In (partial) defence of the liberal arts degree

Cross-posted from Front Porch Republic
and Christian Democracy Magazine:

One of the articles which recently crossed my desk was an interactive online presentation from Georgetown University’s Centre on Education and the Workforce, highlighting which college majors are the most (and least) economically-valuable. The list is unsurprising: every last one of the most lucrative college degrees belongs to a scientific, technical, engineering or mathematics (or STEM, as we call it in the ‘ed biz’) field. On the other hand, the least-lucrative fields overall – with the one notable exception of early childhood education – belonged to the arts, the liberal arts and the humanities. This presentation, along with a couple of recent articles I’ve been reading about Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs fame, the social media-savvy populariser of technical and skilled-trade education, prompted me to a meditation on the sad fate of the liberal arts.

The popularity of Mike Rowe is not at all difficult for me to understand. Encouraging more and more high-school age youngsters to enter trades and to acquire practical skills is a worthwhile and laudable goal, and I have nothing but the most profound respect for it. I’m speaking here as a former AmeriCorps volunteer who worked with low-income and first-generation students, many of whom wanted to know which degrees would help them get decent-paying jobs as soon as they left. Technical schools and community colleges were very often the (only) reasonably-priced options.

Taking a somewhat broader spiritual view, Rowe is performing a truly valuable service in making the skilled trades again a competency that has social currency – that is, giving the youngsters who don’t get into the liberal arts schools of their choice a decent shot at self-respect and competence in skills, which have become criminally undervalued in a ‘cognitive’ age ruled by the digitally-nomadic ‘symbolic analysts’ (to use the term coined by Robert Reich and borrowed subversively by Christopher Lasch). Rowe, a good populist at heart – and who doesn’t love a good populist? – is doing yeoman’s work and he is doing it well: re-establishing the self-respect and self-awareness of the working classes. He’s trying to spare working-class families money and humiliation by not having them and their children chase degrees they aren’t economically-equipped to use effectively, when their wealthier and better-connected classmates are able to live on their parents’ cash while they pursue career-starting unpaid internships, and so on. He’s trying to help them build respectable conditions for themselves on their own terms. For this he deserves three very hearty cheers.

Well, if I were feeling particularly uncharitable and cantankerous, I might give him two-and-a-half. Because Rowe’s work is propped up, in part, on a devaluation of the four-year liberal arts degree. This is a devaluation for which neither he nor the political tendency he represents – a political tendency I share, by the way – is responsible. All the same, it is there. Our age does not trust the liberal arts degree. It isn’t immediately applicable. It doesn’t come with a guaranteed cash pay-off at the end. Think of the stereotype of the English-major barista saddled down with six-figure student loan debt, and also of the derision this tends to draw. Many of us tend to view the liberal arts degree as impractical, an unwise indulgence of the sons and daughters of privilege, which lands them in a penury fully-deserved on account of their naïveté and lack of foresight. Mike Rowe’s success is built, partially, on a very real cultural desire to avoid, not necessarily even the poverty but the social stigma that comes with failure: a social stigma measured in the dollars and cents you could have been earning and saving and accumulating, but are instead using (if you can get them) to pay off the interest in a debt that might hound you to the grave. The sad reality: in America there is no crime more unforgivable than that of being poor.

The blunt truth is that Rowe is reacting to these social and economic realities in a wholly level-headed, understandable and sympathetic way. No, if we are to understand the devaluation of the liberal arts degree, we have to look for the deeper roots, and these roots are many-layered and overlapping.

This is indeed a major theme in the opus of the great social historian Christopher Lasch. In his book The Revolt of the Élites, he turns to the conflicting aims, the built-in contradictions (considered almost in a Marxist fashion), between the myth of meritocracy on the one hand, and the self-perpetuation of a managerial and professional élite on the other whose hallmarks are mobility and managerialism. The academy has come to serve both. It does this firstly by extending the promise of social mobility – if you get a degree here, you will have a limitless future, boundless opportunities! Secondly, by entrenching professional status and expertise as the primary (if not sole) marker of social worth, it ensures that children born into families which already have a professional background have a leg up. Thirdly, the meritocratic norms of the academy effectively shield the perpetuation of professional class privilege from serious scrutiny. Advanced degrees and cushy managerial jobs, so the reasoning goes, go to the people who are smarter, who are more ambitious, who are harder-working, who have earned said positions rather than inherited them.

