Conversations with History - Leon Botstein

welcome to a conversation with history I'm Harry Kreisler of the Institute of International Studies our guest today is Leon Botstein who is the president of Bard College music director and conductor of the American Symphony Orchestra and the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra and the 2011 Tanner lecturer at UC Berkeley dr. Botstein welcome to Berkeley Rob pleased to be here thank you for having me where we born and raised I was born Jurek Switzerland my parents were both members of the medical school faculty my mother in Pediatrics my father in oncology and then when I was two the family moved to the United States and we were brought up in New York City and looking back how do you did your parents shape your thinking about the world well my parents were very unusual people they were idealists my mother was an excuse just died at age 98 and she was an extremely powerful she wrote the major book on the diagnosis and treatment of polio in the 40s she was a real pioneer and my father was a very innovative and important man in the treatment and of cancer that was not surgical and so in the early days of both radiation therapy and chemotherapy and they loved what they did and they also really believed in in doing something to help other people there was a so we grew up in a household there was an intense engagement with work life they they lived to work retirement was a catastrophe for them and I think all the three of us developed an enormous work ethic and also we were immigrants which meant that we got the message that we didn't know anybody they didn't know English you know there's no connections that you were essentially what you could do by merit it was a there was this a very harsh lesson about discipline and hard work I'm always amazed notices book apparently about chinese-american woman for some kind of pole Amy Chua yes yeah about some book about raising and I I didn't read the book but when you read through all the news reports it's very familiar it it's a quite a classic immigrant sensibility that you know achievement was necessary simply for survival now it's interesting you didn't go into the medical sciences but you clearly developed a very sharp perception of the importance of the liberal arts of music but also of citizenship and the contribution that a liberal arts education can make sure my parents I mean my parents were wonderful physicians and clinicians so which means they understood people and then instead you know illness is not separate from you don't only treat the disease you treat the patient and so we understood that very well I developed a great affection for medicine it's a wonderful career my sister is a physician and my brother is in in in biological sciences a very distinguished scientist so we didn't develop and you know a negative reaction to the career was just it wasn't that what I want to do my parents of course were loved for all of us to become doctors but large because they loved it they loved medicine they breathed medicine they talked medicine there was they were in the hospital the whole time you know they were it was a the residents the whole apparatus of of dealing with the forefront of medicine meant a lot to them and but one of the things we learned is that if you were going to help people through a medical system they were for example firm believers in a socialized medical system in a stir national healthcare they found the American circumstance barbaric they didn't believe that you should make money from treating the sick they were very idealistic and so in a sense of the liberal arts part the sort of the general education was simply a necessary component of in meaning in people's lives medically you know who is sick whether they're young or they're old because your parents were immigrants the the world situation I guess you became when you were young very conscious of world events because as I read about your work as a steward of Bard College er you're very sensitive to relating the education of students to what's going on in the world yeah absolutely look it was the major event in our household was the Second World War and we were born after the war but my parents my father was the only survivor of his family my uncle after whom I'm named was killed in the warsaw ghetto my grandparents of one side did survive and they survived both ghetto and camp so for us the war experience was the central event when we came to the United States there was an emigrant community in New York of people hydrogen from the old country so we grew up with a mythical world that had been eliminated in the destruction of European Jewry and so for us world events were not theoretical my parents very much appreciated there were men's Patriots but their patriotism to America was about Constitution about being a citizen and about the ability to vote I remember our naturalization ceremony I was ten and you know the the the whole question of it was a moral obligation to exercise your obligations as a citizen and I remember my parents being very self-critical and talking politics they never talked down to us they were they were discussed political circumstances at the dinner table and so all of us became early on engaged in discussion of politics both history and contemporary politics yeah where were you educated where to public school in the city of New York I went to the high school music and art my siblings went to Bronx Science and then I went to the worst of Chicago my father had a resident a chief resident to us fabulous Co I was a pianist and a real music lover and he liked me and his uncle was Benny Goodman later actually actually had the pleasure of pleasure of doing in concert with when my first public performances was doing the Mozart clarinet concerto with with Benny Goodman but he he persuaded my father and that the University of Chicago would be a good place for me and so I went there and I was 16 and had a fabulous experience there fabulous experience and and then your graduate work I went to Harvard Graduate School and what a wonderful experience - it was a