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George Orwell, James Baldwin, Kurt Vonnegut, Margaret Atwood

In God We Trust?

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Writing about her The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood explains in “Writing Utopia”:

Dystopias are often more like dire warnings than satires, dark shadows cast by the present into the future. They are what will happen if we don’t pull up our socks.

Atwood’s now contemporary classic reads as a brilliant hybrid of George Orwell’s 1984 and Arthur Miller’s The Crucible—”dire warnings” about the allure and dangers of totalitarian theocracies.

Literature, in fact, comes back again and again to warnings about fanatical and fundamentalist religion, especially as that intersects government and politics.

Powerful in its concision and word play, e.e. cummings’ satire of pompous political patriotism begins, “‘next to of course god america i/ love you'”—weaving a stump speech both garbled with cliches and distinctly lucid in its pandering.

The last line (“He spoke. And drank rapidly a glass of water”), the only words not being spoken by the unnamed politician, comes after the dramatic rhetorical question: “‘then shall the voice of liberty be mute?'”

Like Atwood, Orwell, and Miller, cummings is offering his warning about draping ourselves in the flag while simultaneously thumping the Bible.

In God We Trust?

Having been born, raised, and then living and working my entire life in South Carolina, I have mostly existed in a default culture of Southern Baptist religiosity, a fundamentalist view of scripture.

I have witnessed and continue to witness religion used both as a rod and as a water torture: at once a blunt and instant tool of judgment and a relentless, although only a drop at a time, force for keeping everyone in line.

And that line is decreed by God, so they say.

However, this is not something exclusive to the South—although many continue to rely on scripture to justify corporal punishment and even misogyny in my homeland.

The history of the South, too, offers countless and disturbing “dire warnings”: justifying slavery with scripture and the historical roots of Southern Baptists as a result.

But fundamentalism in the South and the dramatic consequences may mask the thread of those same beliefs running throughout the nation. Consider “In God We Trust” on U.S. currency, “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance, and the place of prayer in public schools.

The public is mostly misinformed about all of these, but easily swayed by the political implications of invoking “God.”

“God” on currency and in the Pledge (as a Cold War political ploy) represents a political manipulation of religion (using religion to score political points), as the history of how each occurred reveals. But prayer in public school may be the best example of the problem.

Formed under Ronald Reagan, the committee eventually drafting what is called A Nation at Risk included Gerald Holton, who has revealed Reagan’s “marching orders” for the report:

We met with President Reagan at the White House, who at first was jovial, charming, and full of funny stories, but then turned serious when he gave us our marching orders. He told us that our report should focus on five fundamental points that would bring excellence to education: Bring God back into the classroom [emphasis added]. Encourage tuition tax credits for families using private schools. Support vouchers. Leave the primary responsibility for education to parents. And please abolish that abomination, the Department of Education.

When the president of the U.S. misrepresents a fundamental issue, when virtually no one (media, etc.) holds the president accountable for the misrepresentation, and then when that inaccurate claim remains powerful for decades (until today), we would be careless to suggest that the danger of religion and politics is simply a vestige of the backward South.

Neither prayer nor God has ever been removed or banned from public schools. In 1962, forced prayer was ruled unconstitutional—which ironically seems to be the sort of law the Libertarian-leaning streak in the U.S. would embrace. Yet Reagan Democrats and Tea Partiers are the exact national demographics calling for “religious freedom” legislation, much like the redundant and unnecessary legislation guaranteeing students the right to pray in public schools.

“Freedom To and Freedom From”

“Religious freedom”?

“There is more than one kind of freedom, said Aunt Lydia,” Atwood’s narrator, Offred/June, recounts. “Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don’t underrate it.”

Women training women, Atwood dramatizes, is about control—control of their bodies and control of their minds, which includes controlling language.

“We were a society dying, said Aunt Lydia, of too much choice,” Offred/June adds.

Again, I live in SC, a “right to work” state, so I am attuned to the Orwellian language gymnastics so wonderfully emphasized in Atwood’s novel, echoing Orwell’s “dire warnings”:

Winston kept his back turned to the telescreen. It was safer; though, as he well knew, even a back can be revealing. A kilometer away the Ministry of Truth, his place of work, towered vast and white above the grimy landscape….

The Ministry of Truth—Minitrue, in Newspeak—was startlingly different from any other object in sight….From where Winston stood is was just possible to read, picked out on its white face in elegant lettering, the three slogans of the Party:

WAR IS PEACE

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH. (p. 7)

Therefore, I am skeptical—if not cynical—about the proposed “religious freedom” law in Indiana. I am also disturbed that this is occurring in Kurt Vonnegut‘s Indiana, and as Garrett Epps discusses, there are important connections to Indiana’s law and SC:

Until the day he died, however, [Maurice] Bessinger insisted that he and God were right.  His last fight was to preserve the Confederate flag as a symbol of South Carolina. “I want to be known as a hard-working, Christian man that loves God and wants to further (God’s) work throughout the world as I have been doing throughout the last 25 years,” he told his hometown newspaper in 2000….

That’s a good background against which to measure the uproar about the Indiana Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which was signed into law by Governor Mike Pence last week. I don’t question the religious sincerity of anyone involved in drafting and passing this law. But sincere and faithful people, when they feel the imprimatur of both the law and the Lord, can do very ugly things.

Being reared in the fundamentalist South, I was given mostly a negative education in morality—all that I was determined not to do and be.

My moral compass has come from literature instead—Margaret Atwood, James Baldwin, and Kurt Vonnegut.

These calls, then, for “religious freedom” ring Orwellian, not about “freedom” at all but about the sorts of cancerous marriages between religion and politics already played out time and again in the U.S. to deny marginalized groups what those in power enjoy as if such is ordained by God.

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“Do you know what a humanist is?” writes Vonnegut in A Man Without a Country:

My parents and grandparents were humanists, what used to be called Free Thinkers. So as a humanist I am honoring my ancestors, which the Bible says is a good thing to do. We humanists try to behave as decently, as fairly, and as honorably as we can without any expectation of rewards or punishments in an afterlife.

I am compelled to suggest that the question is not, In God we trust?

