Retooling Our Schools

“School is an unnatural act,” argues Derek Davis (Welcomat, 11/21/90, p. 20). Of course it is. But so are vaccination, contraception, pasteurization, and chemotherapy. The problem, Sirs, is not in our schools that we are underlings, but rather that we have lazily and complacently let them become a patsy for consumer industrialism.

Please note: we teach out teenagers to drive in high school, but we don’t teach them how to eat healthfully, or procreate responsibly, or nurture each other. Do you those priorities have anything to do with General Motors? The depoliticization of our education has been one of the cruelist and most devastating fallouts from McCarthyism. During the Cold War, every teacher who wanted to show students how racism, sexism, and classism were eroding our egalitarian heritage of maximum autonomy for everyone was dismissed (sometimes literally) as a Commie or Nigger Lover, GIGO. Garbage in, garbage out.

Take the issue of Standard English, a puzzle I grappled with for thirty years. Being a latitudinarian by nature, I welcomed Black English as a tasty diversion from the bland emptinesses of Suburban English. (“Between you and I, I think this new English teacher Hazard is a nut case. Why he was playing Stan Kenton’s “This is An Orchestra” to his tenth grade English class the other day. Now what on God’s Green Earth has that noise got to do with tenth grade English?”) What is had to do was Stan’s explaining that an orchestra was like a democracy—everyone agreed on a tempo and key so that everyone could improvise when it was his turn.

But a full professor of English whose twin kids were in the class was outraged at the waste. His eye was on his twins’ SATs not their comprehension of egalitarianism. And his scholarly contribution was compiling a dictionary of agricultural terms. (Actually I was collaterally trying to persuade these East Lansing privileged that the state of our agriculture was more important than the State of Culture: teach people to husband the earth, and eat well and moderately, and their own creative juices would flow. But not vice versa. I believe even more looking back over forty years of Culture Vulturing that we have put the Cart of Art before the Horse of small c culture.

Take English. Ever since the emergence of middling classes with diverse dialects in England during the eighteenth century, we have been beating blue collars over their bowed heads with their crummy idiolects. Propriety not empowerment was our goal. If a body had grit, he’d say stuff it and go right on talking blue. If a body hadn’t grit, he’d kowtow, cowed. Eventually the anthropologists and linguists came along and explained that each dialect had its own value and that the imposition of external standards was a form of cultural fascism, stupid intimidation at the very best. But even the William Labovs of this universe missed the real point: we should be inducing students to have greater control over even their idiolects to empower them further. Rappy bop doesn’t automatically lead to empowerment. My guess is that at the moment it’s disempowering—and not just black talk: the slurvian idiolects of white teenagers keep them from growing up, i.e., getting autonomous.

The ideal English curriculum, say, for the Philadelphia Public Schools would not be an Arnoldian exorcising the dumb buggers by giving them the best that’s been thought and said in their language. They need Max Weiner not William Shakespeare. Teach them to read credit card English, the language of rental agreements, the skillful scams of advertising English. Teach them to psych out political malarkey in TV bytes, the self-demeaning nastiness of slasher films. Derek’s impatience with the institutionalized foolishness of run of the mill curriculum has triggered an equally untenable fantasy: a legion of Noble Savages castrated by six hours of daily school. I fully agree with him that the only true purpose of schooling should be to unleash the learning energy locked up in every kid’s heart.

The trouble with his theory of liberation is that the true school of the American kid today is the shopping mall. If you want to see attention to the curriculum, if you want to see perfect attendance, try the Franklin Mall any school day after “school” has been let out (or before: mall hooky is a big elective with today’s teenagers.) Our children haven’t stopped learning. Hell no. They sop up the shit of consumer paganism, our unofficial national religion, every day and in every way. Rock stars and rock jocks are the “substitute” teachers. The apples they bring to the electronic desks of these louts are their listening time and their indiscretionary income.

It is a sign of our fatuousness that we force kids to go to school for rote learning in slums when they could be helped to organize Healing Parties in their neighborhoods: Don’t give them a “Tempest”; give them a T-square and a hammer and show them how to repair a gutted row house. Show them how to plant flowers. Show kids having kids how to feed their children well and how to hug them. The SAT-saturated curriculum is an abomination, and it explains how we got so messed up: For generations, our schools have been skewed to the privileged, even the ones purportedly serving the underprivileged. Cramming for the SATs is as stupid as “improving” working class English by ridding it of solecisms. We should study to become wiser and happier humans.

Screw the grading systems of the world. You can play the SAT racket and still become wiser and happier, but it ain’t easy. It reminds me of the cadre of flunkers the old Emir of Oman used to have: they could never speak. When the new Commonwealth Union-educated Emir abolished such feudal frippery, the old speechless ones discovered they had forgotten how to speak. (It reminded me of some graduate students in English I had studied with.)

Our Culture is Number One curriculum encourages such supineness. It diverts attention from the real agenda: the pervasive and permanent empowerment of the financially and psychologically impoverished. (It’s not a blacks versus whites issue: I’d rather grow up poor knowing Duke Ellington’s work than rich listening to Lawrence Welk. Poverty of the spirit is worse than poverty of the pocket: and the true disgrace of our schools is that administrators and teachers alike get used to aiding and abetting endemic intellectual poverty.) Throwing money at the schools hasn’t improved them because their assumptions are too status quo. Making our schools work will step on a lot of complacently tender toes. But not making them work will give all of us frostbitten toes eventually. Schooling is unnatural. Bad schooling is denaturing.

If I thought young people could become autonomous on their own, corrupted as they are by the unofficial, out-of-school curriculum of Pop Pap, I’d go along with Derek in abolishing the school. It’s not because they’re unnatural that the schools suck. It’s because they have failed to keep to the mandate of Horace Mann to prepare the next generation for full and equal participation in running the show. That has been a sad and stupid failure. But the mess isn’t set in concrete. And by now even (especially?) their business community now sees that they ignore the common schools at their own peril.

Don’t close the schools. Open them up to the real world. If that means a serious redistribution of wealth and privilege, let’s redistribute. What profiteth a country with a hundred thousand decamillionaires if you can’t risk going out to the Seven Eleven to get a quart of milk? If we can send several hundred thousand troops to a far corner of the earth to protect our oil supply, surely we can stop being stupid in the way we’ve used the schools to guarantee a supply of docile workers and consumers. We lack only the political will to make our schools meaningful.

We need a Max effort, a renewal that shows our children how to be freer than we were so that their children can be freer still. Free of foolish Cultural harassment. Free of pension protecting time servers on the faculty. Free of Happy Consumer agitprop. Free to talk back to teachers and administrators when they stand in the way of legitimate growth. Free to quit school for an apprenticeship if desired without being hassled by a truant officer. To retool our schools, de-fool them.