Joseph L. Kagle, Jr. Peace Essays

Key Problems of Cultural Education in the Period of Globalization

by Joseph Kagle, United States of America

This is a critical moment in global education and cultural leadership. It is a time when America, whose flexible system has moved to massive testing in the tradition of China, and China, whose inflexible testing system is moving toward what the Chinese call “the American system” (a way to find out each students’ strengths and weaknesses therefore teaching to the strengths and helping to improve the weaknesses). It is a time when technology levels our planet into (to use a term that The New York Times reporter, Thomas Friedman, coined) “flatworld” (a place in time when internet communication delivers instant information which is open to everyone on the planet) makes all of us equal in learning.

At this momentous moment in cultural education where leadership and human progress (in a world at war) are essential element to an individual’s learning, we start any discussion with self (“I, he, she”), move out to those close at hand (“us”: family and friends), and expand our vision and messages to the community (an extended “us”: local, national and global). Therefore, the initial question any cultural leader should ask about cultural education on the great road of art, commerce and information is “Who am I?” The post modern 21^st century is a time when technology has made unparalleled breakthroughs, advances in scientific knowledge, discoveries concerning outer space as well as the earth’s innermost core, the human body and its psyche. Human relations are quite different. We have the widest gap between rich and poor in history, the slaughter of humans by humans over the last century is shocking and there has been an alarming growth in population. In less than 150 years, we have gone from a global population of 1 billion to about 6 billion and more than ¾ of the people alive today live in developing countries. We have more information in the midst of less understanding. In this sea of contradictions between technological advances and human progress derailment, one must ask “Who am I?”

Most of us sitting here as cultural educators would answer; “I am numbers on plastic cards. I am Pre-Modern- a believer, Modern- a searcher for truth, and Post-Modern- a pragmatic visionary. I am “and” and “or”.  America is an “or” culture. Republican or Democrat.  Citizen or soldier. Many places, including Mongolia,  along the silk road of technological education can be “and”: that is, conservative and liberal and independent and for and against a war at the same time.

A cultural leader who is also an educator gives us experience, knowledge, intuition, visions and a unique look at history. “I am an American.” Americans have the audacity to think we can find the answer. That is an American strength and our weakness: strength because as a people we believe before any venture that we will prevail and weakness when that belief becomes arrogance instead of humility.

A leader must live with new nature. As Harriet Mayor Fulbright observes, “Now for the first time in human history, one half of the world’s population lives in cities. That means that we are no longer surrounded by nature: we surround it”. Mongolia has been fortunate since that is not the case in its history, although Ulaanbaatar is an example of the clustering of people today. In America, in the middle of our Civil War, Abraham Lincoln signed a bill that began the great conservation movement of the 19^th century, establishing Yosemite and Yellowstone. It was believed our “manifest destiny” was to own the land while preserving it. (It is interesting to see Mongolia preserving the land without owning it.) America had an unequal distribution of the world’s resources- human, natural, educational, technological, and financial.

Another term was coined in the mid 19^th century, “geographic determinism”. America was halfway between two great oceans and halfway between two poles. It was not until Darwin’s 1859 Origin of the Species that this concept of determinism or manifest destiny was undermined in academic circles, yet even today fundamentalists use “manifest destiny” to justify all actions.

Cultural leaders are sometimes blinded by not asking the right question. What are the right questions for the 20^th (and therefore a beginning for the 21^st) century? In America, “What is it?” was used to think about 19^th century American national parks. Now, in contemplating contemporary problems, three other 20^th century questions must be asked: “What forms does reality take?” (a science and cubist question); “What forces are at play in the works creation?” (a question for revolutionaries and artists: 1930’s question) and finally “What systems are involved in the work?” (late 20^th century question for economists, engineers, artists and architects in society). It may take many nations’ educational institutions and their cultural leaders to work together to develop a pattern of thought to conserve the ecological, historical and artistic “systems” for a new generation.

