Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Where do your Congressperson's children go to school?

It doesn’t seem right that lawmakers take lots of money from teachers’ unions, write laws (America 2000, Goals 2000, No Child Left Behind…) that mandate dehumanizing standardized tests that don’t really help children learn or tell us much of anything about their schooling, pass and then don’t fund mandates, politicize schools and budgets, and then neatly sidestep the mess they’ve created by sending their own children to private schools where such tests, unfunded mandates, and politicization are non-issues.

Nationwide, about 11% of families send their children to private schools. We can guess that this number would be higher if more of us had greater means.

In Hawaii, about half of state representatives send their children to private schools. (Hawaiian Lawmakers' Children) In Florida, the number is about 40%, and “the rate climbs to 60 percent for lawmakers on education committees that make key decisions about K-12 policy and funding.” (Florida Lawmakers' Children) I don’t know how representative these numbers are, but to say that state lawmakers send their children to private schools about 3-4 times as often as you and I do sounds about right.

The numbers are the same for Federal lawmakers, between 40 and 50% (Congressional School Choice).

We may assume that almost all of these families, too, live in the best public school districts.

I’m not writing against private schools—I’ve taught in them virtually my entire career (there was that semester I taught at the City University of New York, 140 students in one class with no teaching assistant…). I chose to send both my children through private schools.

I’m not writing against public schools. I went to a few for ten years, had some excellent teachers, married a public school teacher, and I know and have known many, many remarkable persons associated with public education.

I’m not writing against politicians’ choices as parents. They have, like anyone else of means, the right to choose the best schools for their children.

I am writing against the mix of money, influence, and politics that allows teachers unions to have such unfair and detrimental influence on education in the U.S. And I am writing against the hypocrisy of politicians who—ignoring or rationalizing their own educational choices for their own children and ignoring what we actually know about good schools and good teaching—bow to this influence and make schooling worse rather than better.

Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Fruit and the Fall: Metaphor and Fundamentalism

Owen Barfield tells us, “The besetting sin today is the sin of literalness or idolatry…” (Saving the Appearances, 161-162)

By “sin,” Barfield means not a shame-inducing act but a mental habit of which we are guilty and for which we suffer.

By “literalness or idolatry,” Barfield means, at least in part, what academics have come to call “reification,” our ingrained tendency to mistake abstract or metaphorical words, ideas, or concepts for reality.

A prime example from the last century is the suffering inflicted on the world by our belief—perhaps now overcome, or in the process of being overcome—that “intelligence,” because we had a word and, we believed, a meaning for it, was an actual, unitary “thing” that could, because it existed, be measured, say, by an IQ test.

Another current example of literal-mindedness, it seems clear, is what in other contexts is called fundamentalism, taking a religious text as literally true. But, as Douglas Sloan has pointed out, a fundamentalist attitude does not belong to the religious alone. Atheists, scientists, economists, anthroposophists, anthroposophical critics, anyone who takes a dogmatic attitude with regard to a set of assumptions or beliefs may be called a literalist or fundamentalist.

Anyone who asserts truth without remaining open to contradiction or the possibility of being proved wrong may be called a literalist or fundamentalist. This does not mean that the claims of fundamentalists—religious, scientific, economic, anthroposophical—are wrong. They may be—and probably often are—true in any number of ways. But the assertion of truth, the close-minded, hierarchical, smug sense that one knows better than another (even if presented in the guise of open-minded, democratic, and humble discourse) AND the simultaneous assumption or assertion that the truth exists beyond any method for discovering or proving it, adds to conflict, strife, and suffering in the world. What else can fundamentalist assertions do but compete blindly and, in the end, meaninglessly?

Literalness goes even deeper than reification or fundamentalism, and the consequences are profound. Perhaps the most egregious of these is this: When we lose what we might call our “sense of metaphor,” our sense that reality stands behind our symbols (that symbols—words, concepts, works of art or technology—in and of themselves have no particular value), when we mistake symbols for reality, we cut ourselves off from creation. We suffer, again, a fall.

We eat the fruits of the tree while denying the existence of the tree that produced them. But trees need tending, and a tree that we ignore may grow in strange ways, produce strange fruit, or die.

Finally, Barfield goes beyond identifying the sin of idolatry to its consequences: “It will, I believe, be found that there is a valid connection, at some level, however deep, between what I have called literalness and a certain hardness of heart.” (He also addresses a remedy to idolatry, but that’s for another time.) The years between the time Barfield wrote this and the present—a period that saw the rise of fundamentalism in the world—demonstrate exactly this.

Wednesday, May 12, 2010

No Smoking

August 1984, Florence. Around 10 p.m., on the Ponte Vecchio, I walk up to a dark, slender, bearded man who is leaning against a wall, smoking. He is dressed from head to toe in loose red clothing. I have seen persons dressed like this all over Europe, and I want to find out what's up.

