The Great Gatsby or the 7 project?

They gave me a stack of papers today. Worksheets students are and are not to write on, schedules adjusted for the assembly, post-its, paper-clips, to carry around like an albatross. But at first when I showed up there was nothing, and for once it looked like I might have to come up with something to do. It’s Friday, they’re seniors, and so just inviting them to read or do work for another class if they might have it, I would wait for the inevitable questions that arise if kids are bored, or read myself in the hum of their talk amongst themselves. If they are willing to ask or answer a question or two, the conversation is open for the whole class, though one or the other may pick it up or drop it for awhile, their curiosity may grow or wane, or I may get sick of the teasing.But forasmuch as we’d both stand to gain leveling with one another, the lesson plans came through, plentifully, and they got to do their quiz instead. The Great Gatsby, probably the most avidly beautiful of American novels, broken down into nine questions on chapters 7-9, each to be answered in a sentence or two. 

Tempted to say that it’s pointless to ask these kinds of comprehension questions—not just the written work, hundreds of pages for a teacher to grade, but even to check for understanding on that level at all—since if they understand it, they’re ready to ask questions of their own or give opinions much more interesting than this level of analysis; and if they don’t understand it, they either weren’t reading carefully or weren’t ready to read this book. Tempted to say, if they’re ready to read it, they’re able to enjoy it, and wouldn’t need assignments like this at all, but to be challenged to articulate what is beautiful in it, what is sad, or tragic, or symbolic, or what they identify with, or what no longer rings true. Tempted to suspect, alas, that giving assignments like these renders unimportant the enjoyment of reading the novel, and encourages students to look up the sparknotes before class and never open the book. But hey, handing out the quiz was a whole lot easier than having to try to talk to the students about me or them or their school or next year.

Then about that assembly—miraculously the class knew where to sit, and everybody got quiet for the opening act, average-looking young people in t-shirts banging on trash cans and cavorting around, clapping on cue, then more videos and music from the speakers in between speakers in red #7 jerseys. They never explained why the number 7, though the chord progressions and subtext were Christian-lite, the speakers looked and sounded southern, and the statistics for people admitting cheating on the test and not thinking about suicide were both 7/10. They outlined 6 chapters including bullying, tolerance, dreams and substance-abuse, and the message boiled down to being yourself and treating others as you’d want to be treated. A former bully testified, a black man made jokes against racism, and there was a poignant story of an alcoholic father and a suicidal friend. 

Whether this can take the place of thought and reflection in building up one’ s better nature, I don’t know, but a majority of kids seemed to be giving it all the benefit of the doubt. The representatives of the sponsoring organization, Students Against Destructive Decisions—aka SADD—made some timid remarks before the show—having fun without bad choices, something like that. And SADD comes out of the even more acronym-tastic MADD, standing for, at least originally, Mothers Against Drunk Driving. But that’s all so emotional and misguided, if drinking and driving are symptomatic of underlying issues, contradictions in our nature or society or both, and if just saying no means it’s already too late. If instead of providing that life-affirming alternative way to be oneself, one spends the morning preaching against stupidity, and the rest of the schoolday curling up back into it.

Suficient unto the day

I didn’t want to write today. I wanted to draw with the colored pencils in that cup there, the colors are so lovely and I hadn’t done it in quite awhile. The more I tried to start drawing, the more I wished I knew what and how, and looking as it were through the page into some distance, some landscape in my own imagination, with a sea and a hill and grass and houses, off into the horizon. I started to draw, but instead of the sea, it was just lines and circles, and though the blue was suggestive, it wasn’t any better than the blank page. I kept going with the lines and circles, following some logic internal to them, but leaving as much blank as I could. Eventually I realized it was a bike frame, when I put the back wheel on, and so I lay it down in the grass, rather than try to draw a rider for it to be going on fast as it seemed to want to. To keep something of the horizon that started me off, I shaded in a sunset above everything, and somehow it’s right now it looks kind of like the flag of Italy or Iran or India. Anyhow, somewhere far away, where people come from to America. And this fooled me into writing something after all. 

