PLUG AND PLAY EDUCATION
The first time I taught high school English (not counting the previous year of junior high, though we didn’t call it that) was not bad. I was fresh out of college, didn’t know any better, and taught from the heart. By the end of the first five years I was more cynical. The last times I taught high school English, both in Heart Butte (founding in 1990 and again in 1991 until Athena Thompson ran me out) and in Cut Bank (where I lasted only a couple of months) the whole idea of what the courses or teaching or public schools were supposed to be had collapsed.
Some (mostly the high school girls and the adults who had not grown up) simply wanted to replicate their idea of what had happened earlier, though they didn’t really know what had happened. A few saw it as a challenge to their ability to grow up. Others (especially grown men) saw school as a nuisance in the way of winning teams for the reputation of the town businesses.
In the past education had been controlled by textbooks written by cynical companies trying to please California and Texas, because those were the biggest customers. But in rebellion against that, teachers had been urged to innovate, to localize, to be brilliant and funny and effective. Great. But don’t expect time or pay. Impossible.
We must never forget that our present public education was devised as German Industrial Revolution means to MAKING both factory workers and soldiers. In that culture, which came to America and was imposed on the indigenous people, there was dependence on authority discipline enforced physically, sexual suppression, and family control by older generations. Those things are gone now. Even the kind of jobs that kind of education prepared people for have disappeared.
Strangely, formerly suppressed groups now express their independence and defiance by deliberately using language that ignores the rules and chooses styles of vulgarity and garishness so seductive that young people of all kinds adopted them. Slang and cursing are typical. Much attention is given to buttocks and excretion. Yow!
I’m reading Tim Ingold’s “The Perception of the Environment,” which is about what we think is the way the world is and how we fit into it. I’m in the part where he talks about the human transition from being hunters/gatherers to being agriculturalists and pastoralists (those who herd animals through the environment). He sees this as being where things can go wrong.
If we get the idea that we can “make” plants and animals rather than fitting into the way they are, then we are misled, because all we can really do is maintain their environment to allow them to grow. The real creativity comes in the force for growth that is part of them. There is not a crank or a battery where we energize them, but rather they ARE energy and struggle to express it. We can make it easier for them by controlling weeds and predators, providing water, guiding animals to where the food is and so on.
But to do this, we have to pay close attention to what is happening and understand the timing as both people and other forms of life relate to the changes in the environment. Ingold relates this to the “raising” of children which we now tend to think of as making the child be a certain way that we prefer, rather than understanding what the child’s driving energy is and how to nurture it by providing what is needed.
What would happen if we ran our schools this way, not as businesses producing/making conforming adults but as the word “kindergarten” suggests, just providing and getting out of the way. To me this suggests Montessori and Waldorf schools. In a way, those homes that could afford to let a parent stay home to be with the children, listening to them, explaining to them, keeping a safe place, were the equivalent of one of these progressive primary schools.
This subtle understanding of the shift from cooperating with growing things and making their growth easier to a conceited deviation into the belief that we are actually making plants and animals in some predicted way, could completely change our school thinking.
But there’s another consideration. The biggest lack is my own childhood was having things explained as we came into the Atomic Age. Not just “what is an atom,” but how the world works and what “work” is anyway. I puzzled over and over about what was work and how a person found a job. There’s no use in blaming my parents because they also had the same questions. They both grew up on farms near small towns and found work pretty much by accident.
My mother was luckier because she went back to college in middle-age and was there just as the Korean veterans were using the GI Bill to fill the classrooms. Many of her questions were answered then. My father filled the house with books and magazines but never read them, never integrated them into a system. Neither lived long enough to scratch the surface of the new Cyber Age. They never moved from the typewriter to the computer.
My dilemma is that I did this so late in life, as well as plunging into the new knowledge explosion so definitely, that I’m only talking to a surprising number of people on the internet. My disastrous several months not-teaching in 2003 could not be saved by what I know now, because the structure of the school system was “plug and play.”
As one principal put it, “You are assigned to teach journalism, the textbooks I bought for you say journalism, so teach journalism.” He had no clue what journalism was or what it meant. Today it means martyrdom in the name of truth, obedience to multinational plutocrats, trivial titillation, and sometimes real reporting. Every field of knowledge is facing these kinds of deep and moral questions.
The exception is the basic brainwork of numbers and words which we call reading and figuring. But we aren’t even accomplishing that. The evidence against us is our own Congress.