more cut up because I had to leave and work for the city of New York and then God began to work and then I finished my dissertation later but I started out directly from from college to graduate school and and your your work both as an undergraduate and a graduate student was as a musician and a historian is is well you you you've gone down so many paths that I'm curious as to why always had two paths I mean from early on when I was eight or nine you know I had this idea of I want to become a conductor I was a violinist but I I really I didn't have the dexterity that's a virtuosity series for me to play well required 10 times as much time and I was in Tanglewood for example you know I had stand made who could citrate I had to you know work four hours to to play on the level and my teacher Roman Totenberg you know very early encouraged me to go either into composition or to conducting and you know I all of us tried composing I did myself and I I'm not sure that I was persuaded I memorize undergraduate played for example for a dance class you know improvise on the piano for dance classes and that was fun but as a composer I didn't really have the calling I didn't but I was very interested in performance and the history of music so I early on had this idea of combining scholarship in the history of music with performance it was already happening in the early music movement so people who are interested in Renaissance and Baroque music that was seemed very it seemed natural to me one of the I played in the Collegium which was a early music group in Chicago Howard Brown great Renaissance music historian conducted it and so I saw a lot of people who are scholars and performers I thought well we can do that for the 19th and 20th century as well and Colin slim will actually lives in the Bay Area and wonderful musicologist he was the conductor of the university Orchestra I became as his assistant and he was the person who said to me which was a prescient that you know there was the future of music history would be in the 19th and 20th centuries in those days people focused a log on the Baroque the Renaissance annual period and that lets what interested me nineteenth and early twentieth century and so I a new music so he was very encouraging and so I saw it made a decision or in college but I didn't want to do it through musicology there's something about that that didn't appeal to me so I did it through European history so my dissertation was actually the history department although it's in the history of music it seems like you were learning an important lesson about how to make choices about what you could do and what you wanted to do and reconciling those two things well I also I I you know somehow my parents instilled my father I think instilled in me the idea that don't make a career imitative Lee don't look at the earlier generation previous generations how might you exact what they do I've lived through the generation I said well I don't really like what they do if there's something wrong with it or I why follow in their path so I was somehow developed an idea that I could figure out how to do this against things that interested me so for example what I thought was lacking in interpretation of music was a reason an argument and the source that argument wasn't only internal to the piece but somehow about understanding something about the context in which the piece was generated so I was very struck early on as you know what was in Brahms his library what did he read what did Beethoven read you know what what made them composers you know that recently the diaries of Prokofiev have been released that were you know under lock and key for the first fifty years after his death you read those Diaries is fascinating a fantastic writer and you get a sense of music is not separate music isn't out there whereas we know that literature is part of the fabric of politics and life in general painting is as well architecture is well music is too and so III had an intuition that that was possible I remember as an undergraduate reading a book by Panofsky on gothic architecture and and scholasticism and thinking well could the same be done with music in other words if possible people talk intelligently about literature and painting architecture and relationship to history probably conceived is it possible to do that with music as well so that became an ambition of mine and so I combined the two if you will and and as a conductor and music director at the American symphony you you have really innovated in the area that that you just talked about yeah I mean that was a very simple idea I mean all reasonable ideas are usually simple one was why have a concert that's simply a mish mosh you know an Italian overture you know from this 18th century and the 19th century I don't know French or Chopin co-chaired over the 19th century then a 20th century work you know it just put together there's no reason for it to hang together so I thought why not curate a concert the way museum shows are curated you know landscape painting in the nineteenth century or 20th century experimentalism or the Bauhaus or German Romantic painting or Expressionism anything you want but there's some coherence to it it's either biographical its historical its thematic so when I do the same thing in music why not go to a concert that has not a didactic argument but has a contextual argument so I just did a concert for example on the influence of the Spanish Civil War on Spanish composers I took three cases now all York in Torino who was a collaborator with Franco Roberto's our heart one great composer who emigrated to London and then de fire who fled to Argentina you know and so there are three different responses I once did a concert about you know what what it meant to be a composer under Stalin you know what was what was it was there really something that we can speak of as inner emigration among non-jewish Germans who were caught in in Germany during the Nazi era so no the it featured a composer of I greatly admire Carla me there's Hartman who was really did real image in her emigration wrote fabulous