Chapter 7C

Not Good Enough¹⁵

Things had started out badly and were rapidly growing worse.
“What excuse do you have for yourself this time?!” Lily’s mother all but screamed across the table.
“But mom…” came Lily’s plaintive response.
“These grades are absolutely inexcusable! I do not pay over $20,000 a year for you to earn Cs!” Her mom shouted.
“But mom…” Lily continued to reply.
“You are grounded.” She declared. “And until you get serious about studying, I am revoking all cell-phone privileges.”
“But MOM…” Lily pleaded yet again.
“Young lady, do you understand that no college or university is EVER going to look at you with grades like these?!” Her mom continued to shout. “And you are not a good enough athlete like I was to take that route! No coach is ever going to look at someone your size….”
Lily started to tear up, and I held up my hand for attention. It was always a balancing act with an irrational parent between letting them vent enough that they might finally listening and helping my advisee feel safe. Both, I knew, were forms of protection.
“Mrs. Turner,” I said. “I think we need to step back for a moment.”
Her mom made a deliberate effort to control herself and merely glared at me. Inside my head, I took a metaphorical deep breath.
“First, as an experienced ninth grade advisor, I need to provide some perspective. The adjustment to high school is a challenging one, and this is a solid first quarter report card.” I told her.
“How can you possibly say that?” She demanded
“Mrs. Turner,” I replied. “Nearly every single one of Lily’s grades is a solid B or better. She has only one grade in the 70s, and that’s in my class; we’ll get to that in a moment. She is doing solid work in every single one of her other classes, and the first quarter grades are simply progress reports; she has all of second quarter to work on improvement.”
Mom was not satisfied. “What about so many of her teachers commenting about late and unfinished homework?” She insisted.
I turned to look at my advisee. “Lily and I have discussed what her teachers have said.” I replied. “And we have created a plan for how to address this issue.” I nodded toward my advisee and continued. “Lily, you and I agreed that you would be the one to share; so please tell your mother what we’ve come up with.”
Lily took an audible breath, and her voice quavered a bit. But she got it out.
“Mr. Brock agrees with me that I’m not using my study halls well.” She said. “My study halls are all in the lecture hall where it’s easy for me and my friends to distract each other without the proctor noticing.”
She paused to take another deep breath, and I gave her a look of encouragement.
“So I’m going to get a study hall pass from Mr. Brock each time so that I can work in the science prep room where I won’t get distracted.” She finished.
Lily’s mom’s mouth started to open in what was clearly going to be a protest, and I deliberately interrupted.
“Having her in the prep room allows me to have some direct oversight to see that Lily is managing her time well.” I stated. “And we have both agreed that as long as her grades improve by semester’s end that we’ll then begin to cut back on how often she works in the prep room. Next year, she won’t have study halls; she’ll have free periods, and so we will need to start helping her work on her own self-management skills.”
Mom frowned, but I could tell from the rest of her expression that we had closed this specific Pandora’s box.
“What about biology, then?” She barked.
It was my turn to want to take an audible breath, and I had to fight the urge. I glanced over at Lily, and she gave me a shy nod of understanding. The two of us had talked extensively about it, and I could almost see the thought-bubble above her head: “Go ahead; I’m ready.”
“Mrs. Turner,” I began. “Lily and I have discussed her progress in my class, and we have both come to the agreement that the pace in Honors Biology is something Lily’s not quite ready to tackle just yet.”
“What do you mean?” Her mom insisted suspiciously.
“I mean,” I replied. “That Lily’s abstract reasoning skills are not yet as fully developed as some of her peers, and what is best for her is to place her in an educational environment where she can better practice developing them. We need to transfer Lily into standard Biology.”
With some deliberate mindfulness, I prepared myself for the response.
“So you’re too stupid for honor’s science, Lily? Is that it?” Her mother attacked. “Or are you just too lazy? God! Do you know what this will do to your college admission chances?!…”
It was clear there was more coming; so I again used my hand to intervene and stop the conversation before continuing the conference.
“Mrs. Turner, my job as an educator is to maximize the learning opportunity for every child in our science program.” I told her. “Lily’s brain is still in the process of wiring itself, and I would be professionally negligent not to provide her with the learning environment that best matches where she is currently at in that wiring process.”
Her mom started to speak, and again, I deliberately interrupted.
“In addition, brain’s wire at different rates.” I asserted. “It is why we do not track students in our science program; a brain that needs our standard Biology class this year may demonstrate the growth by year’s end that means it is ready for Honors Physics next.”
I put on my serious ‘firm-but-fair’ expression and slowed down my cadence.
“It…is…about…optimizing…the learning environment…for the child.” I resolutely told her.
Mom frowned at her daughter, but at least there was no verbal attack in response.
I caught her mom’s attention again. “Furthermore,” I told her. “Since college is clearly so important to you, I can tell you from firsthand knowledge as someone who once worked for the admission’s office of my alma mater, a solid B in standard Biology is going to look a heck of a lot better on Lily’s transcript than a C in Honors Biology is.”
Sadly, that shut Mom up, and the expression on her face told me that we had at least closed Pandora’s box number two, even if we hadn’t quite locked it.
The rest of the conference involved practical stuff about what to expect during the coming academic year, and so the remaining conversation was less emotionally charged. But as we all stood up for mother and daughter to leave at its conclusion and I watched them go down the hallway together, all I could do was pray: Please Lord, don’t let that car ride home be a long one.

