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.

Just some observations

Student aides—in the front office walking you to the next office where someone had  a schedule for you, and bringing you your hat when you’d forgot it; in classes, grading and returning worksheets, sitting next to a student misbehaving and chatting with the teacher; in the library, so carefully lining up the chairs again after the first bell—he’d looked at me in the hall earlier and asked, I don’t know if forlornly or hopefully, if he knew me from somewhere. 

And the rowdy boys so easily cowed once their teacher called them out, but she’d given them a good while to themselves, letting them dig a bit of a hole for themselves first, while everyone else got to work. The one kid in the back who asked if I had change for a five showed up in the library the period after, escorted by the security guard who’d been sitting there reading until he’d said something into his radio and gone to get him. He listened while the boy told what had happened, impassive, until they both settled into a silence where each reflected the other, the peace of a tumult exhausted. He walked him back after a while without saying a word, and came back to read some more. I wanted to ask him what it was like being a security, but the period was nearly up. They’re really so short. Some of those rowdy boys would stop distracting each other when I just stood nearby, or in their line of sight between the ones who’d been placed across the room from each other. But with the kid who’d been with the security guy that didn’t work. 

And all that the others learned from this was to wait until they didn’t think the teachers were paying attention, then mess with each other again. They trained their attention to know when the others’ attention was absent—but that’s no good for any kind of constructive cooperation. It all stays a game. Winning is getting away with it, losing is getting caught, and maybe  punishment, which is silence—which is the same as behaving, but just a roundabout way of getting there.

Learning is learning to be silent, and so when it’s time to converse, share an opinion, explain oneself, you get responses in monosyllables, mumbles, if not just silence. Among themselves, kids learn to interact in their own way, and whatever of that they’re able to preserve underneath the silence and in those lacunae from the teacher’s attention, that’s their creativity and their joy. And they must have questions they don’t ask. There’s too much interesting stuff around the sides of the room not to notice—skulls, anatomical models, laminated posters, aquariums luxuriant with slime and humming filters. And Mendel the monk in the garden, eye colors. 

The questions com e out tentatively in the down time at the end of class—why can’t the whole lesson be this natural? We are afraid of the possibilities, of ways it can go wrong, and so don’t believe it might somehow get made to work. This process of improving things, so slow, interrupted, dragged backwards or tunnel-visioned, even for good, experienced teachers. To get kids to fear and toe the line, speaking in a loud voice and taking no sass, in particular at the beginning of the year, so that you can joke with them and they respect you later. But I don’t think I can keep a straight face.

Continued into February

All the time I’m looking for a palimpsest, and it’s harder and harder to find as all communication becomes immaterial and instantaneous. Where then do I turn my hand to give it the sense of creating things just for itself, and ordering stray thoughts by means of leftover pieces of the world? These are not entirely idle considerations. But they aren’t the most pressing issues either, not yet. 

The first thing is the way we use our time, and I mean this to include, how much of ourselves we put into the things we do, also, not only the outward results of what we accomplish, but the inward sense, the intention which impels it and the meaning which abides in it. We derive our inspiration about these things much more from the role models for what we want to be than from a real necessity to do much of anything—but as the outward importance laid on the products diminishes, the need for some inward satisfaction remains, and lacks its outlet. Then but if you go looking for just that, you find all false and empty answers, detached from their real context—self-help and yoga and ennui—whereas the most basic chores and work of living—housekeeping, bookkeeping, a yard or garden or front porch—go neglected, and you ignore the connection between the two. 

Go a little further afield, get more serious about being a good person instead of just making a living, living well, and perhaps you see some hope in service, through some organization dedicated to placing people just like you in the places where work needs to get done. But forasmuch as there is something good about this, and it makes you feel necessary and whole, there is something bad about it, too, something forced. Isn’t it that the person who should be doing this work be someone already there, and you find some work like this to do back where you are from? It is all to the good to have some experience of another place and another way of doing things, and while there learning it by doing the things—but then either you assimilate and stay there or you stay basically who you are and go back home to share it and better appreciate all that you had all along, leaving it to the people you met in that other place to take something of what you offered them and apply it to the particular needs they have, while you do the same. 