music and after the war was a major figure so one was thematic I've done no concerts that for example take the subject of Byron and music or Dante and music or issues of painting or literature then the other thing was to look at the repertoire because my feeling my intuition was I didn't know this but it's young person that why we pay playing the same Beethoven on series why are we doing the four Brahms symphonies there must be somebody else out there you know I I never identified you know people identify with you know that people who are exceptional Mozart Beethoven boffin so that so if that's right but there must be people who are really fine perhaps even great composers whose names aren't quite so familiar and why have they disappeared in a museum we see their paintings you go to a museum the Louvre of the Metropolitan if we did if they did what we do in music three-quarters of a rooms no problem museum would be closed so we have eliminated from the repertory for some reason everything but sort of we're you know the few masterpieces we're so part of a olympic contest masterpiece syndrome the top ten you know as if this were you know some kind of beauty contest and so I've been interested in reading the history of music about great pieces you take the opera repertory I've read about an opera by Paul to cos through the Sorcerer's Apprentice with a text of meta link ariana bottle blew everybody thought it was great opera you know Korngold shouldn't burg missing uh if they thought it was terrific how come I've never seen it or heard it I got a vocal score of it so I began doing collecting in my mind you know a whole repository of music that was first class but somehow didn't make it into the standard repertory and so that's the other thing that I do and and so so it sounds like your your work as a historian has really contributed to your journey down the path of being a conductor now what now what what I'm curious about is going back to the Spanish example you get does that understanding of the context in what way does it contribute to the appreciation of the differences in the music or are there differences well sometimes it's a good question I there's no general rule sometimes there's nothing to it the connection it's just is occasional that's person who's written music now sometimes there are connection so share heart for example does an ironic twist on markers of Spanish news you know the Spanish trumpet call the vocation of Spanish folk material that we would recognize as Spanish I went to the concert of all Mexican music so there's Poinsett Rev Welton Chavez now Travis is the least Mexican in some way rev well toss the most original in the transformation of what he would consider to be authentic Mexican materials and plunge a much more romantic but still with a reference to it so it's interesting how how the context influences but doesn't always the more important thing is is discovering that these are wonderful works that make a terrific argument that move audiences it's good music whatever that means but it's not second rate that for some reason we don't do this in film and we don't do this in literature we don't read a book and say that's not war in peace we don't look at a film and we go criticize the film but you don't make an immediate comparison to Casablanca you know we don't and we don't go every year to see Casablanca 17 times so one I know what it is in music you know it's not that we don't like Casablanca but you know I've had enough of it you know what the Mahler's symphonies deserve you put on the shelf and let's bring something else either contemporary or from the past and you know people got tired of reading Dickens well they trollop came into being you know there was a we've done this in literature we've brought back things that have vanished certainly in painting the people like cool Bay and they're whole bunch of artists biklen one of the great artists of the 19th century forgotten totally revived the whole Viennese modernism there was a time when Klimt and Sheila were minor figures they are now major figures so why do we do this in music and that's the task that I'm committed to but it the real criterion at the end is whether and I've not always succeed it sometimes the music that is not as persuasive as I think it is I'm I'm more fascinated than sometimes the audience but you always know in the players the orchestra's and we've had very good track record in in recovering the past I want to end the falsification of the musical past a theme that you pursue in your lectures and and I don't want to go into this in detail but you you also have an interest in the way changes in technology affect the music that is produced and the music literacy of the audience absolutely talk a little about that well the the basic issue in the modern time is that the piano modern piano and the way it was constructed the way it sounds drove our sense of sonorities or exam the way we play violin today is influenced by the modern piano the pitch the way sound is produced the sonority and the modern orchestra in fact the modern piano developed very very much intend of the kind of rich sound that you'll see in a big lush Strauss or Mahler sonority of the modern orchestra the second thing of course is that the most important thing is in the 20th century when the long playing record comes into being the audience today has a kind of attitude to going to concerts that's unimaginable in the past because people come and have heard a Mahler symphony or a Beethoven symphony hundreds of times hundreds of times and the same performance they in their car when they had a cassette now they have a CD not even iPod they've listened I was carry-on or Bernstein or tomini over and over suddenly the text is disappeared when you're a performer you get up to do a standard work you're working against a crowd that hasn't ever read Hamlet but they have seen Jack Nicholson do Hamlet and in their ear is only Jack Nicholson and if you're not Jack Nicholson they don't think it's right you know now this is an impossible situation because suddenly reading Shakespeare becomes one