We must be very cautious about anyone who speaks in God’s stead; we must adopt Vonnegut’s stance toward our fellow humans.

Indiana should feel the consequences of humans’ inhumanity toward humans—a great irony is that this wrath appears to be the Invisible Hand of Capitalism—and like great literature, Indiana’s political hubris and indecency must fulfill Atwood’s recognition of the power of “dire warnings.”

Indiana, pull up your socks.

Recommended

Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism, Susan Jacoby

Education, Equity, Kurt Vonnegut

The Delusion of Choice

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“What you need is a gramme of soma.”

“All of the benefits of Christianity and alcohol without their defects.”

Brave New World, Aldous Huxley

Narcotics cannot still the Tooth
That nibbles at the soul—

[This World is not Conclusion], Emily Dickinson

“‘When Bokonon and McCabe took over this miserable country years ago,’ said Julian Castle, ‘they threw out the priests. And then Bokonon, cynically and playfully, invented a new religion'” (p.172)—opens Chapter 78 of Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle.

Readers soon learn that Bokonon creates a religion “‘to provide the people with better and better lies'” (p. 172), foma, and a central aspect of that strategy involves the fabricated war between the government of San Lorenzo and the religion, Bokononism. Readers discover that this plan fails:

“But people didn’t have to pay as much attention to the awful truth. As the living legend of the cruel tyrant in the city and the gentle holy man in the jungle grew, so, too, did the happiness of the people grow. They were all employed full time as actors in a play they understood, that any human being anywhere could understand and applaud.” (pp. 174-175)

The false choice between McCabe and Bokonon in the other world created by Vonnegut happens to represent well the delusion of choice that exists in the U.S. (not to be examined here, but McCabe/Bokonon reflect the false choice currently in the U.S. between Republican/Democrat; it’s a fake fight, and a false choice).

This delusion, in fact, doesn’t even require the existence of choice—the word itself is nearly magical. But the choice that is the soma of American Myth tends to be binary and constrained, actually no real choice at all.

Should I buy an Accord or a Camry (no real difference, by the way)? But never, Should I even own a car?

And that constraint tends to lie within making sure Americans have no choice other than to work, work, work and thus participate fully in the great Free Market. This choice isn’t really about choice, but about keeping everyone busy and focused on choosing so that no one will consider the alternatives.

This dynamic plays out in the education reform debate through the emphasis on parental choice: that parents must have choice and that parents must know how to choose what education is best for their child.

Just as choosing between car models fails the larger freedom to choose, the school choice truism fails to acknowledge the possibilities of creating conditions that are beyond choice—conditions that make parents choosing what school is best unnecessary.

Many people living in poverty in the U.S. must choose between eating low-quality but cheap food or spending limited funds on more expensive but healthy food (and thus sacrificing other expenses). When do we ever discuss creating a world in which that choice isn’t needed, a world in which only healthy food is available and all food is affordable regardless of social class?

Is that really beyond the scope of a free people and the richest country in the history of humanity?

Probably not.

A a simple example, the South (mostly) has chosen not to play the toll road game, one in which people must choose between spending more money or more time. Many areas of the South have a large number of publicly funded roads (as a cyclist I ride for miles and never see a car, never see a house, but there is a road, usually well maintained).

That attitude toward roads rises above choice; open and available roads render choices between spending time or money irrelevant. But also, that was a choice, a culturally and regionally bound choice.

Idealizing choice and failing to unmask false choice are, ironically, failures of choice, the myopia created by the belief that choice is sacred, that choice is the only key to human freedom.

Although focusing on the UK, a recent study reveals a disturbing conclusion:

But in our new research we found that three and a half years after finishing university, graduates who attended private schools earn an average of 7% more per year than graduates who went to state school.

This could easily be interpreted as the need for choice so the superior private option could motivate the inferior public model to do better—if the consumers choose and create such pressure.

But, as the researchers explain about the complexities of these findings, we often fail to acknowledge that education (including how much achieved and what type of school attended) is often a marker for privilege, and that privilege or race is a stronger predictor of success (such as income) than any equal achievement (such as graduating college); see for example (from HERE, Fig. 1, and HERE, Fig. 2), the influence of class and race against educational attainment:

Figure 1. “Even poor kids who do everything right don’t do much better than rich kids who do everything wrong. Advantages and disadvantages, in other words, tend to perpetuate themselves. You can see that in the above chart, based on a new paper from Richard Reeves and Isabel Sawhill, presented at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston’s annual conference, which is underway.” Matt O’Brien
Figure 2. “On average, black families at a given level of educational attainment receive incomes that are just 66% of what white families at the same level of educational attainment receive. For Hispanic families, that figure is 79%. Naturally, when education-controlled income disparities like this exist, education-controlled wealth disparities will exist.” Matt Bruenig

Thus, if we remain committed to choice—that parents and students must have choice in order to spur higher quality education, that in turn will overcome social inequity (classism, racism)—we are not directly addressing class and race inequities, and thus allowing them to continue: Within class and race, education makes a difference, but education does not erase class and race inequities.

Again, we are committed to a false and misleading choice, and not creating a world where that choice isn’t needed once we have eradicated (mostly) classism and racism.

The soma of choice in the U.S. keeps us addicted to competing so that some may win—while excluding the possibility of collaborating so that all may thrive.

As we seek ways to create better education, we should stop demanding that parents and students have choice, and start demanding that no parents or children should have to choose. This is the sort of real choice a free people can and should make.

—

NOTE: See report by Richard Reeves and Isabel Sawhill identified in Figure 1.

See Also From Bruenig 2013:

educationandmobility
Fig. 18. Bruenig: “Look at the red bar furthest to the right. That is the bar describing where kids born into the richest fifth who do not get a college degree wind up. Notice that 25% of those kids still wind up in the richest fifth. Now look at the blue bar furthest to the left. That is the bar describing where kids born into the poorest fifth who do get a college degree wind up. Notice that only 10% of those kids wind up in the richest fifth.”
mobility
Fig 3. Matt Bruenig concludes, based on data from the Pew’s Economic Mobility Project: “So, you are 2.5x more likely to be a rich adult if you were born rich and never bothered to go to college than if you were born poor and, against all odds, went to college and graduated….Therefore, the answer to the question in the title is that you are better off being born rich regardless of whether you go to college than being born poor and getting a college degree.”
Writing

Teaching Essay Writing through Poetry

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As a writer and teacher, I am pained to admit, but in the big picture I do agree with Kurt Vonnegut who opens “Teaching the Unteachable” with “You can’t teach people to write well. Writing well is something God lets you do or declines to let you do. Most bright people know that….”