Our way of fooling ourselves can really, if there isn’t much else for us, be a healthy thing—Jess was talking about this. It’s sad when you put it like that, you immediately want to fill in that much else there might be, since of course there is much, much else, but then, is it for us? We only can be so much, for so much, with so much. In a time we can’t know for sure unless we ourselves cut it short, and pick up and move. There’s such comfort in being lazy, and how can you call it less natural than the doing and yearning and inspiring part of life? Or how can you make it pejorative, when if there’s nothing that needs to be done, the best thing is to relax? Those energies are all still there, just quiet, waiting—and in the meantime, feeling the fullness of them without the effort of displaying and putting them to work, is a kind of contemplative pleasure—if you’re confident that when the time comes you’ll be able to produce what you want, if you’ll recognize it if it comes, and do the right thing. Otherwise it’s marred, and isn’t it maybe this that causes us to keep busy, doing something, even if it’s not very necessary, just to keep from thinking about it? I would include my own writing in that, though it is me trying to think it out. I would like to give it back for the blank page sometimes.

Maybe this is what Cass meant about intellectual endeavor and killing time so often coming to the same thing. But I don’t want to call anything I’d willingly do killing the time. I don’t want it to sound as pompous and useless as intellectual exploration, either. I do want to learn. Even while doing nothing, I like to think I’m learning and growing into myself. Riding the train so much is good for that. Thinking about the matter and the feelings—don’t they arise from it? Don’t they stress and relax it and give it meaning? Isn’t everything some scale of this movement, and stillness only ever partial, and consciousness only ever its self-reflection? Where is the best place to put all this saved time we find ourselves with, if not into learning and growing and doing nothing? Just doing enough so that those bad feelings of laziness, uselessness, and insignificance don’t come creeping in, but we can be at ease, waiting patiently.

I guess it must be for death, ultimately, until we can believe in something after that—if not for own little consciousness, then meekly wishing well those who’ll come after, and laying up some good thing they might get to use. Maybe I’m just tired today, but I’m maybe just working for a pay-check, too, and in these empty days I’d like to hear them say, that is enough. Put up your sword, Peter. Don’t worry, there’s money in the mouth of this fish. And cast the first stone. To just stop with the tests you know I’ll pass, and give me what you can give me, while I take care of what you can’t and never could, though you’d pretend you did—the learning.

I think if anything it’s what I can understand by spirit, blowing where it lists. Asking for it and wanting it seems to be the only thing I can do, and letting it guide my actions and give some direction to my thoughts. If that’s eternal life, I don’t know. At least it’s saving my life so far, and not killing time if I can help it. I didn’t write yesterday, either. The library didn’t open till noon. So I went t the natural history museum instead for awhile, dreaming museum dreams, looking at Cypriot urns and icons. Then when it was open, with Martin Luther King, Jr gazing from the walls, and all the big windows, I was reading Teresa of Avila instead of writing picture books, and walking over to see Jess, and tutoring in the museum of unnatural history, if you can call it that.

From the week after the Proust talk

Trying to describe what kids in school are like, since this is one of the things Patrick wanted to talk about after the Proust talk. Some of them are scrawny, some growing, some grown, but from what they show, they’re almost all still immature kids. Never having been expected to do anything, they don’t expect much, and never made to feel responsible for what they do at school, they take no responsibility for what happens there; whatever their real world might look like it’s supposed to have no bearing on the school things, and vice-versa. There are so many students, it’s impossible to know what they might be like apart from the group, but in the group their main concern is to stay in the group. The scariest thing is to be treated as an autonomous individual, to have an independent thought, unless insofar as it appeals to the group approbation. To get people to laugh, to laugh along, is the chief good. To be laughed at—observing it, you would think this was feudal Spain, the kind of puffed-up pride and honor they put on, affronted, and spitefully seeking redress and vengeance. It’s merciless. It’s the way loneliness reaches into every interaction, and the lack of love, which draws together and excludes so violently. And so wrapped up they are in this, this social virulence, the best attention they can pay to a teacher’s voice, if it pretends to stand outside it, is the kind of cross-glance you might see a businessman cast askance a bum on the street. The most they can give is half a moment; even then their attention is only half there, but really concentrated in their group, and calculating how they look at that moment, they do everything to deflect the outside attention, or else turn it to their petty aggrandizement.

Under this pressure, it’s common to see a teacher step into the group-scale of valuation, and try to score points in the same way. And not surprisingly, they can do so easily, they’re older and more experienced. But the attention they earn by this is utterly compromised, good for nothing like learning, except a few more tricks, and the damage it does to the kids’ self-respect is not worth that. The only thing is to call out some better nature in the individuals, and undo the hold of the group. This is the work of service, of love, putting things in perspective, taking responsibility. It is practically impossible in the structures that now constitute the school. 