What prevents this from working, in fact, are the structures that keep communities from being self-sufficient , and the thought-cliches arising from this status quo reinforce it—a nomadism, rootlessness, dog-eat-dogedness—into which step well-meaning organizations which go on reinforcing it. There are enough people in any community the size of a neighborhood to provide for all the physical and spiritual needs they are born having, and then some—enough not just to survive, which any individual or family can do, but to live a human life in peace and grow at it, which takes a community. Anything bigger—as soon as you can’t account for each person by name and relationships, and don’t notice if they go missing—stops being on a human scale, and starts to serve other ends than the human development of all its members. Things like the pride of a ruler or glory of a god. But to get back into a community takes time and space, which only those benefiting from the status quo actually have, and don’t seem inclined to use for this purpose, or else the kind of violent uprising which never achieves quite what it says, though it may more or less destroy what had been before. But let’s look at persuading the people who could live this way if they really wanted to, rather than preaching armchair manifestos. 

Starting-places might be where a community is already implied, and only lacks the physical grounds for production and the actual proximity of its members in a more permanent way—places like churches, colleges, or various kinds of networks or organizations around a common cause. Sometimes these ties can become very strong, and to get stronger than the centrifugal effects of the status quo society requires some certain degree of belief or desperation, I can only conjecture, I’m not sure what it looks like—or whimsy, maybe, if the hippies had it right all along. 

The other side to try and start on would be where people are already close together, with the land and property perhaps even already turned to agriculture in the rural places, or fertile enough in the suburbs, or in the city tenements you would have to get creative, a la Crowley in Little, Big, but anyhow the externals are more or less there, it’s the other thing that’s missing, the shared purpose or dream. These people don’t know each other and seem to have all they need as it is, but they’re just Frankensteins lurching around, sewn up from various other peoples’ dreams and imaginary lives, and for all their material prosperity and superior knowledge their hearts are hollow. There’s nothing sustainable there, nothing to fight for, and from one generation to the next even the external well-being frays and grows ever more fraught, and the yearning for meaning and for a dream grows more insistent, wayward, inarticulate, frustrated. 

So what are the models for this movement, if there is going to be anything moving? Vaguely hearing of landless workers’ collectives in Brazil and Mexico isn’t necessarily going to appeal to your red-blooded American suburbanite, however compelling a sinking feeling they get when they look over the edges of their little life. That vertigo is the only teacher, and the leap it invites. You might invoke monastics of east and west, but the aim we’re going for is really the opposite, to appearances—a fuller connection with the world rather than an absconding from it for contemplation and mortifying the sinful parts—possibly there’s Rabelais’ monastery or convent he sketches out. 

Maybe we don’t really want models, but want something distinctive and original, the creation of which is a big part of everyone’s buying into it thereafter. Certainly it has to be up to the kids to go out and explore other places and make their own way, they aren’t stuck in their parents’ community longer than they can’t support themselves—but they do have some responsibility to their parents when they can’t support themselves.. Always this pulling back and surging out. 

We’ll avail ourselves of something of the past, that which speaks to the same strivings, without it being totally foreign to us, calling to the better natures in us we’re trying to live out. These are the books, stories, songs—Kierkegaard, Rabelais, Crowley—and the ways of looking and thinking about the world they imply—that there is beauty, there is truth, though we don’t necessarily agree about where, we are on the lookout for it. Something about this process of discovery is lost when the institutions are no longer questioned—even, especially, such a community has to be taken up at least once a generation, searched through, and founded anew down to its foundations, if it is going to remain living and relevant to its members—if it is going to be its members, their aspirations, their connections and love, and not some husk of dry traditions and vague memorized words. 

This is the same process of learning, but from things and people, not only books. There have to be schools in these communities, and everyone has to go to them, if learning and teaching, discovering and discussing, is going to be the breath of the democracy. Every family and group of friends has to have their own house to go back to, but it won’t be like it is now, a huge empty thing they never willingly emerge from, but something simple, a kitchen, a bathroom, a bedroom, a bed, and they won’t have to lock their doors when someone is always paying a visit and they themselves are hardly at home. 

I still envision it looking like Washington Grove, and much of the rest of Gaithersburg, but where now there are big stores and offices and parking lots, that land is cleared for cultivation. The train and metro still runs, but there is something in the air like India, because all the cars have been replaced by bikes and mopeds and buggies, and the roads are livelier and not so deadly, but not by much.

Rousseau in January

The important thing then remaining—what to do? And trying to do something unambiguously good is not so simple, as for instance reading to kids, helping the elderly about the house and yard, painting and beautifying public places, which all are undoubtedly positive, hurting no one, yet require such structures as do draw on doubts. A mode of transport to get there—which buses will run on a federal holiday? shouldn’t you have asked, for all the schedule said it would—and an organization to facilitate the project, give it words and legal documentation and a face of consistency, that it not be isolated acts, but hanging together and replicate itself and fit into some larger movement, without which those illusions of progress might be found out. And sure enough more numbers involved is better, for immediate results and for press. But the more there are, the harder to give reality to that image of a community at work together. This is inextricably bound to the deeper satisfaction of each individual at work, and the truth, if there is any, in the phrase ‘self-reliance’. 