Lasch makes the point with startling and brutal effectiveness, that ‘social mobility’ is a recent ideal and an ameliorative one, which arose after the Great Depression to replace the older ideal of American producerism which economic disaster had depreciated. In the older tradition of American producerism, the concept of the ‘producing class’ was expansive enough to include (in the words of social reformer and Unitarian minister William Channing) the ‘professional, commercial, manufacturing, mechanical, agricultural orders’. It was an ideal in which wealth and productive property were not entirely out of the reach of the poorest of the producing class, yet honest work – even manual work – not yet beneath the wealthiest. This producerism was also somewhat anti-capitalist insofar as it had precious little use for usury, speculation and the manipulation of money, and sought to discipline all three through collective action and government regulation. However, as Lasch takes pains to highlight, the ideal also allowed for a broad distribution of intellectual assets. Even poor workers and farmers were not excluded from the realm of the fine arts, of music, of literature, of philosophy. Whether rightly or wrongly, Americans of the nineteenth century prided themselves on the fact that their poor workers and farmers were better-educated – in the classical, liberal-arts sense of the word – than Old Europe’s!

The post-Great Depression doctrine of social mobility undermined this ideal irrevocably. When it became clear that work and productivity alone were no guarantee of the ability to enjoy a sufficient existence, the old ideal that a liberal education was meant to supplement work gave way to the idea that liberal education was meant to supplant it. For the first time, a life of manual labour became something the successful student was expected to escape. Or, as Lasch put it, ‘it was only when the hierarchical structure of American society became unmistakable that opportunity came to be widely associated with the achievement of superior standing in an increasingly stratified, money-mad, and class-conscious society’. And the education system inevitably became the vehicle by which the ordinary worker or farmer could hope to improve his economic lot in life, or – more likely – the lot of his children.

From here, it’s not difficult to piece together the trends which followed. When the purpose of education shifted from the supplementation of labour with learning, to the escape from labour by learning, learning itself increasingly took on an ‘economic’ character. Knowledge itself became something specialised and managerial. This trend Lasch ties, with some rhetorical flair, into other broader social trends: ‘the concentration of corporate power, the decline of small-scale production, the separation of production from consumption, the growth of the welfare state, the professionalisation of knowledge, and the erosion of competence, responsibility and citizenship’. And from the interactive web feature put out by Georgetown, it’s hard to argue with his conclusions. The most-lucrative degrees are all ones which mesh neatly with the specialised demands of large-scale production and entrenched corporate power: petroleum engineering; pharmaceutical sciences and administration; metallurgical engineering; mining engineering; chemical engineering. The least-lucrative ones are those degrees which are meant to facilitate social consciousness and the building of basic spiritual, intellectual and emotional competencies in the young: early childhood education; human services; studio arts; social work; normal education; visual and performing arts; theology and religious vocations.

It’s difficult to look at these results – and there’s no reason to deny their factuality – and not come to the same sobering conclusions Lasch did about the choices we’ve made as a society. We have decided, first-order, that accumulating wealth, in the crassest and most materialist sense, is of overriding concern. On another level, we have decided that any effort spent on cultivating spiritual or æsthetic pursuits is a waste of time and energy, and we compensate those engaged in such cultivation accordingly – both in terms of social respect, and in terms of the wealth we have deemed all-important.

