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.

Lover Education

Love education is what we need. If bringing the real world and the classroom into some harmony is possible, topics of sex as well as religion, in their broadest sense, will have to be a big part of the alchemy.

'Melting apparent surfaces away,' education won’t reduce love, but improve it. 'An improvement of sensual enjoyment,' as Blake sees it. Nothing less will do.

This would cover sexism, homophobia,--we're okay at frank discussion of anatomy, but the social anatomy eludes us. And the sort of thing some people get stuck calling emotional intelligence; that is, loftily, philosophy, or being human. The difference between sitting in a car and lying on the grass—but we are the same thing. How to express yourself, getting angry, getting sad, romantic, joyful; how to love freely and safely and then to love one person, so that married or not you will stay together, raise kids together, in love and far from violence, abandonment, distrust, in an unbroken family. How to reconcile loneliness with being busy and having everyone and everything available, friendship with more extravagant imagination, love with confidence and self-reliance, an awareness of the relation of all things. How to make the best of, how not to sell yourself short, how not to sabotage possibilities in their nascent clarity. How to undress fakeness, bare honesty and not abrasively, but with touch, warmth. How not to analyze into abstractness or deconstructed ugliness, but to begin to understand. To learn to dance, all that entails unlearning. Do you see how little a teacher would have to do, the inherent interest the questions hold for youth? Yet who would presume to teach it?

All the influences we have teach us this most important thing, because being so important it pervades them all—every human interaction, mediated or not, the words we speak, the clothes we wear, books, movies, advertisements, responses, jokes, morals, laws, places—everything asserts its loves, gives advice, gives warnings. The models we see for the good life in all its facets are fractured—here the youth, there the up and coming, elsewhere old age—but threaded on a strand of connections to significant others, to God or whatever seems to take his place—this in-common, never-scrutinized thing which makes them good—at least once we become conscious of needing it. In part biology, in part culture—the strict demarcation is not the issue—the idea of love enters our head and deeply grips us, relative associations grow relevant—the religious, the sexual, the status quo and the rebellious form appropriate—so that what we need is not love itself—so thoroughly we are suffused with it or so utterly beyond our comprehension, depending on how you look at it, it is—but a way to mindfully choose it, to act with a hope of living up to it.

This is not as simple as avoiding living out someone else’s dream, the way Obama talks about visiting Europe, or the nausea induced by certain kinds of premature weddings or past-expiration marriages—rather love education would be providing many dreams and sighting on them from many angles, encouraging not the wholehearted acceptance of any one kind of love—though not discouraging that, necessarily—but the awareness of many kinds with some things in common, abstract elements and concrete expressions, some things transposed or totally in contradiction. Nor is it going to denigrate the real education in love that comes only by loving. Nothing is spoiled, nothing precluded, no secret let out: the reality is in experience. No real knowledge is secondhand, only the glosses on it, reflection of more or less value as it is brought to bear on further experience. All of what we know, short of revelation, is carnal knowledge.

And again it bears saying, we are being taught already, crudely, ways of love secondhand, by magazines and gossip and TV, so the philosophical-religious-artistic approach, the humanist approach, has its work cut out for it—its real work consisting, in a sense, in nothing so much as trenchant critique of the idiotic-calculating glosses we flock to in the busier world. This is in line with the aims of the current sex-ed model, lest we range too far afield and neglect—to reduce disease, unwanted pregnancy, abusiveness of the worst sort—only it is oriented toward a more encompassing conception of peace and health—not merely proscribing—nature abhors a vacuum—but promoting in its place: romance, kindness, mutual understanding, self-understanding. (Indeed, it is impossible to love genuinely, you might say, without having built up reserves of confidence in your own heart—such people are certainly more attractive.) Promoting love instead of lust, whether the robust burning or the frigid hushed-up kind—drawing people out of their shells, showing them discipline as the case may be, and thought instead of ignorance. Innocence, so far as it may be preserved, and illusions where possible left intact—but showing no mercy where the damage has been done, healing, setting straight misconceptions, feeding generous tendencies.

As for the semantics-sticklers and epistemologists, the shift from lust to love being too dubious to pass their muster, so that this seems to purport to reduce sexual abuse and ills by promoting, since abstinence hasn’t worked, sex—the thing is that abstinence-only education has focused too narrowly on sex, and failed. What can go toe-to-toe with sex? Certainly not not-sex. But perhaps love. What can compete with the drug high? A little help from my friend! We are talking about all the art and morality of this and many prior cultural forebears, streams of consciousness of the grandeur of being alive, or creativity in all its forms, including the human life’s own generation and preservation, the inward spark of meaning and joy we can externalize as God, or just as well the dynamic interrelatedness of the universe which we can feel inwardly, the microcosm of which, towards which we are biased, being our relationship with some beautiful person, and they of course biased towards us. Sex is a part of it, biology is on one level the ground of our being and all our art and consciousness—but that’s no ultimatum, all or nothing, lust or abstinence, if all our culture and will is not ignored.

And for those who have no room for love still, no faith or hope--the sin against the holy ghost, denying the spiritual gifts; the sin against the human condition, seeing no sense in being alive—life has been cruel to them, but their perspective, their lack of belief or feeling, this stubborn stuntedness still has its lessons, it is welcome in the discussion. The abysmal bleakness of falling out of love, heartbreak, sexual frustration and broken up dreams, have their place, they must be addressed, we all have one death to die—some believe in reincarnation, or an eternity of bliss, or of nothing—and any love, if we open ourselves to its reality, contains its possibilities of extension, repetition, or finality. Some would suppose we have a kind of afterlife in the return of our elements to the earth—this could fall, in our analogy, into ‘well, let’s just be friends.’

We could read Neruda, Blake, "Come live with me and be my love, and we will all the pleasures prove"; we could listen to Shakespeare and the Beatles and make much of the sensuality of music and literature, the music of literature, the sense of music, celebrating subjective interpretation, but insisting that we hear each other out—this includes doing the reading. Song of Solomon, Jesus, Rumi, and Milton, Dante, Petrarch and Rimbaud—the latest music video and the first 20 minutes of ‘Up,’ or parts of Proust, Slumdog Millionaire, Brokeback Mountain, Y tu mama tambien—whatever will reach the students. So their own stories, influences, dreams, beliefs, and really considering how they live in light of them, how they act or don’t act. A romantic meal, a scenic photo, a tango dance—a communion, an abortion, a rape, drunken hook-up, apotheosis, jealousy. The proper use of a condom, the nervousness of getting them; the bitterness of intentions or actual doing contrasted with simultaneous inhibitions on another part. The beauty of being unself-conscious, the real learning, which we have mentioned—mention it, praise it—doing so through these works, it won’t be diminished by it. The kama sutra, all kinds of smut and pornography, yoga, give them all their due. What is it like to identify as homosexual—do you identify as straight? As a man or woman or neither? Consider it. The honesty it requires, the resolve—or abandon. Kierkegaard and the knights, puppy love, what it was like to be innocent, what it means to be responsible. Keats, Pullman, the circumstances, the power of imagined love or doubt and physical lovemaking reacting, working at one another—William James and the smile that makes happy, the arousal that feels like love—seduction, and the way leading not to temptation—the Feminine Mystique, the Tao, a self beyond oneself. A twoself. Or an immolation in God, the ecstasy of St. Teresa. Love at first sight, catching sight of ourselves and laughing at ourselves. Freewheeling and coming back into balance, which seems to have something to do with moons, weather, love letters.