For now love is a joke. Every appeal to the good is one more thing to laugh at, and heartier than most. There is a kind of pudeur about doing the right thing, when all conceptions of honor go back to a petty egoism and saving-face. And when the models are just bigger peacocks, bigger frauds, big kids wielding their authority where they will, it would be strange to expect them to recognize simplicity, humility, kindness as something to aspire to. And yet, it would be strange, too, to expect the teachers and administrators to act with any of these life-affirming virtues, or to dare to love openly with the charitable love that could open a mind or heart, when they are everyday surrounded by the same group dynamics and organizational structures that break the individual down into a fragment of a class or grade, and thrown back on these exercises of authority or a mean wit to salvage what order they can. 

It is easy to see from the position of an outsider with no chance even to attempt this route, the clown, the substitute, how desperately the structures would need to be changed in order to put the principle of order in the student, and the shame in recourse to a crummy group. How reality would have to be brought into the work, to give it relevance. How to raise a kid’s expectations from a little laugh, above a grade, to a desire to learn, for his own sake. How to see beyond the group and the school to the world, to his potential in it, and what his life could be for, if he only cared about it as it cares about him. It is too easy to see, and too impossible to actually do—to reach a position where one could really change this perspective, philosophically one would be reduced to an all but total self-contradiction. 

Seems the only thing is to talk to individuals when the group isn’t looking. The power of reading and writing. That’s the thing after all that really unlocks the individual. And now that no one reads, the individual is on its way out. All that remains is to see what succeeds it—whether it is a greater community, or a lesser hive. The schools are auguring ill, as ever. What you do see more and more of is technology being turned toward the use I used to make of books, raising walls around the individual subjectivity, protecting it from the carrying tide of the group. That’s why so many kids have their ipods in constantly, or the phones, texting someone else. For most of what you get in schools now, in fact, an online class or video teaching could do the job much better. 

This just turns the question around, though—what kind of subjectivity is developed by these kind of media? Does it have the interpretive acumen of a book-devourer, or something different? If at no time have there been enough people keen on reading to call them the norm—taking society as a whole, not just the upper classes, and really the world as a whole, not just one society—maybe there was never as good a chance as now, with new forms of books and literacy to consider, and new media to communicate them by. All it takes is seeing them as more than an entertainment or muffler, to see in them that buried significance—texting incessantly not for the things said, but just to feel that contact, just like when they talk about shoes or sports it’s not that they’re really so fascinated by those things, any more than the young pedants are so fascinated by their philosophers—it’s really the talking and attention at the heart of it.

It’s possible to imagine, though it might be very hard to do—asking one of these kids a series of questions to get to see that—like what they like about shoes, why they’re cool, what it means to be cool, if it’s not the same as what other people like it’s at least connected with that, it’s what’s fun to talk about—more fun anyway than doing work—and so, in that light, shoes or anything else could serve as the content of a curriculum. New media certainly could. If there is something worthwhile in literature, math, and the rest, it will show by this kind of Socratic questioning, just as much as the worthlessness of the material things will, aside from their usefulness, whatever the Republic might say about poetry. Then again, the distant look in the students’ eyes when you try to get their attention is very much like the look on the face of someone reading, listening, to something else, staring into space lost in thought, like Socrates on the battlefield. 

The content must enter in at some point to some scale of values, just as it must at some point engage them back into the world. Insofar as it gives good models to judge by, taken on their appeal to both reason and feeling, that combination of heart and mind that is properly human, a content should hold students’ attention. For that you need some bad models as well as some good, and there should be room for both. It could be talking about what kids don’t know about their own interactions, it could be reading steamy romance novels or listening to whatever trash—with a critical appraisal, a different perspective than they’re used to; rather than that comfortable distant look in the eye that means safety in numbers, that faraway thoughtfulness that can only be got at alone, for oneself, however you might strive to share and impart it after. 

Because there is plenty of time for just enjoying those things in the usual way. Time for just talking about whatever stupid thing should be built into the school day, since kids might not see their friends outside school. But school should sometimes be hard. If it weren’t so boring, it might be easier to tell when kids say that it is because it’s actually hard for them; as it is, they could very well just be telling the truth when they say ‘I’m bored.’ And if they can’t get interested about thinking about things, it could be they simply aren’t ready to learn it yet, and some preliminary work needs doing—giving them things to do, then, so that the time that would have been wasted pretending to think can be productive elsewhere.

