I am just the substitute

“You must know that there is nothing higher, or stronger, or sounder, or more useful afterwards in life, than some good memory, especially a memory from childhood, from the parental home. You hear a lot said about your education, yet some such beautiful, sacred memory, preserved from childhood, is perhaps the best education.”
--The Brothers Karamazov

Maybe the school day is already too long. So much wasted time, husbanding resources of focus and keeping protected the inner life, the still-growing identity that can’t be shown all the time to just anyone and is liable to be jostled, to overcompensate, to be spooked by glimpses of its own grandeur. Afraid of not living up to it, not finding it again, maybe, kids prefer to conspire for mediocrity, to find excuses.

If kids realized that school is open—that they need not be there if they don’t want to learn, or if for what they want to know about they can learn it better someplace else—would any still come? What would classes look like then? (But it takes a long time to learn just how wide open is life, and it's easy to unlearn.)

The old admonitions uphold less and less. Whether because there’s any less correlation in reality between hard work in school and a good job post-graduation than there ever was, or because it has become more acceptable to question the way of life that holds up hard work and good jobs as its chief end—at any rate the kids can’t be forced to do this work that seems to have little or no bearing on their life, and they have every right to act like it.

‘Did your parents ever read to you when you were little?'

'No.'

'Really?'

'No, we don’t do that, that’s something other people do, not us.’

And then I should have read to them. In the other class where the kid was ‘in the bathroom’ an awful long time, then when he did come back let go some evidently pestilential farts, sending everyone scattering and laughing, all appearance of decorum abandoned, I said something like,

‘What would happen if every time someone farted everyone dropped what they were doing and ran off laughing, acting like this? Nothing would ever get done, people could hardly have a serious conversation, or plan an event. It would be so much worse than terrorism, so much more disruptive, and anyone could be responsible, your own body could betray you. In fact, that’s probably how the dinosaurs went extinct, they kept farting and laughing so much that they ended up never going out to get food or doing any of their dinosaurly chores, (or evolving for that matter), and finally their world collapsed and they all starved.'

'No, that didn’t happen to the dinosaurs!' said a girl, catching on I wasn’t actually mad at them.

'Yep. Look, what I’m saying is there’s a time to have fun and there’s a time to do work,’ and that’s what school is now, a time to do work so boring it is rent asunder all the time by bursts of mindless fun or destructiveness. But so,

‘Is there anyplace you wouldn’t act like this? A place you respect?'

'Church.’ Then again, school shouldn’t be too much like that. Nobody said the library, that place that should seem magical in reality before it reduces to being so merely metaphorically. Now it’s mostly computers in there taking up all the space, pressing the books back even more than ever into the corners and obscurity. Still a place the homeless can go, but they shouldn’t have to. No one should be homeless or jobless who doesn’t want to be (can’t forget, though, that that threat or pressure to conform by the possible loss of these things, homes, jobs, could be seen, from a certain perspective, as the invitation to a great freedom. A great, smelly freedom).

Talks with teachers, and with students

An oral history proposal, a project preliminary to and in conjunction with drumming up support for a new school. Getting in touch with some recent high school and college graduates, talking about crazy stuff they’ve done—me, I’d never do much but read at school, which I know now is hardly typical, so what did they do, and how do they feel about it looking back? How would they change it for their little brothers and sisters? Also talking to teachers, hearing about how they imagined the job before they started, how they could imagine improving it now that they know; and about their own schoolday memories, how nostalgia is tempered by dealing with kids every day, and vice versa.

Imagining, perhaps, a school where all the teachers being old friends, they rely on a different kind of tenure, a different kind of union, a less contrived community, trusting in results without hierarchy. A school where the kids notice things, and can be trusted to ask questions. Where they'll learn to want to learn, for the enjoyment of understanding more than they did before. (It might sound elsewhere like this new school is something for Gifted or otherwise Above Grade Level students—it's for anyone who wants to be there.)

But this, again, is exactly the sort of moonshine I'm always spouting, going traipsing around the trackless places of my own voice. It's this that talking to real teachers and students will help keep me clear of, while bringing the new school closer to reality.

