School! Huh! (Good God Y'all) What is it good for?

Maybe actually something? (With help from Calvin and Hobbes)

Is it weird that so many people who love learning hate school?

I think of all the kids’ comics I’ve read in which “hating school” is among the primary themes, from Calvin and Hobbes to Captain Underpants, while the same comics revel in an insatiable curiosity about the world, an in-suppressible drive to create, and pure joy at the strange and wonderful experience of being alive.

There’s really no contradiction here: if you are curious and experience joy and wonder in the world, and you want to create and express what you think and feel, school is actually awful, simply because it’s a place structured by the assumption that people will find no joy and wonder in the world without institutional assistance — it’s therefore structured to tempt its subjects (with prizes) into learning things, presuming that they would otherwise not have interest in doing so.

This is not a new argument. I find its most lucid expression in Alfie Kohn’s Punished by Rewards, but many have written on this subject.

I’m currently haunted by it though. Here are some facts about me:

• I am the parent of elementary-age kids who are lively and bright but hate school (picture George and Harold from Captain Underpants as nonbinary fraternal twins).

• I have been teaching at the university level for over 20 years

• I left school and got a GED as soon as I legally could, which was probably a couple years later than I should have (the laws at that time were especially dumb)

• I spent about 8 years working and living and going to college before I got a BA, and then 4 years getting an MFA

• I have never been in a graduation ceremony

• I am living the life I want, and it is good

Every semester I welcome into classrooms young people who have, mostly, arrived where they are because they have “done what they were supposed to.” And every semester I try to get them to unlearn some of the “rules” they’ve absorbed over years of schooling, and to read, write, and create with less regard for what I, the authority figure, think about the process and product of their creative and intellectual labors.

And then at the end of the semester, I have to assign them grades.

Friends, you might think this sounds fucked up, and you’re not wrong! But this is also the way it must be: because while training can be encouraged by a system, learning can only be encouraged against a system — “against” here meaning not “opposition” as against an enemy, but more like “against the grain,” or “against the tide” — or, even better, like sailing against the wind.

Imagine if sailboats could only travel in the direction the wind blows. That wouldn’t be very useful. The entire utility of wind-driven seafaring is built upon the eye that sees the wind blowing against it and thinks, “I see how I can make this work for me.”

I entered school in 1980 and left it in 1990 (a skooch early), and throughout those ten years I learned a lot by exploring the world on my own and by devouring books from the library and by talking to people and playing with ideas, and, I always believed, I learned comparatively little in classrooms.

But now, as my own kids are trying to navigate the mostly well-meaning but also mostly really dysfunctional world of education, I’m beginning to realize that I did learn something really important from school: I learned how to sail against the wind.

https://hatterassailing.org/learn-to-sail/sailing-upwind-and-tacking/

The majority of the college students I teach are not like I was: many of them (not all!) follow rules to a fault. In this way, I think exposure to me is good for them, a balancing influence against a culture of anxious conformity. I suspect that this exposure is even (indirectly) good for their career prospects, but I know it’s good for their humanity.

Anyway, I’m just one of dozens of professors they’ll interact with over their college years, all with different angles on things — diversity matters.

Between 15 and 25 I had a dozen different jobs, went in and out of two colleges and five majors, married and divorced, lived and worked for a while overseas in “legally shady” circumstances, hitchhiked across a (small) country, camped by the roadside routinely, occasionally brushed my teeth in river water, dodged dodgy people, ran for my life once or twice… you want to talk about an education? This life has been a wild ride. I know who I am. I like who I am. I love my family and I love my friends. I make art. Some of the art I make is my life.

I might be getting a little retrospective because, just recently, I was supposed to go in for my first colonoscopy (which, as you may know, is the contemporary body-ritual of the Nacirema signifying entry into “elder” status), but instead I had what looked like a seizure while getting the IV inserted, which surprised a lot of innocent endoscopy nurses and made them late for their lunch, and for me, parlayed a pretty miserable 24 hours (colon prep is not fun) into a demoralizing couple of days before I could get my “seizure” reclassified as a vasovagal syncope, lest I be barred from driving cars for six months (!!!) — and this was all followed by an ill-timed summer cold and a (just-to-be-certain there’s no brain damage) EEG.

And yeah, in the midst of all this, I have a kid who is not thriving at school, and I’m trying to help them figure it out, and do something about it. At the same time, I’m navigating a world that has always been, if not “hostile” (and it has, at times, been outright hostile), routinely difficult to navigate.

This is when it occurred to me that I did actually learn something important from my experiences with formal education: I learned to push back against the machine; I learned to stand up for myself and others; I learned to jiu jitsu the attacks and to introduce unexpected elements to turn events in my favor; I learned to reject the summary judgements of an unthinking system, its petty authorities, and its peer-enforcers; I learned to cherish the ways in which I move out of step with the norms.

https://www.nyhistory.org/join-and-give/frederick-douglass-council

Today as I read the morning news I came across this essay by AO Scott in which he describes his children’s school as a place where they’re warmly encouraged to find “just right” books, and compares this to Frederick Douglass’s famed narrative in which he must learn to read against the organized opposition of antebellum slavery. Douglass ultimately finds that reading opens his mind in ways that create both freedom and pain; specifically, the pain that comes from freedom. Our schools attempt to cultivate the benefits of pain in students while causing no pain. As Scott puts it:

My children’s classrooms embodied a central ideal of this project: to institutionalize the sense of freedom that Douglass had gained through struggle and opposition.

