Donald M. Hassler

Volunteers in College Teaching.

Volunteers have worked traditionally with individuals whom society identifies as in need of extra help, be they physically handicapped, emotionally impoverished, or culturally disadvantaged. Recently, however, some nontraditional programs in higher education have begun to use volunteers to teach college classes. A five-year experience of the Experimental Programs Division at Kent State University with the use of volunteers in college teaching suggests that there may be intrinsic advantages to volunteerism in higher education.

Experimental university classes and “the best that has been thought”

In the latest in a series of articles on experimental courses at Kent State University, the authors study how students perceive such classes in terms of a liberal arts cultural education versus a values oriented education. The results determine that subject matter interest was the prime motivation for students to enroll in experimental classes. The results also suggest an openness and variety of student interest that seems unaware of a liberal arts core of “the best that has been thought.”

THE PLAY OF EDUCATION: VOLUNTEER TEACHERS IN EXPERIMENTAL UNIVERSITY CLASSES

This paper describes an Experimental academic program at Kent State University in which a volunteer, nonprofessional mode of teaching seems to have produced positive results. The phenomenon of volunteerism is puzzling, but the data collected from this Experimental program suggest that people like to teach and do it well when they are part of a “divergent” system of openness and continued growth. In any case, this programs idealistic objectives of self-directed learning and a strong sense of community have been implemented by using volunteers.

The Playfulness of the Picturesque the Mirth of the Material

Much is lost from literature when it is no longer thought to be divinely inspired nor concerned with permanent, spiritual values; but much remains also of vitality and vividness — the curve of beauty and even a base in sexuality. The physiology of artistic taste and the discovery of the imagination as a material function of the brain opened up literature to something akin to technological development, to progress. Darwin was one of many “engineers” of the imagination in the second half of the 18th century. He experimented with sensation and “imaginative motions,” as he termed them, in order to build an art based on the theory that pleasure comes from the lively recombinations of sense perceptions at the near sub-conscious level of involuntary animal motion. In other words, he believed that pleasure could be engineered out of matter, that it did not spring whole from supernatural virtue. Wordsworth believed the same thing when he described “the very world, which is the world / Of all of us, — the place where, in the end, / We find our happiness, or not at all!”1

The Full Comedian: A Final Loose Analogy

In addition to a healthy theory, what does not fail in Darwin’s writing is the sense of overall tone and a few larger cameo pieces. Several longer passages of his verse have already been quoted and discussed in earlier chapters. These have been little anecdotes or stories that have some self-contained unity. I will deal with two more in this final chapter — longer passages and more unified. Strangely enough, Desmond King-Hele who has edited the only collection of Darwin’s writings in this century apparently does not think that there are sustained passages of unified writing in the poems, and so he only anthologizes little snippets of verse.1 The longer passages ought to be seen, I think, for what they are — memorable sections in admittedly weakly unified poems.

Varieties of Despair

In January 1759, Samuel Johnson, London wit and son of Michael Johnson former bookseller and stationer in Lichfield, learned that his mother was suffering probably her final illness. He wrote frequent, compassionate notes to his mother in Lichfield but was unable to come down to see her before her death toward the end of the month.

Making it Strange Technically

As one would expect from Darwin after knowing his physiological and univocal theories, the couplet art that he practiced was blatant aestheticism — artificial, technically intricate, and very much removed from everyday life. Like modern Formalists, Darwin is continually conscious of what is “literary” about literature, and takes great pains to thicken the language of his couplets. Ironically, the weakest thing in much of his couplet art is that he chooses word patterns and “devices” that are not artificial enough in the sense that by the time he uses them they are too familiar as thickening devices for poetic language. Again, what is most interesting, though, is his theory and the problems it created for his art because his problems are still to a great extent our problems. The Russian Formalist and American New Criticism movements have produced a theory of literature based on the “scientific” study of taste and imaginative motion much more sophisticated and various than Darwin’s, but with some of the same problems. This makes his early ratiocinations all the more important for study.

Darwin’s Literary Theory

A serious, pious view of literature (that is the general concept of verbal human art) as eternally the same obsessed and inhibited many writers of the 18th century. The authoritarian example of the “ancients” was indeed one of the “ghosts” of innate verities that Lockean analysis could not dismiss. Darwin himself could not help but pay devote homage to the general ideas about the mimetic power of literature to hold the mirror up to truth and nature. But Darwin had much more ability and inclination to speculate than, like Pope, to polish epigrammatic condensations of inherited traditions. Thus, even though the nervous tone of his writing seems in part forced out under the burden of the past, what is interesting about his literary theory is its daring speculation about the physiological explanation of literary art.