way of doing it you know it's John Gielgud and you know if it happened to be you know Tommy Lee Jones you know you're in trouble because people have identified with a certain tradition in their ear that's been imprinted the tempo the way it's read and so it's very hard to to reassert the independence of interpretation with an audience that whose habits of expectation are derived from repeated listenings of one or two recorded performances so that's the most terrifying aspect now it's getting better because with the internet there's so much on the internet that people getting used to not sticking to one so they'll surf around and get different and they they suddenly wake up and realize there's not one way of doing it which is for us a great boon let's talk about the other hat that you've worn which is that of university president let's go back to your early part of your career and tell us how you became the youngest president oh you have a colleague by accident I needed a job and this was a bankrupt institution in in bankruptcy in northern New Hampshire that was protected by Dartmouth and John Kemeny and then chaplain Dartmouth Paul ray Meyer some reason took a risk on me because nobody wanted the job this was what College franconi was bankrupt was founded in 64 closed in 79 it went into chapter 11 and 68 so it was really a its most famous alumnus is Jamaica Kincaid the writer and it was a it was a wacky idea but they were very generous and the board of that bankrupt institution was run by bankers and but Dartmouth faculty and so the father of a girlfriend of mine her brother was there it was a place where kids who couldn't get in elsewhere with the draft during Vietnam you're up your horse saying I was right it's a fabulous place not criticizing it but it was really an experimental college was really progressive a commercial college and so they talked me into taking the job I did it for five years we took it out of bankruptcy we got it accredited and then I got recruited to Bard so I got into it by accident yeah and you have been president of bard for how many years since 75 that's 35 yes okay so the question that first comes to my mind what what is the what are what is the comparability of leaving a symphony orchestra and leading a college or institution of higher education or their or their similar qualities of leadership that are required or is it two different realm no it's very much the same people always think it's different it's very much integrated now of course different kind of work in an orchestra conducting its century a visual pantomime that shape sound and you have to persuade colleagues very sophisticated colleagues to follow you and you have to persuade them that what you're doing is plausible and right very similar to a faculty or a student body you have to actually persuade them that to go along also you have to respond positive to what they come up with you know in you in rehearsal if a wind player or a soloist phrase is a certain way instead of imposing what you have in mind you have to listen to them now if you disagree so there are some related aspects and part of it is is developing a relationship with people in a group setting so one things you have to do is no conductor should attempt to think that he or she has a kind of complete infallibility of knowledge so in rehearsal for example I'm able to acknowledge if something goes wrong that it's my fault not the players fault I learned a more comfortable relationship between some of having Authority and not being dictatorial and the same thing in leading university you can't or college you can't actually you have to treat your colleagues with genuine respect whether they be students or faculty and so there's their real overlaps in in dealing with with people now so what is the biggest challenge of running a college up committed to liberal arts committed to a general education that that informed students about what it is to do science what it is to be concerned about public affairs what it is to be aware of globalization and and what it is to appreciate you know art and and and music and so on Bart is a particular history so it's um two hours north of New York it's a private institution so the first task is I believe it's my view they said a private institution has to be in the public interest and that's number one number two you have to create a context in which the intellectual tradition that you describe is actually relevant to the content of daily life and democracy very important basic idea the third is that teaching is crucial the Khalif undergraduate teaching has been devalued in research universities particularly and that undergraduate teaching is absolutely important and it's not separate from research so you also have an ambition to have a high quality operation so Bard what we've done is to try to create a context for undergraduate learning so we have two public high schools in the city of New York which bar runs roaming 1/3 in Newark which are combinations of high school and college their public schools non private schools we have the largest prison education program in the country we have three overseas campuses one in Kyrgyzstan with the American University in Central Asia we have a joint venture with University of st. Petersburg small D first liberal arts college in post-soviet Russia and we have a teacher training graduate program and a college with alkyds University and the West Bank and we have a huge graduate for us infrastructure in the arts so we have a curatorial studies graduate program with a PhD in MA in decorative arts and material culture we try to do different things in the arts we have an MFA in in the arts so we've tried to expand what we do we have a big summer festival which is I think very innovative so we publish a literary magazine conjunctions we have a Contemporary Art Museum so we try to do things that enter the public arena that other places don't and won't the very wealthy institution because they're very conservative and hidebound the public institutions because they're overwhelmed with their own agenda so we create a real context for for