No, no last words, just, Be Good

Only that fear, that I would mess it up, or that hope, which consists in keeping something more that you are holding back, something prevented me from trying to be like Michel. Maybe it was only habit. Maybe it is just easier to keep failing, sometimes a little better, sometimes a good deal worse, with the comfortable old externalities--worksheet, smartboard, homework, assessment--than it would be to start fresh. So we didn't have any goodbye party other than reading about Don Quijote in the textbook and watching a little clip from the musical.

Maybe the end it aims at is simply not truth, as the philosopher-bill collector admits? argues? in Lucian, but is keeping the students at least somewhat occupied, so that they have that much less time and attention to get up to really dastardly shenanigans. An argument similar in content to Emile’s early education, but applied very differently. Chiefly in that there are classrooms full, and not a single kid to tutor.

And maybe something like this is the best that can be accomplished with middle-school-aged kids, a kind of consolidation of their early life, a last chance to play and run around as much as possible, and to mill freely in great herds and packs through school hallways, before the intellectual work of learning, not just its experiential phase, takes hold, and they become individuals capable of thought reflective upon and within themselves. It is the social anger and disrespect that happens at this age that comes as the greatest shock to those charged with care or attempted teaching of these not-much-longer-children. The only halfway helpful approach that seems to be available to treat these outbursts and prevent them manifesting is in isolation, putting the student away from others to perform for or to pursue, though even then conversation of reflection can be impeded by all sorts of deeper factors that prevent trust or interest in the process of one’s own inner development, so boring, after all, compared to the mayhem and ruckus that keep breaking out with one’s peers, accompanied by the ineffectual but gratifying annoyance and frustration of the thereby discredited authorities. The very same who then might attempt some halfhearted reconciliation.

Problems that are big enough are brought to the attention of parents, guardians, or the state, however, and these parties might be less lightly dismissed, mocked, and manipulated. That they care is shown less in words, even wholehearted ones, and in attempts to reason and to awaken the unpracticed reason of the sullen interlocutor. Instead they bring to bear who knows what fists and belts, curses and consequences, loss of freedom, loss of opportunity, and suddenly what was fun, or automatic response to provocation, not really in one’s control and certainly beyond one’s comprehension, but in a fun way, produces long-term effects that one can only recognize in the dimmest immediate ways--as bruises on the skin, as the lack of love, as a phone taken away or broken, as the promise that life will become even harder, or as it becomes harder to see oneself as somebody with an intrinsic value, rather than the problem, the failure, that you are in all interactions. Attempts to assert your own personhood, after all, are so irrational that they come out as defiance, as disrespect, as inappropriate, when compliance, respect, and what is needed and right have seldom or never been shown to you in any way that you can recognize.

Even saying all this means nothing, since it is said in words you cannot understand, and your language is mostly one of actions, experience still, and not the luxury of reflective thought. Leadership, in this arena, cannot be quiet, patient words and listening, until it is proven first and probably also consistently over a good while in the act.

All this is of course based on the modern notion of personhood, which though it might appeal to innate rights and responsibilities, really acts as though we are formed from the outside in. That a soul or an identity is not primarily the room of the spirit, between us and God, but a foundation for action in this world, without reference to any other kind of life than what we can access with our senses or appreciate with our reason. A very different kind of outlook is still possible, still dominant even if unanalyzed, among more conservative people, religious, righteous, indignant at times at being ignored, at times because aggressively trying to recover lost ground or to re-indoctrinate a lost world with cast-off dogmas, but also at times and in some godly people shining out with that happiness, beatitude, merriment, that is at once so appealing, convincing, and also unsettling or even repulsive, jealousy-inducing, holier-than-thou while seeming unconcerned that it is attached to ideologies antithetical to peace and diversity, all the values that make modern life possible at all, on the strength of some indemonstrable knowledge or faith, never liable to be pinned down, about some better life elsewhere. And with that certainty that life in this world has been better in the past than it will ever get in the present, with only justified fear and self-fulfilling prophecies of the future, they can repose in the smug superiority of that lost golden age and that pie in the sky whose coming or not is not in their power, after all, to perform.

In this context no other knowledge really matters, no one has any further responsibility to become an individual or to promote any social cause, and so as a teacher the true believer’s only job is to call the lost sheep back to that one truth, to reorient their vision, as it may be 180 degrees, to see the world as a sojourn and their destination elsewhere, their home and hope of redemption in nothing but the old mysteries obscured by these newer dogmas of science and psychology.

If either of these two attitudes in genuine, it probably can make the work meaningful. But so much of hidden self-interest can be bound up in them, so much appropriation and exploitation can take place under the guise of either the technocratic or theocratic paradigms, that the only thing would seem to be to read their sources critically, the moderns and the ancients, so as to be able to make up one’s own mind as to how to chart one’s actions in this world and how to orient oneself to the possibility of those unknown realities elsewhere.

It is a shame then that one of the first things that seems to be placed out of bounds by both paradigms is this ground of reading and interpretation by which they might be understood. The Bible is appropriated by the churches, whether read or unread by their adherents, and the modern philosophy and literature underlying the presuppositions of the secular state are if possible even more unleaved-through, except by scholars who’ve bound up their own identities with some narrow expertise about some handful of authors or works, unread except by other scholars.

Which I would be only too glad to be proved wrong about, but this is my perception: that the population who reads is vanishingly small, and even now is vanishing. That as has happened with the Bible, so will happen with the foundational works of the modern mindset: increasingly unread, certain canons of interpretation will be handed down about them as authoritative, so that what is intended to free the development of personality and society will end up becoming so many hollow creeds in the service of an authority as pervasive as the medieval church, only considerably more concerned with utility rather than beauty, and considerably more powerful because of its advanced technology. That the prospects for freedom in the space between either of these great educational influences will be in the pages of those books, religious and secular, ancient and modern, as long as there are still libraries and readers, but their sphere of action in the world will only dwindle unless their own numbers somehow miraculously or by uncanny organizing should grow.

The work of the friends of the library seems very important, their all-city reads and their generous book sales, and their speaker this year, Anthony Marra, in Spokane gave a fantastic, humorous address concluding with his belief that whatever else reading good books together might or might not be able to accomplish, it does make people better neighbors. Words very close to my heart.