The Other Side of George W.
by Wade A. Carpenter
RETURN
edited 10/20/07
It's not just that we're leaving children behind; it's that we're also leaving our own souls behind.
My subtitle and thesis sentence may confuse regular readers who know that I'm a Christian, an educator, and a philosophical conservative and who are aware that our current president is also a conservative Christian with a strong education agenda. Truth be told, I voted for him in the last election and would do so again under similar circumstances. But I'm afraid that right now I have to write against him, and forcefully. Happily, the things I'm about to criticize are things that we teachers can fix.
Sorry, but I won't say much about the Iraq war. I have profound concerns about its purpose, strategies, and outcome, but I also have limited information, and we teachers have virtually no power to affect it.[1] Looking on the bright side, though, it is just possible that Mr. Bush has outdone our first George W. by finally and fully securing America's independence from the rest of the world: smart people do not want to be our enemies, and surely nobody wants our help anymore.[2] After all, Dubya has taken over a fully functioning oriental despotism and turned it into an absolute disaster of a democracy. And he is well on his way to doing something similar to our own school system, turning a fetid curricular swamp into an intellectual and moral desert. Let me explain, using two quick stories and a metaphor.
A couple of months ago, on her ninety-third birthday, my mother had a heart attack and stroke, which turned totally catastrophic the next day when she somehow managed to fall out of her hospital bed and break her hip. As you can imagine, the next few weeks were pretty stressful, the kind of stress that makes one think about the really important things in life. But she's tough, and it wasn't long before I was able to tell friends that she was progressing nicely: in and out of consciousness, cheerful when awake, and able to put a few words together at a time—"kinda like me in a department meeting."
That remark doesn't imply a lack of filial devotion; it's just the way we handle such trials in our family.[3] But it does say something about our departmental meetings. My colleagues and I have become so obsessed with standards, test scores, key assessments, data points, and all the rest of the institutional trivia imposed by current "best practices" that we have become uninteresting, victims of the kind of dehumanization that most educators have tried to avoid for centuries. I'm not blaming any of my colleagues for this; I work among extraordinarily experienced professors, and we enjoy some of the savviest leadership in anybody's bureaucracy. And it isn't that the bureaucracy is "going wrong." It's the fact that it is a bureaucracy, and one of the essential functions of any bureaucracy is to make sure that the really important questions are never asked. Regardless of the best intentions and best efforts of its best employees, one of the essential functions of any school bureaucracy is to keep enough people stupid enough to keep coming back. Think about it.[4]
Second story: Many years ago I had a student, a high school senior, with major problems, even by the standards of the high-crime projects she came from. The young woman wasn't the brightest match in the box to begin with, but she was a pleasant kid with an intact and hard-working family — itself a rarity in her community. After a dismal first semester, she was finally able to take advantage of a lot of help from a lot of folks, and with valiant effort she raised her grades to a "passing" average. But by the end of the year she was well into her third pregnancy and her father was well on his way to his third suicide attempt. Still, she was passing my required class, and all her friends and relatives from heaven knows how far away had come to town to watch her graduate.
Then she bombed my final exam. Then as now, I had a reputation for intellectual demand and honest but fair grading, but this was a tough one. By the time she worked up the courage to check on her grade the next day, I had made my decision. In this case, the costs of honesty were just too high, and the consequences of fairness were just too certain. So in my best Andy Griffith, down-home North Carolina style, I pointed to the awful mess on my desk and mock-solemnly declared,"I'm sorry, but I just can't seem to find your exam. . . . Now, if this ever gets out, I will find it." It took a moment for her to figure out what I was saying, but when she did, she completely fell apart, crying all over one of my best shirts. My shoulder still twinges on cold, rainy days.
Okay, I admit it: like George W., maybe I lied. I bent my standards, shattered their standards, and was (ohmygosh!) "unprofessional." And I'd do it again, under the same circumstances. When I recalled this story yesterday with a bunch of retired teachers, they each responded with similar stories, and we all agreed that that is the sort of thing every good teacher does on occasion, and at least thoughtfully considers rather frequently. Well . . . good teachers did. But this is the kind of humanity that I am not seeing much anymore, in either professional literature or professional practice. I'm hearing very little about the important stuff from schoolteachers or their professors. I hear a great deal about NCLB and curricular alignment and testing and "free– and reduced-lunch" populations and so forth, but not much about human interactions. Perhaps the most dismaying indicator, to me anyway, comes from my field-experience students and student teachers this year. Most had far better experiences out in the schools than they've had in recent years.[5] My interns could tell me lots of statistics, present me with some pretty decent lesson plans, and reflect intelligently on them. But despite my year-long promptings, questions, and provocations, only one student volunteered anything substantial—about two kids. Nor did many of their co-ops, and this year most of those were pretty darned competent teachers. The kids just aren't the focus anymore. Unavoidably, Mr. Bush must shoulder some of the blame for that—with me and you.
