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.

Love Education

Love Education
by Jonathan Balog*

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.

This concludes the morning announcements

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.

Have a Marvelous Monday.