An Opportunity I'll Pass On

We've got to take our joy where we find it these days, and I found mine today in this email to "all faculty" at the quaint small town community college where I tilt against the windmill of small minds several days a week:

• Each summer the National Endowment for the Humanities supports study opportunities in the humanities for faculty who teach American undergraduates.
  
  Landmarks of American History and Culture workshops are rigorous national, residential workshops for community college faculty. The Landmarks workshops are 1-week projects that take place at sites of historical or cultural significance across the nation and provide educators with the opportunity to engage in intensive study and discussion of important topics in American history and culture. Participants receive stipends to help defray travel and living expenses. This program is open to full-time, part-time, and adjunct faculty at community colleges.
  
  The list of Landmarks of American History and Culture Workshops for Community College Faculty, along with eligibility requirements and contact information for the directors, is available on the NEH website at: www.neh.gov/projectslandmarks-college.html
  
  The six workshops for 2009 are
  
• Concord, Massachusetts: A Center of Transcendentalism and Social Action in the 19th Century
• Encountering John Adams: Boston and Braintree
• The American Lyceum and Public Culture: The Rhetoric of Idealism, Abolition, and Opportunity
• Landmarks of American Democracy: From Freedom Summer to the Memphis Sanitation Workers Strike
• Progress and Poverty: The Gilded Age in American Politics and Literature, 1877-1901
• Passages to Cleveland: Community Memory and the Landmarks of Migration.
  
  

I'm sorry, but I'm too superficial to consider Concord a "Center of Transcendentalism"--I thought it was liberty and freedom that were of concern. I confess that the "Rhetoric of Idealism" was something that only surfaced in my mind during the Obama campaign. I wonder if the Landmarks of democracy aren't a bit more fundamental than "Freedom Summer" (which sounds a lot like the burning cities of 1968) or the garbage men of Memphis. Honestly, I've got my doubts if 1877-1901 was a particularly gilded age for either politics (do Chester Arthur, Rutherford Hayes or Benjamin Harrison come to mind?) or literature (although Mark Twain, Henry James and Walt Whitman do merit a nod.) As for Cleveland and its position as a landmark of migration only leads me to ask, "Is the Cuyahoga burning?"

Wonder why education is so screwed up in America? Maybe the National Endowment for the Humanities has a hand in it.