“Pardon me,” I ask him, “Um, I’ve seen people dressed like you all over the place. May I ask, um, why?”

“Sure.” He says. “We’re followers of Sri Rajneesh. He’s a great man. He’s our guru.”

“So, uh, what’s involved in, um, following him?”

“Well, we seek enlightenment. We meditate… And we live a simple life. Like, we’re forbidden from drinking alcohol, or having intercourse, or smoking.”

My eyes focus on the tip of his cigarette, and my brain hiccups. “But,” I say, naïve American that I am, “you’re smoking now.”

He looks me right in the eyes, infinitely cool, completely sincere. “No. I’m not.” And takes a drag.

I don’t remember how we part.

I do remember the aerial photograph, a few years later, of Sri Rajneesh’s 72 Rolls Royces, gifts of his non-smoking followers, parked in a muddy field in Oregon.

Saturday, May 8, 2010

Who Needs School?

“Mom, I don’t feel like going to school today.”

“Okay. Do your chores and we’ll go to the beach (or the museum, or the zoo).”

Chores were huge in my house growing up, three boys and a single mom. Muck and feed the chickens, all-male killer geese, and duck (only one, I forget how). Stack firewood. Mow the lawn—three hilly acres with a 20 inch push mower. Turn the soil in the organic garden. Weed. Weed. Weed. But we agreed, Mom called the school, we did the chores.

And then we packed a picnic and piled into our green Pinto wagon or our gold VW 412 wagon or our blue Chevy Cavalier wagon—we had a succession of some of the worst cars ever made—and drove to the beach. During our years in upstate New York, the “beach” was Lake Taconic; later, on Long Island, it was Field 10 at Jones’ Beach. We ate, read, swam, and built sand castles, school a distant memory. (Far earlier, living with my grandparents in the New York City suburbs, we skipped school to go to the Bronx Zoo, or the Botanical Gardens (boring), or the Museum of Natural History.)

Mom knew, intuitively, that what are now called “mental health days” were as much a part of childhood as days behind a desk in a string of mediocre public schools. And, knowing that we didn’t “have” to go to school made it less onerous actually to go. (Going to school, for years, involved bus rides each way of an hour and a quarter over rutted back roads, obtaining from an early age an informal and unreliable education regarding sex, foul language, alcohol abuse, drug experimentation, things with engines (mostly snowmobiles and motorcycles), dysfunctional family dynamics, fighting, stink bombs, and practical jokes, an education that remains more vivid than many classes in school. The Internet? Who needed it. We had the older kids at the back of the bus.)

These memories return when I think of a former student—I’ll call her Zephyr—who simply didn’t go to school (except for an experimental semester here or there in Scotland, or Russia) between 5th grade and 12th grade. Zephyr came from an eccentric family—single mom, again—that simply up and left, traveling the world and, well, living. Around the age of 17, Zephyr decided that she’d like to graduate from an actual high school, so she called us, from Nepal, to see about applying.

How do you apply to a school when you have no transcript? You write a letter describing your life since you left school. You include a list of the books you’ve read—an impressive, extensive list. You list the languages you’ve learned during your travels. And the school takes a chance on you.

Zephyr showed up in September, cheerful, intelligent, and game. She moved, with great equanimity, at her own pace. She agreed that she was ignorant in science and math, and set out to correct this deficiency. She had read most of the books in our curriculum, so she would sit in a corner while the other students were reading, say, Moby Dick, and study geometry. She found geometry easy, and decided to catch up in algebra and other topics in order to join her class in calculus. It took her about a month.

Looking back on her year with us, I’m impressed by how quickly someone of normal to high intelligence who decides to learn something can learn it.

I used to say, somewhat tongue in cheek, that no one should start school until the age of 16 or 18. I guessed that you could learn what you need to know—reading, writing, math—more quickly as a more mature person than you would if you were forced to inhale it, like dust, slowly, year by year by year from the age of 6 or so on. Zephyr was schooled through 5th grade. And she came from an attentive, literate family. And she had travel experience at a young age that few of us will obtain in a lifetime. Regardless, I believe she’s part of a proof of concept that schooling is overrated.

As John Taylor Gatto says, good basic literacy requires only a couple of hundred hours to acquire. Why do we sequester students for twelve years of schooling? The answers may be too unsettling to confront—we’ve created a world in which children are extraneous, even an irritant. We need to “dumb them down” in order for the “establishment” to perpetuate itself. And so on.

My focus here, however, is not on conspiracy theories or the unintended consequences of bureaucracy in education. It’s on the amazing power of the human being to learn. And, from at least one point of view, school just seems sort of beside the point.