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Title: COLLEGE ILLITERACY VIDEO View count: 1232 Rating: 4.5 (8 ratings) Description: http://livinnthebigtime.blogspot.com/ Video Synopsis: A Reading (15 Excerpts From Collegiate Student Essays, 2002-2009) HD DVD 5 Minutes 40 Seconds 2009 "What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins." --Friedrich Nietzsche, On Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense. As an artist committed to Nietzsche studies, I have always been inspired by his investigations into language and its relation to thought, metaphysics, and truth. His once-controversial claim above - a positing of truth as mere metaphor, metonymy, and figures of speech - propelled many of my projects, each being committed to the investigation of the "Creative Lie," or the inherent conceptual illusions and deceptive conundrums imbued in aesthetic objects. A Reading (15 Excerpts From Collegiate Student Essays, 2002-2009), however, investigates language not to form postures about its nature or how its structures produce meaning, but to rather pose as a depiction of the growing problem within our country and abroad: illiteracy and the devolving educational system that gives rise to it. As such, the video laments a moment in US history when the "mobile army" to which Nietzsche refers is increasingly becoming less and less mobile, just not in the sense he meant. Over the past 7 years as an instructor of art, I experienced a disheartening encounter with illiteracy at various colleges with a frequency that far exceeded my expectations. While teaching at the University of Santa Barbara, Fresno City College, Hillsborough Community College, and Bakersfield College, I decided to collect the student essays written for my classes that were egregiously composed and abandoned by their authors (the fact that these students did not find the retrieval of their work to be important was in many ways discouraging enough). I archived these student essays as documentation of the growing illiteracy problem in the United States, for what I found in the contents therein mirrored and sometimes surpassed the most recent and demoralizing illiteracy data compiled by UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization), the National Right to Read Foundation, Jenkins Group, the National Institute for Literacy, amongst others. As A Reading depicts, its 15 selected statements were written by people of diverse backgrounds. Surprisingly, most of the students spoke English as their primary language. The students were always verbally notified on the opening day of class - as well as in writing within the course syllabus - that a term paper would be worth 10% of the entire course grade. Florida law, for example, dictates that each collegiate art history or appreciation class incorporate 3000 or more words of required student writing (When I taught at other schools, the length of the papers varied based on course subject matter). The students were always instructed to drop the course immediately if any of the course terms were disagreeable to them. I additionally informed the students that the college writing center makes itself available for their assistance. After a perusal of the writing, what becomes clear is that many students pass through high school without fortified reading and writing skills. These 15 excerpts thus function as formidable stand-ins for the types of inadequacies that one will consistently encounter throughout the archived collegiate student writings, a collection that has now amassed over 300 essays. Interestingly enough, the broken grammar, misspellings, and made-up words fuse the video with a humorous sensibility. This comical aspect thereby gives the work a sublime punch of pleasure (a viewers pleasure in the form of laughter while hearing such horrifically composed statements) commingled with pain (the terrible potential scenarios one can project regarding the future of the United States if a successful educational remedy is not implemented). Tags: college, illiteracy, in, america, conceptual, art, video, funny, hilarious, Author: LYONSPOTTER |
