We tend to try to help the Kids Who Aren't Getting It, but giving help has to be for everyone. Because the help that matters is something everyone always needs the same, preliminary to even talking about academics—the help is a human connection.
In a little essay on Up the Down Staircase in the paper, the argument is made that this is the reason to stay a teacher, to stick it out in the face of apathy and administrative strictures and hassles—very quotidian struggles next to the scope of a Kozol or a City Year or a new school, and a very within-reach solution—that each of us, where we are, care. About we do and for the people we’re in contact with. From a reason to keep teaching in a misdirected system, the argument could be developed towards a call to bring the system into line with this real underlying purpose for education, a move that in the scope of the article the author doesn’t make. To realign the basic reason for everyone in the school to be there towards accomplishing this humanity, to manifest the possibility of enjoying learning, instead of learning for a test or for the Skill Set or for the Competitiveness in the Global Economy—learning for the fuller understanding of what it is to be human.
But this is fundamentally opposed to being systematized. Not because it is less valid, but because our idea of large-scale systems is so archaic and artificial, a pile-up of thought-cliches. To bring people into an organization of mutual accountability and striving together towards agreed-upon aims has chronically become an entrenched and self-perpetuating cycle of conferences, press, acronyms, abstract frameworks and other phony drivel imposed upon teachers, people not involved in their hammering out but who must kowtow to them for a paycheck.
The only possible best system is the one that least resembles this model yet actually attains the goals of efficacy and stability this one doesn’t manage to hit. It is the organic lines of communication. It can accommodate any challenge on its own grounds of dialogue. That’s what it is. Conversations in the midst of working day to day.
The only thing being time and care, person to person. To convince each other of that simplest and most audacious possibility, to talk, to listen, to do the reading and writing—to learn. To pursue happiness, to respect the freedom and life we’re given by trying to understand them, to know ourselves. And to express our beliefs we can use a dignity of language—to control our means of production, so to speak, to articulate ourselves with the beauty and thoroughness we’re worth. Because there is some moral weight to beauty, delight, which yoking ourselves to dry standards does not possess, and the lack of which—of moral heft, of exposure to beauty—is the critical chink in the ponderous and failing school system we have built.
So in the meantime we provide it not structurally, though the system has to change, but spontaneously, here and there as individuals, freely—completely freely, I’m afraid, this is not to be admixed with any formal stipend or gain, but may be reciprocated only informally in the practice, an invitation to dinner, the School International Dinner, what have you—and each of us on our own, but in dialogue and a certain amount of basic agreement with one another, flowing in like water through the roots and petals and black soil and bright air of this flower of education for all which is a long time growing, until we see it bloom. It is one person at a time, and then, when the system is thus redefined, the system will follow. That dream is there in the background, the systematic radical shift—but our action in the meantime has to begin, we have to go in and do something different today: they act in a dialectic, of course.
This is something more basic than the new school, which the new school would finally embody. Teaching something the school now has no chance to teach, but that anyone could always learn—it’s never too late, but oft-returning, as long as their heart is in the right place. Talking to students like a teacher, but with a different aura, a different ethos—whether it is that of a near-peer role model, someone who’s been where they are, or a kind of expert who’s made it, or a grandmotherly or grandfatherly figure demanding, finally, respect that kids sometimes with good reason do not afford their qualified teachers.
And of course students talking to each other in this way is a major model to endorse as well—mentoring, tutoring, where one-on-one interaction can happen—but it can’t be too contrived. Teaching about religion, philosophy, their application in civil rights and politics, about art and music and what’s marketed as entertainment in our culture, reading articles and stories, listening to speeches, opening minds, but at bottom listening, caring. Never getting away from that.
No comments:
Post a Comment