Synchronicity: As I write, my TV’s on, rotting my brain. Little kids appear on the screen. One tells the camera that a star is twenty feet bigger than a house. Another says that, without gravity, you could jump over those trees. Now, I figured it was a public service ad showing all the stupid misconceptions and ersatz knowledge kids get from our drooly schools. Boy was I wrong: It was, instead, an ad about how education is cable TV.
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The LA riots were based in looting. People called it “going shopping”. That’s because many of them had literally never been able to go shopping for big-ticket items in the way portrayed as normal in popular culture, having never had the money or the credit.
Ah, but why the passion for looting, for shopping, for things ? We’re a consumer-driven economy. Planned obsolescence shares the yoke with sales as they drag manufacturing along. We’ve been indoctrinated to measure worth in terms of wealth and possessions. The looters saw the smashed store fronts as a chance to grab some self worth. Their sense of their own value lies outside themselves, in property, because our society and culture revere ownership and punish and revile poverty. Poverty’s a crime in USA, so, paradoxically, stealing becomes a way of escaping criminality.
Yes, this is topsy-turvy.
And such projection of self worth onto objects creates the root of many, perhaps most, behavior problems in schools, especially in the inner cities, a euphemism, let’s face it, for slums and ghettos.
Even celebrities, people who cause celebration just by their presence, ahem, are judged by how rich they are, how much money they make for their owners and investors.
The excellent film STAND AND DELIVER deals with this self-worth issue, via a portrait of Jaime Escalante, an enthusiastic math teacher who instills confidence in his classes by any and all fair means. He cares, that’s all. And once again, he’s cheered but not emulated. Other teachers do not copy him. They can’t, you see. They can’t because they have no feeling of vocation, they have only jobs.
Too many people opted to become teachers as an out, to keep college from having been a waste. It was seen as a practical, achievable compromise sorted from among lofty dreams, goals, and gritty reality. Most teachers see themselves secretly as something else. Each is “really a poet”, mechanic, designer, ballet-dancer, gymnast, athlete, writer, musician, or computer whiz. Each exists in a psychology of postponement and expedience. Unrecognized genius and abandoned hopes litter their bleak inner worlds. “Well, I have to earn money to live”. That is the sad excuse offered, even to themselves. They were timid about following their interests or joys so they made like Woodward & Bernstein with Deep Throat and followed the money. Why? Because our society demands it and threatens very real and utterly merciless punishments for failure to come up with the cash, or at least the vig. Ours is a loan-shark society and protection racket culture.
What makes the news when the subject is, say, art? Oh, how much money a painting brought in at auction and whether the “investor” is Japanese, Arab, or Old Money Brahmin. What books are newsworthy? The ones that sell most, fastest, and ear the biggest advances and profits, the ones made into blockbuster movies. Music? Oh, that’s easy, the chart-topping shipped-platinum pop jingles dominate. Easy to judge all and sundry by such crass, obvious gauges, is it not?
This is LCD culture, which is not culture at all except in a fungal sense. Yet we’ve been so harangued by this point of view that we’re unable to see past it to more sensible and valuable measures of worth. Which returns us to school, and teaching, where most of us are, ahem, “socialized”.
“Conform or be cast out,” Rush sings in “Subdivisions”. That’s school’s basic lesson and just look at the bankrupt society and meaningless culture into which we cram all those kid-shaped pegs. Hadn’t we better start demanding more of ourselves and our alleged nation?
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These days all we hear are moans about “low pay” and “no respect” or “time wasted on constant discipline problems” or “attitudes never installed at home” and so on. Yes, those are are real concerns. They are not, however, the reasons for the debacle that is our schooling system. Yes, we must change our society’s view of teachers and teaching, but we must also change teachers from pedantic babysitters teaching from restrictive rote blather to real intellectual engagement with a worthwhile curriculum.
Kids are not profit points or opportunities for monetized commodity enhancement, although they’re treated as such by an increasingly corporate approach to schooling. I’m avoiding the word education because schooling is indoctrination, where education is elevating a person’s learning ability and innate talents and skills. We grind out grads, instead of raising good citizens to new heights of achievement.
All my teachers through high school taught memorized lessons from ancient curricula once approved by an ignorant school board and never subsequently reviewed or revised. In most of my classes, what was taught had long since become obsolete. I used school books my father had signed. We had to memorize inappropriate maps because the teachers could not change rote lessons, or buy up-to-date maps, just because uppity natives or twitchy little wars changed the borders, names, and characteristics of various places. We learned Bunga/Simba/Nanook stereotypes that never existed in objective reality outside white bigotry. It is interesting to note that the Bunga of the Jungle tales were illustrated, as I recall, by drawings. After all, photographs would not, could not have proven the bizarre patronizing assertions of the simplistic, racist texts.