My caveat, however, is about what we mean by “writing well.” Vonnegut above and my agreement are confronting what I would call those who are by their nature and inclinations writers first—those who labor over poetry, fiction, essays, and the like for months and even years (and decades) without any real hope anyone will ever publish that work. These are writers who write because they have to, but not necessarily because they want or need to.

For over thirty years now, I have taught primarily high school and undergraduate students to write—but that effort is rarely about the sort of writer mentioned above; instead I am teaching writing that is essentially functional and disciplinary. And it is there that I diverge from Vonnegut because I know for a fact that we can teach people to write well in the disciplines, often extremely well even when they do not particularly like to write, even when they insist they are not very good writers.

One of the most effective approaches to teaching disciplinary-based essay writing is to focus on large concepts about effective writing and then grounding that in examining poetry in order to teach those concepts. Using poetry to reinforce essay writing helps highlight the universal qualities of powerful writing and continues to push students in their awareness of genre, form, and medium as they impact expression.

This fall, in fact, I have had several students directly challenge my focus on being specific—the importance of details, concrete language, and, as Flannery O’Connor has argued, triggering as many of the reader’s senses as possible.

Kingsolver’s “What the Janitor Heard in the Elevator” and the Essay

Barbara Kingsolver from her collection Another America/Otra America begins “What the Janitor Heard in the Elevator” with “The woman in the gold bracelets tells her friend:,” and then continues:

I had to fire another one.
Can you believe it?
She broke the vase
Jack gave me for Christmas.
It was one of those,
you know? That worked
with everything. All my colors.
I asked him if he’d mind
if I bought one again just like it.
It was the only one that just always worked.

Her friend says:
Find another one that speaks English.
That’s a plus.

The woman in the gold agrees
that is a plus.

In class, we begin to read and examine this poem, but I use this discussion to highlight the craft of writing (especially as that relates to disciplinary essay writing), not to do the traditional poetry analysis most students expect.

Here are some of the elements of effective writing I highlight:

  • After we begin discussing the poem, I steer the students back to the title, which in this case is extremely important. Thus, I emphasize the importance of the title as well as discuss the art and craft of subheads in disciplinary essays. Many students have not focused on titles, and often submit essays without titles so this is typically a key lesson for first year students.
  • Next, we highlight the use of “gold” in the opening line and the final stanza. The points I stress are about word choice, connotation, and framing. I believe essay writing must begin at the word level for young writers; they need a greater sense of purpose in the words they choose, notably specificity, concreteness, appropriateness (key here is that words have specialized meanings in the disciplines), and clarity. And that connects with connotations of words; in the poem, “gold” carries a great deal of important information about the scene, issues related to wealth and privilege. My students are quick to admit that Kingsolver has chosen “gold” with intent, purpose. Further, “gold” serves as a framing motif since she incorporates the word in the opening line and the end. I stress to students that essays are often framed (and to avoid the mechanistic introduction and conclusion format they have learned in high school). Framing and motifs add powerful and concrete elements to writing that young writers often lack.
  • We also confront Kingsolver’s use of “one” and “it,” especially the latter since I have stressed the problems with the pronoun to my students. In this poem, “one” and “it” create meaning in their repetition but also in their mixed implications about both the domestic worker and the vase. The point of emphasis is that Kingsolver, again, chooses and repeats words with purpose to create meaning, and this contrasts with how students are apt to repeat and use empty or vague language from carelessness.
  • Finally, we discuss the effectiveness of writing with characters and plot as well as the impact of showing versus telling. People doing things are powerful, much more powerful than abstractions. Kingsolver in her poem trusts the reader to know the abstractions she is showing; however, young writers tend to make many grand announcements (often overstated) and fail to show or support those claims.

This fall I followed the discussion of Kingsolver’s poem with Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham City Jail,” and the result was impressive. We were able to identify these craft lessons immediately in King’s essay; students were also significantly more willing to embrace the concepts once we worked through the poem and then into King’s writing.

While there is a cynical irony to Vonnegut’s claims about teaching the unteachable—written by a writer who often taught at writing conferences and legendary writing workshops—ones that do elicit laugher, I am convinced that we teachers of writing who serve primarily students who will have to write while in formal education and then may go on to write in the disciplines can be very successful, but only if we take the teaching of writing seriously, and seek ways in which students can grow as writers.

Focusing on the universals of effective writing and then allowing students to examine and practice those universal are essential. And to do that, I find that poetry is an excellent resource for teaching the writing of essays.

For Further Reading

Are we teaching students to be good writers? 

Why Are We (Still) Failing Writing Instruction?

More on Failing Writing, and Students

From Failing to Killing Writing: Computer-Based Grading

Misguided Reading Policy Creates Wrong Lessons for Students as Writers

Education, Kurt Vonnegut

Jesusland?: Bible Belt Raises Welt of Corporal Punishment

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“Jesusland” by Ben Folds includes a powerful verse against the energetic piano and soaring harmonies:

Town to town
broadcast to each house, they drop your name
but no one knows your face
Billboards quoting things you’d never say
you hang your head and pray

While the music and rhythm sound uplifting, the message of the lyrics is a sharp criticism of the Bible Belt, where I grew up, where I live. Folds confronting the disconnect between the ideology found in the words of Jesus in the Bible and then how Christians have manipulated those words and ideals for justifications significantly not Christ-like sits in a long tradition including Thomas Jefferson stating that he believed everything said by Jesus but little said about him (and revising his own version of the Bible to reflect that stance):

Had the doctrines of Jesus been preached always as pure as they came from his lips, the whole civilized world would now have been Christian. (To Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse Monticello, June 26, 1822)

To the corruptions of Christianity I am indeed opposed; but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus himself. (Letter from Thomas Jefferson to Benjamin Rush, May 21, 1803)

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I was born and then have lived all of my 53 years in the South, the upstate of South Carolina, a stark example of a Bible Belt state where fundamentalist Christianity is blended seamlessly and unselfconsciously with rabid state’s-rights commitments and fervent patriotism as a veneer for a solid faith in the free market.

