On the Rat Race, Reflection, and Ivan Illich

Fridays here at The Gullog will be a day of reflection.

There's not much time to reflect in school, is there? When I was first assigned to teach AP literature back in the eighties, my principal sent me to a seminar. The presenter was a gung-ho but motherly woman. Her students eight novels a month and gathered at her house one evening a week to memorize all the literary lingo from aesthetic distance (the detachment by a writer or reader from the work being written or read to ensure an objective rather than emotional response to the subject) to zeugma (the technique of yoking two words together for effect as from Gibbon's observation "laws the wily tyrant dictated and obeyed") Her students were also taking four other AP or accelerated classes.

I sat there thinking of my nephew who on the last day of his AP lit class burned his copy of Walden out of rage and hatred for the book and the oppressive demans of the class. Hearing this broke my heart. I loved my nephew and Walden and admired the transcendental qualities in both. Of course, these qualities had not fully flowered in my young nephew who would nevertheless graduate third in his class with an impressive accumulation of cross-country awards and acceptance to Carnegie Mellon University where he would major in one of those scientific fields that remains beyond the comprehension of most of us. Despite his accomplishments, it seemed to me to be a crime of the spirit that the crushing workload imposed by the system had turned what might have been a reflective encounter into just one more analytical exercise crammed between two other analytical exercises.

For all my classes, I chose depth over breadth because I wanted my students to have the opportunity to experience that magical realm of the spirit where all of the arts originate. If they did choose to join the rat race, I hoped what they gained from my class would serve as a reminder to pause from time to time to ask themselves exactly what they were rushing toward and who they would be when they got there. I was always sadly aware, and somewhat guilty, that by not driving my students to consume books and terms, I put them, the AP students especially, at a disadvantage on the standardized exams.

How do we transcend the system and put soul into the education of our children?

On the Friday of every month, I'll be tossing out thoughts on education from those who inspired me throughout my teaching career. Today, I give you the opening lines from Ivan Illich's Deschooling Society, first published in 1970:

"Many students, especially those who are poor, intuitively know what schools do for them. They school them to confuse process and substance. Once these become blurred, a new logic is assumed: the more treatment there is, the better are the results; or, escalation leads to success. The pupil is thereby "schooled" to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new. His imagination is "schooled" to accept service in place of value. Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of community life, police protection for safety, military poise for national security, the rat race for productive work...."

Next week in the spirit of Christmas, we'll have from Ivan Illich on consumer education.

And oh, one final note. My nephew, now in his thirties, did find his way back to Walden. He works at a national laboratory. We still don't understand exactly what he does, except that it includes finding more environmentally responsible ways for powering our world.