So I can be awed by the erudition of a Harold Bloom, or any other secondary source on whatever side of the political-academic spectrum, but I can’t go along much with their claims and answers to questions of ‘where is wisdom to be found?’ I agree reading is important, without setting it on quite so hermetic a pedestal or ascribing to certain of its practitioners the indisputable status of gods, dismissing all the rest. The question can’t be just where is wisdom found, if it moves; first thing is to wonder where are we, then what we can do about it—out of these questions, wisdom is created. For each person, personal, but within cultural frameworks, practical considerations, situations or circumstances of life. By itself, reading is paltry. By ourselves, none of us becomes our best self. But it bears asking, still, how to read and why, from this perspective.

Volunteering with 826 again and bringing it to the suburbs—letting it arise in the suburbs, which are their own center anymore—and seeing how to instill or awaken and enrich and cultivate that love of learning whose reality we take as too good to ignore, how to turn it toward a worthwhile book. And after just one, maybe, it leads itself on of itself. Beyond books, too, but not forgetting them. So there should be more of them like Tales from Outer Suburbia, the Moomins, pushing with images against the page; Under Milk Wood, with voices; The Golden Compass, with themes—and yet all these accessible to young people, before they really know what they’re faced with drawn on entranced by stories, curiosity, wonder, why not escapism from dull or bleak or painful reality. And probably bringing them into play, or re-telling them, or wanting to make their own, much more than writing essays or bubbling in tests on them, at least.

In starting from literacy, aiming beyond it, back to the whole human being, holding onto the capability to learn without being carried away by it or paralyzed by it, but having at any rate to take up the mantle of understanding for the full conscience of actions, a better sense of what is possible and a hint of living up to it. Something like the development of subjectivity in community, if you want a more meaningful phrase than themes/units on identity and being yourself—which comes to the same thing, but one implies a lot more the real work it takes to get there, the process of changing that we are, rather than a totemic consistency. Because it is an objective world whose effect on us is practically totally dependent on our response to it—this is the power of thinking, and of reflection brought to bear upon the present. This is the solitary walker today, whatever Rousseau’s was, fully able to drive but choosing not to, if walking does no harm to anything, if the time saved driving is not worth the stress and expense and banal danger—the ultimate threat of dying a senseless statistic, where dying walking hit by a car, even, retains some human element more pronounced. And living being movement and distance, time commitments around the human rather than mechanical scale are not only preferable in thought but eminently practical to live by. Only it doesn’t have to be just stray individuals—it could be a lot less lonely having others join in. 

And in this place (St. John’s) a community so pure, as it were, and in line with the kinds of ideals I’m operating on. But still so elite and difficult of access—nurturing those with such ideals, but in what sense, if any, contributing their spark to others without it, or without the courage to pursue it for other considerations. The director kindly took on my brazen availability to conversation, telling me about the Touchstones program and Great Hearts Academies, tangentially related to the college without being linked with it. And I told her about the atmosphere, texture, aura surrounding different great books for me. I did a bad job; if she understood anything from what I was saying, it was thanks to the concrete starting-point, the dark mood with which Genesis closes, from the arch between beginnings and ends. That anyway begins to sketch an explanation for what I was talking about—a sense of the total effect of a work, based on its most basic movement between beginning and end. But of course everything else is in the middle, and all these moments and ideas accumulate into the mosaic of more impressionistic shadings, too, adding them to the total picture. But even with this language we’re still in just a visual phase of conceptualizing the, for  me, synesthetic quality of a book’s ambience. It has color and light and even phosphorescence, perhaps, in the case of the Great Gatsby for instance, but also shape and texture and heft and humidity and tone, style, grace, music, taste. Figuratively, of course, more or less. And so of all things this total impression, of a presence cast by books you read enough, with enough of yourself, will be subjectively true and different for each reader. The truth on this basis consisting of their honesty in addressing themselves to the work. And the picture or total impression that they come to associate with the work arising and differing based on the dominant meanings they interpret from it and all they bring to bear on it—the day, other books, and everything else it reminds them of. But somehow, the most important component to this total meaning and its figurative manifestation seems to be the cadence of the writing, the voice, the language in its fullest sense. 

