To satisfy possible curiosity about my background:
I was born in the US in the 1930s during the Great
Depression, just after the end of National Prohibition there, during Hitler’s
rise in Germany — and shortly before the onset of World War II in Europe.
I was raised in an American suburban village in western
New York State, by parents who had not graduated from high school,
and who had recently resumed church-going. At that time our village had
one Roman Catholic church (with a parochial school), several much smaller
Protestant churches, and no Jewish or Islamic congregations. And I don’t
now recall any persons of color living there.
Dad and Mom became active in a conservative/evangelical
Protestant church whose congregation helped support missionaries abroad.
I recall a chorus we kids sang in those days about Jesus’s love
for all the children of the world: red and yellow, black and
white . . . . And as a kid I was impressed by Native American Chief
White Feather who, in Native American regalia, spoke and sang there in the
1940s, having sung earlier in Washington, D.C., at the White House.
We enjoyed frequent visits on weekends with grandparents,
aunts and uncles, and cousins, several of whom lived within an hour or
so. Two or three Sunday visits were undertaken to help close ones who, I
gathered, had alcohol problems.
Often, relatives – mainly on Mom’s side — recounted
appealing stories of the extended family’s happy pre-war fishing vacations on
the Bruce Peninsula at Red Bay, Ontario — woodstove-fired, kerosene-lamp-lit,
with outdoor “plumbing.” Of course there are glossy black and
white photos “developed” via the drugstore. Sadly, I was too young to go
out fishing with Gramp and the other “big guys.” The war and gas
rationing put an end to those fishing vacations, and made me a frustrated
fisher-kid. Repeatedly, Dad took steps over the years to provide me
with some occasions to fulfill my wish to fish (or was it a wish to be included
and active with “the big guys”?)
But — war or no war — we loved, trained, learned from,
and enjoyed our friendly pets; usually it was a cocker spaniel (Tyke, then Red,
then Copper). And we enjoyed climbing and harvesting our full-size fruit
trees in the backyard. And there were grapevines.
Dad, who had emigrated as a very young child with his
large family from England to the province of Ontario, Canada, would play on the
awarded Welland Beavers baseball team, enjoyed golf, and later, in the US,
played on his church softball team, and followed big-league baseball closely
via the daily newspaper. He was employed in banking throughout his
working life, played on the bank’s ball team, and served as a white-helmeted
air-raid warden during the war. Gifted with an outstanding tenor voice,
he sang in quartets and in a church choir pretty much throughout his life,
having begun in childhood. At the bank he was promoted repeatedly, in no
small measure because of his persistent independent study at home that included
use of his set of 1930 books: Modern Business, Alexander Hamilton
Institute.
Dad told me that early in the Great Depression the bank
had reduced men’s salaries by 10%, and laid off most of the women employees.
Dad was a Republican, and I recall his having expressed
some disapproval of labor unions, and his saying that it was World
War II – not President Roosevelt’s New Deal actions (to employ some
of the millions of jobless workers) — that brought the US out of the Great
Depression.
As a kid I thought that – whatever their faults — unions
had probably come to exist because there was a need for them, and I definitely
questioned his downplaying of Roosevelt’s New Deal programs like the CCC and
WPA, that created vital, socially beneficial jobs for large numbers of jobless,
virtually penniless Americans.
Mother enjoyed being a homemaker, and was an
accomplished cook. During the war she worked nights helping build C-46
cargo transport planes, and she volunteered as a Red Cross “Gray Lady,” and
still found time to grow vegetables in our “victory garden,” and preserve many
in vacuum-sealed glass jars. Mom’s flower gardens flourished, and she
took great delight in hosting gatherings of relatives and of church friends at
our place.
Various radio programs – including the Bell
Telephone Hour — were important to us; our family did not acquire a TV until
after 1950.
My after-school (and Friday evening, and Saturday) job at
the local Firestone store was itself instructive, and my earnings enabled me to
buy a four-octave Hohner chromatic harmonica, a V-M tape recorder, and a heavy
Zenith Trans-Oceanic “portable” radio – on which I heard one evening in 1953
the often-repeated announcement from Moscow, after Stalin’s death, of Georgy
Maximilianovich Malenkov’s becoming the next head of the USSR. And I
purchased – and was thrilled to listen to the 1953 three-LP disc album of Hermann
Scherchen directing Handel’s Messiah.
Like Dad, my older brother and I enjoyed playing the
piano by ear – we both had taken piano lessons. I too graduated
from the local public school, having accepted my brother’s advice to take all
the math, science, and foreign languages I could. And like him,
with very strong encouragement from our parents, I too pursued a
higher education.
At the conservative Christian college I attended in the
mid-western US with a view to entering the Christian ministry, I joined the
Men’s Glee Club, and accepted advice to major in Philosophy. That subject
was rarely – if ever — taught in American high schools then. I found
those new studies (with philosophers who were
Christians) very interesting, and, thanks to summer and weekend jobs
as a bank teller, and to financial help from family, I continued them at
Northwestern University. Such costs have since skyrocketed.