undergraduate study that's a very high quality we also not organized in an imitative way of graduate departments so the Department of Anthropology no Department of this so we don't have a kind of mirror image of the Graduate professionalization of the university so the Faculty's organized in four big divisions which creates a much more fluid ground for creating a curriculum it's based on a need-to-know and not on the bureaucratic segmentation of particular disciplines legitimate is that maybe it's very clear in your background and our discussion music that that you're very sensitive to the issue of of getting people to think and to think differently about topics how does one master that with regard to with today's student you know it would you have to go against the grain in terms of general education in the United States or what is the key there the key there first of all is to is to realize that our second education system is very broken my view is the secondary system is the worst part of the American system so we've been very active in trying to reform and improve the secondary system the second is when the student comes to Bard we have a three week intensive immersion of thinking and writing which is the teaching of the use of writing as the development the the technique by which you discover what you think and why you think it the third thing is try to organize the curriculum not by the ordinate of subject matter but try to respond to the need to know so for example the need to know now is different than it was that's in the 50s the 50s the issue of the Cold War or the post-war era so the Soviet to communism versus democracy there's all set of problems today for example many of the traditional issues of politics of political theory are motivated by the framing of issues of human rights it's a different generational framing how do people enter the long tradition of conversation technology for example is huge in the way we make art so the tradition of art making isn't from drawing from a model but maybe using computer it may be visualization through computer technology so they're different questions are asked by different generations so the issue is if you listen to the question then you have to respond by saying what do you need to know to to solve those issues so we have a program of general education and we read Plato and we read Rousseau and Locke and you know it's it's a great books but the great books are organized in relationship to trying to help undergraduates develop the tools to respond to the issues that they're concerned about now you've innovated in in with a program in kind of science education to talk a little about that because that's a good example of what you just explained so our view is that the citizen today cannot be as scientifically illiterate as he or she is we graduate people in all but the sciences who are really in the dark ages so they're ignorant about science is a liability it goes in both directions goes in the in the very far right direction of people thinking well evolution well there's no evidence for evolution it's just an idea who knows what they happen to not to be true right then there's another side which is people who want to have organic food well the whole word organic food is it's a manipulation a marketing of something there's something to it but what what would it mean to have what does it mean have genetically engineered food so there's a lot on the extreme right and the extreme left which is filled with ignorance take one of the tragic examples which will will never erase the idea that there's that the people who fraudulently argued that there's relation with autism and vaccine certain vaccine tributo totally fraudulent so you want to arm the citizen to be able to follow many of the issues of public policy have to the environment with health disease energy that have a scientific base so a knowledge base but also a thinking base about statistics about probability about evidence what is evidence so we decided to do a three week intensive between the first and second semester for all students ungraded for all first-year students where we look infectious disease called citizen science in which they study what is an infectious disease how do scientists study this how is it you know how do you deal with it what makes it infectious and then what are the modes of treatment and response in the public health issues and the social issues both yourself and your neighbor do you get a flu shot or do you not get a flu shot swine flu for example so there are some and what of this how would you evaluate the risk or the probabilities you know is it more dangerous to take the vaccine or you know what how do you evaluate those so you begin to get the tools by which a person can follow and form an opinion as opposed to simply being dependent on experts where their allegiances are archaeological you know they come from my church or they come from the people I trust without being independent a real democracy requires citizens to be able to form their own judgments on the basis of some reasonable evidence or understanding the same thing is we need to in our curriculum need to people understand things about parts of the world that didn't seem that important in 1950 but are now important whether it's Asia or Latin America or Africa not for political correctness yeah right you as I listened to you and I've read some of what you've written I would think that you have a real handle on creativity creativity and music creativity as a as a leader of an institution of higher education but also the problem of do you teach creativity or do you create a context for people to learn to be creative you create a context well one of the most important things we've done is two programs one we have a program of reforming and improving their schools in post-katrina New Orleans and the other is we have this large prison program both of the work of students who came to see me so the context what we're proud of is that a student could come see me and say I have an idea we should be doing something with the prisons that are in our region in