A Wandering Mind: Thoughts on Language

My mind wandered during Monday’s debate, as I grew weary of listening to one man’s rambling refusal to recognize any source of knowledge or wisdom beyond his “gut.” Doing so is the purpose of education – and Donald Trump seems to have missed a few classes. A friend of mine believes that this election is payback for a public education system that no longer turns out students grounded in civics, history and literature. The result is millions of voters unable to see through the hologram that is the Republican candidate.

I believe the current educational insistence on quantitative inputs that produce quantifiable outputs a computer can grade denies children a vast range of possibilities to explore the world with their imaginations. Robert Macfarlane writes that the Oxford Junior Dictionary now includes “MP3 player”, “voice-mail” and “chatroom” but has dropped “heron”, “otter” and “pasture”. Instead of “blackberry” we have “Blackberry”, a change the editors justify because modern children spend so little time outside.

“Technology is miraculous,” writes Macfarlane in Landmarks, “but so too is nature – and this aspect of the world’s wonder seems under threat of erasure in children’s narratives, dreams and plots.”

But there are seeds of hope. My local paper’s lead story tells of opening day at Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Elementary School on Great Cranberry Island, closed since 2000 due to a lack of students. Reopening a 13-student school is not the conventional notion of progress, but perhaps these kids’ intimate explorations of island life will save more words from extinction – and so provide a small step toward reinvigorating our civic discourse.

Patriots’ Day

As a one-time American history teacher, I wrestled with the deficiencies of textbooks, which are as much the product of Texas politics as historical scholarship and challenge teachers to breathe life into dull prose and dead people. In fairness, the text is hard to put together. When I was in school, ours ended with the Korean Conflict, traced the westward movement of Europeans across the continent, and relied on documents written by educated white men. Quite a bit has happened since then, including an array of tools enabling historians to uncover the long-stifled voices of marginalized peoples. Such changes have not sat well with everyone. In the recent tiff over Advanced Placement history standards, for example, some school boards, and the Republican National Committee, demanded changes in textbooks to extol patriotism and “American exceptionalism” and to show America in a more positive light – what we used to call propaganda.

Which brings me to newly unearthed histories at two of America’s most prominent universities: Georgetown’s sale of 272 slaves to plantations in the Deep South to raise operating funds and Harvard’s embrace of a eugenics movement that promoted racial purity and the forced sterilization of those who, in the words of U.S. Chief Justice – and Harvard pillar – Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., “sap the strength of the State.”

Shouldn’t the historian’s role be to uncover and confront the truth of our past, however painful, as Georgetown, and, I hope, Harvard, is doing, rather than airbrush it? True patriotism can’t be built on lies.

Test of Life

The other day I watched agape on a city street as a young woman rode by on her bicycle, negotiating the considerable traffic, with both hands firmly on her cell phone, texting like a demon. Here was multi-tasking at some sort of ultimate, particularly when you consider that some of the drivers of those passing cars were texting as well. They might even have been texting each other. “Consciously and unconsciously, we have gradually grown accustomed to experiencing the world through disembodied machines and instruments,” writes Alan Lightman, in The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew. “It is an irony to me that the same science and technology that have brought us closer to nature by revealing these invisible worlds [from DNA to quanta] have also separated us from nature and from ourselves.”

From drone warfare to urban planning, we seek to manipulate a virtual reality from a safe distance, and like the woman on her bike, we are increasingly adept at it. I see Lightman’s irony particularly in education, where students build models of the natural and manmade worlds and then engineer solutions to the messes people have made. They can do this without having to take the time to listen to the cacophonous melodies of a city neighborhood or dip their hands into a stream’s cold water or smell a spring day.

This is the sadness to me of the current debate over educational standards. You need neither empathy nor wonder to pass a standardized test.

The Wisconsin Idea

I'd never heard of the “Wisconsin Idea” – “the principle that the university should improve people’s lives beyond the classroom” – until Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker set out to dismantle it. Born in the Progressive era, the idea was to make the state education system a “laboratory of democracy.” Walker has backed away from his earlier language to rewrite the university’s mission by removing, "Basic to every purpose of the system is the search for truth” and deleting the phrases to "extend knowledge and its application beyond the boundaries of its campus,” "serve and stimulate society,” and “educate people and improve the human condition." Instead, he would have the university’s mission be "to meet the state's work-force needs."

