of persuasive writing is the responsible use of source material. There are many dimensions to responsible use. One of these is appropriate attribution of sources, the breach of which, in an argumentative setting by one seeking to perform as a scholar or intellectual, public, or otherwise, is plagiarism, a species of academic dishonesty. This is a lesson Fr. Henry Charles, President Richards and T&T will likely not forget any time soon. A more difficult skill for many argumentative writers, one exacerbated by the hyper-geometric increase in available and accessible information is responsible use of source material. Irresponsible use of sources, in the context of persuasive writing or scholarly work, takes many forms ranging from the professed naïveté of students who print out Wikipedia articles or web-pages, place them in folders and try to pass them off as ‘research’ papers, to more subtle scholarly improprieties such as that employed by Kevin Baldeosingh in his article Laptops dance with danger (11/06/10).

Baldeosingh’s arguments are typically presented as an intertextual mashup – a sampling of exemplary excerpts from various commentaries made in public fora which are eviscerated with sardonic commentary while buttressing his own position by appealing to ‘expert’ testimony drawn from one or more of his stable of scientists du jour. His style is, usually, a hybrid genre blending acerbic satire and critique and last Friday’s is no exception. Now satire, when it is done well, can be an effective means of critique, persuasion and entertainment, and there have been occasions when he has achieved this harmony to great effect. Last week’s piece however is neither effective nor well done and bad satire is neither an excuse for, nor can it serve as a rhetorical sanctuary from professional irresponsibility as a writer and journalist.

The article represents an example of irresponsible use of source material as Baldeosingh excises and presents segments of text from the letters of Drs. Sharma and Kalicharan as metonymies for positions they do not advocate. Severed from the contexts of their original utterance, Baldeosingh’s injudicious juxtapositions facilitate the construction of these individuals’ contributions to the national conversation on education as simplistic, spurious and suspicious. In short, he misrepresents their arguments through selective quotation in order to generate (false) ‘evidence’ of the antagonistic position he wishes to critique. He invents his opponents.

Consider the way Baldeosingh very early on elevates the emotional ante by descriptively framing the contributions as “dire warnings” and “passionate denunciations.” Are they really? As a scholar when one suspects that what one is reading is untrustworthy or that claims are exaggerated, or worse unfounded, it is incumbent to check for oneself, and indeed a laptop and internet connection makes this easier than ever. I mean no offense to Dr. Sharma, but in her writing she is rarely what I would call a ‘passionate denunciator’ of any kind. She is typically measured, and restrained. This is what aroused my suspicions and led me back to the sources – the three public commentaries.

I noticed - and readers are advised to check this for themselves - that Sharma offered neither dire warnings nor passionate denunciations. Rather, she attempted to raise critical “issues that need to be considered to honour this commitment” from her perspective as an educator who works with teachers across Trinidad and Tobago. She does not isolate the potential benefits from the possible iatrogenic effects and the practical difficulties likely to be encountered in implementing this election promise that voters forget is not yet educational policy. She wisely situates the decision within the culture and climate of schools in T&T where violence, indiscipline, bullying, theft, infrastructural, human and knowledge resource deficiencies, and a lack of training and supervision are commonplace. In short she does not over-simplify the matter but attempts to present and retain some of the complexity of the situation. Likewise, reading Kalicharan’s letter for myself I take it as a public intellectual’s wondering and questioning of the rationale behind this decision to give laptops away. His central point, like Sharma’s, is that laptops alone are not going to be a panacea for some of the challenges facing education in Trinidad and Tobago. Baldeosingh eschews these central points completely in his attempts to paint these educators as alarmists though it is he who lays the foundation for a media-sustained panic discourse through his interpretation and public presentation of their concerns as “dire warnings” and “passionate denunciations.”

There is some evidence of Baldeosingh’s success in at least one case that I could find and which serves as an example of why I consider this particular piece of writing irresponsible. Consider, Trinizagada, a cotecicotelatnt blogger’s response to this article, “After reading the article (Baldeosingh’s) in the Trinidad Express I was lost for words. Now the laptop program of the People's Partnership is going to create morons? What in heavens name are these so called educated people thinking?” S/he goes on to describe details about a laptop programme in the US. To be fair, many in T&T do not read satire well. We respond to picong, brutish humiliation and humbling of authorities and experts when they can be shown to be talking/doing nonsense, and we are fortunate to have an unnatural abundance so as not to have to invent such opportunities, but that is not the case here and is certainly not my intent with this critique.