I have labeled my home region of the U.S. the self-defeating South because these often contradictory ideologies not only have created scars on our history but also continue to leave us in a constant state of being battered and bruised, especially children, women, and people of color.

My South has often used and still uses the Bible as a weapon.

My South raised the Bible in defense of slavery.

My South outlawed interracial marriage while waving the Bible.

My South fought the integration of schools, including whites shouting hate and scripture at children being escorting into Little Rock Central.

My South remains the primary region—the Bible Belt—where children are legally subject to corporal punishment not only in their homes but also in their public schools.

Like the angry white Christians shouting hate and their narrow faith at the Little Rock Nine, “Spare the rod, spoil the child” quickly follows the defenses of corporal punishment as the topics of domestic violence and child abuse have been spurred by controversies surrounding NFL players.

As Larry Morrison details about Biblical arguments for slavery—”The emphasis from proslavery defenders was always upon a literal reading of the Bible which represented the mind and will of God himself” (p. 16)—so too are Biblical arguments for spanking children.

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Unlike me, Kurt Vonnegut was born and raised in the Midwest. In his collection Palm Sunday, Vonnegut confessed, “Toward the end of our marriage, it was mainly religion in a broad sense that Jane and I fought about” (p. 175).

And then Vonnegut—as he often did—shared his upbringing as a Free Thinker, leading to his casual references to himself as an atheist or agnostic. In a speech delivered at Hobart and William Smith College (May 26, 1974), Vonnegut explained:

So a modern, secular education is often painful. By its very nature, it invites us to question the wisdom of the ones we love….

I have said that one guess is as good as another, but that is only roughly so. Some guesses are crueler than others—which is to say, harder on human beings, and on other animals as well….

But it is reasonable to suppose that other bad guesses are poisoning our lives today. A good education in skepticism can help us to discover those bad guesses, and to destroy them with mockery and contempt. (pp. 178-179)

Vonnegut as Free Thinker recognized that “bad guesses” were often most corrosive when linked to the Word of God; therefore, he called for “a new religion” (p. 181)—necessary to combat “hypocrisy”:

I am willing to drop the word religion, and substitute for it these three words: heartfelt moral code….The trouble with so many of the moral codes we have inherited is that they are subject to so many interpretations….This is good news for hypocrites, who enjoy feeling pious, no matter what they do. (p. 184)

Vonnegut in this speech focused on the tragedies of continuous war and rampant consumerism to the expense of the survival of humans—concluding as only Vonnegut could about the need “to do whatever we need to do in order to have life on the planet go on for a long, long time”:

This is bad news for business, as we know it now. It should be thrilling news for persons who love to teach and lead. And thank God we have solid information in the place of superstition! Thank God we are beginning to dream of human communities which are designed to harmonize with what human beings really need and are.

And now you have just heard and atheist thank God not once, but twice. And listen to this:

God bless the class of 1974. (p. 191)

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In 1974, I didn’t know about Vonnegut, but I was on the cusp of two important realizations of my life: the need “to question the wisdom of the ones we love” (my parents and community) and my own aversion to the hypocrisy of the Bible Belt I called home.

A decade later, 1984, I was teaching English in the high school I had attended, in the classroom where my favorite teacher, Lynn Harrill, had taught before moving on to administration. And then, about another decade later, my students—most of whom attended the Southern Baptist church that sat literally in the middle of the district’s four public schools—joined the national fad of wearing What Would Jesus Do (WWJD) bracelets and T-shirts.

Teaching public school in the Bible Belt throughout the 1980s and 1990s, I can attest that religion was never absent from school, including prayers still be announced each morning over the intercom.

The WWJD movement highlighted for me, however, how in the South superficial religiosity trumps any genuine heartfelt moral code, as Vonnegut called it. Students leading lives that were in fact not Christ-like were the most fervent about the WWJD paraphernalia, creating a great deal of tension with students who were acting Christ-like (in many ways) but not calling attention to it.

Two things remain with me about those years teaching, watching young people too often slip comfortably into the hypocrisy of the Bible Belt (something about which I blame the adults, and not those students).

First, and ironically, the WWJD merchandising was an accurate portrayal of commitments in the U.S. to the market, to consumerism over all else (especially ethics).

And second, what a wasted moment.

Like Vonnegut and Jefferson, I too am comfortable with embracing a world in which humans behave in ways that are Christ-like:

You have heard that it was said, “Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.” But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also. (Matthew 5: 38-39)

Jesus answered, “If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.” (Matthew 19:21)

Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God. (Matthew 19:24)

I have a Who Would Jesus Bomb bumper sticker on a file cabinet in my office, and am certain that if this guided our policy in the U.S., we’d be a much better people.

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It is 2014, 40 years since Vonnegut’s essentially optimistic speech.

I fear I cannot share his optimism, having slipped from the healthy skepticism Vonnegut endorsed into a solid cynicism.

As I have written about and raised in my classes my strong stance against all corporal punishment, based on decades of solid research, I have been bombarded with “My parents spanked me, and I turned out OK” as well as the expected refrain: “Spare the rod, spoil the child.”

All while I lie down each night still living in Jesusland, the Bible Belt where we endorse teaching children lessons with fear and pain.

I am left to muse as Vonnegut did four decades ago, but I think about Who Would Jesus Spank and simply cannot find a credible answer other than not a single child.

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“Human dignity,” Vonnegut offered in a 1980 speech at the First Parish Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts, “must be given by people to people”:

If you stand before me, and I do not credit you with dignity, then you have none. If I stand before you, and you do not credit me with dignity, then I have none….

What could be more essential in a pluralistic society like ours than that every citizen see dignity in every other human being everywhere? (p. 194)

I can’t imagine anything different uttered by Jesus, and I can only add, including children.