The creepily Stalinist language is gone, dismissed as “a drafting error.” But the utilitarian message lingers.

And then I received this from a friend: “I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the ramped-up horrors abroad in the world, almost feeling like a descent into another Dark Age, and keep coming back to the notion that the only defense and antidote is beauty of whatever kind – it helps to balance the hideous dark stuff and thank God for it all!”

I think of Galway Kinnell, the late Irish poet who wrote, “To me, poetry is somebody standing up . . . and saying, with as little concealment as possible, what it is for him or her to be on earth at this moment.”

We need educated workers. We also need poets.

My Muse Goes to School

Calliope is Homer’s muse and also my granddaughter – all wrapped in a single package I sometimes think. She was the wisest of the muses and the most assertive, which seems at least half right about her current reincarnation. She’s in my mind this morning, the end of the first week of a September filled with late summer days when the skies are clear and the crowds have gone home, and loons calling across the calm water bespeak the solitude that has settled on Maine's coast. It’s technically not yet fall, but the cool air has a whiff of the sadness that makes poets write of their impending death, while the more mundane relive the gloomy memories, which the intervening years can’t obliterate, of going back to school.

On Wednesday Calliope started “big girl school,” and although she is only four, it’s quite a step up from “Little Angels,” where she spent her childhood years. Unlike those of us who remember the anxiety of our first days, Callie is unfiltered enthusiasm in a tiny body. She has only one worry: “But Mom, I won’t know the names of my new friends.”

She hasn’t read the reports on bullying (because she can’t read). She’s not desperate to fit in. She doesn’t know she’s starting a long march on which she will be assessed, graded, pigeonholed, sometimes literally disenchanted. She shows hopeful signs of resistance. At four you don’t look back. You look ahead, excited, ready for what Calliope calls “an adventure.”

Three Institutions (Part II)

I know of few places as insatiable for money as Harvard University. Its $32-billion endowment and budget the size of many countries seem only to spur its fundraisers to get more. (“How much is enough?” an old roommate once asked. “It’s just a little more than you have.”) I think sometimes that non-profits have become the creatures of their development departments (or whatever they’re called now to disguise the fact they’re development departments): their primary function is to raise money and their ancillary role is to be a university or a hospital or a museum. In fairness, the life of a non-profit is not easy. In the fierce competition for money from individuals and organizations that often have their own agendas, it is all too tempting to blur your mission simply to survive – to bend it a little because that’s where the money is. And it takes an enlightened donor to fund programmatic excellence over personal politics and to consider the institution’s legacy ahead of his own.

I google Harvard’s mission: “The advancement of all good literature, arts, and sciences; the advancement and education of youth in all manner of good literature, arts, and sciences; and all other necessary provisions that may conduce to the education of the … youth of this country….” It turns out it hasn’t changed in 364 years. As I consider the university’s staggering physical plant and corporate mentality, its huge government contracts and investment strategies, I hope it has remained equal to its mission.

Assumptions

A couple of you mentioned watching the Mountaintop-to-Tap video linked to Friday’s post. Three days before we set off on the trek, a man called me from Delhi, NY. He said he was a dairy farmer, had read about the project in the local paper and wanted to film it. With all the headaches trying to launch this thing, I thought, now a dairy farmer wants to film it. Kent Garrett said arthritis was driving him from farming, and he wanted to return to his career as a filmmaker. He also said he’d do the project for free. We agreed to meet at the Belleayre Ski Center in the Catskills. When I arrived, the only other person there was an African-American man. But, hey, I was in a ski resort looking for a dairy farmer. So I waited. When nobody else showed up, I went over. “I’m Kent Garrett,” he said.

