The Greenville County School Board has decided
to remove Sex Education from the curriculum
From now on, kids in grades 5-10 will be given
a tub of Death By Chocolate ice cream,
an empty can for burning old Poloroids,
a vinyl copy of The Cure’s Disintegration,
and will take 8 semesters of Love Education
In Love Education, kids will be taught the difference
between love and emotional dependency
They’ll be taught how to walk without crutches
and how to project their voice without
someone else holding the megaphone
In Love Education, kids will learn the difference
between love and sexual favors
They’ll be taught the ethics of one-night stands
and how to calculate the mathematics and logistics
of hormones divided by guilt and multiplied by loneliness
Instead of preaching abstinence, instructors will teach selectiveness
For the rate at which a virus multiplies in culture is comparable
to the results of dating within your social circle
Instead of preaching protection, instructors will teach caution
For it’s very easy to become incapable of reaching climax
without picturing the scrunched up face of a redhead in the back of a '95 Ford Escort
Throughout the course, kids will learn that
constant behavior breeds constant results,
and the search for an ideal is a circular path
that ends where it began
Throughout the course, kids will learn that
we need to patch our own holes
and happiness with another human being can only follow
the happiness found in solitude
The program was designed by Peter Samsa,
who, upon looking back on his childhood
remembered the loss of his virginity like some movie
whose ending had accidentally been revealed by a stranger
Love, he remembered, had been a lot more complicated
*I remember reading this in the Collegian magazine, as a just-starting-out freshman at Washington College; along about that time I was into the VIta Nuova, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, Siddhartha, and all these kinds of things you might read, which might change your life. I found it later online and kept it as a word file. All rights to the author.
It must attempt all this, but if there is a possibility of success it must not be done expressly. This is the one invaluable lesson the current school has to give. The more there are statistical studies and scholarly committees and mission statements, the more the burden of actually learning is shifted onto the luck and personality of the individual student—which can make things very exciting, but it certainly isn’t the way to go about educating the majority.
Which begs the same question we began with, but with a slightly different emphasis: some people will learn, given a teacher, whether that teacher facilitates the learning directly or by way of irony as the student works around him—but is it realistic to suppose there is something a teacher can do to make anyone and everyone a learner? Even by trying to embrace the irony, which sounds sophistical but looks very simple as I picture the discussions they will have in the new school, and the dawning realization of the students as they reach a certain age that it all has been orchestrated for them, for the only kind of learning possible—it is really my own school experience, only everyone is revealed to have only been playing all along, playing when they assigned forgettable books, playing when they ran infinite quantities of copies, playing when they held forth solemnly about keeping things orderly in 3-ring binders. Because they cannot have been serious, all that may have been the surface, but surely there was something buried, the real school. Now all I want is to bring it all back to the surface, so that the student still has to realize it for himself, but so that it is not so lonely a job, nor so heavy a chore.
This means keeping the books, but making them unforgettable; requiring essays, but showing how to write them, and why, and why they deserve to be kept. In this way I hope learning will approach its purpose so nearly that a scientific inquiry and a scholarly conference to interpret it will never again seem like something that ought to be ordered up. In other words, what was done by before by mischief will be shown someday into the care of honesty.
I don’t know if it is possible; certainly the duplicity of mischief is thoroughly entangled with our present society—school is just one of the most hypocritical examples; as certainly, honesty for this very reason as well as its innate and proper virtue can go safely, as if it were the highest mischief.
But if all the rest is dismissed as sleight of hand, grant me this: let us teach good books.
Just think: a life’s work becomes a few weeks of reading. Of course, to really understand anything you have to dwell on it, if not live it, but it’s not something you do in a vacuum—all these ideas are going to be combining and running up against one another in different ways for each person, and somehow we all convince ourselves that things make sense. The more we try to discuss anything really important, the more danger there is that we will settle for cop-outs, superficial treatments and emotional exclamations, because there is something looming behind a great truth, or a great conception—like a shadow that weighs, it’s the possibility that we really have no idea what we are talking about. It’s the suspicion that all we are doing is talking, and that words are no guarantee for shared ideas, shared ideas no guarantee for anything beyond intellectual entertainment of the idea, and even the deeply held idea no guarantee for any approach to the actual truth of things. We’re doing it right now, crying ‘Lord, Lord’ and not knowing the kingdom of Heaven.
So there is here what you might call a presupposition—that experiential knowledge is the really important kind. What then of books and the new school? Yes, it is vicarious experience; yes, it is inspiration to better life, and a sort of context in which to understand experience more richly; yes, it’s at least a better way to go about things than the way we have now—but isn’t it still second-best things?
Every institution’s ideal is that state in which institutions are rendered unnecessary. Not that a person could be naturally perfect and know everything, but that he wouldn’t need anything but natural associations to reach that quality of life the institutions safeguard, or to reach toward it. Is this the hardest lesson for the new school to teach, to point beyond itself? Or does it only seem that way to me, looking to institute it rather than coming up through it?
An entirely new side to the new school. We have seen that the fundamental misapprehension which may undo the new school is contained in its very motivation—can the essential voluntary attitude towards reading the great works be freed within a curriculum requiring those books to be read? So far we have more or less turned a blind eye to this difficulty, banking upon the invincible appeal of the books and the maverick Socratic teachers, as well as faith in the students’ natural intelligence and good will; however, and not that there is not some hope in these prospects, a completely different perspective may resolve the situation indirectly.
The thing is to make the school what it has always aspired to be: a place people gather to learn because they want to learn, not because they have to go. What if as it became more strict in certain areas—the chronological curriculum, for instance—the school loosened up in others—in the demarcation between ‘social’ conversation and ‘work-related.’ And if this informality, let us call it more precisely and idealistically, this friendliness, if it were extended even into the curriculum itself?
