Episode 187: There’s no Mental like Experimental (Wed, Jan. 29, 2025)

Episode 187: There’s no Mental like Experimental  (Wed, Jan. 29, 2025)

In general, the public schools are more dull than ever, and much too devoid of substance. So look for antidote and remedies that make students try new approaches. All those things could be called experimental and that's what this article is about.
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MAX your c*r*e*a*t*i*v*i*t*y
links to articles about creativity
https://www.creativity-portal.com/bc/bruce.price/

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Let's Fix Education explains to Americans why their schools are so bad. The people in charge prefer mediocrity because they are socialists of one kind or another. If people work together to promote real education, we'll have it.

Transcript

LET'S FIX EDUCATION         by   Bruce Deitrick Price

Episode 187       Wed, Jan 29, 2025


There’s no Mental like Experimental                                                          

In America, the term experimental does not cause much excitement, except perhaps with Mach 3 jets. I think for many people experimental suggests weird and way-out. 

But sometimes that might be exactly what you need.

There's a big article in WIRED about Keanu Reeves, every thinking person’s favorite actor. He co-designed a motorcycle and created a company to produce it (Arch), and recently launched brsrker, a comic book series.

Now the Matrix Man has partnered with China Mieville, a sci-fi maven and member of a famous literary group in France called Oulipo. Reeves and his French co-author want to explore an experimental tradition that venerates changing the rules to obtain bizarre results, such as a military hero who can't die or the challenge of writing a novel that doesn't contain the letter e.

As a novelist, I'm not personally interested in weird for weird’s sake. I'm interested in maximum creativity for its own sake. 

I'm fascinated that ordinary people go to bed and, with no effort, dream extraordinary dreams. Where do they all come from? In the 1980s I experimented with the surrealist notion of automatic writing, as first proposed circa 1920. I drew words at random and let each one inspire a burst of writing. My experiment generated a novel titled American Dreams.

Although an exotic bird, my novel got many fine reviews. Publishers Weekly said: “Price...obviously a talented writer... has written a funny, stylistically innovative novel that includes everything a popular novel should have: romance, sex, adultery, crime, religion, sickness, death, and even Texas.”

(See reviews of American Dreams on Amazon.)

https://www.amazon.com/American-Dreams-Bruce-Price/product-reviews/0932966624

The Introduction tells you what to expect: 

In which the author speaks of everyday life
in the greatest country on earth…
a simple little story concerning
a statue, three divorces, 
a heart attack, several, infidelities,
a burglary, some marriages, 
some murders, a double suicide,
a $2 million scam, a hit play
and a man looking for God, 
as aren't we all.

I wrote a second experimental novel titled Manhattan Express, which will be published next year.

These days, I write lots of articles about the decline in our public schools. I’m more and more fearful that they will not only eliminate intellect, but creativity as well. What’s left is a dead zone, so I urge all teachers to incorporate experimental wildness.

For example, announce a random word and then point to a student and say, “Give me a sentence with that word in it.” And then ask other students to add a second and third sentence. If the sentences are coherent, the students are already writing a story. (That’s how I wrote my novels.) 

If I were POTUS, I'd say every day should be half-occupied by the most exciting news and video clips that YouTube has found. All of this provides amusement and inspiration so that school is never dull. The other half is more rigorous. Children learn to read fluently, compose sentences quickly, solve simple puzzles, and execute all sorts of simple math calculation. Now you can tell the Education Establishment to stand back, they've got nothing to contribute.

I would certainly not allow the schools to remain simultaneously oppressive, dangerous, and dull, as hostile ideology apparently requires. Look closely at every point in the K-12 curriculum, and you will find dumb by design.

Friendly ideology, on the other hand, requires that school be playful. Facts and fun can go together so beautifully.

(When revisiting American Dreams I was reminded that I have a lot of articles on a site called Creativity-Portal. This is all good stuff if you're looking for ways to jazz up your classes:

MAX your c*r*e*a*t*i*v*i*t*y

If you have superior technical skills, if for example you draw like Michelangelo or write like Hemingway, skip this. But if you're burned out, repeating yourself or feel the need to travel new highways, read on. Today's topic is increasing creativity by doing the wild thing, wild as in weird and even wacky, wild as in experimental.

Here are some ideas:

https://www.creativity-portal.com/bc/bruce.price/