He was not your typical dairy farmer. A 1963 graduate of Harvard, Kent had spent 30 years in television news and documentary films, winning two Emmy’s and a Peabody for his pioneering “Black Journal.” With no planning time, he and d.b. Roderick created an unforgettable record of the three-week trek. Kent’s current project is “The Last Negroes at Harvard”, the story of the 19 people of color, including himself, who entered the college in 1959. Five years after Brown v. Board of Education, that was the largest number in Harvard's history.

It’s amazing the people you meet on the other side of your assumptions.

Leading from the Rear

Following its decision to report on its stranded assets,” two weeks ago, ExxonMobil has agreed to disclose its research on the risks of fracking. Both decisions, long resisted by Exxon, came because of shareholder pressure. Enter Harvard University in response to pressure from its shareholders – students and faculty – to divest its portfolio of fossil-fuel corporations. “Climate change poses a serious threat to our future – and increasingly to our present,” wrote university president Drew Faust. “Harvard has a vital leadership role to play [and] a special obligation and accountability to the future.” It will do so in three areas: “supporting innovative research focused on climate change solutions, reducing our own carbon footprint, advancing our commitments as a long-term investor.”

While the last includes laudable and long-overdue initiatives – joining other organizations to develop best-practice guidelines and drive corporate disclosure – it specifically rejects divestment.

I have no problem with that, but Faust seems to suggest that Harvard cannot use its vast fortune in support of its core values. The endowment, Faust wrote, “is not an instrument to impel social or political change,” but a sacrosanct fund that must be above politics. Harvard is a voracious fundraiser, and in building its $32-billion endowment, it made plenty of political decisions.

Small investors are increasingly taking responsibility for their investments. If Harvard is truly committed as an institution to tackling climate change, how can it refuse to put its money where its mouth is? Don't they teach ethics in Cambridge anymore?

Yomamacare

You’ve got to love the Koch Brothers. Well, maybe love isn’t the right word, but those guys and their proxies pop up everywhere. Their latest stunt is a $750,000 tailgate tour of 20 college campuses by Generation Opportunity, a “non-partisan” 501(c)(4) non-profit that, thanks to the Supreme Court’s Citizen United decision, does not have to reveal the names of its donors. So far, though, it has received over $5 million from groups associated with the Kochs. The motorcade’s mission is to persuade students across America to reject Obamacare.

First stop: the University of Miami-Virginia Tech football game, where, GO spokesman David Pasch emailed the Tampa Bay Times, “we rolled in with a fleet of Hummers, F-150’s and Suburbans, each vehicle equipped with an 8-foot-high balloon bouquet floating overhead.”

Then “brand ambassadors (aka models with bullhorns)” rolled out a full suite of alternative health options, ranging from cardio exercises (beer pong) to balanced nutrition (pizza and beer) to something called “cornholing” (which turns out to be a combination of beanbag and a warning about what Obamacare will do to you).

“And,” added Pasch, “we educated students about their healthcare options outside the expensive and creepy Obamacare exchanges."

The kids had a ball. I mean, free beer, loud music and hot models vs. creepy Obamacare? That’s some choice for college students, especially those still on their family’s health plan.

The Kochs’ (rhymes with “just folks”) commitment to family values and home remedies is unwavering, so perhaps we should call their health-care alternative “Yomamacare”.

Trusting Ty

“Hey, I’m Ty,” he said, as he launched himself from the top of the stairwell, a tiny misguided missile hurtling straight at me. I caught him (he wasn’t very large) – and that’s when I learned that the essence of teaching is trust. I had started an after-school program in a Boston inner-city housing project, and Ty – and his less rambunctious twin brother Troy – had just arrived. It was September 1975, and Boston schools were enflamed by the issue of busing to achieve school integration. That era is history now, but the question of how to educate America’s children is no less urgent. A friend sent me a piece on the new Common Core State Standards, the latest national effort to reform our schools. Both teachers and parents are understandably wary of another grand plan. (The opinion of students is rarely solicited. I mean, what do they know?) But after years of a mind-numbing focus on standardized test scores, not as evidence of learning but to make administrators look good, the new standards do two important things: they provide clear goals without dictating how teachers should teach and they encourage critical thinking rather than rote learning. That seems simple, but it requires something that is too often absent from our schools – a deep trust in teachers to teach and in students to learn.