Cultural leadership embraces flexible thought and “situational leadership”: that are: “If you know nothing, you are told”; “If you know a little, you are shown”; “If you know as much as your mentor, you work in collaboration”; and “If you know more than your mentor, the mentor gets out of the way but finds you the resources to get the job done”. What this takes is not academic learning but cultural learning and patience. I agree with Harriet Mayor Fulbright, “There is a growing realization that those in charge of governments and businesses have a profound impact on history, and recent research on effective leadership for the future has been extensive. It was found that only 10% of those skills (needed for leadership) were intellectual, or IQ, whereas 70% were based on what is called emotional quotient (EQ). What is EQ? Its components are: self awareness, or the ability to see oneself accurately; management of one’s own emotions, to control surges of anger or anxiety; motivation of others- empathy and understanding of other, or the ability to see situations and feelings through another’s eyes; and the ability to make and maintain human connections through reaching out and careful listening.”

Men and women must begin thinking as mothers in new cultural leadership positions. We are now members of a family whose home is the Earth, not the nations that we have arbitrarily divided into. Along this path of thought, in 2001-2003 I worked with leaders in the Caucasus on a new Bauhaus for creative ideas, called Art Villa Garikula. My guideposts have been simple: a set of eleven rules backed by experience and training. I use these rules and advise my students to use them in dealing with a complex, cultural, global world. The first rule was given by my father. He said, "I have never been there so you are on your own but remember when you get there, learn to meet people and situations and everything else will fall into place," therefore: Rule One: When breaking new ground, listen to everyone but follow no one.  This leads to Rule Two: When in doubt, circle the wagons, (the American settlers in the West did this when attacked by hostile forces) and naturally moves into Rule Three: Luck comes to those who are prepared.  After teaching art and art history for 40 years in universities and museums, I was glad that I read outside my field (such as the history of America) because the major questions at the end of all my lectures in 2001-2004 were: "What is an American? What does American freedom mean?"

I learned long ago it is easier to say, "I'm sorry, I did not know" than to get permission for anything which was not illegal but outside the rules. When I went to Georgia, I asked every major museum in America to sent some of their publications for a library in the country of my Fulbright grant. They sent over 200 boxes at a time when US Embassies were suggesting a maximum of four boxes for instructional use. This practice leads to Rule Four: If they give you lined paper, write but across the lines if they don't tell you differently and to Rule Five: Walking on new ground, tread softly at first and hold the hand of a friendly, experience partner. I was the first art professional chosen by the United States Department of State to journey and educate in Georgia since its independence in 1991 (therefore, the country and my teaching needed all those books, slides and CD’s. Luckily for me, someone at the US Embassy in Tbilisi saw the wisdom of breaking a rule for the betterment of all. Of course, in any endeavor there are times when the mind and body should relax therefore Rule Six: Stop and watch the grass grow. You might learn something.  For the last ten years, I had been reading the poetry of Rumi, a 13th century Islamic poet who believed that all men could live together in peace, so we stopped in Cappadocia, Turkey and visited the nature-formed, man-carved “fairy castles” before journeying on to Tbilisi, Georgia.

As an artist, teacher and writer, I could not function without Rule Seven: First you shoot the arrows and then you paint the targets. You cannot miss. Adjusting to the unknown on the second day of my Fulbright Scholar’s tenure, I was asked, "Do you wish to go to Kutaisi and represent America as our artist?"    It was already the end of August and I had been told that I would start in September at the university. "Sure, I will go to the International Workshop on Contemporary Art." My wife and I stayed in the governor's home on the outskirts of the town. His home housed five families in a structure where Americans would have one family. I would recommend staying with a local host to anyone who wants to know a nation’s family life, politics, religion, customs and social gatherings and begin to learn about cultural differences in a global community. We learned the difference between monochromatic systems of living (I see America using a linear system of thought that starts at one point and ends in another in the future) and polychromatic systems (Georgia, the Middle East, Mongolia and the Far East, where thought is a spiral around an idea which may or not end in a point which can be in the past as well as the future). This situation of the unknown leads to Rule Eight: When working in the unknown, any path will do. You can begin in the middle, work backwards or forwards. If you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there. Creativity is not a linear process.