Patrick was also saying how interesting a position the sub is in, and how this gives you a lot of freedom for criticizing and no leverage for backing it up, but also it would let you try out different ways of getting for just a moment the attention kids won’t give anyone but themselves, from the novelty of it. Being so interesting or honest or funny as to make an impression, open their minds to all the things school could be, and all they can do beyond school or anything they’ve ever thought of. And as the things I say sound great and are hard to accomplish, so this, another step removed, sounds dandy, and it is what I’d like to do, but insofar as I, too, am within the system, I have an excuse not to try too hard. Saying the things I need to would cost me the job, and the chances of getting through to a kid are still so fraught—with some the boisterous scene might do it, but there are also quiet kids, and demurring ones, and ones no words would reach or any one instance could open up. It’s so hard to tell what would move those hearts and open those minds, or what good it would do to leave them vulnerable in that state, in those surroundings, without more guidance. Plus I like getting paid to just look on.

As the principal said to the teacher who told the kid what his sagging pants were code for in prison, thereby giving him a little history lesson he and his mother took as an insinuation against his heteronormity—just stick to teaching math. And we were talking about this, she and I, in her free period, and about her wild youth in the Navy and her grandson—showing me pictures—and giving up reading between sixth grade and the friend’s suggestion, years later, about the sleazy romance novels that were her door back in, and her trips abroad with groups of students in the summers, and an old sea-dog’s tattoo poking out between her sock and her jeans, how students might act in class like they needed parenting, more than teaching, but woe to her who broke down and spoke like a parent, for the main thing is to have the kids feel good. The same goes when it comes to grade time, where if they put their name on the paper and attempt a single problem, the lowest they can be marked is a 50%, and failing the senior who’s been passed along his whole life in this way is something unthinkable to him, like snitching about something important to keep secret, so that he’s still mad at her when he sees her at the Target a year later, and she for her part still tells the story. 

Her husband like so to get her goat saying teaching is so easy, or else, commiserating with her, he dares the president or any of the cronies in Washington to try to teach in a public school. As if they didn’t know what their schools are like—they send their own kids to private schools. It seems more likely that they don’t care schools are so terrible, that they are intentionally allowed to become what they sometimes seem to be, merely holding pens for all but the wealthiest youth of America. Or if we are inclined to indulge in political spin, perhaps the schools are simply accurate laboratories of the economic and social realities most Americans face their whole lives, lives in which learning for a human life plays very little part. Surely it’s better to lead a real American life than an imaginary human one. It’s plainly useless to try very hard to bring the two into some kind of harmony—where would politics be without irreducible dichotomies?

What I take for granted for my school are the very things most difficult to find—students who want to learn, teachers able to make their teaching interesting, being truly interesting people themselves. In short, finding good people, young and old, and simply giving them a space to learn together, time set aside for it. How are they found? Do they come looking for you? I’m always on the lookout for them. Do you go about calling out in the wilderness, advertising this place you’ve only so far imagined, maybe on the strength of some ties to the real places you have been?

Do you start in a small way—a single class, an abbreviated course, over the summer, or after-school, or within a larger school? A freedom school, a pilot graduation-booster, something tangible, building the relationships that will make the fuller elaboration of the school come naturally, and  be sought out. Letting a few foundational texts speak for themselves—an emphasis on reading and interpreting as the critical faculty students need to practice, and the behavior and attention are bound up with that, but the only thing prior to it is the genuine interest, will, curiosity, which you have to imagine everyone innately has, only in most cases it is obscured and redirected in all kinds of shortsighted ways. Starting with concrete events, men and women, a Malcolm X reading in prison, a Jane Austen writing deathless prose with social gatherings swirling around her—and the lives these writers led, who led lives worthy of aspiring to—a Tolstoy, a Conrad, and more familiar voices of American originals, and more pertinent living examples, like Wangari Maathai. Not shying away from what is best and most challenging, but going after it with all your heart. That’s all there is worth calling school, education—the rest belongs to life, and only a politician would dream of controlling and shaping that directly. For me, I want to live my own in a meaningful way—and for me, that is in trying to help others do the same. But not if they don’t want the help—not yet. Let me see how this works with people who are willing, and maybe from there I can discover the springs of that willing.