I often wonder what has happened to Ty. Did he find teachers who sough to nurture his exuberance or a system that tried to crush it?

Let Teachers Teach

I spent last week with a group of the hardest-working, most dedicated and most frustrated professionals I have ever met: New Jersey teachers. A measure of their commitment is that they voluntarily participated in a course that met for 12 hours a day in Union, N.J., where the temperature hit 105 on Thursday. They came because they loved learning and they loved kids. And they were frustrated because they believed that the state’s sole focus on improving test scores had elevated political and bureaucratic demands over educating students. New Jersey is not Afghanistan, where the per-student expenditure is $70 (versus $20,000) and girls are threatened with murder. But its importance to both our individual and collective futures cannot be overstated, and the 16 teachers with whom I spent last week have dedicated their lives to teaching children. They are professionals who feel unable to do the work they were trained to do because politicians and bureaucrats decided they knew how to do it better.

In his essay, “What is Education For?”, David Orr urges us to look at the world and rethink our ideas of education, including:

• Its goal is not mastery of subject matter, but of one's person.
• Knowledge carries the responsibility to see that it is well used in the world.
• We cannot say we know something until we understand the effects of this knowledge on real people and their communities.

What I learned last week is that the best way to have children learn is to let teachers teach.

Self-Reliance

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds” (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance, 1841). I write on behalf of 19^th-century individualism, which is not much in vogue on the political left these days. It is seen as the progenitor of the ruthless capitalism that destroyed idyllic communities where people lived in peace with their neighbors and in harmony with the land, where no one was greedy and disputes were resolved by consensus. But I see, not too little community, but too much – groups of like-minded people, joined together by geography or faith, ethnicity or interest, family or class, who enforce conformity on their members and circle their wagons against the world. Increasingly, we talk only to those with whom we agree, reinforcing our belief that we have a special grasp on the truth. Jihadists do this, of course, as do evangelicals and Fox News and progressives like me who feel the urgent need to set the world straight. We read opinion pieces whose conclusions we know in advance, and when we want to tell others what we really think, we send them something written by someone else. Is it any wonder that our politicians lead from behind, taking the pulse of their electorates before making up their minds?

I believe that the true measure of our education system is not a score on a test or fitness for the marketplace, but the development of the courage, critical thinking and self-esteem necessary to stand up to the accepted truths of one’s world.

Spring

Yesterday wasn’t technically the first day of spring, but it felt like it. As I set off for my weekend battle with the vines that are strangling trees along a small stream, the sky was clear and light blue, the sun warm, and a northwest breeze kept the humidity in check. Absorbed in my work, my arms bleeding from the thorns of the multiflora rose, I suddenly heard the stream beside me. It has been there all along, of course, but I hadn’t been paying much attention. Now, as the water moved through a shallow riffle, I became so struck by the sounds it made that I sat down and listened, watching it flow over glistening stones. I’m not much of a naturalist, but what little I know I have learned from unexpected moments such as these, when the sounds and colors of the natural world gently push themselves into my consciousness. I worry that we are increasingly moving our efforts to understand this world indoors, particularly for children. For reasons that range from the price of insurance to focusing on test scores, schools don’t send their students much into nature anymore, and we have replaced real experiences with computer models and simulations. There are people sounding the alarm on this, particularly David Orr and Richard Louv, whose book, Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder, tells a story in its title. We can learn a lot from our computers, but we can’t learn to love an abstraction. And if we don’t love the natural world, we won’t take care of it.

Fifty Years Ago

Later today I will participate in a panel discussion honoring the 50^th anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s visit to a small school in rural Massachusetts where I was a high-school senior. I wrote about his visit a year ago, and today’s ceremony takes me back to the 1960s, which was the formative decade of my life. It is a time now often disparaged because, it is said, it ended up glorifying violence and led to the narcissistic backlash of the “me generation.” Popular culture instead reveres what Tom Brokaw branded “the greatest generation,” a phrase that has always stuck in my craw. For that was that generation against whom my own was in rebellion, not because we saw our elders as an undifferentiated collection of other-directed organization men in gray flannel suits (as some books of those days described them), but because we saw a country, entering into unprecedented economic prosperity after a devastating depression and a global war, which was reacting violently to the demands of a people who were, in Dr. King’s words, “still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination,” a country that ignored an environment that featured a dying Lake Erie and a burning Cuyahoga River sending flames five stories in the air, a country that was itself engaged in a devastating conflict in southeast Asia. And while we were sometimes attracted to false prophets, we were struggling to change things we believed needed to be changed. They still do.