Needless to say, though, this is a worrying prospect. When, as Lasch claims, our élites are indeed in revolt against not only democracy, but the very basis for any kind of high culture, we have run up against a civilisational crisis. No civilisation has long survived in any meaningful way, which has so devalued its arts, its literature, its pursuits of the great humanistic questions, or the men and women responsible for inculcating their appreciation in its young. And as much as I endorse the need for low-income students of working-class backgrounds to look to technical training and the skilled trades in the current social and economic climate, I can’t help but worry that this is a greater indication of the unsustainable direction of our culture.

Just for the record…

Matt Damon is awesome. If you haven’t seen the video, you should. Mr Damon is, in spite of his use of colourful metaphors - quite voluble and articulate on the subject and gets at the very heart of the Christian idea of vocation. Teaching is a profession which, by its very nature (and particularly in our anti-intellectual society, which tends to treat them like dirt) attracts those driven by caritas - even though they do enjoy living and must, like the rest of humankind, eat, they aren’t teaching just to collect their next paycheck.

Matt Damon is right here in more ways than one. The education problem in the United States is a lot more systemic than just bad teachers. Part of it - a large and substantial part of it - is the cultural expectation (on teachers and on students!) underlying the viewpoint both the Reason.tv reporter and cameraman express here. This expectation demands that education prepare students for ‘the real world’ - meaning a highly bureaucratised, technocratic and impersonal system which looks for a certain set of commercially applicable skills, among which is not creative, broad or moral thinking. Modern American society doesn’t want creative students or creative teachers; it wants cogs in a capitalist machine. Our society overvalues the knowledge-ideal of τεχνή (tekhne, from which comes our word ‘technical’) as a model of education and undervalues παιδεία (paideía, from which comes the English ‘encyclopaedia’) - learning for its own sake, particularly in the liberal arts. I tend to think of the scorn that is regularly heaped upon college English majors, or (in the United States, not so much in China) the awkward silences, looks of puzzlement and comments of ‘so what do you plan to do with that?’ that accompany my pronouncement that I studied philosophy in college.

A paideia ideal of education for its own sake won’t fix everything, naturally. What I hope it can do - as with many other believers in a liberal education - is open up people’s minds and hearts to the idea of vocation: of not just a skills-focussed ‘job’ interchangeable with any other, whose only end is making money. Vocation is a committed labour one undertakes to the greater glory of humanity and - ultimately - of God; though most teachers in American public schools are likely alien to such language, I argue that they are on a similar path. It is not a job, as Mr Damon notes, to which people flock because they envy the pay or the benefits. And, with a few notable exceptions, the teachers I had the good fortune of working with as part of my Peace Corps and AmeriCorps service in both American and Qazaqstani public schools did have the best interests of their students at heart. (The administrators, on the other hand, were a notably mixed lot.)

Here is the original video of Matt Damon cussing out the cameraman:



And some Holy Moses for good measure! \m/

Free music - Education

A kill-switch for intellectual integrity in the humanities

It is incredibly rare that I read a New York Times article that sends cold shivers down my spine the way no horror movie can, but the recent one about how the Wikipedia model might be changing the rules of peer review in academic journals made me literally cringe.

When I think back on my post-high school career, and how differently I thought as I left high school from when I left college, and how AmeriCorps and even Peace Corps changed even those views as I was continually exposed to more and deeper knowledge in communities of people who were struggling with the very same questions and issues (even if I completely disagreed with those people), I’ve come to understand how vital it is from a purely intellectual point-of-view to form those connexions. The sciences and the academic disciplines function similarly – you present a piece of work to your peers: people who have both experience with and an interest in the academic question or the scientific hypothesis you are posing; people who know your real name and who are willing to give you criticism (constructive or otherwise) under their own real names.

There are downsides to the process, naturally. Egos get involved. Academic battles and enmities arise. Though I do not know the specifics of the debate in geochemistry in which my father is primarily concerned, his views are immensely unpopular within his own circles and have extreme difficulty gaining traction. But the downsides of having academic debates contained within communities of people who have an understanding and a material interest in the field are vastly outweighed by the benefits. Criticisms are civil, for the most part. Criticisms conform to accepted standards of logic and reasoning. Criticisms are based in fact and according to the best understandings we have within the field.