“Technically Sophisticated and Highly Skilled Barbarians”

One of the most significant ways we devalue children in this society is our preoccupation with form over substance in our schools.  Frequently treating students as pawns for institutions to manipulate to achieve a certain look is the ultimate in dehumanization because it tells a child that she, he, or they is not a worthwhile (or sometimes even a literal!) person until he, she, or they conforms (or should we say deforms?) to preconceived standard for what it means to be human.  Thus, as our culture continues to maintain its lack of investment in our children, we don’t just discount students as second-class citizens in our educational systems; we regularly don’t even treat them as people.

But that’s criminal and we all know it.  Our children need us to transform how we treat them, and that is why I insist that we need more authentic engagement from our teachers than we presently have in so many of our schools.  I believe that only teachers who join with their students as equal co-participants in the dialogue of learning can help children fulfill and complete their true natures because only educators who treat the encounter with the world as a “Thou” instead of an “It”¹⁶ can show children how to enter into that eternal conversation with the “Other” out of which all real identity emerges.¹⁷ It is the only way to stop debasing our children: recognizing them as peers in the journey to become fully human and collaborating together to help them all achieve it.

Yet, whenever I say that, my inner skeptic keeps re-emerging, wanting to know what my obsession is with all this existential “crap.”  Why, for instance, is mastering a specified body of factual knowledge not enough?  What’s so wrong with teaching children to conform to and comply with certain socially valued and accepted modes of thought and behavior? Why does the quality of the teacher matter more than what gets taught? After all, my skeptic reminds me, never forget “Mrs. Stillman,” the veteran teacher who declared that “most kids we teach are worthless, indecent halfwits.”  Her students probably actively disliked her, but they certainly heeded her well enough to learn the history they needed to pass the state test and graduate.  Indeed, my skeptic argues, entire generations have gone successfully through her classroom and thousands like hers without the suburbs all burning down in some apocalyptic Götterdämmerung.  How can I possibly claim that education actually needs what I have described in this project in order to fight the perilous way our society discounts the value of its children?

Part of my response, of course, we have already seen: that the reason for all this existential “stuff” is that without it, truly successful teaching and learning are quite literally not possible.  However, I’m too much the rationalist not to acknowledge that just because the educational process must happen a certain way to be truly authentic does not automatically imply that we need to engage in it that way.  Thus, unless I can convince both my skeptic and everyone else that there is an actual need for this kind of genuine teaching and learning–a need for why all of us should be investing more in our children and their education–then there is no compelling reason to change what we do in schools.  My counsels so far can then be dismissed as inventive fiction, and we can keep walking the dysfunctional pedagogical pathways we always have–the blind leading the blind forever.