So it goes.

CCSS, Daily Kos, Education, education reform, Gates, Kurt Vonnegut, Living in Dialogue, science fiction, Teacher Evaluation, Teaching, Testing, VAM

Debating the Gates Moratorium, Or Life among the Roadbuilders

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As a lifelong fan of science fiction (SF), I want to start by invoking a SF convention that never gets old: time travel (but I’ll spare you the whirlwind prestidigitation mastered by Kurt Vonnegut, who married time travel and non-linear narrative in Slaughterhouse-Five).

Once upon a time (well, I must confess, I enjoy a bit of genre-splicing also), Bill Gates, billionaire and burgeoning education hobbyist, began tossing his considerable expertise (read: money) at small schools projects. Low and behold, Gates eventually looked at the research his own foundation gathered, declared the project a failure, and scuttled away—only to decide that the greatest scourge on the planet was the enormous number of “bad” teachers failing our children everyday!

Since we are now back in time (and you may notice a pattern here about history repeating itself, and such), let’s look at that Gates/small school dynamic as I blogged about this in April and May 2011:

And, Gates’s small schools experiment? While Gates himself declared the experiment a failure, Marshak explains that Gates’ small school experiment actually exposes Gates’ own inability to understand the education dynamics he claims to reform. But ample evidence reveals both that Gates is inexpert and remains unsuccessful as an education reformer. See here, here and here — including his failure to understand statistics and the charts he enjoys using to make his points here. (Accountability? Start at the Top, OpEdNews 11 April 2011)

Let’s do some truly basic math.

First, consider that Bill Gates, a billionaire whose wealth and success have been built on computer innovation and entrepreneurship, has been an education reformer for many years now–stretching back to a small schools focus:

“Bill Gates used to believe that one of the solutions to failing schools was to create smaller ones with 500 students or fewer. His foundation spent $1 billion toward this; seeing the opportunity to bring in private dollars, districts started shifting to smaller schools. Small schools became the big new trend. But then the foundation conducted a study that found that, by itself, school size had little if any effect on achievement. The foundation dropped the project and moved on to teacher reform, but by then some urban districts throughout the nation had changed to small–and more expensive to operate–schools.”

So the first formula is:

Gates initiative + Gates funding = abandoned schools in the wake of failure (with no consequences for Gates)

As the Los Angeles Times reports above, Gates is now focusing on teacher quality–including calls for teacher evaluations tied to test scores measuring student achievement against the common core standards.

This suggests a new formula:

Gates money + common core standards + testing industry = profit for Gates and testing industry at the expense of students, learning, and public education. (If There Remains Any Question, Daily Kos 1 May 2011)

Let’s return now to the present where the Gates machine has called for a moratorium on all that Common Core and VAM stuff because his own people’s research appears to refute what Gates has been pontificating about in the compliant media gaze that only Gates seems worthy of receiving (I hate to beat this to death, but do any of you see a pattern here?).

I want to offer now that this call for a moratorium is another teachable moment—those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it, and all that—and therein we have at least two important lessons:

First, Gates/small schools, Gates/VAM, and Gates/Common Core are all the same flawed dynamic in which political leaders, the media, and the public confuse wealth with expertise. Remove Gates’s billions and he would have zero credibility in any of these ventures—and I still maintain that the small school debacle is the most telling part of this story [1] because Gates misread his own research, declared erroneously the commitment a failure, and simply walked away leaving others to hold the bag (roadbuilder he has always been, roadbuilder he will always be).

And this leads to the debate and discussion that has blossomed from the Gates moratorium announcement.

So our second lesson is somewhat positive: If we could ever set aside confusing wealth with expertise, we may come to recognize that among educators, scholars, and researchers we already have a wealth of expertise that could better serve our goals of education reform.

And thus, I maintain my stance that the Gates moratorium is a sham, but I want to highlight here that within the credible responses to that moratorium call, we see how education reform should be debated by those who know the field:

And while I enjoy coming back to and finding new SF again and again, in education reform I am eager to step off the “Déjà vu all over again” merry-go-round.

Bill Gates, about that moratorium? No thanks. And while we are at it, no thanks to all the rest either.

If you’d stopped building your roads we never asked for right through the middle of our villages, we would have time to take care of business here, instead of constantly staying one step behind underneath the rubble of the disasters you create.

—

[1] Please read carefully Good Doubt and Bad Doubt from 2007 and Why Did the Gates Small-High-Schools Program Fail?: Well, Actually It Didn’t from 2010 for some really powerful time travel. And this is just must-read: Bill Gates should hire a statistical advisor.

Education, Howard Zinn, Kurt Vonnegut

UPDATED: Memorial Day 2015: A Reader

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If we could find a space to honor peace, to honor peace by taking action so that peace was the norm of humanity…

Whom Will We Honor Memorial Day?, Howard Zinn

Memorial Day should be a day for putting flowers on graves and planting trees. Also, for destroying the weapons of death that endanger us more than they protect us, that waste our resources and threaten our children and grandchildren….

Meanwhile, there is such a shortage of housing that millions live in dilapidated sections of our cities and millions more are forced to pay high rents or high interest rates on their mortgages. There’s 90 billion for the B1 bomber, but people don’t have money to pay hospital bills.

We must be practical, say those whose practicality has consisted of a war every generation. We mustn’t deplete our defenses. Say those who have depleted our youth, stolen our resources. In the end, it is living people, not corpses, creative energy, not destructive rage, which are our only real defense, not just against other governments trying to kill us, but against our own, also trying to kill us.

Let us not set out, this Memorial Day, on the same old drunken ride to death.

The First Decoration Day, David W. Blight

Thousands of black Charlestonians, most former slaves, remained in the city and conducted a series of commemorations to declare their sense of the meaning of the war. The largest of these events, and unknown until some extraordinary luck in my recent research, took place on May 1, 1865. During the final year of the war, the Confederates had converted the planters’ horse track, the Washington Race Course and Jockey Club, into an outdoor prison. Union soldiers were kept in horrible conditions in the interior of the track; at least 257 died of exposure and disease and were hastily buried in a mass grave behind the grandstand. Some twenty-eight black workmen went to the site, re-buried the Union dead properly, and built a high fence around the cemetery. They whitewashed the fence and built an archway over an entrance on which they inscribed the words, “Martyrs of the Race Course.”