Transferring these academic debates out of peer circles and onto the Internet is thus a monstrously terrible idea. Perhaps Dr Cohen, the George Mason University professor interviewed in the article who advocates such measures, would care to instruct himself in the subject beginning with this public service announcement (provided by a group of entertainers with a very clear and cogent understanding of how the Internet works to promote civility, rationality, community and factual debate).

A number of good points to be made here. Wikipedia editors are free to edit anonymously – with some exceptions, they don’t even need usernames, just IP addresses. The only reason Wikipedia is not a total wasteland is because they have bots and an active and dedicated team of professional editors who keep it relatively sane by reversing malicious edits and refereeing flame wars between interested parties on their discussion pages, but even Wikipedia is not really reliable for anything more than the most superficial information on any given subject, unless it is extensively sourced – and if you’re going to keep a dedicated team of professional editors who do just such selection of criticism, you might as well give them a break and keep your articles peer-reviewed anyway.

The deeper issue, though, is that of academia willingly subjecting itself to creationists, global-warming deniers and other such ignoramuses. Thankfully, the article was referencing only a certain number of journals in the humanities (the sciences so far seem exempt, and it is my sincere hope that they are wise, secure, sincere and self-aware enough never to attempt such a misguided stunt as this), but it is troubling all the same. The humanities are ostensibly academic disciplines which pose questions about what it means to be human; God help us all if we allow authority over such questions to fall into the hands of people who are insecure enough in their own humanity to spew vitriol and ignorance anonymously over the Internet.

Дос жылатып айтады, душпан күлдіртіп айтады

It’s a saying in Qazaq: ‘дос жылатып айтады, душпан күлдіртіп айтады’ (‘a false friend will make you laugh; only a true friend will make you cry’). I think it’s actually a very good saying – the friends you can trust are the ones who won’t be afraid to correct you when you do something wrong, even if it hurts you.

This is difficult for me to write about even now. I was invited to Nurgül Täte’s house for Courtney’s birthday party, but I was in an emotional shambles that day – my lesson had gone very poorly, and I had gone into a tailspin trying to plan my following lesson, and my host nephew and niece were trying to pick the lock on my room with a spoon. When I arrived at the house, I was on the verge of tears, and I tried to calm myself down in another room, but this caused everyone there to start worrying about me. In hindsight, I should not have gone there at all in that state, since it was offensive of me to be arriving at a birthday party when my emotions were not good – I was spreading my bad mood onto everyone else. Indeed, I had offended my host sister so badly she would hardly speak to me at all for the next two days (when we finally sorted it out). Asem and Nagima had to take me aside later and tell me bluntly that I needed to change my attitude completely if I wanted to work effectively (or at all) in Qazaqstan, that I needed to change my attitude toward my fellow Trainees and in general be more flexible.

It wasn’t easy at all to hear. But I’m glad they were honest with me – my trainers, and indeed all of my fellow Trainees, are far truer friends to me than I gave them credit for. They aren’t afraid of telling me what they think. It was good of my trainers to tell me that I need to learn to take their criticisms more gracefully, and also to have more human grace toward my fellow Trainees in general, because they are good people, every bit as good as the people in AmeriCorps, and I had been misprising them severely. They are undergoing the same trials I am, and they are dealing with them in different ways – they deserve what support I can offer. I had been holding them and myself to an impossibly high standard, and to be perfectly blunt, I needed a good slap in the face from my true friends to realise it.

Since then, I’ve been taking their advice to heart, without being overly hard on myself. I had a good discussion with Laura Marshall (whose blog site, ‘The Central Asian Times’, has some link-love in my volunteeroll to the right – visit her! If she writes half as well as my discussions with her have gone, you won’t regret it!) about how to handle cultural differences and how to manage my own stress. I’m still learning, and I should treat myself as such.