New York and these men and women who are incarcerated have no opportunity for a real education the American romance with prison is a catastrophe this isn't undergraduate speaking and so he put the challenge to me said instead of the sort of volunteering you know it's just release off condescending why don't we put a real degree program and would Bard give degrees to prisoners if they finished a BA degree the way we finish will be with a senior thesis know something I think he expected me to say oh well more so I looked at him and I said you know I thought I thought you know he'll never either I give him the low odd just to get it done so I figured I'm pretty safe you know I say well max back Skinner I said we'll do it we'll give a degree so he looked shocked he said you don't mean nice no I give you my word you come up with the program and the funding I thought he doesn't have a chance you know he put it together it's now ten years old fantastic program wasn't my idea was his idea when Steven Tremaine student from Louisiana after Katrina hit said we need to do something I wanna put a volunteer program on help of the schools and blah blah will you back us and I said what we weren't doing he described it I thought was very into his fabulous young guy and I said yeah well we'll back you now he works for us we have a big volunteer program the Broadmoor district and working to improve singular education in in New Orleans it wasn't my idea was his idea so my role is to create the context by which people feel you know you can get something done you know the one of the things you have to risk when you run an institution is you have to risk being stupid you have to risk this summer we'll sell you the Brooklyn Bridge you know you're you're like you know you're like a patent office you're creating an opportunity for people to register their ideas and realize them my bad path it'll work you know you know it's a form of refrigeration that doesn't function it's sometimes that you lose and you can't feel embarrassed because you're really betting on the on the idea that does work and we've had enough of them that have worked that and your role is to help refine the idea you don't have to have the idea we have to be a good critic of the idea in a way if you want to make it work you have to be empathetically able to say well they want to do this maybe this is a different way of doing it and it will work better so you help in the design and realization of the ideas you're very sensitive to the role the technology plays in changing literacy you know talk about it in your lectures on musical literacy obviously the the Internet is revolutionizing education how do we or you as a leader of an institution master the phenomena of the technology so that students won't lose the capacity to think and at the same time this is a huge problem I don't think we have a solution we're actually involved now in with a technology company thinking about how to do what's called distance learning well you know you have the sonam of the University of Phoenix and really diploma mills you know that are that are doing very well with online education now there's clearly something to the the what the communication skill and the data storage retrieval possibilities of a modern computation but how does it intersect with real teaching and learning is something we haven't quite figured out so we're looking at how to make that work what what's called distance learning a technology-based learning the other problem is one you raise which is you know the Internet is a kind of sewage system it's a huge sewer and there are lot of things that are in that sewer that are worth while there's a lot of junk too so how do you distinguish I mean I'm always amazed when you know I'm always amused to look up the Wikipedia article on st. Agustin now in so far it's comprehensible you know if you know something about the subject it becomes dicey you know it's a lot of junk in it and so forth now it doesn't make it it doesn't make it a bad thing but when you google and subject or an issue how do it's a huge problem how to distinguish you know in its tradition where there's no editorial you know you can't even figure out the bias of the New York Times you read in your times you really know you're pretty armed at reading between the lines you have an idea you know about what questions to ask about what are the inherent Barbies would pick up the National Review or the Washington Times which is a more conservative paper and these kinds of things but in the internet you're so helpless and teaching young people the they are in college the ability to distinguish fact from fiction or things that are on the internet that are complete either defamatory or just plain false it's it's hard I mean it's very hard the overwhelming volume the scale of information is daunting you know I never really realized no very recently how much material there is for example musical maturities on YouTube and it's a riot you know we have a conductors Institute in the summer where we teach conducting and with a live orchestra and and it was through that that I realized that the these are people in mid-career or early in career or spending six intensive weeks under a master teacher how far Berman my own teacher trying to learn perfect skills of conducting and there's so much which we never had video information on conductors of the past on YouTube and you can see Carlos Kleiber mi share some more who knows I mean it's um audio stuff but this is a video stuff and I find myself you know PA student will tell me well I looked on video and I saw I said really so I would go home or YouTube look at em it sort of amazed you know to look at it and and so they're tremendous advantages you know I you know it's very interesting to watch these these documents so the wealth of material is and the wealth of recorded material for example we have emergency Bay has 160 180 200 downloadable mp3 files of live performance that we've done so you can if you want to hear how Zegers Wilander Schmiedt there's a recording of it the only one you know we have a lot of this material