The “Ah-ha” Moment
First year of teaching. Enormous suburban high school. Metro Nashville Public Schools.
Two sections of chemistry. Two sections of world history. And, Heaven please help me, one section of AP European History—because no one else in the department would do it in response to the petition from the student body.
It is 7th Period on a dreary Friday in February. Things are not going well….
Nathan Williams tossed his book onto the seminar table and sneered.
“Locke was completely full of it!” He declared.
The others in the class squirmed. It was not our first heated discussion, but this was still Nashville, Tennessee in the late ‘80s and directing a tone like Nathan’s at an authority figure violated just about every one of the teacher-student mores there were at that school.
Internally, I sighed. My behavior management classes at Peabody said that I was supposed to pounce on moments like this one, and my mentoring colleagues had lectured me on more than one occasion about the danger of letting the students perceive you as a peer.
But by this point in the year, I had already learned that how I chose to respond would either silence the dialogue or open it up, and we were at a critical juncture in our discussion of Locke’s Second Treatise. We had been examining the evolution of the idea of civic freedom and its role in democracy’s development, and without getting them to understand Locke’s radical understanding of freedom, I wasn’t going to get them to see how it lay the grounds for Jefferson’s language in the Declaration of Independence.
I turned to Nathan.
“Want to elaborate a little more articulately?” I replied calmly. “I’m afraid ‘full of it’ isn’t very helpful.”
“His claim in section four that people are in a natural state of perfect freedom. It’s completely bogus.” He answered. “None of us are completely free, or we wouldn’t even be here. They make us come to school.”
Tanya stirred at that.
“Nathan, kids skip school all the time! And they do it….” She paused and looked down at her own copy of the Treatise, stabbing a finger on the page. “They do it ‘without asking leave…of any other man’.” She stated.
“Good.” I complimented. “Always remember to keep coming back to the text. The DBQ on the AP exam is going to require you to support your argument with direct material from whatever historical document they provide.
I turned back to Nathan.
“Sorry to interrupt you, Nathan. Go ahead and continue with what you were saying.”
He leaned forward toward Tanya and pointed at her book.
“I think you need to read the rest of what you were quoting.” He challenged. “The part about not ‘depending upon the will of any other man?’ Sure, some of us may skip school. But we get punished for it when we do, and then they make us come back here. People can make other people do things.”
He looked around the class for confirmation.
“Want to tell me how that’s freedom?” He asked.
Richard, who had been silent throughout, suddenly spoke up.
“What you’re saying,” He replied, “is that adults can control your decision to be in school. That you don’t have the power to choose not to be here. Sorry, I’m with Locke; you can leave any time you want.”
Nathan sighed in exasperation.
“No, that’s not what I’m saying at all.” He insisted, gesturing yet again at everyone at the table. “Look, none of us are going to say that we aren’t free to make some decisions. I’m just arguing that Locke’s wrong that we can make any choice we want.” He picked up his copy of the book. “ ‘Within the bounds of the law of nature.’ Someone in prison, for example, isn’t free to make any choice they want; they’re stuck there against their will. In fact, that’s the whole point of prison: to make people behave so they won’t lose freedoms that are important to them!”
I shook my head in disagreement.
“Anyone in prison is absolutely and completely free to do whatever they want all the time.” I declared in provocation.
THAT woke them up.
“Look, Mr. Brock,” my other Nathan responded. “While I actually think Locke’s basically right and that, as he says later in chapter two, we essentially all have to agree to limit our use of our freedom in order for everybody to be able to function in society, I’ve got to go with Nathan on this one. Somebody in prison doesn’t have any freedom. They’ve lost it until someone else decides to let them out.”
There was a general murmur of assent, along with a mixture of head bobbing and expressions of confusion.
I studied both Nathans and then turned to the one who had started all this and made sure I had his full attention, knowing that the others would get it if he did.
“Anyone in any prison anywhere in the world is absolutely and completely free at all times. He can choose to walk out of his cell; he can choose to walk out the prison’s door; he can choose to walk across the prison yard to the fence; he can choose to climb over the fence….”