Then, black Charlestonians in cooperation with white missionaries and teachers, staged an unforgettable parade of 10,000 people on the slaveholders’ race course. The symbolic power of the low-country planter aristocracy’s horse track (where they had displayed their wealth, leisure, and influence) was not lost on the freedpeople. A New York Tribune correspondent witnessed the event, describing “a procession of friends and mourners as South Carolina and the United States never saw before.”

21st century “Children’s Crusade”: A curriculum of peace driven by critical literacy, P. L. Thomas

Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut

“All the King’s Horses,” Kurt Vonnegut

Whom Will We Honor Memorial Day?, Howard Zinn

At the Un-National Monument along the Canadian Border, William Stafford

“next to of course god america i, e. e. cummings

Kurt Vonnegut

RECOMMENDED: Vonnegut’s Graduation Speeches and Drawings

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Small and unexpected resurrections of a kind help lighten the weight of the inevitable consequence of aging, those losses of people and things that you know must happen but you regret nonetheless.

One such loss for me was when the group R.E.M. called it a day. So it is fitting that I sit writing these recommendations while listening to Unplugged 1991 2001, a beautiful and bittersweet resurrection of everything I love about R.E.M. and everything I miss, mostly that there will never be a new R.E.M. album.

When Kurt Vonnegut died 11 April 2007, I cried on and off for several days, unable to hold inside that I was filled with Vonnegut’s art. I found myself crying as I came to the end of the first official biography of Vonnegut as well, prompting a poem.

Since Vonnegut’s death, we have been gifted small and unexpected resurrections, including two new books.

If This Isn’t Nice, What Is?: Advice to the Young is a collection of Vonnegut’s graduation speeches, a form that suited Vonnegut perfectly since he worked on a basic framework found among comedians: The Joke. And jokes are perfect for graduations where people invited to give speeches often take themselves and the ceremony far too seriously (see my own tongue-in-cheek graduation speech written mostly as a homage to Vonnegut).

If This Ian’t Nice, What Is?

If this collection isn’t perfect for a graduation gift, what is?

In “How I Learned from a Teacher What Artists Do,” Vonnegut employs his standard speech format, exhibiting his mainstay of seeming simplicity and dark bitterness masking crystal clear Truth and genuine kindness, or better phrased, a genuine call to kindness among all humans and for all things of this only world we know:

There are three things that I very much want to say in this brief hail and farewell. They are things which haven’t been said enough to you freshly minted graduates nor to your parents or guardians, nor to me, nor to your teachers. I will say these in the body of my speech, I’m just setting you up for this.

First, I will say thank you. Second, I will say I am truly sorry—now that is the striking novelty among the three. We live in a time when nobody ever seems to apologize for anything; they just weep and raise hell on the Oprah Winfrey Show. The third thing I want to say to you at some point— probably close to the end—is, “We love you.” Now if I fail to say any of those three things in the body of this great speech, hold up your hands, and I will remedy the deficiency.

I probably fell in love hard with the work of Vonnegut with Breakfast of Champions, although Vonnegut himself offered only an average grade for the work. Part of the attraction, I know, are the crude drawings, Vonnegut’s artwork that blends his calling to capture the world simply—I feel Thoreau in the background—and to remain true to his primary love, words.

I probably came to understand fully the work for Vonnegut with Cat’s Cradle, which Vonnegut graded highly also, and I return to it often to help me navigate the world too complex for a humankind unkind.

However, like his A Man without a Country, the collected graduation speeches are punctuated with his drawings, something that remains possibly the most endearing quality of published Vonnegut, which leads me to the other new Vonnegut resurrection—Kurt Vonnegut Drawings.

Kurt Vonnegut Drawings

There is an apt and warm touch to this collection of Vonnegut’s visual art, the “drawings” in the title. Vonnegut, if anything, is an artist that embodies childhood as well as a glorious faith in childhood. When he is most serious and most angry, he appears to be his most playful and childlike, but never childish (preview some of the pieces in this review).

In my most recent poem, Vonnegut’s Bluebeard came rushing back to me, unbidden. I preface the poem with a line from the novel and then include an allusion to the novel’s ending. Bluebeard is one of Vonnegut’s many faux autobiographies that exist in a netherworld between fiction and nonfiction that forces the reader to consider everything she/he knows about genre while also setting all of those assumptions aside.

There is a good deal of Vonnegut to find in Bluebeard and Rabo Karabekian (who confesses [for Vonnegut?], “I may have been a lousy painter, but what a collector I turned out to be!”); just as there is much in both that tells us almost nothing about Vonnegut.

Having spent a year or so of my life as a biographer, and then having read dozens of biographies, I am under no delusion Vonnegut was some saint of a human as he walked the earth daily. Who is?

But—despite Vonnegut being mostly a man of letters—I find his drawings help me come to terms with the complete Vonnegut, the human Vonnegut wanted to be, the humans Vonnegut wanted all of us to be.

Vonnegut shall not pass for me until I too pass because he remains in that thing that a small group of humans reach for, frantically I think as a very human thing to do—our shared frailty and mortality coming up against our longing for immortality: Art.

Buy these books.

Hold the hardback copies in your hands to feel the weight, and then flip each over for the two photos of Vonnegut.

On the back cover of the speeches, Vonnegut is striking a Tom Wolfe pose and look, foregrounded by a pigeon just slightly out of focus.

But save the back cover of the drawings for last: Vonnegut sitting, weathered face balanced beautifully by weathered sneakers and then ceramic Laurel and Hardy on the table beside him.

Please, buy these books, but buy extra copies.

Hand them out to strangers as you walk down the street.

Click for Further Reading

Education

My Speech to the Graduates: Don’t Listen to Graduation Speakers

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I have lived some thirty years on this planet, and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors. They have told me nothing, and probably cannot tell me anything to the purpose. Here is life, an experiment to a great extent untried by me; but it does not avail me that they have tried it. If I have any experience which I think valuable, I am sure to reflect that this my Mentors said nothing about.