Ups and downs

Anyone who has gone abroad at the behest of an educational or service organisation will be very familiar with the culture-shock ‘W’, a graph that shows that culture shock tends to take a sine-wave form: the honeymoon phase descends into initial shock, and an initial adjustment is made, after which come further shocks and further adjustments. I’d say this week I hit my first real trough on the ‘W’ - though oddly enough it wasn’t the local culture to which I’ve had trouble adjusting so much (that comes in different ways and produces different reactions) but the Peace Corps culture and my fellow Trainees. It is vastly different from what I experienced of AmeriCorps (though I’m sure if I had been in AmeriCorps from the beginning, since North Carolina, I might have thought differently). Even though I wasn’t particularly close with my fellow college guides during my AmeriCorps service, there was a palpable sense of camaraderie in that group – we faced similar challenges, we had a common outlook on our service and we trusted each other with our problems (even though we routinely only saw each other once or twice a week). I still consider my fellow (former and current) NCAC college guides to be my friends; I expected that I would get along as well with my fellow Trainees in С—, but I haven’t found that to be the case at all.

Part of the problem, of course, is the time limitation. We spend a lot of time studying, preparing lessons or just preparing ourselves for the next task ahead of us, so there isn’t a lot of social time full-stop. Another part of the problem is that our reasons for serving in Peace Corps seem to be wildly different, and our attitudes toward Peace Corps service and toward the people we’re working with seem to be wildly different, to the point where it is sometimes completely incomprehensible to me exactly why they are here. It was a culture shock of a much different nature than I was expecting, and perhaps that’s why it hit me so badly: I’m not in Providence anymore, I’m not in AmeriCorps anymore, and my fellows in my language group aren’t at all the intellectual, idealistic, open-minded Yankees I’m used to dealing with – like Leah, Afshan, Miranda and David – around whom I could more or less be my normal self and needn’t beware being sized up, judged and belittled. So I withdrew and didn’t talk about my problems with anyone in the group – until I went outside, lost my temper along with my Mennonite upbringing and punched a schoolyard tree over a relatively minor problem. In hindsight, I am quite ashamed I did it, and it will never happen again, because a.) I gave my word on it to Nagima, b.) my right hand really freaking hurt afterward and c.) I know there are far more positive and effective ways to relieve stress.

I’m not trying to say that they’re bad people, on the whole. They’re not. I think it’s simply that I wasn’t expecting fellow Americans to be more deeply alien to me than my local hosts, trainers and neighbours. (Of course, there are other factors to consider, such as the fact that the lack of a language barrier lends itself to a kind of ‘uncanny trench’ in which relatively minor cultural differences within American culture can be grossly exaggerated.)

So yeah, it’s been a rough week. But talking with Nagima about the problems I’d been having really helped, and I feel much better now – more secure, confident and positive. My lessons are getting progressively better and my relationship with my counterpart is good - our teaching styles are drastically different, but I think given some more time and experience we could complement each other well. Also, I've got an awesome host family and an awesome language teacher watching my back; I've got a lot to be thankful for. As the Qazaqs say, ‘жақсы сөз, жарым ырыс’. (Literally translated: ‘a good word is half your fate’.) And the local flora can breathe easy now; they’re safe from me. Instead, I’m following up on my theological interests: I checked out Dame Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love from the Peace Corps HQ's library in Almaty and am currently reading it. So far, so good – but I’ll write some more about it later. Көріскенше, folks.