“But the guards will stop him! They’ll shoot him!!” protested Nathan.
“Yes, according to Locke, the prison guard is absolutely and completely free to shoot a prisoner trying to escape.” I replied. But then I paused and leaned forward, tapping my finger on the table for emphasis. “But does the consequence of getting shot get rid of the freedom to choose to escape?”
Nathan briskly shook his head.
“No, of course not. But….”
His eyes actually widened, and his mouth actually made an “oh” shape, and I could see from a quick glance that similar expressions of understanding were popping up on the rest of the class’s faces.
“Right,” I told them. “The existence of total freedom never implies an absence of accountability.”
“That means, though, that…”
Nathan’s voice trailed off as the full implications of the new insight hit him, and what had just been a slightly smaller world got a little larger for him.
Damn! I thought. How’d I just do that, and how the hell do I make what just happened happen again?
The Looming Crisis
Education in this country is in trouble. Public, private, K-12, universities…our entire schooling system is failing our children, adolescents, and young adults in some fundamental and critical ways, and I am not alone in thinking so. Entire books have been written over the past decade about this issues.1
But as someone heavily trained in both the sciences and the humanities, I am all too aware of the genuine consequences if we leave this problem unaddressed—as far too many of us in education are currently doing. The recent resurgence of diseases such as the measles and whooping cough is only among the more obvious examples of the potential perils facing a world that fails to secure learning for its children, and along with environmental degradation, climate change, and unchecked population growth, the list of major issues threatening us today continues to grow almost exponentially.
Humanity, in fact, is facing a “bottleneck” in the coming century–a moment when the confluence of resource demands and their unavailability will strain the abilities of institutions and individuals to survive–and the final outcome of this predicament is in no way certain.2 Already, the emerging economies of India and China have started to siphon away the limited supply of material and intellectual capital that are available to us here in this country, and the damage to our nation’s capacity for further growth and development has been significant. In addition, “machine intelligence is racing ahead, wiping out millions of routine jobs as it reshapes the competencies needed to thrive,”3 and we are facing the reality of a world where some individuals may be unemployable, not simply under or unemployed. Future generations will have to learn to live as thoughtful individuals who are attentive stewards of their lives in order to weather the coming storm, and if our society wishes to prevail, we must somehow find a way to combat the mounting intellectual illiteracy that currently threatens us and to teach our children the wisdom they will need for tomorrow.
How we will do that, though, is at present quite problematic. Again, the overwhelming data today shows that we are failing completely in our efforts to provide children with the education they will need to succeed in a world that has become truly global, and the past few decades of new standards and other educational reforms have apparently done nothing to change this situation.4 Indeed, it is hard not to have a “been there; done that” cynicism when it comes to the seemingly endless attempts to improve education since A Nation at Risk first warned us that we had a looming crisis on our hands—back in 1983!5
The simple fact is that none of the reform efforts since I started teaching have succeeded in fixing our schools, and until we recognize that this failure is an inherent feature of a certain way of understanding the educational process itself, we will “keep feeding children into an education machine that churns out young adults lacking meaningful skills and purpose, primed to throw hand grenades into the ballot box, or worse.”6 What I want to challenge us to see is that the real crisis we face in education today isn’t that our children aren’t learning what we teach them: it is that they are learning exactly what we are teaching them. So much of education remains broken (and the consequent future we face so grim) not because we haven’t been working hard to repair and change what goes on in our classrooms but because the ways in which we have tried to accomplish this task literally can’t. I want to suggest that the reforms of the past decades have all employed a vision of teaching and learning that makes their inability to improve these things inevitable and that until we change this vision, what is now “merely” a looming crisis will indeed become an incarnate disaster. Therefore, if we want to avoid a future that is as frightening as we think it is, we must alter our understanding of education, and to do that, I think it is critical to see why the current dominant educational paradigm is fated to fail in the first place.
Light a Candle 