New ideas were, for the most part, not tolerated in Soviet- and Communist-dominated societies for centuries, except behind closed doors. I will tell you one short story of a cultural hero on the modern technological silk road. David Kakabadze, in the Republic of Georgia, went to Paris in 1920, worked as the equal of Picasso, Brague and Leger. Today, he has his work from that period of time in the Yale Art Collection beside these better‑known colleagues. He came back to Georgia in 1928, was told that he could not think or teach modem ideas by the Communists, and died in 1952, somewhat unknown and pushed into poverty by the Soviets. Today, he is a respected, national hero.

What living in the unknown does is make you examine your process of dealing with information and therefore Rule Nine: For a creative human being, it is just as important to forget as to remember. When the mind is overloaded, it turns itself off for a time. Also some information stops what Malcalm Gladwell calls “blink- thinking without thinking” (thought that goes on behind some closed door in the mind). After a time, as an expert in a field, we make insights into things and events, which we cannot tell how we arrived at those conclusions. Also, we must select what to forget and what to remember. For instance, I will forget the long lines of Georgian men waiting for work beside the roads each day (although I will retain my drawings of them for reference and remembrance when I need it); that a college professor makes only $10 per month as pay and a pension for that same professor is $7 per month and that one million Georgians have left the country since 1989 so that one person in the family is sending money home (although I will retain my journals with stories about those facts). I will remember the Georgian love of the arts, the hospitality where you give all that you can to a stranger who is an honored guest and I will keep alive the warmth of friendships made and the respect for education shown. I will do the same for my times in Mongolia. Students must do this with cultural education in a flat, technological, global world.

But everyone must adhere to Rule Ten: Leave the door open. The future is sometimes the past. Why did the Persians, Turks, Mongols and Soviets wish to control this small nation of Georgia with little natural resources? It is because Georgia's geographical importance has been known for centuries as the crossroads of the commercial "silk road" between Asia and Europe. Mongolia has been the keystone holding together the great weight of Russia and China (or holding them apart). These two smaller countries are key nations in the spread of democracy to their part of the world. They both are an important stop on the cultural silk road of the arts.

And what did I learn while in Georgia and Mongolia as cultural educator? When I was asked, "What is America’s freedom?" It is three things: 1) Jeffersonian America where we educate the brightest and the best to lead our nation, 2) mercantile America. where business supplies the money to run a free government, and 3) Thomas Paine's America where there is one vote for each American where a citizen can get rid of the brightest and best who do not serve the people. No nation can have a democracy without that balance. I looked at my country with completely new eyes on my return. Each citizen of a nation should spend one day a year as a tourist to his or her beloved country. It will open cultural, educational doors which the mind and tradition has shut. And lastly, as a cultural leader, we come to Rule Eleven: May the beauty we love be what we do. What is learned within the academic walls of the classroom is the fuel that drives the mind to think new thoughts. The arts are flames that light passionate fires that burn for a lifetime.

In a global society where all knowledge is on the internet, we must only be in competition with that person we know we can become. The new silk road is still an important avenue for trade (all kinds) except the pathway is global now and may be expanded to fill the whole electronic world and the spirits of individuals on that network. There is no section of the planet where information cannot penetrate. We now can see with eyes from satellites (called “parallax vision” by the architect, Stephen Holl) as well as Renaissance vision (standing on the ground and looking with one eye through linear or aerial perspective). What is fascinating in this global moment is that seeing the world can be from many points of view at one time, or through any time in history.  One way of seeing does not stop when another paradigm appears on the scene. What is true is that the old vision is now an archaic form or historic artifact! We use glasses when our eyes are not good enough, then we use telescopes and microscopes when glasses fail us. Lastly, we use visionaries to see beyond what we know or have seen. Cultural leaders with a high EQ (emotional quotient) are needed. Our institutions of learning in the past (and to a large degree in the present) educate for IQ, not EQ. New cultural leaders must have a high EQ.

As I have said, the arts are not the fuel of the mind. That is education. The arts are the spark that sets that fuel ablaze. It is the source for a future passion on the “cultural, electronic silk road” that will light up a new horizon.