By irresponsibly misrepresenting and misreporting the central concerns raised by Sharma and Kalicharan, Baldeosingh has influenced this blogger’s, and perhaps some of the general public’s, opinion in a way that undermines their credibility as educators. This is likely not libelous as the piece is sufficiently satirical for this argument to function as a valid defense. In an academic setting however the student would be counseled to return to the sources, read them more carefully, attend to what they are actually saying and responsibly re-present their positions before critiquing them. Indeed, I note that of the three writers (Sharma, Kalicharan, Furlonge), the only person who actually constructs a link between laptops, reduced intelligence and moral questionability (morons, thieves, perverts, politicians, priests, pundits) is Baldeosingh himself. He manages however to successfully obscure this fact by creating and transferring a set of false associations with these ideas and those of the letter-writers. That deception finds any home in Baldeosingh’s argumentative algorithm calls into question his corpus of work as a reliable writer and commentator as well as his ethics. There are other examples in Baldeosingh’s piece, but taking a cue from many good math texts, and a proven strategy for prompting ‘active learning’, “the remainder of the proof is left as an exercise for the interested reader.”

Perhaps of greater concern is the way Baldeosingh deliberately uses misdirection and scientific language to fashion an identity as a knowledge-broker. Globally, there is great concern about the public’s lack of critical understanding of the science, and scientific thinking necessary for enacting democratic citizenship and in helping societies to govern themselves. News media are tasked, perhaps unfairly, with an important educative role in this project. Baldeosingh’s work this week, atypically, works against such goals. In presenting the evidence for his own case Baldeosingh also oversimplifies and misrepresents his sources. Citing psychologist Richard Nesbitt and journalist Steven Johnson he argues for the importance of play in learning and the contributions of popular culture, video-games in particular via Nesbitt, to increasing IQ scores. Baldeosingh neglects however the importance of context to learning and the limits of such learning, viz. the difficulty of transfer. Fortunately, Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker, (someone who also apparently doesn’t teach) provides the missing nuance. In a New York Times Op-ed piece which appeared on the same day as Baldeosingh’s article, he notes that, “If you train people to do one thing (recognize shapes, solve math puzzles, find hidden words), they get better at doing that thing, but almost nothing else…Accomplished people…immerse themselves in their fields.” Despite many of my former students’ protestations, playing FIFA’s video games will only make you a better video-game player, but it won’t get you to a World Cup or improve your skills significantly on the field without significant physical, emotional and mental effort. I don’t think Farmville is going to help us solve our food problems.

Pinker also makes the important educational point that mere access to technology is not going to suddenly usher in some democratic educational utopia. I have made similar arguments in my scholarly publication Harnessing the Complexity of Children’s Consumer Culture, in particular I believe that while popular culture is a powerful pedagogue, there are some things it does not teach very well and indeed is inimical to the development of some important human and democratic values. Pinker likewise argues that good and responsible intellectual habits “of deep reflection, thorough research and rigorous reasoning” have never been easy to develop, rather, “they must be acquired in special institutions…and maintained with constant upkeep, which we call analysis, criticism and debate. They are not granted by propping a heavy encyclopedia on your lap, nor are they taken away by efficient access to information on the Internet.” Imagining what those institutions might be like, understanding why they have found difficulty flourishing locally and then working together to actively construct ones that will work for us to achieve the goals of good, responsible habits of mind and being are what we ought to be debating. These are but a few of the tasks which the privileged people who “can’t teach” should be doing and doing well. It is partly what I have tried to do here.

Finally, Baldeosingh notes rhetorically, “when the lower orders begin to get smarter, they aren’t as easy to fool, which leads to all kinds of dangerous trends…do we really want a society where students challenge teachers…?” The same resources that destabilize the authority of the professor and the priests and their claim to being the final, irrefutable source and arbiters of knowledge can also be applied to other knowledge producing agents including media practitioners and cultural workers but we must be care full. As I continue to advocate we must learn to read and write different types of texts more carefully and critically than we have been doing. We must also teach these skills and be prepared for the painful occasions when they will be applied to our own works.

If democracy and skepticism, digital and otherwise, are to flourish in T&T it will not likely be without effort, struggle, and the courage to take on powerful gatekeepers, including journalists, when they act irresponsibly without also acting irresponsibly ourselves. If we can learn that responsible critique and debate do not necessarily have to humiliate, brutalise, or belittle others to be effective, educative or entertaining, and that compassion is not an estranged kin of argument, then perhaps we might create conditions for fecund conversations. If we can demonstrate that we are a society where thoughtful readers can challenge established writers to be first ‘better’, i.e. more conscientious, in their craft, and secondly, better human beings, then perhaps we might truly create new, more fit models of dialogue for our civilization…