out there and that's terribly helpful so you can retrieve a lot of sound documentation and a variety of it that's far better than the old chuan catalog you know where there were five recordings of one piece or even one recording one piece and now there's just endless supply so there is a certain amount of advantage to it but how to negotiate and how to teach negotiating it is it's not different from the closed critical reading that is traditionally taught whether it's a book or a Kindle or on your iPad or on the screen asking sharp questions about what's being said or claimed is still somewhat the same enterprise what is an ideal curriculum look like do you think I mean language is important obviously learning to write and think is implanted at the center the active use of language you know every scientist you know keeps a lab book lab notebook keeps a record has to articulate in language what it is she or he works on so if that's clearly and be understanding the nutty of the origins of language and how to how to read very carefully we teach I do for example in the grade book seminar we have that every student takes with sections of it you know I have students read aloud and then interpret what they've read it's a very simple old-fashioned way of stopping to think carefully about what do you mean when you say something and what does what you say mean you know I think Stanley Cavell the philosopher and wonderful book called do we mean something might have titles were like that as I recall and so there is a that that's crucial to a curriculum and so you teach the undergraduate how to frame questions how to distinguish a good question from a bad one and how to go about figuring out what a plausible answer would be and ways of argument and thinking and and rules of evidence and rules of research or discovering or finding out material evaluating data an ideal curriculum is also contextual and it's not fixed where I differ from people who support things like the st. John's curriculum or the author of great books idea is that there isn't really a canonic issue a book is important because it works the Republic is a great book to teach not because it's canonic it has a historic importance no question about that and that's good but also because it is so fabulous in its capacity to teach an undergraduate the art of interpretation finding plausible ways of reading things the Bible has the same capacity so the reason they're the reason we defend the choice of certain texts over others is not a a normative prescriptive one because it argues something we believe but it's an excellent teaching tool Gulliver's Travels a great teaching tool you know something like this it's or seems familiar is a kind of children's book but it is it is no children's book and it's a fantastic it's a fan of teaching tool Montaigne is a fantastic teaching tool there are some don't work quite so well and it's not because they're lesser but because they don't actually you want to choose the text for their capacity to teach argument and analysis what was the major obstacle that you encountered as you brought kind of these innovative ways of thinking to running a college the great a look what what I do has a great advantage of being completely unimportant you know I'm not the president of the University of California Berkeley I'm not the president of Johns Hopkins I never had those ambitions or of Harvard or Princeton or Yale so nobody gives a damn it's great to be under the radar screen you know there was this story you know there was a guy who flew to Moscow in the Cold War but was below you know he this guy from Berlin landed in Red Square made impression upon view you know this is a good idea in other words we're totally we're influential because we are no one pays attention you know when Mayor Giuliani and Harold levy asked us to do a public school radical idea in the city of New York that combined high school and college so when you got out of the 12th grade you finished a junior college degree you entered in the ninth grade of public school in the city of New York and the Union had just then blocked the privatization or the private contracting of a school to the Edison the UFT wonderful teachers you know a lot of regard for I'm not one of the people who are the Union bashing business the UFT got hammered you know for preventing this other innovation they looked at us and that's one of the reasons they said we're happy because they thought we're nuts we're never gonna make it these who are crazy you know they're coming in here they have nothing they're not getting paid they're white knights they're fools you know they're never gonna make this never gonna stick so why not go ahead so we have a member under agree with the city of New York we control the curriculum we actually have made something work the UFT is participative isn't collaborated they get part of the credit we get part of the credit we show it's not a charter school it's a real public school so our advantage has been our unimportance nobody noticed us by the time they notice us it's too late so what I learned is that people want to make careers always flying the main line so it's like the airlines you know we have the JetBlue you know the ambition wasn't you know to follow in the wake of American Airlines it was to do something different and the obstacle is people's disbelief you know people don't return my phone calls I don't have a Rolodex I'm completely unimportant and I'm meaningless and that's a little depressing because you've worked real hard and you'd like to have more impact but you know you're not you don't you know no one wants to pay attention to you and that is a certain freedom because then you actually can get something done and if you stick to something without and that's the that's where you get people to to to collaborate I've been only as good as the people I've been able to recruit faculty and colleagues and when they really believe that you're willing to risk everything to do it right people will follow along that you're not gonna and you're also willing to accept failure you know if something doesn't