I have some ideas, even, as to what might be important, but some of them, like temperament or sense of humor, seem almost preordained, and the others are things like parents reading to kids and generally being awesome, which is fairly beyond the scope of the school—except insofar as ultimately the students should go on to be pretty good parents, too. 

Anyhow, getting started in an existing school or church or whatever as an ancillary, optional program they might want to call enrichment or advancement or something like that—this means working with administration, its people and structures. Probably better to focus on the people—the structures I know nothing about, except that from where I stand they look awfully silly and overblown. But people are all right—teachers with many years and indefatigable energy; counselors like Eppeldauer and Ms Williams, with their straight talk and the Black Saga program; coaches like Bauer; parents who are active in their kids’ learning; and ultimately, but way of friendly secretaries, on up to the principals in their sweatshirts before school and their shirts and ties by the time the kids come in, and the far more shadowy bureaucratic ranks, principalities and powers above them in central offices at the state and federal level.

Somehow people manage to organize sports and academic competitions, and even quite rapidly it seems like new directives about grading, scheduling or other policies come down the chutes, so it seems like it has to be possible to institute some kind of program like this. Another of Patrick’s suggestions was to start at Annapolis High, why not do today what you keep putting off until tomorrow kind of thing, and as a corrective to all those sweeping claims I am wont to make, to actually try to put them into practice and see how easy it is. It just seems so awkward starting from scratch there. If it were the beginning of the year, or I knew Julie better, or I subbed there, then maybe there would feel like more of a way in. As it is, if I don’t bring real 826 or St. John’s or some other big-name bona fides, I can see my proposals patiently and blankly heard out ad absurdum, with nothing happening but a burned bridge in my own mind.

And I’m so jealous of my own inspiration and incipient vocation, I can hardly imagine teaching in a public school or TFA situation right off—I want to be welcomed into it, like the prodigal son, like I am where the teachers and staff kind of know me. Like the part about instilling the will to learn, I’ll go later where I’m not so much wanted and more needed—but going there now, I don’t think it would do anyone much good.

Working and doing nothing

Loneliness and idleness, longing for conversation and creation, same old same old. The concrete things that help, not just materials but actions, the particular alignment of some neurons and limbs in the world. First, writing. Making a habit of it, doing it as honestly as possible. All those movies where kids have their notebooks to write in and begin to love it, the teachers are so beautiful and wise. Or coming to it by way of reading, going along with it. To have time in the day for just reading, and knowing how to appreciate it, reading something interesting, leading to other interesting things. Then stepping beyond the books, to do the kind of thinking that gives rise to books—to work out on the chalkboard a proof, a paragraph, a problem—what things have in common, how they differ, what a word means, how it is meant here. Learning words, but also habits of thinking, reflecting, overcoming ignorance while admitting uncertainty. Students taking turns at the front and the chalkboard, or the computer screen, anyhow that visual and media focus of attention—the clicking of the chalk, a music track playing softly in the background for mental math, of their choosing, eventually—but not giddily, feeling the claim they are making and how they are beholden to the others in turn. Letting the center of attention be the work being shown, the thoughts everyone should be concerned with. Then the majority of the time neither individual or lecture-based, but in pairs and small groups, taking things apart and putting them together again, making songs and stories and rehearsing them, reviewing topics covered already and relating them. Learning mostly to talk and listen in a way that tends to get things done. Because one or the other, the individual or the companionable, will appeal to each kid, at least, and the other one be more of a chore. But both are necessary, and they reinforce one another. Just like the time in the classroom and the time outside playing and running around are not in opposition but cohere into a whole, meaningful and enjoyable both. Then both have to be respected as important, not calling one fun and one boring, or one worthwhile and the other a waste of time, or using one or its absence as punishment. If it’s in our nature to set up one thing as valuable to the diminishing of some contrary, then hold up the school as a whole against the contrary lack of school, with regard to kids who haven’t got that opportunity, times and places where it didn’t exist, or still doesn’t. And not to demean those kids, but to feel for them, and feel the responsibility that comes with the opportunity.

