Shutting down

Something about a Friday afternoon makes it impossible to take yourself too seriously, or it suddenly gets clear that nothing in the whole day matters, viewed from that standpoint. But this is a killing thought on a Monday, with the whole week ahead. Better to put our earphones in, like passengers on a train, and try to ignore it. Or put our head down and sleep. In what way can a kid going to class and doing that be called present? In what way are we providing anything more worthwhile than them getting a couple hours’ extra sleep? And a service job for a few years, in the armed or civilian side, once they wake up, until they make up their mind to prefer being awake.

If you’re firing teachers and want to keep class sizes small, probably it’s time to start sending kids elsewhere too. Obviously they aren’t ready to learn, nor we to teach them. Imagine an emergency measure for high schools that looks like this—school as it stands for kids who aren’t disruptive; work-study for those who are, until such time as they demonstrate a drive to return to school; and bare-bones, small-class-size GED programs for those who return. This is the last chance though, an attempt to save the sanity of teachers and the notion of school as a place of learning, not just a holding pen. It’s almost a trap for a conservative district to fall into, since administering it would requiring facing up to who those failing, disruptive kids are and who has failed them all along the way. And there’s no money to pay them at their jobs, anyway—unless they find it with the voracious military. 

So taking another step back, what about all the elementary and middle schools firing teachers, too? Or the school district Rosa Parks, who lied on her address to get her kids zoned in a better school? But place schools right in the community and staff them with people in the community—require teachers to live where they work, as students have to live where they’re doomed to go to school—keeping them small and drawing in volunteers from among the retirees and unemployed to work with groups even smaller, doing something as simple as reading or playing basketball once a week, and you can rebuild the school and the community together. It can be done—Harlem children’s zone is doing it—and probably it can be done even better and less noisily than they’re doing it. It might not work, but it has to be tried, when what is being done is doing nothing. 

Close the schools, otherwise, and let the kids out, instead of wasting their time and letting them waste yours and your dwindling money. In fact, close the schools anyway, but put the classrooms above storefronts in the cities, and in vacant houses in every suburban development. Let the schools rot, or let the buildings be taken over by tireless charters or barefaced juvenile delinquency compounds, of which you’ll be needing many more once the schools are no longer burdened with those kids. Set aside a good portion of them for psychiatric wards and drug- and alcohol-abuse halfway houses, and centers for single mothers. Then watch in amazement as the numbers of those all steadily go down while the little schools actually teach kids, in communities that actually raise them. Provide some incentive to keep teachers from leaving once they move in, like a good mortgage rate or expanded freedoms to develop curricula and activities; likewise, encourage students to come back as teachers and other places in the community, so there is some continuity and meaning to living in that place. Give students ownership and courage to take delight in their school and neighborhood, rather than being ashamed and careless of it—give them their own books—this is easy to afford once you stop wasting money on textbooks—and journals to write in, and at a certain age they should get laptops or tablets as well, and be shown how to use them for learning rather than just watching youtube videos—though also that, and how to post and produce videos, always concentrating on not the thing itself, but the quality and thought that went into it, and the time being spent well. 

And surely at least part of what makes kids so ungovernable is the sheer mass of them gathered together—against so many immediate centers of attention competing with each other, a teacher has no chance. Especially when the kind of attention is playful or flirtatious—these are kinds of interestingness out of bounds for a teacher. They can only be placed out of bounds for students at the price of curtailing what is natural in them. So what can be done is to sublimate them in more creative ways, and reduce their intensity by reducing the numbers of students hemmed in together, then giving them free play outside of class, so long as students respect the demarcation. Simply laying the ground rules and sticking to them—that in the classroom, certain things will be talked about in a certain way. Just as in a story, too many digressions make you lose the thread and lose interest, or too many people talking at once make it impossible to hear, so in a discussion the class has to listen to each member while she has the floor, and respond appropriately and orderly to get from one idea to another. 

Again, it is the shaping of attention, preliminary to learning. As easy as laying down in ground rules, if the students are willing. And nothing to do with intelligence, since the discussion doesn’t come naturally, but if anything the shouting over each other is more in line with the way kids are—but if they can see the use of listening, and get their turn to talk and respond, even the tension of restraint can be made to feel a kind of pride-worthy thing, and whether you’re smart or dumb you can feel that. Smart kids can be harder to keep quiet, if anything. But like the word implies, a dumb kid partakes of a sort of useless quiet, not a helpful one. And like Eppeldauer was saying, it’s hard to talk to a kid stuck in that quiet—you can’t tell them they’re dumb, though in the long run it might be what they need to hear, to save them some frustration down the line. Not to say to give up, but to seek help of a different kind, with another kind of patience. Who is authorized to say this to a kid, though, or could expect her to take it particularly well? The kid has to decide it for herself, in the face of overwhelming evidence, or perhaps coming up against certain models.

I think part of what Mr Eppeldauer was saying, though, is that a stupid person is the last to know he’s stupid, by definition. Could there be a more blissful ignorance? But it is a public health crisis, really. We can be hurt by others’ ignorance, even if they, by some fluke, get to enjoy it. But all school is, is learning to be happier without it. The new school is not inimical to all but the brightest kids, however—the same ground rules go for everyone, and don’t depend on intelligence or prior knowledge, but on willingness and a certain base level of attention and mutual respect. It has as much to do with kindness and decency as smarts, and promotes the former as much as the latter. 

In the end, I suppose I still believe the highest refinement of learning is only a more self-conscious and hard-won form of the innate good of our nature, which gets in trouble by not being content to abide in itself, but wants to be more, known, exclusive and shared all at once. So that some of us have a harder time learning kindness than calculus. And yet the one is as important as the other, because as deeply instilled in us from the beginning is the capacity to understand and enjoy it, and as steadily assaulted by surroundings that fail to nurture the inward things, but substitute all sorts of externals. Surely there are enough externals which follow from the inward things, we do not need to go looking for more? From kindness flows friendship and gratitude, as surely as from calculus all the applications we drive and live in and communicate by means of. We need friends, but out of something good in our nature, not in the kind of in-group/out-group mutual dependency that takes its place. We need to learn from each other, as much as from things and their relations, and trust in the ideas that come to us about these researches—values, considerations—when they are so clear and harmonious. Things like friendship and the appreciation of values and relationships between people and things are precisely what is impossible to control in any external way—they are false then, but only real when they emerge naturally from our own feeling do they become real—and so they are not what the school system is concerned with. But they are the only essential things, and the rest is worthless. 

There has to be a place set aside for cultivating these things, giving them time and security and support—but there is no test that can be the justification, aside from these things themselves crying out. Keeping kids off the streets during the day is not enough to keep them safe, or the society stable—only letting them grow into their human potential will result in actual peace, rather than this zero-sum stalemate. No knowledge they are tested on reflects this, and no subject or curriculum captures it. No teacher can teach it to a class of thirty kids at once. Yet it can be learned, and a safe place be set aside for learning it with the least pain and risk. There should be fewer suicides, fights, hatreds, broken hearts. The pains and problems there are should be less intense, because balanced against the deeper peace, and the false goods—superficial appearance, surprises, vindications—should be less seductive, when the real goods are placed at the heart. Kindness, calculus. Patience, philosophy, frankness, and the love of sincerity and real things.