Product Description

Now in paperback, Walking on Water is a startling and provocative look at teaching, writing, creativity, and life by a writer increasingly recognized for his passionate and articulate critique of modern civilization. Derrick Jensen brings us into his classroom where he teaches writing. He reveals how schools perpetuate the great illusion that happiness lies outside of ourselves and that learning to please and submit to those in power makes us into lifelong clock-watchers.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #47703 in Books
• Published on: 2005-04-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 232 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781931498784
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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From Publishers Weekly
Writing teacher Jensen doesn't believe in the traditional grading system, which he calls "a cudgel to bludgeon the unwilling into doing what they don't want to do," so he opts instead to give his students at Eastern Washington University check marks: one check mark for turning in a piece of writing, four for editing that writing into perfection. For this opinionated offering on writing, teaching and the state of the world, Jensen deserves four checkmarks for courage. His ideas are always radical and often inspiring. He rails against the public education system frequently and with refreshing humor, telling students their papers "have to be good enough—interesting enough—that I would rather read them than make love." Drawing on his personal experience, he castigates what he sees as formal education's lack of creativity and flexibility for personal style. Jensen's strength lies in his honest, provocative, passionate approach. The rawness of his ideas is this book's virtue, but it's also its vice. When Jensen makes seemingly random forays into commentary on the demise of the environment or political consciousness (subjects he explored in earlier books like The Culture of Make Believe), his writing becomes long-winded and unfocused. He loses sight of his own seventh rule of writing, which he so dramatically relays to his students: clarity. But more importantly, Jensen's first, second, third and fourth rules of writing are "Don't bore the reader." In that effort, he succeeds masterfully.
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Review
'The clarity and force of these ideas cut like a scalpel in the hands of a surgeon, preserving the vital, removing the diseased. Mr. Jensen burns sharp holes in the dark places of those rituals we have been tricked into believing are education. We owe him a debt of gratitude for these transformational insights. Read this book!' - John Taylor Gatto, author of Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling

About the Author
Derrick Jensen is a prize-winning author and was one of two finalists for the 2003 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, which cited The Culture of Make Believe as "a passionate and provocative meditation on the nexus of racism, genocide, environmental destruction, and corporate malfeasance, where civilization meets its discontents." He lives on the coast of northern California.

Customer Reviews

How NOT to Teach - How to Be Human
Jensen cuts to the heart of the matter: "As is true for most people I know, I've always loved learning. As is also true for most people I know, I always hated school. Why is that?" Although I cannot presume to speak for others, this was certainly true for me. School sucked. It was like torture, five days a week, eight hours a day, seemingly without beginning or end. And yet the end does eventually come, with much cap-throwing and fanfare, only to be crushed with the prospects of our work-a-day world and the ecological destruction it enacts on a daily basis.

Along with Jensen, I would have to agree that one of the primary reasons we put up with this system is because we have been trained to do so, both bodily and mentally. "Throughout our adult lives, most of us are expected to get to work on time, to do our boss's bidding...and not to leave till the final bell has rung. It is expected that we will watch the clock, counting seconds till five o'clock, till Friday, till payday, till retirement, when at last our time will again be our own, as it was before we began kindergarten, or preschool, or daycare. Where do we learn to do all of this waiting?" The answer, of course, is school. School is the "day-prison" where we learn to be "a nation of slaves" - and servile slaves at that.

To some, these statements might seem too extreme. To be sure, many of us enjoyed moments of school here and there, encountered truly inspiring teachers, and experienced enthusiasm and genuine learning amid the 18-year prison sentence we call formal education. But such is not the norm, nor is it the point. The point is rather to ask what education could be. "What are the effects of schooling on creativity?" Jensen asks. "How well does schooling foster the uniqueness of each child who passes through? Does schooling make children happier? For that matter, does our culture as a whole engender happy children? What does each new child receive in exchange for the so many hours for years on end that she or he gives to the school system?" The answer is not much, unless you consider obedience to the clock a high and noble aim. In light of the looming problems our society now faces - drug addiction, teen suicide, domestic violence, rampant materialism, ecological crisis - this systemic acculturation of obedience has become pathological. Yet as Jensen shows, the aim of education from the very start has been economic growth, homogenization, social control, and industrialization - not personal enrichment, individuality, creativity or even the creation of healthy communities.

Through a complex web of stories, anecdotes and personal experiences teaching both literal prisoners at California State Pen and figurative prisoners at Eastern Washington University, Jensen offers an alternative vision of education. This vision is reoriented to educe, draw out, and lead forth the native impulses and interests of students and teachers alike; and is predicated on our ability to listen to and follow our own hearts. As he says, "We need simply to be encouraged, to be given heart, to be allowed to grow our own large hearts. We do not need to be governed by external schedules - by the ticking of the ubiquitous classroom clock - nor told what and when we need to learn, nor what we need to express, but instead we need to be given time, not as a constraint, but as a gift in a supportive place where we can explore what we want and who we are, with the assistance of others who care about us also. This is true not only for me and for my students, but for all of us, including our nonhuman neighbors."

As with most of Jensen's previous works (Listening to the Land, A Language Older Than Words, and The Culture of Make Believe) Walking On Water is difficult to categorize. Despite the subtitle - Reading, Writing and Revolution - Jensen does not address any of these subjects specifically. Rather, he moves in and out of them while addressing the larger issue - which is how to be fully human, and how to allow others to be fully human, in an extremely dehumanizing world. An important book, for teachers, students, dropouts, and successful members of our industrialized mass culture alike.

j.w.k.

Walking on Water - then writing about it.
Well! Eco-William seems to have summed up all of Walking on Water very nicely. Whereas Jensen touched upon the effects and purposes of formal schooling in A Language Older Than Words (the only other work by Jensen I have read), it is the primary objective of Walking on Water.

