Forbes – James Marshall Crotty
“I am presented on a daily basis with dozens of pitches about this or that ed tech innovation, or new ways to pander to the smart-phone-obsessed, factually deficient, post-millennial generation. At the recent, and always engaging, ASU + GSV Summit in Scottsdale, in the span of five minutes I met folks pitching middle school and high schools centered around rap music, dancing, performance, and just making stuff. Throughout the entire conference, I was not pitched one school centered on the deep reading and discussion of the classics of world civilization, though the Great Hearts Academies of Texas and Arizona are doing pioneering work in that area. As ed reformers keep doing somersaults to meet today’s SnapChatty generation where they are (hyper-texting on their phones, keeping up with the low-brow shenanigans of Kim Kardashian, Justin Bieber and Kanye West), I increasingly find myself called back to the basics. As I learned once at a symposium held at my all-boys Jesuit Alma mater of Omaha Creighton Prep: “Let classrooms be the refuge from the prevailing pop culture, not part and parcel of it.” In that spirit, I have always believed that before you can make something new, you have to fully grasp how it has been done at an elite level. After all, a conceptual or minimalist artist unable to draw a basic figure is unworthy of serious aesthetic appreciation. Or, more directly, you cannot have a Sol LeWitt and Ad Reinhardt until you have a Rembrandt and Picasso.”(more)