The Goldilocks Approach of the Public Classroom

Not Too Long, Not Too Short

TLDR. It’s a social media phenom meaning “Too Long Didn’t Read.”

Unfortunately, that also means settling for TSTU—Too Short To Understand. This site aims for writing that explains some contexts on many issues, but that’s brief enough not to require expertise to figure out.

Resisting reading that is too long is understandable. Life gets busy and long texts are often inaccessible. But actually, that leaves a lot of missed opportunities for learning that can seize a solid place between ignorance and expertise.

Plus, thinking only with the stuff of sound bites lends itself to outrage about any view different from one’s own. Here is a ground zero of our polarizations. And there are plenty of smart people who readily produce the clips designed to stoke that outrage. Even the TL;DR with proper punctuation—Too Long; Didn’t Read—still leaves your brain rented out to other people rather than stocking it to enable thinking for yourself.

The Public Classroom is a platform with brief essays providing readers enough explanations to form their own judgments. Imagine learning essential traits of issues, including contrasting views, with more detail available at a library, in a book, or on a web page near you.

Without advocacy or ideological spin, these essays provide contexts from the arc of the past to enable readers to make up their own minds. We cannot know what’s next, but we can all learn more about the factors that have brought us to the present and that will serve as the secret sauce of the future.

Public Classroom supplies the ingredients; you cook up your own views!

On PublicClassroom.Substack.com, I’m bringing college learning out from under the bushel basket of scholarly expertise for exchanging insights and inviting debate. How can historical research shed light on contemporary challenges? Absolute answers are not likely, but how about some perspective, some contexts, some stories of past troubles dealt with—or not—how can these give some sound footing for figuring out next steps?

Like Huck Finn toward the end of his Mississippi River journey, this web page, constructed toward the end of my scholarly career, lights out on the strand of frontier territory between academic abundance and public interest. Also like Huck, if I have “done wrong” by the lights of any outlook or ideology, the fault may be with me. But before dismissing these Public Classroom outposts, consider the goal, to get past the impulses of the fighting parties for “finding fault” with the other side, and go forth to do THIS frontier job better, starting with listening even when in disagreement.

Photo Credit: Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), and see my essay, “Challenging His Teacher’s Racism: Was Huck William James?” Huffington Post, December 31, 2017, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/challenging-his-teachers-racism-was-huck-william_us_5a490387e4b0d86c803c77a9

Welcome to this webpage, the public classroom, for useable ideas linking academic thinking to public purposes.

While my research on William James and other thinkers has provided wise general guidance, the content of the essays on Public Classroom comes from my teaching on a range of topics in American history. With heady theory serving as general inspiration but slipping to the back of my mind, I have taught courses on topics that confront deep values differences—you know, issues that manners experts tell you not to bring up at the dinner table! But the learning in these courses, on environmental debates, the American Civil War, medical controversies, political polarization, media and the public sphere, race relations, science and religion, war and peace, and the 1950s and 1960s, gets better when we don’t shy away from disagreements, but use the different points of view as learning opportunities. Then, instead of learning what we already know, we can learn whole new worlds, near and yet so far, hidden in the minds and hearts of the people right around us.

Teaching has even given ideas for Public Classroom essays. I’ve noticed “hooks” between items in the news and stories from history. For example, in the early 1990s, when first teaching about the 1960s, I noticed some parallels between the irreverent style of the counterculture Yippies and the tendency for businesses to associate their products with the same type of free-spirited defiance of authority. That insight, which first emerged when teaching about the legacy of the 1960s, spurred an essay, “From Abbie Hoffman in the ‘60s to Joe Isuzu in the ‘80s,” comparing Hoffman, who wrote a book called “Steal This Book” to ridicule the world of marketing, and the car company’s pitchman sporting a big grin while openly declaring, “I’m lying” about just how super the car was.

This little story shows how businesses borrowed the irreverence of that radical time to ridicule any questioning about buying consumer goods—like that car.

PubClassroom.Substack.com is dedicated to sharing the goals of general education, which encourages connections across cultural trends and versatilist thinking. With mental flexibility, you can bring awareness about a range of fields and versatility to a changing and challenging world. Here available for all interested citizens—without the tuition!

If you disagree with something on this web page—even in this opening statement—let’s hear it! As in the college classroom, so in the public classroom, I approach disagreements with a Pat Benatar Approach to Disagreements, based on her song, “Hit Me With Your Best Shot.” On hearing sharply different values or ideologies in class, I insist, hit us with your best shot, Fire Away!

We may still disagree, but we can learn from each other.

Welcome to PublicClassroom.Substack.com, the classroom without walls for looking past—and through—our walls of disagreement!