An Eastern thinker's view of Western Christianity

I confess to being a complete tenderfoot when it comes to philosophy that comes from outside the Continental and early Analytical traditions, and even more of one when it comes to understanding Eastern Orthodoxy. To begin rectifying my ignorance (an utterly reprehensible one given where I am going to be serving for the next two years), I introduced myself to the thought of Nikolay Aleksandrovich Berdyaev (Николай Александрович Бердяев) through one of the only books our library system had by him, The Russian Revolution - which I enjoyed thoroughly. It was an education into Russian history through a religious perspective which was treated somewhat cursorily by the history classes I took at K College - it examined Russian political radicalism and Bolshevism as phenomena which were, at heart, fundamentally religious, with pedigrees in the Raskol schism of the late 1600's, and began thoroughly critiquing the whole of Marxist thought as though it were in itself a religious argument. The case Berdyaev made was strong and convincing - though militantly atheistic, Communism engaged the creative energies of the Russian intelligentsia and inspired the same kind of zeal as the religious Great Awakenings did in the US during the formative years of our history. As Berdyaev viewed it, Communism organised itself around dogmas, had sacraments and a clergy, even espoused an eschatology (though they called it 'the Revolution') and a belief in a Messianic class ('the proletariat').

Though highly critical of the internal inconsistencies of Communism and the way in which it stifled existential creativity, Berdyaev saw the rise of Communism itself as a judgment upon Christendom, which had failed to capture the public's imagination and creative energies and which had failed to fulfil its promises of sowing the seeds of social justice and economic equality, to culminate in the harvest of a Kingdom of Heaven. One wonders, when Martin Luther King, Jr. said in his speech on the Vietnam War that:

[C]ommunism is a judgement against our failure to make democracy real and follow through on the revolutions we initiated. Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism. With this powerful commitment we shall boldly challenge the status quo and unjust mores and thereby speed the day when "every valley shall be exalted, and every moutain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight and the rough places plain"

he was hearkening back to Berdyaev's criticism of Russian Christianity, or whether he had simply come to the same page from another direction.

So, with great interest, I read the translation of Berdyaev's essay 'Unifying Christians of the East and West'. As much as The Russian Revolution had inspired me to delve deeper, 'Unifying Christians' challenged me. Coming from a Protestant Christian background with a fiercely individualistic and egalitarian streak born of the Teutonic temperament (a temperament which made Kierkegaard so appealing to me), Berdyaev's essay needled me to reconsider some of my basic presuppositions of what being Christian really meant.

Berdyaev did begin his essay showing appreciation for the diversity within Christian thought, but no sooner was this done than he began diagnosing the cultural fractures in the Christian project. He saw the Western (Catholic) Church as the logical heir to the demands of empire starting with the fall of Rome, and the result was a reflection of Imperial ways of believing and doing within the Catholic Church itself. The doing was in the clear hierarchies and highly regimented formal structure of the priesthood, and in 'a striving after power upon the earth, after deeds in history'. The believing was in Augustinian, later Thomist doctrine, which strove after proof and solid logic, the 'arming of thinking for battle, defense and attack'.

At first, I was a bit stunned by this characterisation of Western Christianity. I'm certainly no Thomist, and as I said before my Christianity has informed my belief in egalitarian social and economic praxis - and I come out of this tradition of 'Western Christianity'. But at the same time, Berdyaev makes some points about Western Christendom which strike quite near to home. The social Gospel which I hold dear, coming out of this Germanic Protestantism, though it is a reaction to power politics and spiritual and economic exploitation, still makes some of the same assumptions as the Roman Catholic Church about what being Christian truly means. At some level, even the Quakers, the Mennonites, the entire social justice movement within American Christianity are still 'striving after deeds in history'; we still have this very Western, very Roman conceit that we must be the ones who will change (and save!) the world.

Berdyaev, though he is far from denying the responsibility of Christians for their project of social and economic justice, rather gently reproves our cultural hubris. Berdyaev insists that the Orthodox way, the contemplative emphasis on potentiality, can be more freeing to the creative spirit than the Western insistence on action, on the dynamic exercise of political power in history. In terms of what this means for ecumenism, I read that he sees the West as too eager to break ground in political treaties, to have something actual and politically relevant to show for our efforts; he insists that this is an Unrealistic Expectation. Berdyaev sees ecumenism as a worthy goal, but it is something that has to be done 'vertically' (in organically cultivating love, empathy and understanding between faith communities) rather than 'horizontally' (in brokering deals and making treaties on an abstracted political level).