Henry David Thoreau, Walden

No institution has invited me to be the speaker at graduation, and none is ever likely to do so.

But I feel compelled to offer this speech to gradates. So in the spirit of Kurt Vonnegut—great American novelist who knew how to give a graduation speech—I’ll start by telling you exactly what I want you to learn from this speech: Don’t listen to graduation speakers.

Now that I have the main point out of the way, I want to share why I feel compelled to offer this speech to graduates, a speech I will never give, and I have two reasons:

  1. A book of Kurt Vonnegut speeches were just published, If This Isn’t Nice, What Is?: Advice for the Young, and I recommend you either buy a copy or ask for one as a graduation gift.
  2. First Lady Michelle Obama gave a May 2014 commencement address that is offensive to me in its portrayal of teachers:

So my mother volunteered at my school — helping out every day in the front office, making sure our teachers were doing their jobs, holding their feet to the fire if she thought they were falling short. I’d walk by the office and there she’d be. (Laughter.) I’d leave class to go to the bathroom, there she’d be again, roaming the halls, looking in the classrooms. And of course, as a kid, I have to say, that was a bit mortifying, having your mother at school all the time.

But looking back, I have no doubt that my classmates and I got a better education because she was looking over those teachers’ shoulders. (Applause.) You see, my mom was not a teacher or a principal or a school board member. But when it came to education, she had that hunger. So she believed that our education was very much her business.

Next is the part I opened by asking you to ignore—the part where I offer what I learned from my parents and how that differs greatly from the image Michelle Obama created about teachers who needed their feet held to the fire when they were falling short.

I want to focus on two lessons from my parents.

First, my father lived by a creed he repeated often to me: Do as I say and not as I do.

And this lesson is not what my father intended, but it taught me that adults often are hypocritical, especially in their interactions with children and young people (the same adults who implore children to work hard and be nice, do neither themselves). So the lesson I learned—don’t be a hypocrite—is one basis for my speech’s main thesis: Don’t listen to graduation speakers.

They are apt, I have found, to offer my father’s advice (Do as I say and not as I do), thinly veiled behind a number of rhetorical strategies that the speakers themselves likely did not write.

Second, like Michelle Obama, I learned powerful lessons about teachers and education from my parents. But my parents impressed upon me that teachers deserved my unwavering respect and that teaching was a noble thing for any person to do.

If  my parents had concerns about a teacher, that was never uttered in my presence, and if I ever crossed any lines of improper behavior or shoddy work as a student, my parents assured my teachers that would change and that the teachers had my parents’ full support in seeing that I never stumbled again.

The result of this second lesson—one quite distinct from the picture Michelle Obama painted about teachers? I have been a teacher for 31 years.

My parents are very proud of me for having dedicated my life to a noble profession.

They do not see me as someone who needs my feet held to the fire, as someone who must be watched because I am likely to fall short.

I am also proud to call myself a teacher.

Now, here toward the end, I want to include what all graduation speakers are expected to offer, advice.

I could have spent my career so far making more money than I have as a teacher, but my profession is a profession of service and the benefits of dedicating myself to that service is more than enough to counterbalance the money I have not earned.

So I am telling you without an ounce of hypocrisy or without the usual lip-service that accompanies this advice in the U.S.: Dedicate your life to something that matters to you because you have but one life and the pursuit of money and things will always prove hollow in the long run if those pursuits keep you from the things that matter.

In the off chance that you didn’t take the paradoxical advice of this speech, I must end in the only way I can in full sincerity, leading you again to the world of Kurt Vonnegurt.

Eliot Rosewater in Kurt Vonnegut’s God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater implores:

Go over to her shack, I guess. Sprinkles some water on the babies, say, “Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies—:

“God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.” (p. 129)

The adult world is filled with abundant mean-spirited hypocrisy, and you can certainly do better.

I hope that you will.

Capitalism, Education, Equity, Kurt Vonnegut

On Foma and Mendacity: Letting the Cat Out of the Bag

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Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle and Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof may seem at first blush to share only the use of “cat” in their titles, but both works are masterful examinations of something central to the human condition: the lie.

But Vonnegut’s foma at the heart of Bokononism and Big Daddy’s railing against mendacity  present contrasting dramatizations of “lying and liars,” as Brick and Big Daddy wrestle with “one of them five dollar words” [1]:

Mendacity is the darkest of lies because it corrupts and ultimately destroys relationships and even lives. For Big Daddy, mendacity is inevitable, central to the human condition: “I’ve lived with mendacity!—Why can’t you live with it? Hell, you got to live with it, there’s nothing else to live with except mendacity, is there?”

While Vonnegut’s novel is also dark—and typically satirical—foma is offered as harmless lies, as Julian Castle explains to the narrator:

“Well, when it became evident that no governmental or economic reform was going to make the people much less miserable, the religion became the one real instrument of hope. Truth was the enemy of the people, because the truth was so terrible, so Bokonon made it his business to provide the people with better and better lies.” (p. 172)

Although different consequences result from the mendacity of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and the foma of Cat’s Cradle, all lies share one important characteristic: They are almost impossible to confront, and once confronted, they create a great deal of pain.

As a parent, I came face to face with letting the cat out of the bag when my daughter first unmasked the foma of the Tooth Fairy, and then connected that realization with Santa Claus. After I confessed to the truth—trying as I did to make a case about “harmless lies”—my daughter cut right to the heart of the matter, asking, “Why did y’all lie to me?”

The thinnest margins between mendacity and foma, I think, are found in our cultural myths—the fatal flaw of confusing the ideals we aspire to as a people with conditions already achieved. Many of those aspirations have tipped into mendacity, poisoning the possibility of those ideals—especially in the foundational promises of public institutions.