Some examples—the full sunlight gold roundness surrounding Homer; the curtain like a starlit sky draped over the Bible; the scratchy red flannel shirt of Montaigne; the green gardens, parks, creeks and jungles Shakespeare plays in. Along with subjective associations, making them your own, books have their beauty more for themselves, too—in the images and truths and stories they hold. However you acquire them, they’re still there, still abiding in themselves and pointing beyond themselves—to ways of living; to their deeper inarticulate inspirations. Where beauty, practice, inspiration meet in a reader, books deserve their value as cultural riches. And where they don’t they can’t support the acclaim, and are more solid hypocrites, bundles of unfulfilled potential. To get someone to want to read is to once have them experience the first way, even with just one aspect of it enjoyable or striking some chord; to lose someone from reading for a long time, there’s enough disgust in one book that failed to connect with them to carry over into many others that might have, without giving them a real chance. 

Another analogy—the smells of other people’s houses, somehow hanging on their person to some extent and in character with them, --leading gradually to the realization that your house and yourself have a smell, too, to them, only you’ve grown so accustomed to it you can’t tell what it is. These early hints of subjectivity—the idea that other people think, just as you do; that most of them think in some other language when they think in words, and call to mind other images and melodies and dreams when they think of the most fundamental things—food, home, love—and want, for just as good reasons or just as unreasoningly, things other than you want; that they must have as much to tell you as you would tell them, if circumstances allowed. Fiercely aware of their favorite, beloved things, and that these are different is disarming at first—we are so open before enough happens to close us for a long time. Maybe part of what is so awful about school to a child is the sense of an imposition on nascent subjectivity, and being told and surrounded with competing wills and wants and valuations which seem to come from no recognizable person, but are simply thick in the air and the walls of the building—the first impression of what institutions mean for the free play of humanity. 

This is the fundamental stumbling block and strike against education, which I don’t know if I can overcome—if it amounts to being responsible for your neighbor’s morality, and willing instead of your neighbor’s will, for his own good, very well, but for your own good, too—making yourself the arbiter of what is good, and going about inculcating it all around. There are at least a couple of possible ways out of this, though. There is Rousseau’s appeal to nature, as good letting itself be known through lessons of necessity, and leading anyone open to it back to it. And there is the step beyond the non-profit industrial complex, substituting community action for outside-provided services—in the case of education, amounting to a sharing of ideas on curriculum, values, policies among as many of the vested parties as possible, to restore everyone’s faith in the efficacy of the teaching and making all the voices heard.

It all sounds very nice, of course, and yet between these two ways there is an evident contradiction, if we understand nature as Rousseau understands it, particularly the question of childish unreason. But if, as seems plausible, it is the nature of children to love and imitate and acquire rational thought through a process of learning and socialization, not being struck by it as by a thunderbolt one day around age ten—though this could admit of occasional leaps and plateaus—then they could be reasonably supposed to be valued members of the community after their fashion, and a kind of role model even to the adults of what authentic freedom, happiness, honesty look like. So that there is some connection between the two promising solutions, mutually reinforcing one another, if some kind of unselfish love is present, at work. It might be possible to give an evolutionary account of where this love comes from, but for now allow that is had to be believed to be seem, leave it a presupposition as pervasive as Rousseau’ s nature. And for now all that is implied in community love, as good and bad in its manifestations as Rousseau’s self-love, should demand recognition, from the possibility of a network of little utopias to the rise of fundamentalist entrenchments, depending on what the values are that the community comes up with, and how jealous and angry, or how free, it is in its love. 

For a long time we have been wrestling with the kind of nature we want to believe in, and the kind of love appropriate to it. We haven’t been able to quite let go of the dream of a love at first sight that endures, nor of the childhood so sufficient in itself to learn what is best through play, spontaneously. We balk at a love that can be conditioned by circumstance of place and movement, inconstant in emotions, analyzed to the point of distrusting them as real indicators of what we feel. We don’t like at fist the suggestion that is made in NurtureShock, either, about the kids going over how they will play, even writing a plan to the best of their ability, then going to play with all this held in mind or prompted by the teacher’s questioning, yet the results for their mental and social development are so impressive we then want to find a way to finesse the means that the end might be justified.  Again, wouldn’t it come down to a revision to our understanding of nature to include an element of reflection alongside spontaneous action? Even in kids, the action is better when it is understood as play—the more nuanced the understanding, the more sustained the play. Perhaps it is too difficult to say whether it is as fun. There still seems to be lurking something monstrous there, in the kindergarteners who didn’t join in the food fight, in the stillness of the kids told to imagine they were soldiers. 