As a newly-married graduate student, interested in seeing
more of the world, I spent the 1961-62 academic year enrolled as a guest
student at Germany’s Tubingen University. Of course I was pleased that it
was much less expensive to live and to finish a master’s thesis in Germany than
it would be in the US.
During a generously subsidized one-week student bus trip
to Berlin – after we crossed on foot into East Berlin at Checkpoint
Charlie — I was vividly aware of the dramatic contrast
between West Berlin’s glittering free-world
prosperity and East Berlin’s obvious poverty amidst
huge piles of 17-year-old war rubble. Berlin had just
been divided by a militarized wall built by the communist
government to prevent refugees from escaping impoverished,
USSR-controlled, East Germany to West Berlin. Some had
been shot.
My program at Northwestern prepared me for further
research and teaching in the history of Philosophy, and several of Philosophy’s
subdivisions, including Philosophy of Education. After receiving the
doctorate from Northwestern, for decades I taught as a member of the then-new
Philosophy Department of what became a highly regarded four-year College of
Arts and Science of the State University of New York.
A faculty colleague there introduced me to delicious
table wine he had made from fine European wine grapes. Finally,
after three centuries of failed attempts everywhere east of the Rocky
Mountains to grow those finest cool-climate Vinifera grapes commercially in the
US, they were just beginning to be grown commercially in our cool-climate
Finger Lakes region.
That led me to plant and tend a substantial and diverse
(eventually 150-vine) home vineyard – hence the “GrampaGrape” website
name (and the nickname my grandkids have used). Remarkably
successful home winemaking became a strong interest for this guy who
had had no difficulty keeping his pledge to abstain from all alcoholic
beverages throughout his years at that conservative Christian college.
Very well aware of the troubles of alcohol addiction, my new wife,
Shirley (whose winegrowing help included deciding on wine blends) and I each
enjoyed one glass of our own table wine with evening meals.
The abundance of wine we grew enabled us to rent
vines to church friends, who enjoyed getting together for grape harvesting
and inter-generational grape-stomping at our place in the autumn. Their
rental fees secured for them a few (reusable) bottles from the previous
harvest. Those rental fees were contributed to our congregation’s mission
commission, which put them to good use – in some cases providing vetted
$100 micro-finance loans enabling low-income recipients – usually
women with families — in much less-developed economies — to start their own
businesses, repay those loans, and thus continue microfinance benefits there.
Shirley and I fulfilled our retirement dream of operating
a small Bed and Breakfast for a few years at our big, very old place west of
the Genesee River.
In addition to amateur winegrowing, retirement allowed me
to do volunteer work that included our town’s historical society, our county’s
tourism board, and our region’s new Finger Lakes Museum – for which I led the
creation of an historical documentary about the rise of winegrowing in New York
State, and its post-Prohibition resurrection enabled by the 1976 New York State
Farm Winery Act.
I’m now long-retired from college teaching, but I’ll be
drawing on three-plus decades of study and teaching Western Humanities,
mainly Philosophy. Although I was not a student of Asian Philosophy or
Asian Religion, my teaching did include substantial portions of the Hebrew and
Christian scriptures as well as ancient Greek and Roman philosophers, some
modern English Literature, and several subdivisions of modern Philosophy,
including Ethical Theory, several applied Ethics courses, and – unusual for a
member of any Philosophy department — Philosophy of
Education.
Philosophers have addressed in sustained ways some
questions that many folks have opined and wondered about, including questions
as to the ultimate origins of things, and human destiny.
The approach I’ll be taking in Daring
Proposal does not build on any all-encompassing theory about “Everything”
– about our ultimate, cosmic context.
In what follows I won’t be either
championing or arguing against the existence of a personal Creator of
all other things (Theism). And I won’t be arguing
for or arguing against a personal life (or lives) for
people after their earthly death. In what follows,
I won’t be addressing those humanly fascinating and intellectually
challenging topics.
What I am offering in the main section of this
website is a normative Philosophy of Education: I’m recommending — and
making a substantial case for — highly promising educational
aims for us all (not just Americans), and for some crucial
educational ways and means, with some analytic attention to crucial
concepts.
As you read and think about the over-arching aims I’m
recommending (which reflect the widely-honored principles
philosophers call the principles of “beneficence” and “non-maleficence” as
well as some Ancient Imperatives from various cultures), and as you think
about the more specific aims I recommend be taught
for testing our humanly
impactful individual decisions, and
for our testing the decisions made by society’s
governmental, business, religious, and other organizations, I hope
you’ll pinpoint practical ways you already are, or can be, “on board.”
And if you disagree with things I’ve asserted or
recommended, I hope you’ll pinpoint those disagreements and take mindful steps
to address them.
Grampa
Grape