Just Wondering

Sorry for the delay. Technical difficulties this morning. Unknown if they are related to Sandy. Would you be intimidated if you got a letter from your boss that said “another four years of the same presidential administration” threatens your job?

Of course not. You would see through such strong-armed tactics and, thanks to the secret ballot, retaliate without fear in the voting booth.

But would you wear your Obama pin (to date, all letters have backed Mitt Romney) to work? Or park your bumper sticker in the company lot?

These company-wide letters, which several large employers have recently sent out, might be counterproductive in individual cases. But their overall effect is chilling. Just as your boss didn’t build his (the senders are male) business by himself, so you can’t build your rebellion by yourself. It requires communication, the exchange of ideas, open discussion. No one will note who is wearing a Romney pin, but it takes courage to show the other guy’s face.

These small things matter. When was the last time you saw a national politician without an American flag in his lapel? For me, it was in 2008 when someone asked Obama why he didn’t wear one? He does now. It’s part of the uniform.

When I taught school, I didn’t say the pledge of allegiance. I didn’t make a spectacle, but stood respectfully, because I don’t believe in rote oaths of fealty. Some of my students noticed and asked me why I didn’t say it. They did not ask those who did.

I hope some day one of them will.

Strangers’ Gate, Children’s Glade

Strangers’ Gate, one of 20 named entrances into New York’s Central Park, stands near the park’s northwest corner under the shadow of the Great Hill. No one seems to know how the gate got its name, which is chiseled into the entry wall, so I like to think it is there to welcome strangers to this quiet oasis in the midst of a city that can wear you out. If you climb the 77 stone steps to the top of the Great Hill, you come at once on a small stone that marks the Peter Jay Sharp Children’s Glade. This is an urban playground unlike any I have ever seen. It has no swings or slides, no sandboxes or ball fields. It has only some large rocks set about an open lawn, trunk-sized logs on which to climb or sit (and one in which to hide), trees and flowers now coming into bloom, and paths that give the place a sense of unthreatening mystery and quiet adventure.

  Is a playground for the imagination, a place of quiet contemplation that beckons children with its simple beauty. It seems a novel concept in a world of computers, organized sports and flat-screened TVs. But it is what educators such as Richard Louv in Last Child in the Woods and David Orr in Earth in Mind have been trying to tell us we are losing as we become strangers to the world of nature from which we spring.

King

In the winter of 1963, at a small boarding school for boys in rural Massachusetts, a visitor came for the weekend. He gave a talk on Friday evening, spent Saturday in class and at meals with the students, and preached on Sunday in the majestic stone chapel that dominates the campus. He started slowly, almost quietly, before falling into the rhythms and phrasing of his own Baptist tradition. He ignored whatever notes he had and became a vessel for his rich stentorian voice, which reverberated off the chapel walls and summoned the 200 boys to help build a just society. His name was Martin Luther King, Jr., and I had never heard anything like that sermon. There had been a handful of black students at the school since the early 1950s, which was unusual in itself, for most of us had grown up in a world in which Stepin Fetchit and Rastus were not so much vicious stereotypes as insidiously benign jokes. They were how we were taught to view a people about whose lives we knew nothing. A lot happened in 1963. King led the March on Washington that summer. President Kennedy was assassinated in November. Some say that marked the end of the dream. But I don’t think so. You can tell a lot about where people stand today by how they remember the 1960s. To me it was a time of hope and courage, of stirring calls to join hands across deep divides. A lot of people have tried to kill the dream and those who espouse it. They may yet succeed. But I believe that King’s vision, which calls us back to Lincoln’s vision at Gettysburg and Jefferson’s in Philadelphia, is the American Dream we must revive.