Yet the imagination, too, has at least an aspect that needs to be sparked from somewhere, including the moral imagination, if the child is to develop. And in the same breath there must be reserved some space the play-plan doesn’t intrude into, and more free and spontaneous play, if the child is to be a child. The key seems to be to develop as quickly as possible, once you’ve once interfered, the kids’ ability to ask those questions for themselves, internalizing and making their own that suggestive imagination and reflection. When there is a story to be followed in the game, there’s the possibility of changing the story, adding onto it, and deriving something more from it than just the kind of overflowing of energy that unstructured play is, rather a kid of meaning that is missing or at least not yet found in ordinary life. Without getting too psychoanalytical, this amounts to a sublimation of some inner yearning into external and comprehensible significance, not very different from any artistic or relational significant, except in its level of sophistication and maturity. 

And the relative admixture of spontaneity to self-awareness is still high, giving the art and play of children a vibrant quality even when we recognize some element of reflection appropriate to their age interfering. The attempts to approximate this kind of innocence are varied, from dada or even prior in the roots of romanticism on through to Picasso and Pullman’s reimaging of Milton and Blake. To recover in maturity a kind of wise innocence not lost by experience but enriched by it is more or less a statement of the humanistic aspiration I have for my life, but it is helpful not to think of it as necessarily coming about in solitude, rather in relationships and community, and so the definition has to be broadened to include all people who might aspire to something like that, together. 

A huge piece of it does seem to be in the raising of children and the ongoing process of education, for children and adults, this process entails. And the kind of education that would be, clearly dialogic, has to include in some way the inarticulate, spontaneous impulses as well, at least allow for them, from childhood on up. Obviously the emphasis would be not on technical knowledge acquired in this education, though that would follow of itself, but on the process itself, by which interlocutors grow in self-knowledge and mutual understanding, subjectively, even if the objective quality they are seeking remains doubtful, their opinions on it opposed, and the result a kind of humbleness or frustration as the case may be. 

Only, as I’ve lately been realizing, not everybody has the perspectives on community, education, and a well-lived life that I’ve been pointing towards. If they do value technical prowess and possessions and hierarchical prestige above their human developments, then this kind of dialogue has its work cut out for it in reaching them. To say nothing of violent fanatics, merely vain or greedy or insecure people may not be amenable to dialogue. This amounts to saying, I don’t understand them, as they don’t get me, in our shared humanity, only in our interests and differences. But if it is not impossible to shift such basic presuppositions as seem opposed to dialogue back into line with the kind requisite to it, most likely this is more difficult the more time passes, and the more those presuppositions entrench themselves, but easier the younger the person, the more they experience this education as play and the more naturally they enter into it together with others. All the same, it is too sad and too blanket to think that no one who’s grown up into a closed-off, fiercely divided state, can be talked down from it, but will only ever spin harder off into destruction. The conversions and development of full-grown people are well-documented; and it’s too easy to make of all people two camps, whatever you call them—dialogic and conversant, radical and Mr But, socialist and capitalist—because the reality is much more various, and in changing circumstance and surroundings we turn coat. All the time. 

Still it seems important to stress the education of kids as a inclusive community endeavor, as benefitting the kids as well as their parents and neighbors, bringing all of us closer together, making all of us more participant, curious, and intelligent. It’s a commonplace teachers love to remark on, that they learn as much as the kids, but in a sense it is true—while ideally the presence of more teachers and students of different ages, mentors young and old, visitors, would blur the lines of student and teacher, and bring the school closer to the vision of a community in dialogue with itself and with other communities, and the kind of learning the teachers enjoy would be in the reach of the students as well—things like self-reflection, humility, peacemaking—at a level proper to them.

This is where I fall back on terms and concepts too much, maybe—natural and spontaneous, reflective and dialogic, authentic, proper. What is natural is natural to someone at some stage of development, in relation to an underlying dynamic nature, conditioned by an external cultural lens. We’re less concerned with the kind of knowledge or skills students acquire at school leading directly to an ideal job or station, but with instilling and growing their love of learning, the possession of which will make their way to a fulfilling job and lifestyle the natural result of their ongoing development, and each step of the way valuable in its own right, for being what they are. These stages are particular to each student, and might not depend simply on age or physical development. These benchmarks of value, nature, dialogue, authenticity depend on the community and culture around the children, educating them and judging their progress. 

Again, though, about as soon as elements of self-awareness and responsibility may be discerned, it seems crucial that the child feel a part of that community and that education, for herself and others, younger and older, and have an equal say in points of judgment, value, and the rest. She can begin to articulate what is natural for her, and knowing what she feels, she may do a better job than her sister or her mother, who only remember what it felt like—yet they have the advantage of knowing somewhat how it will change. In turn, they benefit from recognizing how it hasn’t. All I’ve been trying to get at here is another perspective on the school, as not just an admirable preparation of students, but a source of purpose, delight, and meaning for the whole community.