In Berdyaev's view, the West (at its very best) still sees itself at the Crucifixion, as taking the Cross alongside our Saviour up to Golgotha; the East tends to spend more of its time and creative energy staring at the empty tomb, contemplating the mystery of the Resurrection. I think a better analogy - and I hope Berdyaev would agree, given his imagery of tilling 'spiritual soil' in his last paragraph - would use St Mark 4:26-29:

He also said, ‘The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how. The earth produces of itself, first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head. But when the grain is ripe, at once he goes in with his sickle, because the harvest has come.’

Maybe we in the West need to beware of being too eager to reach for the sickle. As well as setting before us the task of sowing the seed, Mark holds for us a promise. The earth produces of itself, gradually: the stalk rising of itself, followed by the head budding of itself, followed by the grain ripening of itself. It's a hard lesson, particularly for someone like me - an AmeriCorps, soon-to-be Peace Corps volunteer who wants to see the seed he's scattering bear fruit, who wants to know what he is doing is worthwhile, who wants to strive after deeds in history. It is part of our AmeriCorps mission - 'getting things done for America'. But perhaps Berdyaev is right - maybe we do need to take our hands, and our minds, off the sickle, and wait until the grain is ripe.

It is something to consider as I leave AmeriCorps and join Peace Corps.

New blog, and review of The Nomad

Welcome to my new blog. I am a graduate of Kalamazoo College with a BA in Philosophy, and currently an AmeriCorps volunteer working out of Brown University. My service up until this past week was as a college guide in the Newport Public Schools: I worked with high-schoolers, mostly with low-income and first-generation upperclassmen, on college access - basically acting as a helping hand on college essay and resume writing, college applications, SAT registration and prep, financial aid, senior projects, &c., &c. I have also spent the past five months volunteer tutoring twice a week in adult literacy classes in public libraries in Pawtucket and East Providence.

All this in preparation for Peace Corps! I'm really excited to have been invited to teach English in Kazakhstan, and I've been preparing in several ways - doing research online, reading the Lonely Planet guide to Central Asia, buying and reading the Book of Words by Abay Kunanbaev (Абай Кунанбаев). This past week, though, I rented Көшпенділер (The Nomad), a 2005 high-budget period piece produced by the government of Kazakhstan about one of its founding fathers, Abylai Khan (Абылай Хан).

I did watch it with some trepidation - I looked it up first on Rotten Tomatoes to see how it had been reviewed by American audiences, and I found that it had been pretty widely panned by most American critics (getting a 6% rating! Not even Dragonball: Evolution scored that badly!). The critics seemed to like the scenery and the historical and cultural flavour, but complained largely of poor acting and a plot that made little sense without relying on the main characters being idiots.

I was in for a surprise, however. It was a decent, exciting action movie, even if the writing did tend to rely heavily on the heroic monomyth and even if some characters (notably Gauhar and Yerali) tended to be foolhardy well past the point of stupidity on some occasions. Jason Scott Lee was amazing as Oraz, the Obi-Wan-style wise mentor to Mansür and Yerali - he even got Sir Alec Guinness' half-smile down pat! - and Mark Dacascos made for a plausibly sinister enemy general. I still don't really understand why they chose Latino soap-opera stars from this hemisphere (Kuno Becker and Jay Hernandez) to play the two male leads, but they worked well in the roles they were given.

Special effects were used sparsely, which was somewhat refreshing given the current trend in action movies to green-screen and CGI-enhance any and every visual element of the film (a la Zack Snyder). Where they were used, however, they were suitably epic (as in the final battle outside Turkestan), though I kind of eyerolled at one of Mansür's 'trials', in which it seemed like the SFX director had been watching The Matrix once or twice too often - Mansür does a backbending bullet-time dodge of five arrows aimed at him on horseback. But the hats and costumes were great, the horses were great, and the scenery was breathtaking - if this was meant to be a tourism advertisement for Kazakhstan, it worked! Overall, it's not the best period-piece action film ever, but it's a movie I'd gladly watch again.