As if I didn't have enough to do already, I guess I'll set about becoming a blogger like so many other egocentric members of the cyber community. I assume a degree of egocentrism is required for this, so pardon me if my broad brush across all other blogging persons makes anyone uncomfortable.
I thought some time ago that so much of modern discourse has been overwhelmed by the rush of modern life, that I might bring a bit of arcane perspective to this world. I am a middle aged burned out teacher, who manages to maintain in the classroom on a daily basis, but my heart has always been set in time past. Ironic that I love Star Trek so much (I can hear you all laughing out there, but do the math: born in 1955, lived in a home with two alcoholic parents, and then along came Gene Roddenberry's "wagon train to the stars" - I needed it, absorbed it, became it, etc.). However, I don't see the love for the idyllic future of Star Trek in conflict with the Renaissance, Restoration and 18th Century, and Victorian literatures I have been raised up in through my academic training. I long for a less complicated life of the past with its increased dialogic of philosophical engagement, and the future journey to find connections "out there." I suppose both are really just an indication of my dissatisfaction with life now. Stultifying Solitary, Isolated, Dessicated life. (Am I whining?)
So, I suppose what I will do is visit here once in a while and write something, likely a rant or some such thing about the Way It Is as opposed to the Way It Seems or the Way They Want You To Think It Is. Some of this arises from one of my favorite plays Equus in which the psychologist Dr. Dysart is burnt out being a child psych fixer. He hates and resents that his job in this world is to fix disturbed children just to return them to the mainstream of conformity and invisibility. This is what the teaching profession is these days. After 27 years of this bullshit, I have realized for a long time now that I love the act of teaching, but I hate the constrictions imposed by teaching on the behalf of the State. This mindless blind deaf and dumb entity is the real downfall of modern education. The State arrested education shortly after the second world war when all the boomers began to appear. I realize that the State had its hand in the pie long before this, but its real degradation began when the prosperity of the post war era led to rapid building of schools and setting up a structure largely absent before 1920 in which children and young adults are shoved through an assembly line of preset standardized curricula designed by the faceless "leaders" in every state and our esteemed national government. The foundational value system of the State Run Educational System is easy to detect: make these young, potentially engaged, bright, inquisitive beings conform to the industrial model of production: "Come early, come on time, sit down, get up, sit down again, and learn all these things you've been told to learn and don't fucking question anything. Yours is not to reason why, yours is but to learn and comply." So, The State trains carloads of teachers to manage the indoctrination of kids, hoping that they will believe they are performing a moral humanistic task to provide valuable information to students to store and use later. What we are not told as teacher education majors is that the state decided long ago to create a system to train children and young adults to accept compliance and dutiful performance of work and place that skill set above natural inquiry, genuine creative collaboration, meaningful self-expression, and a desire to read and read and read the greatest minds of the last 500 years, at least. If they were allowed to do so, The State could not easily function, and would have to become overtly Machiavellian rather than covertly ruling with its iron fist. I think I realized this even before I did my student teaching back in the early 80s but couldn't stop the train. I was married, child on the way, and needed a reliable job within my abilities.
Now I am sure many of the readers of this (if anyone reads it at all) will no doubt object to much of my thesis and call me a socialist thinking anti-American wonk. Actually, the system now in place guiding public education in this country is socialistic in the extreme. Each day begins with a call to patriotic glee with the pledge of allegiance. This ingrained mantra starts out the day for one and all and reminds us that we are in the bosom of the State which wants freedom and justice for all. In reality the day is dawning over yet another cycle of classes in which the teachers are required to color inside the lines of State Expectations and produce little compliant half educated order taking youth who will graduate with perhaps less knowledge and fewer skills, but who will be ready to enter the workforce (means of production) on the terms of the STATE. Worker bees one and all. Meanwhile the teachers and administrators are in daily terror of the overseers who wield enormous power to shake down a school district into conformity. Teachers are given an innocent enough looking curriculum, told to engage the students, and teach the essentials compliance. The sword of Damocles hangs above the heads of all who teach and the administrators to comply and shove students through standardized tests, measurements of annual learning progress, and when those don't reflect golden improvement, their jobs are waved in front of their faces.
So, what is the solution? Reinsertion of models like Gates' New School system and the framework of AVID incorporated. Teach to the genuine higher level values of reading, writing, collaboration, and, most of all, the hunger for Inquiry...a child who doesn't have any questions is a child who lacks the motive to learn. pestering teachers and administrators for doing the State's bidding and then blaming them (and parents) for low test scores when these mesmerized kids take endless assessments and don't achieve much is to miss the point: the whole system has got to evolve from post WWII insustrial education to more genuine frameworks of inquiry and collaboration so that these very kids will wind up in universities ready to be self-starters and not drones in the hive.
Tomorrow, I'll make the trek back to my classroom in a daily attempt to appear to be in compliance and all the while subverting my classroom into the path of inquiry and genuine thought.
I just can't stand to work in a factory anymore.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)