I so desperately would like to toss this book to a few people I have passed by in life that have felt they were somehow wrong in their dreams, desires, and actions in life because of how they felt in school. Primarily that they do not like being in school. And thusly are inherently bad people. I myself did fine in school, but the more I distance myself from my pre-college years the more I am able to see just how much of my time was not spent learning, but spent killing my desire to think the fantastic and to stop offering such fantastic ideas to those around me. This is not just conveying ideas in proper grammar and well formatted essays or with the proper mathematical proof and the correct choice out of four on a test, but in being reminded for years on end that we must all adhere to certain "truths" that we are taught in school, and to question them is dangerous to our well being. For example: being an American who spent two of his college years studying abroad with scores of people from around the world I learned the miss-guidance, the nearly subconscious danger I learned in my youth from society (meaning school) that America is #1. Economically, militarily, in freedom, in happiness. These were truths; I felt it in my youth. Now I will not garner controversy to dispute the "facts", but I have since learned that such qualities should not and cannot be quantified.

A proper essay is thesis, argument paragraph 1, 2, and 3, and conclusion paragraph. An O is written from the top in a counter-clockwise direction. Maps of the Earth cut Asia in half. A person with an A in class is better than a person with a B and definitely better than a person with a C and there need not be any more argument to substantiate that. I could go on for pages with examples of how school trains us to "not make waves" and to "ever be complacent" but that is Jensen's job to do in his books. However it is thanks to his writing that I was able to identify this discontent I have with my youth and the time spent in school compared to the experience I have had studying on my own.

Meanwhile, Jensen uses Walking on Water to also tell tales and draw examples from his own creative writing classes that he has taught at Eastern Washington University and Pelican Bay State Prison. His advice on writing was very edifying and his tales of his adventures in teaching helped me appreciate Jensen the man. Even though A Language Older than Words is arguably a more personal book than this one, I somehow felt I could now meet Jensen in person and have a good chat with him after reading Walking on Water. He not just cares about the fate of our lives and civilization, but also about syntax use and sporting a healthy sense of humor. Very much appreciated.

What are you waiting for?
"Walking on Water" is filled with insight, wisdom, and humor by Derrick Jensen, one of the most important (although, sadly, not well known) thinkers, visionaries, and leaders of our time. This is a fascinating book -- provocative, intriguing, informative, entertaining -- albeit a bit scattered at times. Given what I know about Jensen (I have read several of his other books and belonged to his Yahoo discussion group for a while), my guess is that "Walking on Water" is a bit scattered because it is in part an interlude, almost a palate cleanser, for Jensen as he authors his next great "Radical Environmentalist" jeremiad.

And what will THAT book be about? Here's a hint: it's Derrick's third "R" after Reading and Writing. Or how about the following quotes from "Walking on Water": "I hate industrial civilization...[it] is killing the planet" and we need to "change the whole system." In other words, "Walking on Water," while excellent in and of itself, is most likely something of a warmup for Jensen's "bringing down civilization" book -- the book that will represent the culmination of Jensen's thinking, activism, and life work to date (I can't wait!).

As a warmup, though, if indeed that's partly what it is, "Walking on Water" is important because it focuses on the critical role played by our "industrial education" system, and the damage that this system does to to our souls, our communities, and our ecosystems. In other words, training people to think and act like unthinking, mindless, interchangeable parts coming off an assembly line may be a politically effective, cost-efficient way of holding together the industrial capitalist economic system. But, treating people like this is certainly not conducive to their well-being or to the well-being of the planet, which is being rapidly destroyed by human greed and stupidity even as we sit here. This is why Derrick Jensen's "Walking on Water" is important, because it attacks this system based on Jensen's tremendous knowledge and insight, his deep personal experience with the education system (and with fighting the worst of the capitalist system), and his skill, passion, and courage as a writer, thinker, and activist.

At the risk of oversimplifying, what Jensen is (correctly) arguing and demonstrating here is that our education system is first and foremost designed to produce good worker bees for the capitalist economy, bees who will accept authority and "won't question country, God, capitalism, science, economics, History, the rule of law" or anything else, really. In other words, bees that collect honey but don't sting.

What Jensen is also arguing --and showing, through his own leadership and life example -- is that it DOESN'T HAVE TO BE THIS WAY. Thus, we see Jensen teaching ("Principles of Thinking and Writing") in a very different way than most of us are accustomed to, both at an actual prison and also at a metaphorical one (a state university in Eastern Washington). Some of the most interesting moments in the book are when Jensen collides with people who have obviously bought into the system to an extreme degree.

For instance, who knew that arranging chairs in a circle could set off such strife (the "Great Chalkboard War of 1995")? And who knew that encouraging students to think for themselves would lead one particular student, a fundamentalist Christian woman, to come to Jensen's office, to sit in his chair, to tell him he's "going to hell" (while taking "a lot of people with [him]"), and finally to drop down on her knees and start praying for him (as Jensen watches tensely to see if she's about to pull a gun on him). Finally, who knew that one-third of college students, at least in one classroom at one university in America -- answer in all seriousness that they have no interest whatsoever in thinking at all (this does, of course, help explain how 40+% of Americans can continue to support George W. Bush)?

In the end, "Walking on Water" is both encouraging and depressing. Encouraging because it demonstrates that it IS possible to help people break free of the mental straightjacket they have been placed in by the "industrial education" system. Depressing because it highlights that there are perilously few Derrick Jensens out there, and because those few brave souls are fighting such a huge, powerful, rotten system. As Jensen emphasizes through his words and actions, however, we must all fight for what we believe in while living our lives as if death is at our shoulder (which, of course, it is). To quote the last words of Jensen's book: "There is much work to be done. What are you waiting for? It's time to begin."