What I have in mind gets there via the long-overdue realization that there is something analogous between the way some people just don’t get schoolwork and other people just don’t get social relations, and so for the opposite extreme as well: some people do school effortlessly, others are never awkward with people. (Not totally effortlessly, but with a talent for it, not ashamed of it; not never awkward, but making it work.) Why should only the one count in school and determine your standing, while it is the other that is really essential in all other aspects of life? Why this dichotomy? And of the two ways to bring the two back together—either bringing books out of the classroom or bringing personal relations in—why not see that doing either fundamentally changes the nature of the whole enterprise of learning, and be courageous enough to see it through?
Books will be taught, but they will actually be read first, allowed to work their magic; social ease and the art of conversation will be taught, but it will be constantly practiced in so doing, so as to stave off that double standard, that hypocrisy which hamstrings every noble idea poorly implemented. What I am suggesting is that teaching the appreciation of books is actually as hard as teaching, what, coolness, friendliness, charm, grace. But like a foreign language, it is easier the sooner you start—like a mother tongue, it too starts out as something exterior to the child, but is eventually so completely acquired that it is impossible to say it was not inherent to begin with.
Nurture and nature, recollection and the fullness of time, genius and grace—aren’t they all different ways of looking at the same thing, and isn’t it time we knew something about all of them, rather than squinting at everything so narrowly without knowing there was any other way? When we once have in mind the new school as a place where everything contributing to the good life is taught, ideas as well as behavior, sympathy, character, athletics, creativity, we begin to see how inadequate our notion of teaching is. These are not objective quanta being transmitted—but a series—and the order is important—of pointings-toward, of invitations and directions to worthwhile experiences and the perspectives and ways by which these experiences will be recognized as worthwhile.
Plainly, the notion of testing with a scantron cannot be meaningfully applied to the lessons in taste and comportment and enjoyment being taught—the only test is in the student himself, the only question is, Is he a better human being for having spent all this time in school rather than left to his own devices? And it is for no one else to judge, ultimately, than the student himself. If he is dissatisfied it is up to him to try something new; if he is happy, we must show him how much there is yet to do—but not so as to make him despair, only to make his happiness the more balanced, more grounded, more complete.
But given this hope, this wish to be happy, to be our own best self and do all that we have imagined to do—what are we waiting for? Is it forces outside our control that are keeping us down—religion, tradition, culture, society, economics, politics? Well, it sticks in my throat, but yeah, partly it is, if only because so many people believe it is—and they can’t help what they believe, of course. But when we talk about these intractable social ills, the resolution voiced, though we have not got the resolve to see it through—is always education.
Education alone will break the vicious cycle of poverty, racism, violence—but in the meantime our money and resources are still needed to patch the leaks, giving fish while teaching to fish. Of course, then you look at the people who have been lucky enough to receive enough food and security and an education, and you have to wonder if we are better off after all, in any essential way. Is it too much of a stretch to wind up here and say, education of hope is required? In the sense both of suggesting what people hope for and that they then know their hope in such a way that they can follow it out, a thread through the labyrinth. And never suggesting that the people born into poverty are responsible for staying there, but always asserting the educated, really educated individual as above any social constraints or wiles.
Another quaint ‘critique of pure reason’ for my pupils. (I haven’t read that; who am I to talk? Maybe to be so crazy as to want to is enough.)
‘Okay, settle down. I’ll accept the homework tomorrow if you don’t have it; we can talk after class. Now, remember at the beginning of this class I asked, what is philosophy?—rather, what does it mean, what do you think it means? As I said then, I can’t tell you: because I’m still answering that question for myself, and I don’t believe that the answer as I’ve arrived at it so far will be a substitute for you doing the same. But then we shared what we thought, and this is a perfectly legitimate step in answering that question—hearing others’ ideas, articulating your own, debating, compromising or being stubborn—even saying No, there is an answer, just tell us what it is, we’ll find out eventually. I would agree with that up to a point—philosophy is something, for sure, and there are some things it definitely isn’t; it isn’t just whatever we say it is, or else there would be no point in calling it its own thing. There must be some value in calling it its own thing, distinguishing it from games, or cooking, or carpentry, though in some sense they may overlap, particularly if we think of philosophy as a perspective, a way of doing things rather than something done.
But anyway, today I wanted to try to summarize some of the ways we’ve heard our authors talk about philosophy—not in that subtle sense only, as we infer it from the way they go about their writing, but as they explicitly describe philosophy itself. (So Heraclitus, Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, Seneca, Lucretius, Augustine, Descartes—statements of theirs are quoted, or however many of them have been read. Certain threads are perhaps brought out—the ascetic, the encyclopedic, the political, the spiritual, the artistic; the stress on knowledge, the ideal, and wisdom, the return to the real.)
My bias is plain, but I won’t try to force it upon anyone. I know its flaws, and my own as far as living up to it. But that’s more than enough for one day. Read those statements over and over again, memorize some of them if you can or care to, think of both the content, what they say, and the style, how they say it—and the context in the philosopher’s times, his surroundings, the rest of his writing and the tradition he draws upon. And then, when you get tired of that, get back to the heart of philosophy. It isn’t memorization, but learning; not reading, but thinking and feeling.
The word itself is another thing I mentioned—do you remember? (love of wisdom.) The two roots of philosophy, they say, are wonder and doubt. Engage yourself in one or both once you’ve read these over, while you read them over. I hope you feel that shiver of understanding, the hairs physically shivering; that is part of what led me to set aside any notion of disembodied, ‘pure’ reason.