However, history documents well what follows when that happens, and in fact, it is the lessons out of history that can show us precisely why we need  to engage in teaching and learning in the way I have described.  The dangers of falling into a “pit” may seem self-evident, but what has not always been as noticeable to many in education is the role schooling can play in creating the “pit” in the first place.  The late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, for instance, saw the rise to prominence of one of the most successful educational systems of the modern era–the German universities.  Considered the pinnacles of their day, places like Munich, Frankfurt, Marburg, Göttingen, and Berlin produced some of the greatest minds of a generation.   Men and women such as Gödel, Husserl, Brecht, and Noether went on to revolutionize their respective intellectual fields, and by the 1930s, the rigorous analytical so-called “scientific” or reductionist approach the German schools applied to scholarship and teaching had become synonymous with academic excellence. 

Yet, at the same time this “superior” system was nurturing a Thomas Mann, it was also cultivating a Joseph Goebbels, an Adolf Eichmann, and a Rudolf Hess.  The educational system that gave us Einstein also gave us Nazi Germany, and the reason why it did so is precisely the reason why I believe there is an actual need for authentic engagement from our teachers in our schools.  Whenever we reduce learning as the German pedagogy did to mastering a set of abstractions and the necessary skills to manipulate them, we always run the risk of generating a belief in the thing-like character of reality and the consequent loss of any sense of accountability which this belief brings with it. 

Children exposed to such a strictly “objective” approach to education do not develop an appreciation and understanding of their interdependent participation in the universe’s unfolding.  Instead, they come to value whatever is in their lives only in terms of how successfully they can exploit and control these “things” to satisfy their individual needs and wants.  Students taught this way then “downsize [reality] to the limited scale of their own minds”¹⁸ because they no longer have the necessary regard for any “Other” truth that might challenge their own.  As a result, they lose their actual capacity to respect or revere anything or anyone.  They cannot truly grow because they cannot change; they cannot change because they cannot truly care.  All they can do is to employ and to fear power, making them what theologian Christopher Leighton has called “technically sophisticated and highly skilled barbarians.”⁹

Now it may seem unduly harsh to refer to people who have been educated in this manner as “barbarians”–especially when the kind of instruction I’ve just described is precisely what the standardized tests of the College Board, NCLB, its offspring ESSA, and kindred other endeavors intend to assess and, consequently, to oblige all schools (public or private) to use to teach.  But I agree with Leighton that the instance of Nazi Germany makes a powerful case both for his claim and for the dangers inherent in the inauthentic vision of education that produces it.  Worse, in the fourteen years since I first wrote these words, studies show that our children have, in fact, become significantly less capable of empathy and caring relationships,²⁰ and the kind of partisanship and demagoguery that undermined the Weimar Republic have taken a firm foothold in our society.

The simple truth is that education becomes banal when we lose respect for the necessary role our encounter with the “Other” plays in the teaching and learning process.  Only in response to the challenge which alien truths make on our sense of identity can any of us broaden our understanding of reality (i.e. “learn”), and unless teachers and the other adults in our children’s lives nourish this process through their own faithful “Otherness” in the lives of students, it will not happen in any child, anywhere, anytime, anyhow.  No matter how successfully schools may train students to be “technically sophisticated and highly skilled,” if the teachers in them are not authentically engaged in the fashion described in this project, the children are not really learning anything; they are simply getting suitably conditioned. 

In other words–to put it baldly–unless we actually want an educational system that produces habituated beasts, we need those who teach to have a more authentic engagement in what they do because only such a person treats a child as someone more than a “necessary evil” to manipulate and only a child so treated will learn to do likewise.  Choosing to be authentically engaged in the classroom is the only way our children will ever learn to become truly and fully human, and it is the only way we will make the world a place that silences the “Mrs. Stillmans” and makes future holocausts impossible.  Kingsolver is absolutely right that we really will only get back from our children what we give them of ourselves, and until a critical mass of us in this country decide to change what we are currently giving them in our schools and–like with Brooke and Lily–elsewhere in their lives, our culture and our society will remain a place where:

Here in the land of plenty a child dies from poverty every fifty-three minutes, and TV talk shows exhibit teenagers who pierce their flesh with safety pins and rip off their parents every way they know how.  All these punks started as somebody’s baby.  How on earth, we’d like to know, did they learn to be so isolated and selfish?²¹