work you're willing to look at it right in the face and not blame to somebody else and take the blame yourself you're positioned to understand the failings of our educational system in your in your book Jefferson's children you-you-you take on a lot of the problems the the ideological component of different views the the the sense of over idealizing the past and and being too pessimistic about the future the the fact that politicians use education as whipping boy is is there a way to sort of summarize your critique and in point to what your career tells us about what where we need to move let me say that the book which was written under duress about ten years ago more than ten years ago was a total failure until the shooting in Columbine and Oprah Winfrey picked the book up so I oh whatever influence it has and the ability to do these early colleges in the public sector owing to her advocacy because I write in there about the abolition of the American high school but the answer your question is the single most important thing is that education kills children's curiosity and is a necessary evil homeschooling is the oldest and most proven way of schooling but it's not plausible as a social system so the question is you're gonna have schools the most important thing is put young children particularly but adolescents also with people who love the subject matter and understand it if we have math anxiety it's because the elementary school teacher doesn't understand math tell them what a number is and the kids are totally panicked because the teacher is panicked parents have the same problem so you have a child then child says to you mom or dad why does the Sun go down now if you really want that's what the kid is interested in the kid is not interested in George Washington the kid isn't really interested in ideological debates about about anything culture wars of anything ethnic identity or anything they're interested in natural world that's their primary why does it rain like what why does the Sun Shine why is it hot why is it cold so the Sun going down well the truth is that a parent has to be able to say without frightening the child there where the Sun really isn't going down you know we're moving so the question is the kid wouldn't say well how do you know say where's the kids gonna say well you say well we tell the child well the earth isn't flat because it looks pretty flat to me and in fact it actually feels flat so how do you without frightening there's a lot of the true is counterintuitive it's not common sensical so teachers have to be able to not to rely on authority Mira thority which kills curiosity but engender that curiosity because they really understand the subject so the kid doesn't send music doesn't they well doesn't sound rhythm if you understand really how music works and you can find a way to listen to the kid because what a child doesn't know ignorant is not uniform knowledge is an approximation that's what's wrong with standardized testings and it says he is a crime with the crime because it assumes that knowledge is zero-sum game a young person who can every person doesn't quite understand or does think he or she understands something for different reasons so how do you diagnose that that approximation and how do you adjust for it that's one things technology can do in to some extent adapt to the whole testing system is antiquated magic we had a test which the person when he or she got the wrong answer the clock stopped is in a chess game and engaged a program where the young person discovered right away I mean we don't on a baseball field the kid you know runs to third base instead of the first base somebody tells him right away that he's made a mistake he'll never do it again but if they tell him six months later who sent him a letter in the mail and said you did say things wrong you know in the in the nine innings I said well I don't know which ones I did wrong imagine kids take tests and never know what they got right or wrong what kills curiosity kills them it's a ludicrous system so that the education is catastrophic and needs to be fundamentally reformed I has been reformed by recruiting and training teachers who really understand what they're teaching to the age group so the most important math training is for the elementary school teacher not for the university training and therefore we have to organize the training of teachers not through schools of Education but through the fields vertically so the people who should be talking and figure out what should be in the elementary school are mathematicians and physicists about what should be taught in physics and and that's the way it should go and that's what's wrong with the American system because there is it's more organized horizontally by the ager teaching and in schools of Education in the suit of science education which i think is an absolute catastrophe so there's one principal is the love of learning and the love of learning because this questions and the subject matter really motivates you you know how does life work you know how does the world work you know how do we understand history you know what is literature people who really love the subject and it's that is infectious young people children will be inspired by it that's successful music teaching and so we don't have the quality of teachers and that the country needs on that note and that rather stark indictment and thank you very much for joining us today let me show your book Jefferson's children because I think it's still worth a read if you can find it on the Internet I got it Amazon oh that's good so I dr. bot Botstein thank you very much yeah for being here today and thank you very much for joining us for this conversation with history

Channel: UC Berkeley Events

Views: 5,073

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Keywords: uc, berkeley, ucberkeley, webcast.berkeley, cal, Conversations, with, History, Harry, Kreisler, Leon, Botstein, Bard, College, New, York, Symphony, Orchestra

Id: UsK6IVJ2ifo

Length: 57min 20sec (3440 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 19 2011