thoughts on The Teaching Company

I recently finished a good Audiocourse that I purchased from The Teaching Company, on the subject of "European Intellectual History in the 20th Century", presented by the same professor who did "European Intellectual History in the 19th Century", which I finished in Spring 2002 and donated to the UNT Media Library in Chilton Hall. Both courses were good, but I must say I liked the presentation on 19th Century Intellectual History better than the 20th Century survey. Nevertheless, the 20th Century survey did cover a lot of interesting ground. It started with a re-cap of the late 19th century then moved forward to finish at about the mid 1990s.

One topic, on Pierre Bourdrieu's notion of "cultural capital" and its accumulation and comparing it structurally to the accumulation of financial capital, caught my attention in particular. What made me smile is how Professor Kramer alluded gently to the fact that it's not always easy to convert "cultural capital" into financial capital. It's certainly not a 1-to-1 tradeoff! In fact, if there's a rate of exchange at all, the Bulgarian lev or the Russian rouble probably converts more "profitably" into dollars than does most "cultural capital". I'm fairly rich, in cultural capital. Which is like saying "I'm rich--in Bulgaria". Rich in cultural capital, yes, but fairly broke on the financial capital side of things, and even while gainfully employed as a librarian, I was paying such high rent that it ate into my salary fairly quickly, and I was also paying too much for Road Runner highspeed online with digital cable; I didn't do the best job guarding my savings either.

So, anyway, while an interesting thought experiment, I think the analogy breaks down pretty quickly also because it ignores questions of POWER, which are usually rooted in a fairly firm materialistic basis.

As I said before, I really like The Teaching Company's offerings, and I probably buy too may personal copies of their best audio courses, especially the general history and intellectual history offerings. I was first exposed to them at the West U. branch of the Harris County public library while I was living and working in the Sharpstown area of Houston for 2 years. I checked out a survey of 18th Century European thought that was simply delightful. I also checked out a lecture series on Roman History; the professor who taught it was very engaging and made a convincing case that a lot of so-called "ancient history" really isn't all that ancient, in terms of the issues, and general themes worth discussing...a lot of it is strinkingly, surprisingly modern. Author Michael Parenti (who is not a Teaching Company contributor) makes the same case in his book The Assasination of Julius Caesar, which I have read only excerpts of, but I have seen him on DVD giving a book talk summarizing the work, which makes me want to read it all the more. More on Parenti, a personal hero of mine, in a moment.

The audiocourse on European Intellectual History in the 20th Century started out strong, but the finish I found to be rather weak. The last 2 thinkers discussed in the lectures were Juergen Habermas and Vaclav Havel. I appreciated the discussion of Habermas; however, it was Havel who got the final part of the lecture that Professor Kramer closed with, in large part because Juergen Habermas remains within the Marxist tradition of critique and still holds to a kind of ideal of democratic socialism (as do I). Havel, on the other hand, is not a Marxist. While I admire his dissident work and his Charta 77, which were legitimate delayed reactions to the '68 Soviet intervention and hardline crackdown on the Prague Spring movement, Havel's actions since becoming a political leader in the Czech Republic have increasingly left a bad taste in my mouth, especially his announcent of support for Bush and America's wars of aggression abroad, in flagrant violation of international law. Noam Chomsky rightly criticized Havel for his double standard of praising fellow anti-Soviet dissidents, but turning a blind eye to US-aided and abbetted repression in Latin America, for example. Chomsky allowed that the Soviet government often made life difficult for dissidents like Havel, but that it didn't send death squads after them like US proxies often did (and continue to do) with journalists and other societal dissidents in Latin America and other spheres of US influence. Michael Parenti, in his book Blackshirts and Reds : Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism , offers a biting criticism of Vaclav Havel near the end of the book in a section titled "Must We Love Vaclav Havel?", decrying the painful neoliberal economic policies that Havel helped force upon the Czech people, and decrying Havel's increasing resort to mystification in his intellectual work since becoming president. Parenti is a far more eloquent writer than I am, and I really enjoyed reading Blackshirts and Reds. Another Parenti personal favorite of mine is his History as Mystery, a deep meditation on Historiography--how it's done, and perhaps, how it ought to be done.

My problem with The Teaching Company is that, while their audiocourses are of high quality and very intellectually engaging, they never veer too far away from very mainstream, often very centrist points of view. It's nice to hear Marxism discussed at all, of course, and to their credit, most selected Teaching Company professors do at least make an attempt to represent Marxism's position fairly and objectively. But by the end of the lecture, without fail, every Teaching Company professor WILL ultimately condemn the Marxist position, explicity, regardless of the topic under discussion. It happens without fail, each and every audiocourse. Conclusions are reached that basically butress the the bourgeois-liberal, triumphalist view of American discourse and at best merely reconfirm the merely liberal outlook of most mainstream, college educated Americans and their pet predjudices. The Teaching Company will never market or sell lectures by, say, Noam Chomsky, or Howard Zinn, or Michael Parenti. That would probably upset or disquiet too much of their customer base.

I admit, I enjoy much of The Teaching Company's "products", especially when they discuss more esoteric artistic or intellectual topics, or areas of history that are new or not as familiar to me. But I always take the lectures with a grain of salt, and I take note of the hidden biases I've noted that run throughout their offerings. I still heartily recommend The Teaching Company's audiocourses and excellent DVDs not only for Public Libraries but also even for Academic Libraries. If a student misses an important lecture, a pre-recorded lecture by The Teaching Company may be just the thing to fill a knowledge gap and make the difference between a "C" and a "B+" on the next essay test, perhaps. The Teaching Company provides a well done outline of every lecture, with blank spaces for additional notes by students (these should be separated from the material and kept in a library's general reserves collection, in my opinion, so the students can photocopy the outlines rather than take them home and be tempted to write in them). Complete lecture transcripts are also available for an extra charge; these could be circulated normally like the AV recording of the lecture(s) themselves.

Another thing I sometimes find wanting in The Teaching Company's lecture series, is that, unlike real live face-to-face lectures, there's no recording made of any post-lecture Q&A session(s). The Teaching Company's lecture series ARE all apparently recorded before a live audience, and you can hear audience reactions, and the clapping at the end of each lecture. I don't know if they really do have Q&A sessions at these recording sessions, but if they do, then The Teaching Company is doing their customers a disservice by not including the Q&A sessions on a separate tape; Perhaps they could start offering a concluding tape that includes the highlights of Q&A from ALL the lectures, which would be a good, quick review of the entire course in condensed format at the end. If they don't have a Q&A session at all during the "live" sessions, they need to start. The Q&A period is just as vital a component as the lectures themselves in providing the virtual experience of "spending the next year in some of the best college classrooms in America", as the Teaching Company's advertising blurb has it.

Anyway, that concludes my summary of current thought on The Teaching Company and its products.