The method here is to give prizes: school, after all, is basically a “prizeorium” where living, learning, and creating are always secondary to getting an A, winning a ribbon, earning a title, getting voted into a position, being picked to play the lead, getting on the first string team, and so on.

The promise is always “conform and you shall win,” but believing this bargain and conforming is itself the ultimate loss; it’s potentially the giving over of your will and wiles, your creativity and your individuality. This makes our educational spaces into dens of temptation in which children’s souls are at stake in exchange for… stickers.

There is an upside to this. AO Scott points out:

A school, however benevolently conceived and humanely administered, is a place of authority, where the energies of the young are regulated, their imaginations pruned and trained into conformity. As such, it will inevitably provoke resistance, rebellion and outright refusal on the part of its wards. Schools exist to stifle freedom, and also to inculcate it, a dialectic that is the essence of true education. Reading, more than any other discipline, is the engine of this process, precisely because it escapes the control of those in charge.

There are many ways a person can respond to the “conform and you shall win” temptation: first, they can credulously accept the bargain and expect ease and riches to follow; alternately, they can reject the bargain and assert their independence, damn the consequences; but there’s another way to understand the temptation… the bargain itself is an obstacle to be overcome, and rather than accepting or rejecting it, what you really need to do is navigate it.

This is a life skill. Perhaps the life skill. All of the institutions we live and work within promise benevolence and deliver something between “mixed results” and dehumanization: your culture, your job, your system of laws, your financial system, your health system, your language, your idols and gods, your gendered expectations, all of these things affect you in intimate ways, and yet you cannot interact with them using your soft, vulnerable parts and hope to emerge whole.

The most tragic story in all of humanity is “I believed if I followed the rules and did what I was supposed to, everything would work out for me; I did everything right and now here I am, lost and wanting and unfulfilled!”

Most days, when I get my kids up and move them in the direction of school, they resist. Some days they resist powerfully, loudly. I don’t let it turn into a fight; I try to keep them moving in the right direction. But a part of me has to really ask why. School was not a great experience for me. Why am I doing this to them? And why don’t I just stop?

There are two concepts of schooling, as I see it:

The first is that school is supposed to be a program that you accept and that “improves” you. If you do what you’re supposed to, you get rewarded; if you reject this generous offer, you will be “free” to take your chances in the treacherous war zone outside the educational umbrella.

The other concept is that school itself is a treacherous war zone where your material well-being is threatened and your soul is at stake. Somehow you must figure out a way through without losing yourself to the machine. Your way will be oblique — not direct — you will learn to dodge and avoid and to approach challenges from unexpected angles.

This second concept is the way of creatives.

https://fagottobooks.gr/blog/do-schools-kill-creativity/

Perhaps you’ve seen the famous 2006 TED Talk from Ken Robinson, “Do Schools Kill Creativity?” In it, Robinson argues that we’re all creative to start with, and then schools stigmatize being wrong, and make students too afraid to exercise their innate creativity.

As a creative person, though, I tend to think about the other side of it: what about those of us whose creativity isn’t killed? Why do schools fail to kill our creativity?

If you have a creativity-killing machine and you put a bunch of creative children in it, and only a handful of creative adults emerge out the other end, I think it’s pretty clear that the machine is asserting a selective pressure and the trait that results in creativity is simply ability to resist the machine — or inability to conform to it.

Something in you is just a little screwy, for whatever reason, and so you don’t respond to the training the way most people do.

Now the sad fact is that one of my kids wants to win at everything, and the other one wants a prize for everything. Did they learn this from going to school, or are these their natural inclinations? I don’t know. But I do know that my “winner” is also willing to be a “cheater” and can be very creative when it comes to making mischief. My prize-lover’s favorite prize? Time alone with a book.

They are both brilliant in their own ways, tho they are very different people. Neither of them, it seems to me, is being well served by their “schooling.” They benefit from the general structure that is granted to their day, on school days — the predictability is soothing, although some days the school ends up having to switch things up, and that effect is lost. They also benefit from being around kids their own age. They’re learning to socialize, and deal with all the ups and downs that go along with that.

But reading? They learn reading at home. Math? We do math at home. Learning about the world? We learn about the world at home. Science and philosophy and geography and language-learning? We do all these things at home, and they’re fun!

The real challenge that school presents my kids is the question of how to navigate a seemingly-benevolent but potentially-destructive system of rewards and punishments made of people. The maneuvers they learn through these hot trials will be the actual skills that determine their successes in life, as they navigate the overlapping networks of systems we humans live within: law, custom, language, gender, medicine, religion, the neighborhood HOA.

How can they stand up to authorities, and against conformity-enforcing peers, and, even more importantly, get these forces off their back without stoking direct conflict, so they can pursue their own goals, but also without knuckling under and becoming someone else’s tool? It’s a needle that all of us must thread if we want to enjoy our full humanity. And schools make effective training grounds for strengthening individuality precisely because they are massive systems designed to undermine it.

So my mom-job in getting my kids through their formal schooling is akin to my job-job, where I teach young adults to write because they have something important to better-understand and better-say, with absolutely zero regard for extrinsic rewards like “grades.” It’s an anti-conformity counter-spell, and it can’t be taught directly. I can only refuse to play the enforcer, and let them know by example, that if you can find your own way, there is a way.

This essay will be cross-posted at Inner Life