How Hard Can It Be?

Dear Cory:

What do you think of the parlous state of our educational system? Or is it really just national daycare with a dusting of book-larnin' to throw the rabid free-enterprisers off the scent?

Miss Nomer


Dear Miss Nomer:

Reading the words “parlous” (a lovely old variant of perilous) and “larnin’”, with your skillful use of assonance, evokes for free-associating Cory The Beverly Hillbillies, the haunting 1860 hymn “For Those in Peril on the Sea” (and how fine it is someone remembers to pray for terrified sailors, the seasick and the shipwrecked), sturdy lesbians named Beryl, and the way in which certain flutey Brits pronounce peril’s last vowel, making it a true two-syllable word. None of these associations, though, seems to emanate from Cory’s actual education. The interesting things happen outside of the classroom, as you no doubt recall from your own recent youth. Whiting’s hymn includes the line “chaos dark and rude” referring to a rough sea, but what better metaphorical description of classroom psychology could there be?

Education today seems to focus on the acquisition of skills or attitudes that will enable one to survive, as you imply, in the free enterprise system. Thus the ideal graduate would be selfish, nationalistic, greedy, irresponsible, materialistic and lacking in empathy. This is achieved by giving praise that is not linked to performance, through advancement without accomplishment, and by cheating rather than remembering: the elimination of consequences for behaviour. It is essential to be blind to consequences of behaviour in free enterprise or we would be bothered by our mountains of waste, our impact on other nations, our profligate use of resources, our contamination of the world and the emptiness of our lives.

Curiosity is what drives learning, and the best learning comes from following curiosity into unusual or unexplored areas, especially when one suspects that received wisdom is not wisdom at all. Facts are just what we all believe today. Tomorrow facts will be different*. When in a classroom of peers, one is surrounded by the equally ignorant, and the entire burden of teaching falls on the teacher plugging on with whatever curriculum the school board has dreamed up. As far as curiosity is concerned, this is a killer. And socially, we produce people who are obsessed with conformity and uncomfortable with people not their own age. Many prisons have education programs that have far better and more relevant content and, in the classroom, much more interesting peers.

Daycare it is, especially since parents must now both work to feed the mill of perpetual “economic growth”.

The real tragedy, however is the disappearance of charm schools. If our crowded society needs anything, it’s charm, politeness, generosity and consideration. The first twelve years of school, Cory believes, should be mostly concerned with these things. The science, languages, literature, math and history (international, not national) can be thrown in by leaving books lying around for the curious. Schools should canvas for the most charming people in their communities to teach, and magnetic, charismatic older students should mix with the younger to show how appealing a later age can be. Cory can imagine passing by a high school with his heavy bags of groceries and his library books, being eagerly begged by bright eyed, if pimply, youths to allow them to assist him. In Cory’s world, they would walk him home, where Cory would press lemons for fresh lemonade and then draw down a vellum-bound book of poetry to read to them. And after that, a pickup game of road hockey, where there would be no trash-talking, just witty, endearing asides.

*An example: Yesterday, space was empty. Today, according to string theory, it’s boiling with dense energy at the Planck level.