I'm not saying that the old humanism of the 1960s generation was done well. Sometimes we thought we were being creative when we were really just being childish. Sometimes we thought we were compassionate when we were really just weak. All too often we thought we were promoting a healthy self-esteem when we were really just promoting fat-headed self-centeredness. Like everybody else, I had way too many failures, but I had a lot of heart-warming success stories, too. That said, I'm seeing very few personal successes nowadays. This school might pick up a percentage point or two, and that school might become a "passing school," but the kids themselves are basically just sitting there, some of them compliant, some resentful, some struggling, some failing, and many bored to stupefaction. While their teachers would prefer them to be interested, inquisitive, and even demanding, that isn't where the pressure is nowadays. Mr. President, you and I should be ashamed.
Educators are (or should be) familiar with Plato's "Myth of the Cave," in which a gifted educator leads an individual out of the dark cave one step at a time, one question at a time, one challenge at a time, kicking and screaming if need be, into the bright sunlight of Truth.[6] Evelyn Underhill takes the metaphor one step further. Okay, we get out into the sunlight, but then find that direct sunlight isn't all that good for us. It is too bright; looking directly into it only blinds us. Then there are the UV rays and skin cancer and all that stuff we're so worried about nowadays. And sunlight by itself is undifferentiated, and so to most of us mortals uninteresting, as Plato ruefully noted. But when we enter a cathedral we find that sunlight diffracted through colored windows, and
at once we are surrounded by a radiance, a beauty, that lie
beyond the fringe of speech. The universal Light of God in
which we live and move, and yet which in its reality always
escapes us, pours through those windows; bathes us in an
inconceivable colour and splendour, and shows us things of
which we never dreamed before.[7]
Yes, that is a deeply interior, personal experience, but it is not an individual one, it is certainly not a collective one, and you can bet it's not an institutional one. It's personal because it's also interpersonal: that light is coming through stained glass panels that tell stories of people, stories like those we seldom hear or see in schools anymore. Even if somehow we manage to leave no child behind, and even assuming we're headed to some conservative Christian ideal of a national "good place," we probably won't find it's really all that good 0if we're not taking their souls—or our souls—with us.
I wish my observations were wrong, lopsided, or just local. Unfortunately, the research tells me I'm right in way too many places. And even if they don't apply in your place, maybe you can help the rest of us out with good suggestions. This is a fixable problem, so let's fix it.
Notes
1. Reluctantly, I admit that it is possible that "the real enemy" is Iran, Islamic extremism, or even Islam itself, in which case having boots on the ground in Iraq is really a very good idea: the Arab states are too insecure, Israel is too narrow, and anyone who thinks any of those guys are unconditional friends of the United States is crazier than the nuttiest suicide bomber. And I even understand why nobody in any administration could say that out loud if it were true. Truth is always the first casualty in any war, and with Socrates, I concede that governments sometimes have to lie for the public good (Plato, Republic, iii, 389). So at this point I can only propose such possibilities for further thought, and pray they aren't true and that we can find some way out without abandoning the Iraqis to even worse slaughter.
2. Of course everybody wants our money, but they can get that a lot easier through encouraging tourism, investment, and old-fashioned goodwill.
3. On his deathbed my father reassured me that "it happens in the best of families." And Mom is now back home, healthy, and got a kick out my description of her condition.
4. See Robert Epstein,"Let's Abolish High School," Education Week (April 4, 2007): 28, 40, for some assertions that ought to provoke a great deal of thought, especially among secondary-education people and the parents of their students. For a fuller treatment, read Epstein's The Case Against Adolescence (Sanger, Calif.: Quill Driver Books, 2007).
5. See Wade A. Carpenter,"Behind Every Silver Lining:The Other Side of No Child Left Behind," Educational Horizons 85 (1): 7–11, for my dismal assessment from the previous two school years.
6. Republic, vii.
7. The School of Charity (Harrisburg, Pa.: Morehouse-Barlow, 1934/1991), 27.