As far as assessment, it makes more sense in every way for it to be qualitative for it to mean something, but especially in a school like this. This can be one of the ways adults, elders and older students can be involved in a class—engaging students one on one or in groups in conversation about some topic, to see not only how much they know, but how fluently they are able to speak and connect ideas. The chief written work would be the journals, for the teachers only, unless students were willing to share certain pieces with the class or with parents, but really for themselves. However, the tandem storytelling and writing you can do with kids and older students is also valuable to see development in that area. Then the proofs and problems at the chalkboard, the projects when completed and interactions observed throughout the whole process, give a teacher plenty to base a judgment upon when it’s time to assess, confer with parents, and make decisions about what the kids is ready to learn next. And likewise with the sports and games, for health and physical development, and how they tie into the mental and social side. Watching for interests and dislikes, temperament, predilections. At a certain age, certain kids will take to poetry like ducks to water, and especially the spoken word variety, even by way of slam competitions; or debates and forensics; or chess; or athletics—these competitive outlets ave to be available across the board. Even prizes for good art and writing. So that athletic and bookish types equally get exposed to the vanity of it, and outgrow it as soon as may be, or else if they pursue it on up into the crack university programs and the boardrooms, they know what they are getting into. Obviously here, too, elders play a crucial role—as coaches, mentors, tutors, advisors, to talk about career ideas or part-time jobs, to give some perspective on a life in balance between work and family and self. To give countervailing the money interest a fighting chance and slowly questioning prevailing priorities, in line with a philosophic education. They should be there on field trips, and invite classes into their places of business if there’s something interesting to see there—a deli, an auto shop, a boardroom. Or to their neighborhood, to tell its stories firsthand—ideas of social justice, gender equality, and racial and sexual freedom really take hold when shown, not just told. Days when the teacher isn’t there, one of these elders or a few of them should step in to run the class from a place of authority based on a prior relationship, and to make it easy on them show movies and bump up the time outside, playing and talking with friends, rather than cracking down on it more than ever. No busy work, ever, it goes without saying. And something I hadn’t thought of in awhile, the potential for storytelling on the part of the teacher, in the fashion of a Frank McCourt or Philip Pullman, tales from childhood or myths and epics, but either way something real and compelling, never pedantic, to capture attention, never extort it.

Speaking as one who has authority. Even Socrates has to quell the rabble-rabble-rabble when he’s trying to make his public defense. It has to be the tone you take with a class full of kids accustomed to latching onto every distraction, and who have come to crave the appearance of authority, externally, the more they lack self-restraint internally. It’s unnatural to have to aggrandize oneself before them, when in potential they are so much greater than anything a day older—and yet by experience one has the advantage, the timely word, the machinery that compels attention, however wan and sporadic. Only let it be used for their benefit, to develop little by little their own self-direction and confidence, self-possession, not to always harangue them and aggrandize oneself. As far as possible, let them run things, in whatever little ways, and by serving be truly great. It isn’t true that they only understand strict instructions backed up by consequences--that is just what they’ve been accustomed to. Listen to them. They want to know things, they want to do things, but not at the whim of a demanding teacher who hasn’t earned their respect, but taken it as foreordained. They like to read, just not the books they’re forced to, at the pace rhythm imposed by the class structure. Let the class be its individuals, even when there is something to be said to the whole or some discussion they can all be involved in, look each other in the eye, slow down enough that each recognizes what the other is saying, but even more what that says about them—who they are. And the crucial lesson there—that we can never wholly know, except on the grounds of the heart or whatever you want to call it, the shared humanity. So what school amounts to, again, is telling young people how to spend their time, and judging them on how well they listen to you, or how effectively they hoodwink and charm you. It’s the odd nerd who enjoys whatever the former happens to be, and the perhaps rarer genuinely good kid who pulls off the latter with grace—and either way, no one in this situation is free enough to enjoy themselves as they’d wish. Even the teacher is artificially free at best, and compensated for her time. It’s the human interactions and relationships still possible within the thing that redeem the people trapped there, not the end result—graduation  or a paycheck, either way it’s just marking the time. She has one good poster in here, but instead of on the door it should be next to one of the two clocks—‘The time is always right to do what is right,’ –Martin Luther King, Jr. That is the measure of freedom there is in an unjust society or institution—to say and do in accordance with what we know to be better. When the circumstances don’t allow this to be expressed fully, we can go ahead letting the time pass, but in every human interaction transcending it. Asking names, what they mean, how that connects to Shakespeare, to ‘what’s in a name?’ or if they’re talking about videogames, asking what they would do without them for entertainment, then saying in a hundred years videogames will be what’s studied in school—keeping a move ahead, and thereby moving them ahead. Or the new kid from DC, who was in a military school before but doesn’t want to be in the army. Hell no. He’ll play football. And if he gets injured, he’ll be an engineer in the boiler room.