Pat suggested doing a film documentary with it. Maybe later, but first I'll want just audio, Studs Terkel style. Call it, like we've said, To learn to want to learn.

The example of the boy from Havana

But you have to love the unpredictability of human hypothesis, the resilience of a free mind defying imposed guidance for its own good. Talking about Waiting for Snow in Havana. The kid immured in that mean religious education and exiled to America growing up to write such a book, working hotels and factories through high school, learning English beyond fluency, and remembering or imaginatively recreating so much—the pastry man, the firecrackers, the pews and the ocean.

So much, as to argue for the hope that it is not too late to start after childhood itself, so long as the extra, less tangible approaches to knowledge have their room to play out early and often—the roaming the neighborhood, going into town and to court, hearing stories, watching movies and reading comic books.

The reflective capacity, the expressive verve with which to transform this into the evidence of a self-aware life can only come after, and the steps to make it there can be covered at the very highest level quite rapidly if the will is real. And if it is not crystallized in such a beautiful way, open and shut in a book, still we’d have to suppose it is all there in the people who have not written and might never have a chance to write the testament to their truths and stories; yet they have their own ways of expressing themselves, and behind them all a life worth living. It reaches deep to the heart of this belief that we can learn to be something more than bowed heads or sycophants or cogs, that we can get there by books and discussion and thinking, and that they are connected—meaningful life and the words with which to give life meaning. Beyond subtle analysis of a text or its style or comprehension of its internal logic or even its themes, going right to the recognition of something human worth preserving there, worth dwelling on and learning from, imitating, rejecting, or somehow negotiating and adapting.

A good book is not essentially different form all that looser, livelier life—the roaming the neighborhood, the stories and jokes with friends, the whole framework of society adumbrated in our encounters with this or that stranger; it is not better or worse than any other form of expression, artistic or commonplace—but it does tend to raise all the rest to our explicit attention, to achieve some perspective on it, and to begin to make connections.

In this aspect of patterns, connections, allusions and relations Eire is ingenious, full of poetic coincidence with an attuned spiritual expertise brought to bear. He deploys simultaneous irony and innocence, pulling the reader along to those very concrete details from which the elaborate semantic constructions first spring. In the narrative, these details and their extrapolations form circles of meaning, waves of meaning that we have to at last permit ourselves to drift in, weightless as he says, in that aching, laughing, burning and disinterested, above all honest immersion and suspension in paradox, mystery, unjust and right, the world and God, a space suffused with light and lingering by the abyss—that space at the end of a chapter’s last page. The incredible evocations of the smells, sights, sounds of the beach, the park, the houses of the privileged and the wretched poor, ring out and are converted in this brilliant play of hindsight thought and literary artistry, and in lieu of anything more than associative motifs arranged from them, they are allowed to end up once more the ocean, the light, the street, the thing in itself, as far as that is possible. Simultaneity, that’s the effect of great poetic work, reflection and immersion, thought and feeling, all referring to action and experience anterior to them, made still more immediate when shared vicariously, along with a whole set of totally unexpected and free association which we as individual readers bring to the text, and yet never quite capturing, either, all that their author had in mind, all the real thing.

But the dream of education is that we approach that reality, that we share and receive enough of it as to enrich our own experience. And this can be done quietly, I hope, and in fewer words and shorter, plainer ones than these. Just trusting in that beauty, that aesthetic experience first of all, and becoming unashamed of the freedom to do everything, and to choose sometime to read and write, and to know when the time is ripe for each thing—that’s the tall order, and yet the simplest thing of all, if we institute a new school.

If there can be said to be an end beyond the learning itself—really it is more like the same thing seen in another setting—then it would be peace. Do you see how this is the corollary? Through learning, a tending toward peace; through understanding, forgiveness; through creative activity, the sublimation of violence; through the courageous opposition to ignorance, the cultivation of those able to question its most terrible outgrowths, and to nip them in the bud?

I talk too much. Read Waiting for Snow in Havana, and those other books I've listed in the column to the right.

Volunteering, and when you do

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.