Here, then, are those ideals that could have served us well as aspiration, but now work as mendacity and thus against our best intensions:

  • Capitalism and choice. The realization is now becoming hard to ignore, that capitalism (the free market) is incompatible with equity (see, for example, Thomas Piketty). As well, choice as a concept central to freedom is far more complicated than expressed in our public discourse. Both capitalism and choice have worked against cultural aspirations for equity, but those failures may be better explained by the reason they have failed: idealizing capitalism and choice while failing to commit fully to the power of the Commons to establish the context within which capitalism and choice could serve equity well.
  • Meritocracy. In the U.S., possibly the greatest lie that results from confusing an aspiration with an achieved condition is the argument that we live in a meritocracy. The evidence suggests that we currently do not have a meritocracy (see how being born rich and not attending college trumps being born poor but completing college), and even more disturbing, we are unlikely to achieve a meritocracy (see why “[e]qual opportunity cannot actually be achieved”).
  • Education as Key to Equity. As misleading as claims about the U.S. being a meritocracy (or that we are a post-racial country) are assertions that education is the one true way to overcome social ills and how any individual can lift her/himself out of poverty. However, education has not and does not, in fact, change society, rarely lifts people out of the circumstances of their births, and serves as a marker for privilege (thus creates the illusion that education is a force for change)—as Reardon explains:

Here’s a fact that may not surprise you: the children of the rich perform better in school, on average, than children from middle-class or poor families. Students growing up in richer families have better grades and higher standardized test scores, on average, than poorer students; they also have higher rates of participation in extracurricular activities and school leadership positions, higher graduation rates and higher rates of college enrollment and completion.

Whether you think it deeply unjust, lamentable but inevitable, or obvious and unproblematic, this is hardly news. It is true in most societies and has been true in the United States for at least as long as we have thought to ask the question and had sufficient data to verify the answer.

What is news is that in the United States over the last few decades these differences in educational success between high- and lower-income students have grown substantially….

Meanwhile, not only are the children of the rich doing better in school than even the children of the middle class, but the changing economy means that school success is increasingly necessary to future economic success, a worrisome mutual reinforcement of trends that is making our society more socially and economically immobile.

When my daughter allowed the evidence to lead her to a conclusion that made her at least uncomfortable if not disillusioned, she had to begin to re-evaluating her perception of the world, a perception that included the nature of truth and the role of her parents in her navigating that world.

That may sound dramatic about a conversation including the Tooth Fairy, but for a child, the intentions of foma have the same stinging consequences as the cynicism of mendacity. For adults, it seems, burying ourselves in the opiate of foma (Aldous Huxley’s soma) allows us to ignore the bitter pill of mendacity.

As aspirations, the bulleted concepts above remain important for a free people, but as mendacity, they have and will continue to insure that inequity cannot be achieved.

Many readers miss the powerful theme of optimism that runs through Vonnegut’s works; he maintains a genuine and compelling hope among the ruins for the capacity of humans to be kind. The bitterness and fatalism of Big Daddy, however, seem for now a more accurate assessment of the human condition in 2014.

More difficult to confront than either mendacity or foma, it appears, is the hard truth that the human pursuit of equity must come before merit can matter and that in order to achieve that possibility, the human condition must commit to a spirit of community and collaboration, not competition.

Regretfully, most in power are apt to continue to not let that cat out of the bag.

—

[1] The film adaptation of the play has some shifts in the wording and transposing of character’s lines, but the film is iconic as pop culture so I include a clip from that although I use lines from the play in the quotes.

CCSS

Celebrities, Thank You, But…

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My formative years, thanks to my mother, included George Carlin, The Firesign Theater, and Richard Pryor.

I am convinced a powerful line from Carlin to Kurt Vonnegut remains the most important foundation of who I am outside of the people directly in my life. So I am offering here first my indebtedness to comedians, including my much more recent affinity for Margaret Cho, Sarah Silverman, and Louis CK—all of whom fill in some smaller way the void left by Carlin as comedians who are smart, funny, and offensive in the most brilliant ways.

And now that Louis CK has joined the ranks of Matt Damon and Jon Stewart among “celebrities teachers love,” I feel compelled to make a point that cannot be stressed enough: To celebrities weighing in on the education reform debate, I say, “Thank you, but…”

And before I explore the “but,” let me pose a key context for that: Davis Guggenheim.

With An Inconvenient Truth (2006), Guggenheim was the darling of the Left and scourge of the Right for his treatise on climate change.

With Waiting for “Superman” (2010), Guggenheim was the darling of the Right and scourge of the Left for his treatise on education reform.

The inconvenient truth about that Guggenheim contradiction?

Both versions are essentially celebrity visions about important and complex topics that already have very real detailed bodies of research and commentary from the experts within those fields—detailed bodies of research and commentary that are essentially ignored or misunderstood and misrepresented by the media, political leaders, and the public.

Now there is Louis CK and the Common Core, spurring points and counterpoints about whether or not Louis CK has any valid points himself.

There has always been an odd and easily missed streak of kindness, an awareness of the child’s perspective in Louis CK’s comedy, well beneath his profanity and anger. If his foray into riffing on education reform triggers any consideration in the U.S. about the need to increase our cultural kindness and respect for children, then I am on that Louis CK bandwagon. [See the video snippet here as an excellent example of where Louis CK is right on the money about “education should be welcoming.”]

Now I must turn to the “but.”

But Louis CK—as with Damon and Stewart—ultimately slides into the Guggenheim problem. While I agree that essentially Louis CK is onto many of the key failures of the entire Common Core problem as a key element in the broader education reform agenda—including the central premise that Common Core and the related high-stakes testing are inseparable in the debate—I fear that the clamoring to champion and acknowledge Louis CK’s criticism is more evidence that teachers, education researchers, and public school advocates simply have voices, expertise, and experience that do not matter on their own merit.

How must time and energy now is going to debate and cover whether or not Louis CK is accurate in his Common Core rants? I would argue, those debates are more distractions, just as debating the quality of Common Core is a distraction.

Celebrities, thank you, but your weighing in on education reform—while funny—is more entertainment that crowds out time better spent on the real world of teaching and learning in a country that really doesn’t care—not about children (if they are “other people’s children”), not about workers, not about people trapped in poverty, not about the mass incarceration of people of color, and certainly not about education.

I suppose it is better we spend our time laughing to avoid crying, but again, I am certain that education as a profession needs to be acknowledged and taken seriously on its own merit and not because a celebrity makes the same case educators have been making as professionals and not entertainers.