Organizing Night School

A lot of this comes out of spending Thanksgiving with Joe and Mel in Cleveland, reading and talking through Leaves of Grass with Alex, listening to more podcasts from the Ezra Klein show someone at church put me onto. And as always, subbing in the public schools, just seeing train wreck after train wreck perpetrated with taxpayer dollars.

“I am the teacher of athletes...

...roughs and little children…”

-- Whitman, Leaves of Grass (section 47)

“I don’t think you help people by keeping them enslaved to something that is less than they are capable of doing and believing.”

-- Myles Horton, The Long Haul (p 184)

So far, we have been making lots of content and putting it out there without much concern for who might be listening. It could appeal to people like us: teachers and highly educated people looking for interesting discussions of great books and ideas for ways to teach them. So far, so good!

I want to propose that we think about gearing some future content to a broader audience, as well. My vision for this is two-fold:

That Night School be a place for young people to connect to learning in a way different from what they are getting in school, or on Khan Academy. Bringing together live discussion groups, where the discussion is on a level that respects their intelligence and is about topics that they want to learn about in order to do something about: diversity, climate, video games, etc.

That it also create spaces for adult education, for people who look back over their time in school and realize that they missed something important. Everyone from drop-outs to retirees, in almost every case, never read the great books, or didn’t appreciate them. They might also have some of the same topics, but also probably debt, health, technology, immigration...

Essentially, we make this a cosmic library, full of discussion rooms.

Further, that this embrace both the psychological and sociological levels of analysis, so to speak. The individual and the community.

Because let’s look at the kinds of issues we are facing: among kids, a dearth of play, and rising depression and anxiety, everything from attention deficit to suicide; among adults, a broken connection to the sense of adulthood, of purpose, of leadership, of history. We’re all wasting time on social media or cable news, depending on the generation, and we want to ask, how might that time be better spent?

So we can offer teachers big ideas, ways to learn and practice seminar and reading.

For kids who are bored with school, we can open new vistas onto those same big ideas.

For adults who missed some things that would enrich their lives, we can give them ways to recover them.

And it will be of their own volition. So we are there to listen to them, to try to provide guidance if they ask, to model the lifelong learning we delight in.

In terms of concrete next steps, I want us to keep on with what we’re doing, first. Next, we build our own understanding of the issues. Talk to people with different perspectives. Deepen our understanding of history. Read great books from other parts of the world, and those written by people of more diverse backgrounds. I think we’ll be too parochial in our thinking if we don’t engage with a wider range of thinkers, and talk more openly about struggling with that: more women, more LGBTQ people, more poor and working people, more people of other races and religious traditions. We can’t allow the great books to be the private reserve of the gentry; we have to show that they are the most marvelous public parks and botanic gardens.