This was indoctrination to prepare the white among us to be the world’s proprietors. My town, Ebensburg, PA, was permitted a single token black family and if a second tried to move in, they were chased out. One day in fourth grade Mrs. Bearer told us all she had a special visitor but we had to be completely quiet and say nothing while he was in our classroom. Intrigued, we agreed. In came a large man in full KKK regalia, face masked, entirely covered, his sheet bearing many patches and insignia, esoteric sigils, and other eerie symbols. He stood silently before us for maybe five minutes, then left. I noticed something. Beneath the hem of his dress-like covering I saw his shoes and trouser cuffs. I noticed the dark, inch-wide seam running down the outside of the pants.
It was, I realized, our town’s one policeman. We all knew him
After he left, we kids were baffled, but Winnifred Bearer explained. “I just wanted you to know they’re still out there, still guarding us, always on duty.”
I was nine. It would’ve been 1967.
We then moved on to studying La Salle and various other explorers.
After school I walked the block to the public library. I knew what the KKK was, having seen Jimmy Stewart infiltrating them for THE FBI STORY and in other movies and TV shows, including the news. I found several books that might explain them but when I tried to check them out I was scolded by the librarian and told I could borrow books only from the children’s section where, of course, there were no books explaining the KKK, at least not overtly.
I went home and complained to my mother, then explained why I’d wanted the books. We marched back to the library and my mom scolded the librarian and said her son — me! — could borrow and read any book he wanted from any section and she’d sign what ever permission necessary.
None was required and from then on I had free reign of the public library, which I used constantly.
What I discovered about the KKK only disturbed me the more. I’d loved ALFRED HITCHCOCK PRESENTS on TV because it told us kids how adults were behind their smiles and whispers. It was as if I’d walked into one of those stories. Were the adults around me bigots? Home-grown church-burning lynching terrorists?
An already Gothic world got worse for me in fourth grade.
We all nod knowingly about such things but think about it. Why was such dreck as those appallingly condescending text books for young children created in the first place, or tolerated? Or was it encouraged? Was the goal to keep us ignorant and bigoted and compliant to manipulations like the Viet Nam war?
What did we learn every day? How about to worship a piece of multi-colored cloth? How about to accept authority’s word or else? How about never to rock the boat or be thrown off it? We learned that kids are property. We learned that school and real life never met, mingled, mixed, or mattered to each other.
What did the teachers do? Oh, they led by example, of course. They conformed. They played the game for money and gave no shit about much more than getting through another day. Some even told us this in so many words. Some drank. Some dallied with other teachers. Some preyed on us, sexually or otherwise.
So my generation learned what amounts to “bad data”. Such spurious assertive slogans as “Columbus discovered America” or “the railroads moved us westward by manifest destiny” and other homilies. My social studies teacher in high school was not permitted, on penalty of being fired, to mention Communism, even the word. He did anyway, providing me with an example of quiet heroism.
Derrida came then and the next generation of teachers was caught by all the reforms, so weird in effect that they soon flensed content and concentrated solely on “learning how to learn” — without motivation to do so, or context to do it within. Facts became debatable while subjective experience was enshrined as reality’s determinant. Feelings, people, get in touchy-feely with them.
“Oh, well, you can find it out if you ever need to which is highly unlikely” became the attitude kids were confronted with in school. So when’s the last time the average person used a reference library, let along a reference book? Researched something in depth, or at all? It’s easier to let other people worry about everything. Easier to call them dweebs and nerds and get on with the partying.
A crop of disinterested, apathetic, detached, disenfranchised, and otherwise uncurious automatons droned from our schools to flip burgers.
Now we come to “core knowledge” content advocates. I’m one, of sorts. Yes, it can only help actually to teach facts again, but without sparking the concern, the passion for teaching there will be but a small improvement. No teacher should ever stop seeking, and such excitement can come about only if each teacher first and foremost chases those subjects — as if knowledge and learning are compartmentalized, another issue — intensely compelling them. Rooted in hearing a voice calling from the darkness around us, why else call vocations pursuits? Enthusiasm for one’s vocation counts for more than any amount of certification, review, or testing.
Will we spark such flames again? Or will we allow corporate to grind us into what Ambrose Bierce called the dust of erudition to fill hollow skulls?
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I wrote this essay in 1992; can’t remember if it was published, or where, but the points have only become more pointed as 27 years rolled us flat. Some of my questions proved not rhetorical but prescient. Yes, corporate, and notably the GOP and other right wingers, have not only gutted school funding, destroyed curriculum with crazy nonsense such as creationism and ant-science texts, but they have managed to demonize teachers and teaching with lies about how rich teachers are, all for the sake of union busting.
My essay, which could have done little good even had it gone the equivalent of viral back in 1992, reads now like a last gasp.
We have only ourselves, We the People, to blame, for allowing a series of extremist, right wing, and now foreign coups to destroy America.
We could’ve been a contender.
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