Free to read

Somewhat more pessimistic maybe than some of the past formulations, where I’d like to believe more in what can be done short of everything, all at once, structurally and for good. The room for making some changes on the scale of relationships, perspectives, things within reach, and all those good things of the heart. Along with the power napping sleep program, the experimental theology reading group, some ideas along the lines of a free St. john’s, the things I used to worry about when I was so young and bright-eyed, only coming out now from being already within it , liking it too much and too late to back out. What would that look like? If you weren’t paying, didn’t have something vested, and without the degree at the end, or that quid pro quo we try to watch out for in Job—can you form the course without anything at all, other than people and books? No authority, even the dubious kind of a tutor’s, to steer and direct things—but well somehow anyway it has to get started, a question, a reading to be agreed on, and not just one but a sequence of some kind to hold it together. A time and place to meet, a kind of process for admission, tending toward openness and diversity, or else it’s just a bunch of friends reinforcing one another, not much growth or taking seriously. That’s great for just hanging out, talking afterwards, but in the time for struggling and grappling it takes something overarching to hold attention and direct it. An interest and an enterprise, like a game, a sport, a sailing or fishing, which have the possibility of sinking if not everyone is engaged. It asks a kind of consent of the governed, less in the sense of the enlightenment state of nature than in the spirit of those who want to have a good game. It doesn’t preclude wanting to win, or any other impulses, but sublimates them. And without breaking any rules, strictly speaking, it has that appeal to sportsmanship and fair-play which makes that person talking too much, hogging the ball, or not including everyone in the conversation, showing off, lacking grace, look pitiable. Someone has to take them into hand, for their own good, besides policing the more obvious breaches of wandering off topic, arguing or misinforming. It doesn’t have to be the same person every time, it can take turns—but framing it, and sustaining it, it seems inevitable some take the initiative, and others be good at something else, and so long as everyone is doing the things with a will, saying when they don’t buy into something, or else buying in sincerely, it more or less shambles along. But if just finding one other person is so rare, how likely is a group’s coming together?

Self-loathing

So that anyone who is good at school is good at what, exactly? Doing what they’re expected to, keeping themselves in check, not attracting attention? All behavioral definitions, to which learning can attach itself but only incidentally—no one who has been in a school awhile can believe that learning is the order of the day, whatever they might say. The main thing everyone is doing is marking time, really. Teachers get paid, students get released sooner or later to find their own way to do the same. A school is a mechanism for wasting time safely. 

As far as the younger grades go, Rousseau would be impressed. But along with this the passions are awoken as early as may be, and the masses kept congealed, and authority barefaced, and the preparation not for living a human life but for behaving in society—and all this would appall the gentle scoundrel. It even gets through to some of the buried natural impulses or what you might call them, the sense of justice, the urge to do something real that’s in us. No one likes school the way it is now—that’s the strongest argument there is that it has to change radically. 

And the kind of incubation you get as a student being stuck in it for so long, having it impinge on your conscious and unconscious life, having all your interactions mediated by it, you grow immune to it after awhile. For your own sake you don’t think about how it could be any other way. Or else you keep your eyes and your mind open, and learn all you can in spite of it, and accepting, whether you realize it or not at the time, that much of what you’re going to be learning is the very structures and failings of that institution conditioning you. I feel like all the bright kids in public schools today are doomed to become teachers, to redress all the ills that stared them in the face their whole life. It’s an incredible irony, a last-ditch stroke of attrition from a school that’s burning itself out, and a democracy and a world that look like they’re doing the same. Only I can’t tell if they really are, or if I only see them through the lens of the school, so it just looks that way. 

Somewhere between the sense of nature and the debacle of a school, a very clear vocation outlines itself, to bring schools better into line with human potential and nature. But then this vocation arises from the very grounds it seeks to re-cultivate—it questions itself in the same spirit of questioning that characterizes it—and it gets very muddled in the place where intentions attempt to shape realities. All the practical questions—how and where and with what the new school could arise—remain unanswered, barely formulated. Compelling on the field of ideas, the calling falls down powerless so far in the world.